Arguably: Selected Essays (54 page)

This collection is an accidental success as a period piece. The Britain of the immediate postwar was in many ways even more austere and impoverished than the Britain of the Depression, with bad and scarce housing, for example, made very much worse by aerial bombardment. Larkin, who once told an interviewer that “deprivation is for me what daffodils were to Wordsworth,” found his poetic promptings in the overcrowded, overworked, underfed society that he so much purported to resent. Not only that, but his chosen career as a librarian led him to live in Belfast, Britain’s (and Ireland’s) most immiserated and forbidding city, at the cusp of the 1940s and ’50s. His political sympathies can scarcely have been Republican, but a description of an Orange Day rally is one of the best short evocations of massed boorish fanaticism I have ever read. “It was a parade of staggering dullness (every face wore the same ‘taking himself seriously’ expression) & stupefying hypocrisy.”

Indeed, those of the Terry Eagleton crew, who have become so righteously fixated on the later “revelations” of Larkin’s racism and xenophobia, might be surprised at the absence of jingoism and nastiness in these letters. He is very strict with Kipling’s excesses, for example, accusing him of betraying his talent in order to be a crowd-pleaser (“hunts with the pack”). Perhaps the uneasy memory of parental Nazism is too close, even though this makes it the more eerie to notice that he never, ever alludes to the then-recent horror of the Third Reich, either in these pages or any others. Alternative diagnoses include Motion’s opinion that he didn’t quite surrender to reactionary impulses until he became much older, and the high likelihood that much of what he did write in that vein was designed to amuse friends in private letters, by way of outraging the new forms of correctness. A thwarted and furtive sex-life, one may speculate, would have been no obstacle in the formation of a carapace of contempt for modernity and its hedonistic outriders.

And this returns us to the luckless Monica, whose possibly Aspergerish manners he strove in vain to correct. “I
do
want to urge you, with all love and kindness, to
think
about
how much
you say &
how
you say it …” Deploying—in a different but surely conscious declension—the most deadly word in the English vernacular, he warned her that “you’re getting a habit of
boring
your face up or around into the features of your listener.” That was in 1952, with almost thirty years of on-again off-again stretching before the pair of them. But he must have caught something of value in her opinions, because he took seriously her part-grammatical objection to line four of the closing stanza of
Church Going:
today perhaps his best-loved poem. Ought it to have been “And so much never can be obsolete,” instead of “that much”? Look and see. Even if, like me, you cannot imagine changing a word, you notice that she was a shrewd and attentive reader. (Here might be the place to say that Anthony Thwaite’s meticulous footnoting and cross-referencing have made this book much more capacious and lively than it might have been, as well as affording us a unique view of some of Larkin’s most lapidary poems when they were still fluid and in formation.)

Rising above the low-level rancor and tedium that can make the scrutiny of private
anomie
so lowering to the spirit,
Letters to Monica
obliquely shows the civilizing effect that even the most trying woman can exert on even the most impossible man. With the exception of the occasional rather weak joke in passing, Larkin respected Miss Jones too much, it seems, to try any of his vulgar prejudices or cheaper doggerel on her. Most impressive of all, I found, was that even his anti-libidinous propaganda could yield its warm and poetic aspect. Take this stern epistle from 1951:

I think—though I am all for free love, advanced schools & so on—someone might do a little research

on some of the
inherent qualities
of sex—its
cruelty
, its
bullyingness
, for instance. It seems to me

that
bending someone else to your will
is the very stuff of sex, by force or neglect if you are male,

by spitefulness or nagging or scenes if you are female. And what’s more, both sides
would sooner

have it that way than not at all
. I wouldn’t.

Such an ostensibly repressive and limited view, with its unimaginative image of “both sides,” had been given the most starkly beautiful expression by a poem that Larkin wrote the preceding year.
Deceptions
, suggested by a harrowing anecdote of forced prostitution from Henry Mayhew’s history of the London poor, implicitly vindicated the ruined female victim by pleading indirectly that her foul client was also a pathetic loser and that she, the innocent sufferer, might even turn out to have been “the less deceived.” He by no means omitted to picture the raw, latent violence of her own trauma. (“All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.”) Gem hard, it is also an immediately striking piece of imaginative sympathy. Reviewing it, D. J. Enright gave Larkin a rare moment of (almost) unmixed pleasure by saying, as he proudly reported to Monica, that “I persuade words into poetry & don’t bully them.” A critic could not have approached more nearly to the core of Larkin’s gift.

It is inescapable that we should wonder how and why poetry manages to transmute the dross of existence into magic or gold, and the contrast in Larkin’s case is a specially acute one. Having quit Belfast he removed himself forever to Hull, a rugged coastal city facing toward Scandinavia which may once have been represented in Parliament by Andrew Marvell but which in point of warmth and amenity runs Belfast pretty close. Here he brooded biliously and even spitefully on lack of privacy, the success of his happier friends Amis and Conquest, the decline of standards at the university he served, the general bloodiness of pub lunches and academic sherry-parties, the frumpy manipulativeness of womenfolk, and the petrifying imminence of death. (Might one say that Hull was other people?) He may have taken a sidelong swipe at the daffodils, but he did evolve his own sour strain and syncopation of Wordsworth’s “still, sad music of humanity.” And without that synthesis of gloom and
angst
we could never have had his
Aubade
, a waking meditation on extinction that unstrenuously contrives a tense, brilliant counterpoise between the stoic philosophy of Lucretius and David Hume, and his own frank terror of oblivion. Many of Larkin’s expeditions to churches were in fact an excuse to visit cemeteries or memorials in spite of his repudiation of the fantasy of immortality, and with another of the finest poetic results of these—
An Arundel Tomb
—it turns out he had taken Monica as a companion and later accepted some of her thoughtful proposals concerning its final form. We might agree to find it heartening that, in consequence of a dead-average Middle-England Sunday stroll, as the other half of an almost passionless relationship, Philip Larkin should notice the awkwardly conjoined couple on an ancient stone coffin-lid and, without forcing let alone bullying the language, still tentatively be able to find:

Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

(
The Atlantic
, May 2011)

Stephen Spender:
A Nice Bloody Fool
²⁹

O
NE OF THE EARLY POEMS with which Stephen Spender made his name opens like this: “My parents kept me from children who were rough.”

In 1957, in
The Sense of Movement
, Thom Gunn proclaimed: “I praise the overdogs from Alexander / To those who would not play with Stephen Spender.”

Not long afterward two distinguished Englishmen of letters decided that “Stephen” had earned his very own limerick, and wrote,

Then up spake the bold Stephen Spender
“You may think my
conscience
is tender.
You might think my
heart
Was my sensitive part—
But you should see my poor old
pudenda.”

In a long life Spender never quite succeeded in overcoming the widespread impression (which he may have privately shared) that there was something vaguely preposterous about him. His official biographer, John Sutherland, perhaps unwittingly and certainly unwillingly, provides armfuls of ammunition for this view. He does not cite either of the cracks I have just mentioned, but he does give the passage below, taken from Spender’s memoir
World Within World
. In 1930 T. S. Eliot had decided to publish four of the young man’s poems in the
Criterion
, and furthermore invited him to lunch.

At our first luncheon he asked me what I wanted to do. I said: “Be a poet.” “I can understand you wanting to write poems, but I don’t quite know what you mean by ‘being a poet,’ ” he objected.

I think this is quite funny on its own, but additionally so because it inverts what ought to be the proper Jamesian scenario—the stuffy English don admonishing the brash young American student. Be that as it may, Stephen Spender was to pass a great deal more of his life “being a poet” than he ever did writing poetry.

The thought lay about him in his infancy (which was marked by an awful father, a frightful elder brother, and a hideous torment of a boarding school education—so far, “on track” for English writing). At the age of nine he went to the Lake District on a family holiday and was exposed to “the simple ballad poems of Wordsworth,” which, as he further phrased it, “dropped into my mind like cool pebbles, so shining and so pure, and they brought with them the atmosphere of rain and sunsets, and a sense of the sacred cloaked vocation of the poet.” He was already, in other words, what Byron witheringly called “a Laker.” An early school poem sustains the same note of moist wonderment about the weather, yearning for the spring in Devonshire but opening, “The rain drops from the mist endless and slow / The trees are bare and black …”

This culminates in the line “O God! … would I were there.” Sutherland misses a trick, I think, in failing to point out the obvious debt to Rupert Brooke and his
Grantchester
, inspiration of drooping and sensitive versifiers at that time and since. (Ten years later Geoffrey Grigson was dryly to say, in reviewing Spender’s book
The Destructive Element
, “Stephen Spender is the Rupert Brooke of the Depression.”)

Indeed, it was above all the sense of an epoch, and of a decade, that allowed Spender to get away with “being a poet.” Crucial to this image were his friendships from Oxford days with W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Christopher Isherwood, and Cecil Day-Lewis. This cabal provoked Roy Campbell’s joke about the “MacSpaunday” school: a joke that was a source of embarrassment (and rage, given Campbell’s open sympathy for fascism) while simultaneously furnishing a near guarantee of immortality.

Among this book’s assembly of sometimes very striking unpublished photographs is a shot of Spender, Auden, and Isherwood on the beach at Fire Island in 1947. Spender stands commandingly erect in the center, with his arms around the shoulders of his two much shorter comrades. There would be no doubt in the mind of the untutored as to which of them was the senior (the photo is presumably from Spender’s private trove). And yet, as Sutherland shows very skillfully, it was Auden who was the literary boss from the beginning, and Isherwood (sometimes with Auden, and sometimes without) who was the sexually tougher and more resourceful one. Auden demonstrated his mastery from the very first, demanding to know of Spender how often he wrote poetry.

Without reflecting, I replied that I wrote about four poems a day. He was astonished and exclaimed: “What energy!” I asked him how often he wrote a poem. He replied: “I write about one in three weeks.” After this I started writing only one poem in three weeks.

So silly. Up until then, of course, Spender had been so impressed at attending the same Oxford college as Shelley that he had felt compelled to adopt yet another poetic pose: that of the agonized and alienated young dreamer.

Anyone who has seen
Cabaret
can read several of the succeeding chapters at speed. The three men pursued boys of various sorts and conditions (usually proletarian) all over Berlin and over much of Germany and Austria as well. (Auden ended up with a painful rectal fissure, which led him to write his wince-makingly titled
Letter to a Wound
.) They seem to have done most of it on borrowed money or on tiny publishing advances. Orwell’s vicious remark, about the “nancy poets” who spent on sodomy what they had gained by sponging, was barely a match for the amazing narcissism revealed in these pages. However (and as Orwell was later to ruefully admit), there was a core of principle involved. Spender could feel fascism coming on, and was appalled by the premonitory symptoms of it. He may have made a complete fool of himself by going briefly to Spain. (The leader of the British Communist Party, the cynical Harry Pollitt, probably did say that he thought Spender’s only usefulness would be to die the death of a Byronic martyr: another potential poetic “character” for him to have adopted, had he been less prudent than he was.) Spender may have written a fatuous book titled
Forward from Liberalism
, which among other things defended Stalin’s show trials. But beneath all this playacting and conceit and gullibility was a pith of seriousness.