MacNeice had always been the least political writer of his generation, and his play [Out of the Picture] articulates a mood of the time unaffected by political ideas. The main plot-line concerns an indigent painter named Portright, whose only completed picture, 'Venus Rising', is seized by bailiffs for debts and auctioned off to a film star. Portright represents the artist and the individualist, and his painting, and Moll, the model for it, stand for art, love, and life. The film star and her psychoanalyst-adviser are the other side—society's parasitical life-deniers, the locus of money and power.

In these terms the play is simply another version (rather a conventional one) of the relationship of the artist to modern society. But it contains another theme that is of equal importance and of greater originality. The play begins with a news announcement of the failure of a peace conference, and...