Influences

Louis MacNeice

“........... and to Maguire who makes Belfast in all its grime seem gay"

from Autumn Sequel by Louis MacNeice. George MacCann features under the pseudonym of "Maguire”

from "The Strings are False" Louis MacNiece's autobiography, published 1965

“George MacCann had done surrealist work but thought most surrealists were phoney. George, like George the electrician in Birmingham, was a man who suited the name - you could not imagine him having any other. He had the rich earthy quality, shot with grains of humour, that every George should have. I used to spend weekends with him in Co. Armagh, exchanging our memories of the ludicrous, then sleeping on the floor by a turf fire. George's family had always lived in this district, so he took a clannish pride in its geography; every other hill was a link with some ancestor - several of which were, as George described them, wee rogues. George's great virtue, and the one he most admired, was vitality …..”

Married in 1935, the MacCanns made their first home in County Armagh, in apple blossom country, where one of their early guests was Louis MacNeice. George MacCann and Louis MacNeice were introduced by Maurice James Craig, who left them talking together outside a bookshop. After a bit Louis enquired where George was going. "Home" - "where's that?" - "to a place called Vine Cash in Co. Armagh" - "May I come with you?" MacNeice came for a day - and stayed for a fortnight during much of which he worked on his long poem "Autumn Journal". Thus began a friendship bonded by a mutual love of poetry, art, drama, Irish whiskey, stout and rugby football - a friendship which lasted until the poet died of pneumonia on September 3rd 1963 and his friend undertook the melancholy task of taking the death mask.