The Strangers' House: Writing Northern Ireland by Alexander Poots

Author:Alexander Poots [Poots, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Writing, History, Ireland, United Kingdom, Northern Ireland
ISBN: 9781538701584
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2023-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

Louis MacNeice grew into a tall man. He was all angles. His face was long, like the blade of a shovel. Photographs preserve his striking features: the broad escarpment of his forehead and the ridge of his nose. His bottom lip was full, his top lip a hard white line. Contemporaries made much of his laconic character and angular presence. The poet John Hewitt spotted him at the funeral of W. B. Yeats: ‘I recognized the long dark head of Louis MacNeice, in his black oilskin coat’. Bob Pocock, a fellow BBC man, remembered the ‘bent black safety pin of the eyes and hidalgo curl of the lip.’ C. S. Lewis first met MacNeice in 1927, at a party thrown by John Betjeman in Oxford. He thought MacNeice ‘absolutely silent and astonishingly ugly.’ ‘He doesn’t say much’, said Betjeman. ‘But he’s a great poet.’

Not everyone displayed Betjeman’s indulgence towards the taciturn writer. Stephen Spender described a London party thrown by the publisher John Lehmann during the Second World War. MacNeice spent the whole evening ‘leaning back against the chimney piece, and holding a glass in one hand, surveyed the party through half-closed eyes, without addressing a word to anyone.’ Another guest—the British ambassador to the Soviet Union, Archibald Clark Kerr—was outraged by this gauche display, and resolved to give MacNeice a piece of his mind. Spender recalled the moment that the ambassador buttonholed the poet:

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