This week's poem, "The Autumn Outings", is by the Hull-born poet Maurice Rutherford, and comes from his 1994 collection Love is a Four-Letter World, published by the (sadly) no longer trading Peterloo Poets. Rutherford's work is attractively down to earth in tone, soft-spoken in a dry, faintly melancholy English way. His themes, whether historical or personal, are handled with warmth and common sense, and an easily overlooked formal fluency. A political edge is often present, though not usually as plainly declared as in his 1992 tour de force, "The Autumn Outings".
A near-contemporary of Philip Larkin, Rutherford sometimes uses Larkinesque forms or turns of phrase for his own poetic purposes. He usually does so in a good-humoured, non-parodic way, as if he simply found that Larkin liberated his own ideas. "The Autumn Outings" is perhaps a step closer to satire, being a poem about the joyless catastrophe of unemployment composed in the expansive, optimistic stanza of "The Whitsun Weddings".
In Larkin's poem, you'll remember, a detached narrator describes almost novelistically the train-travelling wedding parties: he makes them comic, even a shade rustic, yet allows them to inhabit a landscape which, however mundane, is lit with a vague sense of possibility. The poem culminates in that famous, mysterious epiphany: "And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled/ A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower/ Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain."
The journey in "The Autumn Outings" is a lonely, silent, often-repeated one. The narrator, whose own company has gone bust, begins by remembering how he drove away from the closed down plant in pouring rain. The large stanza is utilised not only for a discursive narrative but for impassioned complaint. This is an angry poem, quietly but pointedly bitter about managerial greed and exploitation, and it remains a stringent comment on the grubby and grabby little year of 2009.
For all the references to "The Whitsun Weddings", it has more serious aims than parody. The references are partly structural, and pathos rather than comedy emerges from the grammatical parallels. But the most important hinge between the two poems is the notion of "wedding", which Rutherford plays with to considerable effect. His poem certainly does not deny the wedding couples of Larkin's epithalamium their right to fun and happiness, but it exposes a different, darker dimension of working-class life. The harsh reality is that a man must be "wedded" to his work – until, of course, his work decides to divorce him.
The speaker, unlike Larkin's narrator, is very much part of his community. He has been a good boss, as the second stanza reveals, and, even in extremis, he thinks compassionately of his employees. Time moves on with the poem, and the fifth stanza unfurls a complaint against Heseltine's infamous pit closures in the early 1990s.
It turns out that the speaker has remained jobless for years. Now he muses on the general effects of unemployment, including the deterioration of his own high principles in favour of "quick back-pocket jobs". The "fat cats" are the most culpable, but they are not the only fallible people in this poem.
"The Autumn Outings" rises to a trenchant climax. As at the beginning of the poem, the rhyme sounds insist we hear a commentary on Larkin. The transcendental conclusion of his poem helps underline the stingingly political implications of Rutherford's, in which he imagines "the spores of loss, somewhere becoming gain".
Rutherford is a master craftsman. His work should be far better known, but it belongs to a seam of English poetry which recent critics have neglected to mine – post-Movement, perhaps, rather than post-modern, working class but not wearing its class on its sleeve in the more showy "them and uz" manner of Tony Harrison. Let's hope some enterprising publisher decides to reissue all his collections soon.
The Autumn Outings by Maurice Rutherford
That autumn I was quick getting away:
only about
one-twenty on the rain-drenched Wednesday
I locked the premises and motored out,
all staff sent home, all workshop plant closed down,
all sense of any kind of business gone,
and not until I'd driven fifteen miles
along fast-flooding roads back into town,
past rival complexes just clinging on,
did rain let up and vision clear: those files
I'd never see again; that desk, the phone
that shrilled all day
when first it was installed; not hear the moan
compressors made, be soothed by lathes, nor say
'Good morning George, alright?', or 'Nice one, Bert',
the human touch, no more, not to distract
them too long from their work, but just enough
to let them see I cared, and not to hurt
old feelings as I tried to breast the fact
of cancelled orders, creditors turned rough.
The friendly bank soon bared its teeth – drew blood;
and then that bane,
the Tax Man, claimed his pound. And so, the flood.
(fine detail dims again as, too, the pain
recedes three autumns on; yet loss stays true.)
The rain comes vicious now – wipers full speed,
dipped headlights on, rear fogs – the journey seems
to lengthen every time I live it through,
involuntarily, as when the need
for sleep is scuppered by recurring dreams.
My crowd was breast-fed clichés, meal on meal:
to pull its weight,
nose to the grindstone, shoulder to the wheel,
and, once it stepped inside the factory gate,
was wedded to its work; slapped all the time
by Newbolt's hand: Play up, and play the game.
Well, this sounds fine; but what about the bloke
who's anorexic, short-nosed, cannot climb
to reach the wheel, and never makes the team?
For him such wedding tales are guffs of smoke.
Again the morning paper hits the floor –
banner headlined
PIT CLOSURES SHOCK – and umpteen thousand more
are facing broken marriages to mines.
A few, lured by that bit-of-fresh, fool's gold,
pin hopes on boarding-houses, market-stalls;
one man sits out his protest down the pit,
while lefties call for strikes with all the old
clenched-fist salutes, and aerosol the walls:
SCARGILL FOR KING and TARZAN IS A SHIT.
Their first few days of idleness will see
in those it hits
undreamed-of traits in personality:
some will get by and others go to bits;
the strong become the weak, the weak make good
as quickly as it's said. Then, as the days
stack up to months or, as in my case, years,
high principles get trampled in the mud
where guile and self-survival point new ways
to quick back-pocket jobs, fiddles and fears
of being caught. But fears will yield, in time,
a sort of pride,
though not the social pride that saw men climb
from old-world swamps: a sense that one's defied
the odds, the system; finger-licked the crème,
nose-thumbed some top brass, bested those who made
the rules and all the running. What survives?
Of Us: too early yet to tell. Of Them:
'Indifferents and Incapables'; their trade
in UB40s and P45s.
In brass-lined boardrooms up and down the land
deep in regret
a million more redundancies get planned,
while chairmen's hiked-up salaries are set,
and Urban Councils chase arrears in rents.
Wide-boys, insider-dealers, some M.P.s
grow richer by a second home in Spain,
a custom-plated white Mercedes Benz,
that new portfolio. True-blue disease.
The spores of loss, somewhere becoming gain.
