The centenary year of Louis MacNeice draws to a close, unmarked by too few commemorations. Apart from a few days of activities at Queen's University in his native Belfast, little has been done to honour the memory of one of our finest poets. But his words live on, writes Wesley Boyd.
He could be described as a man of three cities: Belfast, where he was born on September 12th, 1907 "between the mountains and the gantries/ To the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams", as he himself put it; Dublin, which he visited frequently; London, where he lived and worked for a large part of his life. Not surprisingly, the poet had a word or two for all of them.
Belfast was "A city built upon mud;/ A culture built upon profit;/ Free speech nipped in the bud,/ The minority always guilty".
Dublin fared little better: "This was never my town/ I was not born or bred/ Nor schooled here and she will not/ Have me alive or dead."
London he considered to be the centre of the cultural universe, the place where writers ought to be. "Jockeyed her fogs and quoted Johnson:/ To be tired of this is to tire of life./ Nevertheless let the petals fall/ Fast from the flower of cities all."
MacNeice's father was a Church of Ireland clergyman from the West of Ireland. From his first parish in Belfast he moved down the lough to become rector of Carrickfergus, a bitter sectarian town, when Louis was two. The formative childhood years in the dark rectory were to influence much of his poetry. One of his first memories was of the cook, Annie, "a buxom, rosy girl from a farm in County Tyrone, the only Catholic I knew and therefore my only proof that Catholics were human".
His mother suffered from depression and was admitted to a nursing home in Dublin in August, 1913. Louis and his brother and sister waited each day for her to return to the rectory. They never saw her again: she died in December, 1914. "I think the shock of seeing the sudden change in the mother whom he loved so much, followed by the uncertainty of her return, may have been the chief factor which caused Louis's memories of childhood to be so sad and sometimes so bitter," his elder sister Elizabeth recalled.
Soon after his mother's death his father, who was to go on to become a bishop, decided that Louis should begin his formal education at Sherborne preparatory school in Dorset. From Sherborne he sometimes returned home on the mailboat via Dublin. "My first memory of it," he wrote, "seems to consist of three things - the outside of a vegetarian café, the taste of some very black, very salt chocolate and some little black bog-oak pigs in a window of knick knacks. . .Today I am so at home in Dublin, more than any other city that I feel it has always been familiar to me. But, as with Belfast it took me years to penetrate its outer ugliness and dourness, so with Dublin it took me years to see through its soft charm to its bitter, prickly kernel."
With his friend E.R. Dodds, a professor of Greek, who as a youth had been expelled from Campbell College, Belfast for "gross, studied and sustained insolence", he visited Dublin in 1935. In his unfinished autobiography, The Strings are False(written in the 1940s but not published until 1965, two years after his death) Louis described going to have tea with W.B Yeats in Rathfarnham. The young poet was hoping that the older one would talk about poetry but "he confined the conversation to spiritualism and the phases of the moon."
Dodds, who was a member of the Society for Psychical Research, asked Yeats if he had ever seen a spirit. "Yeats was a little piqued," Louis wrote. "No, he said grudgingly, he had never actually seen them but - with a flash of triumph - he had often smelt them."
Louis was back in Dublin when war broke out in 1939. He recorded: "Spent Saturday afternoon drinking in a bar with the Dublin literati; they hardly mentioned the war but debated the correct versions of Dublin street songs." For the rest of the year he stayed alternately in Belfast and Dublin. Belfast was blacked out for fear of German bombers, "gloomy at all times, was gloomier now, full of patriotic placards and soldiers". Dublin was different: "a dance of lights on the Liffey, bacon and eggs and Guinness, laughter in the slums and salons, gossip sufficient to the day. . .The intelligentsia continued their parties, their mutual malice was as effervescent as ever."
He went to visit the painter Jack Yeats ("far more human than his brother") and found him sipping Malaga, a sweet white wine, with Ernie O'Malley, the writer and revolutionary. They went out together, perhaps for a meal, and on the street an old woman offered them violets. "Jack Yeats bought us each a bunch. As we walked away he told us the old woman's history. He knew the history of all the beggars in Dublin."
After a short stay in America, Louis was recruited by the BBC, along with many other writers, including George Orwell, to write plays and verse that could be broadcast on radio to support the war effort. When the war ended, he joined the staff and wrote scripts, plays, features and travelogues. When I worked in the BBC newsroom in London, I would encounter him from time to time in the pubs around Broadcasting House. Once I had to share his embarrassment when a drunk Scottish colleague tired to recite Louis's finely crafted humorous poem, Bagpipe Music, and failed stutteringly: "It's no go my honey love, it's no go my poppet/ Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit/ The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever,/ But if you break the bloody glass, you won't hold up the weather."
Louis died on September 3rd, 1963 from pneumonia which developed from a chill he caught while down a pothole in Yorkshire recording sounds for a documentary. A few weeks before he died he delivered his last broadcast talk - describing his life in the rectory at Carrickfergus. He is buried in Carrowdore on the Ards Peninsula, beside his mother and not far from the mountains and the gantries.