The local Classical Association included George Augustus Auden, Professor of Public Health and father of W. H. Auden, and by 1932 MacNeice and Auden's Oxford acquaintance had turned into a close friendship. Auden knew many Marxists, and Blunt had also become a communist by this time, but MacNeice, although sympathetic to the left, was always sceptical of easy answers and "the armchair reformist". "The Strings are False" (written at the time of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact) describes his wish for a change in society and even revolution, but also his intellectual opposition to Marxism and especially the communism embraced by many of his friends.