‘A rustle of leaves in Regent’s Park’: Louis MacNeice’s London, by John Clegg
The London of Louis MacNeice’s poetry extends south to Trafalgar Square, north to Whitestone Pond at the top of Hampstead, west to St John’s Wood, and east to the western edge of the Heath. It is dominated by Regent’s Park and, to a lesser extent, Primrose Hill. Many of the places that were important to him as a person do not make it into the poetry at all: no Twickenham (the home of English rugby) or Lords (ditto cricket), no named pubs or tube stations, no theatres, no West End, no Portland Place, no Islington (52 Canonbury Park South, where they’ve put up a blue plaque, was one of his more permanent addresses in London – he lived there for five years – but you’d never know it from his poetry). No tourist attractions apart from the National Gallery and London Zoo, the latter partially accounted for by the fact that he wrote a prose pot-boiler on the Zoo in 1938, and re-used some of the passages in his poems. Nothing south of the river. No east.
The glimpses we get of this London are determinedly anonymous; nothing idiosyncratic, nothing that would mark the city out as London rather than elsewhere. Here are some of the things he notices:
And the sun caresses Camden Town,
The barrows of oranges and apples.
(Autumn Journal, XIV)
Regent’s Park was
Gay with ducks and deck-chairs…
(‘Trilogy for X’)
Toy sail skidding on Whitestone
Pond at the peak of London…
(‘Trilogy for X’, again)
It could be any city or town in Europe. The fifth canto of Autumn Journal (1939) describes a walk, after last orders, from a pub near Piccadilly Circus back to MacNeice’s digs on Primrose Hill Road (16a, now demolished): at Tottenham Court Road, ‘tarts and negroes / Loiter beneath the lights’, there’s ‘a smell of French bread in Charlotte Street’ and ‘a rustle / Of leaves in Regent’s Park’; impressions scarcely worth noticing, nothing you would need to go to London to see. If he’d never left Belfast he could have written just the same from his imagination without fear of being contradicted.
Well, fine, some poets don’t have much of an interest in place. But not MacNeice: in the 1966 Collected Poems, edited by E.R. Dodds, you plunge (after the juvenilia) first into ‘Belfast’ then ‘Birmingham’, both short poems, both getting across more of the cities they describe than anything he ever wrote about London. He loves the sharp particular, what makes one place different from another: in his 1934 poem ‘Ode’, ‘The night is so coarse with chocolate / The wind blowing from Bournville’ – who but a Brummie would know that detail? When MacNeice writes about Ireland or Oxford or Hampshire, he’s alert to what is peculiar to them; whereas his London contains, forcibly, nothing peculiar or distinguishable. His ear for ‘cockney’, for instance, only appears in his poems when he or the poem is situated outside London: ‘snatches of cockney song’ in Glastonbury (canto XXII of Autumn Sequel), the tourist ‘cockney public’ in ‘Dialogue in Stornoway’, a ‘hackney cockney tune’ from a barrel-organ on Dublin’s ‘O’Connell Bridge’, ‘hiking cockney lovers’ in the countryside in Autumn Journal. London place-names he avoids, but place-names in general he is keen on: he finds a beautiful pentameter line in the station-announcer’s ‘West Meon, Tisted, Farnham, Woking, Weybridge’.
That itinerary, and the eventual destination of the journey it describes, brings me to the substantial exception to everything I’ve said so far. MacNeice writes at his best about London – writes, in fact, unforgettably about London – when he is leaving or entering it. Everyone who appreciates MacNeice, I’m sure, remembers the moment at the end of the first canto of Autumn Journal, when he goes down into the Underground, having come back to London from Hampshire (presumably the station is Waterloo):
And so to London and down the ever-moving
Stairs
Where a warm wind blows the bodies of men together
And blows apart their complexes and cares.
But even better is the passage a few pages later where he is driving out from London into the Chilterns:
The next day I drove by night,
Among red and amber and green, spears and candles,
Corkscrews and slivers of reflected light
In the mirror of the rainy asphalt
Along the North Circular and the Great West roads
[...]
And the road slings round my head like a lasso
Looping wider and wider tracts of darkness…
as he gradually passes out into the countryside. Or, alternatively, from the early poem ‘Rugby Football Excursion’ (MacNeice later excised it from the work he wanted to preserve – mistakenly, I think):
Euston – the smell of soot and fish and petrol;
Then in the train jogging and jogging,
The sheaf of wires from pole to pole beside us
Dogging the fancy northward…
Or else, from the underrated Autumn Sequel, the journey to Beaconsfield:
A suburban train
Squeezes me through the black wood of Saint John
By intestinal tunnels like a pain
That London would get rid of, on and on
Past West Hampstead where the backs are ill
With tired chrysanthemums and wobegone
Lace curtains, past the antennae of Wembley Hill
And Sudbury Hill, drab realms of television,
Till the blue roofs turn red and the houses spill
And become semi-detached…
continuing through West and South Ruislip, past ‘poplars white / With wind, past hollyhocks that lurch and toss’. The verse here – like all of Autumn Sequel – is not perfectly sustained (‘the backs are ill’ seems as though it might only be there for the sake of the rhyme); but it feels as though MacNeice has suddenly become interested in the city where he lives. Later in the poem, his return journey to London from Ireland is described more briskly – as in Autumn Journal, he notices the escalator in the tube, ‘moving stairs / To move on’ – and it is immediately followed by five tercets of clear, crisp attention to London in November, the same sort of attention that he paid to Belfast and Birmingham earlier, but which apparently he could only provoke himself to pay to London by leaving or returning to it.
Why was this? I think it has to do with Regent’s Park. I mentioned before that it dominates his poetry’s geography of London; it’s referred to twenty or thirty times, far more than anywhere else in London, sometimes just as ‘the park’ but still recognizable – as in the poem called ‘The Park’, from Solstices, which could in theory be anywhere, but MacNeice mentions the ‘terraces / Where great white bears with extensile necks. . . / Lope their beat’: of course, the Mappin Terraces of London Zoo. From the mid-1930s, a diagonal line across Regent’s Park was MacNeice’s regular commute; both when he was teaching at Bedford College (now Regent’s College) and when he later worked at the BBC at Portland Place, he would have walked across it morning and evening. It is not a stretch to imagine him thinking through his poems as he walks, and no surprise if the park crops up again and again in his poems.
But he was unlucky in that commute. Regent’s Park is one of the least attractive parks in central London, sprawling and dull, no height or surprise in it, banked in on all sides by horrible Georgian terraces in the style the Germans call Schickimiki (over-the-top, fancy-schmancy. He would end up living in one: 2 Clarence Terrace, his final London address). For a writer like MacNeice, there was no material there, nothing to focus on. In the 1950s he added three regrettable appendices to ‘The Park’: ‘The Lake in the Park’, ‘Dogs in the Park’ and ‘Sunday in the Park’. ‘The Lake in the Park’, the worst of them, is a sixteen-line account of a London clerk who ‘thinks no-one will ever love him’, rowing around the boating lake; it concludes with one of the most laboured metaphors in twentieth-century poetry, comparing the movement of ducks with stone-age arrowheads. It is transparently an attempt to whip up a poem out of nothing.
I assume he also thought through poems while he was on the train or on the road, leaving or arriving in London, and the backs of the houses he saw from the train were more productive of good verse than anything in Regent’s Park. Michael Longley called Autumn Journal ‘one of the luckiest poems I know, in which everything somehow falls into place. But the best poets are the luckiest’:
Factory, a site for a factory, rubbish dumps,
Bungalows in lath and plaster, in brick, in concrete,
And shining semi-circles of petrol pumps
Like intransigent gangs of idols.
Suddenly there are things to see – flashing past at train speed, but MacNeice is the first poet of things seen from that speed. (He was such a fine writer about trains. ‘Departure Platform’ and ‘Corner Seat’ don’t have anything to do with London, but are both terrific poems.)
MacNeice’s best London poem is his last – ‘Goodbye to London’, third from the end in The Burning Perch, his final volume, published a few days after his death in 1963 – and also the hardest to read for anyone who loves London.
Having left the great mean city, I make
Shift to pretend I am finally quit of her
Though that cannot be so long as I work.
Right to the end, the long sentence holds out hope for a reprieve, but the final verb doesn’t grant it (it could so easily be ‘so long as I live’). All the same it is bare fact. Next he gives his sense-impression of London as a child, ‘horsepiss and petrol’, which rings completely true as well (as these smells conjoined must have been redolent of London for only a decade or less, they authentically pin down the visit). The poem continues with MacNeice’s account, surely a true account, of what he dislikes about postwar London:
Then came the headshrinking war, the city
Closed in too, the people were fewer
But closer too, we were back in the womb.
Nevertheless let the petals fall
From the flower of cities all.
From which reborn into anticlimax
We endured much litter and apathy hoping
The phoenix would rise, for so they had promised.
Nevertheless let the petals fall
From the flower of cities all.
And nobody rose, only some meaningless
Buildings and the people once more were strangers
At home with no one, sibling or friend.
Which is why now the petals fall
From the flower of cities all.
MacNeice was writing this from Aldbury on the edge of Berkhamsted, where he had gone to live with his partner Mary Wimbush and her young son, but knew nobody. For a year, his local there was the Greyhound, and he used to drink by the fireplace under the clock in the front bar, at what was definitely a table for one. If he’d lived a few more years, I’m sure we would have had a ‘Berkhamsted’ to go alongside ‘Belfast’ and ‘Birmingham’; and his trips back into and out of London would have continued to produce magnificent poems; but he would have remained ‘at home with no one, sibling or friend’.
John Clegg works as a bookseller in London