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MacNeice rejoiced in the living moments
Louis MacNeice was a poet who never lost, even though he may have mislaid, his poetic qualities,writes John Lucas
Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems, edited by Peter Macdonald, Faber, £30. Order this book
I BOUGHT the Hampstead poet Louis MacNeice’s last collection, The Burning Perch, published shortly after his death in 1963 at the age of 57, but more as an act of homage than because I thought it would contain any great surprises.
For by then the agreed critical view was that MacNeice had gone up like a rocket but come down like a stick, and that the descent, that had begun some 10 to 15 years earlier, was unlikely to be arrested by any of his later writings. Wrong.
The Burning Perch proved to be a terrific collection, and showed that he had not lost, though for a while he had certainly mislaid, the qualities marked out his earlier period; great technical skill, a tone that somehow balanced the off-hand, almost louche disenchantment with lyrical ardency, and, running through just about everything he wrote, a witty melancholia of someone for whom time passing was both sentence and reprieve.
In his introduction to the new Collected, timed to coincide with the centenary of MacNeice’s birth, Peter Macdonald remarks that the poet’s middle period was characterised by the “highly ambitious programme of discursive issuing in Ten Burnt Offerings (1952) and Autumn Sequel (1954)”, and adds that “the agendas of his middle ‘stretch’ were not, in any event, especially good for his writing.” I’ll say. Some of the blame for this may lie in the habits MacNiece picked up when writing plays for the BBC.
For radio drama at the time – the 1940s and 1950s – had an unfortunate habit of encouraging sonorous, would-be vatic portentousness, and actors were more than keen to give “welly” to the emptiest remark, so that what was old hat could sound compellingly oracular. But, at his best, MacNeice wasn’t that kind of poet at all.
There’s a clue to the true MacNiece in the cover photograph to his Collected Poems. He’s wearing a smart looking trilby and is caught in the act of lighting a cigarette.
Whether the photograph was taken in a pub, I don’t know, but pubs were an essential part of his life. The only time I saw him was near the BBC, where in 1960 (I think) I’d been taken by John Wain. MacNeice was in a corner, near the bar, his tall figure leaning at a slight angle away from the person to whom he was talking, his eye’s half glazed along that “Irish wolfhound’s nose” of his, a faint smile on his lips.
He looked at once engaged and detatched. Or perhaps I thought that because that’s the stance of his finest poetry, from Poems (1935) through to his 1948 collection, Holes in the Sky, by way of two of the essential volumes of 20th century poetry.
The Earth Compels (1938) and, the following year, the wondrous Autumn Journal. Open the Journal where you will find yourself confronting poetry under whose jaunty matter-factness glimmers a ark streak, an awareness that, to quote one of the finest poems in The Earth Compels, “The sunlight on the garden/
Hardens and grows cold.”
For the Journal was written under the impending shadow of war which MacNeice knew would be terrible, and against which he could assert only the individual will, and that determination, as E M Forster wrote at the same time, to “hurry up and have a good time”.
“The new year comes with Bombs”, he writes in the last section of the Journal. “It is too late/to dose the death with honourable intentions:/If you have honour to spare, employ it on the living.” Foreboding sharpens the relish for observation – nobody, not even Larkin, has improved on MacNeice’s accounts of the dreck of our daily lives – and for rejoicing in the living moment, especially those moments of love when “Time was away and a she was here”.
MacNeice poetry finds space for a life squeezed between different ideologies or compulsions. And so, in “Epitaph for Liberal Poets”, he remarks that “we shall vanish first/Yet leave behind us certain frozen words/Which some day, though not certainly, may melt/And, for a moment or two, accentuate a thirst.”
This modesty is not without its hauteur. Although he was pressed by Roy Campbell into the composite MacSpaunday of 1930s committed poets, he was always apart from them.
Auden was undoubtedly the greater poet, but except in his juvenilia, MacNeice never allows himself to sound like Auden or to imitate any of his stylistic tricks.
McDonald sensibly prints MacNeice’s first collection, Blind Fireworks (1929), where some of these tricks show, as the first of seven Appendices. It isn’t always easy to find your way about these Appendices, but never mind.
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