Learn To Glow Today

Upon Philip Larkin

The poet must deal with the world and the language as he finds it. His career must be a retort. A great poet only appears to forge his way alone because of the extent of his success at making this retort. What seems tall may sometimes seem isolated: this is a characteristic shared by Shakespeare and Everest. If we adjust our perspective, it will seem that a writer is forged by other writers: Eliot might be deemed the offspring of Baudelaire and Dante; Shakespeare of Marlowe and Ovid. But sometimes a figure receives such attention and praise that there is no way round him: he or she fills the sky. Every great poet is sublime in himself but a problem for others. We find a decline in the drama after Shakespeare, and the impossibility of an epic poem after Paradise Lost. The overused metaphor for this effect is the casting of the long shado. Perhaps another might suit better: each great poet consitutes an unanswerable retort.

The poetry of Philip Larkin is an answerable retort, and I hope to show why.

If Philip Larkin has literary parents they are Thomas Hardy and W.B Yeats. From the first he gets his pass to stoic melancholy; from the second he wins occasional access to transcendence.

The mixture was a potent one; with each passing year Larkin seems to sing the louder. His achievements are formidable. A Larkin poem is a dense and packed thing, full of hoarded delights the subtle presence of which ordinarily belie a melancholy music. It is also crammed with a yearning emotion. That this emotion is often overwhelmingly negative, flowing with strange fecundity out of a preoccupation with mortality one might have expected to be stifling, – shouldn't prevent one from seeing that the Larkin project is essentially an updating of romanticism in darker hues. His gifts were also technical: even to the ear becoming less and less accustomed to rhyme (part of the reason ours is not a rhyming generation is because Larkin appears to have stolen a lot of the best full rhymes for now), Larkin's rhyming is cunning enough to seem natural and only rarely impinges on what he has to say, and hardly seems to nudge the thing noticed out of shape, though it is in rhyming's nature to do so occasionally. His line is so resonant as to be instantly quotable. All good writers seem like the end of something as well as the beginning. With Larkin, who sings so much of last things, of light draning down the sky, and evenings coming in over the fields, this seems especially apt. There is not more to do, one feels, in this line. Larkin knew this; he was so successful with what he did say that he silenced even himself. His is a big clear ringing voice. How might one reply?

In fact, that is not all. Every resonant voice has its echoes. The generation now reaching middle-to-late phase have added aftervoices of admiration. These voices are part of the Larkin noise. Julian Barnes (literary parents: Flaubert and Ford Maddox Ford) corresponded with him and has something of his melancholy (see the splendid terrors of Nothing to be Frightened Of); Ian McEwan (literary parents: John Updike and Kafka) pays indirect homage to him with the fictional poet Grammaticus in Saturday; Martin Amis (Dickens and Nabokov) has written robust defences of his father's great friend; as has Clive James (Waugh and Orwell). Christopher Hitchens (Orwell and Trotsky) puts it like this in his memoir: "Our common admiration for Larkin, as a poet if not as a man, arose from the bleak honesty with which he confronted the fucked-up – the expression must be allowed - condition of the country in those years." Larkin, along with Heaney, is the only poet so far to pass definitely and (one suspects) lastingly into the canon in the last 50 years.

Eminence attracts a minuter criticism than mediocrity. After his death and the discovery of the letters, as well as the publication of Andrew Motion's biography, a controversy arose surrounding Larkin the man. Grim judgements ensued: the man was a poet, yes, but also a masturbator, quasi-fascist, a racist rightwinger and unapologetic Thatcherite. Hitchens sums up the charge against Larkin in milder language than was generally the case at the time: "Larkin's pungent loathing for the Left, for immigrants, for striking workers, for foreigners and indeed "abroad", and for London showed that you couldn't have everything." It is hard to disagree with this judgement but the debate turned shrill and some commentators – the ever-fiery Tom Paulin being the loudest countervoice – began to emote. Larkin-lovers came forward to defend, and did so brilliantly, with the calm reason of long love for the poems. In effect, what Larkin's defenders did was to separate the life from the poetry: anything morally deficient in the former was excused for the sake of the purity of the latter. There was almost something of the Cartesian fallacy about it all: mind was being separated from body.

These arguments have evaporated now; they were more about personalities than about literature and besides, poems, especially good poems, have a curious way of persisting: they exist in an untouchable plane of print where their only business is to insist on themselves. Larkin's poems have stayed in the memory. ‘This Be The Verse' and ‘Annus Mirabilis' are widely quoted; Larkin is ‘in the language'. And since such widespread love is so rare it must be difficult to acquire; and difficulty overcome suggests real achievement.

So the fact remains: here we have a very good, possibly great poet. And as I said before, when we have a poet, we also have a problem. Larkin doesn't need to be attacked; he needs to be dealt with, the next mood in poetry sought. We cannot out-Larkin Larkin and shouldn't try. But we do need to assimilate his achievement so that it doesn't colour whatever we might go onto achieve, and do so without recourse to ad hominem carping. We must also separate the virtues of this poetry from its shortcomings, and perhaps in doing so come to some understanding as to what is repeatable in him in some other guise, and also to decipher in him that which is now no longer possible, or even desirable.

Larkin's is an essentially coherent poetry, but in order to make it coherent he imposed certain limitations on it, and on his life. His is not an inclusive poetry, nor is it a poetry whose first tendency is to praise, as Heaney's is, as Yeats' was, and also as Milosz's was. With this in mind, it is with Milosz that I wish to begin:

Against the poetry of Philip Larkin

 

I learned to live with my despair,

And suddenly Philip Larkin's there,

Explaining why all life is hateful.

I don't see why I should be grateful.

It's hard enough to draw a breath

Without his hectoring about nothingness.

 

My dear Larkin, I understand

That death will not miss anyone.

But this is not a decent theme

For either an elegy or an ode.

 

This, a very late poem, is by no means Milosz at his best or most insightful. I am not sure if it rhymes in the Polish, but the rhymes as they have been translated feel clumsy. I think the word ‘miss' is ambiguous – does he mean miss as in pine for, or in terms of aim? But still, particularly in the way it gives the object of his criticism a certain sympathy in the last stanza, it seems to me a useful place to start as a means of looking past Larkin.

The point Milosz is making is a point Larkin himself would have acknowledged, and in fact did acknowledge with his special brand of kindly self-deprecation: "Please don't think me great," he once told an interviewer. Leaving aside the issue of greatness for a moment, Milosz is right to observe that Larkin is not among life's natural celebrants. It is true that he is capable of writing very beautiful nature poems (one thinks of ‘earth's immeasurable surprise' in ‘First Sight' and ‘afresh, afresh, afresh' in ‘The Trees') but a significant part of his work is expressive of a profound dissastisfaction with the way of things. We find that Larkin isn't happy with work, his room, his women, the fact that he will die, his life. This is from ‘Poetry of Departures' from The Less Deceived (1955):

 

We all hate home

And having to be there:

I detest my room,

Its specially-chosen junk,

The good books, the good bed...

Painting provides an analogy here of the poetry that Larkin is here refusing to allow himself. Van Gogh looked on his room, his chair, his bed with enough love to show it to us as if we were seeing a bedroom for the first time. Vermeer stuns us with a love of his Delft house, the chequered floors, the light streaming in through the window, the essential dignity of household tasks. Even Caravaggio's darkly-lit ‘Supper at Emmaus' is full of lovely renderings of fruit, bread, the things of daily life. In opposition to this, Larkin finds no poetry in where he is – rather, he finds poetry only in the thought that he might go elsewhere. Yet the moment he is elsewhere, he find unhappiness again:

Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home,

Strangeness made sense.

[‘The Importance of Elsewhere' 1955]

Larkin was once asked by an interviewer if he should like to Australia. Only if he could come back the same day, he replied. It is as if there is a non-specific unhappiness which is inescapable but which also renders him incapable of any appreciation for surfaces, textures, processes - the "thingness of the world" that so enchanted John Updike. Perhaps one might stop short of labelling this tendency, as Milosz does, ‘indecent', but  it may be that once one realizes its pervasiveness in Larkinland, one might begin to crave another kind of poetry than his – a poetry of affirmation and ectasy - much of the time.

Once one starts to detect this tendency in Larkin, this anti-lifeness, one sees it in almost every line he wrote. It is not that one becomes less grateful for the poetry; it is that one begins to see a way around it. The poet should not be disallowed from announcing his pessimism, of course. But range is important and it is what Larkin ostentatiously lacks. In this sense, Larkin is a miniaturist, and perhaps, something of a classicist: he is like a gloomy Chardin painting the same sort of of pictures over and over again. This is one of the reasons why the output is so small.

In short, the reader experiences weariness with Larkin's weariness. In the doggedness of his romanticism, he is to some extent an anti-Enlightenment poet. It is sometimes said that Aristotle was the last man to know everything there was to be known in his day. It may have been true that he did, but one might reasonably make the same observation about Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe and Joyce, before pausing to observe that in each case one is talking about the highest level of greatness. Nietzsche said of Goethe that he ‘aspired to totality' – and this aspiration, it might be added, is a significant ingredient in his greatness. None of the four writers I have mentioned are closed to anything; their apprehension goes out to join the world in all its variety. They are essentially gluttonous, essentially protean - controlled Fausts. Now, it may not be possible to achieve this ideal in the current age (one thinks of Augie March's complaint ‘This is an era of specialization and I am not a specialist'). But perhaps Larkin's poetry with its devout insistence that such a project is not possible or desirable, almost makes us question in a spirit of quiet contradiction, whether this really must be so. One might even point to the work of John Updike, taken as a whole, to be a (possibly flawed) attempt to travel with the roaming excitement of the other pre-twenty-first century masters I have named and begin to see evidence that the Larkin project is false.

So too might one remind oneself that Nabokov was a lepidopterist – but one would do so with a different emphasis. For if Larkin is anti-enlightenment in the general sense, then he is certainly specifically non-scientific. Again, it is important to realize what Larkin is abdicating here. Dante's La Commedia Divinia is planned with great precision according to the prevailing Ptolemaic view of the cosmos; Shakespeare has a botanist's and a naturalist's eye (and seems to have known everything); and Goethe wrote his Theory of Colour and a Theory of Metamorphosis of Plants both of which are of great interest to the scientist even now. In Larkin, we get a poem like this:

 

Ignorance

 

Strange to know nothing, never to be sure

Of what is true or right or real,

But forced to qualify or so I feel,

Or Well, it does seem so:

Someone must know.

 

Strange to be ignorant of the way things work:

Their skill at finding what they need,

Their sense of shape, and punctual spread of seed,

And willingness to change;

Yes, it is strange,

 

Even to wear such knowledge – for our flesh

Surrounds us with its own decisions –

And yet spend all our life on imprecisions,

Then when we start to die

Have no idea why.

 

I do not wish to labour my point or to deny this poem its beauty as a legitimate expression of bafflement about what Saul Bellow called ‘the ludicrousness of the position'. Also, I have always loved – and often quoted, unasked – the line ‘our flesh surrounds us with its own decisions'. However, what is striking about Larkin is that he never admits, or tries to imagine an opposite viewpoint to the one he has arrived at. This is his final word about the problem of knowledge. But I can well imagine a twin poem extolling all that we do know, and all that we are learning about the world and ourselves all the time. Had Larkin written such a poem, he might have sacrificed a certain measure of the Larkin coherence, but he would have been a larger man and a greater poet.

In Consilience, E.O. Wilson calls for a new enlightnement, based on a new contract between science and the humanities, a contract which reasserts the indivisibility of the two disciplines. Romanticism is what tugged the two apart in the first place, as exemplified by Keats' curious lines in ‘Lamia', beginning, ‘Philosophy [by which Keats meant ‘science'] will clip an angel's wings'. This attitude was Larkin's inheritance, and he accepted it unquestioningly. A poet writing today ought not be so hasty. Great poetry is inclusive; it seeks out strange things, it doesn't run away from what is difficult and is never long down in the mouth about life. It is full of an indiscriminate joy.

Larkin himself once observed in interview that such poets ‘get the medals'. Larkin gets bronze, or even silver, but he is not gold and gold is what we need.

About the Author

Christopher Jackson is a poet and journalist. He lives in London.

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