Six Poets (18 page)

There's something of Auden in that poem. Auden was never very good on women but he was very good on canals, which he had practically privatised along with pylons and factories and all the other paraphernalia of what MacNeice called ‘the placid dotage of a great industrial country'. It's a pity neither of them is around today.

Anybody writing poetry in the thirties had somehow to come to terms with Auden; MacNeice's ‘Trilogy for X', in praise of women, was a way of doing that. Auden, you see, had got a head start on the other poets. He'd got into the thirties first, like someone taking over the digs. He'd rampaged through all the rooms, sprawled in every chair, slept in every bed, put his books on the bookshelves, scattered his stuff all over the dressing table and left the bathroom in a disgusting state, all the time singing at the top of his voice. When the other poets began to arrive, they spent a lot of their time trying to find a place they could call their own, somewhere safe from Auden, where they could hear the sound of their own voices. When Auden finally went off to America at the end of the decade, they must have heaved a sigh of relief. From their point of view, it was perhaps a pity that he hadn't gone five years earlier.

MacNeice lived much of his life in Primrose Hill in London, hard by the zoo, and he wrote a book about zoos:

The pleasure of dappled things, the beauty of adaptation to purpose, the glory of extravagance, classic elegance or romantic nonsense and grotesquerie – all these we get from the Zoo. We react to these with the same delight as to new potatoes in April speckled with chopped parsley or to the lights at night on the Thames at Battersea Power House, or to cars sweeping their shadows from lamp-post to lamp-post down Haverstock Hill or to brewer's drays or to lighthouses and searchlights or to a newly cut lawn or to a hot towel or a friction at the barber's or to Moran's two classic tries at Twickenham in 1937 or to the smell of dusting-powder in a warm bathroom or to the fun of shelling peas into a china bowl or of shuffling one's feet through dead leaves when they are crisp or to the noise of rain or the crackling of a newly lit fire or the jokes of a street-hawker or the silence of snow in moonlight or the purring of a powerful car.

from
Zoo
(1938)

This isn't a man who's frightened of being thought ordinary, and it's this and his refusal to sink his individuality in some Marxist generality – ‘become part of the pattern in the lino', as he put it – that got MacNeice labelled ‘bourgeois', even by some of his friends. Of course, he had that very English fault: an overdose of irony. Irony stops you being whole hearted, stops you going overboard. But, of course, if you don't go overboard, you tend not to make a splash, and it's this, rather than anything lacking in his poems, that makes MacNeice the least known of the poets of his generation. Here's another personal poem, about marriage.

Life in a day: he took his girl to the ballet;

Being shortsighted himself could hardly see it –

The white skirts in the grey

Glade and the swell of the music

Lifting the white sails.

Calyx upon calyx, canterbury bells in the breeze

The flowers on the left mirror to the flowers on the right

And the naked arms above

The powdered faces moving

Like seaweed in a pool.

Now, he thought, we are floating – ageless, oarless –

Now there is no separation, from now on

You will be wearing white

Satin and a red sash

Under the waltzing trees.

But the music stopped, the dancers took their curtain,

The river had come to a lock – a shuffle of programmes –

And we cannot continue down

Stream unless we are ready

To enter the lock and drop.

So they were married – to be the more together –

And found they were never again so much together,

Divided by the morning tea,

By the evening paper,

By children and tradesmen's bills.

Waking at times in the night she found assurance

Due to his regular breathing but wondered whether

It was really worth it and where

The river had flowed away

And where were the white flowers.

That MacNeice turned out to have been right in hedging his bets during the thirties didn't help his reputation either. His longest poem,
Autumn Journal
, is a personal record of the period from August to December 1938, the months that include Munich and the triumph of Franco's forces in Barcelona. MacNeice writes as he always wrote as a private man, these public events jumbled together in his mind with the private ones: the breakup of his marriage and his sense of futility.

He liked fast cars (which was another way of getting away from Auden), and in this extract from
Autumn Journal
he drives up to Oxford to take part in a by-election in which the Left and the disaffected Right joined forces to support A. D. Lindsay, the Master of Balliol, in an unsuccessful attempt to defeat the Appeasement candidate, Quentin Hogg, later Lord Hailsham.

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

Where housewives bolster up their jerry-built abodes

With
amour propre
and the habit of Hire Purchase.

The wheels whished in the wet, the flashy strings

Of neon lights unravelled, the windscreen-wiper

Kept at its job like a tiger in a cage or a cricket that sings

All night through for nothing.

Factory, a site for a factory, rubbish dumps,

Bungalows in lath and plaster, in brick, in concrete,

And shining semi-circles of petrol pumps

Like intransigent gangs of idols.

And the road swings round my head like a lassoo

Looping wider and wider tracts of darkness

And the country succeeds the town and the country too

Is damp and dark and evil.

And coming over the Chilterns the dead leaves leap

Charging the windscreen like a barrage of angry

Birds as I take the steep

Plunge to Henley or Hades.

And at the curves of the roads the telephone wires

Shine like strands of silk and the hedge solicits

My irresponsible tyres

To an accident, to a bed in the wet grasses.

And in quiet crooked streets only the village pub

Spills a golden puddle

Over the pavement and trees bend down and rub

Unopened dormer windows with their knuckles.

Nettlebed, Shillingford, Dorchester – each unrolls

The road to Oxford;
Qu'allais-je faire
to-morrow

Driving voters to the polls

In that home of lost illusions?

And what am I doing it for?

Mainly for fun, partly for a half-believed-in

Principle, a core

Of fact in a pulp of verbiage,

Remembering that this crude and so-called obsolete

Top-heavy tedious parliamentary system

Is our only ready weapon to defeat

The legions' eagles and the lictors' axes;

And remembering that those who by their habit hate

Politics can no longer keep their private

Values unless they open the public gate

To a better political system.

That Rome was not built in a day is no excuse

For
laissez-faire
, for bowing to the odds against us;

What is the use

Of asking what is the use of one brick only?

The perfectionist stands for ever in a fog

Waiting for the fog to clear; better to be vulgar

And use your legs and leave a blank for Hogg

And put a cross for Lindsay.

There are only too many who say ‘What difference does it make

One way or the other?

To turn the stream of history will take

More than a by-election.'

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.

For from now on

Each occasion must be used, however trivial,

To rally the ranks of those whose chance will soon be gone

For even guerrilla warfare.

The nicest people in England have always been the least

Apt to solidarity or alignment

But all of them must now align against the beast

That prowls at every door and barks in every headline.

Dawn and London and daylight and last the sun:

I stop the car and take the yellow placard

Off the bonnet; that little job is done

Though without success or glory.

The plane-tree leaves come sidling down

(Catch my guineas, catch my guineas)

And the sun caresses Camden Town,

The barrows of oranges and apples.

What is appealing about MacNeice is that he wasn't a man for certainties. He couldn't wholeheartedly support either side, and his poetry is about being in two minds – that is, the state most of us are in most of the time.

After the war, MacNeice's reputation dwindled. He had begun working for the BBC in 1941, and though he produced some memorable broadcasts, this didn't improve his reputation as a poet. Nor did it improve his poetry, and it wasn't until the late fifties that he hit his stride again and began to write as well as, and better than, he'd done in the thirties. But he didn't have much time left.

MacNeice died quite young, in 1963, having caught pneumonia down a pothole in Yorkshire while recording authentic sound effects for one of his BBC programmes. There was a memorial service at the BBC church – All Souls, Langham Place – where Auden (one is tempted to say ‘of course') gave the address. He praised MacNeice's poetry and also praised his character, saying that he sponged on no one, cheated no one, provided for his family and paid his bills. It was MacNeice the decent chap. These were virtues Auden himself had come to rather late in life, the virtues of the good citizen rather than the good poet, for whom they're really not virtues at all, doing the right thing not always the right thing to do. He also praised MacNeice, saying he had been the first to appreciate good work by his contemporaries. However, that can work both ways, too; sometimes you need the envy and the jealousy to get the engine going.