Prayer Before Birth
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
club-footed ghoul come near me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
in the back of my mind to guide me.
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
my life when they murder by means of my
hands, my death when they live me.
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
waves call me to folly and the desert calls
me to doom and the beggar refuses
my gift and my children curse me.
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
come near me.
With strength against those who would freeze my
humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
one face, a thing, and against all those
who would dissipate my entirety, would
blow me like thistledown hither and
thither or hither and thither
like water held in the
hands would spill me.
Otherwise kill me.
Up and down one among a million, one
The same at best as the rest of the jigging mayflies,
One only day of May alive beneath the sun.
Flowers in the sun beside the jewelled water.
Daughter of the South, call the sunbeams home
To nest between your breasts. The kingcups
Ephemeral are gay gulps of laughter.
Lips of the river that pout and whisper round the reeds.
The mayfly flirting and posturing over the water
Goes up and down in the lift so many times for fun.
Much for the better, to adopt solider creeds;
The kingcup will cease proffering his cup
And the foam will have blown from the beer and the heat no longer dance
Change her tune to June – but the trouble with us mayflies
Is that we never have the chance to be grown up.’
They stretch out taut and thin and ringing clear;
So we, whose strand of life is not much more,
Let us too make our time elastic and
Inconsequently dance above the dazzling wave.
The dregs of drink, the dried cups of flowers,
The pathetic fallacy of the passing hours
When it is we who pass them – hours of stone,
Long rows of granite sphinxes looking on.
Who make the mayflies dance, the lapwings lift their crests,
The show will soon shut down, its gay-rags gone,
But when this summer is over let us die together,
I want always to be near your breasts.
For the child who never had seen an orchard;
For the youth whom whiskey had led astray
The morning after was the first day.
For Adam before he heard the sentence;
When the flaming sword endorsed the Fall
The trees were his to plant for all.
For the child from streets of doubt and litter;
For the youth for whom the skies unfurled
His first love was his first world.
When Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden;
Yet when the bitter gates clanged to
The sky beyond was just as blue.
And the last ocean is the first ocean
And, however often the sun may rise,
A new thing dawns upon our eyes.
And the first blossom is the best blossom
And when from Eden we take our way
The morning after is the first day.
Death of an Actress
Collapsed after singing to wounded soldiers,
At the age of sixty-five. The American notice
Says no doubt all that need be said
About this one-time chorus girl; whose role
For more than forty stifling years was giving
Sexual, sentimental, or comic entertainment,
A gaudy posy for the popular soul.
Plush and cigars: she waddled into the lights.
Old and huge and painted, in velvet and tiara,
Her voice gone but around her head an aura
Of all her vanilla-sweet forgotten vaudeville nights.
With an elephantine shimmy and a sugared wink
She threw a trellis of Dorothy Perkins roses
Around an audience come from slum and suburb
And weary of the tea-leaves in the sink;
Who found her songs a rainbow leading west
To the home they never had, to the chocolate Sunday
Of boy and girl, to cowslip time, to the never-
Ending weekend Islands of the Blest.
In the Isle of Man before the war before
The present one she made a ragtime favourite
Of ‘Tipperary’, which became the swan-song
Of troop-ships on a darkened shore;
And during Munich sang her ancient quiz
Of and the chorus answered.
Muddling through and glad to have no answer:
Where’s Bill Bailey? How do we know where he is!
Now on a late and bandaged April day
In a military hospital Miss Florrie
Forde has made her positively last appearance
And taken her bow and gone correctly away.
Correctly. For she stood
For an older England, for children toddling
Hand in hand while the day was bright. Let the wren and robin
Gently with leaves cover the Babes in the Wood.
Of old leather trunks – Perdita, where have you been
Hiding all these years? Somewhere or other a green
Flag is waving under an iron vault
And a brass bell is the herald of green country
And the wind is in the wires and the broom is gold.
We said that we should do? The cobwebs cover
The labels of Tyrol. The time is over-
Due and in some metropolitan station
Among the clank of cans and the roistering files
Of steam the caterpillars wait for wings.
“… vitreamque Circen”
Chills and holds us,
Far more fatal than painted flesh or the lodestone of live hair
This despair of crystal brilliance
Narcissus’ error
Enfolds and kills us—
Dazed with gazing on that unfertile beauty
Which is our own heart’s thought.
Fled away to the beasts
One cannot stop thinking; Timon
Kept on finding gold.
In parrot-ridden forest or barren coast
A more importunate voice than bird or wave
Escutcheoned on the air with ice letters
Seeks and, of course, finds us
(Of course, being our echo).
And realise that that never-to-be-touched
Vision is your mistress.
With bricks upon the floor
Building motley houses
And knocking down your houses
And always building more.
Her under-wear was lace,
She smiled while you dressed her
And when you then undressed her
She kept a smiling face.
And broke herself in two
And her legs and arms were hollow
And her yellow head was hollow
Behind her eyes of blue.
Somewhere seen before,
He heard the name Christina
And suddenly saw Christina
Dead on the nursery floor.
London
Rain
The ebony street with white
And the neon lamps of London
Stain the canals of night
And the park becomes a jungle
In the alchemy of night.
Horses black as coal–
The randy mares of fancy,
The stallions of the soul–
Eager to take the fences
That fence about my soul.
The horses ride and across
The country to the channel
Where warning beacons toss,
To a place where God and No-God
Play at pitch and toss.
For God will give me bliss
But No-God will absolve me
From all I do amiss
And I need not suffer conscience
If the world was made amiss.
On pardon when we fall
But if we are under No-God
Nothing will matter at all,
Adultery and murder
Will count for nothing at all.
As having nothing to lose
My lust goes riding horseback
To ravish where I choose,
To burgle all the turrets
Of beauty as I choose.
Its dance upon the town,
Logic and lust together
Come dimly tumbling down,
And neither God nor No-God
Is either up or down.
The alternatives untrue,
We need no metaphysics
To sanction what we do
Or to muffle us in comfort
From what we did not do.
Began in bog or lake,
The world is what was given,
The world is what we make.
And we only can discover
Life in the life we make.
Upon the gleaming slates,
There will be sunshine after
When the rain abates
And rain returning duly
When the sun abates.
Their gallopings in vain,
Logic and lust are quiet,
And again it starts to rain;
Falling asleep I listen
To the falling London rain.
It would take too long;
All we know is the splash of words in passing
And falling twigs of song,
And when we try to eavesdrop on the great
Presences it is rarely
That by a stroke of luck we can appropriate
Even a phrase entirely.
In somebody else’s arms
We should not fear the spears of the spring nor the city’s
Yammering fire alarms
But, as it is, the spears each year go through
Our flesh and almost hourly
Bell or siren banishes the blue
Eyes of Love entirely.
And all the charts were plain
Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters,
A prism of delight and pain,
We might be surer where we wished to go
Or again we might be merely
Bored but in brute reality there is no
Road that is right entirely.
Envying and despising unreflective things
Finding pathos in dogs and undeveloped handwriting
And young girls doing their hair and all the castles of sand
Flushed by the childrenæs bedtime, level with the shore.
To be always stressing either its flux or its permanence,
I do not want to be a tragic or philosophic chorus
But to keep my eye only on the nearer future
And after that let the sea flow over us.
Join hands and make believe that joined
Hands will keep away the wolves of water
Who howl along our coast. And be it assumed
That no one hears them among the talk and laughter.
Jumping the London streets with millions of tin cans
Clanking at this tail, we heard some shadow say,
“Give the dog a bone”–and so we gave him ours;
Night after night we watched him slaver and crunch away
The beams of human life, the tops of topless towers.
Who Mother-naked, suckled with sparks, were chill
Though dandled on a grill of sizzling air
Striped like a convict–black, yellow and red;
Thus were we weaned to knowledge of the Will
That wills the natural world but wills us dead.
O enemy and image of ourselves,
Did we not on those mornings after the All Clear,
When you were looting shops in elemental joy
And singing as you swarmed up city blocks and spire,
Echo your thought in ours? Destroy! Destroy!
The British Museum Reading Room
Go up and down the alleys, tap the cells of knowledge –
Honey and wax, the accumulation of years …
Some on commission, some for the love of learning,
Some because they have nothing better to do
Or because they hope these walls of books will deaden
The drumming of the demon in their ears.
In prince-nez, period hats or romantic beards
And cherishing their hobby or their doom,
Some are too much alive and some are asleep
Hanging like bats in a world of inverted values,
Folded up in themselves in a world which is safe and silent:
This is the British Museum Reading Room.
Puffing their ruffs and sweeping their tails or taking
A sun-bath at their ease
And under the totem poles – the ancient terror –
Between the enormous fluted ionic columns
There seeps from heavily jowled or hawk-like foreign faces
The guttural sorrow of the refugees.
I Am
That I Am
Definition is tautology: man is man,
Woman woman, and tree tree, and world world,
Slippery, self-contained; catch as catch can.
Turn other than themselves, their entities unfurled,
Flapping and overlapping -a tree becomes
A talking tower, and a woman becomes world.
Or the mesh too big or, thirdly, the fish die
And man from false communion dwindles back
Into a mere man under a mere sky.
Happened happened -even if the judge said
It should have been otherwise -and glitter glitters
And I am I although the dead are dead.
The
Sunlight on the Garden
The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold;
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.
Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.
The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying
And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.
Carrickfergus
I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries
To the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams:
Thence to Smoky Carrick in County Antrim
Where the bottle-neck harbour collects the mud which jams
The little boats beneath the Norman castle,
The pier shining with lumps of crystal salt;
The Scotch Quarter was a line of residential houses
But the Irish Quarter was a slum for the blind and halt.
The brook ran yellow from the factory stinking of chlorine,
The yarn-milled called its funeral cry at noon;
Our lights looked over the Lough to the lights of Bangor
Under the peacock aura of a drowning moon.
The Norman walled this town against the country
To stop his ears to the yelping of his slave
And built a church in the form of a cross but denoting
The List of Christ on the cross, in the angle of the nave.
I was the rector's son, born to the Anglican order,
Banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor;
The Chichesters knelt in marble at the end of a transept
With ruffs about their necks, their portion sure.
The war came and a huge camp of soldiers
Grew from the ground in sight of our house with long
Dummies hanging from gibbets for bayonet practice
And the sentry's challenge echoing all day long.
I went to school in Dorset, the world of parents
Contracted into a puppet world of sons
Far from the mill girls, the smell of porter, the salt mines
And the soldiers with their guns.
Snow
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes—
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands—
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.
June
Thunder
The Junes were free and full, driving through tiny
Roads, the mudguards brushing the cowparsley,
Through fields of mustard and under boldly embattled
Mays and chestnuts
Or between beeches verdurous and voluptuous
Or where broom and gorse beflagged the chalkland—
All the flare and gusto of the unenduring
Joys of a season
Now returned but I note as more appropriate
To the maturer mood impending thunder
With an indigo sky and the garden hushed except for
The treetops moving.
Then the curtains in my room blow suddenly inward,
The shrubbery rustles, birds fly heavily homeward,
The white flowers fade to nothing on the trees and rain comes
Down like a dropscene.
Now there comes catharsis, the cleansing downpour
Breaking the blossoms of our overdated fancies
Our old sentimentality and whimsicality
Loves of the morning.
Blackness at half-past eight, the night's precursor,
Clouds like falling masonry and lightning's lavish
Annunciation, the sword of the mad archangel
Flashed from the scabbard.
If only you would come and dare the crystal
Rampart of the rain and the bottomless moat of thunder,
If only now you would come I should be happy
Now if now only.
Dublin
Declamatory bronze
On sombre pedestals –
O'Connell, Grattan, Moore –
And the brewery tugs and the swans
On the balustraded stream
And the bare bones of a fanlight
Over a hungry door
And the air soft on the cheek
And porter running from the taps
With a head of yellow cream
And Nelson on his pillar
Watching his world collapse.
I was not born or bred
Nor schooled here and she will not
Have me alive or dead
But yet she holds my mind
With her seedy elegance,
With her gentle veils of rain
And all her ghosts that walk
And all that hide behind
Her Georgian facades –
The catcalls and the pain,
The glamour of her squalor,
The bravado of her talk.
With a concertina movement
And the sun comes up in the morning
Like barley-sugar on the water
And the mist on the Wicklow hills
Is close, as close
As the peasantry were to the landlord,
As the Irish to the Anglo-Irish,
As the killer is close one moment
To the man he kills,
Or as the moment itself
Is close to the next moment.
And she is not English,
Historic with guns and vermin
And the cold renown
Of a fragment of Church latin,
Of an oratorical phrase.
But oh the days are soft,
Soft enough to forget
The lesson better learnt,
The bullet on the wet
Streets, the crooked deal,
The steel behind the laugh,
The Four Courts burnt.
Garrison of the Saxon,
Augustan capital
Of a Gaelic nation,
Appropriating all
The alien brought,
You give me time for thought
And by a juggler's trick
You poise the toppling hour –
O greyness run to flower,
Grey stone, grey water,
And brick upon grey brick.
The Wiper
Reaps a swathe of water
On the screen; we shudder on
And hardly hold the road,
All we can see a segment
Of blackly shining asphalt
With the wiper moving across it
Clearing, blurring, clearing.
The monotony of its hardly
Visible camber, the mystery
Of its invisible margins,
Will these be always with us,
The night being broken only
By lights that pass or meet us
From others in moving boxes?
Upholstered, equipped with dials
Professing to tell the distance
We have gone, the speed we are going,
But not a gauge nor needle
To tell us where we are going
Or when day will come, supposing
This road exists in daytime.
Where we were when it was not
Night, when it was not raining,
Before this car moved forward
And the wiper backward and forward
Lighting so little before us
Of a road that, crouching forward,
We watch move always towards us,
Cleared and blurred by the wiper
Is sucked in under our wheels
To be spewed behind us and lost
While we, dazzled by darkness,
Haul the black future towards us
Peeling the skin from our hands;
And yet we hold the road.
Meeting
Point
There were two glasses and two chairs
And two people with the one pulse
(Somebody stopped the moving stairs):
Time was away and somewhere else.
The stream’s music did not stop
Flowing through heather, limpid brown,
Although they sat in a coffee shop
And they were neither up nor down.
Holding its inverted poise—
Between the clang and clang a flower,
A brazen calyx of no noise:
The bell was silent in the air.
That stretched around the cups and plates;
The desert was their own, they planned
To portion out the stars and dates:
The camels crossed the miles of sand.
The waiter did not come, the clock
Forgot them and the radio waltz
Came out like water from a rock:
Time was away and somewhere else.
That bloomed again in tropic trees:
Not caring if the markets crash
When they had forests such as these,
Her fingers flicked away the ash.
Be praised that time can stop like this,
That what the heart has understood
Can verify in the body’s peace
God or whatever means the Good.
And life no longer what it was,
The bell was silent in the air
And all the room one glow because
Time was away and she was here.
The
Streets of Laredo
O early
one morning I walked out like Agag,
Early one morning to walk through the fire
Dodging the pythons that leaked on the pavements
With tinkle of glasses and tangle of wire;
When grimed to the eyebrows I met an old fireman
Who looked at me wryly and thus did he say:
‘The streets of Laredo are closed to all traffic,
We won’t never master this joker to-day.
‘O hold the branch tightly and wield the axe brightly,
The bank is in powder, the banker’s in hell,
But loot is still free on the streets of Laredo
And when we drive home we drive home on the bell.’
Then out from a doorway there sidled a cockney,
A rocking-chair rocking on top of his head:
‘O fifty-five years I been feathering my love-nest
And look at it now —
why, you’d sooner be dead.’
At which there arose from a wound in the asphalt,
His big wig a-smoulder, Sir Christopher Wren
Saying: ‘Let them make hay of the streets of Laredo;
When your ground-rents expire I will build them again.’
Then twangling their bibles with wrath in their nostrils
From Bunhill Fields came Bunyan and Blake:
‘Laredo the golden is fallen, is fallen;
Your flame shall not quench nor your thirst shall not slake.’
‘I come to Laredo to find me asylum’,
Says Tom Dick and Harry the Wandering Jew;
‘They tell me report at the first police station
But the station is pancaked —
so what can I do?’
Thus eavesdropping sadly I strolled through Laredo
Perplexed by the dicta misfortunes inspire
Till one low last whisper inveigled my earhole —
The voice of the Angel, the voice of the fire:
O late, very late, have I come to Laredo
A whimsical bride in my new scarlet dress
But at last I took pity on those who were waiting
To see my regalia and feel my caress.
Now ring the bells gaily and play the hose daily,
Put splints on your legs, put a gag on your breath;
O you streets of Laredo, you streets of Laredo,
Lay down the red carpet —
My dowry is death.
Early one morning to walk through the fire
Dodging the pythons that leaked on the pavements
With tinkle of glasses and tangle of wire;
When grimed to the eyebrows I met an old fireman
Who looked at me wryly and thus did he say:
‘The streets of Laredo are closed to all traffic,
We won’t never master this joker to-day.
‘O hold the branch tightly and wield the axe brightly,
The bank is in powder, the banker’s in hell,
But loot is still free on the streets of Laredo
And when we drive home we drive home on the bell.’
Then out from a doorway there sidled a cockney,
A rocking-chair rocking on top of his head:
‘O fifty-five years I been feathering my love-nest
And look at it now —
why, you’d sooner be dead.’
At which there arose from a wound in the asphalt,
His big wig a-smoulder, Sir Christopher Wren
Saying: ‘Let them make hay of the streets of Laredo;
When your ground-rents expire I will build them again.’
Then twangling their bibles with wrath in their nostrils
From Bunhill Fields came Bunyan and Blake:
‘Laredo the golden is fallen, is fallen;
Your flame shall not quench nor your thirst shall not slake.’
‘I come to Laredo to find me asylum’,
Says Tom Dick and Harry the Wandering Jew;
‘They tell me report at the first police station
But the station is pancaked —
so what can I do?’
Thus eavesdropping sadly I strolled through Laredo
Perplexed by the dicta misfortunes inspire
Till one low last whisper inveigled my earhole —
The voice of the Angel, the voice of the fire:
O late, very late, have I come to Laredo
A whimsical bride in my new scarlet dress
But at last I took pity on those who were waiting
To see my regalia and feel my caress.
Now ring the bells gaily and play the hose daily,
Put splints on your legs, put a gag on your breath;
O you streets of Laredo, you streets of Laredo,
Lay down the red carpet —
My dowry is death.
Bagpipe
Music
It's no
go the merrygoround, it's no go the rickshaw,
All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow.
Their knickers are made of crepe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python,
Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with head of bison.
John MacDonald found a corpse, put it under the sofa,
Waited till it came to life and hit it with a poker,
Sold its eyes for souvenirs, sold its blood for whiskey,
Kept its bones for dumbbells to use when he was fifty.
It's no go the Yogi-man, it's no go Blavatsky,
All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.
Annie MacDougall went to milk, caught her foot in the heather,
Woke to hear a dance record playing of Old Vienna.
It's no go your maidenheads, it's no go your culture,
All we want is a Dunlop tire and the devil mend the puncture.
The Laird o' Phelps spent Hogmanay declaring he was sober,
Counted his feet to prove the fact and found he had one foot over.
Mrs. Carmichael had her fifth, looked at the job with repulsion,
Said to the midwife "Take it away; I'm through with overproduction."
It's no go the gossip column, it's no go the Ceilidh,
All we want is a mother's help and a sugar-stick for the baby.
Willie Murray cut his thumb, couldn't count the damage,
Took the hide of an Ayrshire cow and used it for a bandage.
His brother caught three hundred cran when the seas were lavish,
Threw the bleeders back in the sea and went upon the parish.
It's no go the Herring Board, it's no go the Bible,
All we want is a packet of fags when our hands are idle.
It's no go the picture palace, it's no go the stadium,
It's no go the country cot with a pot of pink geraniums,
It's no go the Government grants, it's no go the elections,
Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension.
It's no go my honey love, it's no go my poppet;
Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.
The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall forever,
But if you break the bloody glass you won't hold up the weather.
All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow.
Their knickers are made of crepe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python,
Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with head of bison.
John MacDonald found a corpse, put it under the sofa,
Waited till it came to life and hit it with a poker,
Sold its eyes for souvenirs, sold its blood for whiskey,
Kept its bones for dumbbells to use when he was fifty.
It's no go the Yogi-man, it's no go Blavatsky,
All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.
Annie MacDougall went to milk, caught her foot in the heather,
Woke to hear a dance record playing of Old Vienna.
It's no go your maidenheads, it's no go your culture,
All we want is a Dunlop tire and the devil mend the puncture.
The Laird o' Phelps spent Hogmanay declaring he was sober,
Counted his feet to prove the fact and found he had one foot over.
Mrs. Carmichael had her fifth, looked at the job with repulsion,
Said to the midwife "Take it away; I'm through with overproduction."
It's no go the gossip column, it's no go the Ceilidh,
All we want is a mother's help and a sugar-stick for the baby.
Willie Murray cut his thumb, couldn't count the damage,
Took the hide of an Ayrshire cow and used it for a bandage.
His brother caught three hundred cran when the seas were lavish,
Threw the bleeders back in the sea and went upon the parish.
It's no go the Herring Board, it's no go the Bible,
All we want is a packet of fags when our hands are idle.
It's no go the picture palace, it's no go the stadium,
It's no go the country cot with a pot of pink geraniums,
It's no go the Government grants, it's no go the elections,
Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension.
It's no go my honey love, it's no go my poppet;
Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.
The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall forever,
But if you break the bloody glass you won't hold up the weather.
Soap
Suds
This brand of soap has the same smell as once in the big
House he visited when he was eight: the walls of the bathroom open
To reveal a lawn where a great yellow ball rolls back through a hoop
To rest at the head of a mallet held in the hands of a child.
And these were the joys of that house: a tower with a telescope;
Two great faded globes, one of the earth, one of the stars;
A stuffed black dog in the hall; a walled garden with bees;
A rabbit warren; a rockery; a vine under glass; the sea.
To which he has now returned. The day of course is fine
And a grown-up voice cries Play! The mallet slowly swings,
Then crack, a great gong booms from the dog-dark hall and the ball
Skims forward through the hoop and then through the next and then
Through hoops where no hoops were and each dissolves in turn
And the grass has grown head-high and an angry voice cries Play!
But the ball is lost and the mallet slipped long since from the hands
Under the running tap that are not the hands of a child.
Round the Corner
Round the corner was always the sea. Our childhood
Tipping the sand from its shoes on return from holiday
Knew there was more where it came from, as there was more
Seaweed to pop and horizons to blink at. Later
Our calf loves yearned for union in solitude somewhere
Round that corner where Xenophon crusted with parasangs
Knew he was home, where Columbus feared he was not,
And the Bible said there would be no more of it. Round
That corner regardless there will be always a realm
Undercutting its banks with repeated pittance of spray,
The only anarchic democracy, where we are all vicarious
Citizens; Which we remember as we remember a person
Whose wrists are springs to spring a trap or rock
A cradle; whom we remember when the sand falls out on the
carpet
Or the exiled shell complains or a wind from round the corner
Carries the smell of wrack or the taste of salt, or a wave
Touched to steel by the moon twists a gimlet in memory.
Round the corner is - sooner or later - the sea.
The Suicide
And this, ladies and gentlemen, whom I am not in fact
Conducting, was his office all those minutes ago,
This man you never heard of. There are the bills
In his intray, the ash in the ashtray, the grey memoranda
stacked
Against him, the serried ranks of the box-files, the packed
Jury of his unanswered correspondence
Nodding under the paperweight in the breeze
From the window by which he left; and here is the cracked
Receiver that never got mended and here is the jotter
With his last doodle which might be his own digestive tract
Ulcer and all or might be the flowery maze
through which he had wandered deliciously till he stumbled
Suddenly finally conscious of all he lacked
On a manhole under the hollyhocks. The pencil
Point had obviously broken, yet, when he left his room
By catdrop sleight-of-foot or simple vanishing act,
To those who knew him for all that mess in the street
This man with the shy smile has left behind
Something that was intact.
The Habits
When they put him In rompers the habits
Fanned out to close in, they were dressed
In primary colours and each of them
Carried a rattle and a hypodermic;
His parents said it was all for the best.
Next, the barracks of boys: the habits
Slapped him on the back, they were dressed
In pinstripe trousers and carried
A cheque book, a passport, and a sjambok;
The master said it was all for the best.
And then came the women: the habits
Pretended to leave, they were dressed
In bittersweet undertones and carried
A Parthian shaft and an affidavit;
The adgirl said it was all for the best.
Age became middle: the habits
Made themselves at home, they were dressed
In quilted dressing-gowns and carried
A decanter, a siphon, and a tranquilliser;
The computer said it was all for the best.
Then age became real: the habits
Outstayed their welcome, they were dressed
In nothing and carried nothing.
He said: If you won't go, I go.
The Lord God said it was all for the best.
Star-Gazer
Forty-two years ago (to me if to no one else
The number is of some interest) it was a brilliant starry night
And the westward train was empty and had no corridors
So darting from side to side I could catch the unwonted sight
Of those almost intolerably bright
Holes, punched in the sky, which excited me partly because
Of their Latin names and partly because I had read in the text-
books
How very far off they were, it seemed their light
Had left them (some at least) long years before I was.
And this remembering now I mark that what
Light was leaving some of them at least then,
Forty-two years ago, will never arrive
In time for me to catch it, which light when
It does get here may find that there is not
Anyone left alive
To run from side to side in a late night train
Admiring it and adding noughts in vain.
Poems on the
Internet
As Louis
MacNeice lay dying in 1963, his last major work, a radio play called Persons
from Porlock, was broadcast by the BBC. It is about a painter called Hank, who
starts well in the 1930s, but whose development, as MacNeice explains in a
note, ‘is interrupted by the war . . . Subsequent interruptions and
frustrations include those occasioned by the lure of commercial art, by drink,
money troubles and women.’ Hence the title of the play. Hank (an anagram of
Khan) might have built a stately pleasure dome, but instead he dies, his
promise unfulfilled, in what Coleridge’s poem calls ‘caverns measureless to
man’. For Hank has an unexpected hobby, potholing, and at the end of the play
drowns in a cave. Death turns up there, announcing himself as ‘a noble person from
Porlock’.
There is a lot of MacNeice in Hank. After the high promise of Poems (1935), he began to disperse his energies in money-making prose books. Hank spent the war in Burma. MacNeice shuttled between neutral Ireland and the US, uncertain, like his friends Auden and Britten, how far he should commit himself to the war, before finally settling down in London. In 1941 he did his bit by joining the BBC. For the next two decades, the corporation gave him a steady income and plenty of creative scope. Yet the fluency he developed as a radio features writer was not always good for his poetry, and he came to think of his broadcasting career as a chronic interruption. By now, like Hank, he was numbing his frustration with alcohol. Both, however, pulled through. Hank got out of advertising and painted enough to hold a one-man show. MacNeice went part-time at the BBC, cut back on his drinking, and worked up the concentrated, parable-like lyricism of his later poems.
That the radio play fed off MacNeice’s own experiences is not surprising. To read The Strings Are False, the posthumously published autobiography (drafted in 1940) that Faber has reissued to coincide with the centenary of MacNeice’s birth, is to find many such connections. He says in his book on Modern Poetry (1938) that ‘literary criticism should always be partly biographical.’ This may be theoretically unsound, but it springs from something he knew about his own creativity. Yet his strength was not self-disclosure. Although he never subscribed to the Modernist cult of impersonality, he rejected the idea that poetry is self-expression and argued that even the lyric voice is dramatic. During the postwar years, when his poetry became too discursive, part of the problem was that he was pinned to the centre of his writing by an ethic of honesty without wanting to be confessional. His later, parabolic lyrics have the clean intensity that comes when an inner life has been condensed and generalised into structures as formulaic as nursery rhymes.
Hank converged with Louis to an extent that was finally uncanny. To prepare his play for transmission MacNeice went down a pothole with a BBC sound engineer. He had always obscurely relished going underground; caves, tunnels and passage-graves run through his poems and plays. In Persons from Porlock, Hank’s liking for potholes is mixed up with both his drive to paint and his early abandonment by his mother. MacNeice, whose mother was taken into psychiatric care when he was five, and died just over a year later, seems to have diagnosed a similar complex in himself. Certainly, he put into Hank’s cave system features of the salt-mines at Carrickfergus which, we are told in The Strings Are False, he visited during his childhood. It was not a good idea to repeat that visit fifty years later. Chilled, drenched and weary, MacNeice came down with pneumonia. Friends listened apprehensively as the ‘noble person from Porlock’ carried Hank away. A few days later MacNeice was dead.
Interrupted, for sure. His last book of poems, The Burning Perch, appeared ten days after his death; a potboiler on astrology in 1964. When Derek Mahon declared, with resonant finality, in an elegy published in January 1965, ‘All we may ask of you we have; the rest/Is not for publication,’ he could hardly have been more wrong. Within months, MacNeice’s friend and first employer, the Greek scholar E.R. Dodds, brought out The Strings Are False, a book of unrevised lectures called Varieties of Parable and a Collected Poems. Even now, with Peter McDonald’s intelligently re-edited Collected, we do not have all the MacNeice we could ask for. As McDonald points out, a Complete Poems would be considerably larger than the 600-odd pages of verse plus seven appendices of fugitive poems, prefaces and variants that he gives us. It would include translations, many poems that appeared in small magazines, and others abandoned in manuscript. Though the typical MacNeice poem is decisively thought through, it is caught up in a lifelong, interrupted process. Collected editions often have a sepulchral air; the unfinished nature of MacNeice’s corpus helps makes this one a living monument.
As with the output as a whole, so with its local energy. The Collected is a vast compendium of forms, issues and ideas, but it is animated repeatedly by interruption and its imminence. To be visited by a person from Porlock could be damaging, even fatal, but it was never entirely bad. Those who ‘lay the blame’ for failure on interruption are in denial about other, internal blocks. Interruption administers doses of the worldly impurity that MacNeice wanted to get into poetry. Its imminence makes moments of love, drunkenness and fantasy more sensuously consuming. Interruption could even be chosen. To go on a journey or start a romance was to break life into episodes that made sense where the big picture did not. Above all, interruption shook up habit, rebooting the imagination. Persons from Porlock was itself the product of elective interruption. As Jon Stallworthy points out, in the 1995 biography that we depend on for MacNeice’s later years, he was ‘making a fresh start at 54’ when he went half-time at the BBC.
It was a bold but characteristic step. Auden said in his memorial address that, in technique as well as the search for subject matter, MacNeice ‘shared Cesare Pavese’s belief that “the only joy in life is to begin.”’ And Spender, in a late poem, wrote of MacNeice and Bernard Spencer:
Each poem
Is still a new beginning. If
They had been finished though they would have died
Before they died.
MacNeice did have favourite forms and topics, and often flogged them hard. When he tried to break new ground, he was by no means always successful. But Auden’s troubled awareness that his own verse was becoming at once mechanical and arch, and Spender’s recognition that poetry had abandoned him, made them the more respectful of MacNeice’s indefatigable ability to break off and start again. There is enough truth in what they say to suggest why he was happier writing lyrics than the long, argued sequences and narratives of the postwar years.
Time was the germ of the problem. How to use it and prevent it petrifying us were deep issues for the young poet. They went back to his Church of Ireland upbringing (his father was rector of Carrickfergus, later bishop of Down) though they were given distinctive shape by his classical education at Marlborough and Oxford. Probably no poet since Milton has been as preoccupied with the Pauline injunction that time should be redeemed and talents put to use. When he catches himself ‘killing time’ in I Crossed the Minch (1938), a book about visiting the Hebrides, he is gripped by the horrible thought that time is killing him, and writes an anxious poem about ‘The taut and ticking fear/That hides in all the clocks/And creeps inside the skull’. Reading Greats at Oxford had taught him more enjoyable, pagan reasons for seizing the day. But the reassuring idea that the cosmos was a Heraclitean flux was compromised by the philosophical idealism still current at Merton (the college where, a few years earlier, T.S. Eliot had written his thesis on F.H. Bradley). ‘Time’s face is not stone nor still his wings,’ he concluded. ‘Our mind, being dead, wishes to have time die/For we, being ghosts, cannot catch hold of things.’
MacNeice’s early poetry plays defensive games with time (too much frequency is stasis and so on), but he was right to mistrust his fluency on this theme and to declare, in ‘Wolves’: ‘The tide comes in and goes out again, I do not want/To be always stressing either its flux or its permanence.’ To push time into the background, however, did not defuse its power. When he went to Birmingham as a lecturer in classics, straight after Oxford, he wrote urban poetry with a democratic clarity that it is easy to undervalue. A lyric such as ‘Sunday Morning’ is refreshingly free from the Waste Land hysteria and pylon-school imagery that mars so much from the 1930s: ‘Down the road someone is practising scales,/The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails.’ This being MacNeice, however, the injunction on which the poem turns, ‘concentrate on this Now,’ has metaphysical force. Beyond the moment, church bells swing like ‘skulls’ mouths’ and time ‘deadens and endures’.
The love poetry that followed the collapse of his first marriage, when he left Birmingham for London, is equally obsessed. Women are dancing, elemental, untroubled by the clock: compensations for the poet’s unease. Nancy Sharp, who went with him to the Hebrides, and who illustrated I Crossed the Minch, is praised for ‘living like a fugue and moving . . . Like the dazzle on the sea’. Being in love was about stopping time. In ‘Meeting Point’, an escalator pauses, a bell hangs mid-swing, while a couple sit at a table. The poem was apparently prompted by a date with the American writer Eleanor Clark, but the belief that love can create timeless moments runs all the way through his work, whichever woman is to hand.
Even when the young MacNeice flings himself into everyday pleasures he cannot escape time and its paradoxes. Here is ‘Snow’, his best-known poem from the 1930s:
The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.
And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes –
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands –
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.
The moment of the poem is framed by fleeting phenomena. Without the glass that separates and joins them the warmth of the room would melt the snow that would destroy the roses.
Snow and roses are not just temporary, but literary clichés of temporality, and, like windows elsewhere in MacNeice, the glass flecked with snow is a medium of representation, which is why it makes roses huge. Perhaps, come to that, the roses are already imaged, in curtain fabric or wallpaper. Yet ‘Snow’ is not just another poem about poetry. Its fascination with artifice goes along with the manufactured, slightly tasteless pinkness of the roses, and the poet’s untidy pleasure in spitting out tangerine pips. The roses are as convincingly vulgar, the pips as pointedly impure, as the gaudy flowers and rose-patterned paper and eating in the street that MacNeice praised in his 1937 radio talk ‘In Defence of Vulgarity’. Impurities like these were worth getting into poetry as a kick against St Paul.
MacNeice says in Modern Poetry that ‘words like “gold” and “roses” tend to strike me as if written in block capitals.’ The bold, glamorous command of such words in ‘Snow’ is enhanced by judicious contrast with phrases like ‘incorrigibly plural’. ‘A controlled flamboyance of diction,’ MacNeice adds, ‘has always moved me, so that I have never subscribed to the Wordsworthian exclusive crusade for homespun.’ To be ‘moved’ by fancy phrases suggests a deeper than aesthetic reaction against what was austerely spun at home. The colour and panache of ‘Snow’ seem to be making up for the dourness of an Ulster childhood. When MacNeice published it in Poems, he put it next to ‘Belfast’, which describes a ‘country of cowled and haunted faces’ where ‘The sun goes down with a banging of Orange drums.’ There may be room for debate about whether these poems should be seen as a pair, but the contrast they set up is so typical of MacNeice (like the conjunction of snow and roses) that an editor ought to think carefully before separating them. It is one of the merits of McDonald’s edition that, unlike Dodds’s (in which ‘Snow’ and ‘Belfast’ are printed a dozen pages apart), it almost completely preserves the ordering of MacNeice’s early volumes.
MacNeice is usually thought of as technically conservative, keen on rhyme and joined-up syntax. At least in the 1930s, however, his procedures were inventive and free. ‘Snow’ is subtly irregular, following the line of the voice; it shows the strain of immediacy in its language. By cutting definite articles and proposing an impossible comparative (what can be more sudden than sudden?) it hits us with abrupt existence and makes the world unbounded: ‘World is suddener . . . World is crazier.’ When the poet peels and portions a tangerine, the orderly unfolding of objects is disrupted by a fusillade of spitting and spite and pips. The result is unpunctuated saturation: ‘On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands –’. ‘On the eyes’ brilliantly catches the impacting otherness of things seen, but who is smitten, who is ‘one’? Given his appetite for fresh starts it is not surprising that MacNeice hardly ever revised after publication (a total contrast to Auden). There are, though, a few exceptions, and, as McDonald notes in a valuable appendix, this line was changed in 1941 to ‘the palms of your hands’. This draws the reader into the poem, while splitting the poet by making him a self-observer. Yet ‘one’ is surely keener. Like the donnishly high-falutin’ ‘collateral and incompatible’ it gives the poem an enjoyably analytical air.
The discipline of writing ‘Snow’ helped MacNeice achieve the looser eloquence of Autumn Journal (1939). Although the long poem runs in full, continuous pages, it is tacked together, like ‘Snow’, from flexibly alternate-rhymed stanzas. It takes on the big issues of the day – Spain, Munich, industrial squalor – but shares the lyric’s ability to home in on telling details. Above all, as MacNeice puts it, ‘In a journal . . . a man writes what he feels at the moment.’ This is why the poem is discontinuous, interrupted, constantly refocused by endings and fresh starts. ‘Close and slow,’ it begins, ‘summer is ending in Hampshire.’ On their shady lawns the retired generals and admirals are indifferent to the trouble starting up again in Europe. For the time-haunted poet, ‘the meter clicks and the cistern bubbles’; life is more immediate because change is in the air. ‘Hitler yells on the wireless,’ the academic year begins, De Valera’s Ireland is a mess but so is imperial England: ‘The country is a dwindling annexe to the factory,/Squalid as an after-birth.’
The poem’s focus on the moment keeps it fresh still. Even its false notes sound authentic, as when MacNeice overdoes the class guilt (‘But you also/Have the slave-owner’s mind’) or is driven by his childhood sense of abandonment (‘Louis Malone’ was his early pseudonym, ‘Louis M. Alone’) to claim that England is ‘teeming with unwanted/Children who are so many, each is alone’. Yet the poem’s techniques of immediacy set limits to what it can say. Defending Auden, MacNeice wrote that ‘the combined process of observing and recording = creation,’ which is much too narrow a definition. Autumn Journal is sometimes uneasy with its documentary idiom. It acknowledges what MacNeice later insisted on, that being inside the moment can prevent one understanding it. ‘Past and future merely don’t make sense,’ he writes, ‘And yet I thought I had seen them . . ./But how, if there is only a present tense?’
Once the long poem was done, he sought to see the past again. Dodds suggests that he did not complete and publish The Strings Are False because it opened up his childhood in ways that would have been painful to his father and stepmother. It was one thing to set out the externals, as he had done in ‘Carrickfergus’ – ‘I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries/To the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams’ – but another to excavate the trauma of his mother’s illness and death. What MacNeice could not make explicit in prose was worked out, however, in the poem ‘Autobiography’. The subject drew out of MacNeice something of the spare intensity of the later lyrics. Yet it also looks back to Yeats, about whom MacNeice was writing a book. Against the tenets of the 1930s, Yeats showed that poetry need not be fluid and documentary to be true to life. ‘The writer who despises form,’ MacNeice would later argue, ‘must still formalise even in selecting his material. To despise “form” will not bring him nearer reality but may very easily take him further from it.’
So the title of ‘Autobiography’ does more than denote the genre of the poem. It says that we are looking at the form of a life on the page:
In my childhood trees were green
And there was plenty to be seen.
Come back early or never come.
My father made the walls resound,
He wore his collar the wrong way round.
Come back early or never come.
My mother wore a yellow dress;
Gently, gently, gentleness.
Come back early or never come.
In his book on Yeats, MacNeice defends refrains against the charge that they are decorative, sentimental, or designed to hypnotise the reader. ‘All poetry involves this danger of hypnosis’ and, anyway, ‘hypnosis can be illuminating.’ The refrain of ‘Autobiography’ is, in this deep sense, hypnotic. It allows a loss to surface, almost to become articulate, only to fall away into lulling sensation: ‘Gently, gently, gentleness’.
Yeats’s refrains, as MacNeice points out, are often tougher than the verses they follow. They have ‘an intellectual meaning which is subtle and concentrated, or a symbolist or nonsense meaning which hits the reader below the belt’. ‘Autobiography’ has a childlike simplicity, but its refrain is dense and riddling, close to nursery nonsense:
When I was five the black dreams came;
Nothing after was quite the same.
Come back early or never come.
The dark was talking to the dead;
The lamp was dark beside my bed.
Come back early or never come.
When I woke they did not care;
Nobody, nobody was there.
Come back early or never come.
When my silent terror cried,
Nobody, nobody replied.
Come back early or never come.
I got up; the chilly sun
Saw me walk away alone.
Come back early or never come.
The refrain, having made sense causally, develops a pattern of interruption. Desire for the lost mother (of every reader’s childhood?) is so strong that for her not to come early would be as bad as for her not to come. Yet with every repetition ‘early’ gets closer to meaning its opposite. The refrain tries to set conditions for what the speaker cannot control. It keeps being said, like a charm, as though repetition will make it more potent. Perversely – although MacNeice is always alert to this – repeated interruption is internalised as habit, a block against change, and the speaker has to break away. Yet the sudden assertion of agency at ‘I got up’ shrinks into passivity: ‘the chilly sun/Saw me walk away alone.’ The refrain has the last word; the pattern is not broken.
There is a striking ambiguity here, and not just in MacNeice. It is registered in the history of ‘interruption’, which seems always to have meant both what puts a stop to an event or action and what breaks into a sequence that then resumes. This is not surprising: the latter is always temporarily the former and the former often potentially the latter. Psychologists during MacNeice’s lifetime did a lot of research on the way interrupted activities stick in the memory longer than completed ones. To interrupt something can paradoxically inhibit making ‘a fresh start’, because what tries to be new will be haunted by what hangs over. This is one reason Hank and MacNeice could not forget the loss of their mothers, even when, in the painter’s case, his mother comes back into his life before repeating the initial abandonment.
The doctor who treats Hank’s alcoholism says that it was his mother’s flitting off with a lover when he was small that made his life so frustrated and incomplete. After this early loss, his psyche expected it to be replicated. Interruption may break into life, but is it ever entirely external? Do some people attract it? This is the sort of repetition Freud began to analyse in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and something like it can be observed not just in everyday self-destructiveness but in the way damage is handed down through the generations. In MacNeice’s case, when his first wife left him, she also abandoned their baby son. The consequences of this would be agonising when Dan decided in the 1950s that he wanted to join his mother in America. The patterns of interruption that impelled MacNeice to write about Hank went back to Carrickfergus.
So much goes back to Carrickfergus. But does that make MacNeice an Ulster poet? A few years before writing ‘Autobiography’, he observed apropos of Yeats that ‘the Irish tend to maternal fixation.’ It was a pathology he would thrash out in his later, semi-autobiographical play The Mad Islands (1962). Was ‘Autobiography’ Irish for him in that sense? In the months before he wrote it, he was living in Dublin and seemed inclined to settle there. He published a slim volume, The Last Ditch, with the Yeats family press, Cuala, and applied for a chair at Trinity College. Literary Dublin did not accept him, but he felt at home in the South. He was reconnecting himself with the all-Ireland Protestantism that his father had upheld in the uncongenial atmosphere of Carson’s Belfast, and revisiting the West from which the MacNeices were said to hail. Was he an Ulster poet turning into an Anglo-Irish one? And how useful are these labels anyway?
MacNeice’s reputation was kept alive after his death by Ulster poets and critics. The part they played has been recognised in this centenary year by the reissue of Michael Longley’s perceptive, beautifully introduced Selected Poems and by the addition of a fine preface by Derek Mahon to The Strings Are False. It would be good to have back in print Edna Longley’s study of 1988 which did so much to rescue MacNeice from being a prefix to the essentially British, 1930s conglomerate ‘MacSpaunday’. Peter McDonald, a poet and critic brought up in Belfast, is a gold-standard successor to these figures. It is a sign of the seriousness with which he takes MacNeice’s Irishness that he gives, as an appendix, the full text of The Last Ditch, even though most of its poems are already included in the main body of his edition. Yet the Anglo-Irish polarity that structured MacNeice’s reception during the Troubles is starting to seem restrictive. It can only enhance his standing that so many more of his qualities are visible if he is thought about in the context of what the Good Friday Agreement calls ‘the totality of relationships among the peoples of these islands’.
Certainly, the Carrickfergus described by MacNeice’s poem is a nexus of relationships rather than a place apart. It has a Norman castle, a Scottish quarter and an Irish quarter (‘a slum for the blind and halt’). MacNeice, as ‘the rector’s son’, was ‘born to the anglican order,/Banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor’. Up the lane, at the lodge of an army camp, a ‘Yorkshire terrier’ ran about. The young poet took ‘the Carlisle train’ to school ‘in Dorset’, people had maps of Flanders above the fireplace to follow the progress of the First World War, and German prisoners were held on a ship on Belfast Lough. Ulster was a microcosm of the British-Irish archipelago, caught up in European crises.
I Crossed the Minch, an odd, uneven amalgam of travel journal, satirical dialogue, literary parody and poetry book, shows MacNeice thinking between Scotland and Ireland about nationalism, language and culture, and tying these into the larger problems of Britain and Europe. In his introduction, Tom Herron makes much of MacNeice’s admission that he ‘went to the Hebrides partly hoping . . . that the Celt in me would be drawn to the surface by the magnetism of his fellows. This was a sentimental and futile hope.’ He argues that MacNeice was looking for the sort of archaic, peasant society that Synge found on the Aran Islands, and that his ‘miscalculation colours everything he sees and does’. But this is to take too literally the motif of frustrated quest which MacNeice characteristically uses to draw in the reader. Before he crossed the Minch, he already knew Hector MacIver, the dedicatee of his book. MacIver had published on the iniquities of landlordism, the failures of the herring industry, subsidy and the dole, and the collapse of Lord Leverhulme’s attempt to set up manufacturing industry on Lewis. The TLS reviewer had no difficulty in categorising I Crossed the Minch with other books of the time (by Edwin Muir and Neil Gunn) that treat Scotland and its islands in hard, socio-economic terms.
MacNeice knew that the Hebrides – unlike Synge’s Aran Islands – had been much written about by inhabitants who were novelists and poets. On Barra he visited Compton Mackenzie and talked about Welsh nationalism and the desirability of the islands attaching themselves to the Irish Free State. MacIver helped him see that Gaelic poetry dealt with material realities and not ‘the Celtic Twilight’. That the islands were economically disadvantaged yet also busy sites of literary production were at this date connected facts. In the Shetlands, Hugh MacDiarmid – praised by MacNeice in reviews – had published his Second Hymn to Lenin and would soon write his own prose book on the Scottish islands. In the Hebrides, Sorley MacLean had composed an elegy for MacNeice’s friend John Cornford, ‘marbh ’san Spàinn ’san aobhar naomh/is cridhe ghaoil mì-shocrach’ (‘dead in Spain in the sacred cause/and the heart of love uncomforted’). Within months he would start writing ‘The Cuillin’, which laments ‘the rotten wrack of filth’ in China, India and Spain, as well as in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and urges the Red Army to sweep across Europe and obliterate Fascism.
This is the setting for ‘Bagpipe Music’, the best poem in I Crossed the Minch. Rather than imposing on the Hebrides the politics of the metropolitan left, it shares with MacDiarmid and MacLean an international, anti-capitalist outlook. Hence the way it ranges out from its Scottish characters (John MacDonald and the rest):
It’s no go the merrygoround, it’s no go the rickshaw,
All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow.
Their knickers are made of crepe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python,
Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with heads of bison.
The islanders cannot escape a system so globally rapacious. If anything, their peripheral location leaves them more exposed to the core insanities of the market: Mrs Carmichael rejecting her new baby as ‘over-production’, while Willie Murray’s brother chucks his underpriced herring catch back into the sea.
Through and beyond the war, MacNeice was self-consciously archipelagic. He wrote a monologue for Byron in Scots; Wales looms large in Autumn Sequel (1954). He got interested in the folklore about seals that is common to the Hebrides and the West of Ireland, and put it into a play. In a better world, maybe after the revolution, ‘a modern English dramatist’ would ‘write for the whole British Isles’. In Persons from Porlock the chief potholer is Welsh. Whereas Hank’s appetite for caving has something to do with his interrupted relationship with his mother, Mervyn ‘used to be a Welsh nationalist and this, I suspect, is a substitute’. But MacNeice’s fascination with cultures that preserved their difference under British rule went further: he was in Lahore during partition, Ghana just before independence. These trips for the BBC were ways of breaking up a dull routine. But they also show his determination to address the big subjects of the day.
And in general his postwar bad patch was not caused by a lack of ambition: it was probably the result of too much. He came to agree with the reviewers who said that his early poetry was too concerned with the surface of life. His aim, he announced, would be ‘depth’. Addressing his second wife, the singer Hedli Anderson, he says that poets should ‘divine the answers/Which our grim past has buried in our present’. It was natural for him to feel that ‘the answers’ would be found in a new relationship with time. But he denied his own sensibility when he resisted the episodic. Reasons are given in Autumn Sequel, where he says that the construction of Autumn Journal used ways of managing time that were complicit with routines and habits. ‘Our days are quick,’ he declares. ‘Quick and not dead. To lop them off with a knife/In order to preserve them seems pure fake.’
Long views become the rule. Autumn Sequel is drawn to Oxford, Norwich and other places where the past is present. There is much anecdotal interest, and a lot of worthwhile description. Yet the attempts at temporal connection tend to be apologetically portentous (‘Ancient history, one might think,//Runs into World War Two’) or arbitrary (‘A woodpecker taps. This has happened before’). Four Quartets is partly to blame. MacNeice was clearly impressed by Eliot’s fine-tuned ability to implicate time present and time past in time future, but he lacked the subtle mysticism and etymological acuteness to create comparable effects and fell back on discursive elaboration.
Uneasy and palpably bored, MacNeice was still attracted by the economy of interruption that Autumn Sequel resists. He enjoyed watching ballet, ‘a tale that tells//Itself by interruption’, and preferred rugby to the arts because of its unpredictability. There were even signs that he envied the early death of Dylan Thomas, who ‘never stopped beginning; sink or sin,//Doubles or quits, he dared the passing bell/To pass him and it did.’ Being a true poet, Thomas punctuated his life and work with fresh starts, and his death became not an end but a temporary, enabling interruption. This was a bizarre thought for a poet as secular as MacNeice. Yet it is less surprising when one notices that he had begun to think of suicide as the ultimate elective interruption – a way of casting aside ‘dead/Habits, hopes, beliefs’ (‘The Death-Wish’).
What he was desperate to get away from was the routine, the nagging phones, the bureaucracy of the BBC. Going on about it in Autumn Sequel, he becomes self-awarely unattractive. When he says that without office life he would have done ‘original work and timeless’, it not only sounds unlike anything good that he ever wrote, but not a poem that could be written. One of the simplest, most potent shifts made by the later, parabolic MacNeice involved him getting out of himself and delineating his predicament with the lightness enabled by the third person. In ‘The Suicide’ he imagines a version of himself conducting a group of sightseers around his office, full of files, bills and unanswered letters, which he has abandoned by stepping through a high window. By virtue of the self-interruption he leaves ‘Something that was intact’.
The enemy was not just routine, but the mortgaging of time to tasks that piled up in the waste of time created by these tasks being too unpalatable to tackle. Suicide has obvious drawbacks, but at least it leaves you in credit, jumping out of your job without finishing what the Corporation thinks you owe. These Hank-like frustrations have a representative, postwar aspect. They pick up Orwellian concerns about society becoming anonymous and mechanically ordered. MacNeice had joined the BBC to do ‘ephemeral work’ but it was invaded by Taylorism, by time-and-motion men doing surveys. This insulted the poet’s freelance spirit and interfered with his visits to the pub. How could a time-server with a clipboard understand MacNeice’s deeply internalised guilt-fear about putting time to use?
His last two books, Solstices (1961) and The Burning Perch (1963), show a marvellous return to form. A return to earlier content, also: poems about 1940-41, ‘Reflections’, ‘Variation on Heraclitus’ and ‘The Habits’. The descriptive and discursive are not lost; MacNeice can still evoke ‘October in Bloomsbury’ and write elegant ‘Memoranda to Horace’. But the issues that gripped him most are now unpacked directly, without the setting up through anecdote that makes Autumn Sequel drag. The poems start from scratch (‘When I was born the row began’), but they have the weight of life behind them. And they break off, unresolved, often using repetitive formulae – most strikingly in ‘The Taxis’ where Everyman accumulates ‘extras on the clock’ (family, baggage, dog) yet remains alone.
What should end a Collected so preoccupied with interruption? Dodds chose ‘Thalassa’. This vigorous, stanzaic monologue, in which Ulysses urges his comrades to leave Ithaca with him on one final voyage, survives in a late manuscript, but it was probably written, or at least drafted, in the 1940s. It goes well at the end of the book, breaking off on the brink of an adventure into death. But McDonald’s solution is better. He puts ‘Thalassa’ last in an appendix of manuscript poems. This allows it to be the final poem in the book, but leaves ‘Coda’, printed last in The Burning Perch, to stand at the end of the corpus. The placing is both consistent with McDonald’s policy of following the order of individual volumes and matches a known decision by the poet.
Readers often complain that MacNeice is emotionally chilly. The isolation worked out in ‘The Taxis’ went too far back to be resolved. But the intense restraint of ‘Coda’ is loaded with a desire for intimacy:
Maybe we knew each other better
When the night was young and unrepeated
And the moon stood still over Jericho.
So much for the past; in the present
There are moments caught between heart-beats
When maybe we know each other better.
But what is that clinking in the darkness?
Maybe we shall know each other better
When the tunnels meet beneath the mountain.
Jericho is a part of Oxford, where MacNeice courted his first wife. In his last great love affair, with Mary Wimbush, he returned to that sort of beginning. Yet the past buried in the present reaches back through the biblical Jericho to Genesis when the night was young. ‘Coda’ articulates, in the deftest way, the continuity between archaic past, present and future that MacNeice made his subject during his ambitious postwar decline, and does this by invoking a set of the heightened moments that the poet was always drawn to whatever the philosopher in him said.
Hank drowns because he swims along a flooded ‘tunnel’ to rescue the Welshman Mervyn. Before Mervyn went ahead, they agreed to communicate by jerking on a rope: ‘The usual code. Clear?’ As its title prompts us to notice, ‘Coda’ is shot through with code. Its finely patterned lucidity leaves it obscure on many levels. Yet it remains a poem of imminence, perhaps the greatest MacNeice ever wrote. From a silent, signal moon through insistent heartbeats it moves on to the clinking of picks in tunnels. The sound of work coming closer sends a message to those alone. It says that connection is possible. That the picks will one day break through. But not before the poetry broke off.
The Ticking Fear. By John Kerrigan. London Review of Books , February 7, 2008
There is a lot of MacNeice in Hank. After the high promise of Poems (1935), he began to disperse his energies in money-making prose books. Hank spent the war in Burma. MacNeice shuttled between neutral Ireland and the US, uncertain, like his friends Auden and Britten, how far he should commit himself to the war, before finally settling down in London. In 1941 he did his bit by joining the BBC. For the next two decades, the corporation gave him a steady income and plenty of creative scope. Yet the fluency he developed as a radio features writer was not always good for his poetry, and he came to think of his broadcasting career as a chronic interruption. By now, like Hank, he was numbing his frustration with alcohol. Both, however, pulled through. Hank got out of advertising and painted enough to hold a one-man show. MacNeice went part-time at the BBC, cut back on his drinking, and worked up the concentrated, parable-like lyricism of his later poems.
That the radio play fed off MacNeice’s own experiences is not surprising. To read The Strings Are False, the posthumously published autobiography (drafted in 1940) that Faber has reissued to coincide with the centenary of MacNeice’s birth, is to find many such connections. He says in his book on Modern Poetry (1938) that ‘literary criticism should always be partly biographical.’ This may be theoretically unsound, but it springs from something he knew about his own creativity. Yet his strength was not self-disclosure. Although he never subscribed to the Modernist cult of impersonality, he rejected the idea that poetry is self-expression and argued that even the lyric voice is dramatic. During the postwar years, when his poetry became too discursive, part of the problem was that he was pinned to the centre of his writing by an ethic of honesty without wanting to be confessional. His later, parabolic lyrics have the clean intensity that comes when an inner life has been condensed and generalised into structures as formulaic as nursery rhymes.
Hank converged with Louis to an extent that was finally uncanny. To prepare his play for transmission MacNeice went down a pothole with a BBC sound engineer. He had always obscurely relished going underground; caves, tunnels and passage-graves run through his poems and plays. In Persons from Porlock, Hank’s liking for potholes is mixed up with both his drive to paint and his early abandonment by his mother. MacNeice, whose mother was taken into psychiatric care when he was five, and died just over a year later, seems to have diagnosed a similar complex in himself. Certainly, he put into Hank’s cave system features of the salt-mines at Carrickfergus which, we are told in The Strings Are False, he visited during his childhood. It was not a good idea to repeat that visit fifty years later. Chilled, drenched and weary, MacNeice came down with pneumonia. Friends listened apprehensively as the ‘noble person from Porlock’ carried Hank away. A few days later MacNeice was dead.
Interrupted, for sure. His last book of poems, The Burning Perch, appeared ten days after his death; a potboiler on astrology in 1964. When Derek Mahon declared, with resonant finality, in an elegy published in January 1965, ‘All we may ask of you we have; the rest/Is not for publication,’ he could hardly have been more wrong. Within months, MacNeice’s friend and first employer, the Greek scholar E.R. Dodds, brought out The Strings Are False, a book of unrevised lectures called Varieties of Parable and a Collected Poems. Even now, with Peter McDonald’s intelligently re-edited Collected, we do not have all the MacNeice we could ask for. As McDonald points out, a Complete Poems would be considerably larger than the 600-odd pages of verse plus seven appendices of fugitive poems, prefaces and variants that he gives us. It would include translations, many poems that appeared in small magazines, and others abandoned in manuscript. Though the typical MacNeice poem is decisively thought through, it is caught up in a lifelong, interrupted process. Collected editions often have a sepulchral air; the unfinished nature of MacNeice’s corpus helps makes this one a living monument.
As with the output as a whole, so with its local energy. The Collected is a vast compendium of forms, issues and ideas, but it is animated repeatedly by interruption and its imminence. To be visited by a person from Porlock could be damaging, even fatal, but it was never entirely bad. Those who ‘lay the blame’ for failure on interruption are in denial about other, internal blocks. Interruption administers doses of the worldly impurity that MacNeice wanted to get into poetry. Its imminence makes moments of love, drunkenness and fantasy more sensuously consuming. Interruption could even be chosen. To go on a journey or start a romance was to break life into episodes that made sense where the big picture did not. Above all, interruption shook up habit, rebooting the imagination. Persons from Porlock was itself the product of elective interruption. As Jon Stallworthy points out, in the 1995 biography that we depend on for MacNeice’s later years, he was ‘making a fresh start at 54’ when he went half-time at the BBC.
It was a bold but characteristic step. Auden said in his memorial address that, in technique as well as the search for subject matter, MacNeice ‘shared Cesare Pavese’s belief that “the only joy in life is to begin.”’ And Spender, in a late poem, wrote of MacNeice and Bernard Spencer:
Each poem
Is still a new beginning. If
They had been finished though they would have died
Before they died.
MacNeice did have favourite forms and topics, and often flogged them hard. When he tried to break new ground, he was by no means always successful. But Auden’s troubled awareness that his own verse was becoming at once mechanical and arch, and Spender’s recognition that poetry had abandoned him, made them the more respectful of MacNeice’s indefatigable ability to break off and start again. There is enough truth in what they say to suggest why he was happier writing lyrics than the long, argued sequences and narratives of the postwar years.
Time was the germ of the problem. How to use it and prevent it petrifying us were deep issues for the young poet. They went back to his Church of Ireland upbringing (his father was rector of Carrickfergus, later bishop of Down) though they were given distinctive shape by his classical education at Marlborough and Oxford. Probably no poet since Milton has been as preoccupied with the Pauline injunction that time should be redeemed and talents put to use. When he catches himself ‘killing time’ in I Crossed the Minch (1938), a book about visiting the Hebrides, he is gripped by the horrible thought that time is killing him, and writes an anxious poem about ‘The taut and ticking fear/That hides in all the clocks/And creeps inside the skull’. Reading Greats at Oxford had taught him more enjoyable, pagan reasons for seizing the day. But the reassuring idea that the cosmos was a Heraclitean flux was compromised by the philosophical idealism still current at Merton (the college where, a few years earlier, T.S. Eliot had written his thesis on F.H. Bradley). ‘Time’s face is not stone nor still his wings,’ he concluded. ‘Our mind, being dead, wishes to have time die/For we, being ghosts, cannot catch hold of things.’
MacNeice’s early poetry plays defensive games with time (too much frequency is stasis and so on), but he was right to mistrust his fluency on this theme and to declare, in ‘Wolves’: ‘The tide comes in and goes out again, I do not want/To be always stressing either its flux or its permanence.’ To push time into the background, however, did not defuse its power. When he went to Birmingham as a lecturer in classics, straight after Oxford, he wrote urban poetry with a democratic clarity that it is easy to undervalue. A lyric such as ‘Sunday Morning’ is refreshingly free from the Waste Land hysteria and pylon-school imagery that mars so much from the 1930s: ‘Down the road someone is practising scales,/The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails.’ This being MacNeice, however, the injunction on which the poem turns, ‘concentrate on this Now,’ has metaphysical force. Beyond the moment, church bells swing like ‘skulls’ mouths’ and time ‘deadens and endures’.
The love poetry that followed the collapse of his first marriage, when he left Birmingham for London, is equally obsessed. Women are dancing, elemental, untroubled by the clock: compensations for the poet’s unease. Nancy Sharp, who went with him to the Hebrides, and who illustrated I Crossed the Minch, is praised for ‘living like a fugue and moving . . . Like the dazzle on the sea’. Being in love was about stopping time. In ‘Meeting Point’, an escalator pauses, a bell hangs mid-swing, while a couple sit at a table. The poem was apparently prompted by a date with the American writer Eleanor Clark, but the belief that love can create timeless moments runs all the way through his work, whichever woman is to hand.
Even when the young MacNeice flings himself into everyday pleasures he cannot escape time and its paradoxes. Here is ‘Snow’, his best-known poem from the 1930s:
The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.
And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes –
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands –
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.
The moment of the poem is framed by fleeting phenomena. Without the glass that separates and joins them the warmth of the room would melt the snow that would destroy the roses.
Snow and roses are not just temporary, but literary clichés of temporality, and, like windows elsewhere in MacNeice, the glass flecked with snow is a medium of representation, which is why it makes roses huge. Perhaps, come to that, the roses are already imaged, in curtain fabric or wallpaper. Yet ‘Snow’ is not just another poem about poetry. Its fascination with artifice goes along with the manufactured, slightly tasteless pinkness of the roses, and the poet’s untidy pleasure in spitting out tangerine pips. The roses are as convincingly vulgar, the pips as pointedly impure, as the gaudy flowers and rose-patterned paper and eating in the street that MacNeice praised in his 1937 radio talk ‘In Defence of Vulgarity’. Impurities like these were worth getting into poetry as a kick against St Paul.
MacNeice says in Modern Poetry that ‘words like “gold” and “roses” tend to strike me as if written in block capitals.’ The bold, glamorous command of such words in ‘Snow’ is enhanced by judicious contrast with phrases like ‘incorrigibly plural’. ‘A controlled flamboyance of diction,’ MacNeice adds, ‘has always moved me, so that I have never subscribed to the Wordsworthian exclusive crusade for homespun.’ To be ‘moved’ by fancy phrases suggests a deeper than aesthetic reaction against what was austerely spun at home. The colour and panache of ‘Snow’ seem to be making up for the dourness of an Ulster childhood. When MacNeice published it in Poems, he put it next to ‘Belfast’, which describes a ‘country of cowled and haunted faces’ where ‘The sun goes down with a banging of Orange drums.’ There may be room for debate about whether these poems should be seen as a pair, but the contrast they set up is so typical of MacNeice (like the conjunction of snow and roses) that an editor ought to think carefully before separating them. It is one of the merits of McDonald’s edition that, unlike Dodds’s (in which ‘Snow’ and ‘Belfast’ are printed a dozen pages apart), it almost completely preserves the ordering of MacNeice’s early volumes.
MacNeice is usually thought of as technically conservative, keen on rhyme and joined-up syntax. At least in the 1930s, however, his procedures were inventive and free. ‘Snow’ is subtly irregular, following the line of the voice; it shows the strain of immediacy in its language. By cutting definite articles and proposing an impossible comparative (what can be more sudden than sudden?) it hits us with abrupt existence and makes the world unbounded: ‘World is suddener . . . World is crazier.’ When the poet peels and portions a tangerine, the orderly unfolding of objects is disrupted by a fusillade of spitting and spite and pips. The result is unpunctuated saturation: ‘On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands –’. ‘On the eyes’ brilliantly catches the impacting otherness of things seen, but who is smitten, who is ‘one’? Given his appetite for fresh starts it is not surprising that MacNeice hardly ever revised after publication (a total contrast to Auden). There are, though, a few exceptions, and, as McDonald notes in a valuable appendix, this line was changed in 1941 to ‘the palms of your hands’. This draws the reader into the poem, while splitting the poet by making him a self-observer. Yet ‘one’ is surely keener. Like the donnishly high-falutin’ ‘collateral and incompatible’ it gives the poem an enjoyably analytical air.
The discipline of writing ‘Snow’ helped MacNeice achieve the looser eloquence of Autumn Journal (1939). Although the long poem runs in full, continuous pages, it is tacked together, like ‘Snow’, from flexibly alternate-rhymed stanzas. It takes on the big issues of the day – Spain, Munich, industrial squalor – but shares the lyric’s ability to home in on telling details. Above all, as MacNeice puts it, ‘In a journal . . . a man writes what he feels at the moment.’ This is why the poem is discontinuous, interrupted, constantly refocused by endings and fresh starts. ‘Close and slow,’ it begins, ‘summer is ending in Hampshire.’ On their shady lawns the retired generals and admirals are indifferent to the trouble starting up again in Europe. For the time-haunted poet, ‘the meter clicks and the cistern bubbles’; life is more immediate because change is in the air. ‘Hitler yells on the wireless,’ the academic year begins, De Valera’s Ireland is a mess but so is imperial England: ‘The country is a dwindling annexe to the factory,/Squalid as an after-birth.’
The poem’s focus on the moment keeps it fresh still. Even its false notes sound authentic, as when MacNeice overdoes the class guilt (‘But you also/Have the slave-owner’s mind’) or is driven by his childhood sense of abandonment (‘Louis Malone’ was his early pseudonym, ‘Louis M. Alone’) to claim that England is ‘teeming with unwanted/Children who are so many, each is alone’. Yet the poem’s techniques of immediacy set limits to what it can say. Defending Auden, MacNeice wrote that ‘the combined process of observing and recording = creation,’ which is much too narrow a definition. Autumn Journal is sometimes uneasy with its documentary idiom. It acknowledges what MacNeice later insisted on, that being inside the moment can prevent one understanding it. ‘Past and future merely don’t make sense,’ he writes, ‘And yet I thought I had seen them . . ./But how, if there is only a present tense?’
Once the long poem was done, he sought to see the past again. Dodds suggests that he did not complete and publish The Strings Are False because it opened up his childhood in ways that would have been painful to his father and stepmother. It was one thing to set out the externals, as he had done in ‘Carrickfergus’ – ‘I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries/To the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams’ – but another to excavate the trauma of his mother’s illness and death. What MacNeice could not make explicit in prose was worked out, however, in the poem ‘Autobiography’. The subject drew out of MacNeice something of the spare intensity of the later lyrics. Yet it also looks back to Yeats, about whom MacNeice was writing a book. Against the tenets of the 1930s, Yeats showed that poetry need not be fluid and documentary to be true to life. ‘The writer who despises form,’ MacNeice would later argue, ‘must still formalise even in selecting his material. To despise “form” will not bring him nearer reality but may very easily take him further from it.’
So the title of ‘Autobiography’ does more than denote the genre of the poem. It says that we are looking at the form of a life on the page:
In my childhood trees were green
And there was plenty to be seen.
Come back early or never come.
My father made the walls resound,
He wore his collar the wrong way round.
Come back early or never come.
My mother wore a yellow dress;
Gently, gently, gentleness.
Come back early or never come.
In his book on Yeats, MacNeice defends refrains against the charge that they are decorative, sentimental, or designed to hypnotise the reader. ‘All poetry involves this danger of hypnosis’ and, anyway, ‘hypnosis can be illuminating.’ The refrain of ‘Autobiography’ is, in this deep sense, hypnotic. It allows a loss to surface, almost to become articulate, only to fall away into lulling sensation: ‘Gently, gently, gentleness’.
Yeats’s refrains, as MacNeice points out, are often tougher than the verses they follow. They have ‘an intellectual meaning which is subtle and concentrated, or a symbolist or nonsense meaning which hits the reader below the belt’. ‘Autobiography’ has a childlike simplicity, but its refrain is dense and riddling, close to nursery nonsense:
When I was five the black dreams came;
Nothing after was quite the same.
Come back early or never come.
The dark was talking to the dead;
The lamp was dark beside my bed.
Come back early or never come.
When I woke they did not care;
Nobody, nobody was there.
Come back early or never come.
When my silent terror cried,
Nobody, nobody replied.
Come back early or never come.
I got up; the chilly sun
Saw me walk away alone.
Come back early or never come.
The refrain, having made sense causally, develops a pattern of interruption. Desire for the lost mother (of every reader’s childhood?) is so strong that for her not to come early would be as bad as for her not to come. Yet with every repetition ‘early’ gets closer to meaning its opposite. The refrain tries to set conditions for what the speaker cannot control. It keeps being said, like a charm, as though repetition will make it more potent. Perversely – although MacNeice is always alert to this – repeated interruption is internalised as habit, a block against change, and the speaker has to break away. Yet the sudden assertion of agency at ‘I got up’ shrinks into passivity: ‘the chilly sun/Saw me walk away alone.’ The refrain has the last word; the pattern is not broken.
There is a striking ambiguity here, and not just in MacNeice. It is registered in the history of ‘interruption’, which seems always to have meant both what puts a stop to an event or action and what breaks into a sequence that then resumes. This is not surprising: the latter is always temporarily the former and the former often potentially the latter. Psychologists during MacNeice’s lifetime did a lot of research on the way interrupted activities stick in the memory longer than completed ones. To interrupt something can paradoxically inhibit making ‘a fresh start’, because what tries to be new will be haunted by what hangs over. This is one reason Hank and MacNeice could not forget the loss of their mothers, even when, in the painter’s case, his mother comes back into his life before repeating the initial abandonment.
The doctor who treats Hank’s alcoholism says that it was his mother’s flitting off with a lover when he was small that made his life so frustrated and incomplete. After this early loss, his psyche expected it to be replicated. Interruption may break into life, but is it ever entirely external? Do some people attract it? This is the sort of repetition Freud began to analyse in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and something like it can be observed not just in everyday self-destructiveness but in the way damage is handed down through the generations. In MacNeice’s case, when his first wife left him, she also abandoned their baby son. The consequences of this would be agonising when Dan decided in the 1950s that he wanted to join his mother in America. The patterns of interruption that impelled MacNeice to write about Hank went back to Carrickfergus.
So much goes back to Carrickfergus. But does that make MacNeice an Ulster poet? A few years before writing ‘Autobiography’, he observed apropos of Yeats that ‘the Irish tend to maternal fixation.’ It was a pathology he would thrash out in his later, semi-autobiographical play The Mad Islands (1962). Was ‘Autobiography’ Irish for him in that sense? In the months before he wrote it, he was living in Dublin and seemed inclined to settle there. He published a slim volume, The Last Ditch, with the Yeats family press, Cuala, and applied for a chair at Trinity College. Literary Dublin did not accept him, but he felt at home in the South. He was reconnecting himself with the all-Ireland Protestantism that his father had upheld in the uncongenial atmosphere of Carson’s Belfast, and revisiting the West from which the MacNeices were said to hail. Was he an Ulster poet turning into an Anglo-Irish one? And how useful are these labels anyway?
MacNeice’s reputation was kept alive after his death by Ulster poets and critics. The part they played has been recognised in this centenary year by the reissue of Michael Longley’s perceptive, beautifully introduced Selected Poems and by the addition of a fine preface by Derek Mahon to The Strings Are False. It would be good to have back in print Edna Longley’s study of 1988 which did so much to rescue MacNeice from being a prefix to the essentially British, 1930s conglomerate ‘MacSpaunday’. Peter McDonald, a poet and critic brought up in Belfast, is a gold-standard successor to these figures. It is a sign of the seriousness with which he takes MacNeice’s Irishness that he gives, as an appendix, the full text of The Last Ditch, even though most of its poems are already included in the main body of his edition. Yet the Anglo-Irish polarity that structured MacNeice’s reception during the Troubles is starting to seem restrictive. It can only enhance his standing that so many more of his qualities are visible if he is thought about in the context of what the Good Friday Agreement calls ‘the totality of relationships among the peoples of these islands’.
Certainly, the Carrickfergus described by MacNeice’s poem is a nexus of relationships rather than a place apart. It has a Norman castle, a Scottish quarter and an Irish quarter (‘a slum for the blind and halt’). MacNeice, as ‘the rector’s son’, was ‘born to the anglican order,/Banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor’. Up the lane, at the lodge of an army camp, a ‘Yorkshire terrier’ ran about. The young poet took ‘the Carlisle train’ to school ‘in Dorset’, people had maps of Flanders above the fireplace to follow the progress of the First World War, and German prisoners were held on a ship on Belfast Lough. Ulster was a microcosm of the British-Irish archipelago, caught up in European crises.
I Crossed the Minch, an odd, uneven amalgam of travel journal, satirical dialogue, literary parody and poetry book, shows MacNeice thinking between Scotland and Ireland about nationalism, language and culture, and tying these into the larger problems of Britain and Europe. In his introduction, Tom Herron makes much of MacNeice’s admission that he ‘went to the Hebrides partly hoping . . . that the Celt in me would be drawn to the surface by the magnetism of his fellows. This was a sentimental and futile hope.’ He argues that MacNeice was looking for the sort of archaic, peasant society that Synge found on the Aran Islands, and that his ‘miscalculation colours everything he sees and does’. But this is to take too literally the motif of frustrated quest which MacNeice characteristically uses to draw in the reader. Before he crossed the Minch, he already knew Hector MacIver, the dedicatee of his book. MacIver had published on the iniquities of landlordism, the failures of the herring industry, subsidy and the dole, and the collapse of Lord Leverhulme’s attempt to set up manufacturing industry on Lewis. The TLS reviewer had no difficulty in categorising I Crossed the Minch with other books of the time (by Edwin Muir and Neil Gunn) that treat Scotland and its islands in hard, socio-economic terms.
MacNeice knew that the Hebrides – unlike Synge’s Aran Islands – had been much written about by inhabitants who were novelists and poets. On Barra he visited Compton Mackenzie and talked about Welsh nationalism and the desirability of the islands attaching themselves to the Irish Free State. MacIver helped him see that Gaelic poetry dealt with material realities and not ‘the Celtic Twilight’. That the islands were economically disadvantaged yet also busy sites of literary production were at this date connected facts. In the Shetlands, Hugh MacDiarmid – praised by MacNeice in reviews – had published his Second Hymn to Lenin and would soon write his own prose book on the Scottish islands. In the Hebrides, Sorley MacLean had composed an elegy for MacNeice’s friend John Cornford, ‘marbh ’san Spàinn ’san aobhar naomh/is cridhe ghaoil mì-shocrach’ (‘dead in Spain in the sacred cause/and the heart of love uncomforted’). Within months he would start writing ‘The Cuillin’, which laments ‘the rotten wrack of filth’ in China, India and Spain, as well as in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and urges the Red Army to sweep across Europe and obliterate Fascism.
This is the setting for ‘Bagpipe Music’, the best poem in I Crossed the Minch. Rather than imposing on the Hebrides the politics of the metropolitan left, it shares with MacDiarmid and MacLean an international, anti-capitalist outlook. Hence the way it ranges out from its Scottish characters (John MacDonald and the rest):
It’s no go the merrygoround, it’s no go the rickshaw,
All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow.
Their knickers are made of crepe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python,
Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with heads of bison.
The islanders cannot escape a system so globally rapacious. If anything, their peripheral location leaves them more exposed to the core insanities of the market: Mrs Carmichael rejecting her new baby as ‘over-production’, while Willie Murray’s brother chucks his underpriced herring catch back into the sea.
Through and beyond the war, MacNeice was self-consciously archipelagic. He wrote a monologue for Byron in Scots; Wales looms large in Autumn Sequel (1954). He got interested in the folklore about seals that is common to the Hebrides and the West of Ireland, and put it into a play. In a better world, maybe after the revolution, ‘a modern English dramatist’ would ‘write for the whole British Isles’. In Persons from Porlock the chief potholer is Welsh. Whereas Hank’s appetite for caving has something to do with his interrupted relationship with his mother, Mervyn ‘used to be a Welsh nationalist and this, I suspect, is a substitute’. But MacNeice’s fascination with cultures that preserved their difference under British rule went further: he was in Lahore during partition, Ghana just before independence. These trips for the BBC were ways of breaking up a dull routine. But they also show his determination to address the big subjects of the day.
And in general his postwar bad patch was not caused by a lack of ambition: it was probably the result of too much. He came to agree with the reviewers who said that his early poetry was too concerned with the surface of life. His aim, he announced, would be ‘depth’. Addressing his second wife, the singer Hedli Anderson, he says that poets should ‘divine the answers/Which our grim past has buried in our present’. It was natural for him to feel that ‘the answers’ would be found in a new relationship with time. But he denied his own sensibility when he resisted the episodic. Reasons are given in Autumn Sequel, where he says that the construction of Autumn Journal used ways of managing time that were complicit with routines and habits. ‘Our days are quick,’ he declares. ‘Quick and not dead. To lop them off with a knife/In order to preserve them seems pure fake.’
Long views become the rule. Autumn Sequel is drawn to Oxford, Norwich and other places where the past is present. There is much anecdotal interest, and a lot of worthwhile description. Yet the attempts at temporal connection tend to be apologetically portentous (‘Ancient history, one might think,//Runs into World War Two’) or arbitrary (‘A woodpecker taps. This has happened before’). Four Quartets is partly to blame. MacNeice was clearly impressed by Eliot’s fine-tuned ability to implicate time present and time past in time future, but he lacked the subtle mysticism and etymological acuteness to create comparable effects and fell back on discursive elaboration.
Uneasy and palpably bored, MacNeice was still attracted by the economy of interruption that Autumn Sequel resists. He enjoyed watching ballet, ‘a tale that tells//Itself by interruption’, and preferred rugby to the arts because of its unpredictability. There were even signs that he envied the early death of Dylan Thomas, who ‘never stopped beginning; sink or sin,//Doubles or quits, he dared the passing bell/To pass him and it did.’ Being a true poet, Thomas punctuated his life and work with fresh starts, and his death became not an end but a temporary, enabling interruption. This was a bizarre thought for a poet as secular as MacNeice. Yet it is less surprising when one notices that he had begun to think of suicide as the ultimate elective interruption – a way of casting aside ‘dead/Habits, hopes, beliefs’ (‘The Death-Wish’).
What he was desperate to get away from was the routine, the nagging phones, the bureaucracy of the BBC. Going on about it in Autumn Sequel, he becomes self-awarely unattractive. When he says that without office life he would have done ‘original work and timeless’, it not only sounds unlike anything good that he ever wrote, but not a poem that could be written. One of the simplest, most potent shifts made by the later, parabolic MacNeice involved him getting out of himself and delineating his predicament with the lightness enabled by the third person. In ‘The Suicide’ he imagines a version of himself conducting a group of sightseers around his office, full of files, bills and unanswered letters, which he has abandoned by stepping through a high window. By virtue of the self-interruption he leaves ‘Something that was intact’.
The enemy was not just routine, but the mortgaging of time to tasks that piled up in the waste of time created by these tasks being too unpalatable to tackle. Suicide has obvious drawbacks, but at least it leaves you in credit, jumping out of your job without finishing what the Corporation thinks you owe. These Hank-like frustrations have a representative, postwar aspect. They pick up Orwellian concerns about society becoming anonymous and mechanically ordered. MacNeice had joined the BBC to do ‘ephemeral work’ but it was invaded by Taylorism, by time-and-motion men doing surveys. This insulted the poet’s freelance spirit and interfered with his visits to the pub. How could a time-server with a clipboard understand MacNeice’s deeply internalised guilt-fear about putting time to use?
His last two books, Solstices (1961) and The Burning Perch (1963), show a marvellous return to form. A return to earlier content, also: poems about 1940-41, ‘Reflections’, ‘Variation on Heraclitus’ and ‘The Habits’. The descriptive and discursive are not lost; MacNeice can still evoke ‘October in Bloomsbury’ and write elegant ‘Memoranda to Horace’. But the issues that gripped him most are now unpacked directly, without the setting up through anecdote that makes Autumn Sequel drag. The poems start from scratch (‘When I was born the row began’), but they have the weight of life behind them. And they break off, unresolved, often using repetitive formulae – most strikingly in ‘The Taxis’ where Everyman accumulates ‘extras on the clock’ (family, baggage, dog) yet remains alone.
What should end a Collected so preoccupied with interruption? Dodds chose ‘Thalassa’. This vigorous, stanzaic monologue, in which Ulysses urges his comrades to leave Ithaca with him on one final voyage, survives in a late manuscript, but it was probably written, or at least drafted, in the 1940s. It goes well at the end of the book, breaking off on the brink of an adventure into death. But McDonald’s solution is better. He puts ‘Thalassa’ last in an appendix of manuscript poems. This allows it to be the final poem in the book, but leaves ‘Coda’, printed last in The Burning Perch, to stand at the end of the corpus. The placing is both consistent with McDonald’s policy of following the order of individual volumes and matches a known decision by the poet.
Readers often complain that MacNeice is emotionally chilly. The isolation worked out in ‘The Taxis’ went too far back to be resolved. But the intense restraint of ‘Coda’ is loaded with a desire for intimacy:
Maybe we knew each other better
When the night was young and unrepeated
And the moon stood still over Jericho.
So much for the past; in the present
There are moments caught between heart-beats
When maybe we know each other better.
But what is that clinking in the darkness?
Maybe we shall know each other better
When the tunnels meet beneath the mountain.
Jericho is a part of Oxford, where MacNeice courted his first wife. In his last great love affair, with Mary Wimbush, he returned to that sort of beginning. Yet the past buried in the present reaches back through the biblical Jericho to Genesis when the night was young. ‘Coda’ articulates, in the deftest way, the continuity between archaic past, present and future that MacNeice made his subject during his ambitious postwar decline, and does this by invoking a set of the heightened moments that the poet was always drawn to whatever the philosopher in him said.
Hank drowns because he swims along a flooded ‘tunnel’ to rescue the Welshman Mervyn. Before Mervyn went ahead, they agreed to communicate by jerking on a rope: ‘The usual code. Clear?’ As its title prompts us to notice, ‘Coda’ is shot through with code. Its finely patterned lucidity leaves it obscure on many levels. Yet it remains a poem of imminence, perhaps the greatest MacNeice ever wrote. From a silent, signal moon through insistent heartbeats it moves on to the clinking of picks in tunnels. The sound of work coming closer sends a message to those alone. It says that connection is possible. That the picks will one day break through. But not before the poetry broke off.
The Ticking Fear. By John Kerrigan. London Review of Books , February 7, 2008
Also of Interest :
Seamus
Perry and Mark Ford discuss the life and work of Louis MacNeice, the Irish poet
of psychic divisions and authoritative fretfulness.
No comments:
Post a Comment