'Waking in the Morning to the Rustling of Paper'

Competitively minded readers and critics enjoy setting up either/or rivalries between writers. Joyce vs. Proust. Borges vs. Nabokov. Auden vs. MacNeice. There’s something simple-mindedly Manichean about this approach to literature. I prefer to think we can be selfish and enjoy the lot. Clive James talks sense in “Meeting MacNeice” (Poetry Notebook, 2014): 

“As is only proper, we go on forever hearing about W. H. Auden. But we never hear enough about his friend Louis MacNeice, although there were things MacNeice could do that even the prodigiously facile Auden could not. One of them was Autumn Journal, my favourite long poem of the 1930s, an intoxicating cocktail of classical metres, conversational rhythms and reportorial detail.”

 

In a century of competing book-length poems, many of which now read like well-padded wallows in egotism, Autumn Journal remains endlessly rereadable. MacNeice’s voice is intelligent, even-tempered, sophisticated, charming and tart. He is no aesthete or propagandist. MacNeice wrote it between August and December 1938, the year of the Anschluss, annexation of the Sudetenland, Munich, Kristallnacht. Yet in Section XX he finds room for a meditation on Christmas:

 

“A week to Christmas, cards of snow and holly,

Gimcracks in the shops,

Wishes and memories wrapped in tissue paper,

Trinkets, gadgets and lollipops

And as if through coloured glasses

We remember the childhood thrill

Waking in the morning to the rustling of paper,

The eiderdown heaped in a hill

Of wogs and dogs and bears and bricks and apples

And the feeling that Christmas Day

Was a coral island in time where we land and eat our lotus

But where we can never stay.

 

“There was a star in the East, the magi in their turbans

Brought their luxury toys

In homage to a child born to capsize their values

And wreck their equipoise.

A smell of hay like peace in the dark stable —

Not peace however but a sword

To cut the Gordian knot of logical self-interest,

The fool-proof golden cord;

For Christ walked in where philosophers tread

But armed with more than folly,

Making the smooth place rough and knocking the heads

Of Church and State together.

In honour of whom we have taken over the pagan

Saturnalia for our annual treat

Letting the belly have its say, ignoring

The spirit while we eat.

And Conscience still goes crying through the desert

With sackcloth round his loins:

A week to Christmas — hark the herald angels

Beg for copper coins.”

 

MacNeice balances Christmas sentiment with Christmas dissent. He recalls the wonder of the holiday as a child, “the feeling that Christmas Day / Was a coral island in time.” Some of us spend the rest of our lives trying to recapture it. He evokes the Nativity without preaching. Never devout, MacNeice can still demean a secular society’s materialism and celebrate Christ “knocking the heads / Of Church and State together.” He closes his 1934 poem “An Eclogue for Christmas” with these lines:    

 

“A. Let the saxophones and the xylophones

And the cult of every technical excellence, the miles of canvas in the galleries

And the canvas of the rich man’s yacht snapping and tacking on the seas

And the perfection of a grilled steak –

 

“B. Let all these so ephemeral things

Be somehow permanent like the swallow’s tangent wings:

Goodbye to you, this day remember is Christmas, this morn

They say, interpret it your own way, Christ is born.”