In Auden's Shadow: Cecil Day-Lewis

Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-1972)

There's a reason why the name may seem familiar to you. Yes, Cecil Day-Lewis was the father of triple Oscar-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis. If you look carefully, you can see the family resemblance:

Daniel Day-Lewis (1957- )

It would be a shame if this fact were allowed to obscure Day-Lewis's own achievements, though, which were many and various - some have said a little too various:

Greenwich Society: Memorial Tree (1973)

• C. Day-Lewis (his preferred version of the name - though he often wrote it 'Day Lewis,' which has caused a certain confusion among critics and bibliographers) was the UK Poet Laureate from 1967, when John Masefield died, until his own death in 1972, when John Betjeman succeeded him.





C. Day-Lewis: The Otterbury Incident (1948)



• As well as writing numerous novels under his own name, including the children's classic The Otterbury Incident (1948), Day-Lewis was probably most celebrated for a series of 20-odd detective thrillers written under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake between 1935 and 1968. He claimed that he'd originally based his detective 'Nigel Strangeways' on certain character traits of W. H. Auden's, but the resemblance grew less and less marked over time.





'Nicholas Blake': The Widow's Cruise (1959)



• Like Louis MacNeice, Day-Lewis was a classical scholar, and took twenty years (1940-63) to complete one of the most celebrated modern translations of the complete works of Virgil.





C. Day-Lewis, trans. The Aeneid of Virgil (1953)



• Charles Causley's claim that he was 'the greatest lyric poet of the twentieth century' certainly remains a minority view but, though such early poems as his 1933 Magnetic Mountain sequence are probably still the most quoted, his reputation as a latter-day pastoralist ensures him a hearing even now.

C. Day-Lewis: The Poetry Archive

And, speaking of early poems, here's one from his 1938 book Overtures to Death, published - like MacNeice's Autumn Journal - under the shadow of Munich and Chamberlain's promise of 'peace in our time':

Newsreel

Enter the dream-house, brothers and sisters, leaving
Your debts asleep, your history at the door:
This is the home for heroes, and this loving
Darkness a fur you can afford.

Fish in their tank electrically heated
Nose without envy the glass wall: for them
Clerk, spy, nurse, killer, prince, the great and the defeated,
Move in a mute day-dream.

Bathed in this common source, you gape incurious
At what your active hours have willed -
Sleep-walking on that silver wall, the furious
Sick shapes and pregnant fancies of your world.

There is the mayor opening the oyster season:
A society wedding: the autumn hats look swell:
An old crocks' race, and a politician
In fishing-waders to prove that all is well.

Oh, look at the warplanes! Screaming hysteric treble
In the low power-dive, like gannets they fall steep.
But what are they to trouble -
These silver shadows - to trouble your watery, womb-deep sleep?

See the big guns, rising, groping, erected
To plant death in your world's soft womb.
Fire-bud, smoke-blossom, iron seed projected -
Are these exotics? They will grow nearer home!

Grow nearer home - and out of the dream-house stumbling
One night into a strangling air and the flung
Rags of children and thunder of stone niagaras tumbling,
You'll know you slept too long.

The Auden influence is still apparent here: the somewhat heavy-handed politics combined with an undeniable lyric precision. This is the Macspaunday side of Day-Lewis: Marxist on the surface but Georgian underneath.

And here, a few years later, from Word Over All (1943), is a lyric which could easily find a place alongside A. E. Housman's 'Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries':

Where are the War Poets? (1943)

They who in folly or mere greed
Enslaved religion, markets, laws,
Borrow our language now and bid
Us to speak up in freedom's cause.

It is the logic of our times,
No subject for immortal verse -
That we who lived by honest dreams
Defend the bad against the worse.

Cecil Day-Lewis

So who exactly was Cecil Day-Lewis? He's often referred to as an 'Anglo-Irish' poet, due to the fact that he was born, and lived till the age of 2, in Ballintubbert, Queen's County, Ireland. His clergyman father moved to London in 1906, and Day-Lewis was brought up there, albeit continuing to spend summer holidays with his relatives in County Wexford.

The slight schizophrenia of this shared English and Irish heritage continued throughout his life:

His father took the surname "Day-Lewis" as a combination of his own birth father's ("Day") and adoptive father's ("Lewis") surnames. In his autobiography The Buried Day (1960), Day-Lewis wrote, "As a writer I do not use the hyphen in my surname – a piece of inverted snobbery which has produced rather mixed results."

- Wikipedia

C. Day-Lewis: The Buried Day (1960)

Which brings me to the subject of autobiographies. I promised to comment on the biographies available for each of the writers in this series, but their own accounts of their lives undoubtedly also deserve some comment.

C. Day-Lewis: The Buried Day (1980)

As well as the Day-Lewis book mentioned above, Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice both wrote autobiographies, World within World (1951) and The Strings are False (1941), respectively.

Louis MacNeice: The Strings are False (1941 / 1965)

I've already included some quotes from Spender's autobiography in my post on him. Louis MacNeice's autobiography was written early in the war, in 1941, but not published until after his death, in 1965. It was, I suppose, too nakedly revealing of his own complex relationship with 'Irishness' - and with his own work - to be released during his lifetime.

Sean Day-Lewis: C. Day-Lewis: An English Literary Life (1980)

When it comes to biographies, the situation is a little more complex.

The standard life was written by Sean, one of two sons by Day-Lewis's first marriage - to Constance Mary King. There's a certain (understandable) amount of family rancour visible there, given that his second wife, actress Jill Balcon, was a considerably more glamorous figure, and it was the children of this match who achieved fame.

Be that as it may, it's a competently written book, by a well-known journalist, and fleshes out the information in his father's own more impressionistic account.

The fact is, though, for all his fame and undoubted literary success, C. Day-Lewis is now a largely forgotten figure. There's a tradition of burying or otherwise commemorating Poet Laureates in Westminster Abbey. John Betjeman, his successor in the job, made it - Day-Lewis did not.

Unfortunately a more recent biography, by Peter Stanford - which I must confess I haven't yet read - has (according to reviewers, at any rate) failed to make a very strong case for revived interest in him.

Peter Stanford: C. Day-Lewis: A Life (2007)

Perhaps his admirers can take comfort in a 1963 letter from W. H. Auden:

How delighted I was to find your later poetry so much finer than your earlier ... The critics, of course, think our lot stopped writing 25 years ago. How silly they are going to look presently.

The most endearing anecdote I myself have heard about Day-Lewis concerns his last days, spent at Lemmons, the Hertfordshire home of Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard. Amis had to be forbidden from entering the sick room, as the Poet Laureate found his conversation so amusing that he would end up laughing uncontrollably, thus putting his health in jeopardy. Not such a bad way to go, perhaps, literally laughing yourself to death ...

HIs widow, Jill Balcon, continued to hope for a revival till she herself died in 2009:

I think he's still on the schools' curriculum, but he has come into some sort of obscurity that I cannot quite fathom.

When she gave performances of his work, she noticed that most of the comments and letters she received concerned his poem 'Walking Away.'

A lot of people identify with it. It is about letting a child go. In this case it was his son, Sean, going off to school, but everybody who is a parent identifies with the moment when the children have to go. I wept when my son went to kindergarten for heaven's sake. He was only four, but I knew that forever and ever he would be going to school, to college, to marry and all the things they do.

Perhaps, then. that's as good a place to end as any:

Walking Away

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.

His poetry is now available in full in the magnificent edition below. If there ever is a revival, at least it will be readily accessible to anyone who takes an interest in an old-fashioned nature poet: a stance which now seems more timely than ever.

C. Day-Lewis: Complete Poems (1992)

•


C. Day-Lewis: Collected Poems 1954 (1970)

Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-1972)

[titles I own are marked in bold]:

Poetry:


1. Beechen Vigil (1925)
2. Country Comets (1928)
3. Transitional Poem (1929)
4. From Feathers to Iron (1931)
5. The Magnetic Mountain (1933)
6. Collected Poems 1929–1933 (1935)
7. A Time to Dance (1935)
8. Noah and the Waters (1936)
9. Overtures to Death (1938)
10. Word Over All (1943)
11. Short is the Time (1945)
12. Poems 1943-47 (1948)
13. Poems: A Selection by the Author. 1951. The Penguin Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957.
14. An Italian Visit (1953)
15. Christmas Eve. Illustrated by Edward Ardizzone. Ariel Poem. London: Faber, 1954.
16. Collected Poems. 1954. London: Jonathan Cape, 1970.
17. Pegasus (1957)
18. The Gate (1962)
19. The Room (1965)
20. The Whispering Roots (1970)
21. Posthumous Poems (1979)
22. The Complete Poems. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992.

Translation:


23. Virgil's Georgics (1940)
24. Paul Valéry's Le Cimetière Marin (1946)
25. The Aeneid. 1952. Appreciation by John Pollard. Original Illustrations by David Whitfield. Books That Have Changed Men’s Thinking. Geneva: Heron Books, 1969.
26. Virgil's Eclogues (1963)
27. The Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid of Virgil. 1940, 1952, 1963. Oxford Paperbacks. London: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Non-fiction:


28. A Hope for Poetry (1934)
29. Poetry for You: A Book for Boys and Girls on the Enjoyment of Poetry. 1944. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957.
30. The Poetic Image. 1947. Jonathan Cape Paperback JCP 25. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1965.
31. The Buried Day (1960)

Fiction:


32. Dick Willoughby (1933)
33. The Friendly Tree (1936)
34. Starting Point (1937)
35. Child of Misfortune (1939)
36. The Otterbury Incident. Illustrated by Edward Ardizzone. 1948. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.

[as 'Nicholas Blake]:


37. A Question of Proof (1935)
38. Thou Shell of Death (1936)
39. There's Trouble Brewing (1937)
40. The Beast Must Die (1938)
41. The Smiler with the Knife (1939)
42. Malice in Wonderland (1940)
43. The Case of the Abominable Snowman (1941)
44. Minute for Murder (1947)
45. Head of a Traveller (1949)
46. The Dreadful Hollow (1953)
47. The Whisper in the Gloom (1954)
48. A Tangled Web (1956)
49. End of Chapter (1957)
50. A Penknife in My Heart (1958)
51. The Widow's Cruise (1959)
52. The Worm of Death (1961)
53. The Deadly Joker (1963)
54. The Sad Variety (1964)
55. The Morning after Death (1966)
56. The Private Wound (1968)

Edited:


57. [with L. A. G. Strong] A New Anthology of Modern Verse 1920–1940 (1941)
58. Robert Frost. Selected Poems. Introduction by C. Day Lewis. The Penguin Poets. 1955. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962.
59. [with John Lehmann] The Chatto Book of Modern Poetry 1915–1955 (1956)
60. The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. 1963. With a Memoir by Edmund Blunden. A Chatto & Windus Paperback CWP 18. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1977.

Secondary:


61. Sean Day-Lewis. C. Day-Lewis: An English Literary Life. 1980. Unwin Paperbacks. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1982.

Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-1972)

In Auden's Shadow: Louis MacNeice

Louis MacNeice (1907-1963)

Like other members of the Auden group, Louis MacNeice's defining hour came in the early days of the Second World War. It's then that he wrote much of his best poetry. It's probably no accident that this happened after Auden had left the scene and MacNeice was accordingly free to reforge his identity both as an Irish poet and as an Ulsterman.

He never had that much in common anyway with the other members of the 'gang' (as Spender called it). He didn't have a defined position like 'the novelist' (Christopher Isherwood), 'the musician' (Benjamin Britten), 'the painter' (William Coldstream) - not to mention 'the other poet' (Stephen Spender).

For a start, he was heterosexual, gregarious and a bon-viveur - not really characteristics of any of the others. Also, he got first class honours in Classics at Oxford (unlike Auden's third in English), so was therefore able to obtain a lecturing post at the University of Birmingham rather than the hand-to-mouth schoolteaching jobs available to the rest of them.

Look in your heart, you will find a County Sligo
... a litter of chronicles and bones

wrote MacNeice in one of his wartime poems. He was born in Belfast, and his father John MacNeice would eventually become a Bishop in the (protestant) Church of Ireland. His family 'claimed descent from the kin of the early Irish saint MacNissi.' It's safe to say that all this history, personal and collective, weighed increasingly heavily on him as time went by.

Ben Bulben, County Sligo

from "Five War Poems":

III: Neutrality

The neutral island facing the Atlantic,
The neutral island in the heart of man,
Are bitterly soft reminders of the beginnings
before the end began.

Look into your heart, you will find a County Sligo,
bevel hill with for navel a cairn of stones,
You will find the shadow and sheen of a moleskin mountain
And a litter of chronicles and bones.

Look into your heart, you will find fermenting rivers,
Intricacies of gloom and glint,
You will find such ducats of dream and great doubloons of ceremony
As nobody to-day would mint.

But then look eastwards from your heart, there bulks
A continent, close, dark, as archetypal sin,
While to the west off your own shores the mackerel
Are fat with the flesh of your kin.

'Neutrality,' indeed - it sounds like such a passive thing. And yet, during the war, with neutral Eire standing like a roadblock between Britain and the Atlantic, it seemed anything but.

W. H. Auden & Louis MacNeice: Letters from Iceland (1937)

It apparently came as a great surprise to MacNeice when Auden invited him to come along on a trip to Iceland in 1936. The two were not particularly close, and had never travelled or worked together before. Perhaps that was what Auden was looking for, too - a change of company as well as a change of scene.

The collaborative book that resulted from this journey, Letters from Iceland (1937), remains one of the gems of 1930s travel literature. I've written about it more extensively in the Study Guide for my Massey Travel Writing course so, for simplicity's sake, I thought I might include a few extracts from those notes here:

Magnus Magnusson, ed.: The Icelandic Sagas (1999-2002)

“Für uns, Island ist das Land”
– An unknown Nazi

In the section of their book entitled “Sheaves from Sagaland,” where W. H. Auden and his travelling companion Louis MacNeice have compiled an “Anthology of Icelandic Travel” for their friend, fellow-poet John Betjeman, this discordant little statement stands out amongst all the camp clowning.

“For us, Iceland is the land” – the source and origin of “German-ness” is what this “unknown Nazi” means to say here. The year is 1936, and war-clouds are gathering over Europe once again. The Spanish Civil War is in full swing, with leftist poets and intellectuals travelling from all over the world to help the fledgling Spanish Republic:

They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch
Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel;
They floated over the oceans;
They walked the passes: they came to present their lives.

Auden was one of the most politically conscious poets of his generation, and in the poem “Spain 1937,” he attempted to sum up what that war meant to young people such as himself, born too late to have fought in the First World War, but now faced with the threat of Round Two in this (temporarily suspended) universal bloodletting:

To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the winter of perfect communion;
To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings: but today the struggle.
...
The stars are dead; the animals will not look:
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.

Auden later came to repudiate what he saw as the false dichotomies in this poem, but at the time it perfectly expressed the sense of urgency so many saw in this bitter conflict between Progressive and Reactionary Spain. For Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, by contrast, it was a chance to try out some of their new weapons and tactics, and generally advance the training of their armed forces before the real war broke out in earnest.

For Communist Russia, too, it was a chance to spread its influence further among the Western Democracies. It was, then, a time of hope and disillusionment. In the end, though, the Spanish Republic lost its struggle – largely due to the appeasing, “wait-and-see” policies of Britain and France.

Christopher Isherwood & W. H. Auden leaving for China (1938)

In the midst of all this, Auden decided to go to Iceland. Why? Well, for one thing, because it was as far away as you could get from Europe while still maintaining some kind of foothold in European culture. Also, as an aficionado of the Icelandic Sagas, it was a true pilgrimage for him: to the birthplace of vernacular European literature, long before Chaucer or Dante or Cervantes or any of the founders of the great European literary traditions.

“Sheaves from Sagaland.” Auden’s friend (and occasional lover) Christopher Isherwood, who accompanied him on his trip to China – scene of the other great war before the Second World War – once remarked to him that the doomladen characters in the Old Norse Sagas reminded him of their schooldays.

The hint underlying this statement dominates most of Auden’s early work: the spies, aviators, engineers and other characters in his early poems and plays all speak in a kind of clipped, Germanic shorthand: the idiom of the Sagas and the Anglo-Saxon bards.

Graham Greene, ed.: The Old School (1934)

“The best reason I have for opposing Fascism is that at school I lived in a Fascist state” he said in his contribution to an anthology entitled The Old School, edited by Graham Greene. For Auden, the Honour system that dominated the minor Public School he attended – the oath that he and all the other children were forced to take to inform on any of their companions they saw doing anything “beastly” or dishonourable – was the essence of Fascism.

Auden was homosexual, and so this did entail, in his case, literally living a lie – a life of deception and false façades, since nothing in his most basic instincts was regarded as “natural” by the potential spies who surrounded him (despite the obvious prevalence of homosexual attitudes and activities in most large British Public Schools).

One answer to this official hypocrisy and set of double-standards was politics. Auden was a committed Communist by the early thirties, like many of his contemporaries, though the brutally repressive activities of the Comintern in the Spanish War disillusioned him for good with the Soviet Union. After the War, in fact, he returned to the Church, and attempted to construct a revised code of morality which could explain just why he felt the Nazis were so very much more wrong than their opponents – despite all the obvious failings of liberal democracy.

W. H. Auden: Louis MacNeice on horseback (1936)

Is there much of a hint of all this angst and mental anguish in Letters from Iceland? If so, it’s very well concealed. Louis MacNeice had his own troubles and tribulations to deal with: brought up as an Ulster Protestant in Northern Ireland, his own childhood had been overshadowed by hatred and war. Nor (unlike the Eire poets) could he retreat into any pastoral visions of “Mother Ireland” to justify his alcoholism and compulsive womanizing. They made a pretty pair!

Which is one reason, I would argue, why their book still reads so entertainingly, after all this time. The immediate shadows of the pre-war may have been temporarily in suspension for them in a place as remote from the front lines as Iceland, but the sense of escape, of the need to pause and think things through, is almost palpable in this strange set of “letters home” in verse and prose, bound up as a book.

Auden’s tongue-in-cheek account of a pony-tour through the Icelandic countryside, recasting himself and MacNeice as two School Mistresses with a class of school girls is a thinly disguised version of the actual trip the two poets took with a group of young Public School boys. The silliness of the whole thing is undeniable – but also entrancingly funny, and Wystan’s constant sniping at Louis sounds far more plausible in this new persona as a spinster teacher jealous of her younger, prettier rival.

It may be one of the oddest, most disjointed travel-books ever written, but there’s actually little that’s arbitrary in what the two authors were trying to do with it:

Private faces in public places
Are wiser and nicer
Than public faces in private places

This epigraph to Auden’s 1932 book The Orators encapsulates his view of the world at that time. It was the refusal to be silly and private which had led so many people to death and destruction throughout that “low, dishonest decade”, the 1930s.

Mark Gerson: The Faber Poets (1961)
[l to r: Louis MacNeice, T. S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, W. H. Auden & Stephen Spender]

Well, as you can see, I'm every bit as bad as the next person when it comes to keeping the whole discussion firmly under Auden's shadow - which is where we came in in the first place ... MacNeice scarcely rates a mention.

But, just as Auden went off to China shortly afterwards, to build on his new-found vogue as a travel writer, so MacNeice took the opportunity to head straight from Iceland to the Gaelic-speaking Hebrides.

Louis MacNeice: I Crossed the Minch (1938)

I Crossed the Minch is as much of a cross-genre product as Letters from Iceland, published the year before. This time MacNeice's collaborator was Nancy Sharp, the estranged wife of Auden's friend William Coldstream. Here's a poem from the book (one of his most famous, actually), which shows the Auden-influence still strong on him:

Bagpipe Music

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 crepe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python,
Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with head of bison.

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 dumbbells to use when he was fifty.

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.

Annie MacDougall 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 tire and the devil mend the puncture.

The Laird o' Phelps spent Hogmanay declaring he was sober,
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 overproduction."

It's no go the gossip column, it's no go the Ceilidh,
All we want is a mother's help and a sugar-stick for the baby.

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 in the sea and went upon the parish.

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.

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 my 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 forever,
But if you break the bloody glass you won't hold up the weather.

Louis MacNeice: Autumn Journal (1939)

Nancy illustrated the book, and their short affair formed part of the inspiration for (arguably) MacNeice's greatest poetic achievement, Autumn Journal (1939).

Autumn Journal chronicles the uncertain time before the outbreak of war, in the form of a long autobiographical argument with himself about the true nature of poetry - as well as its place in a world obsessed with simplistic propaganda and facile heroism. Much criticised (but widely read) at the time, it has grown to be one of the few essential poems of the 'phoney war' period.

After a brief stint at Cornell University in America, MacNeice returned to London in 1940, and joined the BBC in 1941. This decision would set the tone for most of the rest of his writing life. On the positive side, it led to the composition of a series of radio plays and programmes some of which (plays such as The Dark Tower, for instance) have stood the test of time.

On the negative side, contact with habitués of the BBC recording studios such as Dylan Thomas facilitated his gradual descent into alcoholism, and the demands of the job itself made it hard to maintain the level of creativity he had enjoyed in the 1930s.

Carrickfergus, County Antrim

As a poet, I think it's fair to say that it's taken a long time for MacNeice to come into focus. It seems now to be the various conflicted identities surrounding his Irishness which mean most to contemporary readers. Take, for example, a poem such as the following - written in the same year, 1937, as 'Bagpipe Music':

Carrickfergus

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-milled 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.

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.

It's hard to say what precisely this is supposed to add up to or 'mean' - but it's almost unbearably evocative and elegiac about an irrecoverably lost past. Not that he's sparing in his account of the alienation that surrounded him, born in the heart of the Protestant Ascendancy, and thus 'Banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor.'

The strength of a poem like this lies, I would argue, in its refusal to editorialise, to make an act of contrition for the mere fact of his birth. Carrickfergus is real, it is and will remain part of him - in a deeper sense, though, there are aspects of his birthplace which must remain forever hidden away. I think this rings a bell for all of us born as the beneficiaries of colonialism across the world - here in New Zealand, for instance.

Then there are the other, 'purer' poems, which simply delight in the music of words and the texture of existence. Poems such as 'Snow' (1935):

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes –
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of your hands –
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

There is, to be sure, a hint of Wallace Stevens' 1923 poem 'Snow Man' in this:

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow

but there's something, too, about that exuberant middle stanza of MacNeice's poem which is incorrigibly his, 'incorrigibly plural,' - 'The drunkenness of things being various.'

At his best, Louis MacNeice was a wonderful poet - the major thing that happened in Irish poetry between Yeats and Heaney, as no less a luminary than Paul Muldoon has argued - and he was at his best far more of the time than he's ever been given credit for.

Louis MacNeice: Autumn Sequel (1954)

•


Louis MacNeice: Collected Poems (1966)

Frederick Louis MacNiece (1907-1963)

[titles I own are marked in bold]:

Poetry:


1. Blind Fireworks (1929)
2. Poems. 1935. London: Faber, 1944.
3. The Earth Compels (1938)
4. Autumn Journal (1939)
5. The Last Ditch (1940)
6. Selected Poems. 1940. Sesame Books. London: Faber, 1947.
7. Plant and Phantom (1941)
8. Springboard (1944)
9. Prayer Before Birth (1944)
10. Holes in the Sky (1948)
11. Collected Poems, 1925–1948 (1949)
12. Ten Burnt Offerings (1952)
13. Autumn Sequel (1954)
14. Visitations (1957)
15. Solstices (1961)
16. The Burning Perch (1963)
17. Star-gazer (1963)
18. Selected Poems, ed. W. H. Auden (1964)
19. Collected Poems. Ed. E. R. Dodds. 1966. London: Faber, 1979.
20. Selected Poems, ed. Michael Longley (1988)
21. Collected Poems. Ed. Peter McDonald. 2007. London: Faber, 2016.

Plays:


22. Out of the Picture: A Play in Two Acts. 1937. London: Faber, 1937.
23. Christopher Columbus (1944)
24. He Had a Date (1944)
25. The Dark Tower and other radio scripts (1947)
26. The Dark Tower. 1947. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1964.
27. The Mad Islands and The Administrator (1964)
28. Persons from Porlock and other plays for radio (1969)
29. One for the Grave: a modern morality play (1968)
30. Selected Plays of Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser & Peter McDonald (1993)

Translation:


31. The Agamemnon of Aeschylus. Trans. Louis MacNeice. 1936. London: Faber, 1967.
32. Goethe’s Faust: Parts I and II. An Abridged Version. Trans. Louis MacNeice. & E. L. Stahl. 1951. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1965.

Fiction:


33. [as 'Louis Malone'] Roundabout Way (1932)
34. The Sixpence That Rolled Away (1956)

Non-fiction:


35. [with W. H. Auden] Letters from Iceland. London: Faber, 1937.
36. I Crossed the Minch (1938)
37. Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (1938)
38. Zoo (1938)
39. The Poetry of W. B. Yeats. 1941. Foreword by Richard Ellmann. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1967.
40. Meet the US Army (1943)
41. Astrology (1964)
42. Varieties of Parable (1965)
43. The Strings are False: An Unfinished Autobiography. Ed. E. R. Dodds. London: Faber, 1965.
44. Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser (1990)

Letters:


45. Letters of Louis MacNeice ed. Jonathan Allison (2010)

Secondary:


46. Barbara Coulton. Louis MacNeice in the BBC. London: Faber, 1980.
47. Robyn Marsack. The Cave of Making: The Poetry of Louis MacNeice. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.
48. Jon Stallworthy. Louis MacNiece. 1995. London: Faber, 1996.

Jon Stallworthy: Louis MacNeice: A Biography (1995)

A very important point when it comes to assessing this group of poets from this distance in time is the quality of the various biographies available for each of them.

MacNeice has been particularly fortunate in this regard. Jon Stallworthy's book about him is honest and balanced - and (more importantly) beautifully composed. If you weren't interested in his work going in, this biography would probably be sufficient to convert you. It includes such useful features as a detailed breakdown of the pseudonyms used in Autumn Journal, together with the names of their supposed originals. In short, it's a model of the biographer's art.

John Sutherland: Stephen Spender: The Authorized Biography (2004)

John Sutherland's 2004 biography of Stephen Spender is also excellent, and contains most of what one would want to know about him.

Auden has fared less well, unfortunately. There are a number of biographies, all of them useful, but none definitive. Mendelson's critical biography, which originally appeared in two volumes as Early Auden (1981) and Later Auden (1986), is by far the most comprehensive, but for everyday detail it still needs to be supplemented by Humphrey Carpenter's W. H. Auden.

Humphrey Carpenter: W. H. Auden: A Biography (1981)

I'll be making more notes as I go along on each of our protagonists' luck in this regard.

Carrickfergus, County Antrim

In Auden's Shadow: Stephen Spender

Stephen Spender (1909-1995)

At one of their first meetings, Auden asked Spender how often he wrote poetry.

Without reflecting, I replied that I wrote about four poems a day. He was astonished and exclaimed: 'What energy!' I asked him how often he wrote a poem. He replied: 'I write about one in three weeks.' After this I started writing only one poem in three weeks.

- Stephen Spender, World within World (1951): p.44.

That gives you some sense of the character of their relationship. It was a long time before Spender managed to climb out from under the older poet's shadow, and one might even argue that he never did.

Stephen Spender: World within World (1951)

His story is a complex one, however. There were times when his poetry was almost as highly regarded as Auden's, and anthology pieces such as 'My Parents' continue to resonate to this day:

My parents kept me from children who were rough
Who threw words like stones and wore torn clothes
Their thighs showed through rags they ran in the street
And climbed cliffs and stripped by the country streams.

I feared more than tigers their muscles like iron
Their jerking hands and their knees tight on my arms
I feared the salt coarse pointing of those boys
Who copied my lisp behind me on the road.

They were lithe they sprang out behind hedges
Like dogs to bark at my world. They threw mud
While I looked the other way, pretending to smile.
I longed to forgive them but they never smiled.

Some of the others, though - 'The Truly Great,' for instance - however highly regarded they may have been at the time, sound rather embarrassing now:

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

They 'left the vivid air signed with their honour,' eh? No wonder they nicknamed him 'Young Shelley.'

Stephen Spender: World within World (1951)

World within World, his autobiography, published in his early forties - though he lived to the age of 86 he never supplemented or continued it - remains, however, a strange, subtle piece of writing.

He records there how, after a brief indoctrination by Auden in the characteristics and requirements of modern poetry ('The poet is far more like Mr. Everyman than Kelley and Sheats. He cuts his hair short, wears spats, a bowler hat, and a pin-stripe city suit. He goes to the job in the bank by the suburban train' - World within World, p.53), Spender reluctantly concluded that there was no place for him there.

After I had known him six weeks he must have approved of as many of my lines. Therefore it was rather surprising to discover that he considered me a member of 'the Gang'. Once I told him I wondered whether I ought to write prose, and he answered: 'You must write nothing but poetry, we do not want to lose you for poetry.' This remark produced in me a choking moment of hope mingled with despair, in which I cried: 'But do you really think I am any good?' 'Of course,' he replied frigidly. 'But why?' 'Because you are so infinitely capable of being humiliated. Art is born of humiliation,' he added in his icy voice - and left me wondering when he could feel humiliated.

- World within World: pp.44-45.

It wasn't that Spender was insensitive to embarrassment. On the contrary, it's hard to imagine a man with a thinner skin, more naturally vain and self-regarding. It's just that he was willing to put all that on the record: to write down the whole of himself, silliness and all. Not even Auden could do that.

Stephen Spender: Journals, 1939-1983 (1985)

I never actually met the man, but I did ask him to sign his latest book - Journals 1939-1983 - for me on one occasion. It was at the Edinburgh Book Festival (one of the many sideshows to the Official Festival which take place in that city every year). I see from the ticket stub, which I still have, that it was in mid-1989, so he must have just turned 80.

He gave a brief poetry reading, then answered a few questions. The one I remember came from a woman with an exceptionally unctuous voice who asked why one particular early poem had been left out of the latest, 1985, edition of his Collected Poems, since it was (she claimed) such a wonderful piece of work.

'Oh, I don't know,' he replied, 'It just seemed a bit sentimental, I suppose.' The put-down of the woman and her level of taste was complete, and yet it seemed (almost) entirely offhand - as if it had never occurred to him that it might hurt her feelings.

She asked. He answered, as accurately as he could. That was that.

Stephen Spender: Collected Poems 1929-1985 (1985)

Then the line formed.

It turned out that almost nobody was there to hear one more reading by the eminent poet. On the contrary, they were all there to get him to sign their copies of his books. The line was snaking all the way round the tent before I could get anywhere near it, and I could dimly see, off in the distance, the old grey head rising and falling as he scribbled industriously in each tome.

I'd provided myself with his latest, in token of good faith - at least some small royalties might be going to him from the sale - but others were not so scrupulous. The man in front of me, for instance, presumably some kind of dealer, had an armful of Spenderiana from all periods of his career. And when, after half an hour or so, the line eventually got to us, the great man duly signed them, one by one.

I felt bad about adding one more tiny jot of effort to his day, but by then I'd waited so long that I simply couldn't face failure. I handed him my one book; he scribbled in it; I said 'thank you' in as unassuming a manner as possible; and that was all. There was no meeting of the eyes, no miraculous conveyance of sympathy from aspiring poet to master ... just an old man plying his pen as he'd clearly had to do so many times before.

After that, I think, he was dragged off to safety by one of his children, and the baying masses were forced to subside. I've always felt a little ashamed of the incident, as if I were guilty of contributing a little to his discomfiture that day, but perhaps it were 'to consider too curiously, to consider so.'

I'd felt terribly anxious to see the grand old man, last survivor of all those thirties poets I idolised, but the occasion seemed tainted somehow by the thronging of all those importunate bookhounds.

Stephen Spender: Journals, 1939-1983 (signed)

The defining moment for the Auden group undoubtedly came at the very end of the thirties, that 'low, dishonest decade,' as he called it in his classic poem 'September 1, 1939.' Whatever his original intentions for the poem, it became a kind of 'Goodbye to All That' for both him and his friend Isherwood. Instead of returning to soon-to-be-war-beleaguered Britain, they decided to stay in the United States.

The other members of the group remained in the UK. All took part in the war effort in their various ways - not as combatants, but as active participants on the Home Front, as well as acting as war propagandists at various points. The Spanish war had united and - some would say - defined them as a group, however various their responses to it turn out, in retrospect, to have been.

It was the Second World War that divided them, turned Spender into a kind of suave literary politician, Day Lewis into a Hardy-esque pastoralist, MacNeice into a drunken BBC producer, and linked them definitively to the Old World rather than the New.

Edward Mendelson: Early Auden, Later Auden: A Critical Biography (2017)

Whether Auden could be said to have ever written as well in his newly adopted country as he did in the old is debatable. He certainly wrote differently, though. His explorations of inner worlds and the inner life may have been less lyrically effective than the gnarled, gnomic verse he composed in the thirties, but they were certainly no less ambitious in scope.

Isherwood, too, gave up the chance to be a kind of novelistic cross between Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene to become a narcissistic Californian navel-gazer. It would be many years before either of them would be forgiven back home for this perceived treachery in time of war.

Spender, too, became less poet than prose-writer and editor - though he never stopped writing poetry right up to the end, it's his earlier work that resonates, still, with most readers.

Should he have gone with them? Almost certainly not. For him the essential thing was simply to see less of Auden, define his own life choices, both professionally and sexually. His fiction from this period is exceptionally interesting in this regard - especially The Temple, an autobiographical novel about his experiences in the Weimar republic begun in the thirties but not finally completed and published until half a century later, in 1988.

It's often seemed anomalous - to some readers, at least - that the defining note of the Auden group, the so-called 'Pylon poets,' was initially struck by Spender, not their putative leader. The poem is certainly not the anthemic call to arms it must once have seemed, but that doesn't leave it without interest. The lapidary clarity of Spender's early style seems unlikely to date in this particular case, at least:

Construction of a High-Voltage Tower (1930's)

The Pylons

The secret of these hills was stone, and cottages
Of that stone made,
And crumbling roads
That turned on sudden hidden villages

Now over these small hills, they have built the concrete
That trails black wire
Pylons, those pillars
Bare like nude giant girls that have no secret.

The valley with its gilt and evening look
And the green chestnut
Of customary root,
Are mocked dry like the parched bed of a brook.

But far above and far as sight endures
Like whips of anger
With lightning's danger
There runs the quick perspective of the future.

This dwarfs our emerald country by its trek
So tall with prophecy
Dreaming of cities
Where often clouds shall lean their swan-white neck.

John Sutherland: Stephen Spender: The Authorised Biography (2004)

•


Stephen Spender: Collected Poems, 1928–1953 (1955)

Stephen Harold Spender (1909-1995)

[titles I own are marked in bold]:

Poetry:


1. Poems. London: Faber, 1933.
2. Poems. 1933. Second Edition. 1934. London: Faber, 1935.
3. Vienna (1934)
4. The Still Centre. 1939. London: Faber, 1941.
5. Ruins and Visions. 1942. London: Faber, 1942.
6. Spiritual Exercises (1943)
7. Poems of Dedication. 1947. London: Faber, 1947.
8. Selected Poems. 1940. London: Faber, 1947.
9. The Edge of Being (1949)
10. Collected Poems, 1928–1953 (1955)
11. Selected Poems (1965)
12. The Express (1966)
13. The Generous Days (1971)
14. Penguin Modern Poets 20: John Heath-Stubbs / F. T. Prince / Stephen Spender. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
15. Selected Poems (1974)
16. Recent Poems (1978)
17. Collected Poems 1928-1985. London: Faber, 1985.
18. Dolphins. London: Faber, 1994.
19. New Collected Poems. Ed. Michael Brett. London: Faber, 2004.

Plays:


20. Trial of a Judge: A Tragic Statement in Five Acts. 1938. London: Faber, 1945.
21. Rasputin's End: Libretto (1958)

Translation:


22. Georg Büchner. Danton's Death: A Play in Four Acts. Trans. Stephen Spender & Goronwy Rees. London: Faber, 1939.
23. Rainer Maria Rilke. Duino Elegies: The German Text, with an English Translation, Introduction and Commentary. Trans. J. B. Leishman & Stephen Spender. 1939. London: Chatto & Windus, 1981.
24. Schiller. Mary Stuart. Trans. Stephen Spender. Preface by Peter Wood. London: Faber, 1959.
25. Sophocles. Oedipus Trilogy: King Oedipus; Oedipus at Colonos; Antigone: A Version. Trans. Stephen Spender. 1985. New York: Random House Inc., 1985.

Fiction:


26. The Burning Cactus (1936)
27. The Backward Son (1940)
28. Engaged in Writing & The Fool and the Princess. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1958.
29. The Temple. 1988. London: Faber, 1989.

Non-fiction:


30. The Destructive Element. 1935. The Life and Letters Series, 87. London: Jonathan Cape, 1938.
31. Forward from Liberalism (1937)
32. Life and the Poet (1942)
33. Citizens in War – and After (1945)
34. European Witness (1946)
35. Poetry since 1939. The Arts in Britain, 1. 1946. London: The British Council, 1949.
36. André Gide, Richard Wright, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, & Louis Fischer. The God That Failed. Ed. Richard Crossman. 1950. New York: Bantam Books, 1959.
37. World within World: The Autobiography of Stephen Spender. 1951. London: Readers Union, 1953.
38. Learning Laughter (1952)
39. The Creative Element (1953)
40. The Making of a Poem (1957)
41. The Struggle of the Modern. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963.
42. The Year of the Young Rebels (1969)
43. Love-Hate Relations: A Study of Anglo-American Sensibilities. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1974.
44. Eliot (1975)
45. The Thirties and After: Poetry, Politics, People (1933-75). London: Fontana / Collins, 1978.
46. [with David Hockney]: China Diary. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1982.

Edited:


47. Horizon (1939-41)
48. Encounter (1953-66)
49. Great Writings of Goethe. Ed. Stephen Spender. A Mentor Book. New York: New American Library, 1958.
50. Penguin Modern Poets 23: Geoffrey Grigson / Edwin Muir / Adrian Stokes. Guest Ed. Stephen Spender. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
51. W. H. Auden: A Tribute. New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1975.

Letters & Journals:


52. Letters to Christopher: Stephen Spender’s Letters to Christopher Isherwood, 1929-1939, with “The Line of the Branch” – Two Thirties Journals. Ed. Lee Bartlett. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow, 1980.
53. Journals 1939-1983. London: Faber, 1985.
54. New Selected Journals, 1939–1995 (2012)

Secondary:


55. Sutherland, John. Stephen Spender: The Authorised Biography. 2004. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2005.

Stephen Spender & George Orwell: Lansdowne Terrace