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Sustains our effort to be ill.
To talk the dictionary through
Without a chance word coming true
Is more than Darwin's apes could do. . . .
If we were really wretched and asleep
It would be easy then to weep,
It would be natural to lie,
There'd be no living left to die.
Auden's poems gravitate—or levitate—around a central concern for self-respect, Louis MacNeice's around a central concern for personal comfort. But MacNeice's idea of comfort is of the self-respecting kind:
All that I would like to be is human, having a share
In a civilised, articulate and well-adjusted
Community where the mind is given its due
But the body is not distrusted.
So writes MacNeice, halfway through Autumn Journal, a long poem covering five months' effort on the author's part to make himself comfortable in England in the autumn of 1938. As it turned out, the time and place were badly chosen.
In this rhymed journal MacNeice's chief aim, as he states in a foreword, was to be honest about what he felt and saw; and in this he succeeds as far as his engaging garrulity will allow. The poem starts at summer vacation's end (All quiet on the Family Front), follows MacNeice up to London for his job:
. . . lecturing, coaching,
As impresario of the Ancient Greeks
Who wore the chiton and lived on fish and olives
And talked philosophy or smut in cliques. . . .
Soon comes the Munich crisis (We are safe though others have crashed the railings), bad times in London, hard times for Poet MacNeice (No wife, no ivory tower, no funk hole). Recurrent ruminations on the meaning of it all down MacNeice often, never knock him out. He visits Barcelona soon before its fall, takes in Paris on the way:
Where alcohol, anchovies and shimmying street-lamps
Knock the stolid almanac cock-a-hoop,
winds up his testament of beliefs and dubieties with a resolution to remain alive — only more so:
For to have been born is in itself a triumph
Among all that waste of sperm. . . .
Wasteful of words as it is, Autumn Journal is a cheerful record of squalid times, occasionally conveys intimations that the fun of living can outweigh its guilt.