I read a fine essay about Louis MacNeice and Autumn Journal by Mathew Lyons, which you can read by following the link: Here
If you don't know anything about either the poet or the poem, it's a fine place to learn about both and comes with the added bonus of a clip of MacNeice reading from his work.
Any discussion of Autumn Journal inevitably raises the spectre of Autumn Sequel. The latter has few supporters though Mathew did send me a link to this defence of Autumn Sequel
It seemed a good time to revisit Autumn Sequel. What follows is deliberately descriptive rather than critical.
Autumn Sequel revisited. An attempt at a description.
How little, a precious little, in life is fixed:
On the one hand this but on the other that;
Justice must lie between and truth betwixt.
(Canto I)
Autumn Journal is documentary poetry. In a note for Faber, MacNeice had claimed: ‘The writing is direct, anyone could understand it’. They can and it remains in print. But while it had been successful, MacNeice wasn’t happy with it. In a note to his Collected poems 1925-1940, he claimed it was ‘in a sense a failure; it fails in depth.[i]’
He told Eliot in 1944 that he was planning a long poem.
I can’t tell you much about the project at this moment, except 1)that the main characters will be imagined contemporary individuals, but will exist on two planes, i.e the symbolic as well as the naturalistic. (2) that there will be some inter-shuttling of past and present (though in a much more modified way than in Ezra Pound’s Cantos). (3) That the total pattern will be very complex and in fact rather comparable to the ‘Faerie Queen’ in its interlocking of episodes, subplots and digressions which aren’t really digressions.
It’s reasonable to assume the Project, however begun, would lead to Autumn Sequel.
In February 1954, writing to Philip Vaudrin, who would be his American publisher at Knopf, MacNeice introduced the finished Autumn Journal:
It is a good deal less occasional than its predecessor and , also, I think differs from it in many ways. There is a good deal less of sheer topicality to it, but on the other hand there are a good many more characters, these being mainly people I know but throughout represented under pseudonyms. […]. What I think myself should be most interesting about this work is the balance I have tried to achieve between the realistic and the contemporary on one hand and the mythical or historical on the other.’
He finishes the letter by telling Vaudrin that for the advance publicity he would like him to ‘bring out that, while in one way this long poem has affinities with Byron’s Don Juan, in another way it has affinities with quite different works, say Goethe’s Faust or The Fairie Queen.’
While claiming to have written a poem that has affinities with two such different works might strain the reader’s imagination, the claim was important enough to MacNeice for him to make the same request about advance publicity to Eliot, who was his publisher at Faber, ‘While AS may have affinities with Don Juan it also may have some with the Faerie Queen. [ii]’
The second poem was therefore designed to be substantially different to the first.
The most obvious difference is the form.
In Autumn Sequel MacNeice abandoned the flexible quatrains of the Journal, which ‘saves it from monotony[iii]’ and tied himself to the difficulties of Terza Rima. Macneice had made a point in the letter to Vaudrin that he used Terza Rima with ‘pure rhymes throughout’. Critics have challenged this claim.
The general consensus seems to be that while this form worked for Dante in Italian, it doesn’t work so well in English. Put simply the form requires sets of three full rhymes, and English just doesn’t have that many.
Glyn Maxwell was adamant: ‘Autumn Sequel fails because it is in Terza Rima’. He ends an essay praising Autumn Journal by eviscerating the first six stanzas of Canto I of the Sequel, claiming ‘The formal infelicities are almost too numerous to mention’ and concluding his brief discussion a page later with ‘Therefore I would surmise that Autumn Sequel failed before it even began, at the moment MacNeice chose to give it the form he gave it.[iv]’
Leaving aside form and the demands it placed on the writer and reader, the major difference between the two poems is that they create very different Model Readers.
Autumn Sequel is very clever, very literary poetry. Depending on your point of view those terms are descriptive or pejorative. For a growing number of poets and critics in the 1950s they were pejorative. MacNeice knew this.
To take one Canto as an example. MacNeice’s friend, Dylan Thomas died when he was writing Autumn Sequel and Canto XVII is ‘about’ that death.
Whether the emotion feels genuine, or whether like Tennyson he wasn’t so much grieving as writing a poem about grief, the whole Canto is self-consciously literary. The opening lines set the tone.
Lament for the Makers. Monday comes; at noon
Gwilym died in New York: if it was late
For his strange kind of poet: it was soon
For all who knew him and we need not wait
To meet his like : his like is seldom born,
Being admitted through the Ivory Gate
Where most of us must enter through the Gates of Horn.
You will need a key to the Sequel to know that Gwilym=Dylan Thomas and the name of the other dead poet who is mentioned later in the canto.[v] ‘Lament for the Makers’ is the title of a poem by William Dunbar. The gates of Ivory and Horn are from Virgil.
In the 43 stanzas of this Canto, MacNeice alludes to works by Skelton, Dunbar, Virgil, Milton, and Dylan Thomas himself, as well as The Mabinogion, The Tain, The Bible (Ecclesiastes) and the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens. He will name Taliesin, Silenus(and his ass?) , Damoetas, Skelton’s Parrot, Lycidas, Dionysus, a poet called Reilly who came from Connaught (F.R.Higgins), Deirdre and Naisi, the Three Kings (who followed the star to Bethlehem) and refers, amongst other things, to the first ascent of Everest and a donkey cropping Asphodel. He also mentions Evans, Calum, Price, Devlin and Gorman[vi]. Lacking a classical education I may have missed something. Inevitably one also starts to suspect allusions where none may be intended. Is the bear that grumbles after the bees Winnie the Pooh. Is MacNeice adding Milne to his long list of literary references?
Some of the many references are internal. A poem with affinities to the Faerie Queen would be structurally intricate and the Sequel is very carefully constructed. The reference to climbing Everest, far from being arbitrary, links to a previous Canto, where MacNeice had described his day job writing a commentary for a documentary about the ascent of Everest. The question he asks there, is answered here. And the idea of losing someone on the summit bid seems as natural as the Three Kings who appear throughout the poem as it moves chronologically towards Christmas and the Parrot who represents the kind of poet MacNeice doesn’t want to be, amongst other things.
The Model Reader not only has a classical education but an impressive breadth of literary knowledge and takes pleasure in noting how skilfully the poem is constructed.
The danger of writing a poem with such an erudite Model reader is obvious. The poem needs footnotes. A list of all the allusions to literary works and literary and historical characters would be very long. Whether it would add anything to the reading experience is moot. It seems unlikely any Real Reader would know them all. The pertinent critical question is whether all these references could cohere for anyone other than the poet. The practical question is how many baffled readers will keep reading.
Another way into the differences between Journal and Sequel Is offered by Al Alvarez. In ‘Lament for a Makar’, an article published in the New Statesmen soon after Autumn Sequel was published, he wrote that MacNeice ‘used to be a poet of two voices’.
When most himself he was a reflective poet and- this was least fashionable- unpretentious. Things, situations, ideas interested him more than his own case-book. He was sensitive, not nervy. […] That was his own voice.
The other voice was that of the Oxford Man, ‘smart, irreverent, quick with his cultured references, one of the Auden Gang. It did not ring true[vii].
Whether Alvarez was correct in establishing such a rigid binary, his distinction is useful. Most of Autumn Sequel is ‘smart’ and ‘quick with his cultured references’. In places it does not ‘ring true’.
However, if MacNeice had two voices, his ‘other voice’ is also present. He can still sparkle, still be the poet who read the paper and loved drink, sporting events and women.
In the same stuffed Canto XVII he provides a memorable image of Thomas standing at the bar, and later in the same Canto, he is describing the memory of listening to Thomas talk, an experience he had described in Canto II, and the abrupt, painful, recurring realisation that it will not be repeated:
…We would bask
As though in a lush meadow in any room
Where that voice started, trellising the air
With honeysuckle or dogrose, bloom on bloom
]
And losing bees between and a bear,
To grumble after the bees. Such rooms are still
Open to us but now are merely spare
Rooms and in several senses: damp and chill
with dust sheets over the furniture and the voice
Silent, the meadow vanished, the magic nil.
While Terza Rima might be one of the reasons Autumn Sequel doesn’t work, the abrupt line endings at still, spare and voice and the slight pause which makes the first two ambiguous, before the following word defines them, seems effective. But the image in the last stanza ‘damp and chill/with dust sheets over the furniture and the voice/silent’ does all the necessary work and makes honey suckle dogrose and bloom on bloom redundant and excessive.
This ‘first voice’ is swamped in the poem.
Finally, in Autumn Journal the future is an ominous presence, the Second World War is arriving slowly. In Autumn Sequel the future is absent, unless it is the Christmas the poem is moving towards. The poet endures the present, finding some pleasure in visiting friends, but so much of the poem is spent looking backwards. Yeats said passive suffering was not a fit subject for poetry, and while ‘suffering’ might be too strong a word to describe an intelligent man trying to make do in a bad time, Autumn Sequel might prove W.B.Ys point.
On the one hand, the Sequel lacks much that made the Journal a success. On the other hand, it has different ambitions, is a different king of poetry, belongs to a different time and is written by an older poet. It is easy to see why it has fewer partisans.
[i] The preface is reprinted in Collected Poems, edited by Peter McDonald Fber 2007.
[ii] The four quotations from letters are taken from Letters of Louis MacNeice, Selected and Edited by Jonathan Allison Faber and Faber 2010. Pages 312, 449-450, 571-2 and 573 respectively..
[iii] Letter to T.S.Eliot November 1938. In op cit page 312
[iv] ‘Turn and turn against Autumn Journal’ in Incorrigibly Plural: Louise MacNeice and his legacy. Edited by Fran Bearton and Edna Longley. Carcanet 2012.
[v] The key is presented as Appendix A in John Stallworthy’s biography ‘Louis MacNeice’. Norton 1995
[vi] Friends of both men, but you need the Key to find out who they are. If you have a copy of the Biography.
[vii] Qtd in Stallworthy’s biography p. 411
