Cultural Cohesion (13 page)

Larkin, Davie insists, follows Hardy and not Yeats. “Larkin has testified to that effect repeatedly,” he announces, clinching the matter. Yeats's influence was “a youthful infatuation.” The ground is well laid for a thoroughgoing misunderstanding of Larkin on every level, and after a few backhanded compliments (“The narrowness of range . . . might seem to suggest that he cannot hear the weight of significance that I want to put on him, as the central figure in English poetry over the past twenty years”—narrowness of range as compared with whom? With people who write worse?) Davie buckles down to the task.

Hardy, we have already learnt, was neutral about industrialism because his technique mirrored it: his skill as a constructor implicated him. With Larkin it is otherwise. Larkin can feel free to hate industrialism because he has no special sense of himself as a technician: “The stanzaic and metrical symmetries which he mostly aims at are achieved skilfully enough, but with none of that bristling expertise of Hardy which sets itself, and surmounts, intricate technical challenge.”

By this stage of the book it is no longer surprising, just saddening, that Davie can't draw the appropriate inferences from his own choice of words. Being able to quell the bristle and find challenges other than the kind one sets oneself—isn't that the true skill? The awkward fact is that unless we talk about diction, and get down to the kind of elementary stylistic analysis which would show how Larkin borrowed Hardy's use of, say, hyphenated compounds, then it is pretty nearly impossible to trace Larkin's technical debt to Hardy. Not that Davie really tries. But apart from understandably not trying that, Davie clamorously doesn't try to find out about Larkin's technical debt to Yeats. And the inspiration for the big, matched stanzas of “The Whitsun Weddings” is not in Hardy's “intricacy” but in the rhetorical majesty of Yeats. In neglecting to deal with that inspiration, Davie limits his meaning of the word “technique” to something critically inapplicable. Technically, Larkin's heritage is a combination of Hardy and Yeats—it can't possibly be a substitution of the first by the second. The texture of Larkin's verse is all against any such notion.

Mistaking Larkin's way of working is a mere prelude to mistaking his manner of speaking, and some thunderous misreadings follow as a consequence. In Larkin, we are told, “there is to be no historical perspective, no measuring of present against past.” Applied to the author of “An Arundel Tomb,” this assertion reminds us of the old Stephen Potter ploy in which a reviewer selected the characteristic for which an author was most famous and then attacked him for not having enough of it.

According to Davie, Larkin is a Hardyesque poet mainly in the sense that he, too, “may have sold poetry short.” With Larkin established as such a baleful influence, the problem becomes how to “break out of the greyly constricting world of Larkin.” Davie enlists the poetry of Charles Tomlinson to help us do this, but it might have been more useful to linger awhile and ask if Larkin isn't already doing a good deal by himself to help us get clear of his dreary mire—by going on writing, that is, with the kind of intensity which lit up the gloom and made us notice him in the first place. Here again, and ruinously, Davie is dealing in every reality except the realities of art. He cannot or will not see that Larkin's grimness of spirit is not by itself the issue. The issue concerns the gratitude we feel for such a grimness of spirit producing such a beauty of utterance.

Near the end of the book, Davie draws a useful distinction between poets and prophets. The prophet is above being fair-minded: the poet is not. The poet helps to shape culture, with which the prophet is at war. Prophetic poetry is necessarily an inferior poetry.

To this last point one can think of exceptions, but generally all this is well said, and leaves the reader wondering why Davie did not then go back and find something centrally and vitally praiseworthy in the limitations of the Hardy tradition. Because it is the Hardy tradition which says that you can't be entirely confident of knowing everything that reality contains, let alone of transcending it. The Hardy tradition is one of a mortal scale. It does
not
hail the superhuman. As Larkin might put it, it isn't in the exaltation business. That is the real point which Davie has worriedly been half-making all along. In a striking way,
Thomas Hardy and British Poetry
is an eleventh-hour rejection of Davie's early gods. Somewhere in there among the dust and hubbub there is a roar of suction indicating that the air might soon be cleared.

IV.  
T
HE
N
ORTH
W
INDOW

“Wolves of Memory” from
Encounter
, June 1974
“Smaller and Clearer” from
New Statesman
, March
21, 1975
“Yeats
vs.
Hardy in Davie's Larkin” from
Times Literary Supplement
, July 13, 1973
“The North Window” from
Times Literary Supplement
, July
26, 1974
“Don Juan in Hull” later included in
At the Pillars of Hercules
, 1979

4.  An Affair of Sanity

Required Writing
by Philip Larkin

Every reviewer will say that
Required Writing
is required reading. To save the statement from blinding obviousness, it might be pointed out that whereas “required writing” is a bit of a pun—Larkin pretends that he wouldn't have written a word of critical prose if he hadn't been asked—there is nothing ambiguous about “required reading.” No outside agency requires you to read this book. The book requires that all by itself. It's just too good to miss.

Required Writing
tacitly makes the claim that it collects all of Larkin's fugitive prose, right down to the speeches he has delivered while wearing his Library Association tie. There is none of this that an admirer of his poems and novels would want to be without, and indeed at least one admirer could have stood a bit more of it. The short critical notices Larkin once wrote for the magazine
Listen
are, except for a single fragment, not here. As I remember them, they were characteristically jam-packed with judgements, observations and laconic wit.

If Larkin meant to avoid repetitiveness, he was being too modest: incapable of a stock response, he never quite repeats himself no matter how often he makes the same point. On the other hand there is at least one worrying presence. The inclusion, well warranted, of the prefaces to
Jill
and
The North Ship
can hardly mean that those books will be dropped from his list of achievements, but the inclusion of the long and marvellous introductory essay to
All What Jazz
, an essay that amounts to his most sustained attack on the modernist aesthetic, carries the depressing implication that the book itself, which never did much business, might be allowed to stay out of print. That would be a shame, because jazz is Larkin's first love and in the short notices collected in
All What Jazz
he gives his most unguarded and exultant endorsement of the kind of art he likes, along with his funniest and most irascible excoriation of the kind he doesn't.

Jazz is Larkin's first love and literature is his first duty. But even at the full stretch of his dignity he is still more likely to talk shop than to talk down, and anyway his conception of duty includes affection while going beyond it, so as well as an ample demonstration of his capacity to speak generally about writing, we are given, on every page of this collection, constant and heartening reminders that for this writer his fellow-writers, alive or dead, are human beings, not abstractions.

Human beings with all their quirks. Larkin proceeds as if he had heard of the biographical fallacy but decided to ignore it. “Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.” But he doesn't rule out the possibility that sanity can be hard won, from inner conflict. He has a way of bringing out the foibles of his fellow-artists while leaving their dignity at least intact and usually enhanced. To take his beloved Hardy as an example—and many other examples, from Francis Thompson to Wilfred Owen, would do as well—he convincingly traces the link between moral lassitude and poetic strength. This sympathetic knack must come from deep within Larkin's own nature, where diffidence and self-confidence reinforce each other: the personal diffidence of the stammerer whose childhood was agony, and the artistic self-confidence of the born poet who has always been able to feel his vocation as a living force.

The first principle of his critical attitude, which he applies to his own poetry even more rigorously than to anyone else's, is to trust nothing which does not spring from feeling. Auden, according to Larkin, killed his own poetry by going to America, where, having sacrificed the capacity to make art out of life, he tried to make art out of art instead.

It might be argued that if the Americanized Auden had written nothing else except “The Fall of Rome” then it would be enough to make this contention sound a trifle sweeping. It is still, however, an interesting contention, and all of a piece with Larkin's general beliefs about sticking close to home, which are only partly grounded in the old anguish of having to ask for a railway ticket by passing a note. He is not really as nervous about Abroad as all that: while forever warning us of the impossibility of mastering foreign languages, he has the right Latin and French tags ready when he needs them, and on his one and only trip to Germany, when he was picking up a prize, he favoured the locals with a suavely chosen quotation in their own tongue.

Lurking in double focus behind those thick specs is a star student who could have been scholarly over any range he chose. But what he chose was to narrow the field of vision: narrow it to deepen it. He isn't exactly telling us to Buy British, but there can be no doubt that he attaches little meaning to the idea of internationalism in the arts. All too vague, too unpindownable, too disrupting of the connections between literature and the life of the nation.

Betjeman was the young Larkin's idea of a modern poet because Betjeman, while thinking nothing of modern art, actually got in all the facts of modern life. Like all good critics Larkin quotes from a writer almost as creatively as the writer writes, and the way he quotes from
Summoned by Bells
traces Betjeman's power of evocation to its source, in memory. The Betjeman/Piper guidebooks, in which past and present were made contemporaneous through being observed by the same selectively loving eye, looked the way Larkin's poetry was later to sound—packed with clear images of a crumbling reality, a coherent framework in which England fell apart. An impulse to preserve which thrived on loss.