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London Review of Books

The Ticking Fear subscriber-only content

John Kerrigan

  • Louis MacNeice: Collected Poems edited by Peter McDonald  Buy this book
  • Louis MacNeice: Selected Poems edited by Michael Longley  Buy this book
  • I Crossed the Minch by Louis MacNeice  Buy this book
  • The Strings Are False: An Unfinished Autobiography by Louis MacNeice, edited by E.R. Dodds  Buy this book

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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John Kerrigan is a professor of English at Cambridge. Archipelagic English: Literature, History and Politics 1603-1707 is due this month.