louis macneice’s war And mad to possess the unpossessable sea
Asa man in spring desires to die in woman.^28‘Failure’ is the inevitability here; the individual’s refusal ‘to wait the communal
failure’ (in a tellingly American turn of phrase) aligns him with ‘the meteor or
the madman’, but does nothing to make his death any less ‘uncommon’. ‘Every-
where’, as MacNeice had written in an earlier poem, ‘the pretence of individuality
recurs’;^29 yet this acknowledgement of self-deceit does not entirely draw the sting of
individuality’s desire, its drive to ‘possess the unpossessable’. The poem has a self-
consciously Freudian cast, but it represents nevertheless an accurate and powerful
report on MacNeice’s own feelings in 1940, for which the War was one way in to
‘the deep sea that never thinks’ of death. In contemplating his own individuality,
MacNeice was determined to harbour no illusions about its special status: and his
return voyage, through the so-called Atlantic Tunnel, was one away from illusion,
even if it was more difficult to say what it was a journeytowards.Nothing,from
now on, could presume to think itself ‘uncommon’, least of all possible death.
These thoughts are given shape at the end of the third chapter ofThe Strings
Are False(which is also the end of the manuscript material, written on shipboard,
which Dodds, as posthumous editor, placed as the opening of the work):
So I got on to this boat and here I am, fitted with a gas-mask, carrying my lifebelt from
cabin to lounge to dining-room.... It is, as I said, the same boat that brought me over.
That was in January 1940 and this is December 1940. But before all that? I am 33 years old
and what can I have been doing that I still am in a muddle? But everyone else is too, maybe
our muddles are concurrent. Maybe, if I look back, I shall find that my life is not just mine,
that it mirrors the lives of the others—or shall I say the Life of the Other? Anyway I will
look back. And return later to pick up the present, or rather to pick up the future.^30
The element of ‘muddle’ is significant: MacNeice was far from sure about what
claims the purely personal might have from now on, upon either his art or his
actions. Besides the composition of some of the autobiographical material inThe
Strings Are Falseitself, 1940 had seen some of the poet’s most searching and
powerful personal writing—including the anguished and painfully clear-sighted
poem ‘Autobiography’. A return to the War might be effectively a decision to sink the
selfinsomecommoneffortoverwhichitcouldhavenorealcontrol,andthisseemsto
haveappealedtoMacNeiceatthetime,evenifitrepresentedanimpulsewhichhewas
capable of regarding as an ultimately selfish kind of death-wish. But there was also,
already, another impulse at work in MacNeice’s thinking: this is towards ‘the lives of
others’(aphraseinstantlydeflatedbytheironicallyportentous‘LifeoftheOther’),in
which some meaning for the life of the individual might now be found. Here, in the
hope that ‘muddles’ might somehow prove ‘concurrent’, MacNeice found a location
for a good deal of his subsequent wartime writing. Work for the BBC was, almost by
(^28) MacNeice, ‘The Death-Wish’, inCollected Poems, 200.
(^29) MacNeice, ‘An Eclogue for Christmas’, ibid. 5. (^30) MacNeice,The Strings Are False, 35.