White-Collar Gnosticism
 
 

Review of The Manager—A Poem.  Richard Burns.  London & Bath: Elliot & Thompson, 2001. 160 pp.  L 13.99 paper.

John Gery

     One of the most effective dramatic devices in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is that the audience never learns what Willy Loman, the play’s title character, actually sells.  The absence of a product circumvents any predispositions the audience may have about a specific line of work, thereby allowing us to focus on Willy’s psyche.  David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross adopts a similar strategy. Although composed as a long poem consisting of interior monologues, speeches, and correspondence, rather than as a play, Richard Burns’s The Manager creates a similar kind of suspension.  Unlike Miller’s focus on American culture, though, Burns’s poem explores a kind of global white-collar gnosticism, that is, the uniquely post-industrialist world-view which has come to dominate our age of corporate conglomerates, digital technologies with little purpose (it seems) other than perpetuating themselves, and an educated elite engaged mainly in professional maneuvering for personal gain and personal maneuvering for self-gratification.  The suffocating pressures and occasional pleasures of postmodern office culture permeate The Manager, as Burns divulges the dynamics of a sophisticated community with little interest, finally, in nourishing itself as a community.
     Written in one hundred untitled sections composed of (what Burns calls) verse-paragraphs, "related to the verset of French poetry," The Manager is framed by a brief, italicized proem and a dream-like envoi, with, standing between Part One (sections 1-51) and Part Two (sections 52-100), the "Curriculum Vitae" of Charles Jordan Bruno, the poem’s central figure.  At first reading, Burns’s verse-paragraph form, infused with a dense, often alliterative and allusive diction, takes getting used to, especially given that Burns sometimes italicizes whole poems or switches fonts emphatically, while insinuating various voices without always identifying them.  Yet despite the poem’s elusive intimations of persons or places, its larger context is readily approachable, as Burns evokes familiar urban and suburban landscapes, populated by familiar, usually affluent figures mouthing familiar, yet revelatory tropes, whether domestically,

This morning every object in this house conspires against
me.  Where are you, Come here, I shout at my wallet and folio.
      My watch has gone into hiding.  My keys are in the wrong
jacket.  My coffee cup slips from the shaking hand and smashes on
the floor.
      Even toothpaste and razor have disappeared from the
bathroom shelf. Outside a pale sun bleeps on a crisp October day
      Summoning me clearly, Come out you fool, and enjoy me.
I tell myself, Stop hurrying, Stop stopping, There is time. (Thirty-
two)

professionally,

      No Wilkie’s not a bad stick.  Loyal as the corgis.  But he’s
nothing but a glorified super-squaddie really.  Always on time with
his orders
      And always sticks by the book.  Never should’ve got past
corporal if you see what I mean.  All right sergeant I suppose if you
must.
      Thinks he can handle policy but won’t ever go it alone.
Keeps shooting off memos and phoning through to the top.  I hear
Sir K’s
      Had a bellyful.  Poor ole codger should have got his
handshake years ago.  We’ll have to find a way to kick him upstairs.
Cheers. (Four)

or sexually,

      We’re late and I drive as usual.  Look, I say, Can we agree
just to enjoy the party.  You do your own thing and I’ll get along
with mine, she says.  The usual crowd there.  Executives shrinks
hacks.
      I stand in the long kitchen and chat up a lanky blonde.
I’ve written to Up Front, she says, About Bluebell Wood.  Everyone
ought to go there.  It’s such a super place.
      Then drift into the living room and dance with David’s
wife. Who’s still teaching geography at the Poly and St. Hilda’s.
Moderately nice tits but tonight I fancy nothing.  Plonkful I roam
the room.
      Get myself plastered and call some twerp a bastard.  He
asks, Who is this creep.  I Eff him and he backs down.  Then look
for Sheila.  Who is dancing with Tony.  Pissed out of her tiny.  Here
we go.  I know. (Thirty-four)

     Though long to cite back to back, these passages taken together demonstrate how Burns unifies the tone of his 150-page poem, using the "verse-paragraph" as a basis for broad rhythms, expansive rhetoric, and conversational diction, while leaving plenty of room for variation.  The text, in fact, looks like Whitman’s or Ginsberg’s verse but reads very differently, more clipped, less cyclonic, perhaps closer to Geoffrey Hill’s.  Sometimes a section breaks loose into a manic voice, overheard on the telephone, or in panic.  Elsewhere Burns might imitate the bland voice of advertising, follow the associative line of a memory, or dramatize a bedroom conversation, as the hexameter-like verset, almost epic in span, accommodates every voice from the coldly impersonal to the heatedly private.
     On the caustic side, individual sections include a daily horoscope (One), a job description (Nine), a "Prospectus" for a residential community (Twelve), an office memo (Fifty-seven), a fax (Seventy-nine), even an email message, looking on the page as though a print-out from a computer (Eighty-five).  Between these parodic pieces fall sections, such as this opening to Seventy-four, that deliberately take language to task: "Adam Kadmon hangs upside down in the Sistine of my skull.  My poor damned Can Man.  MacPaul Muhadman Cabman.  My ole pal Hangman Camden.  Mein pale Haridan Gottman.  Hung batter than any vamp.// How oft did I climb scaffold ladders aloft to the roof of her cave.  I could scalpel her with my palate knife, my tongue screwed into her rafters."  On the other hand, the poem’s most moving sections employ the same verset line, whether in a telling dialogue or a lament, such as section Sixty-five, with its conceit of a lost piece from a jigsaw puzzle as an emblem for childhood.
     Burns’s verse reaches its highest pitch in his litanies (sometimes as tirades) disbursed throughout the book, which only intensify the poem’s fervid pacing.  True, an oblique narrative is at work beneath the poem’s episodic surface, shaped by a series of crises which culminate midway through Part Two, as the manager confronts his failure to "manage" relationships, life, and ubiquitous sense of the dead.  But this plot is not central.  Rather, the poem evolves around its recurring themes ? the manager’s vacuous profession, office intrigue among his colleagues, his strained marriage and infidelities, and his deteriorating sense of himself as he brushes up against madness.
     In other words, The Manager lays bare the very obsessions that monopolize the world of most educated, if not affluent, professionals.  This is not the class-divided world Dickens portrays, nor is it Thackeray’s, Theodore Dreiser’s, nor Scott Fitzgerald’s, quite.  Rather, despite the poem’s leaps of imagination, digressive tendencies, steamy sexual encounters, shifting moods,  and multilingual language-play (I count words from at least ten languages other than English, whether used once, as "Spasibo tovarisch" from Russian [Fifty-four], or repeatedly, as is Italian), it remains rooted in the diurnal.  The result is that, while Burns’s poem may "delight" as poetry,  its edgy candor may also cause us to squirm. (In this way, it recalls what a friend of mine observed years ago about English professors at a certain West Coast university who, while they howled with approval after hearing Ginsberg read his polemical verse on campus, scorned Robert Pinsky’s "Essay on Psychiatrists," a poem that parodies English professors.)
     As we learn, Charles Bruno’s job title is "NAPALM Floating Manager" for "Prosepicked National" (Division of "Prospect International"), where he "represents" (Fifty-four) MAPLAN, or "Market Advice Planning for Living and Necessity" (Ninety-one).  Regardless of the bureaucratic caul that lines the poem, though, it unveils how much of Bruno’s life is invested in "managing," or failing to manage, his own consciousness, no matter how "professional" his effort to remain cool, distant, collected.  Section Seven, for instance, is a richly vitriolic invocation of "Authorities on Bloody Everything," ending, quizzically, with "but why are they ? or we ? / All such arseholes?"  In section Forty-two, the manager seethes with hatred for his boss, Sir Keith, in lines that could be draped in office cubicles everywhere: "Far too many years, Oh Great Schmuck of a Boss," Bruno begins, "Have I lain awake nights till three or four a.m.  Brooding in fantastic rehearsal," as he remembers mustering the courage to say directly to his boss’ face the next morning

    That you are a Dictatorial Power-Hungry Stingy Selfish Unscrupulous
Manipulative Conniving Negarious Flagitous Amoral Pasty-Faced. . .
      But each time it came to it, smiled.  And uttered not a word. Other
than Good Morning Sir Keith, as you zoomed past, unnoticing,
Nor even added You Bastard under my breath.

     Then section Forty-five portrays the sycophantic behavior of a typical staff meeting, though it does so, ironically, in a mock Puritanical idiom: "Rex whispereth to Stuart and Stuart gazeth downe at hys blotto.  Whyl Martyn mumbleth betimes and Sir Keith prepareth to parry.  But Maurice shaketh his head and fiddleth with his stilo.  Aye bristleth/ his nether lippe and his lowe browe furroweth.  Planneth hee yet to squeak, already so soon.  Indeed now squeaketh hee.  Really shouldn’t that be dealt with under item six.  I mean shouldn’t it really go under/ General Admin."   More subtly, section Eighty-six is an ingenious, delightfully byzantine exegesis of how "all the people I need to talk to seem to be unavailable."   But beyond these, in my view, Eighty-four stands as the book’s centerpiece, which, when coupled with "Curriculum Vitae," could serve as a credo for Auden’s "Unknown Citizen."  It begins:

      I have tried to make sense of my life.  Have kept my affairs in
order.  Observed control and deocorum in all matters public. Never asked
for perks.  Not been too pushy.  Driven within limits.  Discreetly concealed
expenses in legitimate tax concessions
      Kept spreadsheets straight.  Kept the in-tray clear.  Infallibly chosen
the right tie.  Not tying too showy a knot.  Sounded neither too officious
nor too forward on the phone. . . .  (p. 130)

     Other passages on the manager’s encounters with women (especially throughout Part One), his hypnotic preoccupation with death, and the crisis of conscience that precipitates his breakdown are as variable and complex as these on his job.   Indeed, delving into The Manager is a strange, estranging experience in which office culture starts drowning in its own contradictions.  To read the poem is to submerge yourself in the quotidian waters of memos and martinis, suburban condos and airport concourses; you can see around you clearly enough, but it grows contorted, not just by the odd mixture of poetry, weird behavior of people, and unexpected flashes of natural beauty, but more significantly, by how often the poem pulls back into itself ? as in Seventy-one, when for the manager, "The whole house is silent. But my head is on the autobahn. With slipways to sea and mountains.  Is this the way/ To Trieste.  Trst Tryst Truth Truce Twist Trust.  Or the blue fringe of numbness between madness and impossibility."
 With this new book, Burns continues to astonish us with his range of subject matter and mastery of technique.  As a poet fiercely unattached to any school, singularly carving out each line, each poem, each integral sequence, each book, he confronts the grim forces that seize his imagination, forces he wants finally to propitiate before they succeed in swallowing us all.  Despite their cragged language, sometimes bitter humor, wild variations, and discordant portrait of our age, though, Burns’s poems sing with an urgency attempting nothing less than to locate the human spirit in contemporary experience.  We can ask no more of a poet than that.