Autumn Journal on Autumn Journal: 10
- By Michael Thurston
(Photo: Persephone reunited with her mother Demeter)
“And so return to work.”
Just as a present-day trip to Birmingham sends MacNeice into memories of his earlier life in that city, section IX’s thoughts on teaching classics provoke a reverie in which MacNeice recalls “the beginnings of other terms,” a sort of capsule portrait of the artist as a young student, stretching back to his earliest days at Sherborne and his sojourn at Marlborough. And if section IX critically wonders about the value of what MacNeice teaches, section X appraises the complex value of the entire institution of education itself.
There is, in MacNeice’s memory of school days, a cocktail of nostalgia and bitter clarity similar to his memories of Birmingham. On the one hand, there were toys and games, the rudiments of soccer, and weekend hikes in Dorset to gather fossils. On the other hand, there were the smells of changing rooms (“Lifebuoy soap and muddy flannels”) and “a bell / Dragooning us to dormitory or classroom,” there were the privations and priorities of wartime (“maize and margarine / And lessons on the map of Flanders”), and the discipline of body and mind by rigid routine. On the one hand, there were book-fed fantasies about adult life and leisure. On the other hand, there was, even as one rose through the grades and left for higher-level learning, “still the acquiring of unrelated facts, / A string of military dates for history, / And the Gospels and the Acts / And logarithms and Greek and the Essays of Elia.” MacNeice threads through his recollections and his balance of positives and negatives a subtle lining up of oppositions such that pleasure, freedom, and the physical (both the body and the world) line up on one side and against them are ranked discipline, routine, and the intellectual. For all of the elevated rhetoric one might deploy to advocate for education (as I did in the last entry), MacNeice insists that ultimately “school was what they always said it was, / An apprenticeship to life, an initiation, / And all the better because / The initiates were blindfold [sic].”
This conclusion requires some unpacking because it is, in its allusive framing, more complicated than it might at first appear. Those blindfolded initiates recall the Eleusinian mysteries, the religious and civic cult at the heart of Athenian society. As MacNeice well knew, the annual pilgrimage and celebration of the rites at Eleusis involved, for the cult’s initiates, a period of deprivation and chastening before they were led, blindfolded, into the depths of the earth for the culminating revelation of that eternal truth by which their lives would be transformed. We don’t know precisely what the priests and priestesses revealed, but it seems to have been agricultural imagery, correlatives of the year’s cycles that brought renewed life from the apparent death and burial of the seed, renewed sustenance from the work of sowing and harvesting.
In light of this complex conclusion, the way MacNeice navigates the oppositions he has constructed takes on a new and somewhat more encouraging significance. Yes, the student’s path becomes constricted:
life began to narrow to what was done—
The dominant gerundive‑
And Number Two must mimic Number One
In bearing, swearing, attitude and accent.
And sure, this narrow path requires a shedding of “childish fantasies” as it enforces a surrender of the individual will:
The order of the day is complete conformity and
An automatic complacence.
Nevertheless, there persists within the attentive, curious student a Fool or critic able to perceive in the dark depths of this descent into discipline certain ironical home truths (“there is something rotten in the state / Of Denmark but the state is not the whole of Denmark”) and certain illuminating moments of freedom (“Sometimes the explosion of rooks / Sometimes the mere batter of light on the senses”). None of this makes the machinery of education any less dark for MacNeice, but, in his clear identification of himself, the poet, with the Fool and critic (who pricks society’s “pseudo-reason with his rhymes”), he suggests the possibility that the initiation into social life carries within it an alternative initiation, a crypto-initiation enabled by the very reading and routines of school into antisocial ways of seeing and being.
The idea of the poet as critic or Fool, the ghost in the school machine, provides me with an opportunity, belatedly, to point out some ways MacNeice uses the poetic character of his poem to important effects. Autumn Journal is cast in loose-limbed quatrains. Lines are rhythmic rather than metrical, typically running from three stresses to five, and the first and third line of each group of four are end-rhymed:
And so return to work—the M.A. gown,
Alphas and Betas, central heating, floor-polish,
Demosthenes on the Crown
And Oedipus at Colonus.
MacNeice tends to drape his sentences over, rather than fit them into, these quatrains, so that it’s easy to lose sight of the rhyming regularity that undergirds the apparent prosy freedom of the lines. But rhyme is a resource MacNeice sometimes deploys with Popean bathetic impact. In lines quoted above, he rhymes “unrelated facts” with “the Gospels and the Acts,” deflating the scriptural authority of the latter via the arbitrariness of the former. At other times, MacNeice’s rhymes reinforce an important idea suggested in the sentence; the Fool or critic, he writes, is informed sometimes by “a whisper in books,” and sometimes by “the explosion of rooks,” the school’s tool of learning coupled subversively here with nature, body, flight, freedom, all that is manifestly understood in opposition to the school. Like Auden and most of his contemporaries, MacNeice worked first in closed and traditional poetic forms. That narrowed path enables him, as he emerges into this poem’s stated mission (to be “halfway between the lyric and the didactic poem”), at once to be and to make palpable the value of that Fool or critic schooled inadvertently in the classrooms of Sherborne and Marlborough.
Read Part 11 here
Michael Thurston is the Provost and Dean of the Faculty, and Helen Means Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College.
