Six Poets (17 page)

This must have been more irritating for Spender, Day Lewis and Co. than it was for Auden, though it's true they all knew one another, had been at the same schools or known one another at university, and sometimes collaborated. But then came the war and they went their different ways, some of them not seeming to survive the loss of their corporate identity, just as actors who have been a big hit when with the National Theatre or the Royal Shakespeare Company then go off on their own and are lost sight of. One should never underestimate the importance of one's
setting
. When Louis MacNeice died in 1963, an obituary (admittedly in a Chicago newspaper) identified him as ‘a writer with the BBC' and concluded: ‘He was formerly a poet.'

I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries

To the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams:

Thence to Smoky Carrick in County Antrim

Where the bottle-neck harbour collects the mud which jams

The little boats beneath the Norman castle,

The pier shining with lumps of crystal salt;

The Scotch Quarter was a line of residential houses

But the Irish Quarter was a slum for the blind and halt.

The brook ran yellow from the factory stinking of chlorine,

The yarn-mill called its funeral cry at noon;

Our lights looked over the lough to the lights of Bangor

Under the peacock aura of a drowning moon.

The Norman walled this town against the country

To stop his ears to the yelping of his slave

And built a church in the form of a cross but denoting

The list of Christ on the cross in the angle of the nave.

I was the rector's son, born to the anglican order,

Banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor;

The Chichesters knelt in marble at the end of a transept

With ruffs about their necks, their portion sure.

The war came and a huge camp of soldiers

Grew from the ground in sight of our house with long

Dummies hanging from gibbets for bayonet practice

And the sentry's challenge echoing all day long;

A Yorkshire terrier ran in and out by the gate-lodge

Barred to civilians, yapping as if taking affront:

Marching at ease and singing ‘Who Killed Cock Robin?'

The troops went out by the lodge and off to the Front.

The steamer was camouflaged that took me to England –

Sweat and khaki in the Carlisle train;

I thought that the war would last for ever and sugar

Be always rationed and that never again

Would the weekly papers not have photos of sandbags

And my governess not make bandages from moss

And the people not have maps above the fireplace

With flags on pins moving across and across –

Across the hawthorn hedge the noise of bugles,

Flares across the night,

Somewhere on the lough was a prison ship for Germans,

A cage across their sight.

I went to school in Dorset, the world of parents

Contracted into a puppet world of sons

Far from the mill girls, the smell of porter, the salt-mines

And the soldiers with their guns.

The concerns of writers are selfish and to be born in Northern Ireland is to inherit a set of circumstances which, however painful, are also useful: they are something to write out of. It was less so in MacNeice's youth, and though, as a child, he was shocked by the poverty of the Carrickfergus Catholics, he seldom dealt explicitly with his divided country. His concerns were generally more personal. His father was a Church of Ireland rector, an Anglican who later became a bishop, and MacNeice's childhood seems to have bred in him a melancholy and an aloofness that always set him apart.

Stephen Spender tells a story how, when the Soviet Union came into the war in 1941, the British ambassador Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr thought he would give a party for British poets with a view to putting them in touch with their Soviet counterparts.

Throughout this party, MacNeice – sleek, dark and expressionless – leaned against the chimney-piece, glass in hand, looking infinitely removed from his colleagues. At the end of the evening, Clark-Kerr went up to him and said, ‘Is it true you were brought up in Belfast at Carrickfergus?'

MacNeice said, ‘Yes, it is.'

‘Ah,' said Clark-Kerr, ‘then that confirms a legend I have heard: that, centuries ago, a race of seals invaded that coast and interbred with the population. Good night.'

The following is a sad poem about the death of MacNeice's mother when he was five.

In my childhood trees were green

And there was plenty to be seen.

Come back early or never come
.

My father made the walls resound,

He wore his collar the wrong way round.

Come back early or never come
.

My mother wore a yellow dress;

Gently, gently, gentleness.

Come back early or never come
.

When I was five the black dreams came;

Nothing after was quite the same.

Come back early or never come
.

The dark was talking to the dead;

The lamp was dark beside my bed.

Come back early or never come
.

When I woke they did not care;

Nobody, nobody was there.

Come back early or never come
.

When my silent terror cried,

Nobody, nobody replied.

Come back early or never come
.

I got up; the chilly sun

Saw me walk away alone.

Come back early or never come
.

When MacNeice did walk away, it was to school in England, to Marlborough, where he was rather hearty, though not wholeheartedly so. MacNeice was never very good at being wholehearted. His closest friend at school was not hearty at all but the very aesthetic Anthony Blunt. At Oxford, it was much the same. MacNeice wrote poetry but didn't quite fit in. ‘Homosexuality and intelligence, heterosexuality and brawn were almost inexorably paired. This left me out,' he said, ‘and I took to drink.' And though most of the other poets and literary figures either took a poor degree or left early with no degree at all, MacNeice – a ‘natural examinee and intellectual window-dresser' as he described himself – took a double first. One catches already the note – it's a very English note – of someone who can do it but deprecates the doing of it, a nice characteristic in a man but not always much help to a writer.

So while Auden and Isherwood were whooping it up in Berlin, MacNeice went off to Birmingham as a lecturer in classics. And that was the way it was going to be, too. MacNeice always on the edge of the group … a radical but never a Marxist, a bohemian but fond of family life.

‘I would have a poet,' he said,

able bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics,
susceptible to physical impressions … I write poems not because it is smart to be a poet but because I enjoy it as one enjoys swimming or swearing, and also because it is my road to freedom and knowledge.

This is the poet as good chap.

Apart from his empirical attitude towards politics, the other thing that set MacNeice apart from many of his contemporaries was that he loved women.

(
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.