Backlisted - Autumn Journal by Louis MacNeice

Episode Date: October 15, 2018

This week John and Andy are joined by actor and director Sam West and writer and academic Sophie Ratcliffe to talk about Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal. The poem was composed in the autumn of 1938 while Britain awaited the declaration of the Second World War. Other books under discussion are Katharine Kilalea's OK, Mr Field and Francis Plug: Writer in Residence by Paul Ewen.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)8'07 - Ok, Mr Field by Katherine Kilalea12'24 - Francis Plug: Writer in Residence by Paul Ewen23'33 - Autumn Journal by Louis MacNeice* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. When you're working out at Planet Fitness, it's a judgment-free zone, so you can really step up your workout. That's why we've got treadmills. And our team members are here to help, so you can be carefree with the free weights.

There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But, like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrollment and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrollment sale of Planet Fitness and July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. all right okay so what i this is what I did last night. I went to the launch party of an album that came out 50 years ago.

That is a great song. And it was the launch party of an album that I wrote an entire book about, about 15 years ago. And the album is The Kinks of the Village Green Preservation Society by The Kinks. It is my favourite record. Anyway, so last night I got to go to this launch party, even though

I was told about an hour beforehand that Ray Davis wouldn't be entirely happy if he learnt that I was there. So that was... Well, that's sort of... That's alright. Did he not like the book then? I didn't even know then that he'd actually read the book,

but that proves that he has read the book, and I'll take that. Everybody falls out with Ray Davis. It's absolutely fine. So, this album came out on the same day as the White Album by The Beatles and Electric Ladyland by Jimi Hendrix, and the White Album went to number one all over the world. Jimi Hendrix left, so huge, huge records. I've missed the year. What year? land by jimmy hendrix and the white album went to number one all over the world uh jimmy hendrix huge huge records 1968 50 years ago to number one village green preservation society by the kinks

charts nowhere in the world hardly sells any copies at all nearly finishes the kinks career is a terrible flop 50 years later they have the launch party for it and there in the room at the same time were ray davis his brother dave davis their drummer mick avery not the bass player who plays on the record because he's dead but john dalton his replacement bass player even barry wenzel the photographer who took the picture on the front cover, was there. How old's he? They are all old, let's not mince our words. Also, it must be noted, it was tremendous fun.

Is Autumn Almanac on that album? It was recorded in the run-up to that album. It's not on that album. But that's why we had Autumn Almanac as our special autumnal. One of the reasons we had it as our special autumnal theme music today. So, yes, that's what I've been up to. You just moved house. As anybody knows, you don't just move house.

You leave one house and feel very, very pleased that you've managed to do that. And then you face the nightmare of the moving into the other house which is essentially just a room after room we've i've never done that from the big to the small before but from the big to the small just means boxes everywhere it's like one of those really difficult puzzles where you have to move one bit in order to create enough space to do another i i say this with some pride i plumbed in the washing machine last night um not not something i'd ever thought i'd have to do yeah great bear of a man well it was um it was not it wasn't it was i i ran some washing and it works but it was um yeah should we say nikki what we're what what we're

doing what we're i mean we are i have to say everybody this has been a stressful week today has been beyond stressful i thought i was being mildly stressed that i'd left my notebook at home with all my louis mcneese notes but that is there's nothing as to what we discovered when we got to the office which is we think i'm putting this out there. I'm hoping it's none of you. But we think people have stolen our podcast kit. We came in today, we have a Tibetan blanket that we always have to damp down sound. And underneath that, there is usually microphones and a mixing desk, and they'd all gone. I mean, masses of computer equipment in the office that hadn't gone. I'm wondering whether it's, you know, lit friction or... The LRB podcast. It's sabotage. They've actually decided that they've just had enough.

Anyway, the reason, if you're able to hear this, we're projecting it to you with our minds. That's how we've recorded it. It's been quite a challenge to get together this podcast for one reason or another. So we were determined not to let it go. So if the sound quality is less than, if it's suboptimal, well, frankly. That's telepathy for you. We're recording this quite literally on our iPhones.

Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives literally, on our iPhones. Yeah. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to our books. Today, you find us staring out into the autumnal gloom, fretting about the onset of war, shoring fragments against our ruins. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And joining us today is Samuel West, actor, director and narrator, most recently on our screens as Geoffrey Ponting in the film adaptation of Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach and as Anthony Eden in the Oscar-nominated Darkest Hour.

And also, I think all right-thinking people agree, the definitive Leonard Bast yes oh you're very kind could you give me just a little bit of Bast oh right careful his voice is something like this it's slightly nasal it's slightly

South London where I grew up and his people are agricultural labourers from there. That's right. But now he's sort of second generation South London from somewhere near Vauxhall, so he talks a bit like this. When I kept a blog when I was writing The Year of Reading Dangerously, when I was doing the reading for it, I didn't do it under my own name.

I did it under the name Leonard Bast. Did you? And I used a little screen grab of you with your bowler hat and moustache as my avatar for that. So if you could speak exclusively in that voice. We're also joined by Sophie Ratcliffe, writer, critic and academic, Associate Professor of English at Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford, editor of P.G. Woodhouse's Letters, and her new book, The Lost Properties of Love, subtitle, An Exhibition of Myself, is out from William Collins in February next year, right? This isn't your knickers book, is it?

It emerged from the knickers book, John. It's working title, it was Anna Karenina's handbag, and it was going to be about such things, but it's become something a bit different along the way. You first told me about that, I mean, many, many years ago. Yeah, it's been a long time. It's about the things we hide, really. In handbags? Well, it's about the things we hide, like grief, childhood bereavement, love affairs. Knickers. grief, childhood bereavement, love affairs.

Knickers. And the stuff in the bottom of your handbag. And Nabokov said what was in Anna Karenina's handbag just before she threw it away, and I was always haunted by that. It's a good acting question. Yeah. What's in your handbag? And when I turned 40, I remember looking in my handbag, trying to find anything at all, and just pulling out this sort of bit

of shrinky dink and old tampons and all this stuff and so it's sort of a book that's come out of come out of that a lot of lists of things we carry around the book we're here to talk about today is a first for us it's the first time we've done on backlisted a poem, a book-length poem. And the book is Autumn Journal by Louis MacNeice, published by Faber and Faber in 1939, but written kind of more or less in real time between August and December 1938. But before we get on to it, John, what have you been reading this week, if you've had time to read anything?

Well, to be honest, it has been a challenge, but I have read, I think, a short, quite brilliant book called OK, Mr. Field by Catherine Killarley. Catherine Killarley is South African by birth, a poet, and has been based in the UK. She came to University of East Anglia as a creative writing student. And this is her first novel. I'm not going to go on much about it except to say that it is, I think it's going to take its place in in that sort of the small novels that will be talked and written about for years you know so long see you tomorrow um thomas bernhard is what it comes it's a study in isolation the story is very simple kind of quite disturbing

it's a concert pianist mr field who fractures his wrist in a train crash on the way back and after that can't really play properly he can play but he doesn't play terribly well and he is the sort of person who you know you can't really he doesn't want to play badly and then he ends up what it's really about it's about it's about art and being good at art and then not being good at art. And then it's about, he goes back to South Africa where he purchases a house, which is a facsimile in every detail of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoy on the South African coast. And he goes with his wife, Mim, to recuperate and to try and rebuild his life. And from then on, more or less everything goes wrong.

Mim disappears. It's jet black, this book. You have absolutely no idea where the story's going to take you. I'll read you a tiny little bit just so you get a bit of the idea of the voice. This is the bit about the accident. The sleep I fell into was heavy, like the temporary shutting down a computer does

when it goes into sleep mode to conserve energy. I missed my stop. Also, I'd fallen asleep earlier. Part of my stressful day, I fell asleep earlier on a bus. And I'd already chosen this as the bit of... I don't know whether it's life imitating art or what. I missed my stop and several after it and woke to a loud bang

and everyone talking and shouting at once. I remember someone picked me up and carried me like a dog up a long escalator. Lovely. I remember a tide of commuters climbing over turnstiles. The next thing I remember is coming to in a hospital ward with my left arm bandaged to the elbow. You were in an accident, said the doctor at my bedside. But don't look so worried. I'm not going to cut off your hand. He laughed and the nurse beside

him laughed too. Even the patient of the adjacent bed, whose head had until now been dropped forward as though he were asleep, started laughing, though he may have been coughing. I couldn't be sure because he covered his face with his hands. The bones of my left wrist had splintered, I was told, and were now held together by a metal pin, the presence of which, since I couldn't see it, though the bandage confirmed its existence, infected everything with a gothic atmosphere, making the bloody gauze which the nurse lifted from my skin, hissing through her teeth, look like a stringy spider-worm, spanning the lips of the the cut and the fluid seeping from a stitch looking like oil oozing from a grotesque sausage. The accident must have been in the news because I

heard two nurses smoking in the covered work weight outside my window talking about it. It must have been suicide one would say because the driver died with his hand on the accelerator. What's unconceivable to me, said the other, is the wad of cash in his pocket. He'd withdrawn it to buy his daughter a car. Who kills himself when he's planning to buy his daughter a car? The first nurse looked at a cigarette as if it had suddenly become distasteful. Yes, she said, but who drives into a brick wall and doesn't cover his face with his hands? Anyway, said the other, life is short and then you die. Sometimes I wish I were just a train driver So I could drive around all day listening to music

I mean, it's Very good Yeah, original So Andy, what have you been reading this week? Well, you know what I've been reading this week I have, I'm so excited It's a book I've been waiting for for three years Four years to come out

So, I've been reading the novel Francis Plug, Writer in Residence by Paul Ewan, the sequel to 2014's Francis Plug, How to Be a Public Author. Have either of you read it? I say without exaggeration and from a position of expertise that Francis Plug, How to Be a Public Author by Paul Ewan is the funniest novel published in the UK in the last 10 years it is an absolute masterpiece that book I did an event in the summer

with the writer Matthew de Beecher and he defined the difference between we were talking about what you know the difference between you call yourself a writer or you call yourself an author and he said the difference is the right the writer is the guy who writes the books and the author is the guy who goes out and does this shit right and and what francis plug how to be a public author about is the is the authorial role of going out and it's not only extremely funny it's also the most it is the most accurate depiction of the complicity of authors publishers bookshops and audiences in creating these weird spaces of public worship of private private grief. Although you...

Actually, you two have got to be two of the best perspectives on this book that could possibly exist. I will say that I know it's very in, and I know it appeals to a lot of things that I find funny, but I find them funny because I recognise the truth in them. They're, you know... Anyway, this is his new book it's called francis plug writer in residence in the last book for reasons that we won't go into in depth francis plug a wannabe writer he's writing a manual for authors to how to behave in public and one of the ways he's investigating how

to do this is by going to events stealing the wine approaching the authors getting them to sign their first edition copies of booker prize winning novels so as the book goes on, reproduced in Francis Plug, How to Be a Public Author, and again in the new one, are the front title pages of books that the author Paul Ewan has gone and got signed at an event. There's one by John Mullen to Francis Plug with best wishes. And what Francis Plug does is he writes down what the authors say to him. And this is autofiction as comedy. For instance, here is Francis Plug meeting the late Doris Lessing. Page 140. When the journalist camping outside her home informed her of her Nobel Prize Page 140. Are you shaking my shit? Doris Lessing. That's a new one to me. Francis.

Or, oh my God, that there is some crazy shit you spouting out of your mouth. Doris Lessing. OK, yes. Francis. Or, what the shitty shit? Doris Lessing. Yes. Francis.

Or, or. Doris Lessing. Yes. Francis. Or... Or... Doris Lessing. Shall I sign these other people's books while you keep thinking? So, as the book goes on, you have a series of cameo appearances by famous authors. However, Francis has had his book published, and it's published by the same publisher as Paul Ewan, Gally Beggar. So the publishers of

Gally Beggar features as characters in this novel. He's got a job as a writer in residence at Greenwich University, rather like the author Paul Ewan, and he enjoys a drink which the author Paul Ewan also does. Nina Stibbe just reviewed it in The Guardian she said it's pure delight Ben Myers just reviewed it said Francis Plug is the saviour of comic fiction there's a very famous thing we keep talking about on this podcast about the Bollinger Woodhouse Prize for Comic Fiction

was not awarded last year because there were allegedly no funny books that had been published so this book is as good as volume one I hope he goes on and writes another one they're absolutely wonderful incredibly funny no in fact it's not just that that they are both very funny and very depressing which is the two best qualities any book can have he runs them side by side i'm just going to read another little bit if you're human me this is francis meeting the meeting the veteran American novelist Paul Auster.

Veteran. Due to the unusual seating arrangements, I find myself sat almost side-on to Paul Auster at the same raised level as the stage. Sitting forward with legs tucked beneath his chair, his side... Sorry. We've lost him. Sorry, I'm trying my best.

His side profile resembles the reddy-orange zigzag on Ziggy Stardust's face. Sorry. We've lost him. Sorry, I'm trying my best. His side profile resembles the reddy orange zigzag on Ziggy Stardust's face. He's a surprisingly tall man, Paul Oster, and although he's just turned 70, there's a sense of Buzz Lightyear about him, helped by a similar physical stature and bold determination. So the thing is, the iconoclasm of this is the point of what I was saying earlier.

You would not, should not describe the great Paul Auster. And he is great in these terms. And yet they're not entirely disrespectful. They're playing off the idea of Paul Auster as much as the real person, right? He normally steers clear of these events, he says, but is embracing his current tour and enjoying it. At his signing, I say I'm sorry, but I find that very hard to believe. Paul Oster,

why's that? Francis, are you kidding? Look at all these people. What a frigging nightmare. Paul Oster, well, yes. But it's not something I'm pushed to do very often. FP, what about pushing buttons on your chest? Do you do that?

Paul Oster, what do you mean? Francis, like Buzz Lightyear does, do you know him? You bear a strong resemblance. Paul Oster, name rings a bell. FP, he has wings attached to his arms. Paul Oster, name rings a bell. He has wings attached to his arms. Has he? Yes, he has. And his sights are ultimately set on the universal good of humankind.

Well, I suppose there are worse doppelgangers. Did you notice the garage door behind you during your talk? Garage door? FP, yes, it was like you were being interviewed in my old house. Or just outside it. Paul Oster, pause. I see. Well, thanks for coming.

FP, oh! Pause. I see. Well, thanks for coming. FP. Oh! Speaking of my garage, would you be OK staying in it for the Greenwich Book Festival? Paul Oster. Sorry? FP. The Greenwich Book Festival.

You've been specially hand-picked to attend. Paul Oster. I hadn't heard about that. FP. Don't worry. it's all been sorted. Out of interest, how many air miles do you have? So what I'm saying, that is a very, very funny book. It's called Francis Plug, writer-in-residence, published by Galley Beggar.

They're an independent publisher. Who we love. Who we love, Who we love. Who deserve your support. As does Paul Ewan. We've talked about books enough. Now for some capitalism. Summer's here and you can now get almost anything you need for your sunny days

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with uber eats order now alcohol and select markets product availability may vary by regency app for details. Can you remember where you were or who you were the first time you read Autumn Journal? Yes, I can. I was a very early version of me in Oxford, in Lady Margaret Hall, where I studied English. And I turned to my rather falling apart edition of Faber collected poems of Louis MacNeice and found in the front, Samuel West Oxford, November 85.

So that's sort of autumn. I thought we were there at the same time. Oh, I didn't know that. And I was in a... 85 was the year I was reading it. I was 83 to 86, but... I was 85 to 88, so it was the first year of reading it I was 83 to 86 I was 85 to 88 so it was the first year of my three year degree and I was in

an English set with Michael Gove I don't know what happened to him Jesus God but I discovered this poem which kind of hit me with the force of a bullet really it seemed very discovered this poem which kind of hit me with the force of a bullet really. It seemed

very chatty and personal and it talked about some stuff I didn't really understand but then it talked about love in ways that I did understand and wished I could understand better and as somebody who was a bit of a late starter, sort of set the bar of honesty and reality in love and personal relationships sort of high, but not so impossibly high that you didn't think you might one day be able to clear it. It's been a more or less constant companion ever since, actually. And you recorded a version, didn't you, in early sort of 2002?

Yeah, that sounds about right. With music by Gary Yershon. Gary Yershon, who is now an Oscar-nominated composer. He got nominated for his beautiful score for Mr Turner, the Mike Lee film. Yeah, he wrote the beautiful, it's a sort of harp quintet I think string quartet and harp and there's some sound effects in the background

not many and I read about half the poem probably quite a lot of the early chapters and the last couple and then quite a lot of people wrote to me this was before iPlayer saying I really enjoyed that when can I hear it again?

And I said, search me, I've absolutely no idea. But apparently it can be found legally or illegally online nowadays and it is repeated on 4Xtra occasionally. We'll put a link up to it on our website because if people have or haven't read the poem and want an introduction to it, it seems to me a perfect way in. That's nice of you to say. What I loved about it was that you captured the, there's just a vulnerability about this poem, which I, like you, you go back to time and time again and it still feels like it was written yesterday. That's an extraordinary thing.

Sophie, where were you when you... Can you remember the first time you became aware of Louis McNeice, his work or just his name or in passing? Yeah. I can because I remember I was at school. It was in a poetry anthology that we had for one of the first years of GCSE. It was a lovely anthology called Touched with Fire, which had some incredible poems.

Really, actually, that's why I fell in love with poetry and decided to do my job, this one anthology. But I remember the poem and thinking, that's a funny name or an unusual name, and I was going to get the E and the I wrong. I knew it. It was an unexpected arrangement of letters. It was a poem in the anthology called L'Essent Fide.

And I remember being struck by the first line, which was, Life in a day, he took his girl to the ballet. And trying to work out how that sounded, the sort of day in ballet, you had to do something with the second word and it finishes. So if I remember, it just falls off the end and he takes his girl to the ballet

and it says something like, being short-sighted, he could hardly see it. So it was my introduction to bathos. It's just like, what? And the poem itself falls off the end. You expect it to finish with a bang and it goes out with this whimper. It's about a marriage going wrong and becoming jaded. And I just, I remember enough about the thinking, this is different. And to make poetry out of the art of sinking in poetry and that's what I sort of

remember as a smaller me I'm just going to read we have a very starry backup for today's backlisters we do we do I'm going to read Alan Bennett's description of the career of Louis McNeice because I think it's worth we normally wouldn't do McNeice. Because I think it's worth... We normally wouldn't do it this way round, but I think it's worth putting this in the minds of listeners before we then move on to talk about the work and about Autumn Journal in particular. So this is from a book called Six Poets, Hardy to Larkin, which was republished by Faber a couple of years ago by Alan Bennett.

McNeice is one of the six poets that he talks about. There's a couple of little bits in here that I'll share with people as we go on. But here's his description of McNeice's life and career. Louis McNeice was born in Belfast in 1907, the son of a bookish Church of Ireland minister, a bishop to be. Academically precocious, he was already writing verse at seven around the time of his mother's death. He was educated in England at Sherbourne and Marlborough. At Merton College, Oxford, he made the acquaintance of Auden and Spender and published his first book of poems, Blind Fireworks, in 1929. He worked subsequently as a translator, literary critic, playwright, autobiographer, BBC producer and feature writer. In 1941, he was appointed scriptwriter-producer in BBC Radio's features department,

where he worked until his death. Letters from Iceland, 1937, was written in collaboration with Auden, and subsequent collections include The Earth Compels, Autumn Journal, Plant and Phantom, Springboard, Holes in the Sky and Autumn Sequel. Ménis published highly acclaimed translations, including The Agamemnon and Goethe's Faust, and he scripted more than 150 radio plays, including The Dark Tower, 1947.

The Burning Perch, his last volume of poems, appeared shortly before his death in 1963 at the age of 55. That's shockingly young, isn't it? Certainly in terms now, that feels incredibly young, doesn't it? John, where did you first read Autumn Journal? Because I know this is a really special book for you, isn't it? It was almost exactly the same as Sam. I was at Merton College in Oxford which is where my niece had gone and I was as you do you know an undergraduate I was casting around

to try and find something slightly different I'd been casting around looking at slightly lesser well-known first world war poets like over gurney isaac rosenberg david jones and you come to the ninth the poets of the 1930s and you've got orden looming over the the whole thing and mcneese i just i read mcneese and i'd like sophie i'd written read some of the lyrics which were i thought beautiful and had this kind of... There's a softness to MacNeice that's really interesting, a kind of... You know, you can't get away from the kind of Yeatsian brilliance

of Auden when you're reading poetry. But then I discovered Autumn Journal and I'd been doing, you know, as you have to do, you have to do Yeats and you have to do Eliot and you're studying 20th century poetry. And I suddenly thought I'd found my guy with with Autumn Journal I thought this is what poetry my dream of what poetry could be which is something that was you could reflect you could be funny you could be non-committed you could talk about the fact that you you didn't understand things and you could do it, and you could do it with amazing structure,

rhythmic structure and rhyme. I remember the first time I read it, and the total sense of exhilaration. It's something I always pick up and I go back to passages, but I went back, having gone back and re-read it this time, I decided I didn't want to get any McNeese and kind of stuff in front of me. I just wanted to go back. And it, God, as we will, I hope, demonstrate,

it is, I could give this book to anyone, I think, and say, if you don't believe you can read a book, a whole book-length poem. I read this earlier this year for the first time and I came to you, John, and went, I've just read this amazing book by Louis McNeese. We ought to do it on Batley. We don't often do it this way book by Louis McNeice. We ought to do it on Batley. We don't often do it this way.

But I said, we've really got to do it on Batley. And you went, it's my favourite poem. I went, right, we're off. I do think it's the great poem of the 20th century, for me anyway, in English, whatever. When I went to Iceland a few years ago, long-term listeners will recall, I took Letters from Iceland with me by Auden and McNeice which was in fact

recommended to me by someone here at Unbound and I came back and I said oh my god that was so wonderful thank you what a brilliant suggestion and they said yeah I haven't actually read it so um but we've got but but um we've got now we've got a clip um McNeice was at Marlborough at the same time and in the same class as the poet John Betjeman. And this is a little clip of Betjeman talking about his memories of MacNeice when they were at school together. He was younger than me, but much cleverer.

We were both in the classical fifth. I suppose I was a bit jealous because Louis was good at work, a clever classical scholar, and he enjoyed games, which I absolutely loathed, and games were, of course, worshipped at Marlborough. Louis, even in those days, one knew without having to ask him that he was a poet he looked like a poet he had large eyes and he looked rather like a frightened hair and a pale freckled face and a dreamy appearance and he was always writing. I love the idea that you look like a poet. Large eyes. He's quite a good advert for poets and he's very handsome.

There's a wonderful story here that Bennett recounts, saying Stephen Spender tells a story how, when the Soviet Union came into the war in 1941, the British ambassador, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, thought he would give a party for British poets with a view to putting them in touch with their Soviet counterparts. Throughout his party, McNeice, sleek, dark and expressionless, leant against the chimney piece, glass in hand,

looking infinitely removed from his colleagues. At the end of the evening, Clark Kerr went up to him and said, Is it true you were brought up in Belfast at Carrickfergus? MacNeice said, Yes, it is. Ah, said Clark Kerr, then that confirms a legend I have heard that centuries ago a race of seals invaded that coast and interbred with the population. Good night.

Yes, indeed. Wow. God, he doesn't look at all like a seal, or a hare, I think. But MacNeice clearly had a sense of himself as a poet and a thinker and a creative person from a young age. He was a brilliant classicist and he could declaim classical verse incredibly well. You get that from Alton Journal, the reflections on the importance or lack of importance of classical learning in the face of, you know, the tide... What's actually happening. What's actually happening.

Yeah, he wears it quite lightly, doesn't he? What I feel is in the way that, you know, that McSpaunday thing, the idea of all these... this sort of group of poets, he's the one that always interested me because he feels to me almost like the sort of poetic kind of opposite of Orwell. He doesn't really sign up for anything. He's too kind of clever to join the Communist Party.

He's not Marxist in a classical sense. He's Camus rather than Sartre. What interests him is kind of the emotional truth of things. The Autumn Journal, amongst many of the things that i love about it is that reading it at this time of year you're reminded it is it is a journal i mean he actually does it's a diary it's writing through albeit an extraordinary that that 1938 into 39 sort of descent into war but it's it's about time you know it's about it's a sustained meditation in time much in the way that four cortexes but in my view doesn't have all the throat clearing the

myth kitty showing off that four cortex has i mean much as i love four cortex it's just there's just something about i can't imagine anyone who is in any way sensitive picking up autumn journal and not finding and also the language in it is so you never feel that he's going i'm writing i'm writing i've just been reading which i'm enjoying robin robertson's novel but it's very much a verse novel you, and the writing is exquisite and the metaphors are exquisite, but it's... With Autumn Journal, it's almost kind of conversational. When I took a holiday from Twitter recently,

which I have to do occasionally, well, often, sometimes when I feel either too depressed or confounded by the political direction of the world or just that I'm shouting into the void, it suddenly became important to nobody but me what tweet I returned with, because I wanted to say something that was valuable or useful and wasn't sort of shouty.

So on the 1st of September, I posted this. September has come. It is hers, whose vitality leaps in the autumn, whose nature prefers trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace. 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 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. And a lot of people liked it. And I thought, yeah, quite right too. That September is hers.

The her refers to Nancy Spender. She married Stephen Spender. We have a clip of Nancy Spender's reaction to reading Autumn Journal for the first time and how she felt about that part of the poem. I had had the book sent to me from Dewey and I was on the underground. In fact, I was on the Northern Line going home from Charing Cross and I was absolutely appalled when I read it.

I really felt I couldn't go out again. Everybody was sort of pointing and saying, that is the woman who left Louis, you know, that sort of thing. Well, I had to really, because it became so across thedress-mobic. I never thought he was particularly handsome. Other people told me he was very handsome. I just thought he looked like a horse. He might sort of swerve for a little bit and you'd fall off, you know. I mean, literally like a horse.

I think that's wonderful. It's funny to hear her voice. I mean, this is, as Sam said, such, it's a love poem and a meditation, and it's also, he gave it to her to read, and he shoved it in her bag, and she went and she read it, she started reading it on the train, on the tube, right, which I love the idea, the person to whom this poem was dedicated

was actually read it on a train and it begins... This is the person who is inopportunely desired on boats and trains. Is that the same person? Yeah, the same person. And that she read it on a train and the poem begins on a train. I'm rather obsessed with trains as sort of metaphors. Your book is built around trains, right? Yeah, it's built around trains and train journeys.

And the epigraph of it is from another train poem by Louis McNeice. And I just, so I just find it's wonderful. It made its way in underground. I wonder if that reaction is more that people don't do things like that. You don't write about stuff like that. Not that it was a horrible thing to say, just that their relationship, washing one's clean linen in public.

I mean, we can't know. I think she felt less committed to the idea of it being this perfect moment than the poet did. But what's so wonderful, that in Canto 19... Oh yes. When we were out of love. Could we hear that? Because that is...

This is quite extraordinary. You can cut this down if you like, but I'm going to have to read a page and a half of this. Okay. Oh, what a busy morning. Engines start with a roar. All the wires are buzzing. The tape machines vomit on the floor.

And I feel that my mind once again is open. The lady is gone who stood in the way so long. The hypnosis is over and no one calls encore to the song. The hypnosis is over and no one calls encore to the song. When we are out of love, how are we ever in it? Where are the mountains and the mountain skies? That heady air instinct with a strange sincerity which winged our lies? The peaks have fallen in like dropping pastry. Now I could see her come around the corner without the

pulse responding. The flowery orator in the heart is dumb. His bag of tricks is empty. His overstatements, those rainbow bubbles, have burst. When we meet she need not feel embarrassed. The cad with the golden tongue has done his worst and has no orders from me to mix his phrases rich, to make the air a carpet for her to walk on. I only wonder which day, which hour, I found this freedom. But freedom is not so exciting. We prefer to be drawn in the rush of the stars as they circle, a traffic that ends with dawn. Now I am free of the stars and the word love makes no sense.

This history is almost ripe for the mind's museum, broken jars that once held wine or perfume. Yet looking at their elegance on the stands, I feel a certain pride that only lately, and yet so long ago, I held them in my hands while they were full and fragrant. So on this busy morning, I hope, my dear, that you are also busy with another vintage of another year. I wish you luck, and I thank you for the party. A good party, though at the end my thirst was worse than at the beginning. But never to have drunk, no doubt, would be the worst. Pain, they say, is always twin to pleasure.

Better to have these twins than no children at all. Very much better to act for good and bad than have no sins and take no action either. You were my blizzard who had been my bed, but taking the whole series of blight and blossom, I would not choose a simpler crop instead. Thank you, my dear, dear against my judgment. God, shall we take a moment? Wow, that was incredible, thank you so much. Actually, I went back to this when the first person of my own age I knew, I had known all their life, died.

Because pain, they say, is always twin to pleasure. Better to have these twins than have no children at all. I thought, I've got to feel this now. It was the first real loss of a person I'd ever felt. And I thought, no, this is the other side of the coin of love. And it's better that it should be this thing than that I never knew this person. And this was the first time I'd ever read that,

put better than I could put it. But I'd sort of taken it in and thought, no, that's true that's useful I think that that profundity in McNeice that he did but he never shows off that's what I love about this poem it's there's a sort of you know you don't feel that he's having to call in all that Yeatsian kind of apparatus of gyres and mythology. He sort of goes to the heart of something that is as good as anything anybody has ever written about the end of a relationship. It's both honest and eloquent.

The economy and the directness is what I love about this poem, is that it's so personal. That's the thing, going back to it, it absolutely hasn't aged a jot. Every time I go back to it, I find you find new and brilliant stuff. It's good when poetry is useful. I remember when he was a poet laureate,

Andrew Motion, talking about poetry and people had said, poetry, it's a bit up there, it's not for me. And he said, OK, do you remember when Princess Diana died and Kensington Palace was covered in flowers and stapled Queen of Hearts cards? He said most of the flowers or the cards had a few lines of verse attached. And it wasn't always very good verse verse but it was the natural language that people turned to when they couldn't express their grief or sadness any other way and it was a really good defence of poetry from somebody whose public job was to do exactly that or part of which was to do

that and I think a lot of McNeice is like that you think you could give this to somebody and it would be a comfort it's a way of composing ourselves really and this is so i don't know whether there is there is showing off in this in a sense of virtuoso composition yeah some of the rhyming is brilliant but but what he is what he's showing is the dilemma of someone being in the now. Almost the fear of dissolving. You were talking about the vulnerability at the beginning. And I love the fact that there's a moment when he's actually in the bath. I mean, there's a comedy.

The whole poem, if it's in journal form, is that he's on a train or he's thinking about being in Barcelona or he's in a cafe. And there's even when he's apparently, it's a bit like Bridget Jones's diary, he's writing in the bath, but the point at which he has this very philosophical bit about Aristotle's right to think of man and action as the essential and really existent man. It's sort of tongue-in-cheek he's talking about himself,

being all philosophical. And he says, I cannot lie in this bath forever, clouding the cooling water with rose geranium soap. One can have a great affinity with the sense of how we try and pull ourselves together it also has the feel as you read through it of being something that benefited from a relatively speedy composition because my sense as a writer i don't write poetry but as someone who's written and edited books is that each canto tends to find something interesting to do with the energy left in the wake of the previous canto yeah so he's feeling his way forward to some extent

now what do i want to write about what's the right thing here what's the right thing to keep the energy swerving along you know but i think without necessarily rereading it and thinking how does this make a cohesive whole it it it it doesn't feel like he's tried to make a a single poem that makes sense of of one state of mind in the autumn of 1938 at all because i don't think there was one this is a really interesting thing that before he had finished it this is a very publishing thing john things never change before he finished writing it, this is a very publishing thing, John, things never change. Before he finished writing it, T.S. Eliot was pestering him for a blurb for the catalogue.

And so McNeice wrote for him some notes for the catalogue. And now we normally on Batlisted, we read the blurb on the back of the book, but I thought this was actually better. So this is McNeice's note to Elliot saying this is what Elliot said can you give me a few give me a few pointers he said and saying this is this is what Autumn Journal is a long poem of from 2,000 to 3,000 lines written from August to December 1938 not strictly a journal but giving the tenor of my intellectual and emotional experiences during that period.

It is about nearly everything from which first-hand experience I consider significant. It is written in sections averaging about 80 lines in length. This division gives it a dramatic, italics, quality, 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. It contains reportage, metaphysics, ethics, lyrical emotion, autobiography, nightmare. There is a constant interrelation of abstract and concrete. Generalisations are balanced by pictures. Places presented include Hampshire, Spain, Birmingham, Ireland and especially London.

It is written throughout in an elastic kind of quatrain. This form A gives the whole poem a formal unity, but B, saves it from monotony by allowing it a great range of appropriate variations. The writing is direct. Anyone could understand it. And I think it is my best work to date. It is both a panorama and a confession of faith. And that's just the blurb. Isn't that extraordinary? I'm glad to hear Celia'sb isn't that extraordinary so we should say that

he's funny too in this poem i love the birmingham there's the canto eight is the you know to homer in a dudley accent but life was comfortable life was fine with two in a bed and patchwork cushions and checks and tassels on the washing line and a gramophone, a cap, the smell of jasmine, the stakes were tender, the films were fun, the walls were striped like a Russian ballet. There were lots of things undone, but nobody cared, for the days were early. Nobody niggled, nobody cared.

The soul was deaf to the mounting debit. The soul was unprepared, but the firelight danced on the plywood ceiling. And he gets... He loves... He was a great jazz fan. And there's a sort of a there's a kind of a almost a rappy feel to some of the some of the stuff in it when you're reading it aloud that canto eight is a great one to arrive at because it just sets you off in frankfurt thinking about sort of writing we're talking about writing in 1938 1939 it's a time when everyone there was

lots of things coming out at this moment it's between the acts at that moment and Auden writing all these poems. The sense of how do you write, capture that moment? And it sort of reminded me of all the sort of rise of autofiction at the moment. We've got Nascar doing Autumn and people producing, thinking, what do we do now faced with what we're looking at politically? And thinking perhaps all I can try and do is capture the now and a sort of listy writing it what I wondered you know Sam you were saying about returning to Twitter having taken a

break from the noise you know one of the things I found about reading this for the first time earlier this year and I slightly you know I say this with the proviso that I don't think one event is as bad as the other, but nonetheless it was fascinating to read something written 80 years ago in a period of looming national crisis, shall we say, to see that sense of time slipping away from the poet in the knowledge that something bad is coming. You don't quite know the shape. You don't quite know where it will land.

But you know people are waiting. You know the phony war has started before the war has started. And that's, he talks about the importance of being honest to the present moment as he writes, even if he's got it wrong. He's just getting it down. Hitler yells on the wireless, the night is damp and still, and I hear dull blows on wood outside my window. They are cutting down the trees on Primrose Hill. The wood is white like the roast flesh of chicken, each tree falling like a closing fan. like the roast flesh of chicken, each tree falling like a closing fan.

No more looking at the view from seats beneath the branches. Everything is going to plan. They want the crest of this hill for anti-aircraft. The guns will take the view, and searchlights probe the heavens for bacilli with narrow wands of blue. I mean, everybody knows that view, don't they? It's just that bacilli made me think of Orwell, the metal tubes, people in metal tubes above my head

trying to kill me in Lion and the Unicorn. I thought this was a wonderful book. This is about London as well. We've done quite a few London novels on Backlisted, but this is what part of the dream of it really is the sense of wandering slightly untethered through these various collapsed spaces of London, how you can be in Piccadilly one moment

and Primrose Hill the next. I mean, the other thing that I love, his reflections on Ireland are, I think, remarkable. He's an Irish writer, as so many Irish writers are, writing in exile in England. There's an amazing thing in Canto 18, which I don't really feel... I can't really get...

As we've got Sam here, I don't know, but there's that, Sing us no more idylls, no more pasturals, no more... Sing us no more idylls, no more pasturals, no more epics of the English earth. The country is a dwindling annex to the factory, squalid as an afterbirth. This England is tight and narrow,

teeming with unwanted children who are so many, each is alone. Niaby and her children stand beneath the smokestack turned to stone. And still the church bells brag above the empty churches and the Union Jack thumps the wind above the law courts and the barracks and in the allotments the black scarecrow holds a fort of grimy heads of cabbage besieged by grimy birds like a hack politician fighting the winged aggressor with yesterday's magic coat of ragged words.

I mean... Sophie, this dovetails with something you wanted to talk about, which is an earlier poem called Train to Dublin. Yeah, I wanted to talk about that. I mean, in relation to... I don't think Backlister does poetry that often, right? And I suppose when I said I was going to talk about that. I mean, in relation to, I don't think, I don't think Backlister does poetry that often, right? And I suppose when I said I was going to talk about Autumn Journal, someone said, oh, a long poem.

I couldn't, I couldn't, wouldn't want to read a long poem. And there is a sense, and this does move very quickly, and it is hugely readable. But for anyone who wants a sort of taster of it, I think this poem, Trained to Dublin, is a really, really good way in, and it's even shorter. And it seems to capture this idea of being stuck in a rhythm, which is what Autumn Journal is about.

How are we stuck in rhythms of thought, rhythms of habit? How should we think differently? Should we think differently? And acknowledging we are. I'll just read a bit of it because it is, I think it is my favourite poem ever. Our half-thought thoughts divide in sifted wisps against the basic facts we patterned without pause. I can no more gather my mind up in my fist than the shadow of the smoke of this train upon the grass. This is the way that animals' lives pass. The train's rhythm never relents. The telephone posts go striding backwards like the legs of time to where in a Georgian house you turn at the

carpet's edge, turning a sentence, while outside my window here the smoke makes broken queries in the air. The train keeps moving and the rain holds off. I count the buttons on the seat. I hear a shell held hollow to the ear, the mere reiteration of integers, the bell that tolls and tolls, the monotony of fear. At times we are doctrinaire,

at times we are frivolous, plastering over the cracks a gesture making good. But the strength of us does not come out of us. It is we, I think, are the idols, and it is God has set us up as men who are painted wood, and the trains carry us about, but not consistently so. For during a tiny portion of our lives, we are not in trains. That's wonderful. God, that's wonderful. We talked quite a lot about Auden as well, and we said that McNeice died relatively young.

I've got a clip here of Auden reading the end of his poem, The Cave of Making, in memoriam Louis MacNeice, in 1965. And Auden, obviously, very struck by the loss of a friend, but also the loss of a contemporary, and saw MacNeice's death as the moment that he, Auden, needed to recommit to poetry, that he felt that he had lost focus after he moved to the States. So this is recorded, I think, relatively close to when the poem was written.

I wish you hadn't caught that cold, but the dead we miss are easier to talk to. With those no longer tensed by problems, one cannot feel shy. And anyway, when playing cards or drinking or pulling faces are out of the question, what else is there to do but talk to the voices of conscience they have become? From now on, as a visitor who needn't be met at the station, but talk to the voices of conscience they have become. From now on, as a visitor who needn't be met at the station, your influence is welcome at any hour in my uberty,

especially here where titles from poems to the burning perch offer proof positive of the maker you were, with whom I once collaborated, once at a weird symposium, exchanged winks as the Juggins went on about alienation. Seeing you know our mystery from the inside, and therefore how much

in our lonely dens we need the companionship of our good dead, to give us comfort on dowry days when the self is an unentity dumped on a mound of nothing, to break the spell of our self-enchantment when lip-smacking imps of Mork and Hui

write with us what they will. You won't think me imposing you. I ask you to stay at my elbow until cocktail time. Dear Shade, for your elegy, I should have been able to manage something more like you than this egocentric monologue, but accept it for friendship's sake.

God, that's beautiful as well. But actually, he's wrong at the end. I was thinking how unlike some Auden, maybe unlike late Auden that is it nods to McNeice's immediacy and simplicity and doesn't have any of that

glory in the incomprehensible word that Auden would love isn't that the thing that I go back to McNeese again and again because he just feels like a... I don't really... You know, the poetry, you read the poetry,

he remains mysterious. He remains someone you feel that you would absolutely want to spend an evening with and talk to. Good evening. And so much of his work was working with other people's work. That always interests me, all the play adaptations and it's always a good sign in an artist if they're a good collaborator and the lack of that's the thing about autumn journal for somebody who was 31 when he wrote it you know the lack of of of disfiguring egotism and grandstanding is is just

seems remarkable it's and it it remains through collected poems you don't there isn't a sort of a there's not a lot of up and down you know there isn't a great late flowering he kind of he hit his stride and and did it and did what he did brilliantly until he's until he stopped his public profile though goes up near the end of his life yeah but it's perceived i think think, that the last volume, The Burning Perch, which is published three days after his death, it was due to go clearly anyway, but he died because he wanted some sound effects for a play

and wanted to make sure they were right, so he went down a pothole in Yorkshire, came out sopping wet, went to the sure they were right, so went down a pothole in Yorkshire, came out sopping wet, went to the pub to warm up, caught pneumonia and died. So, John, you're right there, he's working right up to the end. He remains productive right up to the end.

I was just thinking about the final part of this poem, which is a lullaby, really. Yeah. So I love... A self-erasing poetic form spoken so that no-one can hear it anymore and there's something really quietly composed about ending. So we're going to go out on the voice of Louis-Magnus himself, but before we hear that, Sam,

could you give us the end of Autumn Journal that Sophie was just talking about? I'm going to read this from the first edition that I was given on my 50th birthday by my dear friend Helen Mountfield, who is a fellow poetry

lover. And I want to say that because our mutual love of this poem has been with us since we were at university together. I think one of the shocking things that stayed with me at this poem is that every time I read it, it seems to be more up-to-date. That is the take-out quote. I love it. That's exactly right. And so every time you go back to it, you think, oh, God, this is horribly relevant.

So politically, this isn't a bit about love. It's about who we want to be, which is maybe a question we might be asking ourselves a bit more nowadays. What is it we want, really? For what end and how? If it is something feasible, obtainable, let us dream it now and pray for a possible land not of sleepwalkers,

not of angry puppets, but where both heart and brain can understand the movements of our fellows, where life is a choice of instruments and none is debarred his natural music, where the waters of life are free of the ice blockade of hunger and thought is free as the sun, where the altars of sheer power and mere profit have fallen to disuse, where nobody sees the use of buying money and blood at the cost of blood and money,

where the individual, no longer squandered in self-assertion, works with the rest, endowed with the split vision of a juggler and the quick lock of a taxi, where the people are more than a crowd. So sleep in hope of this, but only for a little. Your hope must wake while the choice is yours to make. The mortgage not foreclosed, the offer open. Sleep serene, avoid the backward glance, go forward, dreams. Sleep serene, avoid the backward glance,

go forward, dreams, and do not halt. Behind you in the desert stands a token of doubt, a pillar of salt. Sleep the past and wake the future. And walk out promptly through the open door. But you, my coward doubts, may go on sleeping. You need not wake again. Not anymore. The new year comes with bombs.

It is too late to dose the dead with honourable intentions if you have honour to spare employ it on the living the dead are Lethe. Tonight we sleep on the banks of Rubicon. The die is cast. There will be time to audit the accounts later. There will be sunlight later. And the equation will come out at last. There really is nothing to be said after that. Thank you, Sam. Had you ended a long poem? Well, I would say, write just like that. Beautiful. As you say, that idea, each time you go back to this poem, it seems like it's written more recently. A great credit to poetry, but a great credit also to what McNeice has done.

That's all we have time for. So I want to thank Sam and Sophie and Nikki, our producer, and Unbound, our sponsor. You can download all 76 Backlisted's, plus follow up all the links, clips and suggestions for further reading on our website at backlisted.fm. And of course, you can still contact us on Twitter, Facebook and Boundless. We've really enjoyed this week

talking into phones if you feel like returning our equipment however that would be that would be good too please consider leaving a review with stars if you feel so moved on itunes or whichever platform from which you obtain your oral pleasure thank you folks we'll be back in a fortnight we're going to leave you with the voice. We've talked about him. You've heard his friends talking about him, his lovers talking about him and us talking about him. We're going to leave you with the voice of Louis McNeice himself, both explaining and then declaiming a little bit of his poem, Bagpipe Music. Here is a poem which I wrote towards the end of the 1930s during a visit to the Western

Isles of Scotland. It's a poem which on the surface is a nonsense poem. It's called Bagpipe Music and technically one of the points about it was to try and suggest by the sound of the lines the noise of the bagpipes. It's no go the herring board, it's no go the bible. All we want is a packet of fags when our hands are idle. It's no go the picture palace, it's no go the stadium. It's no go the country cot with a pot of pink geraniums. It's no go the government grants, it's no go the elections. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 the glass will fall forever. But if you break the bloody glass, you won't hold up the weather. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts,

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