The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (Vintage International)

by Martin Amis

  The attics-digs-lodgings period lasted from 1943, when Larkin left home, to 1955, when he arrived at Hull (where he would dourly remain). It was in 1955 that he commemorated those years in ‘Mr Bleaney’:

  ‘This was Mr Bleaney’s room …’

  So it happens that I lie

  Where Mr Bleaney lay, and stub my fags

  On the same saucer-souvenir, and try

  Stuffing my ears with cotton-wool, to drown

  The jabbering set he egged her on to buy.

  I know his habits – what time he came down,

  His preference for sauce to gravy, why

  He kept on plugging at the four aways –

  Likewise their yearly frame: the Frinton folk

  Who put him up for summer holidays,

  And Christmas at his sister’s house in Stoke.

  But if he stood and watched the frigid wind

  Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed

  Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,

  And shivered, without shaking off the dread

  That how we live measures our own nature,

  And at his age having no more to show

  Than one hired box should make him pretty sure

  He warranted no better, I don’t know.

  In such habitats, Larkin’s nature was being measured. And his sexuality was fermenting, or congealing. Earlier, at Oxford, he had briefly kept a dream journal. This is Motion:

  Dreams in which he is in bed with men (friends in St John’s, a ‘negro’) outnumber dreams in which he is trying to seduce a woman, but the world in which these encounters occur is uniformly drab and disagreeable. Nazis, black dogs, excrement and underground rooms appear time and time again, and so do the figures of parents, aloof but omnipresent.

  Which sure looks like a mess. He had also devoted a ridiculous amount of time and energy to the composition, under the pseudonym Brunette Coleman, of prose fictions about schoolgirls (‘As Pam finally pulled Marie’s tunic down over her black stockinged legs, Miss Holden, pausing only to snatch a cane from the cupboard …’). Along the way, he was developing a set of sexual attitudes as an obvious and understandable defence against his shyness (bad stammer), his unattractiveness (‘My baldness seems to be keeping its end up well’: he was twenty-six), and his fear of failure and of unrequited expense (he was always psychopathically cheap). Thus: ‘Women … repel me inconceivably. They are shits.’ Or ‘All women are stupid beings.’ To his old childhood friend J.B. Sutton he confessed to feelings of anxiety and cowardliness (he worried that he ‘had been “doctored” in some way’), but to his own peer group he liked to sound defiant:

  Don’t you think it’s ABSOLUTELY SHAMEFUL that men have to pay for women without BEING ALLOWED TO SHAG the women afterwards AS A MATTER OF COURSE? I do: simply DISGUSTING. It makes me ANGRY. Everything about the ree-lay-shun-ship between men and women makes me angry. It’s all a fucking balls up. It might have been planned by the army, or the Ministry of Food.

  On another occasion, he confided, ‘I don’t want to take a girl out, and spend circa £5 when I can toss off in five minutes, free, and have the rest of the evening to myself.’

  Those five minutes, it seems, would normally be spent under the auspices of pornography, or what passed for pornography at the time. Once, loitering around a sex shop in London, Larkin was approached by the owner, who quietly asked, ‘Was it bondage, sir?’ Actually it was bondage: bondage, spanking, intertwined schoolgirls. He was mightily gratified when he first got his hands on a copy of a magazine called Swish. ‘Jolly good stuff, Swish,’ wrote Larkin in his thank-you letter to the friend who had sent it to him. (‘Also I wanted to know if the head master stuck his cock up her bum or up her cunt but no doubt I shall go to the grave unsatisfied.’) This area of fantasy is referred to in the correspondence when Larkin complains about the kind of letter he isn’t getting. Extracts from Larkin’s dream mail:

  Dear Mr Larkin, I expect you think it’s jolly cheeky for a schoolgirl to –

  Dear Dr Larkin, My freind [sic] and I had an argument as to which of us has the biggest breasts and we wondered if you would act as –

  My youngest, she’s fourteen and quite absurdly stuck on your

  poems – but then she’s advanced in all ways – refuses to wear a –

  Today, we all know how we feel, or how we’re supposed to feel, about such ‘attitudes’ or ‘mind-sets’, especially when we have shorn them of individuality and self-mockery. Motion duly reaches for the nearest words: ‘misogyny’, which at least in theory describes a real condition, and the still more problematic ‘sexism’. He spots ‘a masturbatory impulse’ behind several of Larkin’s poems: ‘Wild Oats’, ‘Sunny Prestatyn’, ‘The Large Cool Store’, and, he writes, ‘even “An Arundel Tomb” ’. (‘Even’ is certainly the mot juste.) Of ‘Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album’ Motion says, ‘The poem connects with the other pictures Larkin liked to gaze at: the photographs in pornographic magazines. The sex life they entail – solitary, exploitative – is a crude version of the pleasure he takes in the album.’ Exploitative’ is the key word here. It suggests that, while you are free to be as sexually miserable as you like, the moment you exchange hard cash for a copy of Playboy you are in the pornography-perpetuation business and your misery becomes political. The truth is that pornography is just a sad affair all round (and its industrial dimensions are an inescapable modern theme). It is there because men – in their hundreds of millions – want it to be there. Killing pornography is like killing the messenger. The extent to which Larkin was ‘dependent’ on it should be a measure of our pity, or even our sympathy. But Motion hears the beep of his political pager, and he stands to attention. The two poems he specifically convicts of sexism were written in 1965, at which point ‘sexism’ had no currency and no meaning. This is a mild enough incidence, but one wonders how the literary revisionists and canon-cleansers can bear to take the money. Imagine a school of sixteenth-century art criticism that spent its time contentedly jeering at the past for not knowing about perspective.

  Applied to the individual, ‘sexism’ has always been a non-clarifier. Unlike the relationship between the races (‘racism’ describes a much simpler hostility), the relationship between the sexes is based on biological interdependency, which takes complex forms. Still, the biological imperative was something Larkin never felt. A virgin himself until the age of twenty-three, he was excited by virginity in women. His first love, Ruth Bowman, was not much more than a girl when he took up with her, and in appearance remained avian-childlike into middle age. (In a marvellously depressing coda to their relationship, Larkin offered Ruth ‘some money to help pay for a hip-replacement operation’.) His other – comparatively – great romantic love, Maeve Brennan, was principled and religious and took many years to wear down. Larkin’s thing with Maeve was accommodated within, and balanced against, a steadier relationship with his long-term companion, Monica Jones. The two women knew about each other: Larkin expended a lot of effort managing to hang on to both.

  Thus the reader is almost as scandalized as Andrew Motion when, after so much temporizing, after so many survived ultimatums, Larkin starts an affair (significantly, soon after Maeve’s surrender) with a third woman: Betty Mackereth, his secretary.

  Now, you might perhaps feel that having one girlfriend is happenstance, having two girlfriends is coincidence, but having three girlfriends is enemy action. After registering his astonishment at this latest turn, Motion quickly decides that ‘it is all of a piece with [Larkin’s] previous behaviour’. There is selfishness and duplicity; there is even a touch of seigneurism. One can almost hear Motion begging Larkin to seek professional help. Why can’t he be more … sensible, caring, normal? But, of course, Larkin, at fifty-two, didn’t have three women: he had four. He had Eva Larkin, who just went on and on living. ‘My mother,’ he wrote in 1977, ‘not content with being motionless, deaf and speechless, is now going blind. That’s what you get for not dy
ing, you see.’ It has been pointed out that of the score or so major reviews of the biography none was written by a woman. (Were the literary editors feeling protective? Stand back, my dear: this won’t be a pretty sight.) The job was left to the hardy menfolk, with their insecurities, their contemporary amour propre. It occurs to you that women may be less inclined to be baffled or repelled by Larkin’s peculiar chaos, and less inclined to reach for the buzzwords of the hour. Just as a ‘philistine’ does not, on the whole, devote his life to his art (however clumsily), so a ‘misogynist’ does not devote his inner life to women (however messily). Larkin’s men friends devolved into pen-pals. Such intimacies as he shared he shared with women.

  Before moving on to the charge of racial hatred, it will be necessary to answer to younger readers (those under about seventy) the following question: What is a correspondence? Younger readers know what a phone message is, and what a fax is. They probably know what a letter is. But they don’t know what a correspondence is. Words are not deeds. In published poems (we think first of Eliot’s Jew), words edge closer to deeds. In Céline’s anti-Semitic textbooks, words get as close to deeds as words can well get. Blood libels scrawled on front doors are deeds. In a correspondence, words are hardly even words. They are soundless cries and whispers; ‘gouts of bile’, as Larkin characterized his political opinions; ways of saying ‘Gloomy old sod, aren’t I?’ or, more simply, ‘Grrr.’ Correspondences are self-dramatizations. Above all, a word in a letter is never your last word on any subject. Although in Larkin’s writings on jazz (collected in All What Jazz) admiration and nostalgia for black musicians are sometimes tinged with condescension, there is no public side to Larkin’s prejudices, and nothing that could be construed as a racist act.

  The racial hatred – and fear – in the Selected Letters is insistent; and very ugly it often looks to the contemporary eye. “ ‘Sidney Keyes is already outstanding” says Stephen Spender … So is the rock of Gibraltar & a negro’s cock’ (Larkin at nineteen). ‘This Cambridge Guide looks pretty bad to me: explaining Scott’s plots for niggers’ (at sixty). ‘Too many fucking niggers about’ and ‘I can hear fat Caribbean germs pattering after me in the Underground’ – such remarks are pitched to what each correspondent is felt likely to indulge. Colin Gunner, an old school friend, brings out the worst in him: ‘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.’ In this case, words are about deeds. (Still, there is some justice here. Gunner ended up in a house trailer: this is not much of a destiny.) For Motion, the rambling rubbish of Larkin’s prejudice comes under the heading of ‘racism’; he even has a little subentry on it under ‘Larkin’ in his (brilliant) index: ‘racism 65, 309, 400, 409–10’. The word suggests a system of thought, rather than an absence of thought, which would be closer to the reality – closer to the jolts and twitches of stock response. Like mood-clichés, Larkin’s racial snarls were inherited propositions, shamefully unexamined, humiliatingly average. These were his ‘spots of commonness’, in George Eliot’s sense. He failed to shed them.

  ‘Politically correct’ is a better designation than ‘bien pensant’: both bespeak a strong commitment to the herd instinct, but P.C. suggests the necessary regimentation. Although it is French in its philosophical origins, P.C. begins with the very American – and attractive and honourable – idea that no one should feel ashamed of what he was born as, of what he is. Of what he does, of what he says, yes; but not ashamed of what he is. Viewed at its grandest, P.C. is an attempt to accelerate evolution. To speak truthfully, while that’s still okay, everybody is ‘racist’, or has racial prejudices. This is because human beings tend to like the similar, the familiar, the familial. I am a racist; I am not as racist as my parents; my children will not be as racist as I am. (Larkin was less racist than his parents; his children would have been less racist than he.) Freedom from racial prejudice is what we hope for, down the line. Impatient with this hope, this process, P.C. seeks to get the thing done right now – in a generation. To achieve this, it will need a busy executive wing, and much invigilation. What it will actually entrain is another ton of false consciousness, to add to the megatons of false consciousness already aboard, and then a backlash. Still. Here it is.

  In Andrew Motion’s book we have the constant sense that Larkin is somehow falling short of the cloudless emotional health enjoyed by (for instance) Andrew Motion. Also the sense, as Motion invokes his like-minded contemporaries, that Larkin is being judged by a newer, cleaner, braver, saner world. In the 1968 poem ‘Posterity’ Larkin envisages ‘Jake Balokowsky, my biographer’. ‘I’m stuck with this old fart at least a year,’ says Jake, not bothering ‘to hide / Some slight impatience with his destiny’. ‘What’s he like? / Christ, I just told you … One of those old-type natural fouled-up guys.’ Jake, then, is hardly ideal for the job; but in the space of a few lines he gets further than Motion gets. He is asking himself the right questions, and neutrally: what is the difference between being like him and being like me? What is the difference between living then and living now? Motion maintains the tone of an overworked psychotherapist dealing with a hidebound depressive who, exasperatingly, keeps failing to respond to the latest modern treatments. There is nothing visceral in it. The mood of the book is one of impatience: mounting impatience.

  It sometimes seems that the basis of the vexation is that Larkin was born in 1922, rather than more recently. Not only is he not well adjusted; he doesn’t want to do anything about it. There are no serious shots at self-improvement, at personal growth. Larkin left it too late to ‘change his ways’. Even when he spots the difficulty, he ‘gives little sign of wanting to make analysis part of a process of change’. He doesn’t show a healthy enjoyment of positive experiences like sex and travel. Of Larkin’s first love: ‘The best he could do in the way of celebrating physical tenderness was to say “Her hands intend no harm.” ’ Of a late (and rare) trip abroad: ‘The best he could manage was a grudging admission that he had “survived”.’ With women generally, Larkin morbidly refuses to be caring and upfront: he is ‘deceitful’, a ‘self-tormenting liar’, and his affairs are characterized by ‘indecisions, lies and contradictions’. After a while, the book starts to feel like some kind of folie à deux: Motion is extremely irritated by Larkin’s extreme irritability; he is always complaining that Larkin is always complaining. One thinks of a remark in the Letters when Larkin is commiserating with (and complaining to) a woman friend about the inconveniences of Christmas: ‘Yours is the harder course, I can see. On the other hand, mine is happening to me.’ Motion is only writing the Life. Larkin had to live it.

  Towards the end, even Larkin’s fear of death – so central, so formative, so remorseless – has come to strike Motion as just another skein of unsalubrious egotism. After seeing the Times obituary for Bruce Montgomery, ‘a really close friend’, Larkin said in a letter that ‘it makes it all sort of realler’. Motion continues: ‘Larkin aired the same sorrowful but self-interested feelings in a letter to Robert Conquest. “Funeral was today,” he reported. “All very sad, and makes the world seem very temporary.” ’ Since when are intimations of mortality, at a friend’s graveside, ‘self-interested’? But perhaps all such thoughts, and perhaps mortality itself, are now suspect. Don’t dwell on death. It’s anti-life.

  Motion is so shamanistically sensitive to self-interest that you wonder whether this is a personal quirk or whether it somehow fits in with the new-ethos picture. Sober materialism and machine careerism, in response to the incontinence of the Eighties? In any event, you have to warp your mind into novel contortions as Motion monitors Larkin’s ‘self-interest’, and identifies this or that apparently straightforward remark as a ‘pretence’ or a ‘tactic’. The friendship with Kingsley Amis, for example, was not as warm as it seemed to ‘the wide world’, for ‘both men went to some lengths to publicize it as a way of consolidating their literary reputations’. My filial reluctance to make
much of this (it might look like a ‘tactic’) disappeared thirty-odd pages later, when Motion repeats his depressing strophe with regard to John Betjeman: their friendship was ‘affectionate but not … intimate’; for Larkin there was ‘something self-protective’ in it. (‘By extolling Betjeman’s virtues he helped to create the taste by which he wished his own work to be judged.’) And he played the same angle, according to Motion, when he edited the Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (a seven-year job): ‘Larkin used the Oxford book to define and promote the taste by which he wished to be relished.’ Even the friendship with Barbara Pym, which comes across in the Letters as a jewel of delicacy and disinterestedness (in fact, Larkin did more than anyone to help resuscitate Pym’s ailing career), is mysteriously found wanting: despite ‘a genuine warmth’, Larkin ‘nevertheless addressed her as if he knew an audience was listening’; he ‘projects’, he ‘parades’. Motion says, ‘To the extent that Larkin ever shouldered Pym’s worries, he did so knowing he would never be crushed by them.’ What test is Larkin failing here? It is a pity that Pym never held out to him the promise of a free hardback or a bottle of milk, so that Motion could call the friendship ‘self-interested’. 0 brave new superego world, where you shoulder each other’s worries, where men never lie to women, where people will, of course, be marvellous when they are old and dying, where everyone is so incredibly interested in self-interest.