by Rick Gekoski
Over-reactions? Perhaps Bennett goes too far, but there is a lot to be uneasy, and queasy, about. Instances of Larkin at his most objectionable are not hard to come by, either in the letters or (unpublished during his lifetime) occasional verses. He regularly composed little squibs to amuse his chums, of which the following song, written in 1970, is typical (I cite it because I once, a little uneasily, sold the manuscript):
Prison for strikers,
Bring back the cat,
Kick out the niggers –
What about that?
(Chorus: niggers, niggers, etc.)
Trade with the Empire,
Ban the obscene,
Lock up the Commies,
God save the Queen
(Chorus: commies, commies, etc.)
This is so perfect a rendition of the attitudes of the Little-Englanders that Professor Jardine complains of, that you might suppose it a parody. But there is just too much of this stuff, spread throughout the entire corpus of both poetry and correspondence. It frequently occurs as light verse, but is just as likely, and far more tellingly, to be interjected into an otherwise inoffensive letter, as if a momentarily repressed rage just had to find its way out. Thus an otherwise amiable and chatty letter to Colin Gummer, in September 1984, ends with a description of a visit to Lord’s (Larkin loved cricket) and builds foam as it goes:
I don’t mind England not beating the West Indies … And as for those black scum kicking up a din on the boundary – a squad of South African police would have sorted them out to my satisfaction.
I survey the national scene with a kind of horrified fascination. Scargill & Co. can’t lose: either they get what they are asking for or they reduce the country to chaos, at which point their friends the Russkis come marching in.
Or we have this, in another letter to the same correspondent:
I find the ‘state of the nation’ quite terrifying … In ten years’ time we shall all be cowering under our beds as rampaging hordes of blacks steal anything they can lay their hands on. Enoch [Powell] was right – can’t see why they call him a fool.
Enough already. Certainly Larkin would not have been offered the post of Poet Laureate (which he declined) had the volume of his letters been published at the time. Nor, I presume, been made a Companion of Honour. We all know that writers can be bad – Byronically bad – but presumably there are ill-defined lines that cannot be crossed. It’s a wonder that T. S. Eliot, and his fellow anti-Semites Virginia Woolf and Ezra Pound, manage to stay on Professor Jardine’s university’s syllabus.
Fortunately, though, you can say what you like in your journal or diary, unless you are foolish enough to allow their unexpurgated publication, as John Fowles did, exposing more than one wants to know about both himself and his relationships, and manifesting a fair leavening of that anti-Semitic feeling that pops up too frequently in members of his generation. I don’t admire that – being myself the object of some of his pointed remarks (apparently I am ‘too Jewish for English tastes’) – but I am, after all, still an admirer of some of Fowles’s novels, and continue to be devoted to Eliot, and intermittently to Woolf and to Pound. I require them to be artists, not good people. I am not looking for friends, nor do I feel I have a right not to be offended, especially by great writers, whose job it can be to transgress and to challenge our most cherished ideas and values. Once you start burning memoirs and shredding diaries, you align yourself with the extremists who burned copies of The Satanic Verses, or of the Koran.
Given the explosive content of the Letters, what might have been in Larkin’s diaries? Were they worse? (We do not want him – like Byron – to be worse: there is nothing attractive about the extremes of the Larkinian.) Robert Conquest, a lifetime friend of Larkin’s and his partner in various stealthy visits round the porn shops of Soho in the ’50s, once told me that the diaries consisted largely of ‘wanking fantasies’, and that Western literature would have suffered no loss when they were shredded. Indeed, Larkin confided to Conquest that, once he had stripped the diaries of anything that might be creatively useful, he intended to burn them.
I have sold the archives of a great many writers. There are often diaries, journals and personal letters included in such sales, and they always involve some degree of intimate disclosure. It is not uncommon in such cases, when the friends and relatives are still alive, for the writer or his estate to stipulate that such material cannot be made available to the public for a period of time – sometimes as long as seventy-five years.
Might this not have been done with Larkin’s diaries? The problem is that such decisions are always made at the wrong time, often just before or after a death. Soon after Sylvia Plath died, Ted Hughes destroyed one of her journals, thinking that its contents would have been too raw and distressing for her children, even when they were grown up. Surely, as a generation of Plath scholars has claimed, he was wrong? The journal could have been put under embargo for a period of time. I’ll bet that if Hughes had thought of this, he would have done so.
It could have happened with the Larkin diaries too. In a hundred years, who would care if they were rude about a lot of largely forgotten people, or were more or less sexually revealing? Assuming that Larkin’s reputation will survive, and it just might, surely our successors would learn more about him, and us, from their continued existence?
But he didn’t want us to. In writing in a diary, we partake of a secular version of the confessional, in which the writer is both penitent and priest, and absolution is delivered in the very act of honest self-revelation. ‘Dear Diary’, we say, implicitly mirroring ‘Dear God’. In the uncensored exposure of what I ‘am like’ – at the Larkinian extremes of the splenetic and libidinal – one is at one’s worst and, paradoxically, best: clear-eyed, undefended, humble.
The diaries were private. According to Anthony Thwaite, only one person (other than Mackereth) ever sneaked a look at them, and Larkin was understandably furious. He would have been even more outraged and humiliated – if one can imagine being so post mortem – by the public exposure of his rancid inward musings. In destroying his diaries he was adjusting the image of himself that would prevail.
His poem ‘An Arundel Tomb’ concludes with an often cited and frequently misunderstood line: ‘What will survive of us is love.’ The previous line, however, makes it clear that there are conditions attached to this sentiment, which is ‘Our almost-instinct, almost true.’ It is what we strive for, and wish, and fail to achieve. But surely it is better for a little love to survive, however mitigated, than a lot of bitchiness and sexual fantasy?
I am anxious about the destruction of the historical record. We live, understand and accumulate a sense of ourselves as a culture through the preservation of the pieces of paper that record what we truly are, and have been. But I find it hard to regret the destruction of Larkin’s diaries. Our final view of him is probably more sympathetic – indeed, more loving – as a consequence of their ultimate cremation.
Do the dead have rights? I have always supposed so, though it is a difficult argument, and the law is ambiguous on the subject: it is difficult in English law, for instance, to libel the dead. Thus if one were, say, pursuing a vendetta against someone, and publicly and falsely labelled their recently deceased father a paedophile, they would have no recourse to the law. It is obvious that such a claim would be distressing and infuriating to the deceased father’s friends and relatives, but it also seems to me that it does an injury and injustice to the dead man himself.
Whether he still has some notional ‘self’ is, of course, a complex question. But emotionally and morally the case seems clear to me. Surely the decencies accorded to the living, the respect and scrupulousness with regard to fact, ought to pertain (at the very least) to the recently deceased. Because if they are genuine, such feelings, surely they are also durable?
The New Zealand Maori, amongst many other cultures, venerate their ancestors, and it is regarded as an egregious insult to malign a person’s dece
ased relatives. Our attitude, in contrast, assumes that, even if the deceased ascends to Heaven, they cannot be libelled there, and have passed well beyond any exposure to, or interest in, terrestrial human affairs. What they do up there has never been clear to me, but it clearly isn’t worrying about their reputations.
Can we, rising direct from the death-bed, say, of Philip Larkin, happily and publicly brand him a pornography addict and lecher, a racist, a pathetic Little-Englander? There is some truth in all these charges, but not the required decency and circumspection, not the respect due to a person and to the memory of that person.
His letters reveal a misogynistic, ultra-right-wing racism that he jokily regarded as a bit of plain-speaking, but unless you were predisposed in his favour, it was merely repellent. He was not, in this respect, a very sympathetic person, though the fact that virtually everyone who knew him loved him suggests that you can get away with quite a lot, opinion-wise, if you are funny and honest and charming. And he was careful to behave properly in public.
Anyway, all that stuff about, say, masturbating over pictures of (mock) schoolgirls being spanked is pretty tame stuff, especially by today’s standards – nothing to get in a huff about, is it? We all have sexual habits and fantasies that we would be chagrined to have made public. But what if Larkin’s diaries revealed both fantasies and practices that were less (as it were) harmless? Perhaps Larkin destroyed his diaries because they were darker, more embarrassing and more compromising than one might have expected? Let’s suppose that the diaries demonstrate not only a predilection for spanking, but that the recipients of the discipline were twelve-year-olds, and that Larkin often put this into practice? What would such a posthumous revelation do to our image of him, and to our readings of, and respect for, his works?
We are used to the notion that an artist does not have to be a good person to produce great art. It sometimes seems as if goodness is a positive hindrance: writers and artists, like high-class athletes, are often self-centred; they cultivate selfishness, refine and distil it. In order to get the most out of themselves, they take a lot out of others. This is no doubt hard on their friends, partners and children, but the rest of us garner the results happily enough.
Yet every now and again you learn, or come to recognise something, about an artist that is so shocking that it penetrates the way you understand them for ever more. James Joyce and Dylan Thomas were pathologically selfish scroungers? Who cares? Most authors are a bit like that. But what are we to make of the fact that the artist Eric Gill was regularly buggering his daughters when they were young teenagers? I have never been able to look at one of those silky Gill female nudes, or his soppy sets of lovers, without a shudder of remembrance. He is ruined for me.
How can one justify revaluing the work on the basis of the life? After all, if you did not know this about Gill, and I showed you his pictures, your response to them would be, as it were, purely aesthetic. Perhaps you admire them very much? And then you are told the salient facts which have put me off them: what are you to do with them? Look again at the images and recoil? And what is it you would thus be rejecting: the image or the life? They are supposed to be separable, but I have never managed to compartmentalise my responses so clearly. How morally corrupt is an artist allowed to be before we feel justified in turning our backs towards their work?
I had exactly this problem once, in my rare book business, with an illustrated manuscript, entitled The Boy’s Own Book of Spankings, by T. H. White, the author of The Sword in the Stone, a writer admired by many and loved by some. The three bound volumes, clearly intended for private enjoyment, consisted of a text of some 160 pages, together with graphic photographs – clearly taken from the life – of boys with severely whipped bottoms, the stripes and abrasions and bruises lovingly recorded and amplified by the camera. Certain that the material would be of interest to biographers of White, I offered it to the Manuscripts Librarian at the British Library. She replied that she would not be interested in purchasing it, not because it was of no interest, but because it disgusted her. I argued that it was not her job to make moral judgements on the quality of material she purchased, but she wasn’t to be moved.
‘Yuck!’ she said, and it was eventually sold to a private collector. I was never told why he was interested in them, and made sure not to ask.
Such prurient information, of course, eventually has a way of making itself into the public domain. Take the case of James Joyce, whose erotic letters to his fiancée, Nora Barnacle, sent from Trieste in 1909, are pornographic, obsessional, scatological, distinctly graphic. They were published by a (mildly reluctant) Richard Ellmann in 1975, by which time Joyce’s reputation could easily enough survive their disclosure. He was enshrined, by then, in the canon. But suppose they had been published immediately after his death? Would their explicit obscenity not inevitably have leaked into a discussion of his work, thrown it, somehow, out of balance?
We are critically so obsessed by tracing life into work, uncovering and disclosing the unconscious underpinning of the creative act, that it makes revelations about the private life of the artist more important, I feel, than they actually are. Hence our fascination with the literary archives of writers, their diaries and journals, the uncensored divulgation. Artists, like the rest of us, have their little secrets. That these need mapping onto the life’s work strikes me as dubious, as it would be for those of us who have similar secrets, but nothing (as it were) to show for them. I doubt very much whether my life as an academic and writer has very much to do with those aspects of my life that I am happy to keep private. Why shouldn’t Philip Larkin, Lord Byron and James Joyce be afforded the same degree of kindly discretion?
8
Déjà Vu All Over Again: The Trial in Israel
I first read Kafka’s The Metamorphosis at the age of eighteen, in Freshman English 101 at the University of Pennsylvania. It was on the syllabus, I suppose, to serve as an introduction for naïve readers as to the nature and purposes of metaphor. The story begins abruptly enough: ‘As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect-like creature.’ (Vladimir Nabokov suggested a beetle with wings under his shell, capable of flight, though Kafka had insisted he had no particular creature in mind.) At first, Gregor is bemused by his new incarnation, but no amount of doubt or interrogation of his physical form will make it go away. He was a person, and now he is a bug. His poor sister Grete is initially kind to him, but his parents are repulsed, and conditions, and his condition, deteriorate rapidly. At the end of the story he dies, wretched and abandoned, in a corner of the room.
It is a harrowing story, bleakly comic at points, and Gregor’s isolation and alienation from his loved ones, his irremediable misery and loneliness, are emblems, I was informed, of the human predicament, of the absurdity of our existence. We are all Gregor Samsas, isolated in a brittle carapace, waiting alone for the inevitable end, misunderstood, incapable of communication, lacking sustenance. It’s not a beetle’s life, it’s everyone’s, only taken to this new metaphorical extreme.
I didn’t believe it for a minute, the image was too far removed from the human condition to stand as an emblem of what and who we all are. You might as well suppose we are all cauliflowers, or chipmunks. I protested vehemently to our instructor. The difference between persons and beetles is too extreme, I asserted, to serve as the basis for some analogy.
‘That’s the purpose of metaphor,’ he said smugly. ‘One thing has to be understood in terms of another.’
I acceded gracelessly, and was eventually cowed – or cynical – enough to write an essay about Kafka’s brilliant use of metaphor in our final exam, and got an ‘A’. But I was faking it then, and re-reading the story since, I more or less agree with my younger self. Though The Metamorphosis certainly has some metaphoric implications, they are delicately poised, and better left uninterrogated. There is no allegory here, no parable. The power of the story lies in its literalness, it is
particular and exact: it is what it is, a sort of horror story, perfectly imagined and forensically described, of what it would be like to wake up as a big bug. Did Kafka suppose himself, and all of us, to be – as it were – trapped in our own symbolic insectitude? I doubt it very much; he was far too intelligent for that. But what he did know, and could make us experience with chilling acuity, was how – given the absurd premise – it would feel to be thus metamorphosed. And if the loneliness and desperation of the transformed Gregor Samsa ring some bells, so much the better.
Franz Kafka and his dog looking pensive.
He meant exactly what he said; he needed no interpretation. All you had to do was read him, and I loved it. Every day for the next two months I would go down to the Van Pelt Library in the late afternoon and read Kafka in entranced admiration, slouched in an upholstered chair covered in scratchy orange material, with bleached wooden arms, in the downstairs reception area. For those weeks I became one of the fixtures. I hesitated to borrow the books, which was my usual habit. Nor did I wish to own them. It felt curiously wrong to treat his books as takeaways, like literary pizza. There was something satisfying about the ritual of encountering Kafka in what was, I recognised, a space that he could have created himself: there’s something chilling about the rituals and implacable procedures of a library – the organising, shelving, cataloguing, circulating – its imposed silences and grey guardians at the gates.
Reading Kafka when I was eighteen remains the only time in my reading life in which I have been unambiguously happy in a library, without anxiety or self-consciousness, unintimidated by the demands of scholarship or the need to prove myself. All I wanted was to read. Not for any purpose – it was not useful to my coursework, and I cannot recall talking to anyone about it. It was motivated by pure, untrammelled curiosity, and a cause of delight.
