Zoo is a book by Louis MacNeice. It was published by Michael Joseph in November 1938, and according to the publisher's list belongs in the category of belles lettres. It was one of four books by Louis MacNeice to appear in 1938, along with The Earth Compels, I Crossed the Minch and Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay.
Zoo is primarily a book about London Zoo. During the writing of the book, from May to August 1938, Louis MacNeice was living in Primrose Hill Road, London, in a maisonette overlooking Primrose Hill and a short distance from London Zoo. (In the last chapter of the book, MacNeice notes that: "As I write this on Primrose Hill I can hear the lions roaring in the Zoo.") According to the blurb on the flap of the dust jacket, Zoo "contains impressions of the Zoo from a layman's point of view, and impressions of the visitors; information about the keepers and feeding of the animals (and visitors); discussion of the Zoo's architecture and general organisation; and special studies of animals."
Zoo is illustrated with drawings, mainly in carbon pencil, by the English artist Nancy Coldstream (later Nancy Spender), under her maiden name of Nancy Sharp. Nancy Coldstream had earlier provided illustrations for I Crossed the Minch, a book on the Hebrides by Louis MacNeice.
Zoo was a Book Society Recommendation and, as Jon Stallworthy notes in his biography of Louis MacNeice, it "sold well enough, though much less well than Modern Poetry."[1]
Background
Zoo began as a commission from the publisher Michael Joseph for a book on the subject of London Zoo. "Designed for the armchair reader, this was to be more impressionistic than Julian Huxley's Official Guide to the Zoo."[2] In May 1938 MacNeice moved into 16a Primrose Hill Road, London, a short distance from London Zoo, and in the course of the next three months he made many visits to the Zoo. These visits are often recorded in the book in diary-style entries:
"On June 1st I visited Regent's Park, a cold morning, June avenging the inopportune warmth of March. But the silver foxes were boxing and the mongooses making love in their straw."[3]
"June 7th, Whit Tuesday, was fine and sunny. The Daily Sketch had out a poster - "R.A.F. Boxers Missing in Country of Savage Apes" - and the Zoo in the morning was full of people on holiday... The animals were far outnumbered and their occasional croaks and whimperings drowned in a torrent of words."[4]
"June 9th was a fresh morning, gay with farmyard cluckings and the crisp yelps of sea-lions. On the Mappin Terraces the bears were lively, stalking on their hind legs and looking for buns which were not, for people had gone back to work. On one of the top crags a goat sat motionless in profile like an acroterion on the ruin of a Greek temple."[5]
MacNeice worked on Zoo, writing little else, through June, July and the first half of August 1938, taking the occasional break to watch tennis at Wimbledon or cricket at Lord's.[2] These breaks are also described in the book. On June 22 MacNeice went to the lawn tennis championships at Wimbledon, where he watched the American tennis player Helen Wills Moody in a second-round game against Nell Hall Hopman. Helen Wills Moody went on to win the Women's Singles at the 1938 Wimbledon Championships, but MacNeice was "very disappointed" with her playing style: "She plays like any other woman in a tournament, cautiously retrieving and retrieving, never going up to the net."[6] On July 27 "I did not go to the Zoo, but, as I was about to enter my house, I saw someone watching the door whom I did not want to meet, so I changed my course and went to Lord's. There my old school, Marlborough, were playing their annual match with Rugby, a match which I had never yet watched. The game was a dull game, but I met a number of old boys and we stood each other beer in glaring sun."[7]
The final chapter of the book, 'Whipsnade and Last Words', describes a visit to Whipsnade Zoo on August 18, 1938, and a last visit to London Zoo on a wet Wednesday evening a few days before. After the manuscript was delivered to its publisher, MacNeice went on holiday to Hampshire, where he began his long poem Autumn Journal. Some phrases and images from Zoo reappear in Autumn Journal: "As I write this on Primrose Hill I can hear the lions roaring in the Zoo" (Zoo) becomes "When the lions roar beneath the hill" (Autumn Journal, ii).
The literary critic Samuel Hynes, writing in the London Review of Books,[8] quotes the following passage from Zoo to illustrate how MacNeice commonly presented himself as a lover of ordinary pleasures:
"The pleasure of dappled things, the beauty of adaptation to purpose, the glory of extravagance, classic elegance or romantic nonsense and grotesquerie – all these we get from the Zoo. We react to these with the same delight as to new potatoes in April speckled with chopped parsley or to the lights at night on the Thames of Battersea Power House, or to cars sweeping their shadows from lamp-post to lamp-post down Haverstock Hill or to brewer’s drays or to lighthouses and searchlights or to a newly cut lawn or to a hot towel or a friction at the barber’s or to Moran’s two classic tries at Twickenham in 1937 or to the smell of dusting-powder in a warm bathroom or to the fun of shelling peas into a china bowl or of shuffling one’s feet through dead leaves when they are crisp or to the noise of rain or the crackling of a newly lit fire or the jokes of a street-hawker or the silence of snow in moonlight or the purring of a powerful car."[9]
Contents
Zoo contains the following chapters:
In Self-Defence
The Zoo and London
Layout
Wild and Domestic
A Personal Digression
Impressions: Early June
The Annual Report
Impressions: Middle June
Question and Answer
Impressions: Later June
The Aquarium
Impressions: July
More Impressions: July
Zoos in Paris
Whipsnade and Last Words
Reception
Jon Stallworthy, in his biography of Louis MacNeice, comments on the book as follows: "Written to much the same recipe as Letters from Iceland and I Crossed the Minch, Zoo is less successful than its predecessors. An early chapter, 'The Zoo and London', shows MacNeice the philosopher-poet at his zestful best, but much of what follows is undistinguished journalism, and there are no poems."[1]
Notes
1 2 Jon Stallworthy: Louis MacNeice. London: Faber and Faber, 1995. Paperback edition 1996, p. 231.
Whipsnade Zoo, formerly known as ZSL Whipsnade Zoo and Whipsnade Wild Animal Park, is a zoo and safari park located at Whipsnade, near Dunstable in Bedfordshire, England. It is one of two zoos that are owned by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), a charity devoted to the worldwide conservation of animals and their habitats.
Ann Shirley Jones, is a British former table tennis and lawn tennis champion. She won eight Grand Slam tennis championships in her career: three in singles, three in women's doubles, and two in mixed doubles. As of 2023, she serves as a vice president of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club.
Frederick Louis MacNeice was an Irish poet and playwright, and a member of the so-called Auden Group, which also included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis. MacNeice's body of work was widely appreciated by the public during his lifetime, due in part to his relaxed but socially and emotionally aware style. Never as overtly or simplistically political as some of his contemporaries, he expressed a humane opposition to totalitarianism as well as an acute awareness of his roots.
Nancy Culliford Spender was a British painter, described on her death as "much underrated".
Jon Howie Stallworthy, was a British literary critic and poet. He was Professor of English at the University of Oxford from 1992 to 2000, and Professor Emeritus in retirement. He was also a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, from 1986, where he was twice acting president. From 1977 to 1986, he was the John Wendell Anderson Professor of English at Cornell University.
The 1993 Wimbledon Championships was a tennis tournament played on grass courts at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club in Wimbledon, London in the United Kingdom. It was the 107th edition of the Wimbledon Championships and was held from Monday 21 June to Sunday 4 July
Angela Buxton was a British tennis player. She won the women's doubles title at both the French Championships and Wimbledon in 1956 with her playing partner, Althea Gibson.
Sir Herbert William Wrangham Wilberforce was a British male tennis player. He was vice-president of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club from 1911 to 1921 and served as its president from 1921 to 1936. In 1887, he and Patrick Bowes-Lyon won the doubles in Wimbledon.
Letters from Iceland is a travel book in prose and verse by W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, published in 1937.
The Earth Compels was the second poetry collection by Louis MacNeice. It was published by Faber and Faber on 28 April 1938, and was one of four books by Louis MacNeice to appear in 1938, along with I Crossed the Minch, Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay and Zoo.
Phyllis Helen Satterthwaite was a female tennis player from Great Britain who was active from the early 1910s until the late 1930s.
"Carrickfergus" is a 44-line poem by Louis MacNeice. It was written in 1937 and first published in book form in MacNeice's poetry collection The Earth Compels (1938). The poem reflects on MacNeice's childhood in Carrickfergus, a large town in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. Although the title of the poem is "Carrickfergus", the text of the poem refers to "Carrick", as the town is known locally and colloquially.
Rugby Football Excursion is a 44-line poem by Louis MacNeice. It was written in 1938 and first published in book form in MacNeice's poetry collection The Earth Compels (1938). The poem recounts an excursion taken by MacNeice from London to Dublin, in order to watch a rugby football match at Lansdowne Road stadium. MacNeice does not specify the occasion, but internal evidence from the poem establishes the match as a rugby football international when England defeated Ireland on 12 February 1938, 36 - 14.
The Sunlight on the Garden is a 24-line poem by Louis MacNeice. It was written in late 1936 and was entitled Song at its first appearance in print, in The Listener magazine, January 1937. It was first published in book form as the third poem in MacNeice's poetry collection The Earth Compels (1938). The poem explores themes of time and loss, along with anxiety about the darkening political situation in Europe following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. It is one of the best known and most anthologized of MacNeice's short poems. George MacBeth describes it as "one of MacNeice's saddest and most beautiful lyrics".
"Epilogue for W. H. Auden" is a 76-line poem by Louis MacNeice. It was written in late 1936 and was first published in book form in Letters from Iceland, a travel book in prose and verse by W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice (1937). MacNeice subsequently included it as the last poem in his poetry collection The Earth Compels (1938). "Epilogue for W. H. Auden" reviews the Iceland trip MacNeice and Auden had taken together in the summer of 1936; the poem mentions events that had occurred while MacNeice and Auden were in Iceland, such as the fall of Seville and the Olympic Games in Berlin.
Theodore Michel Mavrogordato was a tennis player from Great Britain who was active during the first decades of the 20th century.
June Thunder is a 28-line poem by Louis MacNeice. It was first published in book form in MacNeice's poetry collection The Earth Compels (1938). The poem begins with memories of idyllic summer days in the countryside - "the unenduring / Joys of a season" - before returning to the present and "impending thunder". June Thunder is written in a loose form of the sapphic stanza, with three lines set in falling rhythm followed by a shorter fourth line. The poem was anthologised in A New Anthology of Modern Verse 1920-1940 (1941), edited by Cecil Day-Lewis and L.A.G. Strong, and Penguin New Writing No. 2.
Mary Hardwick was a British female tennis player who was active during the 1930s and the 1940s.
Autumn Journal is an autobiographical long poem in twenty-four sections by Louis MacNeice. It was written between August and December 1938, and published as a single volume by Faber and Faber in May 1939. Written in a discursive form, it sets out to record the author's state of mind as the approaching World War II seems more and more inevitable. Fifteen years later, MacNeice attempted a similar personal evaluation of the post-war period in his Autumn Sequel.
George Galway MacCannARCA ARUA was a Northern Irish abstract painter and Modernist sculptor, writer and broadcaster. MacCann was born in Belfast, the son of monumental sculptor David and his wife Elizabeth.
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