louis macneice’s war certainly an important part of his decision, by the middle of the year, to leave again
forBritain. In a last letter before leaving, MacNeice told Eleanor that ‘perhaps,
darling, we ought to call it a day’, and explained that ‘I have tried to softpedal the
sex business but the more I softpedal it, the more it obsesses me....Ican’tgoback
to Europe, especially with so much death about, & try to keep up a troubadourish
relationship with you.’^16 (Perhaps MacNeice’s curious simile, in describing his
arrival in New York in 1940, when ‘the sky was a candid blue like the eyes of a frigid
woman’, was in fact an indication of trouble to come.^17 ) Yet the ten months in the
USA, which effectively separated MacNeice from wartime Britain, were also a time
of intense literary activity, when many of the poems inPlant and Phantomwere
composed, and when the practice of his art—as well as the influences of personal
and public events—helped him to reach a point of commitment, or at least of
decision. As MacNeice phrased this, as early as March, ‘freedom means Getting
Into things & not getting Out of them.’^18
Talk of ‘freedom’ in such contexts is revealing. The word was, of course, much
bandied about in connection with the War and its reasons, and MacNeice would
have been fully aware of its currency. But the time spent in the USA was also, for the
poet, a time of brooding over the meaning of different kinds of freedom—personal,
political, and artistic. Near the time of his departure, MacNeice composed a
foreword to hisPoems 1925–1940, the precociously hefty volume published by
Random House in New York early in 1941. ‘I write poetry’, MacNeice insisted,
‘because it is my road to freedom and knowledge’; but he also announced an
unavoidable change:
When a man collects his poems, people think he is dead. I am collecting mine not because
I am dead, but because my past life is. Like most other people in the British Isles I have
little idea what will happen next. I shall go on writing, but my writing will presumably be
different.^19
By this point, MacNeice wanted to be identified as someone soon to be back in the
British Isles, but the self-presentation here is also that of a man in Limbo—a man
who, while not actually (or at least not as yet) dead, is patrolling death’s vicinity,
and is dead already to his own past.
Some of the poems written in the USA make use of this perspective, and MacNeice
writes often from a vantage-point that sees events, as it were,sub specie mortis.
(^16) MacNeice to Eleanor Clark, 19 Nov. 1940, quoted in Stallworthy,Louis MacNeice, 285.
(^17) MacNeice, ‘American Letter’,Horizon, 1/7 (July 1940); repr. inSelected Literary Criticism of Louis
MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 75. The same phrase occurs inThe Strings
Are False, 21, where MacNeice also reports: ‘As for the women of New York, they are more outspoken
perhaps, but they appear on the whole when it comes topractice less sexy than the women of London’
(p. 23).
(^18) MacNeice to Mrs E. R. Dodds, 22 Mar. 1940, Bodleian Library, MS Dodds fol. 67v.
(^19) MacNeice, ‘Foreword’, inPoems 1925–1940(New York: Random House, 1941); repr. inCollected
Poems, 791.