Dancing the War

Towards the end of Modern Poetry, his idiosyncratic book of literary criticism, the Anglo-Irish poet Louis MacNeice tells a story of the great Russian ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. MacNeice is arguing that language doesn’t simply describe experience but complements and informs – perhaps even expands – it. ‘Nijinsky, just before he went mad, got up to give a dance, saying “I am going to dance the War,”’ MacNeice writes. ‘In the same way the poet dances his experiences in words.’

Modern Poetry was published in November 1938, a year in which MacNeice himself danced furiously in words. It was one of four books he had out that year. In April, his third book of poems, The Earth Compels, had appeared, alongside I Crossed the Minch, a travel book about a Hebridean journey. Also published in November was a book of reportage about London Zoo – called, simply, Zoo. Then, as if that were not enough, in the closing months of 1938 MacNeice wrote Autumn Journal, a book-length poem in twenty-four cantos charting his memories, thoughts and feelings as a tumultuous year wound to a close. It is almost as if he felt time was running out. It wasn’t an unreasonable thought. The German annexation of Austria had begun in March that year. The Republican cause was crawling towards defeat in Spain. September would see the Munich crisis, in which Neville Chamberlain would trade part of Czechoslovakia for a scrap of paper promising peace. ‘Urgent’ is a much over-used word in book reviews and blurbs, but it properly applies to Autumn Journal, written in ignorance of how history would unfold while also full of the horror of knowing exactly how it would: ‘The heavy panic that cramps the lungs and presses / The collar down the spine’. As it happens, time wasn’t on his side. MacNeice turned 31 in the autumn of 1938, and he was already more than halfway through his life: he died of viral pneumonia in 1963. Autumn Journal is arguably his creative apex. Written with his characteristically poignant joie de vivre, it takes the measure of his life to date with melancholic wit and candour, while wrestling with what the terrors of totalitarianism and an inevitable war will mean both for him personally and for the world he knows. Joy and dread alike course through the poem’s veins. MacNeice was born in 1907 in Belfast – ‘between the mountains and the gantries’, he remembered – when Ireland was still united under colonial rule. His father was an Anglican rector, and later bishop, who supported Home Rule; he grew up in Carrickfergus, a few miles north of Belfast along the shores of the lough. He was closer to his mother: ‘Mother was comfort and my father was somewhat alarm,’ he wrote in The Strings Are False, an unfinished memoir begun in 1940. His had been a difficult birth and he came to believe that he was responsible for his mother’s subsequent ill-health. A growth in her uterus was treated by a hysterectomy; the depression that came with it proved untreatable. She was taken into a nursing home in August 1913. Louis never saw her again. She died in December the following year. ‘When I was five the black dreams came,’ his 1940 poem ‘Autobiography’ runs. ‘Nothing after was quite the same.’ Those bad dreams never left him. It’s probably not a coincidence that Canto XVI of Autumn Journal – about the Ireland of his childhood – is prefaced by a nightmare. After schooling at Sherborne and Marlborough, MacNeice went to Oxford. He would become inextricably linked in the public’s mind with his fellow left-wing poets at Oxford: W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis. The ultra-conservative Catholic poet Roy Campbell mocked them collectively as MacSpaunday in a vicious satire after the war. But they were never really much of a clique and MacNeice was in any case always some way apart from it. Apartness is one of his defining qualities. As a student he was dandy enough for John Betjeman, a Marlborough contemporary, to describe him as ‘that fucking little Oxford aesthete’; but he was also a great aficionado of rugby. He always kept his distance from ideology, too. While both Spender and Day Lewis joined the Communist Party, MacNeice was more equivocal. ‘I don’t even belong to the Left Book Club,’ he tells his Guardian Angel in a somewhat arch dialogue with himself that he included in I Crossed the Minch. ‘My soul is all for moving towards the classless society. But . . . with my heart and my guts I lament the passing of class . . . A man for me is still largely characterized by what he buys, by his suits, his books, the meals he gives you, his chair covers . . .’ At the time his lack of political commitment was thought by many to be a weakness. Reviewing Autumn Journal in June 1939, the Trotskyist Julian Symons dismissed it as ‘bourgeois’, but MacNeice understood that the intellectual left would be irrelevant to the struggle against tyranny that was fast approaching. ‘The nicest people in England have always been the least / Apt to solidarity or alignment,’ he writes in Autumn Journal. ‘But all of them must now align against the beast.’ He left Oxford with a First in Greats and the prospect of a job lecturing in Classics at the University of Birmingham. He also left with a wife: on the last day of the summer term in his final year he married Marie Ezra, stepdaughter of John Beazley, a professor of classical archaeology. MacNeice had lodged in their house in his third year. The couple moved into a flat in a converted stable block in the suburb of Selly Park. Marie ‘saw the stable as an Enchanted Island where the two of them would live happy ever after’, remembered a friend. But it wouldn’t last. Their son Daniel was born in 1934, and the following year Marie ran away to America with a graduate student, leaving husband and son behind. They divorced in November 1936; she remarried the same month. By this time, MacNeice had moved to London with Daniel and a borzoi called Betsy. He quickly began an affair with the artist Nancy Sharp, then married to fellow artist William Coldstream; Louis had a voice like black velvet, she remembered. Sharp illustrated I Crossed the Minch and accompanied him to the Hebrides. The family of their host on Lewis, MacNeice’s friend Hector MacIver, were later appalled to discover that Louis and Nancy weren’t married to one another: ‘more than twenty years after, my family still became virulent when discussing the “immorality” of his visit’, MacIver said. By the summer of 1938, however, the affair was rumbling to a halt. In September, when he wrote Canto IV of Autumn Journal, they were still in love. At least, he was in love with her. ‘September has come, it is hers,’ he wrote, ‘Who has left a scent on my life and left my walls / Dancing over and over with her shadow, / Whose hair is twined in all my waterfalls / And all of London littered with remembered kisses.’ But by December and Canto XIX it was over. ‘When we are out of love,’ he writes, ‘how were we ever in it?’ Nancy had already met Michael Spender, Stephen’s brother, whom she would marry. When she first read Autumn Journal, she sat on the Tube and sobbed. It’s not clear when MacNeice first planned Autumn Journal; no notes or drafts survive. By mid-October T. S. Eliot, his editor at Faber, was asking if it would be ready for publication in the spring. By late November, MacNeice was drafting copy for the poem’s blurb in Faber’s catalogue. ‘It contains rapportage, metaphysics, ethics, lyrical emotion, autobiography, nightmare,’ he wrote. ‘The writing is direct; anyone could understand it . . . it is both a panorama and a confession of faith.’ It was published in May 1939. The poem visits all the past stages of MacNeice’s life – including two trips to Spain bookending the Civil War – while also recording the pressure of events on everyday life. It begins in August in Hampshire, but it is already looking back to the First World War, to an idea of sequestered Englishness that is already out of date and out of time: ‘Close and slow, summer is ending in Hampshire, / Ebbing away down ramps of shaven lawn where close-clipped yew / Insulates the lives of retired generals and admirals.’ MacNeice’s private hinterlands, and in particular the perspectives offered by his classical education, intersect everywhere with the great tragic hinterland of history, which stretches back beyond the ‘end-all mud’ of Gallipoli and Flanders to Athens and Sparta: ‘the crisis hangs / Over the roofs like a Persian army’, he writes of Chamberlain’s negotiations at Munich. Time turns over, experience and memory rush on, driven by the swing of MacNeice’s lines, which are somehow both languid and propulsive, towards a destination suffocating in its certainty: ‘And we think “This must be wrong, it has happened before, / Just like this before, we must be dreaming.”’ And yet Autumn Journal is not a bleak poem. The deep immersion in modernity and life that is everywhere in his writing is in Autumn Journal in particular, stuffed as it is with gorgeously quotidian detail. This is a poetry capacious enough for cinema and jazz as much as Shelley and lieder. But it is also a poetry of cocktails and stockings, of Christmas shopping and dairy carts, of platform tickets and the football pools, of Schiaparelli and cigarettes, of sizzling bacon and the smell of French bread on Charlotte Street. Whatever the opposite of urban alienation is, MacNeice defines it. ‘You must not think that good things are only to be found in Xanadu or in past history,’ he once wrote in a school essay. ‘The dwellers in Xanadu never saw a van going down the street and piled with petrol tins in beautiful reds and yellows and greens.’ London has never looked lovelier than it does through his loving eyes. ‘What I feel makes life worth living is not the clever scores but the surrenders,’ he wrote in The Strings Are False, and Autumn Journal is a great poem to surrender to because it is itself a surrender to life. But its surrender is also an act of resistance as the world MacNeice knew buckled and warped under the weight of history; what is worth remembering is worth fighting for, and remembering itself is part of the struggle. Every trivial human pleasure and distraction is about to be swept away by the blunt reality of war: ‘No one can stop the cycle’, he writes. But the cycle gives hope too. That’s one reason every image from memory and experience here is so clear: the poem is an act of faith in art and memory, in the gorgeous importance of daily life. It is, in its own way, a brave and defiant work. In Hyde Park, he notes, there are protest meetings ‘simply to avow / The need to hold the ditch’. Autumn Journal is his own avowal, his own ditch. It is a great long shout of love for life and humanity with all its fears and terrors, for the need ‘to go out tomorrow as the others do / And build the falling castle / Which has never fallen, thanks / . . . to the human animal’s endless courage.’ ‘A poem . . . is a physical organism,’ MacNeice wrote in a book about W. B. Yeats, written in 1939. ‘The background of a poem, its origin, its purpose, its ingredients, can be analysed and formulated, but the poem itself can only be experienced.’ On this reading, Autumn Journal isn’t a poem full of life: it is both one of life’s great literary experiences and that very life itself.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 87 © Mathew Lyons 2025