Incorrigibly Plural E-Book

• Herausgeber: Lives and Letters
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Incorrigibly Plural celebrates the diversity and vitality of Louis MacNeice's writing. Poets and critics illuminate the work of a writer whose achievement and influence is increasingly recognised as central to modern poetry in English. Contributions include responses to MacNeice by poets such as Paul Farley, Leontia Flynn, Nick Laird, Derek Mahon, Glyn Maxwell and Paul Muldoon; discussions by critics such as Neil Corcoran, Valentine Cunningham, Hugh Haughton, Peter McDonald and Clair Wills; and more biographical accounts, including a memoir by MacNeice's son, the late Dan MacNeice. For each of them, MacNeice remains a continuing presence for his insight into the mechanisms of the modern world, his complex political awareness, his ability to bring the historical moment alive. Above all, what emerges is pleasure in MacNeice's plurality of language and forms. More than a retrospective work of criticism, Incorrigibly Plural belongs to live debates about contemporary poetry.

Leseprobe

Incorrigibly Plural

Louis MacNeice and his Legacy

Edited by

Fran Brearton and Edna Longley

CONTENTS

Title Page

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

Preface

1 The Pity of It All PETER MCDONALD

2 Memoirs DAN MACNEICE

3 Pure Form, Impure Poetry, and Louis MacNeice’s Letters JONATHAN ALLISON

4 ‘I will acquire an attitude not yours’: Was Frederick MacNeice a Home Ruler, and Why Does This Matter? DAVID FITZPATRICK

5 On MacNeice on Trains LEONTIA FLYNN

6 ‘What am I doing here?’ Travel and MacNeice TERENCE BROWN

7 MacNeice and Thirties (Classical) Pastoralism VALENTINE CUNNINGHAM

8 Eclogues Between the Truculent DEREK MAHON

9 MacNeice’s Vehicles HUGH HAUGHTON

10 ‘Who would be loved by a goddess?’ Graves, MacNeice, and the Lyric of Classical Myth EDNA LONGLEY

11 The Perning Birch: Yeats, Frost, MacNeice PAUL MULDOON

12 ‘The ladies would say that he looked like a poet’: Tom and the Selling of Louis ANNE MARGARET DANIEL

13 The Lives We Live GERALD DAWE

14 Turn and Turn Against: The Case of Autumn Journal GLYN MAXWELL

15 ‘The Parrot’s lie’: Autumn Sequel and the BBC CLAIR WILLS

16 ‘Bulbous Taliesin’: MacNeice and Dylan Thomas JOHN GOODBY

17 When I Think of MacNeice THOMAS MCCARTHY

18 ‘His Inturned Eyes’: MacNeice in the Woods PAUL FARLEY

19 ‘Coming up England by a different line’: Louis MacNeice and Philip Larkin STEPHEN REGAN

20 The Same Again? MacNeice’s Repetitions NEIL CORCORAN

21 The Seal and the Cat NICK LAIRD

Notes

Guide to Further Reading

Notes on Contributors

Index

About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The cover image is one of several watercolours painted by MacNeice during his years at Marlborough. He did not title his paintings, and the title ‘Noah’s Ark’ for the cover image was given by his daughter, Corinna MacNeice, to whom we are grateful for permission to reproduce the image. We are grateful to the following for permission to quote copyright material: David Higham Associates, for poems by Louis MacNeice; Carcanet Press Ltd, for poems by Robert Graves; Faber and Faber Ltd, for poems by Philip Larkin; David Higham Associates, for poems by Dylan Thomas; Random House Group Ltd for poems by Robert Frost. Every effort has been made to trace and contact copyright holders before publication, and any omissions will be rectified at the earliest opportunity. The editors also gratefully acknowledge the support of the American Ireland Fund.

ABBREVIATIONS

Works by Louis MacNeice

Collected Poems, ed. Peter McDonald (London: Faber, 2007) – CP

Letters of Louis MacNeice, ed. Jonathan Allison (London: Faber, 2010) – L

Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (1938; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968) – MP

The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1941; London: Faber, 1967) – PY

Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Alan Heuser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) – SLC

Selected Plays, ed. Alan Heuser and Peter McDonald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) – SP

The Strings are False (London: Faber, 1965; repr. 2007) – SF

Varieties of Parable (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965) – VP

Other works

Robert Frost, Collected Poems, Prose and Plays (New York: Library of America, 1995) – FCP

Robert Graves, The Complete Poems, ed. Beryl Graves and Dunstan Ward (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003) – GCP

Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber, 1988) – LCP

Jon Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice (London: Faber, 1995) – JS

Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems 1934–1953, ed. Walford Davies and Ralph Maud (London: Dent, 1988) – TCP

PREFACE

In Louis MacNeice’s poem ‘Snow’, the mind tries to keep pace with a flood of images and sensations: ‘World is suddener than we fancy it. // World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural …’ (CP 24). At one level, ‘incorrigibly plural’ characterises the world of MacNeice’s poetry. It now also applies to his posterity.

Louis MacNeice was born on 12 September 1907. He died on 3 September 1963. The circumstances of MacNeice’s death uncannily echo his own dark myth-making. He developed pneumonia after going down Yorkshire potholes with BBC engineers to record sound effects for his allegorical radio play Persons from Porlock. Underworlds had always fascinated MacNeice: the salt-mines near his childhood home in Carrickfergus; Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth; the classical Hades. His poem ‘Charon’ moves towards Acheron and Styx: ‘And there was the ferryman / Just as Virgil and Dante had seen him’ (CP 593). Persons from Porlock concerns a painter distracted from his work by various interruptions. The last of these is Death, encountered in a deep cave system. MacNeice’s own premature death interrupted the fresh creative direction his poetry had taken in the late 1950s, and delayed full recognition of his poetic achievement.

Yet by 2007, his centenary year, it was becoming clear that Louis MacNeice is central to modern poetry in the English language. A centenary gathering in Belfast drew poets, critics, and ‘common readers’ from all parts of these islands and beyond. Some contributions to this book derive from that occasion, and reflect its excitement. In 2007, too, BBC Northern Ireland inaugurated an annual Louis MacNeice Memorial Lecture, the first being Peter McDonald’s ‘The Pity of It All’. Further memorial lectures, also included here, were given by Paul Farley and Glyn Maxwell. As regards criticism, scholarship, and the currency of MacNeice’s work, his centenary marked not only a culmination but a beginning. The new Collected Poems, meticulously edited by McDonald, provided a foundation stone for the future. There were reprints: the Selected Poems, MacNeice’s wartime autobiography The Strings are False, his idiosyncratic Scottish travelogue I Crossed the Minch. More recently, Jonathan Allison’s edition of MacNeice’s Letters (2010) has increased our biographical and literary understanding.

MacNeice’s lyric transforms biography into psychodrama. Here he resembles Yeats, and there are strong cultural, as well as artistic, affinities between the poets. In his important critical book, The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1941), MacNeice says: ‘Like Yeats, I was brought up in an Irish middle-class Protestant family. I allow for the difference that he spent his childhood in the primitive west, whereas I spent mine in the industrial north’ (PY 50). MacNeice’s sense of this ‘difference’ – which actually replicates Yeats’s tension between London and ‘Innisfree’ – goes deep. His father, Rector of St Nicholas’s parish Carrickfergus (later a bishop in Belfast), had grown up in Connemara, as had MacNeice’s mother. Thus ‘the west’, somehow imbued with the early loss of his mother, became an imaginative source for MacNeice too. In ‘Landscapes of Childhood and Youth’ he recalls: ‘for many years I lived on a nostalgia for somewhere I had never been’ (SF 217). MacNeice’s actual landscapes, whether urban or rural, span many points of the Irish and British compass. He eventually made up his western deficit. He went to school and university in England (Sherborne, Marlborough, Oxford). He crossed the Minch. He taught classics at Birmingham University, and so ‘lived in Birmingham through the slump’ (CP 118). He then moved to London, where he soon ceased to be an academic and joined the BBC as a producer. All these locales have left poetic traces, and several intersect in Autumn Journal (1939), MacNeice’s great poem of Europe on the brink of war.

Even so, MacNeice’s first world underlies the rest. Carrickfergus, a town on Belfast Lough with a Norman castle and sectarian history, enters his poetry as a vivid microcosm, an underworld or unconscious, stained by his mother’s death and other unhappiness. In ‘Experiences with Images’ MacNeice stresses the ‘early stratum of experiences which persists in one’s work just as it persists in one’s dreams’. He lists his own persistent images as: ‘Sea (i.e. the grey Lough fringed with scum and old cans), fields (i.e. the very small, very green hedged fields of Northern Ireland), factories (i.e. those small factories dotted through the agricultural patchwork), and gardens (i.e. my father’s medium-sized lush garden with a cemetery beyond the hawthorn hedge)’ (SLC 159). While some of these images figure stasis or death, the Lough also launched MacNeice’s poetic odysseys, his attraction to everything that flows. He makes this opposition explicit in ‘Carrick Revisited’: ‘Out of the sea / We land on the Particular and lose / All other possible bird’s-eye views’ (CP 262). If his poetry became notable for ‘dialectic, oxymoron, irony’ (his own words), the Carrickfergus ‘stratum’ had a lot to do with it (SLC 248). Yet, how poets’ lives condition their work is an intricate matter – a point often made by MacNeice himself; and ‘condition’, rather than ‘determine’, is his preferred verb. Contributors to this book add to the intricacies traced by Jon Stallworthy’s biography (1995). Jonathan Allison, for instance, discusses the relation between the voice(s) of MacNeice’s letters and poems. David Fitzpatrick tests MacNeice’s portraits of the Rector/Bishop against historical archives. And, in writing his own powerful autobiography, MacNeice’s son, the late Dan MacNeice, has illuminated his father’s life.

In a book of this kind, it is inevitable that critics should sometimes converge on the same poems (‘Star-gazer’ seems to be climbing the charts): yet their different readings are themselves further proof of MacNeicean ‘plurality’. MacNeice hated the categories that critics use to fix poets and leave them there forever. He always stresses poetry’s dramatic and generic shifts:

‘So I am to speak only as myself,’ the poet might say, ‘my whole self and nothing but myself? If you know what my whole self and my only self is, you know a lot more than I do. As far as I can make out, I not only have many different selves, but I am often, as they say, not myself at all. Maybe it is just when I am not myself – when I am thrown out of gear by circumstances and emotion – that I feel like writing poetry.’ (PY 146)

MacNeice’s plurality has been circumscribed by national canons as well as by aesthetic blinkers. That is, he has been classified as a poet of the English or British 1930s; (less often) as an ‘Irish’ poet of the generation or so after Yeats; and, since the collective success of poetry from Northern Ireland, as a proto ‘northern Irish’ poet. The essays here expose the limits and blur the borders of these categories. They suggest how MacNeice’s diverse cultural and literary contexts play into the archipelagic currency of his poetry, and into its significance for modern poetics. They also imply the obvious: his poetry could never have had either its immediate or precursory effect, were it not such a rich and broad conduit; had MacNeice not created his own synthesis from the various ‘legacies’ that he himself inherited. Although he wears traditions lightly, MacNeice is among the most tradition-conscious modern poets. His criticism regularly ranges from Homer to the contemporary, taking in the Elizabethans and Romantics en route. Of course, as Valentine Cunningham shows, it was still common for his poetic generation to be steeped in the classics – also in Christianity. But, at once the Rector’s son and an academic classicist, MacNeice takes these cultural resources further and deeper.

MacNeice shared his centenary year with W.H. Auden. They shared other things too: a famous trip to Iceland; a decade during which poets were hyper-conscious of history and war; views about how poetry might negotiate all that. In his criticism, MacNeice often evangelises for the poetic values of ‘my generation’. That phrase is a mask which allows MacNeice both to advocate Auden’s poetry; and, under cover of Stephen Spender and Cecil Day Lewis (neither of whom he really rates), to hint how his own aesthetic connects with, and differs from, Auden’s. Auden sounds rather like MacNeice when MacNeice writes: ‘Auden’s great asset is curiosity. Unlike Eliot, he is not (as a poet) tired … He reads the newspapers and samples ordnance maps. He has gusto, not literary gusto like Ezra Pound, but the gusto which comes from an unaffected (almost ingenuous) interest in people, politics, careers, science, psychology, landscape and mere sensations’ (SLC 37). Where MacNeice registers his difference from Auden is usually where Auden patterns his poems too rigidly (or ‘ingenuously’), whether in terms of ideas or opinions or syntactical telegraphese or simplified ballad rhythms. And in his 1937 public ‘Letter to W.H. Auden’, MacNeice writes: ‘Your poems are strongly physical but not fastidiously physical. This is what I would expect from someone who does not like flowers in his room’ (L 305). In other words, Auden could not have written ‘Snow’. Glyn Maxwell’s discussion of Autumn Journal uses the adjectives ‘creaturely’ and ‘corporeal’ to underline his own sense of the ‘planetary distance’ between MacNeice’s poetry and Auden’s. But perhaps that suggests the extent to which their separate and linked contributions to modern poetry remain to be explored. They are certainly allied in their attitude to form. MacNeice writes of ‘my generation’: ‘Most of the younger generation have returned to more regular forms, while trying to be their masters not their slaves … believers in meaning (though not a wholly rational meaning) they try, in the European tradition, to convey it by all the means at their command’ (SLC 141).

MacNeice deploys all the structural devices at his command to offer his own take on 1930s motifs, such as traffic and travel, and to elicit meaning from the flood of history. Several essays here show how he can internalise the material and social fabric of the modern world; make this fabric metaphorical or symbolic; and transmit historical dynamics as felt (and thought) experience. These powers, if fostered by the 1930s, did not end with them. For example, starting from ‘Cradle Song for Eleanor’, written during the Second World War, Peter McDonald works towards the ethical core of MacNeice’s imagination: ‘a form of courage’.

MacNeice involves Ireland in his approach to European crisis. As David Fitzpatrick demonstrates, his family history is closely meshed with political and religious conflicts. MacNeice’s legacy to contemporary Irish poetry is manifold. But his critique of Irish politics, sharpened by his sense of wider disaster, has been a key point of reference, as when section XVI of Autumn Journal ironically ‘envies the intransigence of my own / Countrymen who shoot to kill and never / See the victim’s face become their own’ (CP 137). If MacNeice’s literary moment has come, perhaps – with the Northern Ireland peace process – his political moment has also come. Not that all conflict has been resolved. Clair Wills, who writes here on MacNeice’s postwar Autumn Sequel, took the title of her book That Neutral Island (2007) from MacNeice’s still-controversial wartime poem ‘Neutrality’, which attacks Irish isolationism: ‘Look into your heart, you will find a County Sligo / A Knocknarea with for navel a cairn of stones //… ducats of dream and great doubloons of ceremony’ (CP 224). MacNeice makes his point by subverting Yeatsian touchstones like ‘dream’ and ‘ceremony’. Yet it is his absorption of Yeats that enables him to do so. Unlike other poets of his Irish generation, MacNeice did not follow Yeats in banning direct allusions to technological modernity from his work. But it was only he who grasped the epoch-making significance of The Tower (1928), and truly assimilated the forms, structures, and genres of the later Yeats. As Autumn Journal (like ‘Neutrality’) proves, MacNeice learned from Yeats’s public voice, as well as from his psychodrama, and also learned how to combine them. Thus, like Yeats too, he channels history’s nightmares, its ‘not wholly rational’ meanings, through myth and symbol. ‘Night Club’ (1939) succinctly updates Yeats’s ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’: ‘Salome comes in, bearing / The head of God knows whom’ (CP 202).

The contents of this book reflect the fact that MacNeice’s reputation mainly rests on his poetry. As regards other writings, his criticism may ultimately matter more than his radio work. Besides The Poetry of W.B. Yeats, it includes Modern Poetry (1938); the essays and reviews reprinted in Selected Literary Criticism (1987); and his Clark Lectures collected as Varieties of Parable (1965). In addition, MacNeice was always occupied by the intersection between aesthetics and metaphysics, and this shapes his poetry’s subtle self-awareness. His criticism, including its coded presence in poems, plays out crucial arguments about poetry that mark the last century. This is sometimes insufficiently recognised because, unlike Auden, he never lived in the USA. But his links to the Irish Revival on the one hand, and to the 1930s British new wave on the other, uniquely fitted MacNeice to weigh Yeats and Eliot as exemplars of ‘modern poetry’: to stake out the post-Waste Land ground. He wrote in 1935: ‘All the experimenting poets turned their backs on mummified or theorised tradition, but the more intelligent realised that living tradition is essential to all art; is one of the poles. A poem, to be recognisable, must be traditional; but to be worth recognising, it must be something new’ (SLC 12).

For MacNeice, as for Yeats, Pound’s Cantos take experiment too far – beyond the reach of form: ‘Mr Pound does not know when to stop; he is a born strummer’ (SLC 17). During MacNeice’s lifetime, the term ‘modernism’ was not applied to poetry as narrowly as academic critics began to apply it in the late 1960s: that is, to denote free verse along with other kinds of disjunctive structure (e.g. the Cantos). But poetry becomes modern by more means than one. MacNeice’s philosophical sophistication must be reckoned with. And his friendship with Anthony Blunt at Marlborough made him precociously aware of avant-garde art. Witness his schoolboy watercolour on the cover of this book. Witness his poetry’s painterly self-images, its stress on perception and reflection, how it translates colour and light into sound effects. As for ‘experimenting’ novelists: Joyce, Lawrence, and Woolf attracted the young MacNeice as ‘acolytes of Flux’ (SF 118–19). Perhaps because he later attacked ‘The Leaning Tower’, Woolf’s critique of the 1930s generation, her influence on his poetic streams of consciousness has been under-noted. In a letter of 1927 MacNeice wrote: ‘I am very eager to read “Mrs Dalloway” by Virginia Woolf. I have read some wonderful extracts from it, strange rhythms and an exquisite correlation of sensations. She must be a good Modern, I think’ (L 147). He later adapted The Waves for radio.

MacNeice’s own ‘strange rhythms’ remake traditional forms. As regards line and stanza, his forms are less regular than Yeats’s. But this is partly because he gives new twists to other elements of Yeatsian structure: especially to refrain, syntax, and their interrelation. Neil Corcoran’s essay ‘MacNeice’s Repetitions’ shows that, in the later poetry, refrain becomes ‘destabilised, self-deconstructing, and altogether anxiety-inducing’. So, too, with syntax, MacNeice writes: ‘I have often been surprised that reviewers of verse pay so little attention to syntax. A sentence in prose is struck forward like a golf ball; a sentence in verse can be treated like a ball in a squash court’ (SLC 245). Informed by his knowledge of Greek and Latin, MacNeice’s poetic syntax increasingly plays every angle. He dramatises disjunction, not by collapsing syntax, but by stretching its capacities to the limit. In his last two collections, Solstices (1961) and The Burning Perch (1963), syntax and refrain interact with new intensity, as MacNeice probes existential mysteries in what he called ‘parable’ poems. For instance, ‘All Over Again’ might be an extreme rewriting of ‘Snow’. This poem is an inconclusive multi-refrained sentence which tries to hold it ‘all’ together; which depends, like poetry itself, on an ‘as if’:

As if I had known you for years drink to me only if

Those frontiers had never changed on the mad map of the years

And all our tears were earned and this were the first cliff

From which we embraced the sea and these were the first words

We spread to lure the birds that nested in our day

As if it were always morning their dawnsong theirs and ours …

(CP 572)

Writing on ‘Louis MacNeice’s Posterity’, Peter McDonald concludes: ‘MacNeice’s work is not merely one among a number of available influences for contemporary British and Irish poets, but has become more clearly one of the indispensable conditions for their poetry’s existence.’1 Hence the poets who contribute to this book. We asked some to write brief pieces on what MacNeice means to them. Among poets’ more extended contributions, Paul Muldoon and Paul Farley bring not only themselves but also two possibly surprising poets into the MacNeicean orbit: Robert Frost, John Clare. Other contributors add T.S. Eliot, Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas, and Philip Larkin to this magnetic field. The distinctive findings of each ‘MacNeice and X’ essay enrich our sense of his artistic plurality, and of his presence in contemporary poetry. But if MacNeice is a poets’ poet, he is not so in any narrow or technical sense, although technique is intrinsic to what makes him a poetic hub, to the different things that different poets take from his work. MacNeice’s poetry resembles its own cities (cities that have influenced later poetry of Hull, Belfast, Dublin, Glasgow, London, and Liverpool) in that all human life and language, ‘this whole delightful world of cliché and refrain’ (CP 68), seems to jostle there. To quote a recent tribute by the poet Alan Gillis: ‘I really responded to his freshness, to his city poems, to his wit and verve. There was something about the energy of his lines and sense of detail. And this still stands … he claimed a broad reality of day-to-day living for the lyric which was quite new: others had approached this “as a subject”, presuming themselves apart from it.’2

Seventy years ago, for the young Philip Larkin, MacNeice’s impact was equally fresh: ‘his poetry was the poetry of our everyday life, of shop-windows, traffic policemen, ice-cream soda, lawn-mowers, and an uneasy awareness of what the newsboys were shouting’. For Larkin, MacNeice was also somehow unofficial: less established by academy or nation than Eliot, and even Auden, had become. Hence the ‘secret taste’ that Larkin formed for his poems.3 That secret may now be out. But we should still heed MacNeice’s warning in ‘Variation on Heraclitus’: ‘Nor need you be troubled to pin me down in my room / For the room and I will escape …’

FRAN BREARTON

EDNA LONGLEY

Belfast, 2010

Notes

1 Peter McDonald, Serious Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 186.

2 Alan Gillis, interviewed by Aaron Kelly, Edinburgh Review 131 (March 2011), 8–9.

3 Philip Larkin, Further Requirements, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber, 2001), 18.

THE PITY OF IT ALL

Peter McDonald

At the end of his 1941 collection Plant and Phantom, Louis MacNeice printed a poem entitled ‘Cradle Song’:

Sleep, my darling, sleep;

The pity of it all

Is all we compass if

We watch disaster fall.

Put off your twenty-odd

Encumbered years and creep

Into the only heaven,

The robbers’ cave of sleep.

The wild grass will whisper,

Lights of passing cars

Will streak across your dreams

And fumble at the stars;

Life will tap the window

Only too soon again,

Life will have her answer –

Do not ask her when.

When the winsome bubble

Shivers, when the bough

Breaks, will be the moment

But not here or now.

Sleep and, asleep, forget

The watchers on the wall

Awake all night who know

The pity of it all. (CP 209)

The poem had already appeared between hard covers, in Poems1925–1940, published in the USA at the beginning of 1941. There, too, it was the final poem in the book; there, too, it was assigned by the author a date of composition (‘October, 1940’); and there it bore as a subtitle the dedication ‘For Eleanor’, which in Plant and Phantom is carried by the whole book, dedicated ‘To Eleanor Clark’. As a love poem, ‘Cradle Song’ brings both of its volumes to a close on a seemingly personal (rather, that is, than a seemingly public) note. At the same time, both these poles of concern, personal and public, are in some ways ill-fitted to the poem’s actual intent and effect; for ‘Cradle Song’ concentrates its autobiographical meaning in a repeated phrase – ‘The pity of it all’ – that fuses the attentiveness of a lover with a broader and more melancholy kind of watchfulness.

That lover’s attentiveness, however, is itself far from uncomplicated. Although ‘Cradle Song’ operates with a deliberate simplicity of means, ‘The pity of it all’ brings into play matter not at home in the registers of straightforward love. The immediately obvious echo (which may or may not be an allusion) is of Othello: ‘but yet the pity of it, Iago; O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!’ (Othello 4.1.189–90). If this is an allusion, it could hardly, on the face of things, be more out of place: for what is the wounded rage of sexual jealousy doing in a lullaby? True, MacNeice takes away the staccato edge from Othello’s words, smoothing and calming a repeated ‘the pity of it’ into ‘The pity of it all’, but this act of transformation cannot, all the same, completely erase the presence of the Shakespearean text. Moreover, the voice in MacNeice’s poem is that of a lover addressing a young woman asleep – asleep on a bed, quite possibly – whose innocence shades into a kind of ignorance; like Desdemona, discovered on her bed asleep at the beginning of the last scene of Othello, she seems unaware of the ‘cause’ which will keep the speaker (and those ‘watchers on the wall’) so busy.

But here another (and arguably an incompatible) allusion becomes an equally persuasive possibility. For any poet of MacNeice’s generation, ‘pity’ was a word charged with potent literary (and literary-political) content. This comes, of course, from Wilfred Owen’s draft ‘Preface’: ‘Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. / My subject is War, and the pity of War. / The Poetry is in the pity.’1 In October 1940, more than a year into the British war with Nazi Germany from which he had so far absented himself, MacNeice could not keep Owen’s ‘pity’ from impinging on ‘the pity of it all’ through which Eleanor Clark is sleeping. In 1936, MacNeice had written of how with the Great War ‘Pity reappeared in English poetry’, and claimed that ‘The pity of Owen, the Whitmanesque lust for life of Lawrence, and the dogmas of Lenin are now combining to make possible the most vital poetry seen in English for a long time’ (SLC 63–4). Four years later, the poet might not have felt quite so fulsome about these positive effects, and especially about the benefits of Lenin; though the young Eleanor Clark was all for dogmas, albeit those of Trotsky in succession to those of Lenin, in relation to the artist. In 1940, MacNeice would still include Owen as one of the four finest modern poets in England (along with T.S. Eliot, Lawrence, ‘and, within narrower limits, Robert Graves’) in his book on W.B. Yeats – the same Yeats who had scandalously rejected Owen’s appeal to ‘pity’ in excluding him from his 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse (PY 178). ‘The pity of it all’ builds Owen, and the arguments about Owen, into MacNeice’s love poem, with an awareness both of the potency of ‘pity’ and (with Yeats casting his customary shadow) a sense of its inadequateness as a poetic principle. ‘Passive suffering,’ Yeats had pronounced, ‘is not a theme for poetry’.2 Here perhaps there is a point of contact with the Othello allusion: ‘Cradle Song’ might summon the image of a Desdemona, and thus potentially of one kind of ‘passive suffering’; but it opts instead to spare its Desdemona her suffering, and leave her her passivity. If it is a poem that uses Othello, its voice makes a point of not being Othello’s; if it brings to bear Owen’s ‘pity’, it has also absorbed a knowledge of ‘pity”s limitations: ‘The pity of it all / Is all we compass if / We watch disaster fall’. The pity, then, is not all, and it is not all there is to say, or do, in this situation: there is more, perhaps, that can be compassed here, and must be.

It is useful to explore the degree to which MacNeice blurs the boundaries of love poetry, and some of the ways in which, as a poet, he imaginatively absorbs and puts to use the power and the liabilities of ‘pity’. MacNeice started the critical commonplace of an ‘impure poetry’ in the light of which so much of his own work has subsequently been read (MP xxxi); but readers and commentators have applied this largely to poems which have, one way or another, obvious public bearings, whether in the 1930s or afterwards. Yet MacNeice’s love poetry, too, is ‘impure’. The personal elements here have soaked up all kinds of difficult and recalcitrant material: not as things to be transfigured, as though poetry could effect some alchemical change in them, and they are not to be transcended, by assimilating them to the self-awareness of a transcendent poetic personality; instead, MacNeice lets (and makes) them do their worst to the poetry, and their worst in the poetry. In ‘Cradle Song’, ‘pity’ brings both private pain and public anxiety to the show, Othello’s stricken cry and Owen’s deliberate moral imperative finding a distinctly unhappy marriage in the repeated phrase.

To read a poem closely is sometimes to bring to bear all kinds of perspectives which may appear, to some, to be themselves ‘impure’. Biographical elements are amongst these, but they are introduced inevitably in a poem like ‘Cradle Song’ where, after all, names are named, and dates are given. On a wider scale, MacNeice’s writing is often autobiographical in part – if by ‘autobiographical’ we understand a kind of writing that uses particular life experiences, and returns to them with changing purposes and emphases, as parts of an essentially creative rather than a documentary effort. Both with and without a definite article, life is central to MacNeice’s art: the life – like life – is written into this work. We need to be careful as readers, just as MacNeice himself was careful as an artist, to respect the differences between the absence and presence of those definite articles.

The Eleanor Clark ‘Cradle Song’ addresses was a young left-wing American writer with whom MacNeice was in love (and in whose company he felt, as he told E.R. Dodds, ‘timelessly happy’) from late 1938 (L 356). The poet’s decision to go and work in the USA at the end of 1939, which seemed to have so many political meanings and ramifications, was probably attributable more than anything else to the need to see Eleanor again. In the autumn of 1940, having spent much of the year with her, MacNeice was recuperating from a serious case of peritonitis at Eleanor’s parents’ home in Connecticut. Here, several important poems – most notably, the poem ‘Autobiography’ – got themselves written. By this time, too, the love-affair itself was, if not cooling, then coming to terms with the insuperability of obstacles in its way. Some of these were decidedly public things: the war in Europe, above all, and Louis’s adult responsibilities towards his infant son, whom he had left behind in 1939. Others were more private, and specific to the lovers: two, however, have something to do with ‘Cradle Song’. Louis and Eleanor quarrelled, partly about politics. In a long letter sent to Eleanor in May, 1940, Louis rebukes her for her accusation that he has ‘an awful lack of curiosity about the world’. The tone as well as the content of this rebuke is important:

I was curious about the world & suffering for my curiosity about it before you were born. And if you think you can judge my curiosity about the world by the fact that I don’t look at newspapers when you’re around, you show an appalling lack of feminine imagination. Apart from which, newspapers aren’t the world anyway […] And if you think the only way ‘the world’ impinges on me is through my nerves, you are – I am sorry to say, darling – a fool. When for the last week I have been feeling steam-rollers go over me all the time, that wasn’t just nerves; it was imagining (with my brain & also – if I may be hackneyed for want of a better word – with my heart) what this war is going to do to England and Ireland as I know them & to particular people whom I know there … (L 393)

MacNeice writes as Clark’s elder here, and puts her right about his own relationship to the world events whose significance is clearly something at issue between the two. He lets her know, in these terms, that he is both capable of and pained by the process of watching ‘disaster fall’.

There was a second issue lurking in this quarrel, though, and it was to prove finally too formidable a stumbling-block for the pair: although Louis and Eleanor were in some ways lovers, there was one sense in which they were not, since their relationship seems never to have reached a sexual consummation. In the May letter, which is full of recriminations about levels of ‘curiosity’ and the need (or otherwise) for a ‘world view’, it is Eleanor’s nature as ‘sexually inhibited & to some extent self-deceiving’ which draws out Louis’s harshest remarks:

As to your sexual inhibitedness I don’t say this on the strength of you & me because for all I know I am not at all your type but it comes out in a lot that you do & say & I think it is a great pity because, even if the novelist is more concerned with the environment than instinct, I can’t see how he can present the world at all adequately if he hasn’t got inside knowledge of what is about the most important of the instincts. If he hasn’t got that, his internal reality remains in a sense in the nursery. (L 397–8)

This is interesting – though not exactly disinterested – advice to give to a budding novelist. Although Louis and Eleanor did in fact share a bed in the summer of 1940, it appears from Louis’s farewell letter when he embarked for Britain at the end of the year that his practical advice for Eleanor’s writing career was not (at least with him) fully taken up. These particular circumstances impinge upon the poetic circumstances which ‘Cradle Song’ makes for itself: ‘Sleep, my darling, sleep’ – and just sleeping is, in this light, what Eleanor seems determined to do. But the cost of this, in the serene poem as in the fraught letter, is that Eleanor’s ‘internal reality remains in a sense in the nursery’, just as the poem sets itself formally at an angle to the nursery rhyme to which it alludes – ‘Rockabye baby, on the tree top’. ‘When the bough / Breaks, will be the moment,’ MacNeice writes, with the emphatic acknowledgement that the moment will be ‘not here or now’. But what will this be the moment for? One kind of answer is known to this poem’s speaking voice: it will be the moment for sexual love; another kind of answer, of equal importance in the poem, is known as well to ‘The watchers on the wall’, who can see things beyond the sleeping Eleanor’s horizons in ‘The pity of it all’, such as ‘what this war is going to do to England and Ireland as I know them & to particular people whom I know there’.

This ‘pity’ is clearly something apart from the feeling that Eleanor’s refusal to become Louis’s lover ‘is a great pity’. The distinction here is performed very naturally, of course, by the definite and indefinite articles: consider, for example, the difference between’s Owen’s ‘the pity of war’ and a statement that ‘war is a pity’. An early poem of Yeats, ‘The Pity of Love’, replaces the definite article of its own title in the first line:

A pity beyond all telling

Is hid in the heart of love:

The folk who are buying and selling,

The clouds on their journey above,

The cold wet winds ever blowing,

And the shadowy hazel grove

Where mouse-grey waters are flowing,

Threaten the head that I love.3

‘A pity’ here leaves something in the voice exposed and vulnerable, open to the misconstruction of the weak ‘it’s a pity that…’, where the voice of the poem’s title (so to speak) elevates itself into general significance. Yet the poem itself is perfectly specific when it comes to what it at stake, for things threaten a particular loved head, ‘the head that I love’. If this short poem stands somewhere in the backgroundof ‘Cradle Song’, it is more directly in view in W.H. Auden’s ‘Lullaby’ (composed in 1937), with its prayer for protection of ‘your sleeping head’ and invocation of ‘the winds of dawn that blow / Softly round your dreaming head’.4 It is likely that MacNeice’s poem shadows Auden’s; but of course both poems’ generic situations, as lullabies, involve the theme of protectiveness, of an adult wishing to shield his child, or an older lover wanting to keep safe a younger partner.

‘Cradle Song’ is a revealing MacNeice poem, since it builds into its workings so many of the elements that make others amongst his love poems (and more than just his love poems) so distinctive. The autobiographical elements which are, on one level, so specific are on other levels complicated, shadowed and overlaid by other parts of the life, and other parts of life, from which MacNeice habitually drew poetic resource. To revert, for a moment, to the situation of ‘Cradle Song’: the poem’s voice is awake while the object of its address is asleep. To that extent, generic convention is firmly in control. But wakefulness is important to MacNeice, and sleep is figured in his work either as something that does not come or, when it comes, as something which can contain nightmares and dreams: and the nightmares outnumber the dreams. The early poetry contains many vivid traces of the sleep anxieties which MacNeice’s mature writing revisits and puts to work. In his juvenilia, these things are more stark, and the bed is routinely regarded as a grave. In Blind Fireworks (1929), the child’s consciousness is wholly unprotected from night terrors that abound:

The candle in his white grave-clothes, always turning his cowled

head,

Stood in his own shadow at the foot of my grave-bed,

Ho, said the candle with his rich dark beard,

How they howl like the dead!

And wagging his cowled head,

Ho, said the candle, they would make a body afeard.

(‘Candle Poems’, CP 638)

I fell in a nightmare down suddenly

Into a hole without a bottom. Music

Died above my head, died in silence.

(‘Child’s Terror’, CP 616)

Yet all the time on the window-pane

Shadow fingers of the trees

Grope, grope, grope again

After unseen fatalities.

(‘Impermanent Creativeness’, CP 646)

The candle lights MacNeice to bed, but not to sleep; the nightmare is that of literally dropping off, into a limitless void; and the world outside the haunted bedroom enters only to ‘grope, grope, grope again’. In a way, the voice of ‘Cradle Song’ tries to render these fears positively, as things that can now (in the person of the unsleeping lover) be guarded against:

The wild grass will whisper,

Lights of passing cars

Will streak across your dreams

And fumble at the stars … (CP 209)

Now, it is not ‘shadow fingers of the trees’ but ‘Life’ that ‘will tap the window’; but this will come ‘Only too soon’. Instead of MacNeice’s outlandish teenage Gothic, it is just ‘Life’ that waits to interrupt the slumber; but like the earlier grisly figures, this ‘Life’ is going to bring something to an end – something, potentially but nonetheless specifically, like love.

The unsleeping, or sleep-troubled, persona in MacNeice is of course something with strong connections to the particular life of the author. Much of what we know about this is present in MacNeice’s autobiographical writings, published after his death as The Strings areFalse. It is here that bad nights in the Rectory at Carrickfergus are written up, and here that some fairly traumatic memories are tried out in prose. The date of this enterprise is important, for MacNeice seems to have set himself to write his autobiography while preparing to move to America, and much of the composition was probably done there, with some on the dangerous voyage back at the end of 1940, and some more in the first half of 1941. E.R. Dodds, the book’s posthumous editor, reported that the manuscript was given to him for safe-keeping while MacNeice was living in London, during the nightly attacks of mid-1941; the author, it appears, never retrieved his work, whether because he forgot about it or (far more likely) because he had no wish to claim it back. It is here, though, that a childhood unprotected from nightmares is set down, to disturbing effect. When he did go to sleep, MacNeice remembers, the dreams ‘got worse and worse’:

‘Oh God, I do not want to have any dreams. If I am going to go to sleep, do not let me have any dreams. And if I am going to have dreams, do not let me go to sleep, God, please I will do anything if only You keep me awake.’ But I always went to sleep all the same. One night I woke up and yelled, my father came up from downstairs, there was light and his voice, he told me nothing would hurt me. I felt quite safe when he had gone but next morning Miss Craig was very angry; my father had forgotten to go down again to the study and had left the lamp burning there all night. I was a very wicked boy and might have burnt the house down. (SF 46)

In MacNeice’s recollection here, the falling asleep is dangerous – not just in the sense that it ushers in the dreams that the child prays not to have, but because it occasions danger in the real world, a kind of dereliction of duty which might have catastrophic consequences.

The Strings are False is partly an autobiography, but it is also partly (and perhaps primarily) a love story. Giving fictive life to his own life in 1940 and 1941, MacNeice cast it as a series of women lost, to be concluded with the story of a woman found and kept, ‘someone whom according to fairy story logic I was bound to meet but according to common sense never’, ‘A woman who was not a destroyer’ (SF 204). The lost women are Louis’s mother, whose going away from home and subsequent death early in his childhood contributed largely to that childhood’s nightmares, and his first wife, Mary Beazley, with whom his own married life had ended catastrophically, when in 1935 she too left without warning. The third woman, with whom the book tries to find its happy ending, is Eleanor Clark. It was life that refused to give the raw materials for the kind of ending MacNeice hoped this narrative might have, when Eleanor and he parted at the end of 1940, and this might provide one reason why the MacNeice of mid-1941 and after had no wish to return to his unfinished book. What he did complete, however, was the working through of losses, both of his mother in childhood and, as an adult, of his wife Mary.

It is noteworthy that MacNeice presents his early married life (and indeed his whole relationship with Mary) in terms of a kind of shared innocence. The young lovers brave family disapproval on both sides, and inhabit their own romantic vignettes in places like Achill Island and Provence, before settling in a deeply domestic nest, surrounded by, but essentially impervious to, the Birmingham of the early 1930s. Increasingly, the couple’s comfortable retreat is figured as a hothouse, or an aquarium; all comes to an abrupt end with a domestic catastrophe, the outbreak of a fire in the house – ‘Soon there was a large hole in the floor and the bucketfuls of water and fragments of cement were falling on the head of our landlady’s lodger’ (SF 151). And with this, the next morning Mary leaves in the company of her lover, the young American student Charles Katzman.

Is there a connection between the fire in the Rectory that did not start, and the fire in Birmingham that did? The literal disruption of a domestic environment, in the latter case, mirrors metaphorically the end of a marriage – in which it is Mary who walks away – while the imagined conflagration in the Rectory is the consequence (as MacNeice arranges his memories of childhood to suggest) of the absence of another woman, his mother. The biographical facts here are naturally tangled, obscure, and equivocal; but the creative connections made in MacNeice’s artistic transformations of them are both simpler and more direct. If the figure of MacNeice’s mother is that of someone who disappears mysteriously, not to come back early for her child, and then never to come back at all, that of his first wife is of someone who also leaves abruptly, abandoning not just her husband but also her infant son. In this repetition, as it were, of a pattern of loss, it is not illness and death that enforce the parting but personal unfulfilment and sexual infidelity. For the 33-year-old author of The Strings are False, this parallel only makes creative sense in so far as it prepares the way for the arrival of ‘a woman who was not a destroyer’, who will be neither mother nor domestic partner, but will call forth from MacNeice his own powers of protectiveness and collaboration; not someone to rock his cradle, but whose cradle, so to speak, he can rock; and not someone in whose company he can retreat from life but with whom he can work to meet life on real terms.

Perhaps the acknowledgement of ‘fairy story logic’ already contained the seeds of eventual disappointment in actuality. At any event, life did not allow MacNeice’s autobiographical narrative to be finished according to that logic, and the book was put aside for good in 1941. The two self-absenting women, then, Louis’s mother and his wife, were not to be reduced to figures in allegory: they remained to trouble and provoke an imagination often stretched and tested by their loss. In his ambitious stage play of 1958–9, the posthumously published morality One for the Grave, MacNeice faces his hero Everyman with a wife and mother in quick succession. The wife is called Mary, who ‘comes downstage in a straw hat and a summer frock c.1930’; she and Everyman sit by a riverbank, and replay the scenario of MacNeice’s early love poem ‘Mayfly’ (‘Look at all those mayflies. To think they live for one day only!’) The idyll dissolves suddenly, as the Director’s Voice calls out ‘Cue Forgetfulness’ – ‘a female figure, wearing dark glasses’:

(Forgetfulness taps first Everyman, then Mary, on their shoulders)

FORGETFULNESS (sadly) Break it up, children; break it up.

(They draw apart and stand up with their backs to each other)

MARY (as if doped) Where was I?

FORGETFULNESS You were dreaming.

(She points to an Exit. Mary walks out as if sleep-walking)

EVERYMAN I’ve been asleep. Was anyone here?

FORGETFULNESS No one. (SP 225)

Almost as soon as the scene is done, Everyman is a child again in the company of his mother, ‘wearing Edwardian dress’: ‘Here’s Mummy, back from her rest cure.’ She is not back early (‘It’s been ages,’ says Everyman, ‘It’s been awful!’) but she is back with gifts of Hans Andersen and a box of chocolates. The fairy tales scare the child, and the box contains only empty wrappers. Then this:

DIRECTOR’S VOICE Hold that blackout. Let her get off.

FLOOR MANAGER (in darkness) This way, Madam. Come with me.

(In the darkness, off, a child’s voice is heard singing a hymn as far as the lines:

‘Teach me to live that I may dread

The grave as little as my bed…’

The voice is cut as the lights come up. Everyman is still sitting on the kiddystool as if in a trance)

EVERYMAN The grave … as little … as my bed? (SP 227)

The box of chocolates is there in The Strings are False,5 but it is now part of a fast-moving and deliberately problematic conjunction of images and ideas, as MacNeice tries to expose private anguish to the ironic light of a staged environment. Wife and mother are lost, but now as figures ushered off the stage, while Everyman is left without the ability to resolve the personal dilemmas of their loss. The hymn becomes a riddle.

In fact the hymn in question, Thomas Ken’s ‘All praise to Thee, My God, this night’ (1695) offers a good example of the night-time certainties denied to MacNeice’s writing:

When in the Night I sleepless lye,

My Soul with Heavenly Thoughts supply;

Let no ill dreams disturb my Rest,

No Powers of Darkness me molest.

Dull Sleep of Sense me to deprive,

I am but half my time alive;

Thy faithful Lovers, Lord, are griev’d,

To lye so long of Thee bereav’d.6

It may not be fanciful to catch here the accents of MacNeice’s ‘Prayer before Birth’. The religious intent in the hymn is to give God the role of comforting parent; at the same time, sleep itself is being depicted as a kind of waste time, threatened by the ‘ill dreams’ and ‘powers of darkness’ which do haunt MacNeice’s religiously uncomforted imagination. Increasingly, MacNeice went to the level of ‘dream’ in search of poetic logic; and this development is most marked in his last three volumes, where he wrote some of his greatest poetry. Often, however, the ‘dream-logic’ is really the logic of nightmare, as though the perils of unprotected, unwatched-over sleep were the price of admission to the creation of this strange, haunted writing.

In America in 1940, MacNeice could still identify the potential for good dreams in a love-affair, and see the possibility of nightmare as coming from somewhere outside the purely personal sphere. ‘Cradle Song’ makes its poetic voice the mediator between the loved one and the ‘watchers on the wall / Awake all night’, but another poem, written very shortly before, inverts the lullaby genre, and is not comforting, but comfortless. This is ‘Autobiography’, where the wakeful child makes a song out of his own abandonment in the night; the refrain, ‘Come back early or never come’, is not one of reassurance, but of wounded ultimatum. MacNeice’s poem is a lullaby thrown into reverse, or turned inside-out, but like a lullaby it has to run the risk of a certain sentimentality: in presenting a lonely and frightened child isolated from comfort, its pathos has to be carefully contained to prevent it dropping into bathos. The steeliness of the refrain is important for this; so too is the laconic directness of the voice MacNeice employs:

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. (CP 200–1)

Although both father and mother are mentioned, it is the mother who dominates this poem, or who is, rather, most powerfully not there. The poem seems to bite back its own remembered pain – so much so, that its last image, of ‘the chilly sun’, might stand for a chill at its own heart. The figure of the poet constructed here is not – as it would be in a poem given to the easy option of sentimentality – a candidate for mothering, but someone fitted to join the ‘watchers on the wall / Awake all night’. In the context of Louis’s courtship of Eleanor, this is important; in the longer context of the way his poetry was in fact to develop, it also marks a significant rejection of comfort in the way it frames and imagines the self. This voice does not solicit pity, and one way this is shown is in its utter rejection of self-pity.

MacNeice’s poetry tends, in any case, to inflect the word ‘pity’ negatively, and often towards ‘self-pity’. In ‘Valediction’ the visitor is instructed to ‘leave ten per cent of pity / Under your plate for the emigrant’; in ‘Letter to Graham and Anne Shepard’ ‘we … feed our brains on backchat and self-pity’, while in ‘Eclogue from Iceland’ a voice tempts the listeners to ‘let your self-pity swell with the music’ (CP 9, 49, 78). In Autumn Journal, there is a need to ‘abjure the luxury of self-pity’, along with a reminder that ‘the delights of self-pity must pall’ (CP 106, 160). In the wartime poem ‘Babel’ ‘We cut each other’s throats out of our great self-pity’, and in ‘To the Public’, from Visitations, ‘We do not need your indulgence, much less your pity’ (CP 228, 495). Another, more literary, use of ‘pity’ comes in Canto XI of Autumn Sequel (1954), which concerns itself with romantic attachment and loss. Here, the voice of the Parrot coldly ‘Repeats “I told you so, I told you so, I am Pretty / Polly who knows that one peck makes a kiss”’, to be answered by the lines ‘But what does one lost handkerchief make? The pity / Of it, Poll Parrot, the pity!’, and then the idea of how ‘the wronged lover does himself more wrong / Waking in Circe’s room’. This unequivocal calling upon Othello ushers in the anxieties of sexual jealousy and betrayal, but these are being brought to bear on a kind of sexual nightmare, for which Circe’s menagerie of lovers is the requisite myth:

And as the young man shrinks away, the white

Body beside him vanishes and leaves

The bed to him and the beasts, while the bitter bright

Day creeps under the door and under the eaves

Outside the sparrows yield to a louder bird:

‘I told you so, I told you so,’ it grieves … (CP 422)

From ‘the wronged lover’ to the young man in Circe’s crowded room, MacNeice’s images for the sexual life (which, like every other aspect of life, Autumn Sequel relentlessly makes into myth) are shadowed by ‘the pity of it’. But this ‘pity’ is not enough – it is, indeed, a part of the problem.

There is a point to looking again at MacNeice and Othello – or, rather, MacNeice and Othello, and the ways in which his relation to that character plays across the ‘pity’ of, the ‘pity’ in, and even the ‘pity’ about his life and work. When he puts ‘The pity of it’ in the mouth of Autumn Sequel’s Parrot, a character in that poem who embodies all that is facile, self-serving, and reductive in life, MacNeice indicates something of how he understands Shakespeare’s play and its protagonist. Both theatrical and critical traditions have always been divided about the nature of Othello – as ‘noble’ or ‘dull Moor’, as the romantic artist of transcendent love arias, or as a lethal fantasist whose best poetry is, in T.S. Eliot’s phrase, ‘cheering himself up’.7 For MacNeice, true to the modern readings of his time, there is a dreadful inadequacy in Othello’s appeal to Iago about ‘The pity of it’; and that inadequacy is certainly there in the play, for ‘pity’ is the one thing which the deluded hero is not going to show. And appealing thus to Iago, for whom love is ‘merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will’ (Othello 1.3.333), is to expose the word ‘pity’ to the most sceptical and ironic of audiences. Not being Othello necessitates a resistance to the appeals of ‘pity’, a detachment from the word which is also a measure of self-detachment, residually present even in ‘Cradle Song’. But then ‘Cradle Song’ is also a poem in which the ‘lust of the blood’ in one lover has not been met by ‘a permission of the will’ in the other, and its sexual content is therefore something postponed at best. The lover’s voice in the poem, however, makes a point of its experience of ‘Life’, and while a world war is one part of that ‘Life’, a sexual history is another. In this respect, it is interesting to read The Strings are False as part of the evidence Louis offers to Eleanor, for it builds in both sexual betrayal and promiscuity to its account of a personal life in which she is to offer the happy resolution. An American (or at least would-be American) MacNeice writes of how ‘In respect of sex I see England in the thirties as a chaos of unhappy or dreary marriages, banal or agonised affairs,’ adding satirically graphic details of ‘The pattern of every night shot through with the pounding and jingling of bedsteads’. But MacNeice is being true to another aspect of his personality when he makes this into a (Freud-inflected) text for a sermon of his own: ‘If it was a pathetic mistake to think that chastity in itself has spiritual value, it is also a pathetic mistake to think that acts of fornication piled up indiscriminately will somehow give value to life’ (SF 172). ‘Life’ tempts us towards the ‘pathetic’ in our sexual mistakes, then; and ‘pathetic’ here carries a slightly scornful spin, for to fall for the ‘pathetic’ is to succumb to the merely pitiful – as did Desdemona, when she listened to Othello’s courting stories and ‘swore in faith ’twas strange, ’twas passing strange; / ’Twas pitiful, ’twas wondrous pitiful’ (Othello 1.3.160–1). As MacNeice warms to his theme, which is that of how in fact ‘to give value to life’, he conjoins sex and economics:

Sexual promiscuity in our England was a legacy from nineteenth-century Enlightenment. The Emancipation of Women, Every Girl her own Harlot. The resulting paradox is like the paradox of Free Trade – there is nothing free about it. Those whose ship comes home have probably bankrupted others, if not by breaking up a marriage or making the future uncertain, at least – less directly – by encouraging others to gamble in a field where the majority must lose. (SF 172)

It is not clear just how far this would be likely to move the heart of the average American Trotskyite girl in 1940, but sex and the broken marriage would certainly speak to something in MacNeice’s history which, by this stage, he needed to make into a positive. ‘Life’ and its ‘value’ are at stake, but in a remarkable paragraph MacNeice finds his would-be panoptic view interrupted by the very thing it is attempting to rise above, for Othello, as well as Marx and Freud, is still at the party:

The modern Don Juan is the counterpart of the nineteenth-century self-made Captain of Industry. Winning through against odds he assumes that the world is his oyster, and always will be for those who have the requisite courage, technique, imagination. Which of course is a black lie. Man cannot live by courage, technique, imagination – alone. He has to have a sanction from outside himself. Otherwise his technical achievements, his empires of stocks and shares, his exploitation of power, his sexual conquests, all his apparent inroads on the world outside, are merely the self-assertion, the self-indulgence, of a limited self that whimpers behind the curtains, a spiritual masturbation. (SF 173)

‘Self-’ does not come out of this well; and Othello, ‘cheering himself up’, is of course at one point reduced to being (or, it may be fairer to say, is exposed as) a whimperer behind curtains, when he voyeuristically spectates on the false evidence of his own cuckolding. MacNeice’s condemnation of the ‘limited self’ includes the limitation of sexual obsession; and in looking at his own past life (which had, after all, included at least the occasion for rage at sexual betrayal), MacNeice identifies the kinds of ‘self-indulgence’ to which it is his business (implicitly, his business as a writer) not to succumb.

Taking refuge in the self – which, in a sense, is exactly what Othello does in his verbose and self-commentating form of revenge – is the thing MacNeice sets out to exclude. This is something much more easily set out as a programme, of course, than followed through in a writing life; and MacNeice was well aware that his work could accommodate superbly the life of the senses, and the whole range of pleasures, aesthetic and otherwise, which are pleasing, first and foremost,to the self by whom they are experienced. A self-indulgent isolation, whether hedonistic or self-pityingly miserable, is the danger attendant on some of MacNeice’s greatest artistic strengths. The realisation