The Ticking Fear

John Kerrigan

  • Louis MacNeice: Collected Poems edited by Peter McDonald
    Faber, 836 pp, £30.00, January 2007, ISBN 978 0 571 21574 4
  • Louis MacNeice: Selected Poems edited by Michael Longley
    Faber, 160 pp, £12.99, April 2007, ISBN 978 0 571 23381 6
  • I Crossed the Minch by Louis MacNeice
    Polygon, 253 pp, £9.99, September 2007, ISBN 978 1 84697 014 6
  • The Strings Are False: An Unfinished Autobiography by Louis MacNeice, edited by E.R. Dodds
    Faber, 288 pp, £9.99, September 2007, ISBN 978 0 571 23942 9

As Louis MacNeice lay dying in 1963, his last major work, a radio play called Persons from Porlock, was broadcast by the BBC. It is about a painter called Hank, who starts well in the 1930s, but whose development, as MacNeice explains in a note, ‘is interrupted by the war . . . Subsequent interruptions and frustrations include those occasioned by the lure of commercial art, by drink, money troubles and women.’ Hence the title of the play. Hank (an anagram of Khan) might have built a stately pleasure dome, but instead he dies, his promise unfulfilled, in what Coleridge’s poem calls ‘caverns measureless to man’. For Hank has an unexpected hobby, potholing, and at the end of the play drowns in a cave. Death turns up there, announcing himself as ‘a noble person from Porlock’.

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Vol. 30 No. 3 · 7 February 2008 » John Kerrigan » The Ticking Fear (print version)
Pages 15-18 | 6387 words