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"'Not only vividly readable... but touching and memorable.' Christopher Ricks, Sunday Times"
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Book Description
Beautiful repackage of MacNeice's revealing autobiography, publishing to coincide with his centenary in September 2007.
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
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4 reviews
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful
What it means to be middle class and an intellectual in 1930
12 Oct 2000
Format:Paperback
Even on the very first pages of this "unfinished autobiography" there is a hint of snobbery, but that MacNeice is aware of the snobbery he was trained to feel as a member of the middle class is one of the strengths of the book. MacNeice, a poet and friend of W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender wrote this account of his life in 1940 at the age of 33; he never got it published during his lifetime. Maybe he felt the book was too honest - which the modern reader will certainly regard as its chief virtue. MacNeice is far from being a holy man or from being a glamorous bonvivant, and he never tries to give the impression of being what he his not.
MacNeices biography is quite exemplary. He was born in Belfast as the son of an Anglican clergyman with "Home Rule" - sympathies, yet at the age of seven he was sent to a private school in England and never came back to Ireland except on holiday. He felt torn between his Irish and British identities for the rest of his life. At the same time there was the identity of the public school boy, who when at Oxford despised the serious petty bourgeois students from grammar schools, and who when teaching at Birmingham University never took his students very seriously, just because they were not middle class.
MacNeice is a lot more aloof than Auden or Spender, he never really falls for the temptation of communism, nor was he bound to be charmed by Catholicism. He tells quite vividly how he got his full share of religion while growing up in a rector's house. Northern Ireland, Oxford, Birmingham, London, Spain, France, the USA are the places where he explores different kinds of conflicts. Combined with his absolute honesty this makes MacNeice the ideal companion to show us what life was like in the 1920s and 1930s in Britain. He hardly ever mentions his poetry, so this is not just a book for poetry lovers. MacNeice's scepticism has been compared to Orwell's, but in contrast to Orwell he does not affect to be an outsider. He admits that life could be quite comfortable at the time. Just like Orwell, however, MacNeice did not fail to read the writing on the wall.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Serenade for Strings
28 Oct 2005
Format:Paperback
I began reading "The Strings are False" because Louis MacNeice was a schoolmate at Marlborough of the Cambridge Spy and Art Historian Anthony Blunt. I was delighted to discover the luminescent prose of one of the outstanding British poets of the twentieth century. Like Blunt, MacNeice was the son of an Anglican clergyman, and like Blunt, he kicked over the traces of his religious upbringing. Unlike Blunt, however, MacNeice's revolution found expression in his poetry instead of an effort to overthrow the hierarchical British class system.
Why should one bother to read this book, which has long passed out of current circulation? MacNeice's unfinished autobiography not only sheds light on a lost age of British social history, which includes the turbulent thirties and the Spanish civil war, but it also gives one a glimpse into the life of a beautiful mind of an era that is gone forever. Moreover, "The Strings are False" leads us to the gateway to MacNeice's poetry, such as "Epilogue," which furnishes a clue to the title of his book:
Rows of books around me stand,
Fence me in on either hand;
Through that forest of dead words
I would hunt the living birds -
So I write these lines for you
Who have felt the death-wish too,
All the wires are cut, my friends
Live beyond the severed ends.
Why should one bother to read this book, which has long passed out of current circulation? MacNeice's unfinished autobiography not only sheds light on a lost age of British social history, which includes the turbulent thirties and the Spanish civil war, but it also gives one a glimpse into the life of a beautiful mind of an era that is gone forever. Moreover, "The Strings are False" leads us to the gateway to MacNeice's poetry, such as "Epilogue," which furnishes a clue to the title of his book:
Rows of books around me stand,
Fence me in on either hand;
Through that forest of dead words
I would hunt the living birds -
So I write these lines for you
Who have felt the death-wish too,
All the wires are cut, my friends
Live beyond the severed ends.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Serenade for Strings
22 July 2005
Format:Hardcover
I began reading "The Strings are False" because Louis MacNeice was a schoolmate at Marlborough of the Cambridge Spy and Art Historian Anthony Blunt. I was delighted to discover the luminescent prose of one of the outstanding British poets of the twentieth century. Like Blunt, MacNeice was the son of an Anglican clergyman, and like Blunt, he kicked over the traces of his religious upbringing. Unlike Blunt, however, MacNeice's revolution found expression in his poetry instead of an effort to overthrow the hierarchical British class system.
Why should one bother to read this book, which has long passed out of current circulation? MacNeice's unfinished autobiography not only sheds light on a lost age of British social history, which includes the turbulent thirties and the Spanish civil war, but it also gives one a glimpse into the life of a beautiful mind of an era that is gone forever. Moreover, "The Strings are False" leads us to the gateway to MacNeice's poetry, such as "Epilogue," which furnishes a clue to the title of his book:
Rows of books around me stand,
Fence me in on either hand;
Through that forest of dead words
I would hunt the living birds -
So I write these lines for you
Who have felt the death-wish too,
All the wires are cut, my friends
Live beyond the severed ends.
Why should one bother to read this book, which has long passed out of current circulation? MacNeice's unfinished autobiography not only sheds light on a lost age of British social history, which includes the turbulent thirties and the Spanish civil war, but it also gives one a glimpse into the life of a beautiful mind of an era that is gone forever. Moreover, "The Strings are False" leads us to the gateway to MacNeice's poetry, such as "Epilogue," which furnishes a clue to the title of his book:
Rows of books around me stand,
Fence me in on either hand;
Through that forest of dead words
I would hunt the living birds -
So I write these lines for you
Who have felt the death-wish too,
All the wires are cut, my friends
Live beyond the severed ends.
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