MacNeice had always been the least political writer of his generation, and his play [Out of the Picture] articulates a mood of the time unaffected by political ideas. The main plot-line concerns an indigent painter named Portright, whose only completed picture, 'Venus Rising', is seized by bailiffs for debts and auctioned off to a film star. Portright represents the artist and the individualist, and his painting, and Moll, the model for it, stand for art, love, and life. The film star and her psychoanalyst-adviser are the other side—society's parasitical life-deniers, the locus of money and power.

In these terms the play is simply another version (rather a conventional one) of the relationship of the artist to modern society. But it contains another theme that is of equal importance and of greater originality. The play begins with a news announcement of the failure of a peace conference, and as the action unfolds war is 'about to be declared', and then is declared; Paris is bombed, and the play ends in an air-raid on London. Portright, in a fit of rage, shoots the Minister of Peace who has precipitated the country into war, and is then poisoned by Moll to save him from prison or the army.

It is not a very good play…. Nevertheless, it has two interesting aspects. The first is the way in which MacNeice treats war. War enters the play in two forms: as announcements on the radio, and as a Minister of Peace. The first gives to war a remote, invisible, but imminent power that is beyond human resistance; the second gives to government the same sort of power, for the same sort of destruction. There are no soldiers in the play, no armies, and no political issues; there is only war itself, approaching like a pestilence. When it comes, it comes first as news of destruction elsewhere … and in the final scene as an air-raid on stage. The destruction is not done by visible hands or for any expressed cause; it is simply destruction, which cannot be opposed or altered. What occurs is not so much the beginning of a war as the end of a civilization…. (pp. 293-95)

What is lost, as war comes, is commonplace reality, the pleasures of simply living. MacNeice had always been a celebrant of ordinary things; his self-proclaimed role of common man was a kind of substitute for political commitment, a way of being apolitical with a good heart. 'I am all against the rarefying effects of good taste,' he said…. This love of commonplace, particular life appears in the play in an elegiac naming of things that will be lost in the world of war…. It is that sense of what is coming—the Apocalypse that will transform life or destroy it—that makes Out of the Picture so much a parable of its moment, a sad, bitter, passive goodbye to all that. (p. 295)

Modern Poetry is an 'education in the 'twenties', and an explanation of how the 'thirties generation evolved. MacNeice's account is less self-centred than [Lions and Shadows, The Road to Wigan Pier, and Enemies of Promise], for though he was a sentimental man, he was also a reticent one, but it is nonetheless an important part of the record. His very sentimentalism is the source of one kind of value that the book has; for he was able to step back from himself and to describe the sentimental bases of his generation's attitudes. (p. 332)

Of the poets of his generation, MacNeice was the most isolated, and the least political. He was never involved in movements, and he remained outside the political-literary cohorts of the period…. Living in the time that he did, he accepted left politics as necessary, but commitment went against his nature…. He was, he cheerfully admitted, a snob; but then, so was everyone else. 'All the people I know,' he wrote, 'have been conditioned by snobbery.' The people he knew were mainly his own generation, and this is a generalization about the whole lot; the only difference was that MacNeice accepted his snobbery, and so found it easy to confess it. But his vestigial class feelings, and his political unease must have been shared by many of his contemporaries.

MacNeice published four books in 1938—Modern Poetry, I Crossed the Minch, a book on the London Zoo, and The Earth Compels, a volume of poems. All are to some degree autobiographical, and all are touched by the same strains—his nostalgia, his melancholy sense of the present, his apprehensiveness about the future. The world that he want was a world of ordinary pleasures, suited to the ordinary, sensuous man-in-the-street that he liked to imagine he himself was, and wished all poets would be…. But he did not expect to find that world in the near future; he expected a crisis that would silence the poetry and suspend the pleasures. Until that crisis came he would go on writing poetry, but the poetry that he wrote was autumnal and melancholy. Some of this quality was no doubt the tone of the professional lachrymose Irishman; but it was also the tone of the time, of living in the late 'thirties. (pp. 333-34)

[Even] in times of crisis the private life goes on, and MacNeice's achievement in his poem [Autumn Journal] was to interweave the constituent part of his life, and to show how those parts acted upon each other: how the past affected his responses to the present, and how the present forced him to judge the past; how the public world invaded private life, and how private losses coloured his attitude toward public crises. It is a poignant last example of that insistent 'thirties theme, the interpenetration of public and private worlds.

The poem takes its primary structure from the chronology of public events…. But there is also another chronology, less causal and less consequential—the sequence of private occasions and private feelings of a man living an ordinary lonely life. In less critical times one might expect that these two chronologies would exist separately—what have politicians to do with a man's loneliness?—but in the autumn of 1938 they intermingle, seem to become analogies of each other. MacNeice is very good on this relationship; he was always a poet of private living, but in this poem he counterpoints private and public circumstances in a way that creates the mood of crisis as it must have been felt by men like himself.

For example, a principal theme of the poem is his lingering love for his first wife, who had left him and had married another man. Some passages of Autumn Journal are love poems to that lost love, and they are intimate and moving; but the mood is the mood of England in that critical autumn, the private loss is an analogue of public loss, and the poet's helpless misery is an appropriate response to the public situation as well as to the private one.

The relation works in the opposite way, too—public events echo private feelings…. So public and private interweave, and have one theme—loss: the loss of a by-election, the loss of a dog, the loss of Czechoslovakia, the loss of love, all together composing the mood of the autumn of 1938. (pp. 368-69)

[A] good deal of Autumn Journal is retrospective autobiography. I have called such backward glances nostalgic, and they are very much that in MacNeice's case; his habitual sentimental melancholy was especially suited to nostalgia. But the autobiographical passages are more than that: they are also judgments of the past imposed by the disastrous present…. [Somehow] that life of careless love in the careless early 'thirties is made to share responsibility for the way things are at the end of the decade, for the general loss. (pp. 369-70)

Each [part of his early life] is treated with nostalgic affection, but also with the ironic knowledge that it is irrelevant to the present crisis. (p. 370)

[Like] everyone else, MacNeice took the war against fascism as already determined; the only question was how to confront it.

Perhaps it was because of that question that MacNeice travelled to Barcelona in December 1938, and made the record of his journey there, and his night thoughts of New Year's Eve in that beleaguered city, the substance of the closing sections of his poem. The presence of the Spanish War gives the poem an oddly anachronistic quality, for by the time it was published Barcelona had fallen, and the war was over; Autumn Journal must be the last poem written in which the struggle in Spain functioned as a symbolic event…. [The poem] is an indictment that seems more than personal, that spreads out from the poet to involve his class and his generation, and the postures of the 'thirties. On the last night of 1938, MacNeice was acknowledging the end of a time.

The poem ends, not with a call to action, but with an invocation of love and life that is like a blessing, or a prayer…. Like other works of the time, this is Literature of Preparation: the die is cast, and there seems a kind of relief in that knowledge. What is coming will be terrible, but less terrible, perhaps, than waiting for the end.

Autumn Journal is a passive poem, a record of a private life carried on the flood of history. It has no personal momentum, no important decisions are made; the most positive thing that MacNeice does is to work in an Oxford by-election (which his candidate loses). Nor does it propose any positive values, any programme for confronting the future; England has come to the end of laissez faire, but MacNeice has no alternatives to offer, beyond a vague solidarity of resistance against the common enemy. I don't wish to suggest that the poem should have these elements in it in order to be excellent, but simply that the state of mind that MacNeice recorded in his journal did not include them, and that MacNeice, who was honest about his feelings even when they were self-pitying and sentimental, would not falsify what he had felt. In an introductory note to the book, he acknowledged inconsistencies and over-statements, but refused to alter them; he was not, he said,

attempting to offer what so many people now demand from poets—a final verdict or a balanced judgement. It is the nature of this poem to be neither final nor balanced.

                                               (pp. 370-72)

Autumn Journal is the best personal expression of the end-of-the-'thirties mood. (p. 373)