Louis MacNeice's "Autumn Journal"—A Guided Reading Pt.3

"One of God’s graces is the way creativity can create a space for mutual expression, understanding, and solace."

Read the first two of Andrew Roycroft’s reflections on Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal. here and here.

by Andrew Roycroft

There Are Places I Remember

Louis MacNeice is buried in Carrowdore Churchyard in County Down, Northern Ireland. Set with a commanding view of Ireland’s east coast it is a scenic space well worthy of a poetic pilgrimage for reader-travellers. MacNeice’s burial in this precise spot is something of an absurdity given his original roots and the locations in which he lived his life, but it is also a vivid and apt metaphor for how the concept of ‘place’ figured in the poet’s life.

MacNeice died in Yorkshire, but his remains were transported across the Irish Sea so that he could be interred with his late mother - whose failed health when the poet was 10 years old meant she was permanently removed from the family home. MacNeice’s mother, in turn, was buried in Carrowdore not because of long-term familial ties with the village but because her own father had died in the seaside area during a vacation there. In his death, MacNeice’s relationship with place is vexed, conflicted, and contested, and the same could be said of his lived experience as well.

In this final guided reading of MacNeice’s masterpiece, Autumn Journal, the ideas of location and dislocation, belonging, and exile will come sharply into view and provide us with a sense of the poet’s wrestling of soul about where he was from and where he could settle. This snapshot of place and displacement in the poem will help us to understand MacNeice a little better as a man, but it can also provide us with some helpful ways of understanding our own sense of belonging or lack thereof. In a world where we often identify poets with a settled sense of place - Seamus Heaney with Mossbawn, Wendell Berry with rural Kentucky, Mary Oliver with Ohio or New England - plugging into a poet who could not settle can be of help to us culturally and even personally. Not everyone belongs, some writers and readers dwell in exile, and there are creative ways to negotiate with this often unwelcome fact. All of this can be accessed through MacNeice’s ‘places’ in Autumn Journal.

Modernism and Displacement

Louis MacNeice’s experience of dislocation is not unique to him, either as a creative person or as a Modernist writer. The history of literature is littered with key figures whose best work was done when they were away from their home country but the idea of having no home, of being perpetually displaced, is unique to Modernism. Caren Kaplan helpfully captures what this Modernist tendency looks like,

Euro-American modernisms celebrate singularity, solitude, estrangement, alienation and aestheticized excisions of location in favor of locale - that is, the “artist in exile” is never “at home”, always essentially alone, and shocked by the strain of displacement into significant experimentations and insights.

In many ways, then, what Autumn Journal articulates is common to many writers and artists contemporary with MacNeice. In this respect, MacNeice is typical of poets of his era in his wrestling with place and belonging, but as the theme unfolds in his work, we can observe features that are peculiar to his life experience. It is these specific issues that we will pay attention to in this article, and from them find some insights about MacNeice, writing and our own journey through the world.