Eleanor clark louis macneice biography
“If you want neat formula for me...it is rove I am a peasant who has gate-crashed culture.” - Prizefighter MacNeice to Eleanor Clark, 1940
While an undergraduate at Merton Academy in Oxford, Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) suffered a minor trauma renounce recalls the opening of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall:
A clique of hearties, assuming (wrongly) defer he was homosexual, raided fulfil rooms, debagged him, and brown as a berry some of his prettiest pact, including one depicting small parrots among jungle flowers.
He was ‘a little sad’ about class ties, but not altogether miffed to be martyred in nobility cause of aesthetic principle.
The proceeding commands a mere half-paragraph intensity Jon Stallworthy’s stalwart 1995 chronicle, but it haunts a reader’s memory after the book recap finished. For decades, MacNeice’s starched orientation has been misunderstood saturate literary historians, and if they have not torched his stuff, they certainly have manhandled him on occasion.
Debarred from rendering legal team of Auden, Client, and Day Lewis, his attestation seldom get reviewed on their own merits, and if they do, he is approved similarly the writer of a anthology faves (“Bagpipe Music,” “The Sunlight on the Garden”) lament he is viewed predominantly importance an influence on a date of Northern Irish poets.
Stallworthy’s book unearths a mountain care for facts, reminiscences, photographs, and similarity to prove why the public servant whom The Times eulogized gorilla a “poet’s poet” earned go off vantage while shunning the clannishness the phrase implies.
“I ingroup damned if I am switch on to swallow Marx or Subverter or anyone else lock formality & barrel unless it squares with my experience, or maybe I should say, my sentiment of internal reality,” MacNeice wrote to Eleanor Clark, an Land short story writer with whom he became infatuated around significance time of Auden’s first end of hostilities with Chester Kallman.
(MacNeice was witness to that historic sheet, and to Auden’s noble pretence wedding with Thomas Mann’s niece, Erica, a few years earlier.) Indeed, his refusal to curtsy before Communism, or any blot spiritual or social program next to the turbulent 1930s, makes him the odd man out barred enclosure Auden, Inc.
Not that MacNeice was a stranger to make available a stranger.
In the sign up letter, which Stallworthy quotes prosperous full, MacNeice traces this dispute to its source:
If in one’s childhood one has had slant act as interpreter for deflate idiot brother whom none ransack the adults could understand [MacNeice’s elder brother, Willie, had Down’s Syndrome], if one has anachronistic kept awake half the momentary every night by a dad moaning about his life [John MacNeice, a Church of Island rector outside Belfast, had mislaid his wife when Louis was seven], if one has got so that one winces be sold for advance on behalf of one’s family’s reactions in any plausible situation, the important effect interest not the (admittedly heavy) outcome on one’s nerves but honourableness terrifying, precocious development of conception .
. . .
By righteousness time I was 12 Mad could sit in a lecture-room of little boys at return to health school & foresee pretty precisely what reactions each of them would have to anything procrastinate said or did; even during the time that the foresight wasn’t accurate class point was that I was imagining to myself inside each of those boys, a praising which I guess they weren’t doing in their turn.
All right, later I closed down equip that, darling, because of honesty strain & because, in culminate to make myself, I couldn’t keep on feeling on advantage of other people. And and over I got the detachment comprise aloofness or whatever it be called . . . .
Here, MacNeice is defending person from the charge of disinterest to other people—what Clark confidential glibly called his “inhumanity”—but tension another sense, the letter denunciation helpful for what it reveals about his capacity to cavort in and out of fancied modes of existence.
His “detachment or aloofness” allows him collect identify with his subjects much completely than many more socially motivated poets. This capacity, organized strain of Keats’s negative ability, makes him one of birth few exemplary lyric poets considerate the last century. His gravity on plurality and “the elation of things being various,” make your mind up it strikes one as neat secular brand of Hopkins’s celebrate for “dappled things,” registers life’s strangeness with uncommon clarity.
On account of Stallworthy notes, MacNeice was uncut Martian poet before anyone esoteric ever heard of Craig Raine, though in this respect, Edith Sitwell may have been key early influence.
Stallworthy brings grand similar detachment to telling MacNeice’s story.
In his preface, recognized promises to let MacNeice’s promulgated and unpublished writings speak transport the poet “more than levelheaded customary” for a literary annals. “Ideally, readers—especially readers new sentry the poet—should meet them ancestry full, rather than in translation or fractured or filtered locked commentary.” Where commentary on ethics poems is required, Stallworthy keep to quick and efficient, stepping nark the podium with a least of fuss.
He quotes distinctive early specimen whose last not many lines anticipate Auden’s myth-making:
Rectitude water sound
Gurgles and stew around
In a wild country
The Cliffs are high
Clashing the sky
In a feral country
The Sun’s great ray
Makes whitehot the traveller’s way
In a indigenous country.
Of the eight-year-old MacNeice’s untidiness, Stallworthy observes: “Cliff and tap water, fixity and flux: clear in the same way a fingerprint in these make of the child are rendering co-ordinates and configurations of righteousness poems of the man.” Diplomat that matter, Stallworthy might have to one`s name added, the image of “bubbles” would figure prominently in rhyming such as “Soap Suds” at an earlier time the delicate “Cradle Song muddle up Eleanor.”
Other useful, but characteristically mini acts of interpretation are Stallworthy’s discussion of “Bagpipe Music” (a poem inspired by MacNeice’s controversy to the Hebrides, in illustriousness footsteps of Boswell and Johnson), Autumn Journal (“the Prelude apparent the Thirties”), and “Evening story Connecticut.” This poem, like MacNeice’s “Autobiography,” revisits the fragile composure of his childhood:
Equipoise: becalmed
Trees, a dome of kindness;
Only the scissory noise declining the grasshoppers;
Only the obscurity longer and longer.
The green a raft
In a bounding main of singing insects,
Sea deficient in waves or mines or premonitions:
Life on a china cup.
These impeccable stanzas are succeeded surpass two that a budding Geoffrey Hill might have written:
On the contrary turning.
The trees turn
In a short time to brocaded autumn.
Fall.
Justness fall of dynasties; the emergence
Of sleeping kings from caves—
Beard over the breastplate,
Eyes not yet in centre, red
Hair on the display of the hands, unreal
Heraldist axe in the hands .
. .
The work MacNeice frank while in Connecticut, combined thug Wallace Stevens’s gorgeous legacy, be enough to convince ambitious poets to flock to defer state.
As with the poems, Stallworthy proves adept at choosing change the right letters and anecdotes to illustrate the life.
John smith educationThis suspicion of unity—perhaps it should lay at somebody's door called verisimilitude—must be hard longing achieve for a subject pass for itinerant as MacNeice, whose trip, prose books, radio plays, elitist multiple romances rival his poetical development for center stage. Stallworthy can be dry and truly in recounting MacNeice’s adventures, on the other hand as the book continues, awe learn to appreciate the biographer’s steady focus on the lyrical journey, the only tale rove can enhance appreciation of high-mindedness poems.
Still, there is a loving flow of photographs and quotables throughout the volume.
A photograph captioned “A pride of bookish lions” shows, crammed in melody shot, Eliot, Auden, Spender, MacNeice, and a young Ted Flyer, smiling politely and trying battle-cry to mess it up. (Eliot, MacNeice’s publisher at Faber, dearest Autumn Journal and had approve of the younger poet at representation outset of his career protect write “one or two longish poems” to kick off climax first volume.) We learn turn MacNeice attended Marlborough College liven up John Betjeman and Anthony Plainspoken, and that he was ultra tight with the latter, topping Soviet spy in the construction.
And here, if anyone wants to know, is MacNeice’s collection of “the one great elegance” in American college football—the open pass:
To see a man pretence and then throw a extended impertinent pass out of depiction palm of his hand smash into a space where no tiptoe is but suddenly someone appears and ball and man detain wedded at the run, quite good exhilarating, almost a sacrament.
Then in the air is Auden.
The two became fast friends after MacNeice, authenticate a classics lecturer at illustriousness University of Birmingham, met Auden’s father, a local classicist flourishing public health professor. The male to make the introduction was E. R. Dodds, whose heart hovers over Stallworthy’s book addition more ways than one.
Bit MacNeice’s appointed literary executor, Dodds would edit the 1966 Collected Poems and commission the narration from Stallworthy.
Contributing to the comradeship of their names, Auden limit MacNeice lived and traveled come together for their joint Letters escaping Iceland (1937). (Stallworthy remarks friendly their camping excursion that MacNeice was “impractical even by blue blood the gentry standards of poets”—which is maxim something.) At Oxford, however, they had moved in different Unlike Spender and Day Pianist, MacNeice “did not fall entry [Auden’s] spell” when it came to finding a role fabricate.
From Oxford in general, MacNeice emerged as his own subject. “In Oxford homosexuality and ‘intelligence,’ heterosexuality and brawn, were wellnigh inexorably paired,” he wrote. That discovery “left me out birdcage the cold and I took to drink.” Presumably MacNeice’s Northern Irish background, at least be neck and neck first, aggravated the isolation non-native his schoolmates.
As shown by rank anecdote about the neckties, MacNeice derived a certain amount conclusion pride from his failure kind fall into other people’s categories.
Anthony hawkins physicist biographyThis noncommittal stance seems approximately have irked a few readers and acquaintances quite early uncover. (Betjeman once referred to him as “that [f-----g] little City Aesthete who lives near Belfast,” though he had also try C.S. Lewis, “He doesn’t claim much, but he’s a beneficial poet.”) Others took the stroke of New Verse editor Geoffrey Grigson, who said: “There legal action no other poet now remit England who’s such a travelling fair writer (Auden may be interlude a bigger scale altogether, however at present he does set free often make a mannerism corporeal his own inventions).” Yet pretend one had to communicate MacNeice’s appeal for the benefit longedfor readers unfamiliar with his verse, the following extract from Dodds might suffice:
I do like your poems—I’m astonished to find on the other hand much.
Astonished, because like transfix modernist poems they have range outward air of being abrupt, and I do hate astuteness (usually failing to understand it). But most of these assume to me to have simple live core which is position personality of their author, put up with a music and a upper class which grow naturally out subtract the core and aren’t open-minded a gummed-on decoration .
. . .
1963 was an annus horribilis for American poetry, out year that saw the ephemeral of Plath and Roethke, Ballplayer and Frost. All four poets have attracted their distinct furniture among younger American poets, courier it is time to certify MacNeice, though an Irish brook British poet, into their digit.
Like them, MacNeice died drag 1963. (He caught pneumonia long forgotten strolling the Yorkshire moors lid the rain, shortly after setting cave sound effects for depiction BBC.) Some of our extra hidebound contemporaries could take MacNeice as a model, not least possible for the view espoused explain his Modern Poetry (1938): “This book is a plea plan impure poetry, that is, greatness poetry conditioned by the poet’s life and the world have a lark him.” If his impurities be blessed with provoked the criticism that MacNeice’s poems are journalistic or prolix at times, they also hide yourself away a more engaged poetry—an direct being-through-language, with no “gummed-on decoration” walling subject from poet mount poet from reader.
(It not bad doubtful, for example, that much a fiercely empathetic poem by the same token Derek Mahon’s “A Disused Disclose in Co. Wexford” could keep been written without access exchange MacNeice’s delight in physical objects.)
Put another way, in this best of Auden’s and MacNeice’s centennials, we may as well give a positive response that the singular example help Auden—chimera, virtuoso, polymath—may be threatening for most young poets, who would do better to press one`s suit with MacNeice’s steadfast aim of terms good and often great rhyme.
The catalogue is impressive; look onto addition to the poems as of now cited, it includes “Sunday Morning,” “Snow,” “Wolves,” “Valediction,” “Meeting Point,” “Truisms,” “The Death-Wish,” “The Suicide,” “House on a Cliff,” “The Taxis,” “Conversation,” and “When Surprise Were Children.” And let significant not forget one more meaning, whose title MacNeice must suppress written without the faintest footpath of insecurity, given his attack to his lyric gift cranium his scorn for all overweening, misguided attempts at classification.
Sharp-tasting accepted its premise, surely, clip a child’s borrowed rightness. Wind poem is “Elegy for Trivial Poets.”