PHILIP LARKIN
Poems
Selected and with an Introduction by Martin Amis
Contents
Title Page
Philip Larkin, His Work and Life
by Martin Amis
from THE NORTH SHIP
Dawn
from THE LESS DECEIVED
Coming
Next, Please
Going
Wants
Church Going
Toads
Poetry of Departures
Deceptions
I Remember, I Remember
If, My Darling
At Grass
from THE WHITSUN WEDDINGS
Here
Mr Bleaney
Nothing To Be Said
Naturally, the Foundation will Bear Your Expenses
Faith Healing
For Sidney Bechet
Toads Revisited
The Whitsun Weddings
Self’s the Man
MCMXIV
Talking in Bed
A Study of Reading Habits
Ambulances
Dockery and Son
Wild Oats
Send No Money
Afternoons
An Arundel Tomb
from HIGH WINDOWS
To the Sea
The Trees
Livings
I
II
III
Forget What Did
High Windows
Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel
The Old Fools
Going, Going
The Card-Players
The Building
Posterity
Dublinesque
Homage to a Government
This Be The Verse
How Distant
Sad Steps
Solar
Annus Mirabilis
Vers de Société
Show Saturday
Money
Cut Grass
Poems uncollected by Larkin
Love
The Life with a Hole in it
Aubade
The Mower
Poems unpublished by Larkin
Letter to a Friend about Girls
Love Again
Index
About the Author
By Philip Larkin
Copyright
Philip Larkin, His Work and Life
by Martin Amis
In the mid-1970s I edited the Weekend Competition in the literary pages of the New Statesman (with the judicious assistance of Julian Barnes). One week we threw down the following challenge: contestants were asked to reimagine Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ in the style of any modern poet. It was a corpulent postbag: many Gunns, Hugheses, Hills, Porters, Lowells, Bishops, Plaths; and many, many Larkins. First place went to our most trusted star – a reclusive gentleman named Martin Fagg. At the Comp we gave out small cash prizes (Fagg got the maximal fiver), but no prizes are now on offer for guessing which poet he had in mind. This was his opening stanza:
You mean you like that poncy crap
Where some sex-besotted chap
Makes love a kind of shopping list?
Item: two juicy tits. Get pissed!
The lines have a pleasantly hysterical tone (as do many of the best parodies). They also have the virtue of being rich in allusion: allusion to Marvell (the octosyllabic couplet, the poet’s fantasised vow to spend two hundred years adoring ‘each breast’); and allusion, also, to Larkin. The ‘crap’/‘chap’ rhyme inverts the ‘chap’/‘crap’ rhyme in ‘A Study of Reading Habits’ (whose anti-literary sullenness Fagg noisily endorses); the poem ends, ‘Don’t read much now … Get stewed:/Books are a load of crap.’ Now, to transform ‘Get stewed’ – where ‘[I]’ is torpidly or indeed drunkenly understood – into an emphatic imperative (‘Get pissed!’) surely veers close to genius. More than this, though, Mr Fagg manages to imitate what is surely inimitable. I read his lines twice, thirty-five years ago, and yet I summoned them without the slightest strain. This is the key to Larkin: his frictionless memorability. To use one of Nabokov’s prettiest coinages, he is mnemogenic.
Literary crititicism, throughout its long history (starting with Aristotle), has restlessly searched for the Holy Grail of a value system – a way of separating the excellent from the less excellent. But it turns out that this is a fool’s errand. Northrop Frye has great fun with the ‘evaluative’ style in his classic Anatomy of Criticism (1957); he takes three poets, Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley, and ‘promotes’ and ‘demotes’ them in all possible permutations, which include:
4. Promoting Shakespeare, on the ground that he preserves an integrity of poetic vision which in the others is obfuscated by didacticism.
5. Promoting Milton, on the ground that his penetration of the highest mysteries of faith raises him above Shakespeare’s unvarying worldliness and Shelley’s callowness.
6. Promoting Shelley, on the ground that his love of freedom speaks to the heart of modern man more immediately than poets who accepted outworn […]
Etc., etc. (there are eight permutations in all). The ‘value’ words here, both positive and negative, are in effect mere synonyms for individual preferences. Evaluative criticism is rhetorical criticism: it adds nothing to knowledge; it simply adds to the history of taste. After all, when we say ‘Shakespeare is a genius’ we are joining a vast concurrence; but we are not quite stating a fact.
How good/great/important/major is Philip Larkin? Instinctively and not illogically we do bow, in these matters, to the verdict of Judge Time. Larkin died twenty-five years ago, and his reputation (after the wild fluctuation in the mid-1990s, to which we will return) looks increasingly secure. And we also feel, do we not, that originality is at least a symptom of creative worth. Larkin certainly felt so. In a letter of 1974 he quotes a remark by Clive James – ‘originality is not an ingredient of poetry, it is poetry’ – and adds, ‘I’ve been feeling that for years.’ Larkin’s originality is palpable. Many poets make us smile; how many poets make us laugh – or, in that curious phrase, ‘laugh out loud’ (as if there’s any other way of doing it)? Who else uses an essentially conversational idiom to achieve such a variety of emotional effects? Who else takes us, and takes us so often, from sunlit levity to mellifluous gloom? And let it be emphasised that Larkin is never ‘depressing’. Achieved art is quite incapable of lowering the spirits. If this were not so, each performance of King Lear would end in a Jonestown.
I said earlier that Larkin is easily memorised. Like originality, memorability is of course impossible to quantify. Yet in Larkin these two traits combine with a force that I have not seen duplicated elsewhere. His greatest stanzas, for all their unexpectedness, make you feel that a part of your mind was already prepared to receive them – was anxiously awaiting them. They seem ineluctable, or predestined. Larkin, often, is more than memorable. He is instantly unforgettable.
The following examples are chosen to suggest the variety of registers under Larkin’s command. From ‘Self’s the Man’, militant anti-romanticism:
He married a woman to stop her getting away
Now she’s there all day,
And the money he gets for wasting his life on work
She takes as her perk
To pay for the kiddies’ clobber and the drier
And the electric fire …
From ‘Aubade’, epigrammatic brilliance and truth:
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die …
/> From ‘The Trees’, an onomatopoeic prayer for renewal:
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
From ‘Toads Revisited’ (‘toad’ being Larkin’s metaphor for salaried employment), the grimmest and most plangent stoicism:
What else can I answer,
When the lights come on at four
At the end of another year?
Give me your arm, old toad;
Help me down Cemetery Road.
From ‘A Study of Reading Habits’, teenage fantasies of power and predation:
Later, with inch-thick specs,
Evil was just my lark:
Me and my cloak and fangs
Had ripping times in the dark.
The women I clubbed with sex!
I broke them up like meringues.
From ‘Livings, II’, an unusually modernist description – spondee-laden, with almost every syllable stressed – of a nightscape as seen by a lighthouse-keeper:
By night, snow swerves
(O loose moth world)
Through the stare travelling
Leather-black waters.
[…]
Lit shelved liners
Grope like mad worlds westward.
From ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, a feeling of epiphanic arrest, as the promise of young lives (or so the poet sees it) goes down the long slide to drudgery:
[…] We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.
Then, too, there are the lines that everyone knows and everyone automatically memorises. ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’, ‘Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three’, ‘Never such innocence again’, ‘And age, and then the only end of age’, ‘What will survive of us is love’. This is a voice that is part of our language.
It is important to understand that Philip Larkin is very far from being a poet’s poet: he is something much rarer than that. True, Auden was a known admirer of Larkin’s technique; and Eliot, early on, genially conceded, ‘Yes – he often makes words do what he wants.’ But the strong impression remains that the poets, in general, ‘demote’ Larkin on a number of grounds: provinciality, lack of ambition, a corpus both crabbed and cramped. Seamus Heaney’s misgivings are probably representative: Larkin is ‘daunted’ by both life and death; he is ‘antipoetic’ in spirit; he ‘demoralises the affirmative impulse’. Well, these preference-synonyms are more resonant than most, perhaps; but preference-synonyms they remain (still, Heaney is getting somewhere in ‘The Journey Back’, where the imagined Larkin describes himself as a ‘nine-to-five man who had seen poetry’). No: Larkin is not a poet’s poet. He is of course a people’s poet, which is what he would have wanted. But he is also, definingly, a novelist’s poet. It is the novelists who revere him.
Particularly in his longer poems, which resemble Victorian narrative paintings, Larkin is a scene-setting phrasemaker of the first echelon. What novelist, reading ‘Show Saturday’, could fail to covet ‘mugfaced middleaged wives/Glaring at jellies’ and ‘husbands on leave from the garden/Watchful as weasels’ and ‘cartuning curt-haired sons’? In ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ the fathers of the brides ‘had never known/Success so huge and wholly farcical’; in ‘To the Sea’, immersed in the ‘miniature gaiety’ of the English littoral, we hear ‘The distant bathers’ weak protesting trebles’ and ‘The small hushed waves’ repeated fresh collapse …’
Many poems, many individual stanzas, read like distilled short stories, as if quickened by the pressure of a larger story, a larger life. The funny and terrrifying ‘Mr Bleaney’ (a twenty-eight-line poem about the veteran inhabitant of a bedsit) has the amplitude of a novella. And Larkin’s gift for encapsulation is phenomenal. Admire this evocation, in ‘Livings, III’, of the erudite triviality of high-table talk in, as it might be, All Souls, Oxford – and Larkin does it in rhyme:
Which advowson looks the fairest,
What the wood from Snape will fetch,
Names for pudendum mulieris,
Why is Judas like Jack Ketch?
‘Livings, I’ begins: ‘I deal with farmers, things like dips and feed.’ And after a single pentameter the reader is lucidly present in another life.
Larkin began his career as an exceptionally precocious writer of fiction: he had two pale, promising (and actually very constricted) novels behind him, Jill and A Girl in Winter, by the age of twenty-five. Twenty-five, and two novels. The reason he gave for abandoning his third (to be called A New World Symphony) is, in my view, dumbfoundingly alien. Which brings us to the more fugitive and subliminal component of the fascination Larkin excites in all novelists and in all students of human nature. The poems are transparent (they need no mediation), yet they tantalise the reader with glimpses of an impenetrable self: so much yearning, so much debility; an eros that self-thwarts and self-finesses. This is what rivets us: the mystery story of Larkin’s soul.
Every serious devotee will have read, not only the Collected Poems (1988), but also Anthony Thwaite’s edition of the Selected Letters (1992) and Andrew Motion’s A Writer’s Life (1993). Thus, in our response to Larkin the man, there is a Before and there is an After.
The transition, if you recall, was prodigiously ugly and violent. It began with an attack by the poet Tom Paulin (in the correspondence columns of the Times Literary Supplement):
race hatred … racism, misogyny and quasi-fascist views … For the present, this selection [the Letters] stands as a distressing and in many ways revolting compilation which imperfectly reveals and conceals the sewer under the national monument Larkin became.
Here we see, up close, the fierce joys of self-righteousness. You will also notice how quaintly commissarial Paulin’s words now sound. For this there is a historical explanation. The Letters, and Motion’s disaffected Life, appeared during the high noon, the manly pomp, of the social ideology we call PC (aka Westernism, Relativism, and – best – Levellism). All ideologies are essentially bovine; and Paulin was simply the leader of the herd, which then duly stampeded.
Next, like a plodding illustration of the domino effect, came the business of ‘demotion’. ‘Essentially a minor poet,’ decided one literary air-sniffer. ‘He seems to me more and more minor,’ decided another. Yet another, in a piece nobly entitled ‘Larkin: the old friend I never liked’, suddenly spoke for many when he said that Larkin’s poems ‘are good – yes – but not that good, for Christ’s sake’. And so the trahison continued, slowly winding down as the ideology lost stamina. Its efforts were of course quite futile. Today, long After, Larkin is back to being what he was Before: Britain’s best-loved poet since World War II.
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.
‘Mr Bleaney’
Larkin’s life: he was wifeless and childless; he was a nine-to-five librarian, who lived for thirty years in a northern city that smelled of fish (Hull – the sister town of Grimsby). There were in all five lovers: the frail, bespectacled teenager, Ruth; the neurotic ‘poetess’, Patsy; the religious virgin, Maeve; the ‘loaf-haired secretary’, Betty (buoyant, matter-of-fact); and overspanning them all, the redoubtable Monica Jones. There were, after a while, no close friends: penpals, colleagues, acquaintances, but no close friends.
What follows is a personal assessment of Larkin’s character, and one that reflects a preoccupation that can fairly be described a
s lifelong. It began in the 1950s, when Larkin was an occasional houseguest at Glanmore Road, Uplands, Swansea. As I now see it, my parents teasingly mythologised Larkin as a paedophobe and skinflint: ‘Ooh, don’t go near him,’ my mother used to say, semiseriously. ‘He doesn’t like children. And he hates giving you your tip.’ My ‘tip’ consisted of three big black pennies; my older brother Philip – Larkin’s namesake and godson – got four. The poet unenergetically played his part (the doling out of the pennies was always a grim and priestly ritual). These rare visits continued; he came to Cambridge, London, Hertfordshire. Thinking back, I sense a large, grave, cumbrous yet mannerly figure – and someone distinctively solitary: unattached, unconnected.
I started to read him in my early twenties; we had some professional dealings (he reviewed the odd book for the Statesman, and I badgered him for poems); now and then we corresponded; and I spent about half a dozen evenings with him (and others). The closest we came to any kind of intimate exchange was at a drinks party in the late 1970s. We talked about his poem ‘Money’ (see below). Then I praised him for his courage in learning to drive and buying a car (no other poet I knew would ever go near a steering wheel). Then it went like this:
Philip Larkin Poems: Selected by Martin Amis Page 1
