'What a Place to Talk of War'

Cushendun is a town at the mouth of the River Dun in Country Antrim, on the northeast coast of Northern Ireland. John Masefield’s wife was born there and the future poet laureate often visited. Another poet, Louis MacNeice, rented a house in Cushendun in the summer of 1939. He had finished his masterpiece, Autumn Journal, in February and it was published in May. The long poem documents, in part, the previous year’s cascade of disasters in Europe -- the Anschluss, annexation of the Sudetenland, Munich, Kristallnacht. MacNeice writes in Section VII: 

“. . . 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;

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.”

 

While in Cushendun, MacNeice composed a sequence of poems, “The Closing Album,” including “Cushendun,” published in the January 1940 issue of Horizon:

 

“Fuchsia and ragweed and the distant hills

Made as it were out of clouds and sea:

All night the bay is plashing and the moon

Marks the break of the waves.

 

“Limestone and basalt and a whitewashed house

With passages of great stone flags

And a walled garden with plums on the wall

And a bird piping in the night.

 

“Forgetfulness: brass lamps and copper jugs

And home-made bread and the smell of turf or flax

And the air a glove and the water lathering easy

And convolvulus in the hedge.

 

“Only in the dark green room beside the fire

With the curtains drawn against the winds and waves

There is a little box with a well-bred voice;

What a place to talk of War.” 

 

In the same issue you’ll find poems by Auden, Walter de la Mare and John Betjeman, and prose by, among others, Cyril Connolly, J.B. Priestley and Herbert Read. The coming war haunts them all. The “little box,” of course, is a radio (the “wireless” of Autumn Journal), and the “well-bred voice” is the BBC, where MacNeice would soon go to work as a writer and producer. Today, it might be a smart phone. Even in remote, beautiful Cushendun, the world interrupts the poet.

 

Shortly after the war, Isaac Rosenfeld reviewed MacNeice’s collection of wartime poems, Springboard. (The review is included in The Age of Enormity, 1962). “Everyone,” Rosenfeld writes, “knew what was coming, but for that very reason no one was prepared.” He continues:

 

“[T]he resignation, the protest, the urbanity, and the complaint: the ability to steal a lyrical moment from the sense of doom and the determination, always a little awkward and repetitive, to strike a new note, the constant resolution to come to a resolution. With the end of the prewar years in sight, this vein was exhausted; this mine closed down while men streamed back to the actual coal pits.”

 

An odd phrase, “the end of the prewar years,” rather than “the start of the war,” but the “prewar” condition in this case had lasted much of a decade, starting years before the appeasement at Munich and the invasion of Poland. MacNeice’s friend Auden wrote its epitaph, “a low dishonest decade,” not unlike our own.

 

Louis MacNeice was born on this date, September 12, in 1907, and died in 1963, nine days before his fifty-sixth birthday.