Crisis of Culture: Week 10 Practical Ideals: Louis MacNeices Autumn Journal

1. Autumn Journal

A long poem of from 2,000 to 3,000 lines written from August to December 1938. Not strictly a journal but giving the tenor of my intellectual & emotional experiences during that period. It is about nearly everything which from firsthand experience I consider significant. It is written in sections averaging about 80 lines in length. This division gives it a dramatic quality, as different parts of myself (e.g. the anarchist, the defeatist, the sensual man, the philosopher, the would-be good citizen) can be given their say in turn. It contains rapportage [sic], metaphysics, ethics, lyrical emotion, autobiography, nightmare. There is a constant interrelation of abstract & concrete. Generalisations are balanced by pictures. Places presented include Hampshire, Spain, Birmingham, Ireland, & especially London. It is written throughout in an elastic kind of quatrain. This form (a) gives the whole poem a formal unity but (b) saves it from monotony by allowing it a great range of appropriate variations. The writing is direct; anyone could understand it. I think this is my best work to date; it is both a panorama and a confession of faith.
[MacNeice, Letter to T.S. Eliot (29th November 1938), in Allison, Jonathan (ed.) Letters of Louis MacNeice (London: Faber, 2010). p.312.]

2. MacNeice was one of several brilliant poets who were up at Oxford at the same time, and whose names were at first always associated, but the difference between whose gifts shows more and more clearly with the lapse of time. MacNeice in particular stands apart If the term poets poet means a poet whose virtuosity can be fully appreciated only by other poets, it may be applied to MacNeice. [T.S. Eliot, Louis MacNeice Obituary, in The Times (Thursday September 5th, 1963), p.14.] 3. I support the Valencia Government in Spain. Normally I would only support a cause because I hoped to get something out of it. Here the reason is stronger; if this cause is lost, nobody with civilised values may be able to get anything out of anything. [MacNeice, in Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War (London: Woolf, 2001), p.22] 4. A day or two after the street-fighting I remember passing through one of the fashionable streets and coming upon a confectioner's shop with a window full of pastries and bonbons of the most elegant kinds, at staggering prices. It was the kind of shop you see in Bond Street or the Rue de la Paix. And I remember feeling a vague horror and amazement that money could still be wasted upon such things in a hungry warstricken country. But God forbid that I should pretend to any personal superiority. After several months of discomfort I had a ravenous desire for decent food and wine, cocktails, American cigarettes, and so forth, and I admit to having wallowed in every luxury that I had money to buy. [Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (London: Penguin, 1983), p.112] 4. If nostalgia and apocalyptic apprehension, the sad look back and the depressed look ahead, were the dominant characteristics of end-of-the-thirties writing, then the most representative books of that time are MacNeices Autumn Journal and Orwells Coming Up for Air. [Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation (London: Random House, 1992), p.367]

5.

... What you want is not a world of the free in function But a niche at the top, the skimmings of the cream.' And I answer that that is largely so for habit makes me Think victory for one implies another's defeat, That freedom means the power to order, and that in order To preserve the values dear to the lite The lite must remain a few. It is so hard to imagine A world where the many would have their chance without A fall in the standard of intellectual living And nothing left that the highbrow cared about. Which fears must be suppressed. There is no reason for thinking That, if you give a chance to people to think or live, The arts of thought or life will suffer and become rougher And not return more than you could ever give. And now I relapse to sleep, to dream perhaps and reaction Where I shall play the gangster or the sheikh, Kill for the love of killing, make the world my sofa, Unzip the women and insult the meek, Which fantasies no doubt are due to my private history, Matter for the analyst, But the final cure is not in his past-dissecting fingers But in a future of action, the will and fist Of those who abjure the luxury of self-pity, And prefer to risk a movement without being sure If movement would be better or worse in a hundred Years or a thousand when their heart is pure.
[MacNeice, Autumn Journal, Canto III, in Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice, ed. by Peter McDonald (London: Faber, 2007), pp. 99-164 (p.106)]

6.

And we cannot take it in and we go to our daily Jobs to the dull refrain of the caption War Buzzing around us as from hidden insects And we thing This must be wrong, it has happened before, Just like this before, we must be dreaming; It was long ago these flies Buzzed like this, so why are they still bombarding The ears if not the eyes? And we laugh it off and go round town in the evening And this, we say, is on me; Something out of the usual, a Pimms Number One, a Picon But did you see The latest? You mean whether Cobb has bust the record Or do you mean the Australians have lost their last by ten Wickets or do you mean that the autumn fashions No, we dont mean anything like that again. No, what we mean is Hodza, Henlein, Hitler, The Maginot Line, The heavy panic that cramps the lungs and presses The collar down the spine. [MacNeice, AJ (V), p.109]

7. Art in particular has often been regarded recently as an escape from the actual to some transcendent reality on the pattern of Platos Forms, whereas Marxist materialism ignores transcendent realities and is therefore a good creed for the artist who must move in a concrete world. [MacNeice, Modern Poetry (Oxford: OUP, 1938), p.25] 8. By the way, darling, how good a Marxist are you? Marx of course wasnt a very good one. Living in Eire reminds one that people are by no means exclusively governed by economic factors. It also seems to me questionable whether they ought to be No doubt it is a necessary hypothesis if anything is ever going to be done, e.g. it was the Communists in Spain who got things done [MacNeice, Letter to Eleanor Clark, 4 September 1939, in Allison, pp.352-353 (p.353).]

9.

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all: The parish of rich women, physical decay, Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth. [W.H. Auden, In Memory of W.B. Yeats (II), in Auden, Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957 (London: Faber, 1977), p.142]

10.

[Auden] set himself up as a stylite waiting for hostilities to cease, a Dutch master intent on painting an oyster or lemon In dreams begin responsibilities; it was on account of just such an allegory that Lorca was riddled with bullets For poetry can make things happen not only can, but must and the very painting of that oyster is in itself a political gesture. [Paul muldoon, 7, Middagh Street (Louis), in Muldoon, Poems (London: Faber, 2001), p.190-192]

11. It is not a permanent necessity that poets should be interested in philosophy, or in any other subject. We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. [Eliot, The Metaphysical Poets, in Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber, 948), pp.281-291, (p.289.)]

12. These new poets, in fact, were boiling down Eliots variety and complexity and finding that it left them
with certain comparatively clear-cut issues. Instead, therefore, of attempting an impressionist survey of the contemporary world a world which impinges on one but which one cannot deal with, they were deliberately simplifying it, distorting it perhaps (as the man of action also has to distort it) into a world where one gambles upon practical ideals, a world in which one can take sides. [MacNeice, Modern Poetry, p.15]

13.

The next day I drove by night Among red and amber and green, spears and candles, Corkscrews and slivers of reflected light In the mirror of the rainy asphalt Along the North Circular and the Great West roads Running the gauntlet of impoverished fancy... ... All night through for nothing... ... So Thursday came and Oxford went to the polls And made its coward vote and the streets resounded To the triumphant cheers of the lost souls The profiteers, the dunderheads, the smarties And I drove back to London in the dark of the morning, the trees Standing out in the headlights cut from cardboard; Wondering which disease is worse the Status Quo or the Mere Utopia. [MacNeice, AJ [XIV], p.133-2-135]

14. It is quite natural and proper that the Oxford by-election should be brought in, as that has definite symbolic value as one of the historic points of last autumn. But I cannot help regretting that you simplify the issue so much in suggesting that the supporters of Quintin Hogg were mostly a pack of scoundrels Whatever one thinks of Hogg, Lindsay remains Goose Lindsay, and the alternative he offered was obsolete. [Eliot, cited in Jon Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice (London: Faber, 1995), p.237.]

15.

To-day they were building in Oxford Street, the mortar Pleasant to smell, But now it seems futility, imbecility, To be building shops when nobody can tell What will happen next... [Macneice, Autumn Journal (V), p.110]

16.

And as I go out I see a windscreen-wiper In an empty car Wiping away like mad and I feel astounded That things have gone so far. And I come back here to my flat and wonder whether From now on I need to take The trouble to go out choosing stuff for curtains As I dont know anyone to make Curtains quickly. Rather one should quickly Stop the cracks for gas or dig a trench And take ones paltry measures against the coming Of the unknown Uebermensch..
[MacNeice, AJ (VI), p.116]

17.

I loved my love with a platform ticket, A jazz song, A handbag, a pair of stockings of Paris Sand-I loved her long. I loved her between the lines and against the clock, Not until death But till life did us part I loved her with paper money And with whisky on the breath. I loved her with peacock's eyes and the wares of Carthage, With glass and gloves and gold and a powder puff With blasphemy, camaraderie, and bravado And lots of other stuff. I loved my love with the wings of angels Dipped in henna, unearthly red, With my office hours, with flowers and sirens, With my budget, my latchkey, and my daily bread. [MacNeice, AJ (I), p.102-103]

18.

You whom I remember glad or tired, Smiling in drink or scintillating anger, Inopportunely desired On boats, on trains, on roads when walking ... Whose fingers curl and melt When you were friendly. I shall remember you in bed with bright Eyes or in a caf stirring coffee Abstractedly and on your plate the white Smoking stub your lips had touched with crimson. [MacNeice, AJ [IV], p.108]

19. When every theatre has been replaced by 100 cinemas, when every musical instrument has been replaced by 100 gramophones, when every horse has been replaced by 100 cheap motor-cars, when electrical ingenuity has made it possible for every child to hear its bedtime stones from a loudspeaker, when applied science has done everything possible with the materials on this earth to make life as interesting as

possible, it will not be surprising if the population of the entire civilized world rapidly follows the fate of the Melanesians. [Eliot, Marie Lloyd, in Selected Essays, pp.418-421 (p.421)]

20.

Give us sensations and then again sensations Strip-tease, fireworks, all-in wrestling, gin; Spend your capital, open your house and pawn your padlocks, Let the critical sense go out and the Roaring Boys come in... [MacNeice, AJ (XV), p.135]

21.

And you too, my love, my limit, So palpable and your hair shot with red I do not want a hundred wives or lives Any more than I want to be too well-read [MacNeice, Ode, in Collected Poems, p.33 p.135]

22. Modern thought has got to the bottom of everything. We are singularly blessed; now we know what the world is like Modern thought has gone to the heart of the matter has explained everything excellently, has, in fact, unravelled everything; where there was, when we left the room, a completed woollen garment, we find when we return a tangle of separate strands, and instead of being angry we say what a clever kitten it is
[MacNeice, Our God Bogus (May 1929), in Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice, ed. by Alan Heuser (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990) pp. 1-7 (p.1).]

23. ... the difference between Eliot and his imitators was this; a thought to Eliot is, in most cases, really an experience of first value but to most clever young men thoughts rank far below sensations.
[MacNeice, Poetry-Today, in Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice, ed. by Alan Heuser (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1987), pp.10-44 (p.23)]

24.

So blow the bugles over the metaphysicians, Let the pure mind return to the Pure Mind; I must be content to remain in the world of Appearance And sit on the appearance of a behind. [MacNeice, AJ (XIII), p.132]

25.

And Plato was right to define the bodily pleasures As the pouring water into a hungry sieve But wrong to ignore the rhythm which the intercrossing Coloured waters permanently give.

26.

And reading Plato talking about his Forms To damn the artist touting round his mirror, I am glad that I have been left the third best bed And live in a world of error. [MacNeice, AJ (XII), p.129]

28.

As it is, the so-called humane studies May lead to cushy jobs But leave the men who land them spiritually bankrupt Intellectual snobs. Not but that I am glad to have my comforts, Better authentic mammon than a bogus god; If it were not for Lit.Hum. I might be climbing A ladder with hod. And seven hundred a year Will pay the rent and the gas and the phone and the grocer; (The emperor takes his seat beneath the awning, Those who are about to die... ) Come, pull the curtain closer. [Macneice, AJ (XII), p.129-130)

29.

The shops are empty and in Barceloneta the eyeSockets of the houses are empty. But still they manage to laugh Though they have no eggs, no milk, no fish, no fruit, no tobacco, no butter Though they live upon lentils and sleep in the Metro, Though the old order is gone and the golden calf Of Catalan industry shattered; The human values remain, purged in the fire, And it appears that every mans desire Is life rather than victuals. [MacNeice, AJ (XXIII), p.158-159]

30. 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.

[MacNeice, Snow, in Collected Poems, p.24]

Further Reading

MacNeice, Louis, Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice, ed. by Peter McDonald (London: Faber, 2007). MacNeice, Louis, Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (Oxford: OUP, 1938). Heuser, Alan (Ed.), Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Heuser, Alan (Ed.), Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990). Stallworthy, Jon, Louis MacNeice (London: Faber, 1995). Brearton, Fran and Longley, Edna (Eds.), Incorrigibly Plural: Louis MacNeice and his Legacy (Manchester: Carcanet, 2012). Hynes, Samuel, The Auden Generation (London: Random House, 1992). Marsack, Robyn, The Cave of Making: The Poetry of Louis MacNeice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). McDonald, Peter, Louis MacNeice: The Poet in his Contexts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). McKinnon, William T., Apollos Blended Dream (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). Haberer, Adolphe, Theorie et Pratique de la Poesie Impure dans lOeuvre de Louis MacNeice: Les enjeux dune querelle, in Studies on Louis MacNeice, ed. by Jacqueline Genet (Caen: Centre de publications de l'Universit de Caen, 1988.), pp. 79-106. Genet, Jacqueline Studies on Louis MacNeice (Caen: Centre de publications de l'Universit de Caen, 1988.).