Louis MacNeice: “His Own Unchanging Self”: An Interview with Jon Stallworthy
by Ernie on 29/10/07 at 9:35 am
Sunil Iyengar interviews Jon Stallworthy on his biography of Louis MacNeice for the new MacNeice issue of the Contemporary Poetry Review:
Jon Stallworthy’s blood quickened after a poetry reading he gave earlier this year, not because he admired his own recitative powers, but because of something an audience member told him. This man, who turned out to be Stephen Spender’s nephew, had found a sheaf of letters in his late mother’s attic. His mother was Nancy Spender, Stephen’s sister-in-law, and it seems that she had maintained correspondence with her former lover, Louis MacNeice, long after their relationship had cooled. As MacNeice’s literary executor and official biographer, Stallworthy had known of the possible existence of some letters, but after the breakup of Nancy Spender’s first marriage, those had gone missing.
The letters her son found were different. They had been written between her two marriages, at the start of World War II. During this period, MacNeice was in America, chasing Eleanor Clark, a short-story writer to whom he wrote some of his most revealing correspondence, and getting reacquainted with his former wife Mary. The few dozen letters to Nancy Spender are “very entertaining and interesting about America,” Stallworthy says in a recent phone interview. They portray “his sense of what was happening at the outbreak of the war and how Americans were viewing the war,” he adds. “Even more so in the second half of the correspondence.” And what of Nancy’s letters to Louis? Her side of the exchange is missing only “because MacNeice kept nothing. Auden’s letters he would have put in the bin immediately. But the letters to her give you a very good sense of what she was saying to him, and they are very warm, humorous and thoroughly nice letters.”
To read the full interview, click here.
