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Tuesday, February 26, 2008

The Barking Sealion

Posted by Adam Roberts on 02/26/08 at 06:08 AM

I’ve been reading MacNeice’s sprawly, centripetal but often arresting and compelling verse-diary Autumn Journal (written Autumn 1938; published 1939) and am very favourable struck by the mood of the piece. It’s extremely evocative: the failures in Spain, the palpable imminence of war with Germany, the textures of quotidian 1930s English life. In particular I was struck by one detail early on. Section V of this 24-part poem opens in a London brooding on the knowledge that Hitler is knocking on the metaphorical door:

To-day was a beautiful day, the sky was a brilliant
...Blue for the first time for weeks and weeks
But posters flapping on the railings tell the fluttered
...World that Hitler speaks, that Hitler speaks
And we cannot take it in and we cannot go to our daily
...Jobs to the dull refrain of the caption ‘War’[.]

People gossip not about the cricket, but about ’Hodza, Henlein, Hitler,/the Maginot Line’; and everything is overshadowed by the prospect of invasion.

What will happen next. What will happen
...We ask and waste the question on the air;
Nelson is stone and Johnnie Walker moves his
...Legs like a cretin over Trafalgar Square.
And in the Corner House the carpet-sweepers
...Advance between the tables after crumbs
Inexorable, like a tank battalion
...In answer to the drums.
In Tottenham Court Road the tarts and negroes.
...Loiter beneath the lights
And the breeze gets colder as on so many other
...September nights.
A smell of French bread in Charlotte Street, a rustle
...Of leaves in Regent’s Park
And suddenly from the Zoo I hear a sea-lion
...Confidently bark. [p.15]

The unprepearedness of 1938 Britain—the naval hero Nelson gorgonised and static, with only a facile advertising icon to replace him—of the land laid out like a carpet to be swept up by advancing tanks—is nicely rendered. But what’s extraordinary about this is that final bark from the Zoo, given that these lines were written in 1938. Nobody in England knew that Hitler’s planned invasion of Britain (wafted over from France like the smell of the bread), a plan literally to roll tanks across Trafalgar Square, was going to be called Operation Sea-Lion. (According to Wikipedia, Großadmiral Erich Raeder didn’t even start drawing up the plans for Sealion until November 1939). It’s bizarrely prescient of MacNeice to include his confident and rather threatening barking sea-lion in a poem written over a year earlier.

Comments

Not prescient: Raeder was actually a close reader of Autumn Journal, as the underlying apprehensions of the English populace was a preoccupation. Not being ideological himself, Raeder nonetheless recognized that MacNeice made quatrains run on time.

By nnyhav on 02/26/08 at 06:25 PM | Permanent link to this comment

That’s clearly it. In fact Raeder originally wanted to call the invasion ‘Operation Cretinous Johnnie Walker’ but changed his mind at the last moment.

By Adam Roberts on 02/27/08 at 06:06 PM | Permanent link to this comment

Also, and despite the fact that it’s only February, nnyhav clearly wins the 2008 Worst Pun award for ‘quatrains running on time’. Congratulations!

By Adam Roberts on 02/27/08 at 06:08 PM | Permanent link to this comment

Oh, no, anticipated by Tantalus & Penny Wise.

You might find this of interest though. (Her comment that MacNeice was good on trains is what brought the execrable pun to mind.)

By nnyhav on 02/27/08 at 07:03 PM | Permanent link to this comment

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Tuesday, February 26, 2008

The Barking Sealion

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