Peter Costello
Louis MacNeice: In A Between World
by Christopher J. Fauske
(Irish Academic Press, €29.99pb / €70.00hb)
This book seems to offer more than it delivers. The subtitle suggests an analysis of a poet who was indeed between worlds. An Ulster man, who largely worked in London, but who travelled in Scotland (“Crossing the Minch”) and in southern Ireland. But though Dr Fauske provides a survey drawing on the biographies he leaves a great deal unsaid. Take for instance the small matter of Letters from Iceland (1937), which MacNeice wrote with W. H. Auden.
In quickly dismissing this, the author overlooks the fact that the literary travel books passed through a golden age in the 1920’s and 1930s, what with Robert Byron, Peter Fleming, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. Auden also wrote A Journey to China (1938) with Christopher Isherwood, author of The Condor and the Cows, about Latin America. Far from being a negligible work, Letters from Iceland was an example of an important literary genre.
Though pedestrian in presentation, Fauske’s study will provide the reader who knows little about MacNeice with a starting point for further reading.