Reliable Essays

by Clive James

  But Davie’s main comments about Larkin are postponed until some sturdy ground-work has been put in on Hardy. We are told that Hardy’s technique is really engineering, and that he is paying a formal tribute to Victorian technology by echoing its precisioned virtuosity. A little later on we find that Davie doesn’t wholly approve of this virtuosity, and is pleased when the unwavering succession of intricately formed, brilliantly matched stanzas is allowed to break down – as in ‘The Voice’, where, we are assured, it breaks down under pressure of feeling.

  A crucial general point about technique has bulkily arisen, but Davie miraculously succeeds in failing to notice it. At one stage he is almost leaning against it, when he says that Hardy was usually ‘highly skilled indeed but disablingly modest’, or even ‘very ambitious technically, and unambitious every other way’. For some reason it doesn’t occur to Davie that having made these admissions he is bound to qualify his definition of technique in poetry. But not only does he not qualify it – he ups the stakes. Contesting Yeats’s insistence that Hardy lacked technical accomplishment, Davie says that ‘In sheer accomplishment, especially of prosody, Hardy beats Yeats hands down’ (his italics). Well, it’s a poser. Yeats’s critical remark about Hardy doesn’t matter much more than any other of Yeats’s critical remarks about anybody, but Davie’s rebuttal of it matters centrally to his own argument. He is very keen to set Yeats and Hardy off against each other: an opposition which will come in handy when he gets to Larkin. But keenness must have been bordering on fervour when he decided that Hardy had Yeats beaten technically in every department except something called ‘craft’ – which last attribute, one can be forgiven for thinking, ought logically to take over immediately as the main subject of the book.

  Davie argues convincingly that we need to see below the intricate surface form of Hardy’s poems to the organic forms beneath. But he is marvellously reluctant to take his mind off the technical aspects of the surface form and get started on the problem of what technical aspects the organic form might reasonably be said to have. ‘We must learn to look through apparent symmetry to the real asymmetry beneath.’ We certainly must, and with Hardy Davie has. But what Davie has not learnt to see is that with Yeats the symmetry and asymmetry are the same thing – that there is no distance between the surface form and the organic form, the thing being both all art and all virtuosity at the same time. Why, we must wonder, is Davie so reluctant to see Yeats as the formal master beside whom Hardy is simply an unusually interesting craftsman? But really that is a rephrasing of the same question everybody has been asking for years: the one about what Davie actually means when he praises Ezra Pound as a prodigious technician. Is it written in the stars that Donald Davie, clever in so many others matters, will go to his grave being obtuse in this? Why can’t he see that the large, argued Yeatsian strophe is a technical achievement thoroughly dwarfing not only Pound’s imagism but also Hardy’s tricky stanzas?

  Davie is continually on the verge of finding Hardy deficient as a working artist, but circumvents the problem by calling him a marvellous workman whose work tended to come out wrong for other reasons. In ‘During Wind and Rain’ he detects a ‘wonderfully fine ear’, which turns out to be a better thing than ‘expertise in prosody’ – the wonderfully fine ear being ‘a human skill’ and not just a ‘technical virtuosity’. It ought to follow that knowing how to get the ear working while keeping the virtuosity suppressed is of decisive importance to poetic technique. It ought to follow further that because Hardy couldn’t do this – because he wasn’t even aware there was a conflict – he spent a lot of his time being at odds with himself as a poet. What Davie is struggling to say is that Hardy wasn’t enough of an artist to make the best of the art that was in him. But the quickness of the pen deceives the brain, and Davie manages to say everything but that.

  The strictures Davie does put on Hardy are harsh but inscrutable. There is in Hardy a ‘crucial selling-short of the poetic vocation’. In the last analysis, we learn, Hardy, unlike Pound and Pasternak (and here Yeats, Hopkins and Eliot also get a mention), doesn’t give us a transformed reality – doesn’t give us entry ‘into a world that is truer and more real than the world we know from statistics or scientific induction or common sense’. This stricture is inscrutable for two main reasons. First, Hardy spent a lot of his time establishing a version of reality in which, for example, lovers could go on being spiritually joined together after death: nothing scientific about that. Second, even if he had not been at pains to establish such a version of reality – even if his themes had been resolutely mundane – his poetry, if successful, would have done it for him. In saying that Hardy’s poetry doesn’t transform statistical, scientific reality, Davie is saying that Hardy hasn’t written poetry at all.

  It should be obvious that Davie, while trying to praise Hardy as an artist, is actually diminishing him in that very department. Less obviously, he is also diminishing art. To look for a life-transforming theme, surely, is as self-defeating as to look for a life-enhancing one. Good poetry transforms and enhances life whatever it says. That is one of the reasons why we find it so special. In this case, as in so many others, one regrets the absence in English literary history of a thoroughly nihilistic poet. The Italians had Leopardi, who in hating existence could scarcely be said to have been kidding. Faced with his example, they were obliged at an early date to realize that there is poetry which can deny a purpose to life and yet still add to its point.

  Larkin, Davie insists, follows Hardy and not Yeats. ‘Larkin has testified to that effect repeatedly’, he announces, clinching the matter. Yeats’s influence was ‘a youthful infatuation’. The ground is well laid for a thorough-going misunderstanding of Larkin on every level, and after a few back-handed compliments (‘The narrowness of range . . . might seem to suggest that he cannot hear the weight of significance that I want to put on him, as the central figure in English poetry over the past twenty years’ – narrowness of range as compared with whom? With people who write worse?) Davie buckles down to the task.

  Hardy, we have already learnt, was neutral about industrialism because his technique mirrored it: his skill as a constructor implicated him. With Larkin it is otherwise. Larkin can feel free to hate industrialism because he has no special sense of himself as a technician: ‘The stanzaic and metrical symmetries which he mostly aims at are achieved skilfully enough, but with none of that bristling expertise of Hardy which sets itself, and surmounts, intricate technical challenge.’

  By this stage of the book it is no longer surprising, just saddening, that Davie can’t draw the appropriate inferences from his own choice of words. Being able to quell the bristle and find challenges other than the kind one sets oneself – isn’t that the true skill? The awkward fact is that unless we talk about diction, and get down to the kind of elementary stylistic analysis which would show how Larkin borrowed Hardy’s use of, say, hyphenated compounds, then it is pretty nearly impossible to trace Larkin’s technical debt to Hardy. Not that Davie really tries. But apart from understandably not trying that, Davie clamorously doesn’t try to find out about Larkin’s technical debt to Yeats. And the inspiration for the big, matched stanzas of ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ is not in Hardy’s ‘intricacy’ but in the rhetorical majesty of Yeats. In neglecting to deal with that inspiration, Davie limits his meaning of the word ‘technique’ to something critically inapplicable. Technically, Larkin’s heritage is a combination of Hardy and Yeats – it can’t possibly be a substitution of the first by the second. The texture of Larkin’s verse is all against any such notion.

  Mistaking Larkin’s way of working is a mere prelude to mistaking his manner of speaking, and some thunderous misreadings follow as a consequence. In Larkin, we are told, ‘there is to be no historical perspective, no measuring of present against past’. Applied to the author of ‘An Arundel Tomb’, this assertion reminds us of the old Stephen Potter ploy in which a reviewer selected the characteristic for which an author was most famous and the
n attacked him for not having enough of it.

  According to Davie, Larkin is a Hardyesque poet mainly in the sense that he, too, ‘may have sold poetry short’. With Larkin established as such a baleful influence, the problem becomes how to ‘break out of the greyly constricting world of Larkin’. Davie enlists the poetry of Charles Tomlinson to help us do this, but it might have been more useful to linger awhile and ask if Larkin isn’t already doing a good deal by himself to help us get clear of his dreary mire – by going on writing, that is, with the kind of intensity which lit up the gloom and made us notice him in the first place. Here again, and ruinously, Davie is dealing in every reality except the realities of art. He cannot or will not see that Larkin’s grimness of spirit is not by itself the issue. The issue concerns the gratitude we feel for such a grimness of spirit producing such a beauty of utterance.

  Near the end of the book, Davie draws a useful distinction between poets and prophets. The prophet is above being fair-minded: the poet is not. The poet helps to shape culture, with which the prophet is at war. Prophetic poetry is necessarily an inferior poetry.

  To this last point one can think of exceptions, but generally all this is well said, and leaves the reader wondering why Davie did not then go back and find something centrally and vitally praiseworthy in the limitations of the Hardy tradition. Because it is the Hardy tradition which says that you can’t be entirely confident of knowing everything that reality contains, let alone of transcending it. The Hardy tradition is one of a mortal scale. It does not hail the superhuman. As Larkin might put it, it isn’t in the exaltation business. That is the real point which Davie has worriedly been half-making all along. In a striking way, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry is an eleventh-hour rejection of Davie’s early gods. Somewhere in there among the dust and hubbub there is a roar of suction indicating that the air might soon be cleared.

  iv. THE NORTH WINDOW

  To stay, as Mr Larkin stays, back late

  Checking accessions in the Brynmor Jones

  Library (the clapped date-stamp, punch-drunk, rattling,

  The sea-green tinted windows turning slate,

  The so-called Reading Room deserted) seems

  A picnic at first blush. No Rolling Stones

  Manqués or Pink Floyd simulacra battling

  Their way to low-slung pass-marks head in hands:

  Instead, unpeopled silence. Which demands

  Reverence, and calls nightly like bad dreams

  To make sure that that happens. Here he keeps

  Elected frith, his thanedom undespited,

  Ensconced against the mating-mandrill screams

  Of this week’s Students’ Union Gang-Bang Sit-in,

  As wet winds scour the Wolds. The Moon-cold deeps

  Are cod-thronged for the trawlers now benighted,

  Far North. The inland cousin to the sail-maker

  Can still bestride the boundaries of the way-acre,

  The barley-ground and furzle-field unwritten

  Fee simple failed to guard from Marks and Spencer’s

  Stock depot some time back. (Ten years, was it?)

  Gull, lapwing, redshank, oyster-catcher, bittern

  (Yet further out: sheerwater, fulmar, gannet)

  Police his mud-and-cloud-ashlared defences.

  Intangible revetments! On deposit,

  Chalk thick below prevents the Humber seeping

  Upward to where he could be sitting sleeping,

  So motionless he lowers. Screwed, the planet

  Swivels towards its distant, death-dark pocket.

  He opens out his notebook at a would-be

  Poem, ashamed by now that he began it.

  Grave-skinned with grief, such Hardy-hyphened diction,

  Tight-crammed as pack ice, grates. What keys unlock it?

  It’s all gone wrong. Fame isn’t as it should be—

  No, nothing like. ‘The town’s not been the same,’

  He’s heard slags whine, ‘since Mr Larkin came.’

  Sir John arriving with those science-fiction

  Broadcasting pricks and bitches didn’t help.

  And those Jap Ph.D.s, their questionnaires!

  (Replying ‘Sod off, Slant-Eyes’ led to friction.)

  He conjures envied livings less like dying:

  Sharp cat-house stomp and tart-toned, gate-mouthed yelp

  Of Satchmo surge undulled, dispersing cares

  Thought reconvenes. In that way She would kiss,

  The Wanted One. But other lives than this—

  Fantastic. Pages spread their blankness. Sighing,

  He knuckles down to force-feed epithets.

  Would Love have eased the joints of his iambs?

  He can’t guess, and by now it’s no use trying.

  A sweet ache spreads from cramp-gripped pen to limb:

  The stanza next to last coheres and sets.

  As rhyme and rhythm, tame tonight like lambs,

  Entice him to the standard whirlwind finish,

  The only cry no distances diminish

  Comes hurtling soundless from Creation’s rim

  Earthward – the harsh recitativo secco

  Of spaces between stars. He hears it sing,

  That voice of utmost emptiness. To him.

  Declaring he has always moved too late,

  And hinting, its each long-lost blaze’s echo

  Lack-lustre as a Hell-bent angel’s wing,

  That what – as if he needed telling twice –

  Comes next makes this lot look like Paradise.

  ‘Don Juan in Hull’ previously included in At the Pillars of Hercules, 1979

  ‘Wolves of Memory’ from Encounter, June, 1974

  ‘Smaller and Clearer’ from New Statesman, 21 March, 1975

  ‘Yeats v. Hardy in Davie’s Larkin’ from TLS, 13 July, 1973

  ‘The North Window’ from TLS, 26 July, 1974

  4. An Affair of Sanity

  Required Writing by Philip Larkin, Faber

  Every reviewer will say that Required Writing is required reading. To save the statement from blinding obviousness, it might be pointed out that whereas ‘required writing’ is a bit of a pun – Larkin pretends that he wouldn’t have written a word of critical prose if he hadn’t been asked – there is nothing ambiguous about ‘required reading’. No outside agency requires you to read this book. The book requires that all by itself. It’s just too good to miss.

  Required Writing tacitly makes the claim that it collects all of Larkin’s fugitive prose, right down to the speeches he has delivered while wearing his Library Association tie. There is none of this that an admirer of his poems and novels would want to be without, and indeed at least one admirer could have stood a bit more of it. The short critical notices Larkin once wrote for the magazine Listen are, except for a single fragment, not here. As I remember them, they were characteristically jam-packed with judgements, observations and laconic wit.

  If Larkin meant to avoid repetitiveness, he was being too modest: incapable of a stock response, he never quite repeats himself no matter how often he makes the same point. On the other hand there is at least one worrying presence. The inclusion, well warranted, of the prefaces to Jill and The North Ship can hardly mean that those books will be dropped from his list of achievements, but the inclusion of the long and marvellous introductory essay to All What Jazz, an essay that amounts to his most sustained attack on the modernist aesthetic, carries the depressing implication that the book itself, which never did much business, might be allowed to stay out of print. That would be a shame, because jazz is Larkin’s first love and in the short notices collected in All What Jazz he gives his most unguarded and exultant endorsement of the kind of art he likes, along with his funniest and most irascible excoriation of the kind he doesn’t.

  Jazz is Larkin’s first love and literature is his first duty. But even at the full stretch of his dignity he is still more likely to talk shop than to talk down, and anyway his conc
eption of duty includes affection while going beyond it, so as well as an ample demonstration of his capacity to speak generally about writing, we are given, on every page of this collection, constant and heartening reminders that for this writer his fellow-writers, alive or dead, are human beings, not abstractions.

  Human beings with all their quirks. Larkin proceeds as if he had heard of the biographical fallacy but decided to ignore it. ‘Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.’ But he doesn’t rule out the possibility that sanity can be hard won, from inner conflict. He has a way of bringing out the foibles of his fellow-artists while leaving their dignity at least intact and usually enhanced. To take his beloved Hardy as an example – and many other examples, from Francis Thompson to Wilfred Owen, would do as well – he convincingly traces the link between moral lassitude and poetic strength. This sympathetic knack must come from deep within Larkin’s own nature, where diffidence and self-confidence reinforce each other: the personal diffidence of the stammerer whose childhood was agony, and the artistic self-confidence of the born poet who has always been able to feel his vocation as a living force.

  The first principle of his critical attitude, which he applies to his own poetry even more rigorously than to anyone else’s, is to trust nothing which does not spring from feeling. Auden, according to Larkin, killed his own poetry by going to America, where, having sacrificed the capacity to make art out of life, he tried to make art out of art instead.

  It might be argued that if the Americanized Auden had written nothing else except ‘The Fall of Rome’ then it would be enough to make this contention sound a trifle sweeping. It is still, however, an interesting contention, and all of a piece with Larkin’s general beliefs about sticking close to home, which are only partly grounded in the old anguish of having to ask for a railway ticket by passing a note. He is not really as nervous about Abroad as all that: while forever warning us of the impossibility of mastering foreign languages, he has the right Latin and French tags ready when he needs them, and on his one and only trip to Germany, when he was picking up a prize, he favoured the locals with a suavely chosen quotation in their own tongue.