Autumn Journal Read online

  LOUIS MACNEICE

  Autumn Journal

  Contents

  Title Page

  Note

  Autumn Journal

  i

  ii

  iii

  iv

  v

  vi

  vii

  viii

  ix

  x

  xi

  xii

  xiii

  xiv

  xv

  xvi

  xvii

  xxiii

  xix

  xx

  xxi

  xxii

  xxiii

  xxiv

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  Note

  I am aware that there are over-statements in this poem – e.g. in the passages dealing with Ireland, the Oxford by-election or my own more private existence. There are also inconsistencies. If I had been writing a didactic poem proper, it would have been my job to qualify or eliminate these overstatements and inconsistencies. But I was writing what I have called a Journal. In a journal or a personal letter a man writes what he feels at the moment; to attempt scientific truthfulness would be – paradoxically – dishonest. The truth of a lyric is different from the truths of science and this poem is something half-way between the lyric and the didactic poem. In as much as it is half-way towards a didactic poem I trust that it contains some ‘criticism of life’ or implies some standards which are not merely personal. I was writing it from August 1938 until the New Year and have not altered any passages relating to public events in the light of what happened after the time of writing. Thus the section about Barcelona having been written before the fall of Barcelona, I should consider it dishonest to have qualified it retrospectively by my reactions to the later event. Nor am I attempting to offer what so many people now demand from poets – a final verdict or a balanced judgment. It is the nature of this poem to be neither final nor balanced. I have certain beliefs which, I hope, emerge in the course of it but which I have refused to abstract from their context. For this reason I shall probably be called a trimmer by some and a sentimental extremist by others. But poetry in my opinion must be honest before anything else and I refuse to be ‘objective’ or clear-cut at the cost of honesty.

  L. M.

  March, 1939

  AUTUMN JOURNAL

  i

  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

  And the spyglasses hung in the hall and the prayer-books ready in the pew

  And August going out to the tin trumpets of nasturtiums

  And the sunflowers’ Salvation Army blare of brass

  And the spinster sitting in a deck-chair picking up stitches

  Not raising her eyes to the noise of the ’planes that pass

  Northward from Lee-on-Solent. Macrocarpa and cypress

  And roses on a rustic trellis and mulberry trees

  And bacon and eggs in a silver dish for breakfast

  And all the inherited assets of bodily ease

  And all the inherited worries, rheumatism and taxes,

  And whether Stella will marry and what to do with Dick

  And the branch of the family that lost their money in Hatry

  And the passing of the Morning Post and of life’s climacteric

  And the growth of vulgarity, cars that pass the gate-lodge

  And crowds undressing on the beach

  And the hiking cockney lovers with thoughts directed

  Neither to God nor Nation but each to each.

  But the home is still a sanctum under the pelmets,

  All quiet on the Family Front,

  Farmyard noises across the fields at evening

  While the trucks of the Southern Railway dawdle … shunt

  Into poppy sidings for the night – night which knows no passion

  No assault of hands or tongue

  For all is old as flint or chalk or pine-needles

  And the rebels and the young

  Have taken the train to town or the two-seater

  Unravelling rails or road,

  Losing the thread deliberately behind them –

  Autumnal palinode.

  And I am in the train too now and summer is going

  South as I go north

  Bound for the dead leaves falling, the burning bonfire,

  The dying that brings forth

  The harder life, revealing the trees’ girders,

  The frost that kills the germs of laissez-faire;

  West Meon, Tisted, Farnham, Woking, Weybridge,

  Then London’s packed and stale and pregnant air.

  My dog, a symbol of the abandoned order,

  Lies on the carriage floor,

  Her eyes inept and glamorous as a film star’s,

  Who wants to live, i.e. wants more

  Presents, jewellery, furs, gadgets, solicitations

  As if to live were not

  Following the curve of a planet or controlled water

  But a leap in the dark, a tangent, a stray shot.

  It is this we learn after so many failures,

  The building of castles in sand, of queens in snow,

  That we cannot make any corner in life or in life’s beauty,

  That no river is a river which does not flow.

  Surbiton, and a woman gets in, painted

  With dyed hair but a ladder in her stocking and eyes

  Patient beneath the calculated lashes,

  Inured for ever to surprise;

  And the train’s rhythm becomes the ad nauseam repetition

  Of every tired aubade and maudlin madrigal,

  The faded airs of sexual attraction

  Wandering like dead leaves along a warehouse wall:

  ‘I loved my love with a platform ticket,

  A jazz song,

  A handbag, a pair of stockings of Paris Sand –

  I loved her long.

  I loved her between the lines and against the clock,

  Not until death

  But till life did us part I loved her with paper money

  And with whisky on the breath.

  I loved her with peacock’s eyes and the wares of Carthage,

  With glass and gloves and gold and a powder puff

  With blasphemy, camaraderie, and bravado

  And lots of other stuff.

  I loved my love with the wings of angels

  Dipped in henna, unearthly red,

  With my office hours, with flowers and sirens,

  With my budget, my latchkey, and my daily bread.’

  And so to London and down the ever-moving Stairs

  Where a warm wind blows the bodies of men together

  And blows apart their complexes and cares.

  ii

  Spider, spider, twisting tight –

  But the watch is wary beneath the pillow –

  I am afraid in the web of night

  When the window is fingered by the shadows of branches,

  When the lions roar beneath the hill

  And the meter clicks and the cistern bubbles

  And the gods are absent and the men are still –

  Noli me tangere, my soul is forfeit.

  Some now are happy in the hive of home,

  Thigh over thigh and a light in the night nursery,

  And some are hungry under the starry dome

  And some sit turning handles.

  Glory to God in the Lowest, peace beneath the earth,

  Dumb and deaf at the nadir;

  I wonder now whether anything is worth

&
nbsp; The eyelid opening and the mind recalling.

  And I think of Persephone gone down to dark,

  No more a virgin, gone the garish meadow,

  But why must she come back, why must the snowdrop mark

  That life goes on for ever?

  There are nights when I am lonely and long for love

  But to-night is quintessential dark forbidding

  Anyone beside or below me; only above

  Pile high the tumulus, good-bye to starlight.

  Good-bye the Platonic sieve of the Carnal Man

  But good-bye also Plato’s philosophising;

  I have a better plan

  To hit the target straight without circumlocution.

  If you can equate Being in its purest form

  With denial of all appearance,

  Then let me disappear – the scent grows warm

  For pure Not-Being, Nirvana.

  Only the spider spinning out his reams

  Of colourless thread says Only there are always

  Interlopers, dreams,

  Who let no dead dog lie nor death be final;

  Suggesting, while he spins, that to-morrow will outweigh

  To-night, that Becoming is a match for Being,

  That to-morrow is also a day,

  That I must leave my bed and face the music.

  As all the others do who with a grin

  Shake off sleep like a dog and hurry to desk or engine

  And the fear of life goes out as they clock in

  And history is reasserted.

  Spider, spider, your irony is true;

  Who am I – or I – to demand oblivion?

  I must go out to-morrow as the others do

  And build the falling castle;

  Which has never fallen, thanks

  Not to any formula, red tape or institution,

  Not to any creeds or banks,

  But to the human animal’s endless courage.

  Spider, spider, spin

  Your register and let me sleep a little,

  Not now in order to end but to begin

  The task begun so often.

  iii

  August is nearly over, the people

  Back from holiday are tanned

  With blistered thumbs and a wallet of snaps and a little

  Joie de vivre which is contraband;

  Whose stamina is enough to face the annual

  Wait for the annual spree,

  Whose memories are stamped with specks of sunshine

  Like faded fleurs de lys.

  Now the till and the typewriter call the fingers,

  The workman gathers his tools

  For the eight-hour day but after that the solace

  Of films or football pools

  Or of the gossip or cuddle, the moments of self-glory

  Or self-indulgence, blinkers on the eyes of doubt,

  The blue smoke rising and the brown lace sinking

  In the empty glass of stout.

  Most are accepters, born and bred to harness,

  And take things as they come,

  But some refusing harness and more who are refused it

  Would pray that another and a better Kingdom come,

  Which now is sketched in the air or travestied in slogans

  Written in chalk or tar on stucco or plaster-board

  But in time may find its body in men’s bodies,

  Its law and order in their heart’s accord,

  Where skill will no longer languish nor energy be trammelled

  To competition and graft,

  Exploited in subservience but not allegiance

  To an utterly lost and daft

  System that gives a few at fancy prices

  Their fancy lives

  While ninety-nine in the hundred who never attend the banquet

  Must wash the grease of ages off the knives.

  And now the tempter whispers ‘But you also

  Have the slave-owner’s mind,

  Would like to sleep on a mattress of easy profits,

  To snap your fingers or a whip and find

  Servants or houris ready to wince and flatter

  And build with their degradation your self-esteem;

  What you want is not a world of the free in function

  But a niche at the top, the skimmings of the cream.’

  And I answer that that is largely so for habit makes me

  Think victory for one implies another’s defeat,

  That freedom means the power to order, and that in order

  To preserve the values dear to the élite

  The élite must remain a few. It is so hard to imagine

  A world where the many would have their chance without

  A fall in the standard of intellectual living

  And nothing left that the highbrow cared about.

  Which fears must be suppressed. There is no reason for thinking

  That, if you give a chance to people to think or live,

  The arts of thought or life will suffer and become rougher

  And not return more than you could ever give.

  And now I relapse to sleep, to dreams perhaps and reaction

  Where I shall play the gangster or the sheikh,

  Kill for the love of killing, make the world my sofa,

  Unzip the women and insult the meek.

  Which fantasies no doubt are due to my private history,

  Matter for the analyst,

  But the final cure is not in his past-dissecting fingers

  But in a future of action, the will and fist

  Of those who abjure the luxury of self-pity

  And prefer to risk a movement without being sure

  If movement would be better or worse in a hundred

  Years or a thousand when their heart is pure.

  None of our hearts are pure, we always have mixed motives,

  Are self deceivers, but the worst of all

  Deceits is to murmur ‘Lord, I am not worthy’

  And, lying easy, turn your face to the wall.

  But may I cure that habit, look up and outwards

  And may my feet follow my wider glance

  First no doubt to stumble, then to walk with the others

  And in the end – with time and luck – to dance.

  iv

  September has come and I wake

  And I think with joy how whatever, now or in future, the system

  Nothing whatever can take

  The people away, there will always be people

  For friends or for lovers though perhaps

  The conditions of love will be changed and its vices diminished

  And affection not lapse

  To narrow possessiveness, jealousy founded on vanity.

  September has come, it is hers

  Whose vitality leaps in the autumn,

  Whose nature prefers

  Trees without leaves and a fire in the fire-place;

  So I give her this month and the next

  Though the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered already

  So many of its days intolerable or perplexed

  But so many more so happy;

  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.

  So I am glad

  That life contains her with her moods and moments

  More shifting and more transient than I had

  Yet thought of as being integral to beauty;

  Whose mind is like the wind on a sea of wheat,

  Whose eyes are candour,

  And assurance in her feet

  Like a homing pigeon never by doubt diverted.

  To whom I send my thanks

  That the air has become shot silk, the streets are music,

  And that the ranks

  Of men are ranks of men, no more
of cyphers.

  So that if now alone

  I must pursue this life, it will not be only

  A drag from numbered stone to numbered stone

  But a ladder of angels, river turning tidal.

  Off-hand, at times hysterical, abrupt,

  You are one I always shall remember,

  Whom cant can never corrupt

  Nor argument disinherit.

  Frivolous, always in a hurry, forgetting the address,

  Frowning too often, taking enormous notice

  Of hats and backchat – how could I assess

  The thing that makes you different?

  You whom I remember glad or tired,

  Smiling in drink or scintillating anger,

  Inopportunely desired

  On boats, on trains, on roads when walking.

  Sometimes untidy, often elegant,

  So easily hurt, so readily responsive,

  To whom a trifle could be an irritant

  Or could be balm and manna.

  Whose words would tumble over each other and pelt

  From pure excitement,

  Whose fingers curl and melt

  When you were friendly.

  I shall remember you in bed with bright

  Eyes or in a café stirring coffee

  Abstractedly and on your plate the white

  Smoking stub your lips had touched with crimson.

  And I shall remember how your words could hurt

  Because they were so honest

  And even your lies were able to assert

  Integrity of purpose.

  And it is on the strength of knowing you

  I reckon generous feeling more important

  Than the mere deliberating what to do

  When neither the pros nor cons affect the pulses.

  And though I have suffered from your special strength

  Who never flatter for points nor fake responses,

  I should be proud if I could evolve at length

  An equal thrust and pattern.

  v

  To-day was a beautiful day, the sky was a brilliant

  Blue for the first time for weeks and weeks

  But posters flapping on the railings tell the fluttered

  World that Hitler speaks, that Hitler speaks

  And we cannot take it in and we go to our daily

  Jobs to the dull refrain of the caption ‘War’

  Buzzing around us as from hidden insects

  And we think ‘This must be wrong, it has happened before,