by Martin Amis
Atlantic Monthly April 1983
Philip Larkin
The Beginning: Larval Larkin
A Girl in Winter by Philip Larkin
At the age of twenty-four, with three books already behind him, Philip Larkin looked all set to become a novelist. He had produced one fragile, half-forgotten collection of verse, The North Ship, and two vigorous Rill-length novels – Jill and A Girl in Winter. That was thirty years ago. Since then he has published a slender volume of poetry every decade, and he is slowing down all the time (averaging, nowadays, about a poem a year). The fiction, however, stopped dead. As Larkin has ruefully explained, he waited for more fiction to come – but it never did.
Why? Well, the two novels we have provide what clues there are. In this respect Jill (1946) is the less significant book. It is less significant because anyone could have written it – or, to put the point more exactly, it needn’t have been written by Philip Larkin. Blending fantasy and self-absorption in the usual first-novel style, it recounts the gaucheries of a furtive, owlish working-class boy during his first term at Oxford: the hero’s queasy sense of social inferiority, his emulation of a dissolute roommate, and his own graceless erotic yearnings combine to bring about his tragi-comic humiliation. Jill is a funny, confused, likeable and quite undisconcerting book.
A Girl in Winter, published in England in 1940, is something else again: it is Larkinesque. At first it looks like a similar novel – indeed, the same novel, except that it is told from the woman’s point of view. Katherine is a European schoolgirl, invited over for a vacation en famille with her English penpal, Robin. Robin is as boring as his letters suggest, but he is personable enough, and, as with the Jill figure in the previous book, he soon becomes the bland receptacle of Katherine’s overheated longings (one sudden, sweaty kiss is all she has to show for her turbulent four-week visit). A girl in summer, perhaps.
Years later, during the war, Katherine finds herself in England; she is working in frozen squalor at a public library somewhere in the North, and trying, one feels, to discover strength in her misery rather than any plausible escape from it. In response to a casual letter, Robin suddenly appears. It is clear that he has come along with no more complicated aim than to go to bed with her, and then go away again. Now he is the gawky one, petulant and charmless, unmatured (the implication is) by the pangs of loneliness and regret. Entirely unmoved by Robin’s resentful overtures, Katherine none the less complies: it is the easiest way of forgetting him. The novel ends on a note of tremulous optimism, as wintry solitude gathers once more.
It is a far more enigmatic book than Jill; and it is also, somehow, far less of a novel. Haltingly paced and erratically written, Jill is at least integrally thought out – its minor characters are assimilated, its questions resolved, its themes dispatched. In A Girl in Winter the fictional accessories melt to nothing in the glare of the heroine’s solipsism. The minor figures are, strictly, mere walk-ons, liable to be shrugged off as soon as they cease to stimulate Katherine’s introspection; and the moral oppositions of the novel loom and flicker with similar caprice. But these aren’t criticisms – they are clues. The answer is, of course, that Larkin is already becoming less of a novelist and more of a poet.
The process of distillation, of reduction to essences, shows itself in a number of ways, some of them poignant, some of them effortful. Larkin is prepared, for instance, to write an impossibly flat sentence (‘It was very solacing to be alone’; ‘The truth was, she had not been facing facts’) if an abrupt mood-swing requires it. Then, too, he will fasten consecutive scenes on some tritely effusive image – there’s a symbolic snail, a flock of symbolic pigeons, even a symbolic frog – and almost every other chapter fades out in a kind of neon wistfulness: ‘She dropped the dead flowers into the wastepaper basket’, and the like. Correspondingly, though, A Girl in Winter gives us a unique insight into the origins of a remarkable talent. Here we see Larkin getting ready to use his special genius: his ability to make landscape and townscape answer to human emotions. The snow, the shopfront, the rivers, the blacked-out streets – each gives its own expression to the intense seclusion at the heart of the book.
This is the larval Larkin, displayed more transparently here than in even his earliest verse. If you turn to The North Ship (1945) for some lines appropriate to A Girl in Winter, you will find only a remote evocation:
To pull the curtains back
And see the clouds flying –
How strange it is
For the heart to be loveless, and as cold as these.
If you turn to High Windows (1974), however, you will find the essence of the same story, retold in poem after poem:
The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow
Loosely as cannon-smoke …
Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can’t come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.
New York Times Book Review December 1976
The Ending: Don Juan in Hull
When poets die, there is usually a rush to judgment: a revaluation, a retaliation – a reaction, anyway. We know how these things go, with the poets. He who was praised and popular is suddenly found to be facile and frictionless. He who was mocked and much-remaindered is suddenly found to be ‘strangely’ neglected. In 1985, the year of his death, Philip Larkin was unquestionably England’s unofficial laureate, our best-loved poet since the war: better loved, qua poet, than John Betjeman, who was loved also for his charm, his famous giggle, his patrician bohemianism, and his televisual charisma, all of which Larkin notably lacked. Now, in 1993, Larkin is something like a pariah, or an untouchable. He who was beautiful is suddenly found to be ugly.
The word ‘Larkinesque’ used to evoke the wistful, the provincial, the crepuscular, the sad, the unloved; now it evokes the scabrous and the supremacist. The word ‘Larkinism’ used to stand for a certain sort of staid, decent, wary Englishness; now it refers to the articulate far right. In the early Eighties, the common mind imagined Larkin as a reclusive yet twinkly drudge – bald, bespectacled, bicycle-clipped, slumped in a shabby library gaslit against the dusk. In the early Nineties, we see a fuddled Scrooge and bigot, his singlet-clad form barely visible through a mephitis of alcohol, anality, and spank magazines. The reaction against Larkin has been unprecedentedly violent, as well as unprecedentedly hypocritical, tendentious, and smug. Its energy does not – could not – derive from literature: it derives from ideology, or from the vaguer promptings of a new ethos. In a sense, none of this matters, because only the poems matter. But the spectacle holds the attention. This is critical revisionism in an eye-catching new outfit. The reaction, like most reactions, is just an overreaction. To get an overreaction, you need plenty of overreactors. Somebody has to do it. And here they all are, busy overreacting.
There are those who believe that the trouble began with the Collected Poems, in 1988. Its editor, Anthony Thwaite, who has also edited Larkin’s Selected Letters, decided not to segregate the published poems from the unpublished. So instead of the three volumes of clearly finished work – The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964), and High Windows (1974) – with all the other stuff tucked away at the back, we get a looser and more promiscuous corpus, containing squibs and snippets, rambling failures later abandoned, lecherous doggerel, and confessional curiosities like the frightening late poem ‘Love Again’:
Love again: wanking at ten past three
(Surely he’s taken her home by now?),
The bedroom hot as a bakery,
The drink gone dead, without showing how
To meet tomorrow, and afterwards,
And the usual pain, like dysentery.
Someone else feeling her breasts and cunt,
Someone else drowned in that lash-wide stare …
You could say that the editorial decision had a clouding effect on the poems. You could even argue that it went against Larkin’s spirit. Larkin left a lot of go
od things out. His oeuvre (like his taste) was narrow, but it was crystallized; he could circle around a poem for years, in drafts, before completing or rejecting it. In any event, Larkin the man had started to look a little stranger. The Collected Poems didn’t open him to attack. But it might have softened him up.
The frontal assault began in the autumn of 1992, with the English publication of the Selected Letters. The charge was led by Tom Paulin, an ageing turk, who is well known, in the UK, for his literary criticism, his poetry, his controversialism, and his small-screen losses of temper. In the correspondence columns of The Times Literary Supplement (and on television) Paulin articulated the case against. It centred on accusations of ‘race hatred’: ‘racism, misogyny and quasi-fascist views’. He suggested that the editor, Thwaite, had doctored the letters with ellipses to suppress even more ‘violently racist’ passages than those he was prepared to include. Paulin summarized: ‘For the present, this selection stands as a distressing and in many ways revolting compilation which imperfectly reveals and conceals the sewer under the national monument Larkin became.’
I remember thinking, when I saw the fiery Paulin’s opening shot: we’re not really going to do this, are we? But the new ethos was already emplaced – and, yes, we really were going to do this. On Paulin’s terms, too: his language set the tone for the final assault, and mop-up, which came this spring with the publication of Andrew Motion’s Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life. Revolting, sewer: such language is essentially unstable; it calls for a contest of the passions, and hopes that the fight will get dirty. (Blake Morrison, another poet, welcomed Paulin’s intervention, with its summoning of the cloacal and the diseased, as – of all things – ‘salutary’. Look that word up.) Thus the reception of the Life was marked by the quivering nostril, and by frequent recourse to the pomaded hanky, the smelling salts, and the sick bag. Writing in The Times, Peter Ackroyd attributed ‘a rancid and insidious philistinism’ to the ‘foul-mouthed bigot’. Similarly, Bryan Appleyard saw, or nosed, ‘a repellent, smelly, inadequate masculinity’ in ‘this provincial grotesque’. (‘To the objective eye he seems to have been almost wholly repulsive.’) A.N. Wilson, in a piece graciously entitled ‘Larkin: the old friend I never liked’, said that ‘Larks’ was a ‘really rather nasty, prematurely aged man’, and ‘really a kind of petty-bourgeois fascist’, and ‘really a nutcase’.
We get an idea of the breadth of the debate when we see that it extended to the normally tranquil pages of the Library Association Record, alongside headlines like ‘New approach to DNH PL review’ and ‘Funding blow to NVQ Lead Body’. Here an unnamed columnist called the Commoner compared Larkin to David Irving (the historian who keeps discovering that the Holocaust never happened, and who, whether by accident or design, looks more like Hitler every year); the Commoner also said, in conclusion, that Larkin’s books ‘should be banned’. The more senior commentators in the mainstream press are, of course, not so impetuous. But offended senses rouse the will; and the will looks around for something to do about it. They can’t ban – or burn – Larkin’s books. What they can embark on is the more genteel process of literary disposal. A third alternative would be to group Larkin with the multitude of other major writers who harboured undemocratic (or predemocratic) opinions: but they’re too stirred up for that – the offence is too rank and too immediate. So: ‘a sporadically excellent minor poet who has been raised to an undeserved monumentality’ (Appleyard); ‘essentially a minor poet who, for purely local and temporary reasons, acquired a large reputation’ (Ackroyd); ‘he seems to me more and more minor … [The poems] are good – yes – but not that good, for Christ’s sake’ (Wilson).
In late April, when the smoke was clearing after the appearance of the biography, Andrew Motion reviewed the controversy in his column in the Observer. Sadder and wiser – not shocked, just disappointed – Motion identified several regrettable tendencies in the anti-Larkin crusade: the lack of sociohistorical context (Larkin, ‘alas’, was pretty typical of his time and place); the failure to distinguish private from public utterance (‘We need to remind ourselves that we are dealing with Dr Larkin here, not Dr Goebbels’); ‘the evidence of people struggling in the straitjacket of political correctness’; and the naïve ‘conflation of life and art’. Such a conflation, he went on:
rest[s] on the assumption that art is merely a convulsive expression of personality. Sometimes in its purest lyric moments, it may be. More generally, it is a suppression of personality … an adaptation, an enlargement. It’s intensely disappointing to read literary commentators who write as if they don’t understand that art exists at a crucial distance from its creator.
Which sounds – and is – very sensible. But what we can also hear is the whirr of bicycle spokes: for the Observer piece is in fact a Tour de France of back-pedalling. Unstridently, often rather hesitantly, and even sensitively, Motion’s book commits all the sins that he is now wryly shaking his head over. It is not a position so much as an attitude, or just a tone. Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life is confidently managed, and chasteningly thorough; it is also an anthology of the contemporary tendencies toward the literal, the conformist, and the amnesiac. Future historians of taste wishing to study the Larkin fluctuation will not have to look very much further.
The book – the life – is rich in the authentic poetry of dowdiness and deprivation, although Motion hears it faintly or not at all. Hardly anything in Larkin’s letters is as thrillingly grim as the little clump of words and numerals in their top right-hand corners: Flat 13, 30 Elmwood Avenue, Belfast; 200 Hallgate, Cottingham, East Yorkshire; 192A Hallgate, Cottingham, Yorks; 172 London Road, Leicestershire (‘I am established in an attic with a small window, a bed, an armchair, a basket chair, a carpet, a reading lamp THAT DOESN’T WORK, a small electric fire THAT DOESN’T WORK, and a few books’); Glentworth, King St, Wellington, Salop. Even his holiday spots sound far from festive: for example, Dixcart Hotel, Sark. No, the place-names don’t help. ‘I envy you your visit to Sledmere,’ he writes to an intrepid acquaintance. When his girlfriend’s mother gets her fatal heart attack, she does so ‘at her home in Stourport-on-Severn’. Watch the sap rising as Larkin contemplates his summer break:
My holidays loom like fearful obstacle-races: Mallaig–Weymouth with no sleeper (probably) & no reserve seats: they reserve seats, it seems, only on days when there will be enough to go around. On July 25 & Aug. 1 – two busiest days in the year – they don’t. I’M TRAVELLING ON BOTH.
One significant address was 73 Coten End, Warwick. This was the house that contained Larkin’s parents, Sydney and Eva. Motion is quietly persuasive about the feel of the household, with its airlessness and constraint. Nor does he make too much of various sexy discoveries about Sydney Larkin’s pro-German – even pro-Nazi – bent. It seems that Sydney attended several Nuremberg rallies in the Thirties; bizarrely, he kept some sort of mechanical statue of Hitler on his mantelpiece, ‘which at the touch of a button leapt into a Nazi salute’. Even a Nazi might have found that mannequin a little too kitsch, and insufficiently serious. Old Sydney, a city treasurer, sounds like a miserably typical eccentric of the prewar English provinces: a mood tyrant, a man who set the emotional barometer, and set it low, for everyone around him. In an unpublished autobiographical fragment cited by Motion, Larkin wrote, ‘When I try to tune into my childhood, the dominant emotions I pick up are, overwhelmingly, fear and boredom … I never left the house without the sense of walking into a cooler, cleaner, saner and pleasanter atmosphere.’ Sydney died in 1948, when Larkin was in his mid-twenties; and Eva then began a widowhood that was to last almost as long as her marriage. During those twenty-nine years, Larkin wrote to her several times a week. None of these letters appears in the Letters (there are presumably many thousands of them), but from Motion’s quotes we see that they were candid and detailed, and were not dashed off in a couple of minutes. Her letters to him are almost artistic in their flair for the trivial. Here is an especially lively extract:
&
nbsp; I do hope you achieved some warmth after loading all your apparel upon the bed like that. Of course you ought not to have changed those pants – remember that I thought it very unwise at the time.
Larkin’s life, Motion writes in his introduction, was not ‘much diversified by event’. This is one way of putting it. What he gives us, then, is chronic inactivity in an epic frame (570 pages in the British edition). This is one way of doing it. Larkin grew up, studied at Oxford, had a series of jobs as a librarian (and as nothing else), grew fat, grew frail, and died. War, travel, marriage, children: none of this ever happened to him. The poverty of event is best illustrated by the kinds of nonevent that Motion finds himself including. When Larkin attends a wedding or a musical (‘he took Monica to London to see The Boy Friend’), when he involves himself in the expansion of the Hull University Library (‘The existing plans consisted of two stages – Stage 1 and Stage 2 – the first of which envisaged a central administrative three-storey block with a two-storey wing of the same height joined to it on the south side’), when in the course of his duties he is sent on a short tour of northern universities to study ‘issue desk layouts’, we get to hear about it. No, nothing happened. Larkin worked nine to five, then wrote, then drank; he coped with his mother, he corresponded with his friends, and he had perhaps half a dozen love affairs. And that was all.
