Cultural Cohesion (7 page)

Times Literary Supplement
August 10, 1973;

later included in
At the Pillar of Hercules
, 1979

POSTSCRIPT

In a subsequent letter, John Bayley twitted me about the Redcoat andirons. He said that the image in its revised form was not hard to puzzle out. On reflection, I decided Bayley was right, but I still wondered whether the image was improved by being made a puzzle. (Tightened, or screwed? is always a good question to ask about a poet's emendation.) At the time, the main issue raised by Lowell's final barrage of poetry collections was a journalistic one: the legitimacy, or lack of it, of his quoting Elizabeth Hardwick's letters without permission. Only slowly did the discussion shift towards the lasting critical point, which was whether or not Lowell was engaged in the distortion of his own achievement by crushing it under a heap of busywork that it took a tenured scholar to care about. From the point of view of his British publishers (who were in the front line, because Lowell had shifted his base from New York to London), their accommodation to Lowell's latter-day prolificity was a disaster. Sales of the new books were negligible, and the blight eventually affected his back catalogue. The critic's duty was clear: to remind the educated reading public that this absurd attempt to build a pyramid single-handed from within, though it looked like the work of a mad pharaoh, was the aberration of a very talented man. The critic also had the duty to remind his more gullible colleagues that the talent was not attaining an apotheosis, but consuming itself before their eyes. What happened to Lowell in London was not the final development of his confessional poetry. It was the final development of his clinical dementia, a condition for which there had never been any legislating, although there had always been a romantic critical tendency to believe that the poetry would not have been possible without the madness. In that respect, distance lent enchantment to the view. Anyone who caught the merest glimpse of Lowell's solipsistic mania knew that it was more likely to produce boredom than creative freedom. Even at his craziest, Lowell seemed to realize that himself. At the peaks of his delusion, he thought that he was Hitler, not Shakespeare. The saddest thing about the
History
book was its encouragement of the notion that his early volumes might have been precursors to its development, and can thus be safely forgotten along with it. But they'll be back. Poetry of that order always comes back.

2003

4

FOUR ESSAYS ON
PHILIP LARKIN

1. Somewhere becoming rain

Collected Poems
by Philip Larkin,
edited by Anthony Thwaite

At first glance, the publication in the United States of Philip Larkin's
Collected Poems
looks like a long shot. While he lived, Larkin never crossed the Atlantic. Unlike some other British poets, he was genuinely indifferent to his American reputation. His bailiwick was England. Larkin was so English that he didn't even care much about Britain, and he rarely mentioned it. Even within England, he travelled little. He spent most of his adult life at the University of Hull, as its chief librarian. A trip to London was an event. When he was there, he resolutely declined to promote his reputation. He guarded it but would permit no hype.

Though Larkin's diffidence was partly a pose, his reticence was authentic. At no point did he announce that he had built a better mousetrap. The world had to prove it by beating a path to his door. The process took time, but was inexorable, and by now, only three years after his death, at the age of sixty-three, it has reached a kind of apotheosis. On the British best-seller lists, Larkin's
Collected Poems
was up there for months at a stretch, along with Stephen Hawking's
A Brief History of Time
and Salman Rushdie's
The Satanic Verses
. In Larkin's case, this extraordinary level of attention was reached without either general relativity's having to be reconciled with quantum mechanics or the Ayatollah Khomeini's being required to pronounce anathema. The evidence suggests that Larkin's poetry, from a standing start, gets to everyone capable of being got to. One's tender concern that it should survive the perilous journey across the sea is therefore perhaps misplaced. A mission like this might have no more need of a fighter escort than pollen on the wind.

The size of the volume is misleading. Its meticulous editor, Anthony Thwaite—himself a poet of high reputation—has included poems that Larkin finished but did not publish, and poems that he did not even finish. Though tactfully carried out, this editorial inclusiveness is not beyond cavil. What was elliptically concentrated has become more fully understandable, but whether Larkin benefits from being more fully understood is a poser. Eugenio Montale, in many ways a comparable figure, was, it might be recalled, properly afraid of what he called “too much light.”

During his lifetime, Larkin published only three mature collections of verse, and they were all as thin as blades.
The Less Deceived
(1955),
The Whitsun Weddings
(1964) and
High Windows
(1974) combined to a thickness barely half that of the
Collected Poems
. Larkin also published, in 1966, a new edition of his early, immature collection,
The North Ship
, which had first come out in 1945. He took care, by supplying the reissue with a deprecatory introduction, to keep it clearly separate from the poems that he regarded as being written in his own voice.

The voice was unmistakable. It made misery beautiful. One of Larkin's few even halfway carefree poems is “For Sidney Bechet,” from
The Whitsun Weddings
. Yet the impact that Larkin said Bechet made on him was exactly the impact that Larkin made on readers coming to him for the first time:

What made the paradox delicious was the scrupulousness of its expression. There could be no doubt that Larkin's outlook on life added up to an enormous no, but pessimism had been given a saving grace. Larkin described an England changing in ways he didn't like. He described himself ageing in ways he didn't like. The Empire had shrunk to a few islands, his personal history to a set of missed opportunities. Yet his desperate position, which ought logically to have been a licence for incoherence, was expressed with such linguistic fastidiousness on the one hand, and such lyrical enchantment on the other, that the question arose of whether he had not at least partly cultivated that view in order to get those results. Larkin once told an interviewer, “Deprivation for me is what daffodils were for Wordsworth.”

In the three essential volumes, the balanced triad of Larkin's achievement, all the poems are poised vibrantly in the force-field of tension between his profound personal hopelessness and the assured command of their carrying out. Perfectly designed, tightly integrated, making the feeling of falling apart fit together, they release, from their compressed but always strictly parsable syntax, sudden phrases of ravishing beauty, as the river in Dante's Paradise suggests by giving off sparks that light is what it is made of.

These irresistible fragments are everyone's way into Larkin's work. They are the first satisfaction his poetry offers. There are other and deeper satisfactions, but it was his quotability that gave Larkin the biggest cultural impact on the British reading public since Auden—and over a greater social range. Lines by Larkin are the common property of everyone in Britain who reads seriously at all—a state of affairs which has not obtained since the time of Tennyson. Phrases, whole lines and sometimes whole stanzas can be heard at the dinner table.

Drawn in by the subtle gravity beam of such bewitchment, the reader becomes involved for the rest of his life in Larkin's doomed but unfailingly dignified struggle to reconcile the golden light in the high windows with the endlessness it comes from. Larkin's sense of inadequacy, his fear of death are in every poem. His poems could not be more personal. But, equally, they could not be more universal. Seeing the world as the hungry and thirsty see food and drink, he describes it for the benefit of those who are at home in it, their senses dulled by satiation. The reader asks: How can a man who feels like this bear to live at all?

But the reader gets an answer: There are duties that annul nihilism, satisfactions beyond dissatisfaction, and, above all, the miracle of continuity. Larkin's own question about what life is worth if we have to lose it he answers with the contrary question, about what life would amount to if it didn't go on without us. Awkward at the seaside, ordinary people know better in their bones than the poet among his books:

Just as Larkin's resolutely prosaic organization of a poem is its passport to the poetic, so his insight into himself is his window on the world. He is the least solipsistic of artists. Unfortunately, this fact has now become less clear. Too much light has been shed. Of the poems previously unpublished in book form, a few are among his greatest achievements, many more one would not now want to be without, and all are good to have. But all the poems he didn't publish have been put in chronological order of composition along with those he did publish, instead of being given a separate section of their own. There is plenty of editorial apparatus to tell you how the original slim volumes were made up, but the strategic economy of their initial design has been lost.

All three of the original volumes start and end with the clean, dramatic decisiveness of a curtain going up and coming down again. The cast is not loitering in the auditorium beforehand. Nor is it to be found hanging out in the car park afterwards.
The Less Deceived
starts with “Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album,” which laments a lost love but with no confessions of the poet's personal inadequacy. It ends with “At Grass,” which is not about him but about horses: a bugle call at ­sunset.

Similarly,
The Whitsun Weddings
starts and ends without a mention of the author. The first poem, “Here,” is an induction into “the surprise of a large town” that sounds as if it might be Hull. No one who sounds as if he might be Larkin puts in an appearance. Instead, other people do, whose “removed lives/ Loneliness clarifies.” The last poem in the book, “An Arundel Tomb,” is an elegy written in a church crypt which is as sonorous as Gray's written in a churchyard, and no more petulant: that things pass is a fact made majestic, if not welcome.

As for
High Windows
, the last collection published while he was alive, it may contain, in “The Building,” his single most terror-stricken—and, indeed, terrifying—personal outcry against the intractable fact of death, but it begins and ends with the author well in the background. “To the Sea,” the opening poem, the one in which the white steamer so transfixingly gets stuck in the afternoon, is his most thoroughgoing celebration of the element that he said he would incorporate into his religion if he only had one: water. “The Explosion” closes the book with a heroic vision of dead coal miners which could be called a hymn to immortality if it did not come from a pen that devoted so much effort to pointing out that mortality really does mean what it says.

These two poems, “To the Sea” and “The Explosion,” which in
High Windows
are separated by the whole length of a short but weighty book, can be taken together as a case in point, because, as the chronological arrangement of the
Collected Poems
now reveals, they were written together, or almost. The first is dated October 1969, and the second is dated January 5, 1970. Between them in
High Windows
come poems dated anything from five years earlier to three years later. This is only one instance, unusually striking but typical rather than exceptional, of how Larkin moved poems around through compositional time so that they would make in emotional space the kind of sense he wanted, and not another kind. Though there were poems he left out of
The Less Deceived
, and put into
The Whitsun Weddings
, it would be overbold to assume that any poem, no matter how fully achieved, that he wrote before
High Windows
but did not publish in it would have found a context later—or even earlier if he had been less cautious. Anthony Thwaite goes some way towards assuming exactly that—or, at any rate, suggesting it—when he says that Larkin had been stung by early refusals and had later on repressed excellent poems even when his friends urged him to publish them. Some of these poems, as we now see, were indeed excellent, but if a man is so careful to arrange his works in a certain order it is probably wiser to assume that when he subtracts something he is adding to the arrangement.

Towards the end of his life, in the years after
High Windows
, Larkin famously dried up. Poems came seldom. Some of those that did come equalled his best, and “Aubade” was among his greatest. Larkin thought highly enough of it himself to send it out in pamphlet form to his friends and acquaintances, and they were quickly on the telephone to one another quoting phrases and lines from it. Soon it was stanzas, and in London there is at least one illustrious playwright who won't go home from a dinner party before he has found an excuse to recite the whole thing.

Had Larkin lived longer, there would eventually have had to be one more slim volume, even if slimmer than slim. But that any of the earlier suppressed poems would have gone into it seems very unlikely. The better they are, the better must have been his reasons for holding them back. Admittedly, the fact that he did not destroy them is some evidence that he was not averse to their being published after his death. As a seasoned campaigner for the preservation of British holograph manuscripts—he operated on the principle that papers bought by American universities were lost to civilization—he obviously thought that his own archive should be kept safe. But the question of
how
the suppressed poems should be published has now been answered: some other way than this. Arguments for how good they are miss the point, because it is not their weakness that is inimical to his total effect; it is their strength. There are hemistiches as riveting as anything he ever made public.