Ireland's MacNeice: A Caveat

Ireland's MacNeice: A CaveatAuthor(s): Peter McDonaldSource: The Irish Review (1986-), No. 2 (1987), pp. 64-69Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29735281 .

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Ireland's MacNeice:

a caveat

peter McDonald

'There are many places', according to Tom Paulin, 'that should be proud to lay claim to' Louis MacNeice. Ideally, this is true; in fact, things are not quite so

clear-cut. In the Anglocentric focus of many literary historians, MacNeice is lit?

tle more than a somewhat dandified member of the Auden club, even, in

Samuel Hynes' phrase, a 'professional lachrymose Irishman', finally a marginal

figure in the larger drama of 'thirties writing. Ireland, on the other hand, is

more ready than formerly to claim MacNeice for her own, though against Edna

Longley's reasoned advocacy of the poet or Paul Muldoon's generosity towards

him in his recent Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry other, less welcoming,

judgements have to be remembered: the slighting of MacNeice in anthologies edited by John Montague and Thomas Kinsella, for example, or Seamus

Deane's wary description of the 'mixed alienation and attachment' of'One of

the most potent of Irish exiles' in his Short History of Irish Literature. That

MacNeice's work has relevance, particularly for contemporary writers in the

North, has become obvious, but it is important not to ignore certain problems involved in admitting the poet to an Irish pantheon. Whatever his exemplary status for contemporary poetry, MacNeice's standing

as 'Irish', considered in a

more historical light, is problematic, and begs as many questions as does his in?

clusion in an 'Auden generation'; its problematic nature may itself yet turn out

to be exemplary as fer as criticism is concerned, forcing as it does a confrontation

with those differences upon which an 'Irish' culture will have to be built.

In the first issue of The Irish Review, Edna Longley rightly pointed out the

significance of the 'progressive bookmen' in the North from 1930 to 1960, and

analysed perceptively their engagements in literature and politics which resulted

eventually in works like Sam Thompson's Over the Bridge. In dealing with this

group of writers, Longley takes MacNeice's work as 'paradigmatic'; it may well

be so, at least from the vantage-point of the late 1980s, but there is a risk of mak?

ing MacNeice seem a fellow labourer in the same cause as Hewitt and the others, a writer who, although 'expatriate', was engaged in essentially the same cultural, or broadly political, programme. Against this, and against contemporary Irish

appropriations of MacNeice as a whole, the difficulties ofthat word 'expatriate' are worth remembering. What, for example,

were the attitudes of the

'progressive bookmen' themselves towards their 'expatriate' contemporary,

64



Ireland's MacNeice 65

and how far, if at all, did such attitudes correspond to elements actually present in MacNeice's work?

An admission of what is all too easily termed the 'split identity' of the Anglo Irish features in MacNeice's work as a vital imaginative resource, but this should

not be mistaken for mere ambivalence over nationality:

Torn before birth from where my fathers dwelt, Schooled from the age often to a foreign voice, Yet neither western Ireland nor southern England Cancels this interlude; what chance misspelt

May never now be righted by my choice.

('Carrick Revisited', 1945)

With the west of Ireland as an ancestral home and the south of England as an

actual habitat, MacNeice's co-ordinates include Northern Ireland, but hardly in

a way comparable to Hewitt's regionalism. Put simply, MacNeice's character?

istic attitude is one of displacement on the very ground to which Hewitt and

others staked a claim. In Hewitt's 1945 essay 'The Bitter Gourd' there are few

concessions to imaginative homelessness:

If writers in an isolated group or in individual segregation are for too long disassociated from the social matrix their work will inevitably grow thin and

tenuous, more and more concerned with form rather than content, heading for marvellous feats of empty virtuosity.

. . . The Ulster writer. . .must be a

rooted man, must carry the native tang of his idiom like the native dust on his

sleeve; otherwise he is an airy internationalist, thistledown, a twig in a stream.

MacNeice, unnamed here, is clearly one of Hewitt's targets, and the terms used

in censure here are common in many of the cool reviews which MacNeice's

work received on both sides of the Irish Sea during the 'forties. Essentially, Hewitt's case modifies the political imperatives common in English literary circles in the 'thirties by substituting Ulster for Marx: from both 'thirties leftist

and 'forties regionalist points of view, MacNeice's work was seriously lacking. John Boyd, in his editorial for the first issue of Lagan in 1943, appeared to give

a

little more ground than Hewitt, admitting that 'it is neither necessary nor

desirable that a writer should always remain at home', but in fact proved more

severe, adding that 'it seems inevitable that the work of a spiritually uprooted or

declassed writer should appear as sapless and void of any living quality'. MacNeice's admissions to being 'spiritually uprooted' were insufficient to gain his work unreserved approval under such terms.

Of course, MacNeice was voicing a typically Anglo-Irish uneasiness in the con?

text of the North, whose Protestants are a far cry from the usual conceptions of

Anglo-Ireland. MacNeice's presentation of his own displacement is



66 McDonald

'Anglo-Irish' in the same sense as Yeats's use of the West in the late nineteenth

century, with separation from a 'true' home being the mark of a particularly ad?

vantaged social class, one which is mobile enough to be able to choose its en?

vironment. The divisions of allegiance resulting from this are fer removed from

those experienced by the 'progressive bookmen' in Ulster: Boyd's declaration

that 'an Ulsterman is not an Englishman, no matter how hard he tries to be'

meant that 'no writer, however talented, should uproot himself in spirit from

his native place'. The Englishman so unmistakably present in MacNeice, while

fitting him for the 'Anglo-Irish' tag, hardly qualified him to be an Ulster

regionalist. In fact, for Roy McFadden, writing in The Bell in 1941, 'MacNeice

was never Irish, and it is mere sentiment to imagine him so': McFadden

acknowledged the poet's importance, but located it outside Ireland, reflecting that 'If he had continued to live in Belfast we

might well have some foundation

for a new architecture in Irish poetry', but going on to write: 'As it is, he is mere?

ly one of an ever-growing catalogue of names irretrievably lost to this country'.

Eight years later, in Rann, McFadden was still making essentially the same

criticisms, but now with the target clearer in his sights:

The only uneasy ghost in Mr. MacNeice's mind is his place of origin. From

time to time the poet reverts to Ireland, nostalgically, impatiently, contemp?

tuously ?

only to set his face firmly again toward the English scene. This

retreat from childhood and country is a pity, for, in the absence of any

spiritual roots, Mr. MacNeice might well have strengthened his work by

allegiance to place. . . .

Allegiance to something beyond one's immediate

time is a valuable asset in poetry. Mr. MacNeice may yet apply for member?

ship of Mr. Hewitt's school of regionalism, and, studying the superstitions and sagas of the forefathers, discover Louis MacNeice. Come back, Paddy

Reilly.

'Allegiance to place' is clearly a prerequisite for a great deal of what Hewitt,

Boyd, McFadden and others understood by 'regionalism', and constitutes a

vital element in their challenge to the conservatisms of Unionist and Nationalist

thought. However close MacNeice might have been to them in terms of specific social and cultural ideas, his insistence on displacement made him for them an

aspect of the cultural and political problems rather than a part of their possible solution.

All of this should be open to a degree of qualification: the criticisms above

come from the 1940s, when MacNeice's 'thirties reputation still tended to get in the way of his new books for most critics, and before the increasing contact

with Ireland, and Belfast in particular, of MacNeice's BBC work of the 'fifties

and 'sixties made him a better-known and more approachable figure among Ulster writers. Indeed, the point identified by Edna Longley as decisive in the




work of the Protestant socialists of 1930 and after, the successful staging of Sam

Thompson's Oper the Bridge in 1960, is one in which MacNeice himself is in?

volved to a certain extent. His involvement took the form of representing the

play's importance to a British audience unfamiliar with its tension in an Observer

review written at his own request. MacNeice gives the story of the play's difficult

path toward production, in the teeth of the Unionist establishment, and offers

an estimate of its importance:

"Over the Bridge", therefore, was a test case ? but also something much

more. Mr. Thompson, born and bred a Protestant, a fervent supporter of

Linfield, the soccer team corresponding to Glasgow Rangers, has made this

play his ' 'J'accuse'

' and what he is accusing is religious bigotry, primarily Pro?

testant bigotry ? but this is only because the Protestants in Ulster are in the

majority. Ireland, North or South, is in many circles considered so insular as

to be incapable of throwing any light on world problems, but anyone who

noticed the communal troubles in India in 1947 will be only too aware that

Mr. Thompson is hitting the target, and what a target he is hitting!

MacNeice's praise for the play implicitly displaces or uproots it as a gesture

against insularity, making the situation from which it arises an aspect of a larger

problem that transcends national boundaries. Himself a witness of the after?

math of the Shiekhupura massacre in India in 1947, MacNeice had at that time

compared the situation with the Irish troubles, where 'it is not only religion that

is the root of the evil; religion is complicated with other factors, especially the

economic'. Yet in India too, against the objectivity of such comments there was

also personal alienation and revulsion to be taken into account: 'But in fact (and on a much smaller scale I have found the same thing in Ireland) men can be not

only intelligent but kindly, not only charming but generous, in all respects but

one, and in that can be demons.' When Over the Bridge eventually met with a

cool reception in London, it was in MacNeice's opinion owing not to a failure

on the audience's part to grasp what he had called the 'union versus non-union'

element, but to the less rationally acceptable problem posed by its 'demonic'

bigotry ?

'Englishmen cannot believe that in the Twentieth Century a man can

be murdered in a "British" shipyard because he happens to be a Catholic'. The

point at which reason becomes useless in understanding action was perhaps not

so universally obvious in Thompson's play as MacNeice had supposed; the

English, recoiling from the acts of'demons', served to prove how far Over the

Bridge was in fact rooted in Ulster, and to question whether MacNeice's own at?

tempts to universalize the play's issues had not been itself a form of imaginative recoil, a

sign of distance.

This is not to suggest that the Ulster writers, and Hewitt especially, equated 'rootedness' with insularity: on the contrary, implications beyond the



68 McDonald

immediately local were always taken for granted as a proper resource. But the

terms in which regionalism read MacNeice in the 'forties were largely combative

because of the challenge his work presented to self-definitions of the Ulstermen

as 'rooted', coming from someone whose poetry seemed preoccupied with

uncertainty and disillusion: it was the lack of roots, in this reading, which denied

MacNeice the strengths of certainty or purpose. However, it may be wrong to

see the regionalists as offering alternatives to a

specifically Southern culture in

tune with fundamental Northern Protestant working-class feelings ? the

Planters defining themselves against the Gael ? and more useful to see them as

part of a larger system of culture in Ireland which may be recognised by means

other than the political Nationalist/Unionist criteria. One defining characteristic of such a culture might be indicated by its inability fully to come to

terms with what MacNeice represents. As far as the North is concerned, the

dangerous clich? is that of spiritual division, which MacNeice's poetry both in?

habits and subverts. In 1942, for example, W.R Rodgers could speak for 'a

"split" people' (already perhaps acknowledging at least a truism) ? 'Our eyes

and thoughts are turned towards England, but our hearts and feet are in Ulster'

? but MacNeice, towards the end of his life at least, tended to disagree. In a let?

ter of 1959, the poet wrote of how T myself, having been brought up on either

side of the Border, have always felt strongly that, in spite of politics, the Ulster

man is far nearer to the Southern Irishman than he is to the Englishman.' MacNeice's transformation of the clich? of division in his work had always im?

plicitly denied the validity of place as a determining factor operating on the im?

agination; the unity he perceived in Ireland 'in spite of politics' is far from com?

pletely positive in its implications. Rootedness in itself may be a poetic strength; rootedness as a cultural totem has its liabilities. In one respect, at least, the

literary cultures of North and South are often united: both disallowed

'Englishness' in the context of'rooted' poetry, and could see MacNeice himself

as tarred with the 'English' brush.

In some ways it is comforting to be able to assimilate a writer like Hewitt into a

general picture of Irish poetry. His work delivers a specifically political challenge

to the hidebound orthodoxies of Nationalism, so any culture that includes him

might seem to disarm those who accuse it of singlemindedness

or toeing any

broadly 'political' line. The tradition that stretches from certain aspects of Yeats

through Kavanagh to Heaney can encompass Hewitt and the regionalists easily, for this work from the Protestant North serves to increase the weight of local

piety and historical self-definition in Irish poetry as a whole; most important, it

defines itself often in distinction to England. The 'Englishness' of MacNeice's

poetry is as important as its Irish allegiances (did what happened in English

writing in the 'thirties simply not matter in Ireland?) but its insistence on

'displacement' undermines both 'Irish' and 'English' as useful critical terms: it




is this, perhaps, which still makes his acceptance in Irish culture particularly dif?

ficult. There was once almost no room for MacNeice in Irish criticism; today, with his presence less easy to ignore, he is still discussed in terms of'exile', with

all the value judgements hiding behind that word in Ireland. Somehow, it is still

possible to write, as Dillon Johnston does, of how 'MacNeice has escaped the

relative obscurity of most Irish poets by merging his light with Auden's in the

thirties and by gaining access to a wider British audience through London

publications and the BBC: the message seems to be that MacNeice's standing in

an alien culture should not be allowed to enhance his status in Irish poetry. The

English career of Seamus Heaney should have made such an idea ludicrous by now, but that career has also confirmed the totem of place for a number of critics; in this respect, Heaney's admiration for Hewitt's regionalism is an ack?

nowledgement of common cultural assumptions. An Irish culture 'broad'

enough to include the 'rooted' culture of the Planter may perhaps appear pleas?

ingly open in political terms, but if it is still not 'broad' enough to include

MacNeice on his own terms, to accept the challenge of the division he represents rather than the thoughtless clich? of a

'split' people, it is in fact both narrow and

unworkable. In this sense, Ireland should read MacNeice whole or not at all.

MacNeice's Ireland is a subject which will always be one of the most pressing concerns of his critics; but it is important that in the process they do not lose

sight of Ireland's MacNeice, nor of the awkward questions raised by the dif?

ferences between those two things.



Documents

Ireland's MacNeice: A Caveat