Summer with Monika, Autumn Journal

Two poems, years apart, but the same sad story of love and regret

Louis MacNeice, painted by Nancy Culliford Spender (née Sharp), c 1936: Collection of the National Portrait Gallery

Last week I wrote about poetry anthologies, and the difference between the carefully collated, edited and published volumes, of which Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of the 1860s would be a prime example, and the less carefully collated, absolutely personal collection each of us chooses to carry around in our heads. Mine, like many other scribblers’, isn’t just in my head: when I was a teenager I began to copy my favourite poems into a little book, and I have that very book on my desk now. I wasn’t always very careful about noting authors and titles: but there are two particular passages that I keep returning to because they have meant so much to me over forty years or more, and today I want to share with you why I love them, why they are so different, but perhaps surprisingly, what they have in common.

In the spring of 1939, Faber and Faber published Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal. Written between August and December 1938, it is a very long poem, twenty-four sections, chronicling MacNeice’s own life and thoughts at a time of great personal sadness: the ending of a grand love affair, as well as the slow drift into war. Reading it today I am struck by its historical significance as a contemporary record of events: when I wrote about the 1938 Oxford by-election recently I did not know that MacNeice had driven to Oxford from London to support the anti-Fascist candidate, Sandy Lindsay, using his car to ferry voters to the polls:

So Thursday came and Oxford went to the polls

And made its coward vote and the streets resounded

To the triumphant cheers of the lost souls -

The profiteers, the dunderheads, the smarties.

Nor had I remembered that he had been in Barcelona just before it fell, his second visit to war-torn Spain:

And the lights go out and the town is still

And the sky is pregnant with ill-will…

And in the pauses of destruction

The cocks in the centre of the town crow…

These, almost needless to say, are not the reasons that I copied so many passages from Autumn Journal into my notebook: like most teenage girls I was in love with the idea of love, and no-one writes a love poem like MacNeice:

September has come, it is hers
Whose vitality leaps in the autumn,
Whose nature prefers
Trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace.
So I give her this month and the next
Though the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered already
So many of its days intolerable or perplexed
But so many more so happy.
Who has left a scent on my life, and left my walls
Dancing over and over with her shadow
Whose hair is twined in all my waterfalls
And all of London littered with remembered kisses.

‘All of London littered with remembered kisses’…What a line. The woman in question was Nancy Sharp, an artist, the wife of William Coldstream. She and Louis had had an affair over the previous two years, but as the poem opens it has run its course, and Nancy has fallen in love with another man.

So that if now alone

I must pursue this life, it will not be only

A drag from numbered stone to numbered stone

But a ladder of angels, river turning tidal.

Louis MacNeice was born in Belfast in 1907: his father was an Anglican priest who would later become a Bishop in the Church Of Ireland. MacNeice’s early years follow the predictable pattern of the British upper classes: schooled at Sherborne and Marlborough, a contemporary of John Betjeman, then a scholarship to Oxford to read Classics. But there in the late 1920s and early ‘30s his outlook changed as he fell in with the left-wing set, WH Auden, Stephen Spender, Anthony Blunt, Cecil Day-Lewis. He began to write poetry at Oxford and by 1935 was published by Faber & Faber. His friends moved further to the left, joining the Communist Party, but MacNeice felt an intellectual resistance to this, and his scepticism was presumably strengthened by his experiences in Spain.

Autumn Journal showed me that men, or at least this particular man, did not just write about how women looked in their poetry. This might sound obvious, but so much traditional love poetry is focused on physical attributes, the golden hair, the blue eyes, the luscious lips. It’s a bitter pill to swallow when they are not attributes you share! Here was a man who had truly known and loved a woman for her mind, her character, her strength, her honesty, and her sense of purpose. It was the idea of a relationship to aspire to.

And though I have suffered from your special strength

Who never flatter for points nor fake responses

I should be proud if I could evolve at length

An equal thrust and pattern.

Poets, as well as women, come in all shapes and sizes, and from all sorts of backgrounds. Roger McGough was born to a working class, Roman Catholic family in Liverpool in 1937. He was educated at a catholic boys’ school, and went to Hull University where he read French and Geography, and seems to have spent most of his time scribbling poems he never showed anyone and trying to pluck up courage to talk to Philip Larkin (famously the University Librarian at the time). His life changed back in Liverpool in the early 1960s when he was teaching English at a boys’ school, and frustrated by the irrelevance to these lads of his prescribed textbook, the aforementioned Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, he began reading them his own stuff. Hanging around the coffee bars and pubs of Liverpool with the art student crowd he met Mike McCartney, brother of the more famous Paul, and together they formed a band called The Scaffold. People my age who were children in the 1960s will remember with great pleasure their hits ‘Lily the Pink’, which got to Number One, and Thank U Very Much.

Roger McGough and someone else…

When Roger wasn’t writing silly lyrics, and hanging around with The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan, he was continuing to write his off-beat, quirky and usually very funny poetry. In 1967 some of his works were published in an anthology along with Brian Patten and Adrian Henri, called The Mersey Sound. On the back of Beatles’ mania it took off: according to The Guardian it is one of the biggest selling poetry anthologies ever, more than one million copies sold. But that same year, Roger had a solo collection published by Michael Joseph: a slim volume entitled Summer with Monika.

they say the sun shone now and again

but it was generally cloudy

with far too much rain

they say babies were born

married couples made love

(often with eachother)

and people died

they say it was an average

ordinary

moderate

run of the mill

commongarden

summer

... but it wasn't

for i locked a yellowdoor

and i threw away the key

and i spent summer with monika

and monika spent summer with me

Obviously Louis MacNeice had written a more serious poem, a proper poem, with rhyming schemes and punctuation and everything … But for me these two pieces have so much in common, and not just that I love them both and can quote from them. They are both autobiographical, they are based in a specific identifiable time, being respectively the autumn of 1938, and a summer in the early 1960s when Roger McGough met Thelma, a divorced art student living in Toxteth. And they both chart the sadness of a love affair going wrong, running out of steam, or in the case of Roger and Thelma, just settling into the graveyard of overfamiliarity. When love goes from:

somedays we thought about the seaside

and built sandcastles on the blankets

and paddled in the pillows

or swam in the sink

and played with the shoals of dishes

through this

i have lately learned to swim

and now feel more at home

in the ebb and flow of your slim

rhythmic tide

than in the fullydressed

couldntcareless

restless world outside

to this:

away from you

i feel a great emptiness

a gnawing loneliness

with you

i get that reassuring feeling

of wanting to escape

And finally:

monika

the sky is blue

the leaves are green

the birds are singing

the bells are ringing

for me and my gal

the suns as big as an icecream factory

and the corn is as high as an elephants’

i could go on for hours about the beautiful

weather we’re having but monika

they dont

make summers

like they

used to…

See what I mean? it’s funny, it plays with your expectations, but in its own way, it breaks your heart. McGough admits he stole the title from an Ingmar Bergman film poster: ‘I knew it was a foreign film straight away because they’d spelled Monica wrong.’

Of course, Summer with Monika doesn’t have the historical significance of Autumn Journal. McGough says that people assume it was an affair of the Summer of Love, 1968, that Monika was a hippy. He is very clear that that is neither the time, nor the point. ‘What was exciting about the sixties for me was that I was young, and there’s never a better time to be young than when you are young. The summer I wrote about was early sixties, pre-Pill, pre-psychedelia, CND not LSD. And as for the Permissive Society, it may have sashayed onto Merseyside years later, but if it ever went to parties, then it arrived just after I had left.’¹

Louis MacNeice struggled in later life with alcohol abuse, and died of pneumonia at the age of 55. No-one talks much about his poetry today, perhaps he is overshadowed by Auden and Spender. Roger McGough lives in London, and has had a long and successful career as a poet, a children’s author, and for many years the presenter of Poetry Please on BBC Radio 4. A few years ago he came to the Cheltenham Literature Festival, and I queued up with my copy of Monika to get his autograph - my teenage groupie years not quite behind me!

It is possible that the summer spent with Monika was actually written at a time of important world events: the Cuban missile crisis, or the assassination of JFK, the jailing of Nelson Mandela, or the outbreak of the Vietnam War, say, but that Roger and Monika were otherwise occupied and did not notice. Or, as that other Mersey poet , Adrian Henri, put it: ‘If I’d known that I was living in one of the most exciting periods of recent history, I’d have taken more notice.’ But Louis MacNeice was only too aware of the terrible crisis looming, and at times in Autumn Journal he is Cassandra, crying out to be heard.

Let him have the last word:

The New Year comes with bombs, it is too late

to dose the dead with honourable intentions:

If you have honour to spare, employ it on the living;

The dead are as dead as Nineteen Thirty-Eight.

1. Roger McGough, ‘Said and Done: the autobiography’, 2005