JONATHAN ALLISON (ed.). Letters of Louis MacNeice.

Abstract

In November 1940, having decided after much vacillation to spend the war in England, Louis MacNeice was on the verge of making the hazardous journey back across the Atlantic from New York. Writing from the evocative address of 7 Middagh Street, Brooklyn Heights, home to W. H. Auden and Gypsy Rose Lee (and the eponymous subject of a fine Paul Muldoon poem), MacNeice instructed his friend, the Irish classicist E. R. Dodds, about what to do in the event of his death with his literary remains. In case ‘any mug’ wants to publish his correspondence: ‘I do not want any letters to my father or stepmother to be published as they nearly always contain some falsity. I also regret most of my undergraduate letters (esp. to Anthony Blunt) which are nearly always v. affected & forced but I suppose they might be interesting to social historians’ (p. 415). In this generous selection of the poet’s letters, Jonathan Allison has thankfully ignored his wartime wishes (as well as braving his pre-emptive insult). However, MacNeice’s judgement on the inauthentic nature of these letters points to a more fundamental elusiveness. In contrast to several vivid volumes of twentieth-century literary correspondence recently published—such as those by Ted Hughes and Samuel Beckett—the voice in these letters lacks a certain coherent presence; MacNeice remains, as ever, aloof. But to view this quality as a failure—the poet somehow neglecting to provide the requisite mix of psychological revelation, intellectual muscle-flexing and literary sensibility—would be to misunderstand MacNeice’s literary achievements, pass over the unsettling darkness lurking below so much of the shimmering surface of his life and work, and to neglect the considerable insights this volume offers readers and scholars beyond the distorting category of character.