What is it like to be a White male in the postwar rust belt: after the atom bomb, when America fights to achieve itself? “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” by James Wright gives a portrait of this life. In the close reading that follows, I attend to the poem’s signifiers of class, race, and gender. Then, I argue that life in the atomic family and the anxiety it induces is not simply an expected output in the constitution of women’s subjectivity. Rather, men’s subjectivity—as historically, geographically contingent and embodied—is at stake too.
The poem’s title drops us into its time and place. It is a perfect example of the lyric present tense: autumn begins again and again in the poem, each time it is read or remembered. Changing seasons is a common motif across literature since antiquity, but autumn in lyric expression is recently and quite memorably seen in Keats’ “Ode to Autumn”. That poem is also, in a way, about “grow[ing] suicidally beautiful,” but it is the birds and gourds rather than the “sons” who do so. As the seasons turn, so with it comes death from life. In Hegelian terms, it is another example of Spirit’s self-negation: a juggernaut: an eventuality: an impersonal process.
But this generic process is at tension with the specific places in and around Martins Ferry, Ohio. The effect is that the speaker is elevated to the status of a voice emanating from the heavens but retains his specific surroundings. The speaker undertakes a metonymic portraiture, to borrow the term Brian Reed has used in describing Robert Lowell’s “Waking in the Blue.” The speaker identifies with both the “proud fathers” and the “sons,” as both are in the stadium, but he does not see himself in the “Polacks” of from further north, or the “Negroes” from just south. By naming these figures, he acknowledges but disavows their status as men. It is unclear, however, whether the speaker identifies with the “ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,” and this for a few reasons. On the one hand, the speaker suggests that the boys “growsuicidally beautiful,” (my emphasis) an event which occasions their declension. They are not in this state from the beginning. Second, this “night watchman” is “[d]reaming of heroes,” a fantasy which the speaker does not share. Or does he? Is the speaker who “think[s]” of the “Polacks” and “Negroes” also “think[ing]” of himself? It is plausible he is, and in this case, the heroes he dreams of are the sons of “[a]ll the proud fathers.” More about the speaker’s is evinced in the first line break. The “I” leads the second line, distinct from and transcendent of the end-stopped first line. The speaker’s ambiguous relation to worker solidarity and construction of a racial caste system marks his position as a White man of the petty bourgeois speaking in postmodern lyrical style.
Martins Ferry High School in 1962 (looks like the leaves are turning!) (https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=519552316837968&set=a.502947955165071)
Why is it that the “proud fathers are ashamed to go home” in the second stanza? This would seem to be a paradox. Turning again to the speaker, it reveals the pressure he senses for “the proud fathers” to satisfy the rapacious “cluck” of the “their women.” This is certainly sexist for a male speaker to turn women’s desire for emotional intimacy into the obnoxious animal sound of an animal. But it also reveals the couple form is imperiled. The first line stands alone, as a seemingly contradictory insight that needs no justification. But one comes nonetheless: and it is that the speaker’s thoughts about the world become the world’s self-evident character. And this is the most alarming ideological effect of the Confessional poets.
If the poem has thus far been sulky, it becomes morose in its last stanza (reproduced below) The first line, a singular “Therefore,” is what the poem hinges on. It heightens the importance of what follows, while remaining unified in its own utterance as a single stanza. It shows that the poem was written to explain the following, wearisome knowledge. Ushering in that knowledge is the similar sonic structure of “Their sons grow.” Here, we have a parallel homophone, from “there” to “their”. Then, we have a long O sound and a lingering R sound between “fore” and “grow”. This means that the “sons” slips into the second line in excess of the intended structure—and too much for the “proud fathers,” the family, to bear.
“Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.”
The obtrusive qualifiers “suicidally” and “terribly” seem to disorient the forward movement, and this is especially important when “gallop” has such a strong rhythm tied to it. The iamb is said to evoke this horse’s gallop. There is an implicit comparison made here, between the football players, men on horseback, and the poet. In this final line, Wright suggests the collision of these figures is imbued with grandeur and weight. It is the collision of men’s bodies, on the football field, entrapped in the theatrical, institutional, again timeless setting of a high school football game.
Deborah Nelson has convincingly argued that “Confession… is mandated in the act of female privacy” (43). I agree. I must also note that I have encountered no evidence to suggest James Wright is a woman. Rather, the setting here would seem to be an especially masculine one: the players of a high school boys’ football game. So what do we do when men and boys are just as particularly gendered as women, but this fact has been neglected across the critical reception of the confessional poets—and even across literary and intellectual history? I start with a basic claim: the white man is situated just as uniquely as any other subject. I am not arguing that men, and white men particularly, are not material beneficiaries of others’ suffering. (Although, others like historian John H. Bracey, have argued that racism harms white Americans). I am not arguing that men have not been afforded the exclusive privilege to define and enforce categories legal and otherwise. I also wouldn’t argue that the effects of this confessional are ultimately defensible. They are not. They are racist and chauvinist. Rather, I am arguing that white men are alienated by capitalist patriarchy too. James Wright’s poem proves this.
And just for fun, the Martins Ferry High School alma mater:
On the shores of old Ohio
Where the coal and iron meet,
Stands our dear old Ferry High School
Full of joys and memories sweet.
And the spirit that we find there
growing up so strong and true,
Brings us back to friendships made there,
Ferry High, we stand for you.
Ferry High School, Ferry High School,
We’ll always think of you.
And no matter what befalls us,
Ferry High, we’ll e’er be true.
Works Cited:
Reed, Brian. “Confessional Poetry: Staging the Self” in Modern American Poetry : Points of Access. Edited by Kornelia Freitag and Brian Reed. Universitätsverlag Winter, 2013.
No comments yet.