'This Endless Land': Louis MacNeice and the USA

'This Endless Land': Louis MacNeice and the USAAuthor(s): Maria JohnstonSource: Irish University Review, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Autumn - Winter, 2008), pp. 243-262Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40344297 .

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Maria Johnston

'This Endless Land': Louis MacNeice and the USA

The poem 'Bar-Room Matins', composed by Louis MacNeice in an apartment on Fifth Avenue, New York in 1940, opens with the jaunty line: 'Popcorn peanuts clams and gum'. There is a transatlantic momentum at work here and this points up the necessity of reclaiming MacNeice as a poet of far more range and scope than many critics have fully allowed, by exploring the presence of America in his poetry and foregrounding the centrality of his American experience to the trajectory of his career. MacNeice has too often been considered merely in terms of his relations to either Ireland or England, but his autobiographical narrative The Strings are False begins with his symbolic crossing from the US to Europe in late 1940, 'on a boat going back to a war', thus making for a larger and more complex reality of experience. Indeed, his poem 'Variation on Heraclitus' voices the variable and multi-faceted identity of the poet who will not be fixed or contained: 'Nor need you be troubled to pin me down in my room/ Since the room and I will escape'.1 As Justin Quinn has astutely observed, MacNeice was 'a Northern Irish poet who refused to accept the borders of his province as the borders of his world'.2 MacNeice's time in the United States is a defining transitional moment, bridging his so-called 'thirties' phase and his career in BBC radio which lasted until his death. It takes place too, of course, at the onset of World War II, a time of universal upheaval and uncertainty. In many ways, America, as an elsewhere, as a legendary site of limitless imaginative possibilities for the self in the process of becoming, may be seen to have greatly expanded and enriched the work of one of the twentieth century's most important and influential poets.

America had long existed as a very real place of adventure and of alternative possibilities in MacNeice's imagination. Aged just four years old, MacNeice wrote a letter to his sister laying out his detailed plan to run away to North America:

I am going to run away on a raft [. . .] I am not going to stay. I am not going to stay [. . .] We will have plenty of provisions as we will have to go into the interior of North America. We will go where the lions howl in the night-time. We will keep a fire burning all

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night, as [you] wild beasts hate fire. I will disguise myself in my Indian suit and then they will be friends with us.3

The four-year-old MacNeice sees America as a space away from the limitations of the present, where disguise and remaking of the self are possible. MacNeice's run-away adventure never happened of course but America continued its hold over him; MacNeice and Margaret Gardiner frequented cinemas in London in the 1930s to watch American westerns.4 Despite such journeys of the imagination to America, MacNeice did not actually set foot on its shores until March 1939. Arriving for a lecture tour, he felt exhilarated beholding New York for the first time and took in every detail of its landscape and character with a keen painter's eye; what Robert Lowell in a review of MacNeice's poetry recognized as, 'perhaps the most observant eye in England'.5 This was a long-wished for trip; MacNeice had written to T.S. Eliot three years previously seeking advice on how he could get to the US.6

Having finally reached the America which was for British people as MacNeice realized 'a legend until they go there, one big pumpkin-pie fairy story' he felt an 'immediate nostalgia' for it on having to return to England (The Strings Are False, p.199, p.207). He had also, while there, fallen in love with the American writer Eleanor Clark whom he had met at a Partisan Review party. Thus, in January 1940 he returned to America on a boat of refugees for a long-term stay in what was a critical year in terms of world events and at a moment that had MacNeice, as he described himself in his autobiography, 'tense, anxious, muddled, expecting the moon, guilty of the war' (The Strings Are False, p.18). For MacNeice at this dark, uncertain time, New York, the towers of Manhattan as seen from deck, seemed 'a weight of concrete plumped on the lid of Europe to keep the bad dreams down' (The Strings Are False, p.21). W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood had, as is well known, caused controversy in 1939 by leaving England for America - a move termed by Cyril Connolly as, 'the most important literary event since the outbreak of the Spanish War' - and were criticized by commentators in Britain for 'running away from the war'.7 MacNeice stayed with Auden for Thanksgiving in New York and it is upon this moment that Paul Muldoon's poem '7, Middagh Street' pivots. Largely concerned with questions of art and politics, evasion and commitment, Muldoon's poem locates MacNeice along with Auden, Benjamin Britten, Salvador Dali, Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee, and Chester Kallman in the commune at that address in Brooklyn, New York; Auden himself is 'on the cusp' as Muldoon has elucidated.8 This poem is particularly interesting for the way that it emphasizes MacNeice as a transatlantic figure, a poet among exiles in New York - as World War II grips Europe

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- and in a similarly provisional and liminal state. The poem was written at the time when Muldoon himself was preparing to emigrate to the US and so it forges connections between Muldoon as emigré and MacNeice as his cosmopolitan poetic precursor. Muldoon's poem has his 'Louis' quoting Delmore Schwartz, alluding to Hart Crane, while Auden, visiting him in hospital, finds him reading Lorca's 'Ode to Walt Whitman':

'If you want me look for me under your boot-soles'; when I visited him in a New Hampshire hospital where he had almost gone for a Burton with peritonitis Louis propped himself up on an ottoman and read aloud the ode to Whitman from Poeta en Nueva York.9

Here, Muldoon has Auden and MacNeice suspended in a dialogue regarding the poet's responsibility in war-time, the spectre of Yeats haunting their words as they articulate their sense of being artists of their time in this temporary American locale. MacNeice, during this period in America, became, as Peter McDonald has noted, more preoccupied with the connections between the public world and private self and 'how much the external was in fact internalized for him at the time'.10 MacNeice considered his own departure from England an escape to America but not a relinquishing of responsibilities. Rather, it provided this poet who had long been 'tormented by the ethical problems of the war' with a necessary space apart in which to consider such questions (The Strings are False, p.21). As he had written in his 'Letter' from Reykjavik in 1936: 'We are not changing ground to escape from facts/ But rather to find them'.11

America in 1940 was for MacNeice a place of alternative experience where new possibilities could come into focus and where he could rethink and reformulate his own views. Crucially 'not at war' it became an important elsewhere that freed his mind up to new intellectual and creative ideas, broadening his own perspectives, as he moved away from his much-documented poetry of the 1930s and onto larger concerns. As MacNeice expressed it: 'I thought I could think things out there, get myself clear before I went back into the maelstrom' (The Strings Are False, p.21). He realized the deeply enabling significance of his transatlantic stay as an interregnum: 'An Atlantic crossing is always an interregnum and this one in January 1940 was more so than most' (The Strings are False, p.20). His work prospered as he completed his study of W. B. Yeats there. As Edna Longley has recognized, while he was working on this study of Yeats's

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poetry in America, 'he was simultaneously redefining his own aesthetic in relation to politics and war'.12 MacNeice saw himself as a man of various selves and identities, all fluid, writing in The Poetry of W. B. Yeats: 'I not only have many different selves but I am often, as they say, not myself at all/13 In his essay 'Traveller's Return' in 1941 he reflects on his own complex identity as one 'uprooted' and how his sense of being a self in transit connects to his writing life:

I can give myself as an example of uprootability. Born in Ireland of Irish parents, I have never felt properly 'at home' in England, yet I can write here better than in Ireland. In America I feel rather more at home than in England (America has more of Ireland in it) but I am not sure how well I could write if I settled there permanently.14

'Travels', as McDonald has remarked, are 'at the very heart' of MacNeice's work, 'taking the self out of its accustomed context to face difficult otherness, testing the known against the unknown' (The Poet and his Contexts, p.205).

America confirms MacNeice as a poet of travel. His time there had him travelling widely to give lectures at Vassar, Buffalo, Montreal, Skidmore College, Northwestern University, and Syracuse. He taught at Cornell, frequented New York, spent summer in Maine where he stayed with F. O. Matthiessen while convalescing from peritonitis and visited Atlantic City. This constant travel across America deeply impacted on his thinking and on his view of the world and human affairs. His experience of the country and its vast landscape is registered in his 'American Letter' to Stephen Spender:

Last week I flew from New York to Chicago and back. Much of the American landscape being dull from the train, I was astonished by its elegance from the air. Elegance is the word for it - enormous plains of beautifully inlaid rectangles, the grain running different ways, walnut, satinwood, or oatcake, the whole of it tortoise-shelled with copses and shadows of clouds (Selected Prose, pp.75-6).

The description ends with a profound realization, a vision of 'fresh clean scepticism' that this American journey affords him:

but you cannot, with this endless land below you, avoid a beautiful feeling of futility, of fresh clean scepticism about humanity in general; the elections of Republicans and Democrats, the squabbles of the AFL and the CIO dwindle to a lottery in an

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ant heap; even if there were war down there on the plains of Indiana, it would just be one more ingredient in the pattern of a sliding map.

MacNeice's relationship with Eleanor Clark also contributed greatly to the changes in him during this time and part of his American experience was simply that of being hopeful and in love. Overall, as he himself wrote, 'something inside me changed gear' (The Strings are False, p.204) and he felt at home in America making many friends, including Muriel Rukeyser, Allen Tate, and Delmore Schwartz. Schwartz, eager to give MacNeice a taste of New York night-life, took him to a nightclub in Harlem where an energetic black dancer persisted in coming up to MacNeice and urging him to 'Get hot, boy, get hot!'15 MacNeice clearly explored many diverse experiences during his American sojourn.

Leaving America at the end of 1940 MacNeice felt homeless, bereft, portraying himself in his autobiography as a 'mere nomad who has lost his tent' (The Strings Are False, p.17) and he wrote later of how, as the ship pulled away, he looked with 'nostalgia at the Wall Street cluster of buildings, patter of green and white and dull red and terra cotta'.16 This acute moment of displacement and disturbance is captured in his autobiography as he professes: 'The world for me has become inverted: America is the known and England the unknown' (The Strings Are False, p.17). The Atlantic had become for MacNeice: 'the tunnel between two worlds', a 'chrysalis, Lethe' (Selected Prose, p.78). It is clear from these weighty observations that MacNeice was deeply aware of the irreversible changes that had occurred within his own self over the course of his transatlantic journeying. His time in America formed a decisive experience and its effects would continue to radiate. As Stallworthy has noted, this love for America 'shines through his radio scripts of summer and winter 1942' in radio broadcasts such as 'Britain to America', 'Halfway House', and 'Salute to the US Army' (Louis MacNeice, p.313). It is highly probable that MacNeice's interest in radio as a form was influenced by his exposure to American radio and the broadcasts of Edward Murrow in particular. MacNeice's radio work was crucial in opening his poetry out into new dimensions and it points up the reach of his innovation and experiment. Writing for radio enabled him to communicate through many voices, dissolving boundaries of time and place and of genre and so allowed him to travel the world in this way. Indeed, MacNeice's work for radio may be seen to exemplify his transatlantic impulse as his radio play Christopher Columbus 'created a sensation in artistic circles on both sides of the Atlantic' (Louis MacNeice, p.315). Furthermore, his programme for BBC radio, titled 'Word from

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America: Poems and Songs of the American people chosen by Louis MacNeice for the people of Britain', presented a wide range of American poetry including Walt Whitman's 'Song of Myself and 'A Sight in Camp', Robert Frost's 'The Bear', Vachel Lindsay's 'A Negro Sermon', and E.E. Cummings's 'All in green went my love riding'. MacNeice introduced the programme by explaining how the selection expressed his sense of the dynamism and diversity that is America:

The poems and songs that follow now, each in their own way, breathe the same spirit, the spirit of America as it has been expressed by American poets and singers, telling of the American way of life, the workers, the idlers, on the rail-roads, the ranches, the plantations, in the nurseries; the isolated homes of the countryside and the crowded working life of the big city.17

MacNeice's choice of American poems reflects the range of his own poetic resource as he embraced the formal and the free, the modern and the traditional, the universal and the local, always alive to new possibilities.

MacNeice had long been, and would continue to be, a presence in American literary life. His poetry was published and reviewed in journals such as Poetry, Partisan Review, Signatures, the American Review edited by Robert Penn Warren, and Delmore Schwartz's Mosaic; his poetry and prose were reviewed by F. O. Matthiessen, Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, Conrad Aiken, Cleanth Brooks, and Anthony Hecht. Jarrell named him as someone whom he could 'admire and appreciate' for 'writing beautiful or witty or moving poems'.18 MacNeice was respected by an impressive roll-call of American writers. Karl Shapiro, reviewing MacNeice's Autumn Sequel, celebrated him as 'the natural poet of the age, possibly the only living poet who knows how to speak in poetry' asserting that 'his significance has never been properly estimated.'19 Shapiro also praised MacNeice's poetic technique: 'one cannot overestimate his gift for character, for aside, for subtlety of tone, and for a masterly control of the tatterdemalion idiom of the 20th century'. Indeed, MacNeice's influence on Shapiro's poetry has also been remarked upon.20 Louise Bogan begins her 1964 essay on MacNeice by stating that 'The dazzling early lyric performance of Louis MacNeice remained unmatched in his generation' and described him elsewhere as 'a special kind of North of Ireland talent.'21 He was read too by Elizabeth Bishop who had written to Marianne Moore in 1938 commenting on MacNeice's poetic style in relation to her own: 'Have you seen Louis MacNeice's Poems? - that's the kind of spotted helter-skelter thing it seems so easy to fall into. Some people can do it and say what has to be said by them. I can't seem to/22 MacNeice was

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elegized with affection by both Robert Lowell and John Berryman. In 1963 Lowell wrote to Bishop of the death of the Irish poet mentioning how much he admired MacNeice's poetry: 'I liked some of his poems, more the early ones, very much. Always a smart mind and eye, and a spring to the rhythm/23 Lowell's elegy ends with a symbolic exchange between both poets as they appear engaged in conversation beside a bust of that other famous crosser of the Atlantic, Eliot:

A month from his death, we talked by Epstein's bust of Eliot; MacNeice said, 'It is better to die at fifty than lose our pleasure in fear'.24

John Berryman was shocked by MacNeice's death, writing to Lowell in September 1963: 'Hell of a year, isn't it - Mr Frost, Ted [Roethke], & NOW Louis whom I loved.'25 He elegized MacNeice in his 'Dream Song 267', mourning the death of the man he had spoken of to Richard Wilbur as 'one of my best-loved friends':

So Henry's thought rushed onto a thousand screens & Louis, the midwife of it. A thousand dreams behind, birds are incredibly stupid. My love for Louis transcended his good work, and - older than Henry - saw him not in the dark & suffocating.26

Eliot wrote the obituary for MacNeice in the Times calling him 'a poet of genius' who 'stood apart from his generation'.27

MacNeice's knowledge of American Literature was deep and he critiqued the work of poets such as Ezra Pound, Eliot, Robert Frost, Delmore Schwartz, and E.E. Cummings. He had read American poets like Whitman early in his career - the epigraph to Autumn Sequel is the oft-quoted line from Whitman's 'Song of Myself, 'Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself - and as a young man in his twenties was given to quoting Pound's Cathay (Selected Prose, p.235). At this time too, as he recalled, 'The Waste Land hit me in the way a person hits one' (Selected Prose, p.232). Eliot was a formative influence on MacNeice. Frost too interested him very much and was, in MacNeice's appreciative words, a poet of 'very subtle craftsmanship' and importantly, a 'master of angles' in his handling of syntax.28 MacNeice's knowingness about Frost's poetry is in evidence as he points out the tendency among critics to misread the American as a simple poet. Frost, as MacNeice recognizes, is 'one of the most sinister writers in the language.' MacNeice also greatly admired Randall Jarrell's critical writing and often quotes him approvingly, professing

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in a 1955 review of Jarrell's Poetry and the Age that: 'There are few contemporary critics, either here or in America, who show such enthusiasm, honesty or wit' (Selected Literary Criticism, p. 203). MacNeice singles out Jarrell's treatment of Whitman as one of the book's 'best chapters' and makes the case for Whitman's undeniable centrality to poetry: 'Many of us can remember, when we were undergraduates, laughing our heads off at Whitman's absurder passages' but, as he confirms, 'American poetry (or, for that matter, poetry) cannot be considered apart from him' (Selected Literary Criticism, p.204). He concludes by quoting Jarrell's point that 'Whitman was [...] a poet of the greatest and oddest delicacy and originality and sensitivity, so far as words are concerned' (Selected Literary Criticism, p.205). Here, MacNeice applauds Jarrell for his sustained attentiveness to words as being crucially 'what poems are made of and so must have seen in him a kindred spirit. As his poetic relations indicate, MacNeice embodied the modern and the cosmopolitan.

MacNeice's writings on America show him to be a thoroughly unbiased, open-minded, and intelligent thinker as he denounces anti- American prejudices, correcting received fallacies. His essay 'Touching America' (1941) begins by refuting the stereotypical images of America and Americans that are transmitted to Europeans by way of the cinema, as he states: 'Thanks to Hollywood, we think of the USA as a whirl of millionaires, hard-boiled business men, simple-minded toughs and free-living blondes' (Selected Prose, p.92). He refuses naively to romanticize America and is critical of particular elements of its culture, commenting with shrewd insight on American life, its politics, social structures, culture, and attitudes. He is always sensitive to its vices - stridently critical of its tolerance of Fascism and anti-Semitism - but he writes too of the country as 'inspiring' and praises the American's 'keen curiosity about the world':

Having thus made clear that I suspect all gush about Americanism, I can say how much I like the country and most of the people. The visitor [...] is continually being shocked - by the sponsored radio programmes, by the patent sadism of the police, by the American Business Man (monstrous hybrid of crook and baby), by the American Committee Women and patronesses, by the New York intelligentsia (even more self-conscious, more cliquey than the English), by the cellophaned drug-store food, by the worship of the gadget etc., etc. - but he is also continually being inspired and even enlightened (Selected Prose, p.92).

This 'keen curiosity' is clearly something MacNeice valued both in Americans and in himself. Furthermore, MacNeice's 1943 pamphlet

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Meet the U.S. Army strongly promoted links between the USA and Britain. In its review of the pamphlet, Time magazine hailed MacNeice's efforts, underlining the relevance of his American background to the project's success. His insights into America, its complexities, the 'vastness and diversity of the American background' are penetrating.29 Meet the U.S. Army shows MacNeice in characteristic fashion eschewing easy generalizations. The pamphlet opens by emphasizing the deep connections and empathy between the two nations, correcting ignorant assumptions each nation has fostered about the other due to lack of knowledge and national bias:

The U.S.A and Britain, the two great English-speaking nations, have more in common than a language. The present war has seen a new unity growing between them; and this process must neither be broken off nor slowed down. [. . .] In the past their ideas of each other have too often been little better than caricatures, drawn from the inadequate and misleading evidence of books, films and stray flesh-and-blood visitors (Meet the U.S. Army, p.5).

MacNeice sets out to dispel myths, to open up the minds of Britons to transatlantic vistas. One of the many interesting and entertaining passages concerns the American language as MacNeice helpfully explains the differences between American and British English, including a glossary of American words and their English equivalents:

When an American speaks of the hood of a car he means what we call the bonnet; when he says vest he means waistcoat, and when he says undershirt he means vest; when he says crackers he means biscuits and when he says biscuits he means scones (Meet the U.S. Army, pp.16-17).

His interest in American slang is emphasized here also:

Apart from such standard differences, Americans of course use a wealth of slang. Some of this is now familiar to British cinema- goers and may even have been adopted by them for their own use but much of it is likely to strike you as alien and perhaps unintelligible. You must remember that American slang is always changing and is richer and more colourful than our own; this is partly because the U.S.A., being still a comparatively young country, retains an experimental and effervescent habit of speech which we have not had since the days of Elizabeth, and partly because her diverse racial ingredients, including the America Negroes, have all contributed something to the national language,

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as well as to the national character. Some people in Britain may feel that American slang is too flamboyant. Remember that your visitors may find British slang flat, hackneyed, monotonous and colourless (Meet the U.S. Army, pp.17-18).

That MacNeice's interest in American speech feeds into his own poetry is particularly evident in his essay Modern Poetry as he discusses poetic language: 'Popular images harden into clichés and so lose vividness, no longer call up a picture. But the popular imagination, as shown, for example, in the American wisecrack is something with which the poet should stay in communication/ MacNeice himself employed a large variety of voices and registers of diction in his poetry and here it is the 'slang talk of New York' that is 'rich and living' making the poet in turn 'rich and copious in his words'.30

MacNeice's America informs his poetry at a crucial time and its presence points to the ways in which the purpose of travel was, as he believed, both to frustrate and illuminate. His poetry in America began to undergo important changes as he himself noted: 'During the war years [. . .] I myself grew more relaxed while my poetry tightened up'.31 It is then that his vital technique of parable begins to develop too, as he explains in an essay: 'Since Autumn Journal I have been eschewing the news-reel and attempting a stricter kind of drama which largely depends on structure/32 Indeed, MacNeice described his American odyssey in terms of a parable. At a heightened moment in The Strings Are False MacNeice presents the story of a boy who 'lived in a house where everything was always the same' (The Strings are False, pp.204 - 6). When the boy complains to his father that he wants something different the father gives him a nickel, a dime, and a quarter and instructs him to throw one over his shoulder whenever he wants to be elsewhere. The boy does so and finds himself floating over the sea. His journeying takes him to 'a country of prisms and fountains' dominated by a lake with a skater on it. As MacNeice writes, 'there is nothing you have ever wanted so much as to meet this figure and talk with it' but the skater never leaves the ice. The boy therefore has to risk everything in the hope of meeting the skater and so he gambles with the last remaining quarter. He throws it, only to find himself back home where everything is always the same. However, as the boy realizes: 'But now everything was different'. MacNeice writes later in The Strings Are False of how he returned to America in 1940 because, 'I wanted to see if the fountains were still working and the skater still skating on the lake' (p.215). The boy in the parable is of course MacNeice himself just as his own journey to America has changed everything that will come after. MacNeice's Foreword to the Random House, Poems 1925 - 1940, shows again this awareness of a new phase being ushered in:

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When a man collects his poems, people think he is dead. I am collecting mine not because I am dead, but because my past life is. Like most people in the British Isles I have little idea what will happen next. I shall go on writing but my writing will presumably be different [. . .] We shall not be capable of depth - of tragedy or great poetry - until we have made sense of our world.33

He wrote too to Mrs Dodds from Ithaca in March 1940 with this same sense of new horizons, of new reaches of thought emerging:

I am writing a new kind of poetry (very slight so far but will gain body I hope) [...] Am also [...] formulating a new attitude, the basic principle of which is that Freedom means Getting into Things and not Getting Out of them; also that one must keep making things which are not oneself - eg. works of art, even personal relationships - which must be dry and not damp; as sticking cloves into an orange makes a pomander, = something NEW.34

With all of this in mind, it comes as no surprise that, as Derek Mahon has perceptively recognized, the years 1939 and 1940 make up a 'particularly rich period in MacNeice's creative life'. Mahon considers poems such as 'London Rain', 'Bar-Room Matins', 'Meeting Point', and 'Autobiography' to be high points in MacNeice's poetry of this period.35 Peter McDonald, too, has commented on how The Last Ditch, published in 1940 by the Cuala Press, represents 'an important moment in the poet's publishing history'.36 Yet the collection, which contains some of MacNeice's most remarkable poems, has received little critical attention. One poem, 'Meeting Point', registers the poet-as-lover's initial American experience. Based on his relationship with Clark and enclosed as part of a letter to her which MacNeice wrote while crossing the Atlantic in 1939, it is one of his finest and most celebrated love poems. Indeed, Conrad Aiken, in his 1941 review, hailed it as one of his best lyrics.37 America here is a place out of time; mutability being a constant preoccupation for MacNeice:

Time was away and somewhere else [...], There were two glasses and two chairs And two people with the one pulse (Somebody stopped the moving stairs) Time was away and somewhere else.

The bell was silent in the air Holding its inverted poise -

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Between the clang and clang a flower, A brazen calyx of no noise: The bell was silent in the air (Collected Poems, p.686).

It is in America that he is momentarily freed from the constraints of time, the processes of war and history, and finds himself 'timelessly happy' in a new relationship.38 In The Strings are False, America was for MacNeice a place 'whose present tense is a continent wide' (p.17) and in Meet the U.S. Army he described how 'all over the United States you meet many people who are not the victims of the clock' (p.13). 'Meeting Point' is born out of that deepening sense of 'life no longer what it was' as MacNeice escapes from time into a yearned-for interstice, to a place of pause, of 'interregnum'.

The technical mastery of this poem is evident, its power lying in the rhyme scheme and the repetition that, as it frames stanzas, suspends time to create stasis. The poem's structure, as a temporal enclosure that envelops the lovers, calls to mind Frost's idea of the poem as a 'momentary stay against confusion'. Yet this freeze-frame effect can also be seen to induce stagnation; Michael Longley has noted how 'the rhyme scheme brings the couple together yet keeps them apart'.39 Longley has also interestingly stressed the relationship between 'Meeting Point' and the later poem 'The Introduction' (1962), describing the 'nightmarish transformation of the refrain' here and of the refrain in the equally exceptional poem 'Autobiography' from 1940. Through such juxtapositions, what he terms the 'family likenesses' between poems across MacNeice's oeuvre become evident and although critics routinely dismiss the poetry of what has been referred to as MacNeice's 'middle stretch' it is important to see the crucial linkages between his output in the early forties and his later poetry. In this way, the idea of continuity which Longley touches on is significant. For example, the 'calyx' in 'Meeting Point' is the same 'calyx upon calyx' of 'Les Sylphides' (Collected Poems, pp.187-8) from 'Novelettes' which comes later in The Last Ditch. The bell pervades MacNeice's work with its deep resonance. As MacNeice elucidated: 'church bells have for me a sinister association, e.g., in my poem "Sunday Morning"' (Selected Literary Criticism, p.159). Another poem from The Last Ditch, the tenderly articulated second section of 'Three Poems Apart' (later titled 'Trilogy for X' in Plant and Phantom) professes the same desire to seal the moment in time, the chiasmus and caesura in the final line 'closed on the world [...] world closed' creating the still point, the moment held safe 'within it':

O my love, if only I were able To protract this hour of quiet after passion,

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Not ration happiness but keep this door for ever Closed on the world, its own world closed within it (Collected Poems, p.698).

'Cushendun' from the 'Coming of War' sequence, composed on MacNeice's return from America in 1939, is a poem that has America represent that which lies out of reach. Much of MacNeice's relationship with Clark was conducted by correspondence - letters and poems - across the Atlantic in 1939. Thus the poem darkly addresses Clark: 'you beyond the clamour of Manhattan/ Are terribly far away.' America, from the distance of Ireland, the poet's view clouded by the outbreak of war in Europe, is an unrealistic prospect at this time:

In a land which is a legend for me already, A dream that has come untrue, For now, my love, there is more than the Atlantic Dividing me from you (Collected Poems, p.683).

As McDonald has noted, MacNeice 'made Ireland the middle ground between dream and nightmare', America and Clark being the dream (The Poet and his Contexts, pp.96-7). However, MacNeice's return to the US in 1940 would profoundly alter this idea of America as 'dream', as 'legend'. America in 1940 becomes a site of intense inner struggle where a variety of central preoccupations are debated and worked through.

The poem 'Jehu', written at F. O. Matthiessen's summer home in Kittery, Maine in August 1940, was later included in Oscar Williams's anthology The War Poets published in the US in 1945.40 'Jehu' juxtaposes the tranquil, lush New England setting - an 'outmoded peace' - with the life-negating desert of war, the forces of destruction that have laid waste the world throughout history. Thus, the poem opens on the view of a peaceful New England, captured in all its languid detail:

Peace on New England, on the shingled white houses, on golden Rod and the red Turkey carpet spires of sumach. The little American flags are flapping in the graveyard. Continuous Chorus of grasshoppers. Fleece Of quiet around the mind. Honey-suckle, phlox, and smoke-bush Hollyhocks and nasturtium and corn on the cob. And the pine wood Smelling of outmoded peace (Collected Poems, p.198-9).

The 'Fleece / Of quiet around the mind' suggests a lassitude and inertia that are disquieting. MacNeice's poetic style has clearly been

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influenced by his change of landscape and his technique reflects the mounting chaos of a world at war. He leaves behind traditional, tight metrical forms for a more intuitive rhythm and freer, more open, and exploratory verse modes. Here MacNeice locates America as a space untouched by war - in contrast to the desert sand now blowing over England - as he considers in the closing lines of this parable poem where he himself in his uncertainty and confusion should be standing in the face of such large-scale devastation and anarchy:

And now the sand blows over Kent and Wales where we may shortly Learn the secret of the desert's purge, of the mad driving, The cautery of the gangrened soul, though we are not certain Whether we should stand beside The charioteer, the surgeon, or shall be one with the pampered Queen who tittered in the face of death, unable to imagine The meaning of the flood tide.

Thus, the American landscape inspires MacNeice to engage with large- scale questions of politics and culture that pertain to every historical moment. Indeed, his letters to Clark display a restless, thoughtful mind wholly given over to anxieties over the implications of the war. As he wrote to her in May 1940: 'For the last week I have been feeling steam- rollers going over me all the time, that wasn't just nerves; it was imagining [...] what this war is going to do to England and Ireland'.41 The poem 'Refugees', written in September, presents the monstrous realities of modern contemporary life, as it describes the arrival of the uprooted, those displaced by war, in the colossal city of New York, in an America that is their promised land of freedom, dignity, and hope: 'to be unmolested / And make ends meet - an ideal surely which // Here if anywhere is feasible' (Collected Poems, pp.197-8). As John Montague has recognized, 'few American poets could equal MacNeice's description of New York in "Refugees" where the skyscrapers "heave up in steel and concrete/ Powerful but delicate as a swan's neck."'42 However, MacNeice does not focus only on his immediate American environs and the current climate. The haunting poem 'Autobiography', composed, as 'Jehu' was, in F. O. Matthiessen's summer house, draws on MacNeice's childhood in Northern Ireland to create a lurid, nightmarish kaleidoscope of heightened, discreet images bound by a haunting refrain that points up a dark obsession with time:

In my childhood trees were green And there was plenty to be seen.

Come back early or never come.

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My father made the walls resound, He wore his collar the wrong way round.

Come back early or never come {Collected Poems, p.200).

The compulsive repetition of the refrain as it is voiced over and over again in the present tense creates a frightening temporal dislocation within which the poetic consciousness is trapped. 'AH thumbnail nightmares' is how MacNeice would describe his final poems in his last letter to his friend Allen Tate in 1963.43 From his American vantage then, the whole panorama of selves, past and present, comes acutely into focus along with intimations of future poetic strategies.

The masterful poem, 'Evening in Connecticut', also from September 1940, is set in the garden of Clark's childhood home at Southover Farm, Connecticut and it opens on a scene of equilibrium that is eerie in its forced stillness:

Equipoise: becalmed Trees, a dome of kindness; Only the scissory noise of the grasshoppers; Only the shadows longer and longer {Collected Poems, p.201).

Here, the word 'equipoise' points back to the stasis of 'Meeting Point' and the sense of being at a temporal and spatial remove. There are obvious echoes of Eliot's The Waste Land particularly in the use of anaphora in the last two lines of the first stanza, the repetition of the word 'unreal' (a word that resounds throughout Eliot's poem), the lengthening shadows ('Only / There is shadow under this red rock'), and the 'sea of singing insects' in the second stanza that echoes Eliot's 'the grass is singing'. Again, MacNeice is employing free verse here, as the lengthening lines are mimetic of the advancing shadows. This garden, a sanctuary of seeming innocence, becomes overshadowed by MacNeice's knowledge of war and his continued search for meaning in America. The reality of world events, of growing threat, cannot but impinge here, the pivot being the word 'Fall' and its duplicitous plurality of meaning:

But turning. The trees turn Soon to brocaded autumn. Fall. The fall of dynasties; the emergence Of sleeping kings from caves -

The world turns, is 'turning', time cannot now stand still and the American natural landscape becomes as vast and lonely as it was for

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Auden, rendering the human more isolated in its 'seeming-friendly woods' and ultimately 'not to be trusted'. The poem ends with the shadows lengthening and continuing to encroach:

Not to be trusted, no, Deaf at the best; she is only And always herself, Nature is only herself. Only the shadows longer and longer.

Throughout these American poems there is a dark vision at work, the distance affording MacNeice keener perspectives. A more troubled and searching voice in his poetry emerges as it works through unending existential questions and registers the tensions of the displaced, disordered self in a contingent world. MacNeice's poetry of this period makes clear how his move to America can in no way be viewed as an escapist manoeuvre. Questions of the personal and the political preoccupy MacNeice here as a precarious self and impermanent world hang in the balance. 'Frost knows loneliness only too well', MacNeice wrote of the American poet and in MacNeice's own poetry of this American period a deep sense of alienation and insecurity takes hold as the fragmented, dislocated self wrestles with weighty, far-reaching issues. The shift in the poetry is apparent; as the poem to Clark that opens The Last Ditch signals, this is a poetry 'without heroics, without belief (Collected Poems, p.678). Gone is the 'spotted helter-skelter' quality that Bishop had seen in his earlier work as described in her 1938 letter to Moore.

In 1957 MacNeice proposed a new kind of travel book to be titled Countries in the Air, the purpose of which was, as he declared, 'to explore, in the light and shade of my own experience, the corroborations and refutáis of my myths, the frustrations and illuminations I have found in various travels' (The Strings are False, p.14). MacNeice is a poet of travel, of ceaseless exploration, and his influence on contemporary poets has been born out of his own deep engagement with elsewheres, his boundless transnational scope. Tom Paulin has stated that MacNeice is for him, 'a great poet of the sea. The sense of the sea, of Belfast Lough, of darkness and travelling and not knowing where you are or where you're going is powerfully there; he's a poet of emigration'.44 John Montague has remarked on MacNeice's 'diversity of landscape' as particularly influential and concludes that 'the ease with which Northern poets, like Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon, seem to move in the outside world may well derive from MacNeice's restless photographic eye' (The Figure in the Cave, p.211). Michael Allen, too, in an essay that examines the presence of America in the poetry of Heaney and which starts by asserting that 'local

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attachments were no longer a crucial spur for Heaney's generation of Irish poets' has identified MacNeice as a vital and exemplary precursor: 'When Longley, Mahon, and Heaney first read together in the mid-60s [...] they were celebrating a poet, MacNeice, for whom all places were potentially elsewhere.'45 MacNeice is a truly transnational poet. Outward-looking, internationally-minded, refusing to be fixed, he strongly resisted the idea of entrenched national boundaries as he did totalizing ideologies or political dogma. A heated discussion between MacNeice and F. R. Higgins had MacNeice correct Higgins by adding pointedly that modern English verse was being written in America and not just in England. By way of response to Higgins, MacNeice expressed his far-sighted opinion that: 'sooner or later national traditions will be taken up into some wider traditions, corresponding to the superseding of narrower national feelings by creeds or philosophies which cut across national frontiers':

I have the feeling that you have side-tracked me into an Ireland versus England match. I am so little used to thinking of poetry in terms of race-consciousness that no doubt this was very good for me. However, I am still unconverted.46

These comments testify to MacNeice's open and inclusive view of poetry as a form that crosses the narrow boundaries of tradition, nationality, and language. MacNeice, as Derek Mahon has pointedly reminded us, when 'asked if he were an Irish poet or an English one, [...] would reply that he was simply a "poet"'.47

In 1961 MacNeice proposed to Faber a book titled Poems of Place in which around sixty poems would be presented under sixteen different country-headings, from Ireland to the USA by way of fourteen other countries. This arrangement was indeed 'innovative' as McDonald has commented and it calls attention once more to MacNeice's idea of poetry and knowledge transcending boundaries of place, the self moving across geographical spaces to know more of the world and make sense of its place in it; the world being, in his immortal words, 'incorrigibly plural'. Hedli MacNeice's portrait of her husband also focuses attention on his limitless world-view. 'The front door' as Hedli writes of MacNeice's ability to embrace and encompass all, 'was wide and always open' as 'the windows on the west side looked towards Connemara, Mayo and the Sea. Those to the south scanned Dorset, the Downs and Marlborough - the windows to the north overlooked Iceland and those to the east, India.'48 As Montague has pointed out, 'Ireland is an island off the coast of Europe, facing, across three thousand miles of ocean, towards America' (The Figure in the Cave, p.208) and, by looking to America, MacNeice is liberated beyond the

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limited critical views that have placed him only within the restrictive contexts of Ireland or England, or framed him as predominantly a 'thirties poet'. Like Whitman, MacNeice 'contains multitudes' and is no less a poet of contradictions. Exploring the ways in which America informs and enabled MacNeice's work deepens our understanding of his rich, multi-faceted oeuvre, opening up new and more expansive perspectives for its appreciation and for the appraisal of the contemporary poetry - of the late twentieth century and after - that has been made possible by his example. In this way too, his identity as a poet and writer is enlarged as it transcends the rigid national boundaries of Ireland or England and engages with America and the wider world in all its complexity and diversity.

NOTES 1. Louis MacNeice, 'Variation on Heraclitus', in Louis MacNeice: Collected Poems, edited

by Peter McDonald (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), p.560. All further quotations from MacNeice's poetry come from this edition. MacNeice, The Strings Are False: An Unfinished Autobiography (London: Faber and Faber, 1965). Further references to this volume will be noted in parentheses.

2. Justin Quinn, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry, 1800-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p.180.

3. MacNeice, Letter to Elizabeth MacNeice, Christmas 1911, reprinted in Jon Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), pp.30-2.

4. See Susan Mansfield, 'Friendship is a Thing of Beauty', The Scotsman, 4 December 2004,6.

5. Robert Lowell, 'Current Poetry', Sewanee Review 54 (Winter 1946), 340-1. b. MacJNeice, Letter to i.b. tiiot, 15 January Wób, in jonatnan Allison, Letters to uiiot

and Auden', Irish Pages (Spring/ Summer 2005), 210-219, p.211. 7. Cyril Connolly, Comment , Horizon: A Review of Literature and Art 1.2 (February

1940), 68. MacNeice employed the phrase in his 'The Coming of War', in Collected Poems, p.683.

8. Paul Muldoon, interviewed by Lynn Keller, 'An Interview with Paul Muldoon', Contemporary Literature 35.1 (Spring 1994), 1-29 (p.26).

9. Muldoon, '7, Middagh Street', in Meeting the British (London: Faber, 1987), p.40. 10. Peter McDonald, Louts MacNeice: The Poet in his Contexts (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1991), p.105. Further references to this volume will be noted in parentheses. 11. 'Letter to Graham and Anna' from Letters to Iceland, in Louis MacNeice: Collected

Poems, p.50. 12. Edna Longley, Louts MacNeice: A Critical Study (London: Faber and Faber, 1988),

p.100. 13. MacNeice, The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), p.146. 14. MacNeice, 'Travellers Return', in Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice, edited by Alan

Heuser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp.83-91 (p.88). Further references to this volume will be noted in parentheses.

15. 'See James Atlas, Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1977), p.127.

16. MacNeice, 'The Way we Live Now', in Selected Prose, pp.78-82 (p.78). l/. MacNeice, Word rrom America , broadcast on the bBC Home Service, 15 February

1941. On microfiche at the BBC Written Archives Centre, Reading. I am grateful to Simon Workman for making available a copy of this script.

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18. Randall Jarrell, 'Introduction to a Poetry Roundup', in No Other Book: Selected Essays, edited by Brad Leithauser (New York: Harper Collins, 1999), pp.257-8. See also Randall Jarrell, Letter to The Nation, 20 May 1948, in Randall Jarrell's Letters: An

Autobiographical and Literary Selection, edited by Mary Jarrell (London: Faber, 1986), p.193. Here he includes MacNeice among a list of poets whose poetry he valued and would review positively.

19. Karl Shapiro, 'The Truth Outside the Rules', Encounter 4.5 (May 1955), 87-8. 20. His 'idiom is indebted to Hart Crane, Louis MacNeice'. See William Van O'Connor,

Maurice Beebe et al., 'The Middle Generation of American Poets', College English 18. 4 (January 1957), 229-243.

21. See Louise Bogan, 'Louis MacNeice', in A Poet's Alphabet: Reflections on the Literary Art and Vocation, edited by Robert Phelps and Ruth Limmer (New York: McGraw Hill, 1970), p.294. Also, Louise Bogan, 'W.H. Auden', in A Poet's Prose: Selected Writings of Louis Bogan, edited by Mary Kinzie (Athens; Ohio: Swallow Press, 2005), p.224.

22. Elizabeth Bishop, Letter to Marianne Moore, 5 May 1938, reprinted in One Art, edited by Robert Giroux (New York: FSG, 1994), p.73.

23. Lowell, Letter to Elizabeth Bishop, 11 September 1963, reprinted in The Letters of Robert Lowell, edited by Saskia Hamilton (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2005), p.436.

24. Lowell, 'Louis MacNeice 1907-63', in Collected Poems, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (London: Faber, 2003), p.538.

25. John Berryman, quoted in John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman (Boston; London: Routledee and Keean Paul, 1982), p.332.

26. Berryman, The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), p.286. 27. T.S. Eliot, 'Louis MacNeice', Obituary, The Times, 5 September 1963, 14. 28. See MacNeice, 'Frost', in Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice, edited by Alan

Heuser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp.244-7. Further references to this volume will be noted in parentheses.

29. MacNeice, Meet the U.S. Army (London: H.M. Stationary Office, 1943), p.7. 30. MacNeice, Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p.102. 31. MacNeice, Sleeve Note to Argo Reading of his Poems, quoted in Longley, p.114. 32. MacNeice, 'Experiences with Images', in Selected Literary Criticism, pp.153-164

(p.162). 33. MacNeice, 'Foreword', Poems 1925-1940 (New York: Random House, 1941) reprinted

in Louis MacNeice: Collected Poems, pp.791-2. 34. MacNeice, Letter to Mrs A.E. Dodds, 22 March 1940, quoted in Robyn Marsack, The

Cave of Making: The Poetry of Louis MacNeice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p.65. 35. Derek Mahon, 'MacNeice, the War and the BBC, in Studies on Louis MacNeice, edited

by Jacqueline Genet and Wynne Hellegouarc'h (Caen: Centre de Publications de l'Université de Caen, 1988), pp.63 - 77 (p.65).

36. McDonald, Louis MacNeice: Collected Poems, p.xxv. McDonald's new edition of the Collected Poems has restored The Last Ditch to its rightful place in MacNeice's oeuvre.

37. Conrad Aiken, 'Louis MacNeice , m A Reviewers ABC: Collected Criticism of Conrad

Aikenfrom 1916 to the Present (London: W.H. Allen, 1961), pp.285-8 (p.287). 38. MacNeice, Letter to E.R. Dodds, 5 February 1940, quoted in McDonald, The Poet and

his Contexts, p.105. 39. Michael Longley, Lecture on Louis MacNeice at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, 7

November 2004.

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40 Along with poems by Richard Eberhart, William Empson, Robert Penn Warren, Mark Van Doren, William Meredith. Jarrell, in a letter to Robert Lowell, describes 'Jehu' as 'rather good but not enough' (Jarrell, Letters, p.133). Jarrell also mentions in this letter how he had wanted to review MacNeice's Springboard for Poetry but had to refuse as he 'then thought [he] was getting shipped overseas that week'.

41. MacNeice, Letter to Eleanor Clark, 21 May 1940, reprinted in Stallworthy, p.273. 42. John Montague, 'The Impact of International Modern Poetry on Irish Writing', in The

Figure in the Cave and Other Essays (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1989), pp.208-220 (P.211).

43. MacNeice, Letter to Allen Tate, 2 August 1963. MS. Princeton. The letter is marked with the following comment written in Tate's hand: 'Our last letter from Louis MacNeice'. I am grateful to Jonathan Allison for kindly making available a copy of this letter.

44. Tom Paulin, quoted in Elizabeth Young, 'Inside Story: Canon Law', Guardian, 4 February 1995, Weekend. See also Paulin, 'The Poetry of Displacement', Poetry Review 69.3 (March 1980), 52-56.

45. Michael Allen, 'The Parish and the Dream: Heaney and America, 1969 - 1987', Southern Review 31.3 (Summer 1995), 726-38 (p.726). As Paul Muldoon has said: 'it's important to most societies to have the notion of something out there to which we belong, that our home is somewhere else.' Quoted in Eamon Grennan, 'American Relations', in Irish Poetry Since Kavanagh, edited by Theo Dorgan (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1996), pp.95-105 (p.104).

46. MacNeice, 'Tendencies in Modern Poetry: Discussion between F. R. Higgins and Louis MacNeice, Broadcast from Northern Ireland', The Listener, 27 July 1939, 185-6.

47. Mahon, 'Incorrigibly Plural', in Journalism: Selected Prose (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1996), p.49.

48. Hedli MacNeice, 'The Story of the House that Louis Built , reprinted in Stallworthy, pp.481-2.

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'This Endless Land': Louis MacNeice and the USA

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Transcript of 'This Endless Land': Louis MacNeice and the USA