[BITList] If not a poet?

[John Feltham]

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MacBeth,  George Mann  (1932-1992), writer and radio broadcaster, was born at Hill Road, Shotts, Lanarkshire, Scotland, on 19 January 1932, the only child of George MacBeth (d. 1941), a coalminer, and Amelia Morton Mary Mann (d. 1951). His parents moved to Billingham, Cleveland, before settling in Sheffield where his father was killed in an air raid in October 1941 while serving in the Home Guard. His mother died of cancer ten years later. Educated at King Edward VII School, Sheffield, MacBeth was a clever child and received a scholarship to New College, Oxford, where he read classics and philosophy, gaining a first-class degree in 1955. At Oxford he ran the poetry society, founded and co-edited Trio, and published A Form of Words, his first collection of poetry, in 1954 with the Fantasy Press. On 3 August 1955 he married a fellow student, Elizabeth Browell Robson, later the distinguished geneticist.

On leaving Oxford he joined the BBC as a producer in the Overseas Talks department and for the next twenty-two years worked as a BBC radio producer on programmes such as Poets' Voice, New Comment, and Poetry Now. As the producer and editor of these programmes, MacBeth exercised a very considerable literary influence. A zealot in the cause of modern literature, and poetry in particular, he was in touch with a wide congregation of poets from staid traditionalists to avant-garde concrete poets and visualists. His exceedingly eclectic tastes and superb editorial judgement resulted in his programmes not only broadcasting the best and latest work of the established poets but also a considerable body of poetry from unknown, up-and-coming writers. Furthermore, all programme contributors read their own work, a new departure for the BBC which had previously relied predominantly upon actors. Through his radio programmes MacBeth was instrumental in developing-even in some instances kick-starting-the careers of many poets who went on to become major writers, such as Adrian Henri, Peter Porter, and Alan Brownjohn. In the recording studio, he was sensitive and professional to every poet whom he produced, treating everyone as equal: he was never above gently instructing even the most famous in order to get their best performance. Indeed, it was due to MacBeth's tutelage that the standard of spoken poetry rose so sharply. He also introduced British poetry audiences to foreign writers, of whom they would otherwise have been ignorant: this led to his bringing fresh influences to British verse. MacBeth was utterly unpartisan. He abhorred literary cliques and prophesied, accurately, that they would eventually stem the nation's poetic tide that was running hard during the 1960s and 1970s.

From the 1950s MacBeth was a central figure of The Group, a loose company of poets including Edward Lucie-Smith, Philip Hobsbaum, Alan Brownjohn, and Ted Hughes, whose aim was to modernize verse, to bring it away from the tight confines of the past. This group metamorphosed into the Poets' Workshop, of which MacBeth was a leading figure, religiously attending meetings to offer incisive and always impartial criticism on the work of the other seventy or so members. In his own right MacBeth was a remarkably adroit and skilful poet. With his second and third collections, The Broken Places (1963) and The Doomsday Book (1965), his reputation was assured and he published twenty-one verse collections. His talent, once described by an antagonistic critic as being 'magnificently wasted', ranged from sound poetry ('The Lax Cheer') to tightly structured traditional forms ('My Father's Patents'). He was a master with any poetic form, any genre. His personal verse ('The Land-Mine', 'The Drawer') was remarkable for its intensity of emotion while his comic poems, such as 'The Flame of Love, by Laura Stargleam (a Mills & Boon Poem)' and 'Pavan for an Unborn Infanta', a poem lamenting the inability of two London Zoo pandas successfully to mate, were not only hilarious but often trenchant. As a performer of his own poetry MacBeth was a consummate literary entertainer. He could judge an audience the minute he walked into a room and his poetry readings drew large followings. MacBeth's popularity as a poetry performer, however, rankled with some who did not share his generous non-partisan stance and were jealous of his position. Consequently his work was frequently attacked by establishment critics who not only took against him but found his work hard to pigeonhole. Despite occasional critical opprobrium, his poetry earned him the prestigious Geoffrey Faber memorial award in 1964 for The Broken Places, and the Cholmondeley award in 1977. MacBeth also wrote for children and was an outstanding anthologist. His three anthologies for Penguin, the Penguin Book of Sick Verse (1963), Animal Verse (1965), and Victorian Verse (1969), were remarkable for their range while his Poetry 1900-1975 (1979), an enlightened educational anthology, was widely used in schools. His anthology The Book of Cats (1976)-MacBeth was an enthusiast for cats-remained in print for over twenty-five years. He also taught creative writing to American undergraduates (both in London and the USA) and travelled internationally on reading tours.

In 1975 MacBeth's marriage was dissolved. In that same year, a watershed in MacBeth's life, he quit the BBC to make his living by his pen and published his first novel, The Transformation. His prose was never as popular as his poetry. Each novel-he wrote nine in all-was utterly unlike the last: several were erotic to the point of the pornographic, and all seemed somehow self-indulgent. Only one, Anna's Book (1983), received critical acclaim. On 4 March 1982 MacBeth married the writer Lisa St Aubin de Teran (b. 1953), with whom he was overjoyed to have a son. Later that decade she left him and the marriage was dissolved in 1989. This was devastating, as he was to show in his poetry, collected in a powerfully emotive volume entitled Anatomy of a Divorce (1988) and in a novel, Another Love Story (1991). On 28 September 1989 he married Penelope Ronchetti-Church and settled in Ireland. He was again made happy by the birth of a daughter. By this time, however, MacBeth had contracted motor neurone disease, from which he died at Moyne Park, Tuam, co. Galway, Ireland, on 16 February 1992. His last collection, published posthumously, was The Patient (1992), in which he dealt touchingly and courageously-even humorously-with his condition. The book cemented his position as one of Britain's most important post-war poets.

MacBeth was tall and always extremely thin, moustachioed, bespectacled and eccentric, especially in his dress; he once shocked the then staid BBC hierarchy by coming to work wearing a cream leather suit. Unconceited, generous, and always good-humoured, he never played the part of the poet. He was too busy living a life that included owning a run-down Ferrari (to which he wrote a funeral ode), collecting samurai swords, and buying Edwardian furniture for the vast, semi-derelict houses he revelled in owning. He was once asked, if he had not been a poet, what would he have liked to have been? He replied, without hesitation, 'A general'.

Martin Booth 

Sources  personal knowledge (2004) + WWW + G. MacBeth, A child of the war (1987) + b. cert. + d. cert. + m. certs.
Archives State University of New York, Buffalo, papers + TCD, papers from his time in Eire, photographs, childhood diaries, memorabilia + U. Cal., Los Angeles, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, papers | NL Scot., corresp. with Duncan Glen + U. Reading L., poems and letters to I. Fletcher SOUND BBC Archives
Likenesses  C. Barker, photograph, priv. coll. [see illus.]
Wealth at death  £202,510: probate, 16 Oct 1992, CGPLA Eire




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