MACNEICE, Louis. Out of the Picture. A Play in Two Acts.

MACNEICE, Louis. Out of the Picture. A Play in Two Acts.Presented to Auden MACNEICE, Louis. Out of the Picture. A Play in Two Acts. London: Faber and Faber. 1937. 8vo. Original light brown cloth lettered in blue to the spine, in the supplied first state dust jacket priced 6s. net to the front flap; pp. [4], 127, [1]; cloth toned and dusty (notably to spine) with a handful of stains to rear board; the dust jacket, lightly toned to spine, is a little dusty to the rear panel, rubbed and nicked to spine tips

Presented to Auden

MACNEICE, Louis. Out of the Picture. A Play in Two Acts. London: Faber and Faber. 1937.

8vo. Original light brown cloth lettered in blue to the spine, in the supplied first state dust-jacket priced 6s. net to the front flap; pp. [4], 127, [1]; cloth toned and dusty (notably to spine) with a handful of stains to rear board; the dust-jacket, lightly toned to spine, is a little dusty to the rear panel, rubbed and nicked to spine tips and corners with a closed tear (c. 20 mm) to the lower edge of the rear spine fold; presentation inscription in black ink to front free endpaper, dated 15 June 1937 (see below).

First edition, first printing, inscribed by Louis MacNeice to W. H. Auden in the month of publication, ‘To Wystan | from | Louis | with all | wishes | 15. 6. 37.’ If books signed or inscribed by Auden are relatively common, those by MacNeice are notably harder to find, making this volume, warmly inscribed to Auden, particularly pleasing.

MacNeice and Auden met as students at Oxford. By the time MacNeice arrived in 1926, Auden, already in his second year, already had a reputation as a poet. Also present were Stephen Spender and Cecil Day Lewis, but in spite of later ‘Thirties Poets’ and ‘Auden Generation’ labels, there was never a group or gang of any kind. Auden and MacNeice became and remained close friends, and it is their work that has clearly stood the test of time influencing later (and current) generations of poets. In the summer of 1936, the pair famously travelled to Iceland, resulting in Letters from Iceland, a vivid collection of poems, letters (some in verse), and essays which has never been out of print since.

The Iceland volume was published by Faber and Faber (where T. S. Eliot was poetry editor) in August 1937. Two months earlier, Faber had issued MacNeice’s Out of the Picture, a play in verse, published in advance of the first performance , which was staged at the end of the year by the Group Theatre with original music by Benjamin Britten. The jacket states that MacNeice had been at work on the play, his first original work for the stage, ‘for a considerable time, […] put[ting it] aside in order to prepare the translation of the Agamemnon [also staged by the Group Theatre with music by Britten] which we published last year.’ Faber had also published MacNeice’s Poems in 1935.

In his autobiography, MacNeice recalls that during this time he was ‘dreaming about bombs and the fascists, was worried over women’, and ‘was mortifying my aesthetic sense by trying to write as Wystan did, without bothering too much with finesse (witness Out of the Picture).’ A number of critics at the time and since have pointed out that the play, an elaborate romp involving a painting (The Rising Venus) with magical powers, an artist named Portright, a quack psychiatrist with a parrot named Bill, parody church services, and more besides, is as close to Auden in tone and technique as the Irish poet ever got.

Although the two poets remained friends and mutual admirers until MacNeice’s death in 1963, they saw little of each other following Auden’s relocation to the United States in 1939, making this inscribed copy of MacNeice’s early play a valuable token of a period when the pair, the finest poets of their generation, were at their closest. Published in June 1937, 3,040 copies of the first edition were printed.

Armitage A5a; MacNeice, ‘The Strings are False’ (1965).

SKU: 2124833