3 - To Build the Falling Castle: Louis MacNeice and the Drama of Form

Summary

Though the BBC careers of James Hanley and Louis MacNeice would follow different trajectories, they began as part of a single push by Features to draw more writers into the radio fold. Both would move from freelance script-writing to contracted positions with the BBC, but an involvement that for Hanley lasted a little over eighteen months became a decades-long career for MacNeice. He had left Britain early in the war to take a teaching position at Cornell, but returned at the end of 1940 determined to play a role in the conflict. Ruled ineligible for military service on medical grounds, MacNeice instead turned to the BBC, which had approached him in March 1940 about the possibility of bringing his poetic talents to the Department of Features and Drama (Stallworthy 1995: 286–7). In an April 1941 letter to Elizabeth Dodds, a friend from his days teaching Classics at the University of Birmingham and wife to his eventual literary executor E. R. Dodds, MacNeice expressed the mingled excitement and resentment of wartime propaganda work:

May be going on B.B.C. in the regular way soon if M.I.5 don't turn me down … I am beginning to write poems again, so very pleased with myself. But am rather fed up with thinking up ingenuities for the air & then having them chopped about by genteel halfwits; if I join the B.B.C. I shall eventually produce my own stuff. When I’ve learned about the knobs. (MacNeice 1941a)

The ‘knobs’ in question were the technical controls of the studio, which were to serve as the material link between MacNeice's new occupation as radio artist and his on-going role as poet. Unlike many other writers during the war, Hanley included, MacNeice moved quickly to master the technical aspects of broadcasting, thereby minimising the violent chops dealt to his written works by ‘genteel halfwits’. In a field where collaboration and compromise were essential to the creative process, MacNeice came to exert a greater degree of control over his material than did many other literary broadcasters by virtue of the fact that he could oversee their translation from printed page to produced sounds.