An accomplished poet, yes, but Louis Macneice was no Jonathan Cainer ...
Faber has just published a very handsome new edition of Louis MacNeice's Collected Poems. Not every poem in the collection matchesSnow and Sunday Morning's brilliantly plain lyricism, or the bleak wit of Bagpipe Music, but all the way through you are aware that you're looking at work by someone with a great gift.
It wouldn't be the same story if it were a complete works. His measured and elegant unfinished memoir, The Strings Are False, is a notable exception, but get away from the poetry, and there are some very strange aberrations in his other missives.
The plays I have read were inclined to be windy and solemn, but even these seem quite respectable next to his "non-fiction" primer on Astrology.
The contents are as ridiculous as you'd expect, with a plodding account of obviously nonsensical theories illuminated with ludicrous diagrams - it's a bit like seeing TS Eliot, say, dropping in as a guest star on an episode of Most Haunted.
It's quite striking how rare such aberrations are. Only very rarely do the authors one admires trip up quite so radically.
Of course, it's true that sometimes favourite authors disappoint: after the fantastically energetic and impassioned recent novels from Philip Roth, Everyman's bleak, claustrophobic look at approaching death, by contrast, seems a slightly one-note performance; so too The Dying Animal's relentlessly libidinous and rather unlikely account of an ageing professor's shenanigans with a much younger woman. But a champion off form can still play most competitors off the field.
Quality control seems at its most perilous when writers stray from their home territory. Eliot and Yeats are virtually peerless poets, but you really don't want to go near a theatre showing one of their plays - Yeats's plays tend to be strange hybrids of proto-hippy mysticism and nationalist harangue, while Eliot's always seem to me like sermons delivered by an unusually remote vicar. (Some people would argue that Murder in the Cathedral is a pretty good play - it certainly gets revived often enough - but it's always seemed much more like an essay than a drama to me.)
The closest you'll come to one of Henry James's plays these days, unless you're prepared to dig deep in very large libraries, is in the tragicomic accounts of his out-and-out West End flops provided in David Lodge and Colm Toibin's novels about this period of "the Master's" career.
Similarly, Peter Carey and John Banville are fantastically stylish and vivid novelists, but their excursions into travel writing have been singularly flat. Likewise, David Mamet's intense focus as a playwright becomes scattered and incoherent when he turns to fiction.
A few seem to be able to skip across the genres with some poise - Rainer Maria Rilke's only novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, is just as intense a reading experience as his poetry - but it's a gift possessed by very few.
It seems rather pessimistic, even mean, to suggest that authors should stick to what they've proved they can do well. Experiment and innovation seem like good things - but writers who go in for them are playing for very high stakes.
