Louis MacNeice (1907–1963)

What a strange and weird travel book about Auden and MacNeice’s three month’s of travel around Iceland, mainly by bus and pony, in 1936; part letters home, part poetry, a little fact and quotes from earlier writers about Iceland, and a diary section written by a cod spinster.
As Auden says in his first “Letter to Lord Byron”:
Every exciting letter has enclosures,
And so shall this - a bunch of photographs,
Some out of focus, some with wrong exposures,
Press cuttings, gossip, maps, show more statistics, graphs;
I don’t intend to do the thing by halves,
I’m going to be very up to date indeed.
It is a collage that you’re going to read.

It might have been considered a bit of a rum do in its time, it now reads as humorously eccentric. It is fascinating too for its view of a historic Iceland that has disappeared in the 80 odd years since it was written (although Auden bemoans the move to towns from the countryside), for mentions of German tourists in search of the Aryan homeland and fleeting references to the Spanish Civil War, which started whilst Auden and MacNeice were in Iceland. The book ends with a humorous versified joint Last Will & Testament, which surprised me with its name dropping - John Betjeman may be expected, but Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess (both later revealed as Russian spies) were a surprise.

Overall, an enjoyable but not special book, with MacNeice’s letters from Hetty to Nancy are the most interesting reads, and Auden’s Letters to Lord Byron also working well. show less

Re-reading him after some years. I do love Louis Macneice, great poet of the everyday and the bittersweet. He sets out to make you feel quite pessimistic and grim, yet you end up laughing for joy. Favourites: “Snow”; “Prayer before Birth” that wonderful incantation; “Apple Blossom” and “The Truisms”.

So immediate, so that it almost reads as stream of consciousness poetry:
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 show more eyes to the noise of the ’planes that pass

By turns, autobiographical and personal.
But for all that, so of the historical moment, as he went into 1939. show less

I've been waiting more than 30 years to read this. Perhaps I would have liked it more then. As it is, the only passages that really grabbed me were ones I already knew:

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 show more 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.

***

There will be time to audit
The accounts later, there will be sunlight later
And the equation will come out at last.

***

I had thought I was going to love it. The idea of a poem written in real time and published, same, autobiographical, capturing the time-before-the-war in anticipation of it. When it was about the vacation in Spain just before the fall to Franco, the trip's clichés given piquancy by the looming horror and very uncertain future, that was a poem I thought might give me some sort of solace, or at least perspective, when faced with our own uncertainty.

But no. All the rest of it is quite different: an election, a lost dog, a great deal of classical Greek references, most of which I didn't understand. Apparently it was quite popular in 38 and 39, so maybe readers then did find in it what I was hoping to.

At least it was possible to get through to the end, which seems like a near impossibility with new works just now.

Library copy show less