Autumn Journal on Autumn Journal: 5
- By Michael Thurston
“To-day was a beautiful day, the sky was a brilliant
Blue”
You probably remember where you were, what you were doing, when a brilliant blue September sky, the kind some of us look forward to throughout the hot and hazy end of August, was suddenly, strangely, riven by off-course airliners and suddenly, awfully, no more than a backdrop for orange explosions of jet fuel and great black and gray clouds of ash and dust. At 9:00 Eastern time, I walked into my classroom and led a discussion of Frank O’Connor’s “Guests of the Nation,” one of those accidents that seems, in retrospect, like no coincidence at all. It was a good discussion, I remember, the students as aghast as I am every time I read that story, by the twist that turns befriended prisoners back into enemies fit for an informal firing squad. The sky in western Massachusetts was brilliant and blue that morning; I walked under it for a post-class coffee from the little shop across the street from campus, enjoying the smells of freshly baked pastries, the advent of autumn, and the comforts of the professorial morning. And then, back in my office, news of the last hour’s terrible events rose like a dark tide in my email inbox, and the rest of the day was spent absorbing the catastrophe.
September 11, 2001, was a sudden shock (though it was really the dark flowering of something with deeper and longer roots). Events in early September, 1938, unfolded at a somewhat slower pace (at least from the distance of London), though with no less sense of dark foreboding and the likelihood of violence and destruction. MacNeice nicely captures both the irruption of the unimaginable into everyday life and the uncomfortable way the everyday continues to sit there alongside the newly imaginable. When the beautiful day is interrupted by Hitler, MacNeice writes that “Hitler speaks / And we cannot take it in.” Though “War” is a buzzing refrain, the daily round of work and leisure continues unabated:
But did you see
The latest? You mean whether Cobb has bust the record
Or do you mean the Australians have lost their last by ten
Wickets or do you mean that the autumn fashions—
Such normalizing, though, is quickly set straight:
No, we don’t mean anything like that again.
No, what we mean is Hodza, Henlein, Hitler,
The Maginot Line.
In the environment of utter historic change, the normal becomes as impossible to imagine as the falling towers or invading tanks were just a day or two before. Remember how strange and unfamiliar certain names and terms were on September 12 or 13, 2001? Al Qaeda. Taliban. Osama bin Laden. Wahhabism? And how quickly they started to fall fluently into conversation? And how weird it felt to pay attention to a pennant race, even though the loathsome Yankees were heading for the World Series? For MacNeice, the names are German, the geography is alarmingly familiar from the last war, and the assumption that Cobb, the Australians cricketers, and fashions will stop mattering is similarly wrong. Noticing new building on Oxford Street, MacNeice sees the “futility” of “building shops when nobody can tell / What will happen next.” All the same, the construction continues, and advertising continues (“Johnnie Walker moves his / Legs like a cretin over Trafalgar Square”), and interpersonal commerce continues (“the tarts . . . / Loiter beneath the lights”), though all of the continuing now goes on in a martial metaphorical register: “in the Corner House the carpet-sweepers / Advance between the tables after crumbs / Inexorably, like a tank battalion.”
This section of the poem perfectly illustrates one of Autumn Journal’s strengths throughout: it acknowledges our tendency, even when historical events loom over us, to focus on the personal, the near-at-hand, and dramatizes the irruption of the historical into the quotidian. MacNeice revels here in the sensory details of the everyday, but he can’t keep himself from finding, even in those pleasurable moments, reasons for cold foreboding:
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.
And so to my flat with the trees outside the window
And the dahlia shapes of the lights on Primrose Hill
Whose summit once was used for a gun emplacement
And very likely will
Be used that way again.
That gun emplacement cinches the sense of threat, but readers familiar with Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway will catch the awful note even earlier, those Regent’s Park leaves the very ones whose rustling brings to Septimus Warren Smith’s shell-shocked mind his comrades killed in the Great War. Even the Frenchness of that French bread, in the shadow of the Maginot Line reference above, takes on a threatening aroma. In something of a climax for this visionary moment, MacNeice concludes that “The bloody frontier / Converges on our beds.”
With all our possible pleasures somehow inextricable from the atmosphere of dread, we can, MacNeice say, neither follow Christ in asking for the cup to be taken away (“Having helped to fill it ourselves it is only logic / That now we should drink it up”) nor ignore, ostrich-like, the fate that seems to be coming for us. Echoing Eliot (again), MacNeice writes that, at this moment of recognition that we stand at the intersection of the public and the private, the contested border and matters of the bedroom, “Nothing remains but rock.” But every resolution for MacNeice, here as elsewhere in the poem, is just an opportunity to pull a thread and dissolve things again, to find a new beginning in an ending. The remainder of this section insists, through the anaphoric repetition of “And,” which suggests continuity and the ongoing, that we must, even at “this zero / Hour of the day,” persist. A woodcock calls, a dairy cart passes, workers travel to factories and “charwomen to chores.” A car passes as the poet reminisces about past days of “affection and comfort,” and a train starts up. Just as he has decided in previous sections that he must get up, get out, get into step with others, MacNeice resolves as this section concludes that the morning has arrived already, that the present that presents itself is inescapably here, that the day he must emerge into and engage, even though that day is frightening and foreboding, “is to-day.”
I’ll have more to say about that last phrase in my next post (and anyone up for a little homework should feel free to take a look at W.H. Auden’s 1937 poem, “Spain,” in the intervening week). For now, and to conclude this post, the fall of 2020, like that of 1938 or 2001, has its newly familiar vocabulary of threat. “Novel coronavirus.” “SARS Co-V 2.” “COVID 19.” We are suddenly conversant with concepts like community spread, social distancing, and effective reproduction number, just as we became suddenly, belatedly, aware of global Islamic fundamentalism and on-the-ground antagonisms in Afghanistan, just as MacNeice and his fellow Londoners in 1938 were newly attentive to the geography of central Europe and the leadership of that region’s nation-states. But this fall we also grapple with a profound threat to our society that is all too familiar, the deep and foul strain of toxic nativism and racism in American political culture. And this threat is personified in another figure whose rise was in some ways enabled by his televised ubiquity. The day for facing up to all that threatens us on beautiful September mornings and afternoons, whether literally or figuratively viral, is, as it was for MacNeice, today.
Michael Thurston is the Provost and Dean of the Faculty, and Helen Means Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College.
