MacNeice Zoo

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-29975-1
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

'I go the zoo half because I like looking at the animals and half because I like looking at the people... The pleasure of dappled things, the beauty of adaptation to purpose, the glory of extravagance, classic elegance or romantic nonsense and grotesquerie - all these we get from the Zoo.' In 1938 Louis MacNeice published his second collection of poems with Faber; his 'personal essay' Modern Poetry for OUP; and Zoo, a prose commission from Michael Joseph to write an impressionistic 'guide' to the London Zoo in Regents Park. Envisioned as a breezy assignment MacNeice's Zoo inevitably became a richer endeavour, taking in side-trips to Paris and Belfast. Zoo also benefited from illustrations by the painter Nancy Sharp, with whom MacNeice had begun an affair after moving to London in 1936. This Faber Finds edition returns to circulation a delightful rarity by one of the twentieth century's most brilliant poets.

Louis MacNeice was born in Belfast in 1907, the son of a Church of Ireland rector, later a bishop. He was educated in England at Sherborne, Marlborough and Merton College, Oxford. His first book of poems, Blind Fireworks, appeared in 1929, and he subsequently worked as a translator, literary critic, playwright, autobiographer, BBC producer and feature writer. The Burning Perch, his last volume of poems, appeared shortly before his death in 1963.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Macneice, Louis

Leseproben

I

READER: WHY EXACTLY ARE YOU DOING IT?

Writer: Doing what?

Reader: Writing about the Zoo.

Writer: Because I like the Zoo.

Reader: Oh yeah?

Writer: Well, why shouldn’t I like the Zoo?

Reader: I didn’t say you didn’t. I like the Zoo myself.

Writer: I know what you’re thinking—the Zoo is not my style?

Reader: Something of the sort.

Writer: Well, is it your style then?

Reader: More my style than yours. The Zoo is a public institution and I’m the public. You’re just a writer.

Writer: A private institution?

Reader: Private, anyway.

Writer: Writers, you mean, mustn’t write about public institutions?

Reader: Not unless they know something about them.

Writer: You mean—unless they’re experts.

Reader: Yes.

Writer: Then who is the expert on the Zoo?

Reader: Julian Huxley.

Writer: So that’s that?

Reader: Yes.

Writer: Then this also is this. Julian Huxley knows a great deal more about the Zoo than either you or I do. But Julian Huxley himself is, so to speak, in the Zoo. Now it is very necessary that people who are inside something should speak about it from the inside. But, if not necessary, it is sometimes agreeable that outsiders—laymen—should say what they think about things.

Reader: Outsiders! Busybodies, dilettantes, parasites!

Writer: Quite so. But there are good parasites and bad. Now I am a good parasite.

Reader: In what way good?

Writer: Because I pay homage to the hand that feeds me, or, if you prefer it, to the skin on which I fatten without the knowledge of its owner. We are all fed from hundreds and thousands of hands. Often we do not know whose they are nor how they work. Only a few of us ever visualize the hands that grope in the coal-mines or push levers in the mills or handle axes in the lumber-camp. Still fewer of us have any inside information about these hands or their owners. All the same, if we think about them at all, it is our privilege to talk about them, though with the proper humility of laymen—to say at least that we are grateful to them (if we are) or on the other hand to criticize, if we want to, the hands themselves or their owners or, more likely, the owners of their owners.

Reader: The layman has no right to criticize.

Writer: Oh, yes he has. Democracy—or any improvement on it—will rest on the layman’s right to criticize. His criticism will be often—very often—damn silly, but if, like Plato and the Fascists, we take away his right to criticize, we take away his right to appreciate. Now suppose you were the head of the whole show——

Reader: What show?

Writer: It makes no difference—an institution, a city council, a nation, a world. Would you like to be doling out necessities or amenities to people who just accept them dumbly as a tea-pot accepts hot water? No, you would not; at least I hope you wouldn’t. And perhaps even the analogy of the tea-pot lets you down. The tea-pot takes in water and gives out tea. So the human individual takes in anything you give him and promptly transforms it; he is ready to give you out again his own reactions—first, in thought and emotion, then in voice or action. The human being cannot experience anything—anything, mind you—without reacting to it both with his emotions and his intelligence. This being granted——

Reader: It’s not granted.

Writer: Never mind. This being so, it is inevitable that he should go on to let these reactions come out in words or deeds. Now you say he is not to commit himself to words, still less to deeds, unless he is specially qualified to do so—unless he is an expert. No one is to pass comment on anything unless he has a licence, issued by the bosses, to do so. No one is to pronounce a sunset lovely unless he has been recognized by your authorities as having a Grade A æsthetic sensibility. And no one if you hit him, is to hit you back—however ineffectually—unless he is a professional boxer. All you want is an ant-heap.

Reader: Ant-heap?

Writer: Yes, ant-heap. Specialization; efficiency; experts running in grooves. Automata dressing by the right. All you want is a right little, tight little, uniformed, chloroformed, totalitarian ant-heap.

Reader: You’re just going off into abstractions. All I am questioning is whether you, you in particular, have any right to be writing about the Zoo——

Writer: There you go again. How do you mean any right to be writing about anything? You’d put it a little more sensibly if you asked if it was any use my writing——

Reader: Well, is it any use?

Writer: How should I know? All I know is that there are a number of things outside whatever you might call my proper sphere—things which I like not as a specialist but as a layman. About such things I can write not with authority nor yet as the scribes but as a layman who honestly records his reactions to them. As there are in this case vast numbers of other laymen in the same position, I think that they may find it pleasant (and so, indirectly, useful, for pleasure is useful) that I should put down for them what they do not bother to put down for themselves. Everyone likes seeing things in words.

Reader: I doubt really whether you’ll put down much that they want to see in words; as far as the Zoo goes, all they want to see is animals.

Writer: Well, they will see animals. I admit that as a writer I can’t put over the appearance of individual animals, but Miss Nancy Sharp is doing that for me. I will give you both impressions and information and she will give you the pictures. She will draw the animals for you as they really look.

Reader: Personally——

Writer: I know what you are going to say. Personally you plump on the camera.

Reader: The camera cannot lie.

Writer: Neither can it discriminate. The camera is much too glib. The realism of the camera is not the realism——

Reader: All right. We won’t argue about æsthetics. Personally I know what most of these animals look like to start with.

Writer: Oh, no, you don’t.

Reader: Oh, yes, I do.

Writer: Well, what does a rhinoceros look like?

Reader: As you just said, one can’t describe it in words.

Writer: Well, draw it then. Here, on the back of this envelope.

Reader: There.

Writer: Is that an Indian rhinoceros or an African?

Reader: I don’t know. It’s just a rhinoceros.

Writer: My very good man, there is no such thing as just a rhinoceros. The Indian rhinoceros is totally different from the African.

Reader: Well, anyway, it looks pretty like a rhinoceros.

Writer: No, it doesn’t. It’s much too natural.

Reader: Well, so it ought to be.

Writer: Oh, no, it oughtn’t. A rhinoceros doesn’t look natural. You’ve probably never looked at a rhinoceros.

Reader: Excuse me, I’ve seen them before you were born.

Writer: Oh, yes, I know you’ve seen them. I merely said you hadn’t looked at them. You brought with you a preconceived idea of what a rhinoceros looked like—formed no doubt from the stereotyped representations of rhinoceroses which you had seen on your nursery bricks or in advertisements or commercial art generally—and the moment you got into the Rhinoceros House, up came this old preconception like a film between you and the rhinoceros. You take things for granted, my dear man. Now just let me test you. What shape is the brass knocker on my front door?

Reader: The brass knocker on your front door?

Writer: I suppose you don’t remember it? You knocked with it, after all.

Reader: I remember the brass knocker perfectly.

Writer: No, you don’t, old man. It isn’t brass.

Reader: Funny, aren’t you? To leave all this about rhinoceroses and knockers—I’m not an artist after all—and to come back to what we were saying. Even supposing you give your public some minimal pleasure by reminding them of something they’ve already seen or felt, is this achievement from your own point of view—I’m only considering yon now, not the community——

Writer: Very kind of you, I’m sure.

Reader: Well, is it really worth the trouble?

Writer: No trouble at all, old man. I like doing this sort of writing. You probably keep a diary yourself.

Reader: Very hand-to-mouth, aren’t you? What I am asking is whether you couldn’t be doing something either of the same sort—i.e. writing, or of some other sort, which would be both more serious and more useful—to the community as well as to yourself.

Writer: I thought we were now leaving the community out of it; but never mind. For myself, writing about the Zoo is enjoyable exercise. I naturally admit, however, that writing about the Zoo from a layman’s point of view is not a very serious activity. But at the same time I flatly assert that it is most important and useful and, indeed, serious that the less serious activities, or the less serious branches of serious activities, should continue to be practised. Twenty-four hours a day of whatever is hallmarked as serious—pamphleteering, preaching, praying, goose-stepping, grinding axes—would soon kill off the human race. I am strongly against the abolition of harmless frivolities.

Reader: Frivolities are not necessarily harmless.

Writer: Quite so. All fungi aren’t mushrooms, but I’m still going to go on eating mushrooms.

Reader: Perhaps...