#267

p.286: https://books.google.com/books?id=-Wf2AwAAQBAJ&pg=PA286&dq=Can+louis+die?+Why,+then+it's+time+to+join+him+again,+for+another+round,+the+lovely+man&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CBwQ6AEwAGoVChMIm6qkypuWyAIVA5WACh1DkQJ0#v=onepage&q=Can%20louis%20die%3F%20Why%2C%20then%20it's%20time%20to%20join%20him%20again%2C%20for%20another%20round%2C%20the%20lovely%20man&f=false

Louis MacNeice was an Irish poet and playwright of Auden’s generation, and was very well-known and popular through his work. He also wrote the commentary for a film, The Conquest of Everest, in 1953, as B. lets us know. MacNeice died in 1963 from viral pneumonia, “suffocating” there at the end. He was only 55.

I can’t help marveling at the kind of fawning for attention that B. constantly engages in. The poem is a way of announcing, I knew this guy too, in other words, I was of the company of the immortals, and beyond that, B. goes shouldering in on the attention MacNeice earned through his work on the film. It’s doubtless not a lie that B. helped him with some info and advice on mountain climbing when he was engaged in a project about mountain climbing. But it was MacNeice’s project. Here’s what B. makes of the advice he gave: “So Henry’s thought rushed onto a thousand screens / & Louis’, the midwife of it.” There does seem to be such an obsequious need for attention. In this case, he doesn’t let a scrap of potential attention slip by, he grabs it, then turns that molehill into a mountain. Is it unfair of me to see this whole exercise in begging for fame and love as an Everest-sized pile of horse-hockey? MacNeice wrote the script and did all the work, but one night out drinking and B. is the midwife of the whole thing. Strikes me as a tad narcissistic is all, but hey, there’s a surprise, huh? And how about ending the poem with declarations of love but also with that final image of the poor man suffocating from the lung infection that killed him? Sheesh.

Here’s a poem by Louis MacNeice, “Obituary.” [You can’t link directly to the poem. This http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/244604 will get you there, then click on the link “See it in its original context.”].

MacNeice wrote much of his most well-known work in the 30s, so the stock market crash and the Great Depression were part of his experience of the world. This poem is a bit dark, about a professor, maybe an economics professor, who in a fit of suicidal depression gets drunk and heads into the street and kills himself by falling in front of a truck. Sure it’s not the happiest poem in the world. In the 1930s, when so many fortunes were lost, it was a common enough occurrence. It’s a booze-sodden piece, too, so B. would probably approve. I chose it because of what strikes me as a great line: “then having collected / His courtesy and his hat, soft-pedaling desire / Went out to find the world as bad as he expected.” There is a subtle double-entendre there. On one hand the world being as bad as he expected comes because the professor is a smart guy, he’s educated, and the prediction he had made about the stock market crashing, and all its consequences, have come true. The badness he finds out there is bigger than he is. He simply saw it coming through the lens of his expertise, and obviously, because the world is so big, he was just an observer. He had nothing to do with it. But there is also an insinuation that his having predicted it has something to do with how it is. Volcanoes and cataclysmic asteroid strikes aside, the societal world unfolds as we make it. We participate in its becoming, so when we predict bad things, that is what we expect to happen and those expectations influence the outcomes. If we try to be too literal about this, it doesn’t work because the size of the world is still overwhelming. But the creation of the world exists in our perceptions. If we expect to perceive goodness in the world, we’ll go out and find it, because in being so vast, the world is filled with a variety of stimuli for our perceptions. We see what we want to see. But beyond that, in seeing good or bad, we participate for good or for bad in the goodness or badness of the world’s becoming. Our expectations tilt the odds one way or another. Maybe not even the professor himself, who as one man is tiny, but the profession of which he is part—and over which he has a measure of influence. So when the professor gets drunk and kills himself out of despair at the state of the world, he is fulfilling his own prophecy. I think it’s going to suck, so sure enough, I go out there and find out it sucks. But the real tragedy is that his suicide had indeed made the world a worse place. There is now that much more woe in it, that needn’t have been there. He has tragically added to the tragedy he expected. This is the excellent foppery of the world.