Poet who talked in his letters

THE poet, Louis MacNeice died suddenly in 1963 of viral pneumonia, contracted while recording sound effects in an underground cave in Yorkshire for his last radio play, Persons from Porlock.

He was 56. In the very last letter he wrote, on August 26, just 24 hours before his death, he complains that 10 days in bed, “with bronchitis etcetera”, have prevented him taking a planned trip to Ireland, but he still hoped to make a visit in September: “I have a great desire to be in on the Oyster Festival at Clarinbridge, Co Galway.”

MacNeice left an unfinished memoir, The Strings are False. In 1995 a highly acclaimed biography by Jon Stallworthy was published. The centenary of his birth was marked in 2007 by a new edition of his poems. Now, 47 years after his death, this selection of his letters is presented in a substantial volume running to 768 pages, edited by Jonathan Allison.

MacNeice was an enthusiastic letter writer, but his male friends, including his fellow poets WH Auden, Stephen Spender and Christopher Ishwerwood, did not keep letters, and as MacNeice kept no copies of the letters he sent, the correspondence is lost. Women, on the other hand, obviously treasured the letters they received from the charming and handsome poet, and there are numerous long, witty letters to the women in his life in the collection. Surviving letters to his male friends and to his editors (including TS Eliot), tend to be short and business-like.

The best letters are so immediate that it is like hearing him talk, an experience described by his friend ER Dodds as “a rich flow of fun and fantasy, mercurial gaiety, warm vitality and love of life”. The helpful, well-judged footnotes by Jonathan Allison provide a lively running commentary, and their picture of intellectual life in the mid-20th century is almost as enjoyable as the letters themselves.

With the passing years, MacNeice’s reputation has risen steadily and he is considered by many second only to Yeats among modern Irish poets. But for many years MacNeice was dismissed by the Irish as an English poet, and by the English as an Irish one. He was of course Irish by birth, but by education and place of residence he was very much an Englishman. Today’s generation of Ulster-born poets, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon, have all paid tribute to their predecessor, claiming him firmly as an Irish poet.

“I was born in Belfast, between the mountain and the gantries,” MacNeice wrote in his autobiographical poem Carrickfergus, named for the place where he grew up on the shores of Belfast Lough. His father, a Church of Ireland rector, later a bishop, came originally from the west of Ireland, as did his mother, who was born in Clifden. His father left Connemara after a sectarian stand-off on Omey Island, which ensued when the Catholic priest came to the Protestant mission to claim back his “stolen flock”.

MacNeice did not visit Connemara until he had left school, but grew up hearing nostalgic talk of this magical windswept, mountainous place.

His mother died when he was seven and, as was the custom, the young Louis was sent to board at a prep school in Dorset,(“Schooled from the age of 10 to a foreign voice”, he later wrote), and went on to Marlborough College where his closest friend was the aesthete, Anthony Blunt, famous later in life as a spy and double agent. MacNeice won a scholarship to Oxford, where he studied Classics, and graduated with a double first. He went on to teach at universities in Birmingham and London, and also lectured in the US. Later he worked for the British Council and as a freelance writer and producer for BBC radio.

The collection is unusual in the amount of space that it allocates to letters from MacNeice’s childhood and youth; he does not leave school until page 115. The earlier letters, written to his stepmother, but also intended for his father, are illustrated by drawings and diagrams. As early as age 11, he is showing the original mind and strong powers of observation that will later inform his poetry: a list of 10 items entitled ‘Things in Summer Term different from other terms’ begins (1) caterpillars (2) butterflies (3) cricket… He has a fixation on food (curried eggs, rhubarb tart: bad; strawberries, chocolate, plum pudding: good), which later resurfaces in his poetry – and in his last wish to attend an oyster festival. But charming as these early letters are, the succession of headmasters, prefects and school dinners eventually becomes tedious.

The letters become more interesting when he reaches Oxford and widens his circle of friends. Here he met, among many others, WH Auden and Stephen Spender, with whose names his was to become linked as the new generation of young poets who flourished between the two world wars. The longest letter, running to 12½ pages, written in April, 1939, is to Eleanor Clark, a writer with whom he had fallen in love in New York shortly before boarding a Cunard liner for home. The romance with Clark carried on, largely by letter, for nearly three years and ended abruptly when he wrote a letter on July 9, 1942, beginning “Darling, This is to tell you that I have got married . . .”

His second wife was Hedli Anderson, an English singer and actress, mother of his daughter Corinna. They seemed true soul mates, judging from his letters, but Louis’ heavy drinking took a toll, and by 1960 it was all over. Louis married the actress Mary Wimbush, and in 1961 he wrote to a friend “Hedli is more or less emigrating to Kinsale in Co Cork where she is going to run some sort of steakhouse”. This was The Spinnaker, one of the first restaurants in what was to become Kinsale’s Good Food Circle. The connection was celebrated during Kinsale Arts Week in 2007, one of several events in Ireland commemorating the centenary of the birth of a great Irish poet.