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To Work. to My Own Office, My Own Job, Not Matching Pictures, But 13210 L.McN INNER ST22 5/9/07 9:46 am Page 36 To work. To my own office, my own job, MacNeice was awarded the CBE in the 1958 New Year’s Honours Not matching pictures, but inventing sound, list. He recalled his conversation with The Queen: Precalculating microphone and knob “Herself asked me ‘What do you do?’ and I said, ‘Well, I do radio. I also write.’ She said: ‘Have you been doing it long?’” In homage to the human voice. From Autumn Sequel (1954) 43 MacNeice’s response was to direct his energies towards his radio work. His output in the following years varied greatly in range and scale: in 1955 alone he produced programmes on the Nile, Yorkshire and Delhi. In 1957 MacNeice received an Honorary D.Litt from Queen’s University in Belfast, and published a new collection of poems, Visitations. “I like to think that my latest short poems are on the whole more concentrated and better organized than my earlier ones, relying more on syntax and bony feature than on bloom or frill or the floating image. I should also like to think that sometimes they achieve a blend of ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’, marrying the element of wit to the sensuous-mystical element.” Visit of Queen Elizabeth II MacNeice, on Visitations (1957) to the BBC, 1953 42 In 1958 MacNeice was sent on a BBC television training course. He adapted two Strindberg plays for the small screen. But he always preferred radio. The following year he undertook a lecture tour of South African colleges and universities. In March 1961, MacNeice’s new collection Solstices was published. “To assess one’s own development is difficult. I would say of myself that I have become progressively more humble in the face of my material and therefore less ready to slap poster paint all over it.” MacNeice on Solstices (1961) During this period the BBC Features Department was visited by a team of management consultants. Their conversation with MacNeice Accepts has become the stuff of legend: appointment to Established Staff, 1957 36 37 13210 L.McN INNER ST22 5/9/07 9:46 am Page 38 Consultants: “We see, Mr MacNeice, that during the past six In the summer of 1961 MacNeice renegotiated his contract with months you have produced only one programme. Can you tell us the BBC, becoming a part-time employee. This was something of a what you were doing the rest of the time?” relief both to MacNeice and to the BBC. MacNeice: “Thinking.” 45 “Study of a sensitive and sympathetic man getting blunted and possibly corrupted by finding himself in the wrong job.” MacNeice’s proposal for a new broadcast play, The Administrator, March 1960 By this time, MacNeice was drinking 44 heavily. “A good deal of Features Department’s time in those days was spent in either the Stag or, further down the road, the George. This was the way that Louis worked, but God, he did get through a lot of work as well.” Anthony Thwaite, Archive Hour: Louis MacNeice (2007) MacNeice’s Staff Card Cover for The Mad Islands & The “I believe that this new arrangement will stimulate MacNeice to Administrator creative activity in fields outside radio, and that this, in turn, will have a beneficial effect on his radio work when he returns “How Louis wrote so much, read so much, travelled so much, to work for us.” drank so much and had so much time for his friends baffled me. Laurence Gilliam Once we were walking past the old Group Theatre when he stopped suddenly and addressed me seriously. 1962 and 1963 proved a period of extraordinary creativity, with ‘Are you a drinking man?’ MacNeice completing the poems for his collection The Burning ‘No, I wouldn’t call myself one, I drink irregularly but seldom Perch, as well as writing book 46 seriously.’ reviews, a book on astrology, ‘I drink very regularly and very seriously.’” and delivering the Cambridge John Boyd, The Middle of My Journey (1990) Clark Lectures. Cover for The Burning Perch 38 39 13210 L.McN INNER ST22 5/9/07 9:46 am Page 40 In July 1963 he recorded an unscripted talk on his childhood years for John Boyd. Broadcast on the BBC’s Third Programme, Childhood Memories remains the only extant recording of the poet talking about his own life. “. the McCanns have just lodged their visiting poet who by noon will cross from the Elbow Room to the studios in Ormeau Avenue, and deliver his talk, unscripted, on ‘Childhood Memories’; whose sleep now, if sleep it is, remains unbroken through the small, insensible hours between the whiskey nightcap and a breakfast of whiskey.” Peter McDonald, ‘The Neighbours’ In August 1963 MacNeice visited Yorkshire to gather sound effects for his radio play Persons from Porlock. “I was very glad to hear that this had been accepted but am now somewhat distressed to hear that you want a different title . it would break my heart if either the word ‘person’ or the name ‘Porlock’ disappeared from the title . I could easily add a sub-title – something like ‘A Study in 20th Century Frustration’.” MacNeice memo to Assistant Head of Features, February 1963 The programme involved recording 47 underground. MacNeice, anxious that the sounds captured would be absolutely accurate, insisted on going down a Yorkshire pothole with a BBC engineer. He got wet, caught a chill and developed viral pneumonia. He was admitted to hospital on 27 August, and died on 3 September. MacNeice circa 1963 “MacNeice’s premature death at the age of fifty-five had shocked us. We felt bereaved of a father-figure whom we had only recently been getting to know.” Michael Longley MacNeice’s funeral was held on Saturday, 7 September 1963, in St John’s Wood Church in London. His ashes are buried in Carrowdore churchyard in County Down. Headstone of MacNeice’s grave, Carrowdore churchyard 40 48 13210 L.McN INNER ST22 5/9/07 9:46 am Page 42 The tributes were laudatory: “As a radio writer, he had almost no rivals. Many distinguished poets and dramatists have contributed to the radio form but none “It seems almost grotesque to write about Louis MacNeice in the have used radio as a principal medium of expression so consistently past tense. His sudden death (aged fifty-five) from bronchial and over so long a span of time.” pneumonia makes no sense or meaning. He always seemed Christopher Holmes writing in the Radio Times (1965) destined for a long career, one who would survive, a man possessed of immense staying-power and a mind like a dynamo; “Louis MacNeice was a cat who walked by himself. He had a of natural distinction and dignity, as Apollonian as his friend Dylan quality of great stillness, as he watched at Lord’s or Twickenham, Thomas was Dionysian.” in a Delhi bazaar or a Dublin pub, but there was always a sense of ‘Louis MacNeice: A Tribute’ by Cyril Connolly (1963) restrained movement and energy conserved for the decisive spring.” Obituary, The Times (4 September, 1963) “I am confident that posterity will sustain my conviction, that Louis MacNeice’s later poems show an advance upon his earlier, are 50 more certain in their technique, brilliant though that always was, and more moving, but even if I thought otherwise, I should still admire him for risking failure rather than being content to repeat himself successfully.” From W.H. Auden’s Memorial Address (1963) 49 W.H. Auden, 1964 List of personal possessions collected from MacNeice’s BBC office after his death 42 43 13210 L.McN INNER ST22 5/9/07 9:46 am Page 44 The Features Department, which 51 had encouraged and nurtured the art of imaginative writing for radio, was disbanded early in 1965, as the BBC further sought to respond to the challenges and opportunities of television. Louis MacNeice, 1952 The posthumously published poem ‘Thalassa’ is one of MacNeice’s finest: The Burning Perch, MacNeice’s final collection of poetry, was published shortly after his death. Put out to sea, ignoble comrades, Whose record shall be noble yet; “From the abounding memory source of ‘Soap Suds’ to the Butting through scarps of moving marble as-it-is-now-and-ever-shall-be mythic take on ‘Charon’, the book The narwhal dares us to be free; had swiftness and inevitability and left an indelible mark.” By a high star our course is set, Seamus Heaney Our end is Life. Put out to sea. “He seemed like his later work, grim and sardonic, scored by long First published in the London Magazine (1964) experience, though there was a wistful nobility too. If the world he loved so much had let him down, the long head rose above it – MacNeice’s legacy is not only to the BBC and to the many as his best work now rises above that of his contemporaries.” poets and writers from Northern Ireland who have been Derek Mahon influenced by him: it is above all to the generations of readers and listeners who have been inspired by his work. “His poetry reconciles traditionalism and Modernism. In a curious way MacNeice did more than other twentieth-century poets to test poetry against the century. He tested it against the claims of politics and philosophy, against the pressures of cities and war. And he did not take the outcome of these tests, or of anything else, for granted.” Edna Longley, Louis MacNeice: A Critical Study (1988) 44 45 13210 L.McN INNER ST22 5/9/07 9:46 am Page 46 Short Reflections on MacNeice 52 Bernard MacLaverty World is crazier and more of it than we think, Louis MacNeice was born in Brookhill Incorrigibly plural.
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