Philip Larkin

by James Booth

  As his time in Oxford ran its course Larkin became fatalistic and dispirited: ‘as I feared, I’m drawing English poetry in my own image, & it isn’t going to make a good book’.66 Nevertheless his choices among his contemporaries and successors largely avoid contentiousness. He restricted his own representation to 191 lines. Though he included only 35 lines by Sidney Keyes, he rose above his personal antagonisms to include 137 lines by Ted Hughes, 151 lines by Donald Davie and 49 lines by Charles Tomlinson. Thom Gunn is given 123 lines. Kingsley Amis has an overgenerous 144 lines in comparison with Anthony Thwaite’s 111 lines (including the Larkinesque ‘Mr Cooper’). At the time, however, none of these allocations caused concern. Instead, with a certain arbitrariness, Dan Davin of Faber objected to the exclusion of the Scottish communist Hugh MacDiarmid and the visionary ‘Apocalyptic’ poet David Jones. Given the by now compromised nature of the whole exercise, Larkin could easily have given way. But he felt at bay. In a letter of 2 April 1971 he disputed Davin’s suggestions in a bristling tone, concluding sulkily: ‘I know this is a matter of opinion, and tot homines quot disputandum est67 and all that, but this is no more than saying that I am the editor and not anyone else.’ He continues: ‘I am so averse from [MacDiarmid’s] work that I can hardly bring my eyes to the page, but I agree a lot of people will expect to find him there [. . .] if you like I will make another effort to find some stretch of his verbiage that seems to me a trifle less arid, pretentious, morally repugnant and aesthetically null than the rest.’68 In what looks very much like a rueful private joke, he eventually gave MacDiarmid 191 lines, exactly the same number as himself. Arbitrarily, however, he dug in his heels over David Jones. Davin did not have the heart for another quarrel, and Jones remained excluded.

  The anthology was finally published on 29 March 1973. It immediately became apparent that the lack of coherence in the selection process extended also to the mechanics of its compilation. Monica Jones, having exerted her influence on his choices, might have been expected to have brought the discipline of her scholarly profession to the proof-reading of the volume. But she had not done so. Christopher Ricks wrote to Larkin to draw his attention to the fact that his carelessness with xeroxed pages had caused the omission of half of William Empson’s ‘Aubade’. The same fate had befallen the last two stanzas of Thom Gunn’s ‘The Byrnies’. Larkin was mortified. He wrote to Thwaite in April 1973: ‘I can see myself joining Bowdler & Grainger: “to larkinize”, v.t., to omit that part of a poem printed on verso and subsequent pages, from a notorious anthology published in the latter half of the twentieth century.’69

  The expected clamour from the critics ensued, Donald Davie in the vanguard. ‘Recoiling aghast from page after page’, Davie accused Larkin of not taking poetry seriously, and of privileging ‘amateur verse’ over the poetry of David Jones, Elizabeth Daryush, I. A. Richards and Roy Fisher. ‘This volume is a calamity,’ he declared, adding gleefully: ‘and it’s very painful that it falls to me to say so.’70 Larkin responded with disdain, reflecting, in a letter to Jon Stallworthy on 14 May 1973, that Davie ‘must feel like a mill that has been given a lovely big lot of grist’.71 He resorted to the defence that he was appealing over the heads of the academics and professional literati to the genuine audience of the common man and woman. ‘I made twentieth century poetry sound nice.’ ‘My taste’, he bravely proclaimed, ‘is much more akin to that of the ordinary person than it is to that of the professional student or practitioner of literature.’72 There is some truth in this. And in hindsight it does seem that much of what was confidently alleged against the volume was beside the point. Whoever is chosen to edit an official collection of this scope, the resulting volume will be bound to contain a large number of good poems. It will also, inevitably, bear the individual stamp of its editor. Moreover, the large anthology is so capacious a genre that any reductive summary or evaluation will be bound to be partial and arbitrary. Every reader encounters a quite different Larkin Oxford Book, depending on which combination of its 207 poets he or she happens upon. Over time the volume has performed its intended function of introducing readers to the variety of modern poetry as effectively as any conceivable alternative could have done.

  19

  Larkin’s Late Style

  1969–72

  Larkin’s public and professional commitments were driving his poetry deeper and deeper into a private space. It was not until nearly nine months after his ‘political poem’, ‘Homage to a Government’, that he completed his next poem. As one might expect it shows him at his most intimate and personal. He confided to Barbara Pym in a letter of 8 October 1969: ‘I have just written a poem, which cheers me slightly, except when I read it; when it depresses me. It’s about the seaside, & rather a self parody.’1 In ‘To the Sea’ the speaker is pleased to find the rituals he remembers from his youth still ‘going on’. Larkin wrote to Monica that the poem ‘was aimed at being a Boudin, in its own way of course’, referring to the French painter Eugène Boudin (1824–98).2 As in a Boudin painting, exactly observed details depict ‘The miniature gaiety of seasides’: the low horizon, the white steamer ‘stuck in the afternoon’, the ‘uncertain children [. . .] grasping at enormous air’, and the rigid old in their wheelchairs feeling a ‘final summer’. The poet reminisces about his childhood spent searching in the sand for cigarette packets with their cards of ‘Famous Cricketers’, and concludes, with the afternoon fading, the steamer gone and the sunlight ‘milky’:

  If the worst

  Of flawless weather is our falling short,

  It may be that through habit these do best,

  Coming to water clumsily undressed

  Yearly; teaching their children by a sort

  Of clowning; helping the old, too, as they ought.

  There is indeed a self-parodic element in the studied hesitancy of tone (‘If the worst’; ‘It may be’), and the familiar Larkinesque assumption that flawless weather makes us feel inadequate. The halting last line is sincere and heartfelt, but the tone is weary and a touch pious. Larkin wrote to Anthony Thwaite on 13 January 1970: ‘I am very pleased to know that you liked “To the Sea”, though I am not too keen on it myself – it seems rather Wordsworthian, in the sense of being bloody dull.’3

  ‘The Explosion’ was completed three months later in January 1970. Like ‘At Grass’, written exactly twenty years earlier, it was suggested by a film. At Christmas Larkin had watched a television documentary on the mining industry with his mother, which had included the moving ballad ‘The Trimdon Grange Disaster’, by ‘The Pitman Poet’ Tommy Armstrong (1848­–1919). Mindful of his public distrust of poems not based on direct experience, he told Monica: ‘Don’t tell a soul where I got the idea from.’4 Sixty-nine miners had been killed in an explosion at Trimdon, Durham on 16 February 1882 at 2.30 in the afternoon. In Larkin’s poem, however, the explosion takes place, more symbolically, at noon, and for the sake of its central image of the eggs, the season is changed to early summer. The tone is highly mediated. The pitmen, in their beards and moleskins, recall early scenes from Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. This is one of Larkin’s most riskily artificial poems. He claimed that he was at first unaware that it was falling into the trochaic metre of Longfellow’s Hiawatha.5 The effect is of archaic formality, though if the reader tunes into the metre too consciously it can sound over-insistent and mechanical. The image of the eggs, which one of the miners finds as he chases after rabbits, may also seem sentimental: ‘Came back with a nest of lark’s eggs; / Showed them; lodged them in the grasses’. After the explosion, these eggs reappear in the vision of the wives who:

  saw men of the explosion

  Larger than in life they managed –

  Gold as on a coin, or walking

  Somehow from the sun towards them,

  One showing the eggs unbroken.

  The reference to the men seeming ‘Gold as on a coin’ sounds forced, with its awkward period allusion to sovereigns; and ‘Somehow’ sounds loosely emotive. Moreover, t
he image will fail to deliver its full meaning of ‘unbroken’ life for some readers. The miner has already killed these eggs by pulling the nest up. Lodging it back ‘in the grasses’ will not help. He has ensured that, broken or unbroken, they can never hatch.6

  A short meditation, ‘How’, followed, completed on a single workbook page on 10 April 1970. Like ‘To the Sea’ it has an element of the self-parodic with its repeated Larkinesque adverbial phrases: ‘How high they build hospitals! [. . .] / How cold winter keeps [. . .] / How few people are.’ He gave the poem to Ted Tarling, ‘a local chap who I think deserves encouraging’,7 for publication in the autumn 1970 issue of his little magazine Wave, printed in Hull on Tarling’s own hand-operated press. Tarling’s imprint, the Sonus Press, also published Joan Barton’s volume The Mistress, the title poem of which Larkin included in The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse. Tarling was an artist of some accomplishment, and later two of his gouaches hung in Larkin’s house.8

  Larkin’s next completed poem is again the product of an indirect, secondary inspiration. Since 1965 his imagination had been haunted by the image of brutal, peasant contentment which he had encountered in the paintings of the seventeenth-century Flemish artist Adriaen Brouwer. On 15 May 1965, he had written to Monica that the Acquisitions Department of the Library was agitating for the return of a book of Brouwer’s paintings which he had borrowed:

  fine stuff: a comforting world of its own – you are a great fat oaf, three quarters drunk, sitting on a bench with a jug of beer in your hand, surrounded by cronies as ugly and disgusting as yourself. You are all smoking clay pipes: there’s a good fire in the hearth. One man is flat out on the floor, having spewed (dogs are licking it up), another is pissing out of the back door. The candlelight shows patched clothes, broken cupboards: outside is wind, mud, winter. But you are all right.9

  Over the months and years he had elaborated on this image. On 23 November 1967 he wrote to Monica: ‘I think about Jan Hogspewer (flor. 1600) sometimes these days – I would write a poem about him if I believed poems about works of art were licit.’10 The image sounds exclusively masculine; nevertheless he alludes to it in letters to Monica as a hard-core alternative to their cosy rabbit-burrow. On 10 December 1967 he writes: ‘Darling: I do look forward to your being here. We shall be two Hogspewers together. Friday is it?’11

  Finally, after this long gestation an imagined Brouwer painting became the basis for one of his most original late works, ‘The Card-Players’, completed in three days, from 6 to 8 May 1970 on two pages of Workbook 7. This is his fourth and final mature sonnet to be published, and like the others it has its own unique formal structure.12 No division is indicated after line 8, eliding the traditional progression from expository octave to reflective sestet. The picturesque squalor of the ‘lamplit cave’ is built up without pause over thirteen lines, with a false conclusion, one line early, on the sordid couplet rhyme ‘farts / hearts’. The final, typographically isolated fourteenth line then leaps out, unexpectedly, in an exclamation of brutal euphoria: ‘Rain, wind and fire! The secret, bestial peace!’ The feeble half-rhyme of ‘peace’ with ‘trees’ satisfies the scheme only nominally; the final line is effectively unrhymed, its denial of literary decorum matching the poem’s denial of social decorum.13 The sonnet becomes a symbolist ode, its final apostrophe recalling similar effects in Gautier, Baudelaire and Laforgue, and of course Larkin’s own ‘Absences’, written twenty years earlier.

  Like Brouwer’s paintings, the poem transfigures its low-life subject in a sublime celebration. The storm outside and the scene inside the ‘cave’ both embody the four elements of nature: Earth (mud, clay, mussels, ham), Water (piss, rain, ale, gob), Air (belch, snore, gale, ‘wind’ in both senses), Fire (cinder, smoke, lamp, grate). The elements are in continuous flux between inner and outer worlds. The rain outside mingles with Hogspeuw’s piss, and when Dirk pours himself ‘some more’ the grammar makes it sound as though it is rain as much as ale that he is pouring. The ‘mud’ of the cart-ruts outside is also the ‘clay’ of Dirk’s pipe. Dirk’s cinder and Prijck’s fire relate to the element of fire in the outside world. The ‘Rain, wind and fire’ of the final line are the elements as much of the interior world as of the exterior.14 Rather than looking upwards for transcendence, as do ‘Absences’ and ‘High Windows’, ‘The Card-Players’ finds profundity below. In this chthonic world the composed self-possession the poet usually guards so jealously is euphorically cast aside. All the barriers between outer and inner which preserve his self-possession are transgressed. Almost uniquely in his work this room is exposed to the elements, its door wide open on the dark.15 Larkin has, like Brouwer, fused together a selfish, secular poetry of low life with a selfless spiritual poetry of ineffable epiphany.16

  The most original element is the farcical ‘double-Dutch’ of the characters’ names: Jan van Hogspeuw, Dirk Dogstoerd, Old Prijck. Though recognizable as ‘Dutch’, they bear only a superficial relationship to the language; ‘speuw’ is not far from the Dutch spuwen, but the extra ‘e’ makes hyper-Dutch nonsense of it, while the other elements are crude English projections of Dutchness. ‘Hog’ should be barg, ‘Dog’ hond, ‘turd’ drol; while prijk and prijken have no sexual connotation in Dutch.17 Clearly the poet knows no Dutch; nor does he want to know any. His concern is not to blend the two languages, but to invent an idiom which evokes the context of a Dutch genre-painting by sounding like Dutch to an English-speaker. It is a complex effect, similar to the false-French of ‘Immensements’ in ‘Sad Steps’. Paradoxically, however, the mistranslation shows the opposite of cultural provincialism. Rather it acknowledges the universal cultural currency of this image of peasant earthiness, familiar in the work of Flemish painters such as Bruegel, Teniers and Brouwer.18 Larkin made clear that, unlike Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ or Berryman’s ‘Winter Landscape’, his poem makes no reference to an actual painting.19 The scene described is, nevertheless, a perfectly visualized Brouwer composition.

  ‘Dublinesque’, completed on just over a page in the workbook between 1 and 6 June 1970,20 though very different, is also heavily mediated, and set in a mythic past. This is no literal nostalgic recollection of his holiday in Ireland the previous year. He told Maeve Brennan that the poem’s origin was ‘a dream – I just woke up and described it’.21 This is the ‘Dublinesque’ of a sensitive tourist who knows his Joyce and his Jack B. Yeats. The light is ‘pewter’, the afternoon mist brings on the early lights in the shops, above ‘race-guides and rosaries’. As in a dream the poet feels euphoric gratitude at being spectator at the mourning ritual of the streetwalkers in their wide flowered hats, leg-of-mutton sleeves and ankle-length dresses. There is ‘an air of great friendliness’:

  And of great sadness also.

  As they wend away

  A voice is heard singing

  Of Kitty, or Katy,

  As if the name meant once

  All love, all beauty.

  It is an exquisite, fragile poem, like ‘The Explosion’: just this side of sentimentality.

  While in his poems he was conjuring these elusive epiphanies, his social image in Hull was hardening into that of an irascible hermit. A recently arrived lecturer in American Studies, who occupied the flat below his for a short time, remembers hearing him striding about his room alone reciting Macbeth with great feeling.22 Another lecturer in American Studies, who occupied the same flat with his wife in 1970–2, invited him to tea and found him distantly amiable. He played with their cats and they discussed jazz. But then, when the lecturer left Larkin a note suggesting they might share the shed in which he kept his bicycle, the response was an official letter from the Estates Office indicating that the shed was for Larkin’s sole use. Later he asked the poet to sign a copy of The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse, intended as a wedding present for some friends. Larkin rebuffed him, remarking that copies of his books were beginning to turn up in second-hand bookshops shortly after being signed. However, this refu
sal gave Larkin an uneasy conscience. Later the same day he phoned, asking if he might come across from the Library and sign the book after all, since he realized that recipients of a wedding present were unlikely to sell it on.23

  Larkin’s spell in Oxford working on his anthology disrupted his usual drafting processes. He completed no poems in his workbook for nearly a year between ‘Dublinesque’ on 6 June 1970 and ‘Vers de Société’ on 20 May 1971.24 He did however complete two poems outside the workbook. ‘Poem about Oxford’ is inscribed on the flyleaf of an illustrated history of Oxford which he gave to Monica at Christmas in 1970. Movingly, he inserted the draft in the manuscript of his Brunette Coleman novella of three decades earlier, Michaelmas Term at St Bride’s, which he must have reread at this time. As in ‘To the Sea’ Larkin was returning nostalgically to his earlier life. The poem is dedicated ‘for Monica’, and is possibly an anniversary poem, ten years on from ‘Talking in Bed’. The form is the favoured metre for occasional verse in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, anapaests in alternate rhyme, with the added joke of carefully contrived ‘slapdash’ double rhymes (‘touchstone / much tone; certain / Girton; notecase / Boat Race; cake-queues / break-throughs’). Larkin pitches his tone carefully to suit the poem’s addressee. Its nostalgia is edgily anti-nostalgic, and there is ‘Hogspewer’ cynicism in the mockery of the ‘arselicker’ who stays in Oxford. Since they had shared the city ‘without knowing’, emphasis inevitably falls on generic period detail, in a kind of ‘Oxonesque’. Apart from ‘more durable things’ (their first-class degrees and literary educations), they shared ‘Dull Bodley, draught beer, and dark blue, / And most often losing the Boat Race –’. And, in a beautiful zeugma, to these poignantly trivial memories ‘You’re added, as I am for you.’