Six Poets

by Alan Bennett

  (first part)

  When clerks and navvies fondle

  Beside canals their wenches,

  In rapture or in coma

  The haunches that they handle,

  And the orange moon sits idle

  Above the orchard slanted –

  Upon such easy evenings

  We take our loves for granted.

  But when, as now, the creaking

  Trees on the hills of London

  Like bison charge their neighbours

  In wind that keeps us waking

  And in the draught the scalloped

  Lampshade swings a shadow,

  We think of love bound over –

  The mortgage on the meadow.

  And one lies lonely, haunted

  By limbs he half remembers,

  And one, in wedlock, wonders

  Where is the girl he wanted;

  And some sit smoking, flicking

  The ash away and feeling

  For love gone up like vapour

  Between the floor and ceiling.

  But now when winds are curling

  The trees do you come closer,

  Close as an eyelid fasten

  My body in darkness, darling;

  Switch the light off and let me

  Gather you up and gather

  The power of trains advancing

  Further, advancing further.

  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.

  Les Sylphides

  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.

  from Autumn Journal

  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 sol
icits

  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.

  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 – they had diminished him. And in this respect, the common sense that makes him so sympathetic diminished MacNeice. Perhaps he recognised this:

  The Slow Starter

  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 ‘Shares in MacNeice are rising …’: something Larkin was perhaps predicting as early as 1963 when he wrote of MacNeice’s ‘poetry of everyday life, of shop windows, traffic policemen, ice cream sodas, lawn mowers and an uneasy awareness of what the newsboys were shouting’.

  ‘And then,’ one feels Larkin is thinking, ‘then comes me!’

  There is, though, appreciation much closer to home – 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 – Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon – 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 (‘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.

  To Posterity

  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 wonde
r 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.

  Death of an Actress

  I see from the paper that Florrie Forde is dead –

  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 ‘Tipperary’, 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