I S S U E 9
Birmingham: The Making of MacNeice
Ross Wilson considers the influence of Birmingham on Louis MacNeice
But my dear,’ my friends said, “you will not be able to live in Birmingham!” Birmingham was darkest Africa.
—The Strings Are False, Louis MacNeice
Living in a large industrial city, Birmingham, I recognized that the squalor of Eliot was a romanticized squalor because treated, on the whole, rather bookishly as décor.
—Modern Poetry, Louis MacNeice
Birmingham had reconciled me to ordinary people.
—The Strings Are False, Louis MacNeice
‘He wasn’t one of us,’ someone once said to me regarding Louis MacNeice. I was tempted to ask, Oh, he wasn’t a human being? Of course, I knew what was being referred to: class. Had MacNeice never moved to Birmingham I might have been more sympathetic to this view, for prior to moving there MacNeice was a self-confessed aesthete detached from everyday life. In a sense Birmingham was the making of the MacNeice we know and, while he remained a product of the upper middle-class described by more than one acquaintance as aloof, he reached a place in Birmingham—as a thinker and as a maker of poems—that was more in touch with life than it might otherwise have been. In Modern Poetry (Oxford University Press, 1938) MacNeice writes of ‘going down’ to Birmingham from Oxford to get married:
while still holding firmly to these two tenets: (i) that what makes a poem a poem is its artificiality; (ii) that poetry is a pursuit for the few, that these few are the pick of humanity, and that when they speak they speak for themselves rather than for others
I won’t be alone in recoiling from the second point here, especially when we consider how Oxonians have dominated recent UK governments, including the last five Tory prime ministers. In our era, this ‘pick of humanity’ have been doing a fine job speaking on behalf of themselves and their cronies rather than in the interests of the public. MacNeice is talking about poets, of course, but that same sense of superiority and entitlement comes from the educational institutions that helped form his mind; Sherborne Preparatory School and Marlborough College providing stepping stones to Merton, Oxford. In Modern Poetry, MacNeice confesses:
I first achieved a highbrow attitude to poetry when I was 12. A young man from Oxford came to my school as a master and taught us English literature in the grand manner.
This ‘new master’ told the class it was ‘vulgar’ to admire certain poets and that poetry ‘should be about beautiful things, and should offer an escape from the drabness of ordinary life’. In 1961 MacNeice would confess in the New Statesman, ‘I marvelled once again at what Oxford does to her captors’ before going on to catalogue the ‘soft-spoken malice’, ‘thin-lipped irony’, and ‘cynicism’ of those formed by ‘this city of sneering spires’. ‘Going down’ to Birmingham then was a coming down to earth.
In his essay ‘Experiences with Images’ (1949), MacNeice comes to the conclusion that his time in Birmingham was the first time he was ‘in any proper sense, grown up.’ He acknowledged as much in Modern Poetry: ‘I had to earn my own living and this is antipathetic to a purely aesthetic view of life’. In the preface to that book, MacNeice makes a ‘plea for impure poetry’ ‘conditioned by the poet’s life and the world around him’. MacNeice was reacting to the art for art’s sake aestheticism fashionable during his time as a student in the late twenties, what he described in Modern Poetry as ‘the divorce between the poet and other men’.
In late nineteenth-century France, Stéphane Mallarmé attempted to make pure music of poetry, detaching it from everyday concerns and pushing it into a salon only a few avant-garde intellectuals would be interested in entering—though Mallarmé’s dictum ‘poems are made not of ideas but of words’ remains instructive to those who would go to the opposite extreme and use poetry as a means to an end, putting the message before the medium. MacNeice felt the modernist poet who emerged from these theories was ‘both a “rebel” and a parasite upon his community’, no longer interested in making himself coherent to the general public, and yet ‘demanding that the community shall support him and his poetry for their own sake in the same way that an appreciative oyster might support the pearl that grows in it’.
MacNeice felt his generation of poets were ‘working back from luxury-writing’ towards a ‘functional’ poetry more in touch with life as lived by the poet than with culture. A few years earlier, in Russia, Vladimir Mayakovsky rejected the avant-garde Futurism of his youth in order to commit himself to the Revolution and ‘work devotedly for the working-class reader’, while in Germany Bertolt Brecht reacted to the individualism of romantic-symbolists like Rilke with a socially aware poetry that was spare and direct and didactic though often utilising traditional forms. Brecht’s complaint that ‘the poet now represents only himself’ was echoed by MacNeice in Modern Poetry. But unlike Mayakovsky or Brecht or his contemporaries Spender and Day Lewis, MacNeice never embraced Marxist theory. He believed the poet ought to be a small voice in society, not a loudspeaker spreading propaganda. In The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (Oxford University Press, 1941) MacNeice weighs up two opposing schools of thought:
The believers in Art for Art’s Sake had gone too far in asserting that poetry can be judged without any reference to life. But the realists went too far in the other direction.
Yeats provided MacNeice with a bridge between the generations and a model of what was possible, progressing as he had from the escapism of the Celtic Twilight to the social awareness and ‘responsibilities’ of his later work. Responsibilities would become a favourite word of MacNeice’s. Albert Camus also made good use of it in his lecture Create Dangerously (1957) when he called art for art’s sake a theory that emerged from ‘middle-class Europe, before and after 1900,’ and ‘a voicing of irresponsibility’ that resulted in ‘the artificial art of a factitious and self-absorbed society’ in which ‘abstractions’ disconnect us from reality. Art, Camus claimed, had been severed from ‘its living roots’. Like MacNeice, Camus was looking beyond the artistic revolutions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century towards Ancient Greece which ‘assumed’, as MacNeice claimed in Modern Poetry, ‘life was the source and subject of poetry’. In 1894, Stéphane Mallarmé was in Oxford lecturing students and planting seeds: ‘Literature alone exists, to the exclusion of everything else’.
So, art for art’s sake (and the nihilism underlying it) was the worldview MacNeice had inherited when he arrived in Birmingham in 1930 to work as an Assistant Lecturer in Classics at Birmingham University. At this time, he was a twenty-three-year-old intellectual snob lacking life experience or exposure to people outwith his social class. He had got the job despite writing, as he admitted to a friend, ‘a flippant letter’ accompanied by ‘an assassin-like photograph’, and despite the Merton authorities warning his employers that MacNeice ‘was unquestionably gifted but unfortunately rather a difficult character and not always a steady worker—he spent too much time writing poetry’. It is amusing to compare this ‘difficult character’ of 1930 with the questionable work ethic to the MacNeice of 1960. By then working for the BBC, MacNeice was confronted by his bosses about what he’d been doing with his time, seeing he’d only produced one programme in six months: ‘Thinking’ was his terse, witty reply. MacNeice got the job in Birmingham probably because his difficult character and enthusiasm for poetry endeared him to E. R. Dodds who was himself an Irish poet who had been expelled from school for ‘insolence’.
Initially, MacNeice struggled to relate to his students, many of whom were known as ‘brown-baggers’ due to carrying their books in brief cases when commuting to the university. They in turn struggled with his monotonous voice and lack of vocation as a lecturer. MacNeice would, however, go on to befriend some like Walter Allen and Reggie Smith, who happened to be raised in the same working-class street and went to the same Grammar School. Years later Allen would write:
It would scarcely be possible to exaggerate the effect of Birmingham, the great black sprawling industrial city, upon him. The evidence is in his poems . . . He went to Birmingham an aesthete and in some respects remained an aesthete all his life; but in Birmingham he discovered common humanity and recognized it in himself.
In his poem ‘Birmingham’, the erudite young poet alludes to Plato while observing the mod cons of a modern commercialised city inhabited by shop girls, factory workers, police men, and neighbours immersed in a competitive capitalist mindset:
In these houses men as in a dream pursue the Platonic Forms
With wireless and cairn terriers and gadgets approximating to the fickle norms
And endeavour to find God and score one over the neighbour
By climbing tentatively upward on jerry-built beauty and sweated labour
In his unfinished memoir, The Strings are False, MacNeice writes how he had begun to discover a city whose writers were ‘free of the London trade-mark’ and whose students ‘were not poseurs’. It appears some of these students even enjoyed mocking their supposed ‘betters’. Reggie Smith, for example, according to MacNeice, ‘thought nothing was so funny as the Oxford and Cambridge proletarianisers’. Smith was someone who, much like MacNeice, was ‘immune’ to the ‘escape’ Oxonians referred to as ‘realism’ and ‘hard to draw into a crusade’. MacNeice’s biographer, Jon Stallworthy, sketches the Birmingham scene at this time:
Friends like Reggie Smith and Walter Allen were less obsessed by politics than their contemporaries at Oxford and Cambridge who, in reaction against their bourgeois origins, were idealizing The Proletariat. The Birmingham novelists, like the Birmingham Surrealists, were free of social guilt and had a strong sense of self-identity.
MacNeice had already published a first collection Blind Fireworks (Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1929) the year before he moved to Birmingham. Considered juvenilia today, it has been relegated to the appendix section of his most recent Collected Poems (Faber & Faber, 2007.) In Louis MacNeice: A Critical Study (Faber & Faber, 1988) Edna Longley describes the progress between this debut and his second collection Poems (Faber & Faber, 1935) as a cooling from ‘hothouse solipsism’ to ‘dialectic about responsibilities’. Elsewhere in her study, Longley writes: ‘The impulse behind MacNeice’s criticism is always to confront abstract or evasive formulations with the real messiness of life’. This is as true of his poetry as his criticism. Take ‘An Eclogue for Christmas’, the opening poem of Poems where MacNeice draws a portrait of modern man as depicted by modernist art:
. . . sifted and splintered in broken facets,
Tentative pencillings, endless liabilities, no assets,
Abstractions scalpelled with a palette-knife
Without reference to this particular life . . .. . . abstracting and dissecting me
They have made of me pure form, a symbol or a pastiche,
Stylised profile, anything but soul and flesh
MacNeice goes on to warn us against ‘the pitiless abstractions’ that can lead to the dehumanising of the other. Almost a decade later, in ‘Prayer Before Birth’, from his 1944 collection, Springboard, a foetus prays from the womb for the ‘strength against those who would freeze my / humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton’. By then, of course, MacNeice wasn’t reacting to art for art’s sake but to an increasing fanaticism with the rise of Nazism and Fascism in the West and Stalinism in the East: ideologies hell-bent on reducing individuals to ‘a cog in a machine, a thing with / one face’, to quote ‘Prayer Before Birth’.
There is a surprisingly early indication of MacNeice confronting abstractions in a letter he wrote to his stepmother, in June 1927, where he warns her that Victorians (like her!) fed on abstractions and were sick, whereas his generation ‘have returned to the concrete’. A decade later, in a letter to Auden, MacNeice insisted: ‘One must write about what one knows. One may not hold the bourgeois creed, but if one only knows the bourgeois one must write about them’. In this letter he praises Auden for showing ‘great sense’ not writing ‘proletarian stuff’, although reviewers had accused him of just that. As Robin Skelton pointed out in his 1964 anthology, Poetry of the Thirties, the poets of that era ‘much to their embarrassment’ were largely public schoolboys; ‘products of the bourgeoisie’. However, Skelton also points out how these poets were also children during the Great War, students during the General Strike and young adults during the Great Depression ‘pitch-forked in a period of intense social tension’. Like most generations, they were rebelling against what came before. But rebelling against needn’t be a rejection of: MacNeice was too savvy to throw away what could be of use to him; however much the real world and social awareness began to appear in his poems his background in classics, his interest in philosophy, and his religious upbringing (his father was a bishop) would always inform his poetry, sometimes leading him astray into obscure rumination, sometimes adding a richer layer to the material he made his poems from.
Memories of lecturing in Birmingham University appear in Autumn Journal. To my mind one of the great long poems of the twentieth century, a wonderful blend of the discursive and the lyrical, the conversational and the metrical, the private and the public, Autumn Journal presents an individual life spotlit on the backdrop of a world emerging from the storm of a depression and about to be submerged by the darkening shadow of an oncoming Second World War:
Eight years back about this time
I came to live in this hazy city
To work in a building caked in grime
Teaching classics to Midland students . . .[. . .]
We lived in Birmingham through the slump –
Line your boots with a piece of paper –
Sunlight dancing on the rubbish dump,
On the queues of men and the hungry chimneys . . .
During his time in Birmingham the Great Depression hit Great Britain but, as ever, it hit the not-so-‘great’ harder than their elevated (supposed) betters. In The Strings are False, MacNeice paints a bleak picture:
Up in the industrial district on the north side of Birmingham the air was a muddy pond and the voices of those who expected nothing a chorus of frogs for ever resenting and accepting the status quo of stagnation.
That was in the industrial district. Things weren’t so bad elsewhere, as MacNeice confesses (the italics are my own): ‘For five years Mariette and I lived together in Birmingham and all that time we were living on an island. We ignored our Birmingham context as much as possible’.
Having to earn a living might have forced MacNeice from a ‘purely aesthetic view of life’ but the newly-weds were still somewhat sheltered: Mariette had an annual allowance from her grandfather and MacNeice’s father gifted them a car. From this it’s hard not to imagine the couple driving around in their own bubble. Indeed, there are references to them driving around in Autumn Journal: ‘roads ran easy, roads ran gay’ as they ‘put on tweeds for a getaway’ to the Cotswolds. The young couple spent a lot of time at the cinema: ‘Nothing but bliss in a celluloid world where the roses are always red and the Danube is always blue.’ At this time, MacNeice wanted to write poetry ‘expressing doubt or melancholy’ but as these felt ‘disloyal’ to Mariette and the life they were leading he wrote a novel instead, ‘an idyll of domestic felicity’. ‘Faking, I thought, doesn’t matter so much in prose.’ The novel, Roundabout Way (Putnam, 1932), was published under the pseudonym Louis Malone. It was poorly received by critics. The opening lines of the synopsis are interesting, however:
An Oxford student disillusioned with his privileged past and the aesthetic life, heads for Yorkshire and a simpler identity as a gardener.
Much as MacNeice might have claimed to ignore Birmingham, and as distracted as he might have been writing his romantic novel, he was, as we have seen, also exposed to the arts scene in the city and this, as well as mixing with working-class writers like Smith and Allen, had an impact on the young writer. As Jon Stallworthy wrote:
Birmingham had brought MacNeice closer to the workers – in sympathy and understanding – than it would ever bring Auden, closer than London would bring Blunt, Day Lewis, or Spender.
MacNeice’s landlady in Birmingham was a militant socialist. He became suspicious of what he called her ‘gospel-tent enthusiasm’ for Marx. MacNeice was influenced, at least in part, by listening to the views of working people he met in Birmingham who told him they were as wary of their local Labour Party as they were their local church. His Oxonian friends were another matter: ‘Young men were swallowing Marx with the same naïve enthusiasm that made Shelley swallow Rousseau’, he remarked in The Strings are False. MacNeice was determined the strings he played were true even if the truth made for an unpopular tune: ‘None of our hearts are pure, we always have mixed / motives, are self-deceivers’, he wrote in Autumn Journal, a poem in which he admonishes the exploitation of a ‘system that gives a few at fancy prices / Their fancy lives’ in one breath while admitting his own prejudice in the next: ‘that in order / To preserve the values of the elite / The elite must remain a few’. MacNeice shows compassion but doesn’t hide his own self-interest.
‘An Orwellian honesty’, Jon Stallworthy noted, ‘would always prevent MacNeice from concealing the inner self the others would deny, but time would increasingly reveal’. I’ll return to that last sentence in a moment but first let me digress a little: Orwell himself was critical of MacNeice and his contemporaries in his essay Inside the Whale (Gollancz, 1940): ‘Politically they are almost indistinguishable’ he wrote of ‘Mr MacNeice and his friends’ as if they were posh boys playing games the vast majority are oblivious to; poetry games that have no concrete political impact though they pretend to be important. In Modern Poetry MacNeice claims his generation protested more effectively than Eliot’s but Orwell scoffs: ‘Just where these “protests” are to be found I do not know’. Orwell makes a great point here, one that applies to many poetry ‘activists’ of our own era ranting into the echo chamber of social media to the applause of the converted. However, Orwell is guilty, as many were, of lumping MacNeice into what Roy Campbell famously dubbed MacSpaunday: MacNeice, Spender, Auden, Day Lewis. As Stallworthy suggests, MacNeice is closer to Orwell than his fellow poets, standing somewhat to the side of his generation, absorbing everything, and observing everyone from the distance of a sceptical humanist. The following could be Orwell on ‘Mr MacNeice and his friends’ but is in fact the Orwellian MacNeice:
I remembered how under the Roman Empire intellectuals spent their time practicing rhetoric although they would never use it for any practical purpose; they swam gracefully around rhetoric like fish in an aquarium tank. And our intellectuals also seemed to be living in tanks.
But let’s return to Stallworthy’s point about MacNeice’s ‘Orwellian honesty’; it is an important one, one that makes MacNeice so attractive to me as a thinker and so unattractive, or limited, to his contemporaries who criticised his lack of commitment. There are many who would agree with those critics today rather than with myself, but I would argue a writer can hide behind commitment (or use it to simplify complex issues) particularly when the cause is modish among their milieu and in the interests of their career; this might be especially so in the small self-enclosed world of poetry, or rather the ‘business’ of poetry, which has little to do with poetry itself. When Stallworthy goes on to say how MacNeice ‘saw through’ his friends as he saw through himself, I like to imagine MacNeice surveying the poetry scene today. When I do, I see the older MacNeice on the cover of Edna Longley’s study of his work; a world-weary man with a withering no-nonsense gaze, the MacNeice described as ‘grim and sardonic’ by Derek Mahon. Not a man, I suspect, to suffer the bullshit posturing endemic to poetry in our own era, the ‘Blurbonic plague’ as Dennis O’Driscoll memorably diagnosed the pretentious havering that too often adorns the backs of books churned out of creative writing factories by today’s marketing-minded rhetoricians.
When we look at MacNeice’s poetry or criticism, we look in the opposite direction of a Poetry Twitter where, too often it seems to me, poets twitter like birds in an attention-seeking exhibitionism that can be irritating (or hilarious) depending on how seriously you take it. In an age of dogmatic certainty, MacNeice, as a thinker, offers a welcome dose of doubt and questioning (including self-questioning), hard intelligence, erudition, and clarity of thought. And then there’s the poetry that frames and finds forms for the thought. At his best MacNeice is a virtuoso craftsman. At his worst he wrote far too much: while in Birmingham, he said this of Ezra Pound: ‘Quantity must always affect quality . . . Mr Pound does not know when to stop’. If only MacNeice listened to his younger self! That said, he came back from his midlife crisis as a writer to produce some of his finest work near the end of his life. Often labelled a ‘thirties poet’, like any good poet he transcends his era by plugging his individual talent into the tradition and feeling the charge of the centuries electrify the present he inhabits. Modern Poetry becomes a somewhat ironic title when we consider the following passage is embedded in it:
Homer gave me an example of verse-writing which was homogeneous but yet elastic enough to represent much of life’s variety. I have noticed since that many modern theories of poetry could not make room for Homer.
‘The drunkenness of things being various’ was essential to MacNeice, as he famously wrote in ‘Snow’: ‘World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural’. This applies to MacNeice himself: when proposing Autumn Journal to his publisher, T. S. Eliot, he acknowledged his own multitudes ‘as different parts of myself (e.g. the anarchist, the defeatist, the sensual man, the philosopher, the would-be good citizen) can be given their say in turn’. Note: ‘the would-be good citizen’ and recall the line: ‘none of our hearts are pure’. How at odds with the image (and identity) obsessed poetry scene of our own time when virtue-signalling and posturing are so abundant that just using a phrase like ‘virtue-signalling’ could have you accused of being a right-wing reactionary. Certainly, there wouldn’t be much room for Homer today. Would The Iliad get by a sensitivity reader?
But let’s return to Birmingham. In 1935 Mariette left MacNeice and their young son to emigrate to the USA with a man who had been their lodger. In his memoir, Dan MacNeice would write how he later came to believe he and his father had been abandoned and how he remembered ‘perceiving an aura of melancholy’ about MacNeice: ‘His own mother had died when he was seven and his whole life was consciously affected by this; possibly the replication in mine, or repetition in his, magnified his sadness’.
MacNeice turned his failed marriage into one of his most famous and arresting poems, ‘The Sunlight on the Garden’, a great showcase for his mastery of form and internal rhyme:
The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold . . .
While clearly hurt by the divorce, MacNeice was remarkably unbitter. Gratitude for better times, those early days in Birmingham, shine through:
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.
‘The house in Birmingham became too ghost-ridden for my father,’ Dan MacNeice would write. In November 1936, father and son moved to London.
***
I started this essay by saying how someone once told me MacNeice wasn’t one of ‘us.’ In a sense he never will be. Born over a century ago some of what he wrote will jar today. And then there’s his aloofness: God (‘or whatever means the Good’) knows what he would have made of an autodidact like myself! But all generations are judged by future generations and whatever faults we might find in MacNeice his integrity shines through while his skills as a poet, at his best, stand strong almost a century after the publication of his first collection of poems. Was he ever one of ‘us’? (whoever ‘we’ are?) Even in his own time MacNeice was always something of a dark horse, an Irishman in England, never quite at home in either country: ‘If I had one foot poised over the untrodden asphodel, the other was still clamped to the ankles in the bogs,’ he would write.
Is it hyperbole to say Birmingham was the making of Louis MacNeice? Probably, for he only lived in the city for five years. But the best-known, most familiar MacNeice came of age as a poet in Birmingham and, to some extent at least, came down to earth a little through living and loving and working in that city. To repeat the words of his friend Walter Allen: ‘In Birmingham he discovered common humanity and recognized it in himself.’ The Oxonian master who taught the twelve-year-old MacNeice that poetry should shun the vulgar and embrace beauty would not have been impressed by the Birmingham effect. In an essay published shortly after leaving the city, ‘In Defence of Vulgarity’ (1937) MacNeice wrote:
I am all against the rarefying effects of good taste, and have no sympathy with the idea that artists are people who should not soil their fingers with life.
***
Over half a century since Louis MacNeice died, I’m re-reading Modern Poetry on a bus into another post-industrial city, Glasgow. As I rise to depart and as my sole descends to earth (‘the earth compels’) more everyman ‘proletarian’ than Oxonian ‘pick of humanity,’ I am reminded of something MacNeice wrote in The Strings Are False: ‘My father played with the idea of sending me to Glasgow University, as being both more moral and industrious than Oxford’. What might have been had he gone further north! But we must be grateful for what was and still is, thanks to his ‘going down’ to Birmingham, and grateful too for the sunlight on the page that shines a light on what it is to be human, whoever we are and wherever and whenever we happen to be when we open a book of Louis MacNeice’s poems.
Ross Wilson is a full-time Auxiliary Nurse and autodidact from Fife. His second collection, Vital Signs, is forthcoming from Red Squirrel Press.