Letters from Vienna #107
W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice
Chronicle of a Friendship
“Our mortality is seldom real to us,” W. H. Auden said at the Louis MacNeice memorial address delivered at All Souls, Oxford, on the 17th of October 1963, “Even when our parents die, our primary awareness is not so much of death as of loneliness – henceforth we shall no longer be sustained by a bond which because it was created by nature, could not be broken, from now on, our relations with others will depend, for better or worse, upon their choice and ours. But when a person of our own generation to whom we have been close, as a brother, a husband, a lover, a friend, a colleague, someone we have opened our hearts to and shared our thoughts with, someone with whom we have frequently drunk and joked together, dies suddenly, our sorrow is accompanied by terror – instead of our friend, the dead man might be you or I and, if it were so, to how many in truth, would our absence be real? For, when death is really present to us, we cannot deceive ourselves. When a person dies, we learn the exact truth about our feelings towards him: we cannot pretend that we cared if, in fact, we were indifferent and vice versa.”
“I should be very surprised were I to learn that Louis had any real enemies. I don’t mean, of course, that he was an angelic character who never had a row with anybody or, if he did, was entirely blameless. I mean that I do not believe there was anybody for whom to think of Louis was automatically, to wish him ill. Not to make enemies is, in part, a matter of luck…”
“Aside from his warm and generous nature, Louis was fortunate in that his work lay in spheres where, though meanness and ruthless ambition are, no doubt always possible, they are not obligatory, and he was blessed with the social ability to make himself agreeable to a wide variety of human beings. I, myself, was sometimes surprised at this since I felt certain that he was, by temperament, shy and reserved, but perhaps it was this very reserve which made him such a welcome companion. He had as much respect for the solitude of others as for his own: he would never, one knew, importune intimate revelations one was unwilling to grant, nor thrust his problems upon oneself.”
“In this age, to die at fifty-five is, statistically speaking, to die early, but worse things can befall a poet than an early death. At least Louis MacNeice was spared the experience which some poets have had to endure…the experience of being condemned to go on living with the knowledge that the Muse has abandoned them. Not only was his Muse faithful to him till the end, but she increased her favors…”[1]
In an article for “Encounter” in November 1963, Auden wrote: “If someone is really my friend, this, as F.H. Bradley said, when I think of him, I must feel pleased with myself. We are also friends if, on meeting again after a long separation, we feel as if we had only parted yesterday. Whenever I thought of Louis MacNeice, I felt myself fortunate and, whenever we met, it was easy and pleasant to talk as it had ever been.”
“We must certainly have met at Oxford though I have no clear recollections of doing so. I remember a tall, dark, languid undergraduate from Merton, rather foppishly dressed. Though the “aesthete” was soon to disappear he always retained a dandy’s interest in clothes which, in his case, was an authentic reflection of his fastidious artistic conscience…”[2]
MacNeice by contrast remembered Auden very well as a “prominent poet among the undergraduates”[3] and wrote of him: “Auden, then, as always, was busy getting on with the job. Sitting in a room all day with the blinds down, reading very fast and widely – psychology, ethnology, “Arabia Deserta”. He did not seem to look at anything, admitted he hated flowers and was very free with quasi-scientific jargon, but you came away from his presence always encouraged; here at least was someone to whom ideas were friendly – they came and ate out of his hand – who would always have an interest in the world and always have something to say.”[4]
“Oxford in October 1926 was entering a transitional phase. The master decadents had just gone down and their acolytes were soon to follow them. One still heard the word “Aesthete!” venomously hissed in the streets, but W H Auden was already in his rooms in Peck, dressed like an untidy bank clerk and reading in a self-imposed blackout all sorts of technical unaesthetic matter or flapping his hands while he denounced the wearing of bright colours or the cultivation of flowers.”[5]
Auden stated: “We first became friends when he was appointed a lecturer at the University of Birmingham…” According to Carpenter[6] they frequently met at the house of Professor Dodds, a Professor of Greek at Birmingham, who’d been a good friend of Auden’s father.
MacNeice however was unhappy: “Birmingham had begun to irk me. I had some wonderful pointless nights walking through back streets with (a student) Reggie Smith, dropping into his father’s house at two in the morning and there would be his father playing chess in the kitchen with his brother. But when I got back to my own house I was oppressed by Mariette’s colour-schemes which she would not call colour-schemes and by her gadgets which were intended to make the home permanent. I accepted a post at Bedford College for Women in London, then went off to Iceland to join Wystan and collaborate with him in a travel book.”[7]
Auden related: “I cannot now recall exactly how it came about that when, in 1936, I went to Iceland, we decided that he should join me there and collaborate in writing a travel book. One thing is clear: we must already have developed a mutual professional respect without which collaboration is unthinkable…”
“Louis MacNeice turned out to be, so far as I was concerned, the ideal travelling companion, funny, observant, tolerant and good-tempered. I have rarely in my life enjoyed myself so much as I did during those weeks when we were constantly together…”
“The personal quality of his which I most admired was his stoic reserve. I know that he suffered a great deal from fits of depression, but he never spoke of these or asked for consolation, and at times when I know he was having troubles in his personal life, he never, as so many people do, wear one out by harping upon these and demanding the help and advice one is always powerless to give.”[8]
Carpenter relates how: “MacNiece’s marriage had just broken up and he was about to start a new lecturing job in London. Like Auden, he too had come to Iceland hoping (as he put it) to “get the focus” of ordinary life by standing away from it a little. He and Auden spent a week together in Reykavik while Auden made some arrangements for the next part of the trip, for which they were to be joined by the Bryaston boys. The school party, consisting of four boys and Bill Hoyland, then master in charge, arrived on 17 August, and swiftly set out from Reykavik to begin a journey on horseback around the Langjökull icefield, Auden and MacNeice riding with them.”
“Auden had arranged the guides and the horses – which he did by leaving another party stranded. He was greatly annoyed to discover that MacNeice had come from London without any tent or gear, and only reluctantly agreed to share with him – “Ora pro nobis, please, this evening, won’t you?”
“His fears proved justified. The tent, which was missing part of its pole, was far too short for them, and their feet stuck out of the doorway. Auden lay down on a pneumatic mattress – McNeice said he looked like something out of a Breughel when blowing it up – and adopted the fetal position, which left MacNeice almost no room. It began to rain, and the tent, which they had pitched with both skins of the canvas touching, began to subside and close in on them “like something out of Edgar Allan Poe.” The Bryaston boys, who, being properly equipped, had a dry night, woke the next morning to see no sign of either poet except a flattened tent on the ground. “Perhaps they had sneaked off to the nearby tin hut for coffee” wondered Michael Yates. “Then the tent undulated and two wet, cross faces appeared.”
“The journey around the icefield now began in earnest. Two guides led them, and there were seventeen horses or ponies in all, which allowed several for spares and baggage-carrying. Auden now regarded himself as an experienced rider but any impression of competence was entirely offset by his peculiar appearance. He chose to wear an outfit of which the innermost layer was pyjamas, on top of which were two shirts, two jackets, flannel trousers, riding breeches, a coat, and, finally, yellow oilskins. “When he walks”, said MacNeice, “he moves like something that is more at home in the water.”[9]
Of his experience MacNeice wrote in the book he co-authored with Auden:
Among these rocks can roll upon the tongue
Morsels of thought, not jostled by the throng,
Or morsels of un-thought, which is still better,
(Thinking these days makes a suburban clatter).
Here we can practise forgetfulness without
A sense of guilt, fear of the tout and lout.
And here — but Wystan has butted in again
To say we must go out in the frightful rain
To see a man about a horse and so
I shall have to stop. For we soon intend to go
Around the Langjökull, a ten days’ ride,
Gumboots and stockfish. Probably you’ll deride
This sissy onslaught on the open spaces.
I can see the joke myself; however the case is
Not to be altered, but please remember us
So high up here in this vertiginous
Crow’s-nest of the earth.
[1] pp. 69-71 W.H. Auden, Prose, Volume V
[2] p.67 Ibid
[3] p.113 The Strings Are False, An Unfinished Autobiography, Louis MacNeice
[4] p.114 Ibid
[5] p.232 Ibid
[6] p.117 W. H. Auden, Humphrey Carpenter
[7] p.164 The Strings Are False, An Unfinished Autobiography, Louis MacNeice
[8] pp.67-68 W.H. Auden, Prose, Volume V
[9] pp.200-201 W. H. Auden, Humphrey Carpenter