|
|
 |
| |
William Empson and Louis MacNeice |
Portrait of the poet as a thinking man
Irish poet and playwright Louis MacNeice was born 100 years ago next week. In the first of a two-part feature Dan Carrier meets the radio producer who watched as MacNeice, his marriage failed, found solace in drink
IT is a measure of Louis MacNeice that as he stood over the grave of fellow Irish poet WB Yeats, re-interrred from his original burial place in France, instead of some well-prepared lyrics, he questioned whether the body in the grave was the one the mourners had come to pay their respects to.
Yeats’s friend Maurice Collis recalled what happened: “It remained for Louis to say the final word. He declared that the wrong body had been buried. Instead this was the body of a Frenchman with a club foot. ‘A mistake, but does it really matter?’ But was he certain he knew what he was talking about? Why, it’s common knowledge in Menton, he assured us. Well, then, what do you think should be done? we asked. Can’t do anything now, he said. Everyone then went back to the hotel for tea.”
The episode illuminates the unpretentious and sardonic nature of the poet, playwright and broadcaster. Next week is the centenary of his birth and with two anthologies of his work and a travel book being re-released, his legacy is due to be discovered by a new generation of readers.
BBC radio producer Anthony Thwaite first met MacNeice in 1958, five years before his death.
MacNeice had joined the Corporation in the late 1930s, producing talks for the war effort before branching out into drama.
A restless traveller who crossed continents to find material, he always had a home close to the BBC’s Portland Place offices. For more than two decades he lived in Hampstead, Primrose Hill, Regent’s Park and Highgate.
A young BBC trainee, Thwaite had published a volume of poetry. The head of the features department, Laurence Gillam, told him to share MacNeice’s office.
“Gillam said: You are a poet – I suppose you had better go in there with Louis. He is one of them too. It was as if we were a rare breed of animal, put in a cage together.”
It was a memorable moment for Thwaite. “Louis was very famous,” he recalls. “I was in awe. I had known his poems since I was in my teens. And I realised quickly he was not that delighted to be sharing his space with me.”
But they settled in and Thwaite got used to MacNeice’s eccentricities.
“I was young and keen, and I would get in early and get started,” he says. “MacNeice would roll up, coughing and wheezing and looking hungover, at around 11am. He would shuffle his papers, scribble a few words and at about midday he would gesture with his head towards the window and say: ‘Let’s go to The Stag in New Cavendish Street’.”
A few pints would follow, colleagues would join them, followed by more drinks. “There was heavy drinking each day,” recalls Thwaite.
Despite this, Thwaite maintains the features department still produced telling work. He collaborated with MacNeice on a well-received translation of Homer’s Odyssey.
However, as MacNeice’s drinking escalated, the BBC hierarchy asked him to explain his output.
“He had written one play in six months,” recalls Thwaite. “They asked him what he had been doing with the rest of his time. He looked them straight in the eyes and said: Thinking.”
MacNeice had been going through the failure of his marriage to the singer Hedli Anderson, and his drinking was affecting his health. It made mornings in their shared office tricky, recalls Thwaite. “He had kindly impulses but he could be cutting and disapproving if he wanted to be.
“He could use a real put-down on you but when he praised something you had done it was like getting three gold stars.”
But he also remembers when MacNeice’s gentle nature came to the fore.
He says: “In 1963, Sylvia Plath’s friend Douglas Cleverdon arrived at the Great Portland Street pub The George with the news she had killed herself.”
Thwaite recalls some one making a disparaging remark about “women poets”. “MacNeice rounded on him and told him to shut up. ‘Can’t you see the man’s upset, and rightly so,’ he said.”
Thwaite had originally not been particularly moved by MacNeice’s poetry – he was more interested in the romanticism of Dylan Thomas.
“He grew on me,” recalls Thwaite. “He was a scholar of Latin and Greek and this comes through in his work. He was a very clever man. Think of his contemporaries: Auden got a third, while Spender did not get a degree at all. MacNeice got a first from Oxford.
“People remember MacNeice from when they first read him. His words become part of you. You do not need to learn them by rote – you hear them once and they stick.”
Next week: MacNeice and his women. |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
