|
|
 |
| |
Louis’ first wife Mary, with Betsy the dog |
The five ladies who shared the house that Louis built
Concluding a two-part feature for the centenary of Louis MacNeice’s birth, Dan Carrier reveals the romantic side of a poet who loved to look ‘at the legs with the high heels go by’
LOUIS MacNeice did not see it coming, though his wife’s behaviour towards the tall American house guest should have raised suspicions.
Charles Katzman had been staying at the poet’s Birmingham home in the early 1930s while recovering from a car accident. MacNeice’s wife Mary (pictured below) nursed him back to health and, when he was well, left with him.
It was a painful period – but one that the Irish poet drew on to influence his writing.
This month is the centenary of MacNeice’s birth, and his poetry can be seen on Tube trains, having been chosen for the Poems on the Underground series. The curator of the scheme, Judith Chernaik, who lives in Gospel Oak, believes the women in his life – he was married twice and had numerous long-term girlfriends and short-lived affairs – were an inspiration for his work.
MacNeice was inspired by Mary’s dance floor grace to write, soon after their divorce, a poem called Song, dedicated to the “the girl who had been the best dancer in Oxford”:
The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.Ms Chernaik said: “His work was influenced by his girlfriends. It is written to them and about them. His disappointments and his triumphs are chronicled in verse.
“He was a romantic person. His poetry was influenced by his longing, his love and his loneliness. And he was also inspired by femininity – he writes of sitting in his home in Hampstead and looking at the legs with high heels go by.”
But despite the upset of a failed marriage, he was still able to celebrate the five years he had with Mary. MacNeice wrote: “Life was comfortable, life was fine, / With two in a bed and patchwork cushions / And checks and tassels on the washing line / A gramophone, a cat and the smell of jasmine.”
After Mary left him, he moved to Keats Grove, Hampstead. And despite his own experience, he was not averse to affairs with married women.
In November, 1936, MacNeice was strolling over the Heath when he met artist Nancy Coldstream. She lived with her husband Bill, a painter, in Upper Park Road, Belsize Park. MacNeice was seeing the actress Leonara Corbett, who had once been the girlfriend of AA Milne. But it did not stop him falling for Nancy.
The affair was cemented when the pair visited the Hebrides to write a travel book, with Nancy providing illustrations.
They discussed marriage but as they returned to London, the image of her husband waiting forlornly at home made Nancy back away but not until either MacNeice or Bill – history does not record which – had suggested they live as a ménage à trois.
Another of MacNeice’s Hampstead friends was Margaret Gardiner. The secretary of the Association of Writers for Intellectual Liberty, she was clever, artistic, and well connected: she had met DH Lawrence and known Auden from holidays in Berlin. Auden had introduced them when MacNeice lived in Keats Grove – she had a home in nearby South Hill Park, in a cobbled mews behind The Magdala pub.
She was to write: “The MacNeices came from Connemara and it was in Connemara that I had seen rough-hewn versions of Louis – tall, proud, bony men with long faces, dark-haired and dark-eyed.
That was the mould in which Louis was cast, differentiated by the sensitivity of his mouth, his moody, grey, dark-lashed eyes and a camel-look of disdain... I was impressed by Louis’ dark looks and air of mystery. I was also piqued that he appeared to take no interest in me at all.”
Louis invited her to spend a weekend with him in Ireland. After much drinking, they woke up next to each other the following morning. Margaret was fond of MacNeice, more than he was of her, and their friends believed he had treated her badly by sleeping with her but not committing himself.
His academic patron ER Dodds wrote him a letter telling him to buck up. He was prompted to reply: “I am not in the habit of using my friends as prostitutes but I do feel guilty over M G as she is the only person I have ever had anything to do with without feeling in the slightest degree romantic about her.”
He later said to Dodds: “I am tired to death with polygamy. I should like to live somewhere monogamously. I feel remorseful over MG but if I were to meet her half way, it would only make things worse.”
He admitted to strong feelings for author Eleanor Clark, who was also an inspiration.
MacNeice met her at a party organised by the Partisan Review and quickly fell in love. But although his romancing of Clark was hampered by the fact she was in the States, it did not stop him writing beautiful love letters to her, proclaiming his feelings.
He goes on to call Eleanor “virginal” – but then qualifies it: “this has nothing to do with how many times you have slept with people... we were probably right not to sleep together just now because it makes it much more delicate and much fuller of possibilities; when we have a lot of time, it will evolve very naturally and beautifully.”
Although his relationship with Clark did not last, he wrote a poem for her called Meeting Point: “Time was away and somewhere else / There were two glasses and two chairs / And two people with one pulse / (somebody stopped moving the stairs) Time was away and somewhere else.”
But Clark melted into the background when he fell for singer Hedli Anderson, whom he married in 1942.
He wrote the poetry collection Springboard and dedicated it to her. They were to spend a happy two decades together, their marriage only failing when he left her for the actress Mary Wimbush, with whom he was to stay until his death in 1963.
Despite Hedli’s upset over the failure of their marriage, she penned a tribute to MacNeice after his death.
She called it “The Story of the House that Louis Built.”
It describes a series of rooms containing different facets of Louis’ life – the friends he kept, the art he created – but she saves the most important room till last.
“(It)...was elegantly furnished – there, the five ladies of his life lingered... The first, a young girl ‘with whom I shared an idyll five years long’. Through her he escaped from the Anglican church background of his father. The next four all had worlds of their own, a painter, a writer, a singer to whom he was married for 18 years and a talented actress.
“Over the lintel was written Love, Loyalty, Loneliness and Disillusion. On September 3rd 1963, with the words ‘am I supposed to be dying?’, he quietly closed the doors of the house he had built.”
|
 |
|
|
|
