The letters of Louis MacNeice
…
There are no more letters like the one to Hilton until the correspondence of the late 1930s and early 1940s with Eleanor Clark, an American writer he had an affair with. The letters to her are long, often funny – they make you wish you could read her replies. She presses him to be more dogmatic in his beliefs, and in a letter written during a bombing raid he tells her with the usual grace and disdain he felt for sloganeering:
I’m sick & tired, darling, of being accused of things like relativism & empiricism (burst of guns then) because it’s all a misunderstanding; & it’s not that I don’t believe anything, it’s just that I don’t think you can explain the Universe by saying 2 + 2 = 4 or by Dialectical Materialism or by the Cross of Christ. Etc. etc. etc. Droning & droning. The cook in my professor’s house at Oxford suddenly the other day began cursing Hitler Homerically – ‘I’ll cut out his inside & rub salt in it, I’ll cut off his leg & make him look at it etc.’
The bulk of the post-Oxford letters are practical. They concern the books he did write, and many relate to books he never began or finished: among them ‘The Roman Smile’, a discussion of Latin humour, a children’s book about three goats in Achill, an anthology of poetry for schools, an anthology with W.R. Rodgers called ‘The Character of Ireland’, a book on the practice of poetry for John Lehmann, a book called ‘Countries in the Air’ intended to discuss how ‘in foreign travel one is much of the time searching for the implementation of certain myths.’ Starting in April 1932, there are almost 50 letters to T.S. Eliot (who published MacNeice’s poetry and plays and Letters from Iceland). For those interested in this sort of thing (I am), the addressee remains ‘Mr Eliot’ until 1936, when he becomes ‘Eliot’, and finally in 1949 ‘Tom’, though he signs his letters ‘Louis MacNeice’. Disappointingly, the letters to Eliot are nearly all administrative, short, and not particularly enlightening, as are many of the letters to publishers, magazine editors and universities.
There’s not much correspondence with fellow writers, and what there is doesn’t deal with practice. Only one letter to his collaborator Auden is extant, and though interesting on what he thought of his friend’s poetry, it’s a public letter that appeared in New Verse. MacNeice was busy. He did his connecting (literary and otherwise) in person, in pubs and clubs and restaurants. The correspondence of a poet who writes letters to connect – like Keats or Bishop or Larkin – is different in kind, and a note to Larkin in 1958 reminds us how different. The two poets were editing a PEN anthology with Bonamy Dobree. In a footnote to MacNeice’s terse four lines suggesting inclusion of a poem by Redgrove, Allison records Larkin’s experience of the collaborative process, as related to Kingsley Amis: ‘Each editor became more like himself as time went on – Dobree more feather-brained and corrupt, MacNeice lazier and duller witted, and me more acutely critical and increasing in integrity.’ (In the recently published Letters to Monica, Larkin was – at least in 1950 – more generous: ‘I also happened on a poem called “Dublin” by MacNeice & that also depressed me by its extraordinary talent. Despite all we say about them, Auden & MacNeice have talent whereas the tiny fish have not. Poetry is like everything else: if you’re not 2/3rds of the way there already, it’s not worth starting.’)
MacNeice’s letters have little of Larkin’s bile or candour. The impression they give of their writer is similar to his own famous prescription: ‘I would have a poet able-bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions.’ There are plenty of physical impressions and very few mental ones; here large events – both political and personal – for the most part happen off-stage. In 1942 MacNeice married Hedli Anderson, a singer and actress, though she’s mentioned only after the marriage has taken place. A daughter, Corinna, was born the following year and the family spent 1950 in Athens, where MacNeice was director of the British Institute.
In the 1940s and 1950s, MacNeice starts to make radio documentaries abroad and in lieu of a diary writes long letters home to Hedli. There is much vivid local colour, but no time or space for anything else. Khartoum is
v. un-glam … Whole town laid out by Lord Kitchener; nothing from before him. Shoes get dusted over in no time. Inhabitants mainly sullen-looking; at any rate not responsive … Visited one of the ginning factories where the seeds are extracted from the cotton. Occasional motheaten camels wandering in, wedged between 2 great bales like the most cumbrous kind of lifejacket.
Throughout he is assiduous in recording his tipples: lager, Dutch beer and champagne in Accra, John Collinses in New Delhi, sarsaparilla in Singapore, whisky in Colombo, brandy and soda in Kuala Lumpur, Chianti in Khartoum. The letters also relate the embarrassment and consequences after MacNeice, staying on a US naval destroyer to make a radio feature, was upbraided for being drunk. Drink is a recurrent topic in the letters to Hedli in particular, with him repeatedly apologising or defending himself.
And the letters take you to places you don’t really want to go. In 1959, from Johannesburg, he writes to Hedli that
I don’t think I’m any longer interested in Sex for Sex’s Sake … & can’t really get interested – drink or no drink – unless ones tuned in on the other wavelength. Which so often (drink or no drink) we aren’t – probably because we’re both such egocentrics. Please don’t take any of this amiss; everyone (including me) knows that you’re extraordinarily attractive for your age.
In arguments he is mostly gentle, but that ‘for your age’ is barbed. Within a page it becomes clear he’s having an affair with a 20-year-old South African, who, as he tells her, is definitely ‘on the same wavelength’. His marriage to Hedli broke up in 1960 and he moved in with Mary Wimbush, another actress, his companion until he died.
