Abstract
This chapter sets out to apply Philip Lejeune’s idea that a diary is both a “place of asylum in space” and an “archive in time” (Katherine Durnin, Versa Press, Manoa, 2009 , p. 334) to a reading of Louis MacNeice’s Autumn journal written from August 1938 until the New Year and published with a preamble in 1939. Lejeune interestingly marks that the diary is “virtually unfinishable from the beginning, because there is always a time lived beyond the writing, making it necessary to write anew” (Katherine Durnin, Versa Press, Manoa, 2009 , p. 188). MacNeice did return to his journal 15 years later in 1953 with Autumn sequel. It consists of 26 cantos that contain a number of characters drawn from his personal friends and also “hinged to the autumn of 1953” Louis (Collected poems, Faber and Faber, London, 1979, p. 329). Both Autumn journal and Autumn sequel are defined by the poet as occasional poems. Autumn sequel, however, was not received well by critics. The unfavourable reviews stressed the fact that it “look[ed] back over its shoulder beyond the fire-blackened pit of the war” and that it was a mere “ironic gloss on its predecessor” (in Stallworthy (Louis MacNeice, Faber and Faber, London, 1979, p. 410)). Most critics writing about this powerful personal document seem to agree that Autumn journal caught the spirit of the 30s in Britain as Eliot’s The waste land did for the 20s, and that in its “honesty” and range it can be compared to The prelude (Jon Stallworthy Louis MacNeice: His own changing self, The Web, p. 248). This comparison is also brought to attention by John Powell Ward. In The English line: Poetry of the unpoetic from Wordsworth to Larkin he admits that “MacNeice’s time does not allow him Wordsworth’s tenacious moral grip against his guilts” (Ward John Powell The English line: Poetry of the unpoetic from Wordsworth to Larkin. Macmillan, Hountsmills, 1991, p. 167). Autumn journal’s “unflinchingly personal” meanings and MacNeice’s position of engagement with history, of acceptance of political nature of man not only at times of profound public crisis, make it “one of the few unremittingly good long poems in English” in the twentieth century (Bergonzi Bernard Reading the thirties. Texts and contexts. Macmillan, London, 1978, p. 109).
Days are where we live…
Philip Larkin
…because a diary is like lacework, a net of tighter or looser links that contain more empty space than solid parts
Philippe Lejeune
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Notes
- 1.
In his autobiography The strings are false he writes of the moment: “The alarm came in the autumn. Perched on the very joists I came down very quickly, began shrieking down for solidarity” (1996, p. 174).
- 2.
In the Note to Autumn journal MacNeice says it is “something half-way between the lyric and the didactic poem”(1979, p. 101).
- 3.
I am using W. B. Yeats’s idea which MacNeice does not assimilate. Yeats wrote his journal in the form of loose notes kept separate. He says he “must keep one note from leading on to another. To do that is to surrender oneself to literature”. The process involves first “a casual thought” and then it becomes his life (Yeats 1972, p. 139). It seems MacNeisian way is informed by the distrust of the fragmentariness and pretentions of the modernist kind. His journal is socially constituted and yes, it looks onto a sustained narrative.
- 4.
In MacNeice’s words: “Verse is a precision instrument and owes its precision very largely to the many and subtle differences which an ordinary word can acquire from its place in a rhythmical scheme” (1987, p. 143).
- 5.
I suspect Lejeune blurs the terminological distinctions to allow the etymological variety to co-exist. Also Lejeune uses the term journal personnel as a much broader and precise one than e.g. journal in time which is usually not addressed to a wide audience and which in view of the development of modern media has lost some of its potent secrecy.
- 6.
Derek Mahon, an admirer of MacNeice, resonates the same idea in “How to Live.” He says: “the days are more fun than the years/Which pass us by while we discuss them. Act with zest/One day at a time, and never mind the rest” (1990, p. 76).
- 7.
In “The Essential Solitude”, Blanchot sees the practice of journal writing as a pause in creation, as a means to “recall himself to himself”; it ties him to the inessential everyday, and such a perspective, he claims, leads not to remembering but to forgetfulness. As a “parapet walk it is viable,” but it really belongs to the person who is not capable of “belonging to time through the community created by work.” In the journal the I “sinks into the neutrality of a faceless ‘he’” (1992, pp. 828–829).
- 8.
Nussbaum’s phrase (1988, p. 135).
- 9.
I am drawing here on Ricoeur’s idea of an archive as a place and on his understanding of the role of reader as a historian connecting ideas with places (2000, p. 221).
- 10.
Stallworthy says, “There is no reason to doubt the truth of this statement” (1995, p. 227).
- 11.
Robyn Marsack supposes that MacNeice did not think them worthy of preservation but also suspects that many 1930s poems were not “heavily worked over” (1985, p. 42). But we find MacNeice praising Yeats for preserving his manuscripts as mines for researches where the poet’s “stiching and unstiching” can be studied. MacNeice, for example, is known to have carefully compared versions of Yeats’s manuscripts (1987, p. 217).
- 12.
Lejeune suggests three approaches to the diary study. His preferred method is the study of published and unpublished diaries in archives, then analysis of the diary as a form of behaviour, and study of a diary as text, which should, he says, focus primarily on problems of rhythm (2009, p. 165).
- 13.
Shared consciousness of the inevitability of war and need to preserve life invites strong comparisons with other diarizing practices in the 1930s. In a prose journal written under the title Journals 1939–1983 Stephen Spender believes that “The best thing is to write anything, anything at all that comes into your head, until gradually there is a calm” (1985, p. 161). Like MacNeice, Spender produces the journal feeling that his life is “very unsatisfactory” (1985, p. 175) and like many of his contemporaries he keeps a 1939 diary. Spender mentions discussing the practice with Virginia Woolf who at the time thought “it was the only thing she could do” (1985, p. 198). Spender also reports a conversation with T.S. Eliot who told him that “Just writing every day is a way of keeping the engine running, and then something good may come out” (1985, p. 199).
- 14.
Stallworthy suggests that Autumn journal has everything “that, in 1938, he asked of a poem: it would admit the impurities of the world, the flux of experience, in a documentary form that, for all its seeming spontaneity, would be directed into patterns on a page—as indexes on film—by the invisible imagination” (1995, p. 228).
- 15.
- 16.
Despite its anachronistic appeal, Freud’s “Beyond the pleasure principle” (1920) comes to mind. The whole poem lends itself to a reading informed by Freudian claims to pleasure gain resulting from excessive impulse to obtain the mastery of a situation by means of repetition. Painful anticipations coming from the external world give rise to such a principle. Freud emphasizes its active component which he contrasts in this essay with mere “passivity of experience” (1990, p. 646). He also remarks that the repetition compulsion which constitutes psychic life, goes beyond the pleasure principle, that it seems “more primitive, more elementary, more instinctive than the pleasure principle” (1990, p. 646).
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Bruś, T. (2013). Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal as a Place of Asylum in Space and an Archive in Time. In: Fabiszak, J., Urbaniak-Rybicka, E., Wolski, B. (eds) Crossroads in Literature and Culture. Second Language Learning and Teaching. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21994-8_21
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