'Eclogues Between the Truculent': A Meeting between Derek Mahon and Louis MacNeice, 1962

This month, Carcanet publishes Incorrigibly Plural: Louis MacNeice and his Legacy, which celebrates the diversity and vitality of the great Irish modernist. In twenty-one essays, poets and critics illuminate the life and work of Louis MacNeice; and the volume is crowned by a memoir by MacNeice's son, the late Dan MacNeice.

Incorrigibly Plural

For today's blogpost we have an extract from the poet Derek Mahon's 'Eclogues Between the Truculent'. Here, Mahon gives an account of the second of his two encounters with MacNeice (of whom he was already in awe) in 1962, when Mahon was in his early twenties.

Incorrigibly Plural is available now from the Carcanet website, with a 10% discount and free UK delivery.

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...Some months later I was sitting with other students in a well-known Dublin pub and noticed two older men at a nearby table, one talkative, on taciturn. The taciturn one was MacNeice. With the bumptiousness of youth we went over and introduced ourselves; he didn't remember me of course. He wore some kind of an anorak, looked unkempt, and acknowledged us with a polite snarl and a side-long flash of the horsy teeth. The talkative one, Bill Webb, books editor of the Manchester Guardian, as it then was, chuckled at our intrusion. He was a lively man in tweeds, with a short pepper-and-salt beard, who had put himself in charge of the truculent Louis.

Both were on the whiskey, the effect being to make Webb witty and MacNeice morose. We spoke to Webb and I tried in vain to get a response out of MacNeice, preferably some poetry talk. Perhaps, frustrated by his reluctance, I got a bit truculent too. (What a pain in the neck I must have been.) They had been to a rugby international at Lansdowne Road, and MacNeice's report appeared the next week in the New Statesman, its circulation higher then than now. He mentioned Dublin pubs and remarked on their 'aggressive' (bad mannered) students. We had been put in our place. He died the following year.

Not exactly Keats and Coleridge, is it? But it's seldom a good idea to meet your admired authors; you will often be disappointed. (Not always: Keats wasn't, for one.) Not meaning any harm, they may take no notice of you; or, meaning a little harm, they may put you down. Besides, they are generally older, wearier, and less forthcoming than you might wish, and words of wisdom will be few. Such was my experience of MacNeice. I was just some Belfast whippersnapper of course. He was in rugby mode; though once a nifty scrum-half, I'd lost interest in rugby. He didn't want to be bothered (why should he?) and he was tired of words, of which he had written a great many. Tired too, perhaps, of life itself: it's there in the last poems. But you knew that, even if you got on the wrong side of him, he wouldn't clobber you like some. His eyes were kind, and it was his eyes that spoke...

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