Graham Hough

MacNeice and Auden’

NEW collected Auden and the final collected MacNeice: no one of my age and condition can pretend to write of A these with complete detachment. Any English bourgeois

literary intellectual, born in the first decade of this century, moderately well read, moderately travelled, moderately academic and not too happy about it-anyone like this, even without their talent, has shared too much their experience ever to see their poetry from the outside. That is why so much that has been written about them is of the “I knew him well, we were at school together” kind. Well, I didn’t and we weren’t; and the fragmentary glimpses and over- lappings are distracting blurs on the screen. So one must try to look at the poetry as poetry, to speak only of styles and attitudes revealed by the poetry, forgetting persons and biographies, affections and dissents, as though one were much older, or much younger, or had come from another country.

What one cannot forget is the time; and a very bad time it was. Auden and MacNeice had much in common, and the chief thing they had in common was their age. So much in their work seems an almost automatic reaction to a history in which we all share. Not quite unavoidable; there are poets who stand outside it, or respond in a way that was unique and wholly different. For Auden and MacNeice the groove worn by English social history since 1930, shallow though it may look, has been too compelling. Both were formed irrevocably by the thirties. The tone of their writing is the tone of the day, a tone shared by others who were not poets. It is a tone which claims complicity with other B.B.C. feature writers, other cultural functionaries, other Anglo-American dons. This may be a bad thing-it may be a good thing; it was at least a little world to speak from, a group to address. But it brings them very close to an essentially unpoetical, even an anti-poetical, culture; a culture from which it is hard to imagine that the best kind of poetry could ever ‘W. H. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems 1927-57. Faber, 42s. The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice. Edited by E. R. Dodds. Faber, 63s.

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spring. It was a culture of scepticism, or attenuated faith; not croyant, but not quite infidel either; not quite left but not quite right, and certainly not comfortable in the middle; shocked, dis- tressed, in a way engaged by the wars and revolutions; but not really in any of them; a culture of non-participants. This is said without malice, and as a simple matter of fact. Unlike most of Europe we were not occupied, only bombed; we did not have a revolution, only an Education Act; and in the background there was always that false Shangri-la, the United States.

The other thing they had in common was their class, and their odd relation to it. 0 hellish public schools, 0 awful Oxford, 0 the complacencies of inherited culture, too weak to nourish its parti- cipants, too strong to leave them unmarked. There was no country like England in the thirties, where so many intellectuals were apologising for their own youth, and then apologising for the apologies by relapsing into little in-group jokes. It is a kind of uneasy honesty: I am what I am, but I’m not very proud of it; my friends stand for something decent, even if it’s not much; the great world has turned so bestial that it is better to fall back on the little values that one shares with old companions rather than to rely on the great ones that have been so vilely corrupted. The moral law within can be trusted, slightly moth-eaten as it is; as for the starry heaven above, no one can claim much kinship with that. For both these poets are more concerned with telling the truth than with poetry; telling the truth, I mean, on some simple correspondence theory of truth; not claiming to feel more than the historical situa- tion warrants, or differently from what one actually feels at the given moment, never writing cheques for more than there is in the bank. This is a very unpoetical state of mind. Greater poets expect the cheque to be honoured by the poem, not by their feeling or the historical situation. A poem, if it achieves its own rightness and completeness, is a valid draft of the whole world’s stock of nobility %nd splendour, whatever the meanness of the actual situation, or the historical impotence of the author. Auden and MacNeicc are rarely willing to make this claim; and it is this more than any change of rhetoric or period style that puts them in a different sphere from Yeats.

So much for what their culture gave them: the more important question is what they made of it. Here the answers begin to diverge: for Auden has done far more with this unpromising situation, has disposed his material in a far more masterful fashion. MacNeice’s collected volume is really a sad one. It can hardly fail to command liking and sympathy, but it is pervaded by a conscious sense of fulfilment unachieved. The great imagists Eliot and Pound had made it their aim to purify the dialect of the tribe; the later genera- tion to which Auden and MacNeice belonged tried rather to take it over bodily. Slick talk, triviality, the argot of a group, are used

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with irony; often the irony is effective; sometimes it manages to suggest by their very absence the values that it cannot state. But this is the weapon of the writer at bay, not of the writer in full possession of his powers. Mt!$ez-vous de l’ironie surtout en moments, d’impuissance. Moments of impotence are common enough nowa- days, and language chosen with irony in view tends to a self- defeating automatism. The poet’s own voice, if he has one, is taken over by the voice he intends to parody. This happens often with Auden, and far too often with MacNeice. The tone of the time suits Auden well enough--he was able both to use it and to transcend it; but it is hard to feel that MacNeice was at ease with the language that was available. He was a poet who could have added his individual note to an established tradition-the Caroline lyric or the Augustan couplet. But in his years there was nothing of assurance and dignity to attach himself to, and he was all at sea.

So often he settles for the second-best. Poetry is made with words, and all his words will allow him is a rather shallow goodfellowship; vague conviviality; moderate attachments and quirky velleities; bodings of doom that go off with a damply emphatic fizzle; and all these undercut and criticized by the style, as though even while the words were forming themselves their inadequacy was realised- inadequacy to something better that is really there but never manages to find its way out. The shorter poems often begin with a lyrical tenderness that is immediately checked by the fashionable jolts and mumbles. The long poems often degenerate into a low- toned obsessive muttering, like that of a man talking dully to himself after a hard day at the office and a couple of drinks. The fact is MacNeice was neither a man of ideas nor a creator of form. Faced in the war years with the collapse of a world, he responds with sincerity and feeling but also, it must be said, with banality. And a slight reflection, a real but small impression, will be cobbled up into a verse so ramshackle, so rough-and-ready, that one has to read it several times to make sure that there is not some unsuspected principle of organization. Alas, as a rule, there is not. Too straight- forward, too unassuming, to raid the past in the wholesale manner of Eliot and Pound, he lacks a model: or the models that really suit him, the classical ones on which his taste was formed, did not often suit what had to be said.

One is unhappy to say this; but it seems to be so, for most of these five hundred pages. Indeed he almost says it himself. Luckily this is not all. A selection, not very large, could be made (I hope it will) of achieved and beautiful poems which reveal with great clarity the talent that misdirected itself or was buried in miscellaneous flotsam and irrelevant circumstance. It would not, I think, show MacNeice in the light in which he is usually thought of; the more genial pieces with their real appreciation of the pleasures and variety of the world would not be much represented. They are often undistinguished in

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phrasing and rhythm. When he achieves a finer control it is almost always in darker moods. “An Eclogue for Christmas” (1933) is not only one of the best-known but also one of the best of his early poems. The dialogue form suited him; no need to reconcile contra- dictions intellectually, the poet can be equally present in both speakers; on the one hand the modernist worldling:

I who was Harlequin in the childhood of the century Posed by Picasso beside an endless opaque sea;

On the other hand the grumpy acceptor of something obstinate, earthy, and unchanging:

It is better to die in situ as I shall, one place is as bad as another Go back where your instincts call.

This grasps a moment in the modern English consciousness, the same moment as was grasped by Cyril Connolly in The Unquiet Grave. Where we go next nobody knows, for we are st i l l in it.

This is one of the poems where MacNeice was able to avail himself of a securely founded tradition-an amoebean pastoral on a Virgilian model. Slightly later is the precise and delightful translation from Horace “Winter to spring; the west wind melts the frozen rancour”. The appalling risk of rendering every man’s most familiar classical quotations is faced with complete equanimity and complete success. Perhaps it looks almost too easy for Horace’s highly wrought verse; but if anyone imagines that this sort of thing is easy, try it and see.

Equally heavy is the heel of white-faced death on the pauper’s Shack and the towers of kings, and 0 my dear

The little sum of life forbids the ravelling of lengthy Hopes. Night and the fabled dead are near

And the narrow house of nothing, past whose lintel You will meet no wine like this, no boy to admire

Like Lycidas, who today makes all young men a furnace And whom tomorrow girls will find a 6re.

Much later, in fact in the year before his death, he wrote a sequence of five poems, Memorandum to Horace, which applies the same note to his own condition, and in which he greets a kindred spirit across the centuries. He plays delicately between the Horatian remini- cences and the modern instances; and the formal satisfaction of the achievement offers a consolation, if no hope. Indeed, he did not see much to hope for, and a sad late poem, “Goodbye to London”, tells US Why-

Then came the head-shrinking war, the city Closed in too, the people were fewer But closer too, we were back in the womb.

Nevertheless let the petals fall Fast from the flower of cities all.

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From which reborn into anticlimax We endured much litter and apathy hoping The phoenix would rise, for so they had promised.

Nevertheless let the petals fall Fast from the flower of cities all.

And nobody rose, only some meaningless Buildings and the people once more were strangers At home with no one, sibling or friend.

Which is why now the petals fall Fast from the flower of cities all.

If times had been different, MacNeice might have been a sort of English Horace with the same alternation between the stoic and the epicurean. But the years between 1925, the date of his first volume, and 1963, the date of his last, were not much of a time for myrtles and roses, and it is an unindulgent realism that is his most authentic note.

The new Auden volume extends to 1957-to the end, that is, of Homage to Clio. For the most part it repeats collections already existing, with the usual omissions, alterations and reappearances. We have had so many complaints of Auden’s editorial habits that I don’t want to repeat them. It is maddening to get hold of a new edition and find old familiars missing, others altered and mutilated, but clearly the poet has the right to revise his own verses. I do wonder, all the same, just what is going on. Auden stoutly denies in the Preface that he has ever attempted to revise his former thoughts and feelings; and we can think, if we like, that all the changes are what some of them obviously are, made on stylistic grounds. Some poems, he says, have been thrown out because they were dishonest or bad-mannered or boring. “Sir No Man’s Enemy” has disappeared and “September 1939”--on which of these grounds does not appear. AU the same, to omit them does look like a revision of former feelings; and I do not know what is achieved beyond a useless disavowal. These poems are so well known, so often anthologised, so uniformly present in earlier editions that no obliteration now will unwrite them or delete them from the poetic canon that has been built up. One song from “The Sea and the Mirror’’ is given; why not more, or none? Three stanzas are lost from the poem in memory of Yeats-the stanzas that no one forgets, about Time who worships language and pardons all things to those who write well. The section to which they belong is hopelessly mutilated without them. On the other hand, the cruel but clever poem about A. E. Housman reappears after many years’ absence. And there are numerous tinkerings of a lesser significance. I can see no rhyme or reason in them; and indeed, not much for the whole edition.

But to give up biblographical nagging: what sort of a poet does the volume as a whole reveal? Not by any means the whole of Auden; for without “The Orators”, without “The Sea and the

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Mirror”, without the brilliant prose passages in that work, and in “For the Time Being”, much that is most characteristic is absent. If most modern poets were represented simply by their shorter poems they would not suffer much. With Auden this is not so. Not very many of his poems achieve perfect detachment and complete- ness, the quality of floating away entire, independent of their author or their surroundings. He is an occasional writer, and a copious one; the enormous impact he has made has been various and diffused. He himself hates the idea of pure poetry, as he never tires of telling us; it is the whole mass of warning, exhortation, preaching, journalism in both prose and verse, that has moved us; not its perfection but its intelligence, relevance and honesty. We really need a fat volume comprising all the poetry, warts and all, including “The Orators”, and “The Dog Beneath the Skin”, which Auden himself considered a failure. We could do our own skipping. And if a selection is to mean much it should be on a broader base than this.

The poems in this edition are arranged in a chronological order, and it is now much easier to trace a line of development. The work of the late twenties and thirties retains its power. Most of the things it warned against have happened, most of the things it looked forward to haven’t; but the poetry has stood up to the flux. The prevailing imagery-the ruined land, the spy, the conspirator, the threat of catastrophe, now that we no longer tie it up to a particular situation, remains as a vivid fiction. Not quite serious; there are too many echoes of The Boys’ Own Paper and the scoutmaster’s talk, and used in a curiously double-edged way: partly to assail the enemy- bourgeois society; and partly to undercut the pretensions of the assailants. It is the honest but uncomfortable attitude of the left- wing schoolmaster, personally pledged to destroy the system, but emotionally and institutionally tied to many of its values. The divided allegiance is perilous, its results sometimes confusing; and I can imagine a future time in which the whole thing will become totally unintelligible. But I suspect it will retain its strength for a good many years yet.

These poems are full of private references and hermetic language. These remain as impenetrable as ever, but curiously, they are not damaging. Where the surface meaning contains so much preaching and threatening, the gaps in logic and intelligibility serve a positive purpose; they are windows letting in a rich, uncertain radiance. The language of conflict is omnipresent, to choose the right side is of supreme importance; yet it is never a matter of simple black and white. The very failures and neuroses can be beneficent for they bring crisis and psychic revolution nearer.

The unseriousness of Auden is a serious subject for discussion. Apart from a few early pieces strongly influenced by Anglo-Saxon verse, almost all his poems until the war are in a sense parodies- parody folk songs, parody ballads, parody sermons. It is a trickily

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literary art, working always by a visible gap between the style and the message. Armageddon is announced in a boys’ adventure story, the twilight of the gods in a prize-day address. In the middle and later poetry, fairy tales and myths are used in the same fashion. There is no other poet who raids the bric-a-brac of legend with such irreverence and such unconcern. At times he draws on a very wide range of learning, but large areas of his poetry seem to prefer what could be found in a very well-stocked nursery:

Just as his dream foretold, he met them all : The smiling grimy boy at the garage Ran out before he blew his horn; the tall Professor in the mountains with his large Tweed pockets full of plants addressed him hours Before he would have dared; the deaf girl too Seemed to expect him at her green chateau; A meal was laid, the guest-room full of flowers.

This is brilliant and charming; but the attitude towards the myths, adventures and dilemmas is always quizzical. What was simply believed in childhood or in earlier ages is now taken as a fanciful indulgence. And this is sometimes seen by Auden’s critics as frivolity. But Auden is like Byron in that he is always at his most serious when his manner is most uncommitted. Slapdash, parody, self-parody, are his weapons in a real engagement; and the fanciful indulgences always have a moral in attendance. He is unlike Byron in that he Oever attempts to present us with real love stories, real battles, real shipwrecks--only their reflections in a shifting and distorting mirror. This is, perhaps, the consequence of a certain tenuousness in his relation with the physical and sensuous world. His early poems are intensely English in their atmosphere, not because they offer us a window on the visible English scene, but because they present English legends, English stereotypes, English tics and obsessions. After he left for America there is hardly a sign that he derived any nourishment whatever from the world around him. His-liveliest response is to ideas, and the response is to mythologise them. Marx, Freud, Groddek, Kierkegaard, a miscellany of anthropologists and historians, have provided the ideas ; Auden has re-combined them into a kaleidoscopic series of images, glimpses, miniature narratives, none of them firmly grappled with or seriously taken up, yet each serving as a moral flashlight, a momentarily-illuminated meta- physical signpost.

The energy and the illumination are in these flashes. Sometimes it is a moment of wit, of ballad-like poignancy or surrealist astonish- ment:

Fleeing from short-haired mad executives, The sad and useless faces round my home-

* * *

‘0 where are you going ?’ said reader to rider, ‘That valley is fatal when furnaces burn,

Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays.

* * *

The demon that haunted his early verse was merely Rxivel- relatively harmless, because though tifesome when present, he had no long-range effects. In the post-emigration period the twin demons are Snuffle and Gabble, more sinister and more pervasive in their influence. Drivel produced “Uncle Henry” and “Halfway”; and it doesn’t matter much-we needn’t read them. Snuffle produced those terrible pieces “In Sickness and in Health” and “Many Happy Returns”-the unconventional radio parson offering his cheery non-sectarian admonitions. Gabble produced the “Bucolics”, and (outside the limits of this volume) most of About the Howe-and they cannot be so easily dismissed, for they are apt to leave nasty smells behind in otherwise satisfactory places. Auden’s religious and quasi-religious poems are not acts of devotion, they are homilies, and homilies require more authority than he can command. His light verse and occasional pieces require form, both social and metrical, that now seems to be lacking: what we get is clever, and sometimes agreeable, party chatter that nevertheless offends because it is always pretending to be poetry and falls so far short of it. Delight, affection and resentment are the sentiments that Auden evokes at this period. Delight at the verbal sparkle, the fertility of ideas, the wide and unpompous erudition. Affection; who could fail to feel affection for a poet who can turn out all the miscellaneous lumber of myth, history, and childhood memories that we all have lying around the house, and before our eyes transmute it into some- thing shining and precious. Resentment-perhaps unworthy, but we feel it because the real wisdom, the authentic good will, are not quite pure, contaminated with platitude, self-indulgence and smugness.

Then, out of the middle of this varied and uncertain material, arise objects of such gravity and beauty that we forget all the rest. There is “Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love”, that rare thing, a modern love poem. There is “The Sea and the Mirror”, not included in this volume; the verse sure and serene in its movement, the variations on the themes of “The Tempest” not clever but profound; the prose passages, the only Shakespearian criticism in the world that anyone reads for pure pleasure. Later, there is the “Shield of Achilles”, a poem in which the myth is used with perfect simplicity and seriousness to contrast the dream vision of the classical heroic age with the modern reality of war, oppression and consequent moral vacuity :

A crowd of ordinary decent folk Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke

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As three pale figures were led forth and bound To three posts driven upright in the ground. The mass and majesty of this world, all

Lay in the hands of others; they were small That carries weight and always weighs the same

And could not hope for help and no help came: What their foes liked to do was done, their shame

Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride And died as men before their bodies died.

Contrary to popular belief Auden is not generally a political poet; here is one of the few political poems of our time that can stand up to comparison with Yeats’ “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”, though it is very different in its sombre unrhetorical realism.

Auden is too close to us not to leave us at times dazzled, enchanted -at times irritated and repelled; but in the end, beyond the senti- ments I have confessed, the prevailing one must be gratitude.

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