Louis MacNeice Centenary In collaboration with the Scottish Poetry Library (SPL) and Napier University, we celebrate in this issue the centenary of Louis MacNeice's birth. The SPL have organised for the Irish poet Michael Longley to come to Edinburgh and give a talk on his favorite MacNeice poems on the evening of the 5th October. On the following evening, 6th October, Dr Stephen Davismoon, head of the music dept at Napier University (and member of The Drouth Editorial Board has organised a competition for his students to set MacNeice poems to music. The compositions will be performed on the evening by the Research Ensemble. Davismoon further contributed a piece to this issue on the difficulties and delights of setting text to music.
‘Selected Works’ at the Scottish Poetry Library Robyn Marsack We began this series of conversations as a way of demonstrating the range of poetry available from the SPL, knowing that the people choosing their favourite poems would bring to light little known works as well as perennial favourites. We could also highlight recordings, and we hope to encourage people to follow the selectors in broadening their range of reading. Sometimes it has meant our broadening our range, too: Simon Armitage chose a poem from the American James Tate’s collection Return to the city of white donkeys, which we didn’t have but acquired and learned to like in Simon’s reading of it. So far we have had over 20 such conversations, with many poet-selectors but also novelists – Louis de Bernieres, Joanne Harris; cultural critics – Pat Kane, Marina Warner; broadcasters Sheena MacDonald and Joan Bakewell; artists too, such as John Byrne. If you are interested in learning about their selections, you can see a couple listed on a new area of the SPL website: www.splreadingroom.org.uk – look for ‘favourite poems’. More will be added to that site; meanwhile, paper copies of the leaflets produced for these events are available in the Library.
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This year sees the centenary of two very fine poets, W. H. Auden (1907-1973) and Louis MacNeice (19071963). MacNeice, who was schooled in England, published by Faber & Faber and associated for most of his working life with the BBC, is not always recognised as coming from Belfast, but he did, and he was celebrated there with a conference and series of readings over the September weekend of his birthday. We asked Alexander McCall Smith, the number 1 Auden fan, to choose his favourite Auden poems for ‘Selected Works’ in the summer, and Michael Longley, the Belfast poet and editor of MacNeice, to choose his favourite MacNeice poems for a conversation held at the SPL on 5 October. The list of poems, all of which may be found in the splendid new edition of MacNeice’s Collected Poems (edited by Peter McDonald, Faber & Faber), is given here, together with Michael Longley’s brief reflection on his choice. Robyn Marsack Director, Scottish Poetry Library www.spl.org.uk
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MICHAEL LONGLEY List of Louis MacNeice poems chosen Mayfly from Trilogy for X: Section ii Meeting Point Cushendun The Gardener Death of an Actress Autobiography Soap Suds Charon The Introduction. I believe that love poetry is at the core of the poetic enterprise, and that Louis MacNeice has written some of the finest love poems in the language. In them he focuses his sense of the transitoriness of everything, the fragility of experience. He also possesses a wonderful sense of place, and is most sensitive to locale and atmosphere when he writes about Ireland. I have selected ‘Cushendun’ from The Closing Album which was written in the autumn of 1939: the peacefulness of the Antrim countryside makes the coming war seem even more terrible. The Closing Album is almost my favourite MacNeice. He is also a brilliant portraitist, preternaturally alert to the nuances of human personality. ‘Death of an Actress’, his portrait of Florrie Forde, is both rumbustious and tender-hearted. ‘The Gardener’ I find almost unbearably moving. He always writes well about childhood: ‘Autobiography’ and ‘Soap Suds’ are deep, simple, perfect lyrics from different times in his life. In his last two or three collections MacNeice was pushing the lyric poem into very dark, bleak places. ‘Charon’ is utterly disenchanted – a chilling poem. ‘The Introduction’ is a nightmarish love poem that seems to bring us full circle. Despite the often dark themes and moods, MacNeice’s poetry flashes with vitality.
Michael Longley was born in Belfast in 1939, and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he read Classics. He has published eight collections of poetry including Gorse Fires (1991), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award, and The Weather in Japan (2000), which won the Hawthornden Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Irish Times Poetry Prize. His most recent collection Snow Water (2004) was awarded the Librex Montale Prize. His Collected Poems appeared in 2006. In 2001 he received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 2003 the Wilfred Owen Award. He and his wife, the critic Edna Longley, live and work in Belfast.
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MACNEICES AND MACNEPHEWS It’s no go the merrygoround, it’s no go the rickshaw, All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow. Their knickers are made of crêpe-de-Chine, their shoes are of python, Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with heads of bison. I must have been about 13, and in my favourite bookshop in my native Dublin, where I had caused some interest among the assistants by having ordered a book that turned out to have been banned by the Irish Censorship Board. I seem to have been unaware of the concern my interests aroused. The book was a Penguin by the criminologist F. Tennyson Jesse, thinly fictionalising the Thompson-Bywaters case (both were hanged in 1922 for Frederick Bywaters’s murder of Edith Thompson’s husband, the judge holding that her fantastic letters to him constituted conspiracy to murder) and I had hopes of becoming a criminal lawyer. What the Irish Censorship Board saw in it as too dangerous for innocent Irish eyes of any age I never found out, since although I acquired it later I never waded my full way through all of its hot-house pages. But the title had interested Michael Walshe, later the foremost scholarly antiquarian bookseller in Ireland, and he wanted to know if its words, A Pin to See the Peepshow, derived from Louis MacNeice’s ‘Bagpipe Music’, which he read to me from Kenneth Allott’s The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse (1950, and I think also banned later, presumably for Lawrence Durrell’s ‘Ballad of Good Lord Nelson’, or maybe for ‘Bagpipe Music’ since Censor vigilance was at its Pecksniffing keenest for Irish authorship). Walshe may simply have wanted to read; it is, in fact, an ideal poem for a schoolboy wanting to progress from poetic infancy. It has zest, mystery, anger, laughter, resolution, despair, heart, eyes, and head. It also has its music, although Walshe’s rendering, however celebratory, did not attempt that: I only realised it many years later when hearing Angus Calder declaim it to the Edinburgh University History Society so as to make his audience hear the pipes in the poem, I suppose I had never heard of Louis MacNeice, but I knew he was Irish without being told: the jokes seemed Scottish but the joker was one of ourselves, had to be. The fact that Walshe admired MacNeice, and may have felt (correctly, if so) that MacNeice was now the greatest living Irish poet writing in English did not exempt the icon from Dublin ambush. MacNeice had looked into the shop somewhere around this time, with a fawning, treacherous acolyte in possibly
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undesired tow, in the best manner of Sean O’Casey’s Joxer. The sidekick sidled up to Walshe asking with an unconvincing air of the impromptu: ‘Would you have any of Louis MacNeice’s poems in stock?’. Walshe was ready for some such ploy, and assuming as glib a patronising salesmanship as ever graced Oxford Street, replied that it was impossible to keep Mr MacNeice’s poems in stock, so great was the demand for them, outselling every other title in the bookshop as they invariably did. The sidekick returned to MacNeice, with a touch of objectivity in the manner of disclosure: ‘Eh, Lewee, that fella there says yewr poems sell betther than any bewk in the entire shop.’ The poet sent a scorching eye in Walshe’s direction: ‘Oh, he does, does he, the fucking bastard!’ (The adjective was one then not in common discourse (save from Mr Brendan Behan) but Walshe in retrospect acknowledged it as the mot juste on this occasion.) About 10 years later MacNeice was back in Dublin on what would be one of the last of his countless visits:(he would die a year later in September 1963, a few weeks after covering President John Kennedy’s visit to the home of his ancestors. The assignment, like that of the previous year, was for the New Statesman, and the 1962 target had also been a somewhat contrived pageant of ‘exile’s return’, being the celebration of Bloomsday and the opening of the Martello Tower known by now even in polite society for having staged the opening of Joyce’s Ulysses (or, more exactly, for having housed the events on which it was loosely based). MacNeice was there with his friend the ex-pastor (Presbyterian) W. R. Rodgers, a fellow-producer for the BBC, who told the story later to the historian E. R. R Green, my source. MacNeice and Rodgers were suffering the leech-like attentions of a local councillor who (ignoring the very vocal evidence of their Ulster origins) wanted to show the BBC fellows how superior was the intrinsic virtue of the Irish nation, a theme he opened with the whimsical air of a suburban La Rochefoucauld: ‘It is a strange thing that there is no word in the Irish language to describe, hyeh, Oscar Wilde’s trouble, hyeh!’ ‘I have just returned from Finland,’ replied MacNeice, awfully, ‘and it is a strange thing that in the Finnish language there is no word for snow.’ John MacDonald found a corpse, put it under the sofa, Waited till it came to life and hit it with a poker. Sold its eyes for souvenirs, sold its blood for whiskey, Kept its bones for dumb-bells to use when he was fifty.
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Is not that last verse the finest Irish furniture of corpse for Scottish use since Burke and Hare? The sumptuous new birth-centenary Collected Poems, lovingly edited by MacNeice’s longterm disciple and defender, Peter McDonald, may suddenly seem appallingly relevant to this verse (written a quartercentury before Peter McDonald’s birth, thus lacking him five years before the 50), but it limits its notes here to the apposite information that ‘whiskey’ was thus so Hibernically spelt until MacNeice brought out Eighty-Five Poems (1959) ‘when the correct Scottish spelling was substituted’. Just to remind Peter McDonald that we are as vigilant as John MacDonald’s corpse, we regret his failure to mention ‘Bagpipe Music’ having first appeared as a chapter in MacNeice’s I Crossed the Minch, his Hebrides book for Longmans (1938 (as dated on p. 802) not 1937 (as dated on p. 801)), in which first appearances of ‘The Hebrides’ and ‘Leaving Barra’ are noted here. This is not merely our pedantry: ‘Bagpipe Music’ takes on a new validity, as does Angus Calder’s rendition, when we realise it formed as did a new dimension in a tourist-conscious travel book, as did Hugh MacDiarmid’s first printing of ‘Island Funeral’ in The Islands of Scotland published by Batsford in 1939 and, like MacNeice’s Minch, researched in 1937. MacNeice and MacDiarmid were intellectually circling one another, suspiciously but receptively, in these years, culminating in MacDiarmid’s paying MacNeice the highest compliment in his well-stocked quiver, likening him to his own dearest friend Norman MacCaig (both poets grounded in classical scholarship). Edna Longley’s invaluable Louis MacNeice – a Study (1988) alliterates the context of ‘Bagpipe Music’, clearly subversive of its own market: it ‘continues his critique of consumerism’:
edge of autobiography. Edna Longley links ‘Bagpipe Music’ to ‘Carrickfergus’, a poem remembering the Antrim coast-town where MacNeice grew up as the Church of Ireland Rector’s child, but her linkage stresses ‘the formal importance of sounds. [Carrickfergus takes its cue not from a set quatrain, but from the ‘informing of that quatrain by the notes and voices of childhood. ‘Bagpipe Music’ finds yet another rhythm for the long couplet (already imitative of a river and traffic movement)’ – and the circular progress and cycling-style advance in the funfair – ‘including some particularly “vulgar” feminine rhymes: Blavatsky – taxi’. (Blavatsky’s insistence on her communion with vast spiritual heights receives as squalid a descent as could be asked in what the rhyme juxtaposes.)]
It’s no go the Yogi-Man, it’s no go Blavatsky, All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.
MacNeice himself stressed the ‘feminine rhyme’ motif but the term, however appealing to Edna Longley and ourselves, masks a deeper source. Angus Calder’s and its parent book’s insistence on its origin in Hebridean civilisation turns us back to Gaelic, whose revival MacNeice supposedly ridiculed but which he wanted to know. Its voices necessarily supplied any libretto we might allow as background to the bagpipe. Rhyme in Gaelic poetry is by vowel, hence ‘rickshaw/peepshow’ especially with an Ulster accent, shortening ‘peep’ and broadening ‘show’. It is English admittedly, to rhyme ‘sofa’ and ‘poker’: Welshvoice does it, but natural Scots and Irish will not: but the ‘--fa/-ker’ rhyme is irrelevant save for the vowel sounds which again with Ulsterspeak ‘-fa’ easily becoming ‘-fer’, ‘whiskey’/’fifty’ is perfect Gaelic rhyme and so is ‘Blavatsky/taxi’, the play with ‘tsk’ and ‘x’ being amusing irrelevance. However little MacNeice talked about his knowledge of all of this, he clearly grasped it. It forces us back on his Irish origin where Gaelic plays a curious part both as antecedent and as precedent.
The attack on consumerism wings initial, obvious arrows against the prostitution of love, firstly substituting for the childhood delights of carnival thrills of strange transport, the nastiness of peepingTom pleasures by machine-picture squints and the worthless ostentation of pretentious cars. Perhaps after all there was a link between Tennyson Jesse’s A Pin to See the Peep Show and the poem, but the book came first (1934) and ‘pin’ became ‘ticket’ (if it did) because cheap entry into salacious fantasy had to be replaced by the commerce of pretension, the peepshow entry-fee upgraded to theatre trappings. The Yogi-Man and Blavatsky are no go because religion, however assertive in the Hebrides, has now exhausted even its most exotic attractions for a hedonistic world. And we are now well honed into the cutting
Frederick Louis MacNeice was in fact as representative genealogically of the four kingdoms as could be asked. His paternal grandfather William Lindsay MacNeice from the West of Ireland died in 1906, the year before our MacNeice’s birth. His paternal grandmother, Alice Jane Howell (1839-1904), seems to have been Welsh. His maternal grandfather Martin Clesham (1831-1906) was said to have come from Scotland, bringing a wife, Christine, whose maiden name, Bush, presumably denoted English origin (she died in 1868, two years after the birth of her daughter, hence MacNeice’s English ancestry is the least certain of his points of ancestral departure). Little Fred (as he was first known) knew none of these grandparents but he dug out some data he recorded, and may have learned or inferred more.
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Grandfather Clesham is said to have been a Roman Catholic convert to Protestantism, which he almost certainly was, since families as a rule concealed any flaw in pure Protestant descent: Scots Catholicism in the early 19th-century probably means Gaelicspeaking. The MacNeice line may seem clear Anglophone, but grandfather Lindsay MacNeice had a father whose first names were ‘Ferguson John’, the first sounding like Anglicisation from a Gaelic patronymic, which would mean that Frederick Louis had Gaelic-speaking great-great-grandparents whose son Ferguson John was probably Anglophone. William Lindsay MacNeice is said to have been a ferocious anti-Catholic evangelical, a startling similarity to the ancestry of the leaders of the Irish Literary Renaissance (Wilde, Shaw, Synge,Yeats, O’Casey) and, like them, resulting in a strong teaching emphasis in their artistry. The anti-Catholicism may also mask a Catholic ancestry. Certainly MacNeice enjoyed claiming Gaelic ancestry from the names of the two husbands of Deirdre of the Sorrows, Conchobhar (or Conor) MacNessa and Naisi, both of which pleased him as putative early forms of MacNeice. He made up a cod genealogy also announcing his descent from St Brandon (the Navigator, usually rendered ‘Brendan’ but MacNeice’s spelling is in fact closer to the Gaelic ‘Breandán’), Stephen Dedalus, Don Quixote, Queen Victoria, the Playboy of the Western World, Hamlet, and Katherine of Aragon (the last, presumably, to show Catholic ancestry), but it also listed ‘Bishop Heber’ (partly in ribald since Bishop Heber MacMahon as a celibate Roman Catholic prelate should be childless, but partly also in rebellion, because MacMahon (160050), Bishop of Clogher, led a Catholic army against the Cromwellians, was defeated, taken prisoner, and hanged). The joke suddenly becomes exceedingly sinister when Clytemnestra appears in the genealogical table: the Mycenean Queen murdered by her own son. MacNeice seems to have believed (probably incorrectly) that his birth plunged his mother into physical and mental decline which ultimately killed her. This blazes through in ‘Bagpipe Music’ after some obvious bitter modernising of pretty Gaelic legends: Annie MacDougal went to milk, caught her foot in the heather, Woke to hear a dance record playing of Old Vienna. It’s no go your maidenheads, it’s no go your culture, All we want is a Dunlop tyre and the devil mend the puncture. The Laird O’ Phelps spent Hogmanay declaring he was sober,
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Counted his feet to prove the fact and found he had one foot over. Mrs Carmichael had her fifth, looked at the job with repulsion, Said to the midwife: ‘Take it away, I’m through with over-production.’ ‘…’Bagpipe Music’ is too routinely chosen to represent his lighter side,’ observes Edna Longley. God knows she’s right, Mrs MacNeice had Frederick Louis as her third, but ‘fifth’ works better in the context of the poem. Mrs MacNeice was half Scots, which may have induced the thought. And so Scotland sends MacNeice into self-mocking recollection of an infancy among maids, housekeepers, childminders, and eventually stepmother. It probably played its part in making his own multi-married life, and its antiromanticism forced materialism where he yearned as a boy and man amongst endless women for the mother he scarcely had. It’s no go for the gossip column, it’s no go for the Ceilidh, All we want is a mother’s help and a sugarstick for the baby. The loss of his mother seems to have permeated his sense of another loss, that of the West of Ireland whence his paternal ancestors had come and where his maternal grandparent lived. He was Belfast-born, Carrickfergus-reared, English-public-school educated, and yet he and his poetry were haunted by this land which tangibly could only be a paternal memory. It eerily likens him to the Gaelic poet of the early 18thcentury Aodhagán Ó Rathaille, whose verse bewails the loss of his MacCarthy masters exiled from west Munster 300 years before his time. It seems to have been a haven and a rejection. The new Catholic lordships were gaining control of land once dominated by MacNeices and worked by Cleshams, and what he disliked about North-eastern Ulster deepened his sense of exile and expulsion (‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget her cunning’). MacNeice did not feel himself an exile in England, merely an extension of his exile condition. He had grown up an Ulster Protestant, but conscious of softer voices around him from the Connacht (to him ‘Connaught’) past of his parents, and the gentle voice of a Tyrone-born Catholic maidservant. He records his clerical father as a Home Ruler, though the Rev. J. F. MacNeice may have simply accepted Home Rule as the wish of the Irish majority, irrespective of that majority’s Roman Catholicism. With great courage he refused to sign the Ulster Covenant pledging rejection of, and resistance to, Home Rule in 1912, despite the
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mass support for Covenant by the Protestant clergy headed by his own Bishop. He had been opposed when appointed to Carrickfergus shortly after Louis’s birth: the parish hostility was on the surface no more than vehement support of a local rival, but it involved Masonic and hence probably Orange rancour.Young MacNeice was thus an outsider from birth. (‘The politics of MacNeice’s Irish poems begin in childhood,’ explains Edna Longley with a slightly sardonic eye on her British audience, ‘because Irish politics begin with the family and not at voting age.’) The sea, the railway, symbolised and sounded ways of escape. But the new Ireland born in its terrible beauty in his boyhood added its sentence of exile to eastern Ulster’s. In the Irish canto (xvi) of his masterpiece Autumn Journal (1939) he turns on Sinn Féin and its new icons, so strangely different from what he could learn of those shelved with Home Rule: The bombs in the turnip sack, the sniper from the roof. Griffith, Connolly, Collins, where have they brought us? Ourselves alone! Let the round tower stand aloof In a world of bursting mortar! Let the school-children fumble their sums In a half-dead language; Let the censor be busy on the books; pull down the Georgian slums, Let the games be played in Gaelic. Let them grow beet-sugar; let them build A factory in every hamlet; Let them pigeon-hole the souls of the killed Into sheep and goats, patriots and traitors. The Irish nationalist revolution of 1912-23 had room in which their Ulster Protestant supporters (very few) could find some common ground, but once revolution had won (save for the six counties, with which the revolution was little concerned) the Irish Free State showed no interest in conciliation of potential latterday converts. The face of the state seemed implacably turned against Rugby and cricket; against the Irish who died fighting for the Allies in World War 1; against the freedom of cultural expression; against the architecture of the former ascendancy; against the English language. These were not necessarily the views of all the new rulers, all of the time: for instance, de Valera, Taoiseach 1932-48, attended a Rugby match to cheer Ireland and was declared ‘banned’ by the Gaelic Athletic Association; the Constitution’s recognition of English as the second official language did not thereby invite social pressures and graffiti against Englishspeaking (‘Bás do’n Bhéarla’ = Death to the English Language) but such things were urged by sacrosanct
patriotism. MacNeice in ‘Carrick[fergus] Revisited’ (1945?) cried: Torn before birth from where my fathers dwelt but acknowledged … … the pre-natal mountain is far away. Far, and getting farther. The Rev. J. F. MacNeice did return to the 26 counties as Bishop of Cashel in 1931 (its dwindling flock forced its union with Waterford and Lismore almost a century earlier and degraded it from archbishopric), so that Louis now lost Northern as well as (imaginary) Western Irish identities. Cashel had been the ancient seat of Owen Mór progenitor of the MacCarthys and O’Sullivans some 1,500 years earlier and was given to the Christian Church in 1101, but its peasantry had remained resolutely Catholic, and Bishop MacNeice readily accepted translation to the combined see of Down, Connor and Dromore in 1934, remaining there until his death in 1942. The work was much harder (Connor, including Belfast, was split off from the rest under the next bishop) but it was real. Louis MacNeice’s belief (rearticulated in 1957 in an unfinished book posthumously published with what could be found of his earlier draft autobiography, The Strings Are False (1965) that his parents ‘obvious[ly} ... both ... vastly preferred [Connemara] to Ulster’ could not be extended to the southern heartland. Louis asserted here that ‘The West of Ireland’ was a ‘phrase which still stirs me, if not like a trumpet, like a fiddle half heard through a cattle fair’ which certainly gave his fantasy a local habitation and a name. But his ‘little visual evidence – two photographs of Achill Island, framed in plush’ may have meant more than he realised, for in the early 1840s Achill, starved of sufficient Roman Catholic clergy, fell prey to efficient, Irish-speaking Protestant evangelists for the Church of Ireland who took nearly half the island. There was little outside of the great houses (many burnt down in 1920-23) to speak for the Protestant South, but Achill was one such place, whose Protestantism cut across an entire society. It was a world where Protestants like the parent MacNeices could live on pleasant terms with Catholic neighbours, at least until war came in 1920-23, and the Protestant population of the Irish Free State at its foundations in 1922 had halved within that area from its 10% at the century’s turn. Protestant Ireland had fled north or east, often without the shadow of an excuse of a job to go to. The young MacNeices recalled their parents’ ecumenism, but the years took their toll of that commodity even in the Bishop’s keeping: in his later career he became an evangelist for Protestant reunion (of which the Ulster Covenant he had rejected offered
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an excellent foretaste). The most Louis MacNeice could do was to reject his father’s Protestantism and its Catholic opposite with it, and the fairy legends which had offered their own belief simply became grotesque or brazen charlatanism. Willie Murray cut his thumb, couldn’t count the damage. Took the hide of an Ayrshire cow and used it for a bandage. His brother caught three hundred cran when the seas were lavish. Threw the bleeders back again and went upon the parish.
Scotland where similar proscriptions are hung up in the cultural Forum from time to time; Scott, Stevenson, Conan Doyle, Barrie, Buchan have all been subjected to it. MacDiarmid from time to time sought to ignite controversy by flytings where, finding some Edwin Muir too weak for his weapons, he took on Scott or Stevenson or some other bonnie fechter.
It’s no go the Herring Board, it’s no go the Bible. All we want is a packet of fags when our hands are idle. MacNeice continued to revert to Irish themes and create Irish poems for the rest of his life, including ‘Prologue’, the overture to the anthology he projected and commissioned but never rounded off on ‘The Character of Ireland’. But his multiplicity of subjects and reluctant Englishness of location qualified him for the usual chorus of Devil’s Advocates (which in Dublin far exceeds denizens of the Bar Library and all other bars within reasonable radius) to frame the usual denial of his Irishness. Almost any Irish writer of distinction has suffered variants of this persecution from the Paddyer-than-thou legions. But its vehemence and extent in MacNeice’s case seems to augur something more than the routine disembowelling. The process invites comparison with
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MacDiarmid’s polar opposite was presumably Mrs Grundy (so anathemised by Willa Muir, who as it proved became MacDiarmid’s real enemy among the Muirs) and Mrs Grundy’s nauseating respectability did much more injury to Stevenson’s Scottish reputation than a fellow-roisterer like MacDiarmid would ever do, or want to do. Scotland, lacking the penalties of freedom, had fewer means of spoiling fortunes by denial of Scottish birthright to Scottish writers. Rivalry in a convert pack saw the same phenomenon: Cardinal Manning seeking to wrongfoot Cardinal Newman (before their Cardinalates); Ernest Oldmeadow witchhunting Evelyn Waugh for his preconversion novels which had sold much better than all of Oldmeadows. Burns had more or less anticipated the full technique in ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’. What invites attention to Irish denial of MacNeice’s Irish claims is their purpose and longevity. D. P. Moran’s denial of Yeats’s Irishness, Daniel Corkery’s denial of the Irishness of almost all literary Protestants save Synge, the Catholic Standard’s simple response to bans and consequent boycotts in the first year of the Irish Theatre Festival ‘We Don’t Want Joyce, O’Casey or Beckett’, Heterosexual and pseudo-Heterosexual Ireland’s denial of Oscar Wilde’s Irishness, all carried their own nauseating logic, and the motives of all were at bottom a crass self-interest, usually a sense of threat to their title to rule their own dunghills. But MacNeice won the rancour of Denis Donoghue in an extraordinarily dismissive review of MacNeice’s Selected Literary Criticism as edited by Alan Heuser (London Review of Books, 23 April 1987). As review it was a disaster, nit-picking at a couple of the reprinted pieces and disgracefully (given its official duty) ignoring the rest. The late MacNeice in ‘Eliot and the Adolescent’, an essay for a 1948 Symposium on Eliot, had noted that his first reading of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ saw ‘no form in it and, with the exception of the mermaids at the end, got little kick from it’. Donoghue responded with the ludicrously egocentric demand as to who wanted to know MacNeice’s first reactions, and why not his second ones? The jibe was not merely cheap: it was crazy. It is very useful to know first reactions of a critic to a poem, especially when the critic is a poet, and few critics have the honesty to disclose initial follies of the kind. Then MacNeice did also give his maturer judgments. And his subject was an enquiry into Eliot’s impact on the adolescent. Donoghue is unlikely even to have been original on the point, since a scholar of such breadth of reading as he can hardly have missed Orwell ‘Inside the Whale’ (1940, reprinted in his Critical Essays (1946) attacking MacNeice’s Modern
Poetry: a Personal Essay (1938). MacNeice had quoted E. M. Forster on his initial reaction to ‘Prufrock’ (it seems only fair to say my own initial reaction to ‘Prufrock’ was to find it exactly the poem to read when suffering from a bad case of hangover). Forster reading it in 1917 found it a very welcome relief from the high patriotics passing for poetry in mid-war (which reminds us that ‘Prufrock’ – like Yeats’s ‘Irish Airman’ – anticipated the Sassoons and Owens coming to public knowledge later in the war, or after it). Then Orwell quoted MacNeice after Forster, finding the comment ‘somewhat’ smug: Ten years later less feeble protests were to be made by poets and the human heritage carried on rather differently … The contemplation of a world of fragments becomes boring and Eliot’s successors are more interested in tidying up. Forster had first called Prufrock ‘feeble ... and the more congenial for being feeble’. (The 30-year-old MacNeice may have been smug, but he was not a bully.) Orwell was still abrasively hostile to the proStalin Popular Front after witnessing its brutalities against dissident Marxists in Civil War Spain, all the more when its cultural evangelists were, like himself, public-schoolmen, but, unlike Donoghue, be made a good historic point while, so to say, on the Trot: Similar remarks are scattered throughout Mr MacNeice’s book. What he wishes us to believe is that Eliot’s ‘successors’ (meaning Mr MacNeice and his friends) have in some way protested more effectively than Eliot did by publishing ‘Prufrock’ at the moment when the Allied armies were assaulting the Hindenberg Line. Just where these ‘protests’ are to be found I do not know. But in the contrast between Mr Forster’s comment and Mr MacNeice’s lies all the difference between a man who knows what the 191418 war was like and a man who barely remembers it. The truth is that in 1917 there was nothing that a thinking and sensitive person could do, except to remain human, if possible. And a gesture of helplessness, even of frivolity, might be the best way of doing that. If I had been a soldier fighting in the Great War, I would sooner have got hold of ‘Prufrock’ than [Ian Hay’s] The First Hundred Thousand ... We may welcome Orwell’s breath of fresh air while unkindly noting that Orwell (or rather Eric Blair) in
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1914 (and probably also in 1917) was a chauvinistic young teenager whooping it up for King and country, and MacNeice aged 10 – or at least from 8 to 14 – seems to have lived in perpetual fear of war at firsthand, as his opening to Autumn Journal’s Canto xvi says: Nightmare leaves fatigue: We envy men of action Who sleep and wake, murder and intrigue Without being doubtful, without being haunted. And I envy the intransigence of my own Countrymen who shoot to kill and never See the victim’s face become their own Or find his motive sabotage their motives. So reading the memoirs of Maud Gonne, Daughter of an English mother and a soldier father, I note how a single purpose can be founded on A jumble of opposites: Dublin Castle, the vice-regal ball, The embassies of Europe, Hatred scribbled on a wall, Gaols and revolvers. And I remember, when I was little, the fear Bandied among the servants That Casement would land at the pier With a sword and a horde of rebels; And how we used to expect, at a later date, When the wind blew from the west, the noise of shooting Starting in the evening at eight In Belfast in the York Street district; And the voodoo of the Orange bands Drawing an iron net through darkest Ulster, Flailing the limbo lands – The linen mills, the long wet grass, the ragged hawthorn. And one read black were the other read white, his hope The other man’s damnation: Up the Rebels, To Hell with the Pope, And God Save – as you prefer – the King or Ireland. Orwell may not have known MacNeice’s Great War (although be could have picked up Autumn Journal while writing ‘Inside the Whale’). But Donoghue, however retrospectively, must. He did quote Autumn Journal xvi some lines further down:
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Such was my country and I thought I was well Out of it, educated and domiciled in England, Though yet her name keeps ringing like a bell In an under-water belfry. Why do we like being Irish? Partly because It gives us a hold on the sentimental English As members of a world that never was, Baptized with fairy water; And partly because Ireland is small enough To be still thought of with a family feeling, And because the waves are rough That split her from a more commercial culture ... Yes, I suppose so,’ jeered Donoghue, ‘and I have to concede Yeats gave poets the lead in this kind of sentiment, good enough for Portland Place’ [BBC Broadcasting Studios]. But it’s unworthy matter, after all, and too slack to be taken seriously. Here, as Wilde would say, the highest as the lowest criticism is a mode of autobiography: let the reader decide whether MacNeice’s verse or Donoghue’s comments are unworthy and slack. What, after all, did Donoghue mean MacNeice was unworthy of? Donoghue himself (to me, otherwise an admiring former pupil) was unworthy of himself, and he probably the greatest Irish critic of his time on most modern writers from Whitman to Yeats (thinking of two of his sparkling profundities. What reduced him to inanity on MacNeice? such as: His poems about Ireland present the place as beautiful, but dumb. He has no interest in the Irish Literary Revival or the provocations which issued in it; he thought the attempt to revive the Irish language was daft – an error of judgment, in my view – and he deplored, as I do not, Irish neutrality in the war. Indeed, what disables MacNeice from consideration as a precursor [of modern Ulster poets] is that his work touches Irish history and sentiment only occasionally and opportunistically. He was not sufficiently interested in what was going on. Edna Longley and Peter McDonald duly took knives and forks to this in subsequent issues, Longley pointing out that MacNeice’s Ireland was ‘beautiful but deadly’, McDonald asking was an Irishman only
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an Irishman when he was analysing the Irish revival, endorsing wartime neutrality or singing the praises of the Gaelic League? They might have recalled Conor Cruise O’Brien’s definition of Irishness in a writer as showing the person has in some way been maimed or mauled by Ireland: Donoghue’s notions of opportunism seemed to include revelling in terror of death, and the very canto whence he quoted from Autumn Journal thrusts the wound in the reader’s face. They could hardly be blamed from avoiding the supremely personal response of inquiring why on earth a sensitive and intelligent critic like Donoghue could write garbage like ‘not sufficiently interested in what was going on’ about a child terrified by rumours, shots, drums, graffiti. But, 20 years after, the question still has to be answered if we are to make sense of MacNeice’s lrishness and its enemies. Edna Longley put it brutally enough: ‘When Donoghue congratulates himself on being more Irish than MacNeice he simply betrays his own Irishness is of a kind that does not – will not – admit MacNeice’s.’ She reminded Donoghue that the Irish Literary Revival in its time had been under suspicion of being ‘un-national’ (especially by the usual suspects such as D. P. Moran in his hectoring weekly, the Dublin Leader). And she stressed that MacNeice was inspirational to poets who in differing ways from MacNeice, and from one another ‘have experienced the tensions of Belfast – London – Dublin’. Donoghue found this point the ‘most interesting’ thing in her letter, stressing that he himself simply visited London and Belfast-Dublin was enough tension for him. This, too, was ‘interesting’ (a term much used in the Ulster of these years as synonymous with ‘subversive’ or ‘dubious’). As McDonald had asked, did Donoghue find MacNeice too Northern or too Protestant to be an appropriate precursor to modern Ulster poets? (Certainly he could hardly object to MacNeice himself being preoccupied by Belfast – Dublin – London, since London was the Irish capital up to 1922, spanning MacNeice’s first 15 years.) The problem was therefore that MacNeice, however dead, was in some way dangerous to Donoghue’s beliefs, or perhaps Donoghue’s instincts. Donoghue had begun his review by agreeing with the poet and translator from Gaelic Thomas Kinsella who in his New Oxford Book of Irish Verse had derided a Northern Irish Renaissance as ‘largely a journalistic entity’ (less convincing an exorcism than they seemed to think, most modern history having started as a journalistic entity). Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, John Montague, Paul Muldoon, Seamus Deane, Michael Longley were ‘individual poets, not a school’ (nobody less ignorant than Chris Woodhead would envisage a
school capable of housing Seamus Deane and Michael Longley simultaneously. Donoghue continued: ‘They are not even two rival schools, though some of them have started fabricating a split, presumably in the hopes of establishing that there are real forces at war.’ There were certainly real forces at war, some of which enjoyed the support of Seamus Deane, while others did not: could Donoghue have meant anything quite as crude? But schools and schoolmasters were merely mislabelled packaging, and individual existence as poets has never negated the widespread influence of a John the Baptiser in a previous generation.Yeats, for one, was likely to influence all the named Ulster poets, and, as natural follow up the Ulster poet Louis MacNeice who wrote The Poetry of W. B.Yeats (1941), admitted even by Donoghue to be ‘a good book’). It would be noticeable then and later that Ulster poets would admit at least the presence if not always the influence of MacNeice among the stars twinkling over their poetic conceptions; the philosophic Republic made no such admission. MacNeice never seems to have been prescribed, nor even recommended, for Leaving Certificate English for secondary schools, although of the associates with whom MacNeice was too often lumped, Auden was frequently assigned and even Stephen Spender (a vastly inferior poet to MacNeice) squeezed his way into honourable mention. But Denis Donoghue had grown up in Northern Ireland, in circumstances he disclosed in his memoir Warrenpoint some four years later. His father had been a Catholic sergeant in the United Kingdom’s Royal Irish Constabulary who elected to retain his rank and enter the newly-formed Royal Ulster Constabulary in 1923 and who retired in 1946 with no further promotion. Northern Ireland preferred to favour its Protestant population or, alternatively, reluctantly to promote its members since all Catholics were to be regarded as potential enemies of the state. The son of the sergeant who diligently wore out his shoeleather and tholed his degradation in the service of the state which scorned him, saw the cult of the son of the Bishop promoted up and down the country as a fresh insult. Donoghue himself had given his teaching life to Ireland (at any rate up to his fifties) and was he to witness modern Ulster poets canonise a more prodigal son who appeared to remember his Irishness at frivolous will? All the more because Donoghue had deserted his usual academic objectivity in pain from a private wound, he could not concede a comparable hurt in MacNeice. All the more because Donoghue would not (at least until writing Warrenpoint) want to admit how close he was to MacNeice, even the MacNeice of ‘Suited for Recorders’ written in Greece (notes the admirable Peter McDonald) in 1951:
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Pride in your history is pride In living when your fathers died, Is pride in taking your own pulse And counting in you someone else. …
The sound of fight is silent long That began the ancient wrong; Long the voice of tears is still That wept of old the endless ill.
For pride in being alive is what? Is being what yourself are not, Is being a world which must outlive All you take from it or give.
In my heart it has not died, The war that sleeps on Severn’s side; They cease not fighting, east and west, On the marches of my breast.
Your Alter Egos, present, past. Or future even, could not last Did your word only prove them true; Though you choose them, yet they chose you. …
Here the traceless armies yet Trample, rolled in blood and sweat; They kill and kill and never die; And I think that each is I.
In and of the world and yet Distinct from it, our task is set To become Atlas while we can And bear the world which made us man. ... And you, a would-be player too, Will give those angry ghosts their due Who threw their voices far as doom Greatly in a little room. It harks back to Yeats’s ‘great hatred, little room/ Maimed us from the start;/I carry from my mother’s womb/A fanatic heart’, but its metrical precursor (while we’re admitting ourselves precursed) is more formidable, and a poem well-known to MacNeice, Housman’s ‘The Welsh Marches’. Its language is far more brutal than anything Donoghue or MacNeice or even Yeats might want to own, yet unlike all three the poet makes no claim to speak for himself. (The most we might guess was that Housman may have known or desired some part-Welsh lad (one of the many Shropshire lads in that grimly self-contradictory sequence): Ages since the vanquished bled Round my mother’s marriage-bed; There the ravens feasted far About the open house of war: When Severn down to Bui Coloured with the death of man,
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Couched upon her brother’s grave The Saxon got me on the slave.
None will part us, none undo The knot that makes one flesh of two, Sick with hatred, sick with pain, Strangling – When shall we be slain? When shall I be dead and rid Of the wrong my father did? How long, how long, till spade and hearse Put to sleep my mother’s curse? There is nothing in MacNeice or Yeats to equal the agony of this, however painful and poetic the results of Yeats’s passion for Maud Gonne (who inspired very different but perhaps no less profound response in MacNeice), or whatever depths of yearning and rejection gave poetry to MacNeice’s graded divergences from his father and guilt for the death of his mother. Who did what to Housman to elicit this? Or must we conclude with scholarly austerity or bone-idle laziness (same thing, sometimes) that it was all an exercise? I shall be mad today (said the poet) Tear out my eyes and cut strips of my skin for garters. Tomorrow I shall simmer down so you won’t know it By the time we take tea with the vicar’s daughters. After all, translating Aeschylus’s Agamemnon to the approval of leading fellow classicist university teachers, as MacNeice did should require passion as well as professionalism, and may not be all that artificial: it is Agamemnon in which his wife Clytemnaestra kills, the
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sequel where her son kills her. Housman preferred his classical publication to be acid and awesome academicals. But Yeats, however untrained in classics, made new poetry of Sophocles’s Oedipus plays. Wilde, of course, had been trained in the classics, (though preferring his uncles’ Bible for stage adaptation). So had MacNeice. And so had Michael Longley. If we took seriously Donoghue’s protest against the canonisation of MacNeice by modern Ulster poets (and admit such a cult is merely affectation if it becomes a solemn ceremony for a school), the thing would have to be a matter of personal recognition in each case: as MacNeice says, ‘counting in you someone else’. It may be that Poet A, the influence, is something Poet B, the influenced, would be as anxious to lose as Housman’s Anglo-Welsh lad to lose his life (a nice mathematical measurement, this: the Anglo-Welsh lad is one youth created by Houseman who doesn’t contemplate suicide). MacNeice may well have felt like this about Yeats in the intervals of writing his critical study of Yeats’s poetry and generally living in its long shadow; he may have felt it, differently when excessively and sometimes seemingly inseparately linked to Auden (and Spender and Day Lewis whom he knew before the hyphen). On the other hand, Longley doesn’t feel it about MacNeice, not that his poems have ever said, anyway. For one thing, you don’t denounce as an Old Man of the Sea the poet whom your wife has made the subject of so great a critical study on her part. Michael Longley may usually look like the lion after finding his old friend Androcles, but when Edna Longley is attacked Heaven help the guilty wretch meeting that lion. In fact Michael Longley’s love for his wife – the basis of so many of his poems, open or subconscious, allusive or half-disclosed – meant that MacNeice was not a choice for him but a certainty. His judicious selection of MacNeice poems appeared the same year as her study: more recently their and MacNeice’s publishers, Faber and Faber, have brought out (2001) his selection of his selection with a fresh introduction (both his introductions being welcomes to the stranger to MacNeice as well as benevolent reflections for the votary). Cape now brings out Michael Longley’s own Collected Poems, and the reader may enjoy correlating the classicists. Longley is essentially a happy poet, disclosing Nature with the delight of a Kenneth Grahame rather than the theologising of a Wordsworth, all the more when it is clear he knows how to write poetry about animals which will interest children rather than keeping child and animal suspended in some HeathRobinsonian balance with the operator’s eye firmly on the respectful audience. Longley plays with versions of passages in Homer rather than having Aeschylus inescapably devouring the poet-translator. Yet the Ulster war makes contemporary what Homer had left there for us three millennia ago: Longley’s grim rendition of Odysseus’s house-cleaning having taken savage vengeance on the suitors (repulsive in Greek or English great as was its cause) means that Longley’s title ‘The Butchers’ brings the beef back to our own side doors. War forced Ireland back into MacNeice’s verse when one of his best friends died in naval war and his ‘Neutrality’ hymned his former dreams of Connacht to end:
But then look eastward from your heart, there bulks A continent, close, dark, as archetypal sin. While to the west of your own shores the mackerel Are fat – on the flesh of your kin. The gentle Michael Longley might seem remote from such indictment. But gentleness cannot survive the knowledge that the slain are all our sons. His ‘Wreaths’, for instance, write of Ulster war victims, and almost as dreadfully as MacNeice on mackerel the culinary preoccupations confront us with our own cannibalism (Edna Longley’s last letter to London Review of Books (4 June 1987) signed off affirming that MacNeice is ‘too big a fish to finish in Professor Donoghue’s jaws’). De Valera’s Ireland had no choice but neutrality, and its belligerence alongside the UK would probably have meant pincer-threat against Britain after successful German invasion of the smaller isle; but that takes nothing from MacNeice’s art and anger. Similarly Michael Longley confronts the true believers with the deaths of the humanity for whom the embattled Christians proclaimed their crusades: one of his ‘Wreaths’ is for a Greengrocer: He ran a good shop, and he died Serving even the death-dealers Who found him busy as usual Behind the counter, organised With holly wreaths for Christmas, Astrologers or three wise men Who may shortly be setting out For a small house up the Shankill Or the Falls, should pause on their way To buy gifts at Jimmy Gibson’s shop, Dates and chestnuts and tangerines. The Ulster war tore MacNeice from his grave, and he made a better resurrection than the Cuchulainns and Williams of Orange recruited as murderous angels. MacNeice’s disciples get scepticism before passion, realism before romanticism, buried loss and uncertain gain, firm exit and sardonic return. And also they get music, sometimes a music whose apparent cynicism forces the reader back into being, but a being which knows it has been warned: It’s no go the picture palace, it’s no go the stadium, It’s no go the country cot with a pot of pink geraniums, It’s no go the government grants, it’s no go the elections, Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension. It’s no go honey love, it’s no go my poppet; Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit. The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever. But if you break the bloody glass you won’t hold up the weather.
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