Mairi Macinnes
Poet whose career was revived after 30 years in obscurity
MAIRI MACINNES, the poet and author, who has died aged 92, spent much of her life outside the literary limelight, before achieving the recognition she deserved some 30 years after she made her debut.
After the publication, in 1953, of her first collection of poems, Splinters, and her first novel, Admit One, in 1956, she was described as belonging to a new generation of young writers which included Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis. But following her marriage to the distinguished American literary critic, John Mccormick, she went with him to the Frei Universität in post-war Berlin and then to America, where writing took second place to bringing up their children in the wilds of Maine and placid New Jersey, with time out in Mexico and Spain.
She reappeared as a writer nearly 30 years later with a collection called Herring, Oatmeal, Milk & Salt (1981), and having returned to England with her husband in 1987, she spent her last 30 years in Yorkshire, during which time she produced several collections of poetry – The House on the Ridge Road (1988), Elsewhere and Back (1988), The Ghostwriter (1999), and The Girl I Left Behind Me: Poems of a Lifetime (2003), as well as a second novel The Quondam Wives (1993) about King Lear’s wife.
In 2002 she published a memoir, Clearances, which painted a sharp but affectionate portrait of her marriage and her struggle to reconcile her roles as a wife, mother, and daughter with work as “advertising copyrighter, university lecturer, editor, museum secretary, ghost-writer and general stooge” as well as her vocation as a poet. “Not being able to practice your art,” she wrote, “is painful”. It took “a lifetime to attach the life to the poetry, and only now that I’m old … do the life and the poetry go along together.”
Mairi Macinnes was born in Norton-on-tees, County Durham, on January 5 1925. Her father, a doctor originally from Skye, had met her mother, a nurse, in a field hospital at Salonika during the First World War. In her poem “The Caul” Mairi Macinnes describes her mother on a ship docking at Tilbury in February 1919 and seeing her husband-to-be, now no longer in the “death and chaos” of war and finding him “a stranger/in shabbiest tweeds, whom she felt nothing for”.
Educated in Helmsley, Yorkshire, Mairi went on to win a place at Somerville College, Oxford. Her studies there were interrupted by the outbreak of war, during which time she served as a driver in the Women’s Royal Navy Service.
In 1954 she married John Mccormick whom she met when he interviewed for the programme of American Studies in Salzburg, of which he was Dean. In “Why Poetry: An Essay” (1999) she described her realisation that as her husband’s career blossomed she was no longer a rising star: “No more inclusion in anthologies, reduced publication in journals, no more invitations to write reviews …”
But she continued to write, inspired by the places Mccormick’s work took her to, her poetry infused with isolation and longing for her homeland, as in “Hardly Anything Bears Watching” (1963): “When I was young/ the pavement curbs were made of stone,/a substance like my fingernails./ It is not like that any more.”
Following John Mccormick’s death in 2010 she led a vigorous life among friends in York. In 2015 she was awarded an Honorary Degree from the University of York and the following year she published Amazing Memories of Childhood, etc,a dazzling last collection of work from six decades. “I understood something very simple,” she wrote in her 2002 memoir. “To make things happen, you have to go away.”
She is survived by her two sons, a daughter and a stepson.
Mairi Macinnes, born January 5 1925, died September 14 2017