THEME 5: CONFORMITY QUESTIONED
An appreciation of Michael Dugan's To a Trainee Accountant
Every life is made up conformity so it is easy to parody it. In To a Trainee Accountant, Dugan mocks the safety of the suburban life and the predictability of a measured life. It may well be safer/wiser/more profitable/more stable to walk that well-trodden path in the interests of those you love of course. To make wiser choices, we should know the criteria we use on which to make career choices. This is the moral of the poem.
Like a runway lit up for the approaching pilot, the poem itemises life for the trainee accountant as a line of predictable and inevitable stages. Dugan's irony is ameliorated by some gentle humour as he iterates the various milestones in a typical accountant's life, one not marked by adventure, risk and crowning successes but security, safety and a satisfactory harmony. Readers should also compare W. H. Auden's To the Unknown Citizen as the intent is very similar. In Auden's poem, a eulogy for an unremarkable life, predictability and no-rocking-the-boat are counted as virtues in his secular saint. The State finds he has done all that is required of him in society and hence he must have been happy. Yet happiness is another, immeasurable dimension of life altogether; for making choices, reaching self chosen goals, achieving personal bests are surely better indicators of success at living.
Dugan's poem lacks conventional devices of poetry and offers a very accessible diction; both facts in themselves reflect the plainness/ banality of the life so portrayed. The poem generates interest with a prosaic mood, as in one unbroken stanza the message of the poem rolls out like a new carpet being inspected. The text is a singular genre, not appearing to be a script for a trainer of new accountants (unless he was indeed very cynical in which case he/ she would not be employed in that job), not a diary in progress (since the view is in hindsight by one who has trod this path), nor a job description (for it includes off-the-job events and scenes). This would be enough to deter any would-be trainee I would think. One might read it as a Preface to a training Manual for Life (unless of course it was just a poem by Michael Dugan, which it is!). As we might expect, the last line is the moment of its author's revelation where he editorialises his description (or not so hypothetical imagined scenario) with the sad comment that no one really knew who the now deceased accountant was, neither his wife, his work mates nor indeed he himself. His identity was to be just as a functionary for others, that his work would not provide him with the rich fulfillment that every human life really yearns for. Remember this is a poet's view not an accountant's, so as the commercial says: Ask an accountant! for a more positive (more informed?) perspective.
Most people appreciate the poem although they do not necessarily like it. With its ease of reading and its sideswipe at modern bureaucratic life, most readers recognise the point of the poem. It is successful. Life today may seem less secure to most workers in that industry as the insurance giants crumble in disgrace and corruption. What was then in the 1950s seen as a secure and dull life is no longer that today. Creative accounting and the enormous legal liabilities we are all aware of blunt Dugan's irony and sardonic tone for us in 2002. But the poem stands on its own as an effective exercise in point of view, as a foreseeing in hindsight, and an exercise in a poet's distancing himself from the run of the mill lives of office workers to assert that there will always be other creative, perspectives available from which to view our lives. In this respect, Dugan can claim the title of seer. #