louis macneice’s war While MacNeice was keenly aware of what it might mean, as an Irishman, to
‘takethe King’s shilling’ in the War, he could not identify either with the apparent
indifference, real or affected, of some of the Irish people he met in the long autumn
of 1939.^5 In the autobiographical manuscript of 1940–1, which was published after
his death asThe Strings Are False, MacNeice remembered the day of Germany’s
invasion of Poland, when he ‘was alone with the catastrophe’, and ‘spent Saturday
drinking in a bar with the Dublin literati; they hardly mentioned the war but
debated the correct versions of Dublin street songs’.^6 ‘Dublin was hardly worried
by the war’, he continued, ‘her old preoccupations were still preoccupations’; and
while ‘[t]he intelligentsia continued with their parties’, others were ready to give the
old imperial enemy their tacit support: ‘A young man in sports clothes said to us:
‘‘Eire of course will stay neutral. But I hope the English knock hell out of Hitler.’’ ’^7
The detached bemusement of such recollections was to deepen, in the course of the
War, into something more trenchant for MacNeice; but whatever the significance
of Eire’s neutrality for the poet, it is worth remembering that protracted stays in
the country marked the end, as well as the beginning, of his war. While the autumn
of 1939 was spent between Dublin, the West of Ireland, and Belfast, MacNeice
chose to spend the three months after VE day in Ireland too, with a bout of intense
creativity which included his verse-playThe Dark Tower—a poetic meditation on
the meaning of the War which complements the poetry written in 1939, before ‘my
war’ had properly got under way.
A sequence of ten poems written in August and September of 1939, ‘The Coming
of War’, was MacNeice’s first significant artistic reaction to the public and personal
crises of the newly declared hostilities. The poet was travelling through Ireland
in the company of his friend, the scholar Ernst Stahl, just before the invasion of
Poland: part of their time had been spent with MacNeice’s family in the County
Antrim coastal village of Cushendun, and the rest motoring from Dublin to the
West of Ireland, and finally back to Dublin, to see Stahl off on his return journey
to an England by now officially at war. The poems are haunted, obviously, by the
(^5) See MacNeice’s letter to E. R. Dodds from Dublin, 13 Oct. 1939, Bodleian Library, MS Dodds
fols. 48r−v: ‘Down here one gets quite de- (or dis)orientated. It all sounds like a nightmare algebra
which you have to change back into people being killed. It is all very well for everyone to go on saying
‘‘Destroy Hitlerism’’ but what the hell are they going to construct? I am now falling into a sort of
paradox which is:—if the war were a rational war leading somewhere, I should want to stay out of it
in order to see where it led to: but if it is a hopeless war leading nowhere, I feel half inclined to take the
King’s shilling & escape—more likely than not—the frustration to come. The motives in each case
of course being selfish.’ Commenting on thisletter, Terence Brown claims that MacNeice ‘reckons he
has a perfectly honourable choice in this matter’, adding that ‘he understands that from the nationalist
point of view the war is England’s war’ (Brown,‘Louis MacNeice and the Second World War’, in
Kathleen Devine (ed.),Modern Irish Writers and the Wars(Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1999), 167).
Nationalist though he might have considered himself, MacNeice did not share ‘the nationalist point
of view’ on this matter. 6
7 MacNeice,The Strings Are False:An Unfinished Autobiography(London: Faber, 1965), 212.
Ibid. 213 and 212.