Philip Larkin

by James Booth

  Larkin’s next two completed poems continue the process of stock-taking. ‘Sad Steps’ (dated 24 April 1968) offers a tragic point-by-point riposte to the tenuous transcendence of ‘High Windows’. The earlier poem concluded with an empty daytime windowscape. ‘Sad Steps’ opens with a crowded night-time windowscape. The ‘wedge-shadowed gardens’ and ‘wind-picked sky’ are reminiscent of Laforgue, but this ‘laughable’ epiphany goes off half cock, and the poet becomes, as in ‘High Windows’, entangled in words: not now words of envy and frustration, but of another bad translation from a French symbolist: ‘Lozenge of love! Medallion of art! / O wolves of memory! Immensements!’ In Laforgue’s ‘Complainte de cette bonne lune’ the moon is ‘le médaillon’, and in ‘Litanies des premiers quartiers de la lune’ it is a ‘blanc médaillon’.81 But the less deceived English poet rejects his role as decadent Pierrot lunaire with a quiet monosyllabic ‘No’, and the poem ends where ‘High Windows’ began, with a vision of youth – not this time in the form of a shallow caricature generated by envy, but with tragic gravity, in the form of an intimate recollection of:

  the strength and pain

  Of being young; that it can’t come again,

  But is for others undiminished somewhere.

  ‘High Windows’ ended in a suspect escape into an absolving ‘nowhere’ of clear blue air. ‘Sad Steps’, daring to impart the rose tint of human pathos, contemplates a ‘somewhere’ where youth still exists undiminished: but not for him. Larkin did not feel the need to add any disparaging comment to the draft of this more profound poem.

  In ‘Sympathy in White Major’ Larkin had reviewed his achievement through a grotesque combination of French symbolism and British clubbability. In ‘Posterity’ (dated in the workbook ‘17.6.68’) he delivered another scathing verdict on himself, this time in the trans-Atlantic tones of his own future biographer, Jake Balokowsky. The poem is a point-by-point variation on ‘Naturally the Foundation will Bear Your Expenses’, written more than seven years earlier. Both poems are monologues by professionals in the literary business: one a blithe British freeloader, the other a dissatisfied American on the academic treadmill. Both poems show a dynamic ambiguity in their attitude towards the speaker. Instead of teaching school in Tel Aviv as he would prefer, Jake has to bend to the demands of his wife’s family and achieve tenure. Consequently he is stuck with ‘this old fart’ (Larkin) for ‘at least a year’. ‘Just let me put this bastard on the skids, / I’ll get a couple of semesters leave // To work on Protest Theater.’ The poem is satire only on the surface. Jake may represent the cynicism of the academic racket but, more profoundly, he is a victim of the system. Like the poet whose work he is studying he is fouled up by the gulf between his dreams and hard reality. He also submits himself with a bad grace to living for others. Different though he appears from Larkin, Jake is the poet’s intimate alter ego. His description of his subject conveys the poet’s self-judgement: ‘Not out of kicks or something happening – / One of those old-type natural fouled-up guys’. Jake’s boring task is to write the biography of the author of ‘Toads’. The toad with whom Jake is walking down Cemetery Road is Larkin.82

  By 1968 the downward direction of Larkin’s life was firmly established. His poetry had become a widely spaced series of ever more subtly successful poems about failure. As if to mark the loss of his past, in September the Hartleys, his first friends in Hull, split up, and Jean left Hull Road, Hessle, with her daughters.83 He remained friends with Jean after George left Hull, but kept ‘very much on the sidelines’, unwilling to complicate his already difficult relations with his publisher.84 His health was in steep decline. He told Brian Cox that, after a party for Critical Quarterly in October, he woke up feeling so terrible that he went ‘on the wagon for a month’.85 He was aware of being full of shallow anger, often out of proportion to any cause. In November he complained to Robert Conquest that the University was licking ‘the blacking off the boots of all students in sight’.86 Later in the month he broke into a heartfelt lament in a letter to Monica over the lost simplicity of his years in Belfast and the early time in Hull:

  Oh dear, it’s such a nice day. I wish I could go out on my bike as in my youth, instead of taking the car to the Library, for work. As I said in an earlier letter, I spend my days in meetings, & then there’s all the post stuff to be fitted in somewhere. I’d fit it into the lavatory pan & no error. And then the evening will be all bed changing & eating & bill paying & washing up. No time for anything.87

  In addition, though he had done his best to live for others, he was beset by guilt over his failure to satisfy the demands of his mother, Monica and Maeve. In a letter to Monica written from his mother’s house in Loughborough on Boxing Day and headed ‘GLUM LETTER’, he exclaimed: ‘God! It seems a waste of a life. I suppose someone someday will explain what went wrong. I can’t believe I am so much more unpleasant than everyone else. How sick I am of it all.’88

  17

  Jazz, Race and Modernism

  1961–71

  Ever since February 1961 Larkin had been writing his monthly jazz review in the Daily Telegraph. In 1968 he collected the pieces into a volume and wrote an introduction. At first his intentions were modest. Indeed he had already given the text to a local Hull printer when he wrote to the book’s intended dedicatee, Donald Mitchell, who had originally recommended him to the Telegraph and was now a commissioning editor at Faber: ‘My idea is to print a small edition privately, just enough to send to the copyright libraries and distribute among friends, with perhaps some minor sales conducted personally.’ Might Faber, he asked, help distribute the book? It was, he wrote, ‘not over serious, but I think it might be of interest to people who like jazz and who have heard of me’.1 Faber dismissed this naive idea and took over the project. But the book, particularly the Introduction, retains an uneasy private tone. There is perhaps even a hint of antagonism in the title. The heading of one of the reviews is the question ‘All What Jazz?’ Either this phrase, or the indicative answer, All That Jazz, would have been a natural title for the volume. Instead Larkin preserves ‘what’, but omits the question mark, stranding the phrase between interrogative and indicative.2 Is this a subtle nuance or an attempt to catch the reader out? All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961–68 was published by Faber on 9 February 1970. Larkin continued to write his column, finally giving it up in December 1971, six months after the death of Louis Armstrong. The reviews of 1969–71 were added to the second edition, which was published in 1985 as All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961–71.

  Jazz was essential to Larkin.3 Misquoting mischievously he proclaimed ‘the truth of Baudelaire’s words: “Man can live a week without bread, but not a day without the righteous jazz.”’4 (Baudelaire actually wrote ‘not a day without poetry’.) Though Larkin rarely expressed the same passion for other kinds of music, his musical tastes were wide. He was listening to records of Monteverdi in Belfast in the early 1950s at a time when this was very much a minority taste. His LP collection included the 1982 three-disc boxed set of early Mozart symphonies, Volume 1 in the series made by Christopher Hogwood with the Academy of Ancient Music playing on original instruments.5 When he comments that ragtime, the early precursor of jazz, had ‘a bizarre classicism, like plantation Scarlatti’, the exactitude of the judgement relies as much on his knowledge of eighteenth-century styles as on his knowledge of ragtime.6 And when he deplored the popularity of Jacques Loussier’s ‘Play Bach’, he was as indignant at the travesty of Bach’s baroque integrity as he was at Loussier’s tepid ‘jazz’: ‘tasteless expanses of real Bach themes distracted with aimless bits of syncopation [. . .] the acme of pallid vulgarity’.7 Of the eight records he chose for the Desert Island Discs radio programme in 1976, three (his first, fourth and seventh choices) featured jazz musicians: Louis Armstrong (‘Dallas Blues’), Bessie Smith (‘I’m Down in the Dumps’) and Billie Holiday (‘These Foolish Things’). But his other five were a Newcastle street song from the 1790s, Thomas Tallis’s motet ‘S
pem in Alium’, the medieval ‘Coventry Carol’, Elgar’s Symphony No. 1 and the closing chorus of Handel’s oratorio Solomon.8 His taste extended also to pop music. As Jean Hartley recollected: ‘he had an affection for the more romantic Beatles numbers. He bought Maeve a copy of “Yesterday” and played it over and over.’ Under the influence of ‘Gin and the ambience’ he declared Bob Dylan’s ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ to be ‘the best song ever written’.9

  Jazz was not a taste he shared with the women in his life. Though she tolerated references to jazz in letters, Monica Jones preferred ‘Classical. Mozart. Beethoven’ and had no notion of the differences between jive, hotcha and boogie-woogie.10 For Larkin jazz was a private passion, shared with a small number of male friends. He never tired, in particular, of the ‘inexhaustible vitality of the blues’, which in his view were ‘fundamental to jazz’.11 Mezz Mezzrow, he wrote, found in the blues ‘the key to a relaxed vitality white America lacks’.12 He himself, as a white British schoolboy at a further cultural remove from black America than Mezzrow, found in the blues a release from emotional inhibition and the boredom of his bourgeois boyhood. ‘I suppose everyone has his own dream of America,’ he wrote, and jazz music, particularly the blues, provided his earliest, most intimate and consoling version of this dream.13 From the beginning he expresses his lyric appreciation of life in the vocabulary of jazz: ‘Oh, yeah, man. The ultimate joy is to be alive in the flesh. Shake that thing.’14 Bechet’s held note evokes the ‘appropriate falsehood’ of his own private dream: ‘Everyone making love and going shares –’. It conjures up ‘My Crescent City’: ‘On me your voice falls as they say love should, / Like an enormous yes.’ Jazz allowed Larkin to indulge his longings without the censorship of reality. More specifically the jam session, in which ‘hot’ music was created by improvisation, offered him an ideal of spontaneity and freedom. He wrote in dispassionate retrospect, ‘Nothing’s arranged, we were told. Everyone just plays. Well, perhaps they did.’15

  But jazz also taught him a more impersonal lesson in artistic rigour. The twelve-bar blues formula, that modern version of the ancient aubade (‘Woke up this mornin’ . . .’),16 gave him the example of a strict but infinitely variable artistic discipline: ‘for all its formal simplicity it is rarely monotonous. Somehow in this most characteristic music of the American Negro has been imprisoned an inexhaustible emotional energy. You can go on playing or listening to the blues all night.’17 The jazz records over which he enthused with his schoolfriend James Sutton gave him a model for his own poetic practice of ‘preserving’ emotion. Larkin belonged to the first generation of listeners to experience their music largely through the private encounter with repeatable recordings, rather than, as in previous centuries, through their own playing or the fugitive public performances of the salon and concert-hall. The ‘work’ is now no longer an interpretable score but the particular recording. As Larkin wrote, ‘it is not “Weary Blues” we want but Armstrong’s 1927 “Weary Blues”’.18 This new twentieth-century model of performance profoundly influenced Larkin’s ideas about poetry. In his poetic theory the artist preserves the moment by creating a device in which the normal rhythms of speech are played off against the formal pattern of metre: ‘When you write a poem, you put everything into it that’s needed: the reader should “hear” it just as clearly as if you were in the room saying it to him.’19 He could have learnt this from Shakespeare or Marvell, but the extreme meticulousness with which he organizes his devices imitates the exact nuances and subtleties of recordings. In a sense, it could be said, the reader ‘plays’ a Larkin lyric, just as one might ‘play’ a recording of Louis Armstrong or Bessie Smith. The poet aims at the identity and repeatability of impact of a record. In this context it is significant that the readings of his own poems which he recorded in 1980 for the Watershed Foundation show only very slight variations of inflexion and intonation from those made in 1958 and 1964 for the Listen label.

  From the first, Larkin adopted in his reviews a pithy, opinionated voice capable of engaging even a reader who knows nothing about the subject. Larkin is a master of ‘occasional’ spontaneity. His critical voice commands respect largely because of the freshness and exactitude of each individual judgement: ‘I have never heard a band whoop in the last ride-out as in this one [Count Basie’s ‘Jumpin’ at the Woodside’], and how striking the accompaniments are – the menacing trombone figure behind Clayton, the harsh falling single note behind Young repeated like an accusation.’20 He catches exactly the ‘characteristic excitement’ of the solos of the clarinettist Pee Wee Russell: ‘their lurid snuffling, asthmatic voicelessness, notes leant on till they split, and sudden passionate intensities [. . .]’.21 Russell’s timing in ‘D. A. Blues’ ‘is perfect, his phrasing oratorical without being melodramatic, his tonal distortions involuntary, and all is conceived in [a] vein of unique hard hitting lyricism’.22 Elsewhere he lovingly evokes the qualities of the New Orleans trumpeter Henry ‘Red’ Allen: ‘by the end of his life an Allen solo was a brooding, gobbling, stretched, telegraphic thing of half-notes and quarter-tones, while an Allen vocal sounded like a man with a bad conscience talking in his sleep’.23 Thelonious Monk’s hesitant chords are, he writes, ‘like suitcases just too full to shut properly’, and he characterizes Fats Waller’s piano playing as ‘a baroque triviality’.24 He can also recognize when critical decorums become irrelevant: ‘Listening to his “Moon River”, a piece of slop if there ever was one, I came to the conclusion that it is Armstrong’s staggering and economical sincerity that makes this kind of number succeed.’25 Larkin persuades us that his ear is experienced and discriminating: to be trusted.

  In the 1968 Introduction to All What Jazz Larkin describes his initial intention as to adopt a posture of uncritical benignity. ‘In literature, I understood, there were several old whores who had grown old in the reviewing game by praising everything, and I planned to be their jazz equivalent [. . .] It didn’t really matter, therefore, whether I liked things at first or not, as I was going to call them all masterpieces.’26 He was after all no expert, and his taste, particularly in relation to recent developments, would need educating. Thus the fifth review, published in June 1961, ‘Bechet and Bird’, judiciously juxtaposes the two reed-players, Sidney Bechet of the older generation and Charlie Parker of the new, as ‘two players with nothing in common except that they manifestly stood head and shoulders above their contemporaries’.27 He lovingly evokes the older performer’s ‘Blue Horizon’: ‘six choruses of slow blues in which Bechet climbs without interruption or hurry from lower to upper register, his clarinet tone at first thick and throbbing, then soaring like Melba in an extraordinary blend of lyricism and power that constituted the unique Bechet voice, commanding attention the instant it sounded’.28 He then goes on to summarize the shift from ‘trad’ to ‘mod’ in the mid-1940s, and ends with a paean to the original genius of Parker:

  the new modern jazz that Parker and Gillespie founded was in part a reaction against the ossified platitudes of 1940 big-band jazz which they were both forced to play. Driven to desperation by the fag-end of the swing era, they and a few other young Negro musicians produced a music among themselves that was technically, melodically and rhythmically beyond their elders and their audience alike. By doing so, they recaptured for their race the jazz initiative, and, incidentally, split the world of this music into two camps. But on the evidence of these solos alone it would be absurd to call Parker’s music a reaction. As well call leaping salmon a reaction.29

  There is no affectionate evocation of particular felicities, and the ana­lysis is objective and socio-historical. Nevertheless the eloquent final sentence strikes a note of sincere admiration.

  But this show of even-handed balance was short lived. As the reviews proceeded Larkin showed himself as a partisan of traditional jazz, and Parker and Gillespie were increasingly denigrated. In January 1963 he wrote: ‘Trad, everyone agrees, is dead, but it shows no more signs of lying down than modern does of sitting up.’30 Else
where he notes that though Bop has been called development ‘there are different kinds of development: a hot bath can develop into a cold one’.31 His attitude accurately reflected the taste of most British jazz-lovers at the time, and many since: ‘I am afraid that the modernist tradition in jazz – I am not for the moment thinking of gifted individuals such as Parker and Gillespie – strikes me, even in historical perspective, as no better than the modernist tradition in other arts – that is, as tending towards the silly, the disagreeable and the frigid.’32 He notes that ‘Even the magazines have a traditional reviewer and a modern reviewer,’33 and devotes separate paragraphs to records which ‘All modernists will want’ and those of specifically ‘traditional’ interest.34 Magnanimously rising above his prejudices, he finds ‘the BBC’s decision to ban modern jazz from its weekly “Jazz Club” on the grounds of public uninterest, a regrettable step in view of Britain’s many fine modern musicians such as Tubby Hayes’.35 Occasionally he will express enjoyment of a particular performance by Charlie Parker, Miles Davis or even John Coltrane. He seems genuinely prepared to be pleased by each new record, even against his expectations: ‘I continue to listen gamely to Archie Shepp (who is wearing a beard now) in the hope that it will one day all cease to sound like “Flight of the Bumble Bee” scored for bagpipes and concrete mixer.’36 He was wary of his own disputatiousness, and in the Introduction to All What Jazz expressed the hope that the reviews themselves ‘are tolerably free from such polemics’, conceding that his ‘was not the only ear in the world’.37