'This endless land': Louis MacNeice and the USA.(Critical essay)

The poem 'Bar-Room Matins', composed by Louis MacNeice in an apartment on Fifth Avenue, New York in 1940, opens with the jaunty line: 'Popcorn peanuts clams and gum'. There is a transatlantic momentum at work here and this points up the necessity of reclaiming MacNeice as a poet of far more range and scope than many critics have fully allowed, by exploring the presence of America in his poetry and foregrounding the centrality of his American experience to the trajectory of his career. MacNeice has too often been considered merely in terms of his relations to either Ireland or England, but his autobiographical narrative The Strings are False begins with his symbolic crossing from the US to Europe in late 1940, 'on a boat going back to a war', thus making for a larger and more complex reality of experience. Indeed, his poem 'Variation on Heraclitus' voices the variable and multi-faceted identity of the poet who will not be fixed or contained: 'Nor need you be troubled to pin me down in my room/ Since the room and I will escape'. (1) As Justin Quinn has astutely observed, MacNeice was 'a Northern Irish poet who refused to accept the borders of his province as the borders of his world'. (2) MacNeice's time in the United States is a defining transitional moment, bridging his so-called 'thirties' phase and his career in BBC radio which lasted until his death. It takes place too, of course, at the onset of World War II, a time of universal upheaval and uncertainty. In many ways, America, as an elsewhere, as a legendary site of limitless imaginative possibilities for the self in the process of becoming, may be seen to have greatly expanded and enriched the work of one of the twentieth century's most important and influential poets.

America had long existed as a very real place of adventure and of alternative possibilities in MacNeice's imagination. Aged just four years old, MacNeice wrote a letter to his sister laying out his detailed plan to run away to North America:

 
   I am going to run away on a raft [...] I am not going to stay. I am 
   not going to stay [...] We will have plenty of provisions as we 
   will have to go into the interior of North America. We will go 
   where the lions howl in the night-time. We will keep a fire burning 
   all night, as [you] wild beasts hate fire. I will disguise myself 
   in my Indian suit and then they will be friends with us. (3) 

The four-year-old MacNeice sees America as a space away from the limitations of the present, where disguise and remaking of the self are possible. MacNeice's run-away adventure never happened of course but America continued its hold over him; MacNeice and Margaret Gardiner frequented cinemas in London in the 1930s to watch American westerns. (4) Despite such journeys of the imagination to America, MacNeice did not actually set foot on its shores until March 1939. Arriving for a lecture tour, he felt exhilarated beholding New York for the first time and took in every detail of its landscape and character with a keen painter's eye; what Robert Lowell in a review of MacNeice's poetry recognized as, 'perhaps the most observant eye in England'. (5) This was a long-wished for trip; MacNeice had written to T.S. Eliot three years previously seeking advice on how he could get to the US. (6)

Having finally reached the America which was for British people as MacNeice realized 'a legend until they go there, one big pumpkin-pie fairy story' he felt an 'immediate nostalgia' for it on having to return to England (The Strings Are False, p.199, p.207). He had also, while there, fallen in love with the American writer Eleanor Clark whom he had met at a Partisan Review party. Thus, in January 1940 he returned to America on a boat of refugees for a long-term stay in what was a critical year in terms of world events and at a moment that had MacNeice, as he described himself in his autobiography, 'tense, anxious, muddled, expecting the moon, guilty of the war' (The Strings Are False, p.18). For MacNeice at this dark, uncertain time, New York, the towers of Manhattan as seen from deck, seemed 'a weight of concrete plumped on the lid of Europe to keep the bad dreams down' (The Strings Are False, p.21). W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood had, as is well known, caused controversy in 1939 by leaving England for America--a move termed by Cyril Connolly as, 'the most important literary event since the outbreak of the Spanish War'--and were criticized by commentators in Britain for 'running away from the war'. (7) MacNeice stayed with Auden for Thanksgiving in New York and it is upon this moment that Paul Muldoon's poem '7, Middagh Street' pivots. Largely concerned with questions of art and politics, evasion and commitment, Muldoon's poem locates MacNeice along with Auden, Benjamin Britten, Salvador Dali, Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee, and Chester Kallman in the commune at that address in Brooklyn, New York; Auden himself is 'on the cusp' as Muldoon has elucidated. (8) This poem is particularly interesting for the way that it emphasizes MacNeice as a transatlantic figure, a poet among exiles in New York--as World War II grips Europe--and in a similarly provisional and liminal state. The poem was written at the time when Muldoon himself was preparing to emigrate to the US and so it forges connections between Muldoon as emigre and MacNeice as his cosmopolitan poetic precursor. Muldoon's poem has his 'Louis' quoting Delmore Schwartz, alluding to Hart Crane, while Auden, visiting him in hospital, finds him reading Lorca's 'Ode to Walt Whitman':

 
   'If you want me look for me under your boot-soles'; 
   when I visited him in a New Hampshire hospital 
   where he had almost gone for a Burton 
   with peritonitis 
   Louis propped himself up on an ottoman 
   and read aloud the ode to Whitman 
   from Poeta en Nueva York. (9) 

Here, Muldoon has Auden and MacNeice suspended in a dialogue regarding the poet's responsibility in war-time, the spectre of Yeats haunting their words as they articulate their sense of being artists of their time in this temporary American locale. MacNeice, during this period in America, became, as Peter McDonald has noted, more preoccupied with the connections between the public world and private self and 'how much the external was in fact internalized for him at the time'. (10) MacNeice considered his own departure from England an escape to America but not a relinquishing of responsibilities. Rather, it provided this poet who had long been 'tormented by the ethical problems of the war' with a necessary space apart in which to consider such questions (The Strings are False, p.21). As he had written in his 'Letter' from Reykjavik in 1936: 'We are not changing ground to escape from facts/But rather to find them'. (11)