peter mcdonald
MacNeice’s decision to return to Britain in 1940, however, had nothing to do
withthe plotting of his writing career, still less with any ambitions to become a war
poet. In one sense, it was part of a determination to submerge his life as a writer in
a situation which could end his life altogether. Shortly after the War was declared,
MacNeice put things bluntly in a letter to his older mentor, Professor E. R. Dodds:
The tiresome corollary of all this from my point of view is that,ifit is my war, I feel I
ought to get involved in it in one of the more unpleasant ways. Ignoring the argument that
writers are more use writing. No doubt they are. But writers also unfortunately seem to be
expected to express opinions on these subjects, & if,quawriter, one were to say that one was
pro-War, then one ought to be prepared to accept the nastier parts of the war just as much
as anyone else.^2
But a lot of weight, in November 1939, was still attaching itself to that ‘if’: and
indeed, MacNeice would in a matter of weeks board ship for America, and an
academic appointment at Cornell University. Nevertheless, there was no doubt
for the poet that commitment to the War was something quite distinct from any
supposedly literary form of commitment. By August 1940, he was writing to Dodds
from America of how ‘By this stage I am on for doing anything—cleaning sewers
or feeding machine guns, but preferably nothing too intelligent.’^3 In fact, one of
the poet’s first actions on his eventual arrival in the England of December 1940 was
to attempt to enlist in the Royal Navy—unsuccessfully, in the event, though on
account of his recent operation for (life-threatening) peritonitis, rather than any
notion that his literary gifts were of too great national value to be put at risk.
Nevertheless, the process of understanding MacNeice’s war needs to begin with
an awareness of how pressing, in 1939, was the question of ‘ifit is my war’. For a
start, MacNeice, who considered himself Irish, was writing then from Belfast (where
his father and stepmother lived, and to whose guardianship he was about to entrust
his young son Dan), to Dodds, another Irishman whose career was in England. Eire
was (and was to remain) neutral in the conflict; but even Northern Ireland (both
Dodds’s and MacNeice’s home ground), despite its fierce official loyalty to the
Crown, did not introduce conscription in the course of the War. MacNeice might
easily have remained in either Northern Ireland or Eire; and there are grounds to
suppose that he hoped to be appointed to the Chair of English Literature at Trinity
College, Dublin, in late 1939. Certainly, MacNeice was not going to make the war
his in the belief that it was a war in the interests of the British Empire. Even when
writing as a returned ‘ex-expatriate’ for a British audience in 1941, he reminded his
readers that ‘I have never really thought of myself as British; if there is one country
I feel at home in, it is Eire’, adding that ‘As a place to write in or live in I prefer the
USA to England and New York to London.’^4
(^2) MacNeice to E. R. Dodds, 10 Nov. 1939, Bodleian Library, MS Dodds fol. 53v; italics original.
(^3) MacNeice to E. R. Dodds, 18 Aug. 1940, Bodleian Library, MS Dodds fol. 70v.
(^4) MacNeice, ‘The Way We Live Now’,Penguin New Writing, 5 (Apr. 1941); repr. inSelected
Prose, 82.