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'More Than Glass': Louis Macneice's Poetics of Expansion

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'More Than Glass': Louis Macneice's Poetics of Expansion THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA ‘More than glass’: Louis MacNeice’s Poetics of Expansion A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of the Department of English School of Arts & Sciences Of The Catholic University of America In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree Doctor of Philosophy © Copyright All Rights Reserved By Michael A. Moir, Jr. Washington, DC 2012 ‘More than glass’: Louis MacNeice’s Poetics of Expansion Michael A. Moir, Jr., PhD Director: Virgil Nemoianu, PhD The Northern Irish poet and dramatist Louis MacNeice, typically regarded as a minor modernist following in the footsteps of Yeats and Eliot or living in the shadow of Auden, is different from his most important predecessors and contemporaries in the way he attempts to explode conventional ideas of place, presenting human subjects in transit and shifting, melting landscapes, rooms and buildings that tend to blend in with their sur- roundings. While Yeats, Eliot and Auden evince a siege mentality that leads them to build religious or political Utopias easily separable from the chaos of the contemporary world, MacNeice denies the validity of any such imaginary constructs, instead taking apart the boundaries of imaginary private worlds, from rooms to islands to pastoral landscapes. Mac- Neice’s representations of space favor what Fredric Jameson terms ‘postmodern space’: his poems and radio plays operate outside of ideas of ‘home,’ ‘church,’ or ‘nation,’ opposing the rigidity of such places to the fluidity of travel. MacNeice has been much misunderstood and underestimated, and a reappraisal of his career is due, particularly given the amount of material that has been published or reis- sued since his centenary in 2007. His revolutionary approach to space and his hostility to most forms of essentialism show that he is important not just as an influence on contempo- rary Irish and English poets, but that he was in the vanguard of postmodernism’s assault on the grand narratives of the modern nation-state. This dissertation by Michael A. Moir, Jr. fulfills the dissertation requirement for the doctoral degree in English approved by Virgil Nemoianu, PhD, as Director, and Joseph Sendry, PhD, and Pamela Ward, PhD, as Readers. _______________________________________ Virgil Nemoianu, PhD, Director _______________________________________ Joseph Sendry, PhD, Reader _______________________________________ Pamela Ward, PhD, Reader ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ‘But I come not to give you any idol or idea…’ ..................................................... 1 Chapter One A Plea for Impure Poetry: MacNeice’s Prose Criticism and Postmodernism ................................................................................................27 Chapter Two ‘A cage across their sight’: Place, Space and Non-Place in MacNeice’s Poetry .............................................................................................76 Chapter Three Childe Louis to the Broadcast Tower Came: Louis MacNeice and the Development of Postmodern Poetic Drama ............................................126 Chapter Four ‘Give us this day our daily news’: Religion and Politics as Limiting Factors in MacNeice’s Poetry and Thought ..........................................170 Chapter Five ‘But I will escape, with my dog, on the far side of the fair’: MacNeice, Ego, and the Poet’s Social World ......................................................209 Conclusion ‘If you want to die you will have to pay for it’: MacNeice Becomes his Admirers ........................................................................246 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................282 iii Introduction ‘But I come not to give you any idol or idea…’ Louis MacNeice is a difficult poet to place, whether in the overarching canon of Literature in English or the smaller alternative canon of Anglo-Irish Literature. Born in Belfast in 1907 but educated and domiciled in England, he nevertheless thought of himself as Irish and remained imaginatively engaged with his home country, though he never lived there as an adult. He was a leftist intellectual who openly expressed doubts about the effect of a Marxist revolution on social life and culture. Though he was a classicist educated at some of the best schools in Britain, he managed to write in the voice of the ordinary ‘man in the street’ with much greater ease and panache than his more politically committed contemporaries. MacNeice is a bundle of contradictions, a skeptic writing in an era that seemed to insist on belief. His resistance to fixed positions is forward-thinking and innova- tive, and it may also be the ingredient in his poetry that damaged his critical standing. Of the four poets who made up the four-man collective known alternately as “the Auden group” or, as the right-wing poet Roy Campbell disparagingly called them, “Mac- Spaunday”, only Auden and MacNeice have maintained their early reputations; their best poems are regularly anthologized, most of their work remains in print, and a steady stream of dissertations and books show sustained academic interest. Though in the years since his centenary in 2007 MacNeice has made some gains in this area while Auden has slowed 1 2 a bit, MacNeice has typically lived in Auden’s shadow due to his failure to resolve the contradictions in his life and work by adopting a fixed political, philosophical, or religious point of view. His contemporaries seem to have regarded this as a weakness in his work, and the following remark by Francis Scarfe (in a 1942 book tellingly titled Auden and After) is typical. According to Scarfe, MacNeice ‘can be considered a very good represen- tative of many of the young poets…who have failed to make up their mind about society, philosophy, and religion, and whose tragedy is that they are aimlessly drifting through a hostile world, and failing to use their talent to the best advantage’1. Scarfe never lets us know exactly what this ‘best advantage’ would be, but he hints at it at the end of the chapter on MacNeice: ‘there is no centre, as yet, to his work’2. The quality Scarfe seems to be after, then, is the kind of fixity of purpose that commitment would bring to MacNeice’s work – whether it be the cultural nationalism of Yeats, the ‘royalist’ and ‘Anglo-Catholic’ attitudes of Eliot, or Auden’s seemingly contradictory attraction to both Marx and Freud, both of whom are eventually thrown over for Christianity tinged with existentialism. The fact that MacNeice does not adopt any such program or creed renders him, for Scarfe, ‘obscure’3; his work lacks a known structure of symbolism to which the critic can refer, and he is not attached to any particular body of opinion that might help to illuminate his work. Criticisms of this sort have dogged MacNeice since the 1930s, as have comparisons to Yeats, Eliot, and Auden, which often present MacNeice in an unfavorable light. George 1 Francis Scarfe , Auden and After: The Liberation of Poetry 1930-1941 (London: Routledge, 1942), 56. 2 Ibid., 67 3 Ibid., 64 3 Bornstein accuses him of ‘facile adoption of Eliotic impersonality’4 in his criticism, while group studies of the period tend to emphasize Auden’s centrality, a case in point being Samuel Hynes’s study of 1930s writing, The Auden Generation. MacNeice is clearly im- portant to Hynes’s conception of the decade, given that he figures prominently in its organi- zational principle (Hynes discusses the decade year-by-year, focusing his analysis on a few key works, and MacNeice is represented at least once in every year after 1936); he calls Autumn Journal ‘the best personal expression of the end-of-the-΄thirties mood’5. It is still Auden, though, along with Christopher Isherwood, who receives most of the author’s at- tention. MacNeice is, in the end, ‘the professional lachrymose Irishman’6, writing gloomy poems on autumnal themes. Tellingly, both MacNeice’s admirers and detractors often cite his Irishness as either the great strength or the great weakness of his poetry. Scarfe sees it as a limiting factor; MacNeice is a less important poet than Auden because he ‘lacks one of Auden’s stabilizing factors, his understanding and love of England…It is evident by this, and by his Irish habit of beating his nurse when he writes of his home country…that MacNeice is a fundamentally Romantic poet…in a word, he is damnably Irish.’7 Critics more sympathetic to Ireland and the Irish (and to MacNeice) make their argument in similar terms, though without Scarfe’s pro-English chauvinism. The generation of Northern Irish poets who came of age in the 4 George Bornstein, Transformations of Romanticism in Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 74. 5 Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s (New York: Vi- king, 1972), 373. 6 Ibid., 334. 7 Scarfe, Auden and After, 62. 4 1960s, which includes Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and the slightly younger Paul Muldoon, claims MacNeice as an important influence (though Mahon is not willing to go so far as to affirm MacNeice’s Irish nationality). Seamus Deane concedes that ‘Valediction’ and Section XVI of Autumn Journal ‘are important as statements of a kind of rejection-in-acceptance of Ireland which is typical of the Northern Protestant mind in one of its subtler manifestations’, though he does not think that they ‘wear well as poetry’8 – perhaps because they lack the ‘regional loyalty’9 that Deane
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