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Abstract
In the middle stretch of his twenty-two-year BBC career, the poet and producer Louis MacNeice earned a reputation as one of the ‘undisputed masters of creative sound broadcasting’, a reputation derived, in part, from a huge range of radio features that were founded upon his journeys abroad. Through close examination of some of his most significant overseas soundscapes—including Portrait of Rome (1947) and Portrait of Delhi (1948)—this article will consider the role and function of travel in shaping MacNeice's engagement with the radio feature as a modernist form at a particular transcultural moment when Britain moved through the end of the Second World War and the eventual disintegration of its empire.
Notes
1 Coulton, Louis MacNeice in the BBC, 161.
2 Countries in the Air remained unfinished at the time of MacNeice's death in 1963 but two draft chapters were found amongst his papers at the BBC (letter from E.R. Dodds, MacNeice's literary executor, to Features Department, 9 November 1963, BBC WAC L1/285/1). These were published as one fragment, ‘Landscapes of Childhood and Youth’, in The Strings Are False, 216–38. For a synopsis of the book see Coulton, ibid., 161–162.
3 See the Appendix in Wrigley and Harrison for list of MacNeice's travel-related features.
4 As defined by Coulton, 149–173.
5 Doyle and Winkiel, Geomodernisms, 3–4.
6 One of the earliest such broadcasts was Special Empire Day Programme on 5XX Daventry (Radio Times, 24 May 1926, Issue 138, 333).
7 Aimed at schools and the general listener, Travel Talk was broadcast on 2LO London and 5XX Daventry from the end of the 1920s to the mid 1930s, after which it became a regular series on The Children's Hour on the Home Service.
8 Gielgud was a Radio Times editorial assistant in 1927, and was billed as a British writer with Polish connections for this programme. He held overall responsibility for radio drama production from 1929 until after the Second World War.
9 Radio Times, 2 September 1927, 22.
10 Hilmes, Network Nations, 2.
11 Ibid.
12 See also Bridson, Prospero and Ariel, 80.
13 ‘Home Features’, wrote Laurence Gilliam, was ‘taking a new shape and intensity … likely to be very much influenced by the growth of Overseas’. Memo to Val Gielgud, 4 February 1941, BBC WAC L2/78/1.
14 Heppenstall, Portrait of the Artist, 47–57, and Bridson, Prospero and Ariel, 133–150.
15 Gilliam, BBC Features. Scripts included The End of Mussolini by D. G. Bridson, India at First Sight by MacNeice and From Anzio to Burgundy by Wynford Vaughan Thomas.
16 Ibid., 97, 149.
17 Wakeman, “Veblen Redivivus,” 427.
18 Examples include Portrait of Istanbul, 13 November 1949, and Return to the U.S.A., 18 March 1952, both Home Service, prod. D. G. Bridson; Return Journey: To Strasbourg, 12 September 1948, Third Programme, prod. Rayner Heppenstall; A Journey in Greece, 6 November 1951, Home Service, prod. Laurence Gilliam.
19 Farley, Modernist Travel Writing, 1; Fussell, Abroad, 15–23.
20 MacNeice, I Crossed the Minch, 7.
21 MacNeice to T. S. Eliot, 25 February 1957, printed in Allison, Letters, 614–615.
22 Ibid. MacNeice writes that ‘in foreign travel one is much of the time searching for the implementation of certain myths’, but the insinuation is that often reality does not match travellers’ expectations.
23 MacNeice, I Crossed the Minch, 7.
24 MacNeice, The Strings are False, 235.
25 See also Ranasinha, “South Asian Broadcasters in Britain,” 2010, on the transcultural atmosphere in the BBC during wartime and exchanges between the BBC's Eastern Service staff, such as M. J. Tambimuttu, and writer-producers who also broadcast on the BBC's domestic services. MacNeice published work in Poetry London, a journal founded by Tambimuttu, and was included in Tambimuttu's edited anthology Poetry in Wartime (1942).
26 Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style, 16–20.
27 Ibid., 8. High modernist émigré authors included James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and T. S. Eliot.
28 I refer here to the post-war iteration of Features Department, following its separation from Drama Department in 1945, until its closure in 1964.
29 The Dark Tower and The Golden Ass. George R. Foa memo to Laurence Gilliam and others, 1 June 1947, BBC WAC R19/953.
30 Letter from MacNeice to George R. Foa, 31 March 1947, BBC WAC R19/953.
31 Opening Announcement, Programme Report, Portrait of Rome, ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 MacNeice, “Autumn Sequel,” Collected Poems, 387.
34 Amended billing, Portrait of Rome, 4 June,1947, BBC WAC R19/953.
35 Portrait of Rome script, 20, line 197, BBC WAC.
36 Whittington, “Archaeologies of Sound,” 48.
37 McWhinnie, The Art of Radio, 37.
38 Verma, Theater of the Mind, 33–72; Yusaf, Broadcasting Buildings, 20–27.
39 Portrait of Athens, 18 November 1951. Time code: 00’30–00’34. Recording accessible in the British Library Sound Archive (BLSA). Script accessible in the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
40 Ibid., time code: 17’06–17’08.
41 A lack of signposting is notable when compared to earlier features about place, even those produced by MacNeice himself such as The Stones Cry Out series (1941, BBC Home Service).
42 Ibid., time code: 08’16; Portrait of Delhi recording also in BLSA, time code: 01’31.
43 Portrait of Delhi script, 7, line 77. BBC WAC.
44 Ibid., line 75.
45 Ibid., line 76.
46 Thacker, Moving Through Modernity, 13.
47 Portrait of Rome script, 23, line 224–5.
48 Ibid.
49 Doyle and Winkiel, Introduction.
50 See Introduction to this special issue for discussion of features as a genre.
51 Portrait of Rome script, 16, line 158.
52 Ibid., 23, lines 225–226.
53 Ibid., 15, lines 147–151. See also ‘What Now?’, part of MacNeice's series The Four Freedoms, in which two radio listeners, one of whom is called Evelyn, discuss whether they can detect propaganda in a radio feature (BBC Home Service, 28 March 1943, 8.45 pm).
54 Letter from Mrs Johnson to MacNeice, 2 May 1948, BBC WAC R19/948.
55 Journey Into Greece scored 69% in the Index; Listener Research Report, Portrait of Athens, BBC WAC LR/51/2556, Week 47. On MacNeice and other writers’ radio engagements with Greece, ancient and modern, see Wrigley, Greece on Air.
56 Ibid.
57 The Manchester Guardian, 25 June 1947, 3.
58 BBC WAC R19/R53.
59 Letter from MacNeice to C. H. Dodd, 13 May 1948, BBC WAC R19/948.
60 Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice, 354–366.
61 Quotations from MacNeice's letter to Hedli MacNeice, 31 August 1947, in Allison, Letters, 487. For fuller description of the trip, see 470–511.
62 As quoted in Allison, 488, n. 1.
63 Letter from MacNeice to Laurence Gilliam, 19 September 1947, in Allison, 496–502.
64 Ibid., 498.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid. The series was broadcast on Sundays from 9.30 pm to 10.30 pm between 18 April and 15 August 1948, BBC Home Service. MacNeice also produced India at First Sight for BBC Third Programme (13 March 1948, 8.30 pm).
67 Radio Times, 30 April 1948, 8.
68 Portrait of Delhi script, 2, line 18. Perhaps MacNeice drew inspiration from Forster's use of a native bird as metonym for India. See A Passage to India, 1924, Chapter 8.
69 Ibid., 40, line 457.
70 Ibid., 40, line 455.
71 Beer, “The Island and the Aeroplane,” 265–290; Harris, Romantic Moderns, 25–29. See also how MacNeice explores this idea in the passage of his 1946 Enemy of Cant which draws on Aristophanes’ Birds, as discussed in Wrigley and Harrison, Louis MacNeice, 255–260.
72 Letter, 19 September 1947, in Allison, 498.
73 Bery, Cultural Translation, 74–100.
74 Letters to Hedli Anderson, 5 September 1947 and 5 November 1955, in Allison, 489, 598.
75 Gilliam, BBC Features, 61.
76 Patke, “Partition,” 5, 17.
77 Portrait of Delhi script, 52, lines 569, 570.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Aasiya Lodhi
Aasiya Lodhi, School of Media, Arts and Design, University of Westminster, London. United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.