Six Poets

by Alan Bennett

For an older England, for children toddling

  Hand in hand while the day was bright. Let the wren and robin

  Gently with leaves cover the Babes in the Wood.

  Philip Larkin

  1922–1985

  Philip Larkin was born in Coventry. He was educated at King Henry VIII School, Coventry, and St John’s College, Oxford, where he was a contemporary of Kingsley Amis. 1945 saw the publication of his first book of poetry, North Ship, followed by two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947). Subsequent collections include The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974). He wrote two books of journalism, All What Jazz: A Record Library and Required Writing: Miscellaneous Prose, and edited the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse. For twelve years he worked in campus libraries before taking charge of the Hull University library from 1955 until his death. He was the recipient of innumerable honours, including the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. One critic said that Larkin was ‘a laureate too obvious to need official recognition’. He died in 1985.

  I Remember, I Remember

  Coming up England by a different line

  For once, early in the cold new year,

  We stopped, and, watching men with number-plates

  Sprint down the platform to familiar gates,

  ‘Why, Coventry!’ I exclaimed. ‘I was born here.’

  I leant far out, and squinnied for a sign

  That this was still the town that had been ‘mine’

  So long, but found I wasn’t even clear

  Which side was which. From where those cycle-crates

  Were standing, had we annually departed

  For all those family hols? … A whistle went:

  Things moved. I sat back, staring at my boots.

  ‘Was that,’ my friend smiled, ‘where you “have your roots”?’

  No, only where my childhood was unspent,

  I wanted to retort, just where I started:

  By now I’ve got the whole place clearly charted.

  Our garden, first: where I did not invent

  Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits,

  And wasn’t spoken to by an old hat.

  And here we have that splendid family

  I never ran to when I got depressed,

  The boys all biceps and the girls all chest,

  Their comic Ford, their farm where I could be

  ‘Really myself’. I’ll show you, come to that,

  The bracken where I never trembling sat,

  Determined to go through with it; where she

  Lay back, and ‘all became a burning mist’.

  And, in those offices, my doggerel

  Was not set up in blunt ten-point, nor read

  By a distinguished cousin of the mayor,

  Who didn’t call and tell my father There

  Before us, had we the gift to see ahead –

  ‘You look as if you wished the place in Hell,’

  My friend said, ‘judging from your face.’ ‘Oh well,

  I suppose it’s not the place’s fault,’ I said.

  ‘Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.’

  Larkin is famous for his fear of death. He’s also famous for his fear of life. When I first read Larkin, it wasn’t the fear of extinction that rang a bell; I was still young enough to think that bells like that only tolled for other people. It was recognition of a different sort, familiarity not so much with the feelings he was talking about as with the places. And the sense that, most of the time to most people, nothing much happens. Life is elsewhere. There were the provinces for a start, where nothing ever happened; libraries, where I’d spent half my life; churches, where I’d spent the other. Until I read Larkin – and in particular ‘I Remember, I Remember’ – I’d never imagined such experiences, or non-experiences, could be the stuff of poetry, still less the credentials for writing, or that anybody could write, not about the something but the nothing that happens anywhere.

  When he first started writing poetry, before he learned the sound of his own voice, Larkin wrote like Auden. Then, when he got to university, it was Yeats. Finally, he discovered Hardy, whom he liked, he said, because he taught him that he didn’t have to ‘jack himself up’ into poetry. It could be ordinary and about ordinary things, which suited him.

  His childhood he characterised as ‘a forgotten boredom’. His father was the city treasurer of Coventry and they don’t seem to have got on.

  This Be The Verse

  They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

  They may not mean to, but they do.

  They fill you with the faults they had

  And add some extra, just for you.

  But they were fucked up in their turn

  By fools in old-style hats and coats,

  Who half the time were soppy-stern,

  And half at one another’s throats.

  Man hands on misery to man

  It deepens like a coastal shelf.

  Get out as early as you can,

  And don’t have any kids yourself.

  This poem seems to show that Larkin didn’t get on with his parents but, as he said in an interview, he did get on with them; it was just that they weren’t very good at being happy. The poem, which certainly doesn’t jack itself up, echoes a short one of Hardy’s.

  I’m Smith of Stoke, aged sixty-odd,

  I’ve lived without a dame

  From youth-time on; and would to God

  My dad had done the same.

  Even if Larkin hadn’t got on with his parents, I still think he was wrong to complain about it. If your parents do fuck you up and you’re going to write, that’s fine because then you’ve got something to write about. But if they don’t fuck you up, then you’ve got nothing to write about, so then they’ve fucked you up good and proper.

  The problem arises in the first instance because we think of novels as something made up but poems as messages from the heart. Larkin must be telling the truth about himself because that’s what poems do – just as, in Housman’s case, his poems were flags of distress, an SOS from the soul. But a poet can counterfeit. He can put on a personality and impersonate just as a novelist can. And the ‘I’ that writes is never quite the same as the ‘I’ written. Kingsley Amis, who knew Larkin well, says that some of Larkin’s poems were by the man he knew, but others were by someone else entirely. The ‘I’ is always the eye. It is not always I.

  This next poem was possibly occasioned by the marriage of an ex-girlfriend; it’s certainly very different from the last one.

  Maiden Name

  Marrying left your maiden name disused.

  Its five light sounds no longer mean your face,

  Your voice, and all your variants of grace;

  For since you were so thankfully confused

  By law with someone else, you cannot be

  Semantically the same as that young beauty:

  It was of her that these two words were used.

  Now it’s a phrase applicable to no one,

  Lying just where you left it, scattered through

  Old lists, old programmes, a school prize or two,

  Packets of letters tied with tartan ribbon –

  Then is it scentless, weightless, strengthless, wholly

  Untruthful? Try whispering it slowly.

  No, it means you. Or, since you’re past and gone,

  It means what we feel now about you then:

  How beautiful you were, and near, and young,

  So vivid, you might still be there among

  Those first few days, unfingermarked again.

  So your old name shelters our faithfulness,

  Instead of losing shape and meaning less

  With your depreciating luggage laden.

  Larkin went to Oxford at the start of the war, then became a librarian, working in various places before landing up at Hull University, where he remained for the rest of his life as librarian of the Brynmor Jones Library. The library
had been endowed by Sir Brynmor Jones, who once came there on a visit. Meeting him in the library, Larkin said, was like being in St Pancras Station and coming across St Pancras.

  The library was to Larkin as textual criticism was to Housman: something at which he excelled but which made no demands on his other life. But he cared about it.

  New eyes each year

  Find old books here,

  And new books, too,

  Old eyes renew;

  So youth and age

  Like ink and page

  In this house join,

  Minting new coin.

  This next poem is about a return visit to Oxford, and in the background, as so often in Larkin (and Hardy), is the railway.

  Dockery and Son

  ‘Dockery was junior to you,

  Wasn’t he?’ said the Dean. ‘His son’s here now.’

  Death-suited, visitant, I nod. ‘And do

  You keep in touch with –’ Or remember how

  Black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight

  We used to stand before that desk, to give

  ‘Our version’ of ‘these incidents last night’?

  I try the door of where I used to live:

  Locked. The lawn spreads dazzlingly wide.

  A known bell chimes. I catch my train, ignored.

  Canal and clouds and colleges subside

  Slowly from view. But Dockery, good Lord,

  Anyone up today must have been born

  In ’43, when I was twenty-one.

  If he was younger, did he get this son

  At nineteen, twenty? Was he that withdrawn

  High-collared public-schoolboy, sharing rooms

  With Cartwright who was killed? Well, it just shows

  How much … How little … Yawning, I suppose

  I fell asleep, waking at the fumes

  And furnace-glares of Sheffield, where I changed,

  And ate an awful pie, and walked along

  The platform to its end to see the ranged

  Joining and parting lines reflect a strong

  Unhindered moon. To have no son, no wife,

  No house or land still seemed quite natural.

  Only a numbness registered the shock

  Of finding out how much had gone of life,

  How widely from the others. Dockery, now:

  Only nineteen, he must have taken stock

  Of what he wanted, and been capable

  Of … No, that’s not the difference: rather, how

  Convinced he was he should be added to!

  Why did he think adding meant increase?

  To me it was dilution. Where do these

  Innate assumptions come from? Not from what

  We think truest, or most want to do:

  Those warp tight-shut, like doors. They’re more a style

  Our lives bring with them: habit for a while,

  Suddenly they harden into all we’ve got

  And how we got it; looked back on, they rear

  Like sand-clouds, thick and close, embodying

  For Dockery a son, for me nothing,

  Nothing with all a son’s harsh patronage.

  Life is first boredom, then fear.

  Whether or not we use it, it goes,

  And leaves what something hidden from us chose,

  And age, and then the only end of age.

  I don’t, alas, know much about the technicalities of poetry. Like most people, I recognise a thumping metre and an obvious rhyme and not much more. But poetry isn’t just prose that’s been through the shredder, and it’s only after reading Larkin’s poems a few times that one senses how well they’re constructed, the rhymes lurking just under the surface so that what seems casual and even discursive is actually carefully structured. Larkin’s remark about MacNeice – ‘He always brings the kite down safely’ – applies equally well to Larkin himself.

  Larkin generally feels, or affects to feel, shut out, though the language he uses in order to say so signals that he still wants to be recognised as a member of the human race, and a pretty straightforward one at that. He has one poem which begins:

  When I see a couple of kids

  And guess he’s fucking her and she’s

  Taking the pill or wearing a diaphragm,

  I know this is paradise

  Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives –

  Bonds and gestures pushed to one side

  Like an outdated combine harvester,

  And everyone young going down the long slide

  To happiness, endlessly …

  Well. Not quite. Yes, one wants to say, but … Of course, Larkin wrote that in 1967, a few months before this:

  Annus Mirabilis

  Sexual intercourse began

  In nineteen sixty-three

  (Which was rather late for me) –

  Between the end of the Chatterley ban

  And the Beatles’ first LP.

  Up till then there’d only been

  A sort of bargaining,

  A wrangle for a ring,

  A shame that started at sixteen

  And spread to everything.

  Then all at once the quarrel sank:

  Everyone felt the same,

  And every life became

  A brilliant breaking of the bank,

  A quite unlosable game.

  So life was never better than

  In nineteen sixty-three

  (Though just too late for me) –

  Between the end of the Chatterley ban

  And the Beatles’ first LP.

  Larkin didn’t want to be thought nice, and sometimes wasn’t. A friend of mine – the writer Neville Smith – was a student at Hull and found himself at a bus stop with Larkin. It was pouring with rain and Larkin had an umbrella. Neville edged closer and closer to the poet until finally Larkin said, ‘Don’t think you’re coming under my umbrella.’

  ‘Don’t think you’re coming under my umbrella’ could serve as a description of a number of his poems. The temptation of all art is to console, but Larkin’s poems seldom attempt to.

  This next poem would, I suppose, nowadays be called a ‘green’ poem, though properly construed, all poems are green. It was written in 1971, when its sentiments were rather less modish than they are today.

  Going, Going

  I thought it would last my time –

  The sense that, beyond the town,

  There would always be fields and farms,

  Where the village louts could climb

  Such trees as were not cut down;

  I knew there’d be false alarms

  In the papers about old streets

  And split-level shopping, but some

  Have always been left so far;

  And when the old part retreats

  As the bleak high-risers come

  We can always escape in the car.

  Things are tougher than we are, just

  As earth will always respond

  However we mess it about;

  Chuck filth in the sea, if you must:

  The tides will be clean beyond.

  – But what do I feel now? Doubt?

  Or age, simply? The crowd

  Is young in the M1 café;

  Their kids are screaming for more –

  More houses, more parking allowed,

  More caravan sites, more pay.

  On the Business Page, a score

  Of spectacled grins approve

  Some takeover bid that entails

  Five per cent profit (and ten

  Per cent more in the estuaries): move

  Your works to the unspoilt dales

  (Grey area grants)! And when

  You try to get near the sea

  In summer …

  It seems, just now,

  To be happening so very fast;

  Despite all the land left free

  For the first time I feel somehow

  That it isn’t going to last,

/>   That before I snuff it, the whole

  Boiling will be bricked in

  Except for the tourist parts –

  First slum of Europe: a role

  It won’t be so hard to win,

  With a cast of crooks and tarts.

  And that will be England gone,

  The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,

  The guildhalls, the carved choirs.

  There’ll be books; it will linger on

  In galleries; but all that remains

  For us will be concrete and tyres.

  Most things are never meant.

  This won’t be, most likely: but greeds

  And garbage are too thick-strewn

  To be swept up now, or invent

  Excuses that make them all needs.

  I just think it will happen, soon.

  That poem was written for the Department of the Environment. What Larkin didn’t foresee was that one of the things that was going was the ability of government departments to spend money on poems.

  Now a poem called ‘1914’, though the title is written in Roman numerals, as if it were carved on a war memorial.

  MCMXIV

  Those long uneven lines

  Standing as patiently

  As if they were stretched outside

  The Oval or Villa Park,

  The crowns of hats, the sun

  On moustached archaic faces

  Grinning as if it were all

  An August Bank Holiday lark;

  And the shut shops, the bleached

  Established names on the sunblinds,

  The farthings and sovereigns,

  And dark-clothed children at play

  Called after kings and queens,

  The tin advertisements

  For cocoa and twist, and the pubs

  Wide open all day;

  And the countryside not caring:

  The place-names all hazed over

  With flowering grasses, and fields

  Shadowing Domesday lines

  Under wheat’s restless silence;

  The differently-dressed servants

  With tiny rooms in huge houses,

  The dust behind limousines;

  Never such innocence,

  Never before or since,