Philip Larkin

by James Booth

  Usually however, whenever the names of Parker, Davis, Coltrane, Monk, Ornette Coleman or Archie Shepp appear, the reader learns to anticipate an acid drop of delightful wit. Larkin’s dislike varies in tone. His response to Davis shows a lively humour, as though he were marvelling that talent could be so wilfully perverted: ‘his lifeless muted tone, at once hollow and unresonant, creeps along only just in tempo, the ends of notes hanging down like Dali watches’;38 ‘the fact that he can spend seven or eight minutes playing “Autumn Leaves” without my recognizing or liking the tune confirms my view of him as a master of rebarbative boredom’.39 ‘I freely confess that there have been times recently when almost anything – the shape of a patch on the ceiling, a recipe for rhubarb jam read upside down in the paper – has seemed to me more interesting than the passionless creep of a Miles Davis trumpet solo.’40 ‘To my surprise, I found myself liking at least two tracks of “Miles in the Sky” (CBS), not of course as jazz, but as a kind of soundtrack to some bleak pastoral such as a film of the Paston Letters.’41 Even a reader unsympathetic with Larkin’s opinions will surely wince with delight at his deadpan judgement on an LP of Davis in concert: ‘for me it was an experience in pure duration. Some of it must have been quite hard to do.’42

  In writing of John Coltrane, however, Larkin’s poise is less secure. On some level he seems deeply, personally offended by Coltrane: ‘John Coltrane, that relentless experimenter, intersperses the vinegary drizzle of his tone with chords (yes, two notes at once) that hardly seem worth the effort’;43 ‘in the main the effect is like watching twenty monkeys trying to type the plays of Shakespeare’.44 This antagonism reached its extreme in the notorious ‘Looking Back at Coltrane’, written following Coltrane’s death in 1967. There is something chilling and unpleasant about Larkin’s refusal of any glimmer of generosity. He begins, in a most unLarkinesque way, by rebuking The Times and Melody Maker for not paying proper respect to his authority, in their praise for Coltrane. ‘I do not remember ever suggesting that his music was anything but a pain between the ears [. . .] Was I wrong?’45 It is the most rhetorical of questions, and he goes on to speak ill of the dead in a tone of deliberate malice, concluding: ‘I regret Coltrane’s death, as I regret the death of any man, but I can’t conceal the fact that it leaves in jazz a vast, a blessed silence.’46 Unsurprisingly the Daily Telegraph refused to publish this review. Surprisingly, however, Larkin was not chastened by the rejection. Though his next reference to Coltrane shows rare approval – ‘On “Catwalk” in particular Coltrane is light and appealing’47 – four months later he describes his solos as ‘the scribbling of a subnormal child’.48

  The reason for his ill will lies deep. Coltrane’s playing exemplified for Larkin a fundamental artistic crime. For Larkin, art exists for its own sake; it does not ‘do’ anything. It has no ulterior designs on the audience. His obituary of Louis Armstrong stresses that the trumpeter humbly served his art and his audience: ‘Armstrong was an artist of world stature, an American Negro slum child who spoke to the heart of Greenlander and Japanese alike. At the same time he was a humble, hard-working man who night after night set out to do no more than “please the people”, to earn his fee, to pay back the audience for coming.’49 He cited Armstrong’s criticism of Parker for failing to please the audience: ‘you got no melody to remember and no beat to dance to’.50 Coltrane, in Larkin’s view, takes this perversity a stage further than Parker:

  He did not want to entertain his audience; he wanted to lecture them, even to annoy them. His ten-minute solos, in which he lashes himself up to dervish-like heights of hysteria, are the musical equivalent of Mr. Stokely Carmichael. It is this side of his work that appeals to the Black-Power boys such as LeRoi Jones and Archie Shepp.51

  Some see such views as racist. Ben Ratliff comments: ‘for Larkin Coltrane’s aesthetic problem [. . .] was that he was an American Negro’.52 But this argument does not convince. Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith were also American Negroes. It is not Coltrane’s colour that rouses Larkin’s hostility; it is Coltrane’s attitude towards his colour and, crucially, the effect of this attitude on his art.

  Larkin’s earliest enthusiasm had been specifically for the exuberant rhythms of black musicians. As a schoolboy in 1939 he regretted that ‘America is in the grip of the white bands [. . .] I’d back coloured against white most times.’53 At this early stage his preference seems entirely aesthetic, with no ideology behind it. Awareness of the socio-political context followed later. The mature Larkin of the Telegraph reviews fully acknowledges the social and economic context of the blues and jazz. ‘Behind the blues spreads the half-glimpsed, depressing vista of the life of the American Negro’, he writes in a review of Paul Oliver’s The Story of the Blues.54 In a review of Nat Hentoff’s book The Jazz Life he refers to ‘the continual indignities endured by the Negro entertainer, who may well be refused admission at a club front door over which his name blazes in lights’.55 Elsewhere he relates how the Ellington band was unable to find food during the interval of a concert in St Louis, since there was no segregated black restaurant close by, and a racist drugstore owner refused to make sandwiches for a white go-between.

  Larkin draws an historical lesson in moral consequences, relating this episode to the insulting behaviour of Charlie Mingus towards his white audiences on a European tour in 1964.56 Ellington had returned to the concert after his humiliation, still aiming to give pleasure; Charlie Mingus in contrast retaliated against his white audiences, refusing to be obedient to their pleasure. In a review headed ‘The End of Jazz’, Larkin quotes Mingus: ‘Don’t call me a jazz musician. To me the word jazz means discrimination, secondclass citizenship, the whole back-of-the-bus bit.’57 As Larkin wrote in his weekend Telegraph essay ‘Requiem for Jazz’, ‘Where there had been joy and relaxation, there was now tension and antagonism.’58 This he registers as objective history: ‘The Negro did not have the blues because he was naturally melancholy. He had them because he was cheated and bullied and starved. End this, and the blues may end too.’59 Jazz, in the sense that he means the word, is destined to become ‘an extinct form of music as the ballad is an extinct form of literature, because the society that produced it has gone’.

  The American Negro is trying to take a step forward that can be compared only with the ending of slavery in the nineteenth century. And despite the dogs, the hosepipes and the burnings, advances have already been made towards giving the Negro his civil rights under the Constitution that would have been inconceivable when Louis Armstrong was a young man. These advances will doubtless continue.60

  As he puts it in the 1968 Introduction to All What Jazz: ‘The tension between artist and audience in jazz slackened when the Negro stopped wanting to entertain the white man, and when the audience as a whole, with the end of the Japanese war and the beginning of television, didn’t in any case particularly want to be entertained in that way any longer.’61

  Modern black musicians show:

  a desire to wrest back the initiative in jazz from the white musician, to invent ‘something they can’t steal because they can’t play it’. This motive is a bad basis for any art, and it isn’t surprising that I found the results shallow and voulu [. . .] The constant pressure to be different and difficult demanded greater and greater technical virtuosity, and more and more exaggerated musical non-sequiturs.62

  This was the source of the ‘new inhumanity’ which he heard in the playing of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. ‘From using music to entertain the white man, the Negro had moved to hating him with it.’63 It is a travesty to suggest that Larkin would have preferred blacks to remain oppressed and ill-educated so that his beloved pleasure-giving jazz might continue. His antagonism towards the modernizers might sometimes be mistaken for racist condescension: ‘like most of his Negro contemporaries [Davis’s] increasing preoccupation with musical theory is in direct ratio to his liability to make an ass of himself’.64 But Larkin dislikes Davis’s affectation of theoretical complexity not becaus
e he is black but because it leads him into unpleasant ‘calculated perversity’,65 a perversity he shares with many white artists.

  Indeed, Larkin’s disappointment with modern jazz gains intensity from his respect for the contribution of traditional jazz to world culture. In his obituary of Louis Armstrong, he refers to ‘the great ironical takeover of western popular music by the American Negro (and remember the saying “Let me write a nation’s songs, and anyone you like may write its laws”), Armstrong stands with Ellington and Waller as one of the Trojan horses that brought it about.’66 Shortly after Armstrong’s death Charles Monteith of Faber suggested that Larkin might write Armstrong’s biography. In his reply Larkin showed his appreciation of the historical gravity of the subject: ‘It is already accepted – or if it isn’t, it soon will be – that Louis Armstrong was an enormously important cultural figure in our century, more important than Picasso in my opinion, but certainly quite comparable.’67 One approach to the biography might be ‘cultural’, ‘taking Armstrong as a kind of Trojan horse of Negro values sent into white civilisation under the cover of entertainment’.68 Any biographer, he stresses, must be fully aware of Armstrong’s significance as ‘a cultural phenomenon of the twentieth century, not overlooking the part he has played (with, of course, other artists such as Duke Ellington, Fats Waller and so on) in “Negroising” western culture. This may sound a tall order: it certainly isn’t a description of me!’69 He concludes that he is underqualified for the task.

  In view of Larkin’s enthusiasm for this ‘Negroising’ of Western culture, it seems strange that in his correspondence with Faber’s Donald Mitchell concerning All What Jazz he should have commented: ‘It’s about time jazz had its Enoch Powell.’70 Larkin’s temperament constantly runs to contradictory extremes, but this surreal remark seems at first quite baffling. Powell’s notorious ‘rivers of blood’ speech had been made a few months earlier on 20 April 1968, and following his subsequent dismissal from the government Powell had become the focus of widespread opposition to West Indian immigration into Britain. In terms of the politics of the day Larkin’s comment should mean that he intends to take up Powellite cudgels against the ‘Negroising’ of British culture. Powell’s own ideas were complex, but the ideological constituency to which he appealed was in the main crudely racist. Clearly Larkin does not intend his jazz criticism to be Powellite in this sense. It seems that, ignoring the immediate political implications, he is using Powell’s name to signify simply a refreshing, bloody-minded candour on delicate issues. Larkin in jazz, like Powell in politics, will give voice to the inconvenient but deeply held feelings which others are too mealy-mouthed, or too intimidated by political correctness, to express.

  But inevitably his mention of Powell will remind the reader of the handful of references to ‘niggers’ and ‘pakis’ in Larkin’s correspondence of the later 1960s and 1970s. It is these which have led to the careless assumption by some critics that he is, in Lisa Jardine’s words, ‘a casual, habitual racist’.71 Larkin does on occasions entertain some of his corres­pondents with expressions of pungent bigotry. However, these are performative riffs, always requiring inverted commas. They never come directly in his own voice or without subversion. He wrote to Monica on 19 November 1968, after he had completed his Introduction to All What Jazz:

  Dearest, For once I feel pretty cheerful – 11.20 pm on a Saturday night, on wch I think I have finished the preface, & eaten haggis, neeps & claret, reading the Noctes:72 then a glass of Glenfiddich, & by God wasn’t the toast ‘Mr Enoch Powell’! Then jazz records to my taste, especially Armstrong, ‘How Long Has This Been Going On’, ‘Let’s Do It’, & ‘others about as good’, as he himself once said.73

  The smooth transition of approval from Powell to Armstrong makes a comic show of his own self-contradiction. Similarly in June 1970 he gave Robert Conquest his ultra-nationalist prescription for success at the ballot-box: ‘Remember my song, How To Win The Next Election? “Prison for Strikers, Bring back the cat, Kick out the niggers, How about that?” How about it indeed. Yeah man.’74 The slogans are held up provocatively for examination; they are not proposed as his sincere political creed. And the closing exclamation, ‘Yeah man’, evokes a ‘Negro’ jam session. He later inserted the quatrain in a letter to his old schoolfriend, Colin Gunner, adding ‘Ooh, Larkin, I’m sorry to find you holding these views –’.75 Gunner could read as much or as little irony into this comment as he liked. A less ironic manifestation of his nationalism came in his obituary of Louis Armstrong, when he expressed satisfaction that the trumpeter had in his final years been better appreciated in Britain than the USA: ‘let us take pride in “The Melody Maker Tribute to Louis Armstrong”’ (a set of LPs from the seventieth-birthday concert held in the Queen Elizabeth Hall). ‘I defy anyone to listen to the final “Sleepytime” track without being glad that this country made its feelings about Armstrong clear once more before his death.’76 Nationalism was alien to Larkin’s sensibility, and this is perhaps the most passionate assertion of nationalism in his writing.

  Worried about his health, Larkin might sound off comically about ‘fat Caribbean germs’ chasing him in the Underground, or lament ‘all manner of germs brought into the country by immigrants (Powell for Premier)’.77 Or later, in a letter to Colin Gunner, he might deplore the behaviour of black spectators at Test matches: ‘I don’t mind England not beating the West Indies, but I wish they’d look as if they were trying to beat them [. . .] 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.’78 But characteristically he begins with a reminder of the inferior skill of the English players. The verbal comprehensiveness at which Larkin aims in his writing meant that he would inevitably find a place for every conceivable kind of word. He could thus speak of ‘the paki next door’ in a letter to a friend without the slightest implication that he lacked respect for his neighbour, or would treat him differently from people of his own ethnic group. For all his verbal transgressiveness, it is impossible to imagine Larkin ever acting with racist motives.

  Philip and Monica frequently dined with R. K. Biswas, an Indian colleague in the English Department at Leicester, and his wife.79 In August 1971 Larkin travelled to All Souls for a farewell dinner given for Biswas, who had been a fellow there. Larkin approached publishers on behalf of the young poet and novelist Vikram Seth.80 And in a letter to Anthony Thwaite he gave a glimpse of his contribution to a meeting of the Arts Council Literary Panel: ‘You should have heard me pleading for ethnic culture.’81 When the President of Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor, visited Hull, Larkin was disappointed not to meet the poet of négritude and the translator of T. S. Eliot into French. He wrote to Conquest: ‘Didn’t get introduced to His Nibs [. . .] I suppose I represented Litherachoor. Apparently His Nibs is stuck on it.’ But his casualness is affected. He had taken the trouble to read Senghor’s poetry, and gave an incisive verdict on its combination of Gallic suavity and swooning négritude in terms of a cocktail recipe: ‘I read his poems (in translation) and thought them Whitman-and-blackcurrant-juice-and-catpiss.’82 This judgement may be felt to be too wickedly accurate, but it shows no racism.

  In 1972 a student sit-in occurred in Hull when it was revealed in the press that Reckitt and Colman, a local company in which the University held a large investment, was paying black workers in its subsidiary factory in South Africa wages below the official UN poverty minimum. Larkin’s comments on the merits of the issue were neutral. He told Barbara Pym on 22 March: ‘I felt it was all rather halfhearted, and it failed to achieve its end anyway. The Admin Building stank for a week after the sitters-in (“activists”) had departed.’83 This issue was the source of ongoing tension in the University. I myself became involved as a young lecturer, securing the signatures of half the University staff on a petition to the University’s Council requesting that the University sell their shares in Reckitts. Over lunch in the staff bar Larkin was asked about this petition
, and replied: ‘He’s performing a valuable function. It will be handy to have a complete list of all the pricks in the University.’ John Howarth, a Mathematics lecturer who was in the bar at the time, felt impelled to interject: ‘There’s one thing to be said about a prick. It usually has a pair of balls associated with it.’ Larkin made an appreciative gesture of concession, as if to say touché.

  It is unfair that Larkin has suffered so disproportionately for the flashes of performative racism in correspondence with his more prejudiced correspondents. D. H. Lawrence immersed himself in racist theories and fascism for a time in the early 1920s, and T. S. Eliot showed the nasty anti-Semitism of his class and generation in ‘Gerontion’ and essays of the 1930s. In contrast Larkin had no cultural investment in ideas of racial ‘inferiority’ or ‘superiority’. It could never have crossed his mind, for instance, that Sidney Bechet must be an inferior musician to Pee Wee Russell because he was of an ‘inferior’ race.84 He was not a racist, either ‘casual’ and ‘habitual’ or, for that matter, consistent and systematic. The speaker of ‘Sympathy in White Major’ declares, ‘white is not my favourite colour’, and throughout his work Larkin subjects the customs and establishments of his own culture to scathing ridicule. When All What Jazz was reissued in 1984 he reflected: ‘It now reads very anti-black, insofar as most of the people I bollock are black [. . .] Coltrane, Coleman, Shepp. But then most of the people I praise are black too.’ He added with a twinkle: ‘Better play safe.’85

  But the issue of Larkin’s supposed racism only came to the fore after his death, with the publication of his letters. In the 1970s the controversy focused instead on his loud attack on ‘modernism’ in the Introduction. In his initial approach to Mitchell, Larkin had written diffidently: ‘I thought it might amuse you to read the introduction, which is a jeu d’esprit not perhaps to be taken very seriously.’86 There is something puzzling in his fatalistic anticipation of the trouble he was making for himself. He was determined to have his say, while at the same time he hoped not to be taken seriously. He repeats later to Charles Monteith that the Introduction was ‘really only a jeu d’esprit in the manner of Mencken or someone like that’, and anticipates that ‘to pass it off seriously will earn me the biggest critical clobbering I have ever experienced’.87 As publication approached he attempted to disarm criticism by suggesting that the book be promoted as a ‘freak publication’. He wrote to Faber’s Sales Director: ‘I don’t think it will earn me anything but execration [. . .] Treat it like a book by T. S. Eliot on all-in wrestling.’88 To Anthony Thwaite he wrote: ‘Try to imagine a book by Humphrey Lyttelton saying that modern poetry is no good, while at the same time charmingly admitting he’s never read any since 1940, and you will get some idea of how mine will be handled.’89