Authors: Alan Bennett
One feels quite safe saying these things about MacNeice, knowing full well that this ironic, melancholic and disdainful man would have been the first they would have occurred to. He was a man riven by doubt and duality and made a virtue out of it, and his poems are full of debate. The others might make fools of themselves over Communism or boys or religion or tinpot psychology, but he didn't make a fool of himself. He wasn't single-minded enough ⦠but perhaps not to be single-minded, that was to be the real fool. E. M. Forster said of himself that he had been nibbled away by kindness, lust and fun â they had diminished him. And in this respect, the common sense that makes him so sympathetic diminished MacNeice. Perhaps he recognised this:
A watched clock never moves, they said:
Leave it alone and you'll grow up.
Nor will the sulking holiday train
Start sooner if you stamp your feet.
He left the clock to go its way;
The whistle blew, the train went gay.
Do not press me so, she said;
Leave me alone and I will write
But not just yet, I am sure you know
The problem. Do not count the days.
He left the calendar alone;
The postman knocked, no letter came.
O never force the pace, they said;
Leave it alone, you have lots of time,
Your kind of work is none the worse
For slow maturing. Do not rush.
He took their tip, he took his time,
And found his time and talent gone.
Oh you have had your chance, It said;
Left it alone and it was one.
Who said a watched clock never moves?
Look at it now. Your chance was I.
He turned and saw the accusing clock
Race like a torrent round a rock.
Leaving it like that, it's a sad story, but it has a happy ending. MacNeice has now been dead long enough to be ripe for re-discovery. I'm not sure that's quite a happy ending, involving as it does articles in the Sunday supplements beginning âShares in MacNeice are rising â¦': something Larkin was perhaps predicting as early as 1963 when he wrote of MacNeice's âpoetry of everyday life, of shop windows, traffic policemen, ice cream sodas, lawn mowers and an uneasy awareness of what the newsboys were shouting'.
âAnd then,' one feels Larkin is thinking, âthen comes
me
!'
There is, though, appreciation much closer to home â that is, MacNeice's home. Some of the liveliest and most accomplished poetry being written today comes from Northern Ireland. The English may think of MacNeice as an Auden sidekick, and in Dublin he's still an outsider, but with the younger poets of Northern Ireland â Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon â MacNeice comes into his own; they have picked up frequencies in his work inaudible in Dublin and London but not in Belfast. Never a poet of Northern Ireland (â
Come back early or never come
'), MacNeice has nevertheless bequeathed to its poets in their shameful time a perspective and a detachment, a concern for the private in the confusion of the public that he learned in another shameful time.
I almost end with a poem that might be thought to be about ecology, though I think it's about the imagination.
When books have all seized up like the books in graveyards
And reading and even speaking have been replaced
By other, less difficult, media, we wonder if you
Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste
They held for us for whom they were framed in words,
And will your grass be green, your sky be blue,
Or will your birds be always wingless birds?
But finally a lovely, touching poem, one of the best MacNeice ever wrote and which deserves a place in every anthology of twentieth-century poetry.
I see from the paper that Florrie Forde is dead â
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 rôle
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 âTipperary', which became the swan-song
Of troop-ships on a darkened shore;
And during Munich sang her ancient quiz
Of
Where's Bill Bailey?
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.
1922â1985
Philip Larkin was born in Coventry. He was educated at King Henry VIII School, Coventry, and St John's College, Oxford, where he was a contemporary of Kingsley Amis. 1945 saw the publication of his first book of poetry,
North Ship
, followed by two novels,
Jill
(1946) and
A Girl in Winter
(1947). Subsequent collections include
The Less Deceived
(1955),
The Whitsun Weddings
(1964) and
High Windows
(1974). He wrote two books of journalism,
All What Jazz: A Record Library
and
Required Writing: Miscellaneous Prose
, and edited the
Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse
. For twelve years he worked in campus libraries before taking charge of the Hull University library from 1955 until his death. He was the recipient of innumerable honours, including the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. One critic said that Larkin was âa laureate too obvious to need official recognition'. He died in 1985.