The University of Hull
2010/2011 Public Lecture Series
‘ Philip Larkin, Life or Art’
The University of Hull’s Larkin 25 Lecture
Date: Monday 22 November 2010, 6pm
Venue: Middleton Hall, Campus, Hull
Speaker: Professor James Booth
Duration:
0:54:24
START AUDIO
Announcer:
Welcome to the fourth lecture in the University of Hull’s Larkin 25
series of podcasts; ‘Philip Larkin, Life or Art’, given by Professor
James Booth from the University’s Department of English.
Prof James Booth: ‘Philip Larkin, Life or Art’; Aristotle, as we all know, wrote that art
imitates life and this is a pretty solid commonsensical way of
looking at it. The poet lives and the incidence of his or her life give
the occasions for the poems; a visit to a cathedral, falling in love,
the death of a loved one.
However there is also the hardcore decadent version. This comes
in two variants. In the first, and the more familiar of these, the poet
lives deliberately or subconsciously in accordance with an artistic
myth. In extreme cases the myth dictates the literal events of the
life. Byron invents himself as a cursed glamorous hero in his
writings and to prove the point throws his life away fighting for a
romantic cause in Greece.
Sylvia Plath, with a deliberation that shocked Larkin, dictated the
myth of her victimhood at the hands of Ted Hughes; “There is a
panther stalks me down, one day I’ll have my death of him.” She
then lived out this myth by committing suicide when Hughes
deserted her. Byron and Plath, if you like, paid with their lives for
their self-image as artists.
WB Yeats did not go to that extreme but he did see the artist as
fundamentally abnormal, antisocial, as we’ve just heard. And David
anticipated, uncannily I think, several of the elements of my talk
here. But as we’ve just heard “The intellect of man is forced to
choose perfection of the life or of the work. And if it take the
second, must refuse a heavenly mansion raging in the dark.”
The artist, like a Christian saint, a kind of anti-saint perhaps,
renounces the rules and decorums of ordinary life in order to
achieve the perfection of art. In Yeats’s dramatic phrase “The poet
rages in the dark” while others fulfil their social commitments and
take the road to their heavenly mansions.
Following his own principles Yeats made his life into the glamorous
myth of a sage in a tower, buying himself ‘Thoor Ballylee’ and then
writing his poems in the symbolic isolation of this tower.
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This is no simple matter of metaphorical art versus literal life. ‘Thoor
Ballylee’ is both literal and a symbol. The process of living involves
a continual metaphorical transfer between literal and figurative,
concrete and abstract. We’re all literally here in the Middleton Hall
but what makes sense to each individual one of us of being here
will be something profoundly subjective and imaginative in each
one of our heads.
In TS Elliots’ words you can hardly say where the metaphorical and
literal meet. Christopher Ricks adds: “The concept of the literal is
itself stubbornly resistant to clarification.” Although we use the word
all the time and we think we know what it means, don’t we?
Larkin’s poetry is distinctive for teasing intense figurative meaning
from literal description. Instead of metaphor “My love is like a red
red rose”, “The evening spread out against the sky like a patient
etherised upon a table”, he prefers metonym, a description of reality
which suggests some larger, more abstract concept. That vase
representing the sadness of home, a glimpse from a train of
someone running up to bowl invoking transience.
Since there is nothing which is purely literal, the more innocently
real an image the greater perhaps is its metaphorical potential.
Someone running up to bowl, though an empirical visual
observation, is a more highly charged metaphor than the familiar
comparison of one’s love to a rose.
In his last great poem ‘Aubade’, Larkin experiences his final
epiphany as the light of dawn gradually fills his room. This
revelation takes the form of a wardrobe; “It stands plain as a
wardrobe what we know.” A wardrobe is, of course, a man sized
wooden box. Get it?
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Is this an image from life or from art? It is, of course, just a
wardrobe and he sees it. You could make a very lame image out of
it but obviously it resonates. Is it excruciatingly literal or is it equally
excruciatingly a really subtle metaphor?
Larkin too had his towers like Yeats, vantage points from which he
viewed life at a safe or perhaps an unsafe distance. Frequently they
take the form of a bohemian attic or garret. In January 1946 at the
age of 23 he moved into new lodgings in Wellington, Shropshire
and found that his window faced east towards the rising son.
As the days lengthened he was woken earlier and earlier in the
morning. The impact of this experience went deep. In many of his
poems a light-filled room figures as the sight of a revelation, either
an epiphany of transcendent or, as in ‘Dry Point’ or Livings II’, the
lighthouse keeper poem or of less deceived reality and
disappointment of tragedy as in ‘Deceptions’ or, as we’ve just seen,
in ‘Aubade’.
Another tower was provided by the new rooms in Belfast into which
Larkin moved five years later in 1951. “Romantic attics and
delightful they are”, he wrote to his friend Winifred Arnott. Here he
would be able to write his poems and play his records of jazz and of
Monteverdi. He was into Monteverdi even at that stage
interestingly.
And here also he wrote his poem ‘Best Society’ alluding to Eve’s
words as she leaves Adam in Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, ‘For solitude
is sometimes best society.’
Our virtues, he complains, are all social and consequently he
makes his choice for antisocial vice. “Viciously then I lock my door,
the gas fire breathes, the wind outside ushers in evening rain. Once
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more uncontradicting solitude supports me on its giant palm. And
like a sea anemone or simple snail there cautiously unfolds
emerges what I am.”
No heavenly mansion of social responsibility and virtue here for
Larkin, “Viciously then I lock my door” and what goes on behind
that locked door is his own business. He finds himself.
When he moved to Hull four years later in 1955, Larkin found
himself eventually in the top floor flat of 32 Pearson Park with its
view of the “Deep blue air that shows nothing and is nowhere and is
endless.”
His new post also required him to build his own tower, this must
have seemed quite delightful to the young poet and I’m sure he saw
what was happening and relished the peculiar interaction between
literal and metaphorical. He was charged with building a new
library.
The eminent Viennese sculpture, [?? 0:08:34] was to decorate the
building and many of us here will be familiar with his images above
the two library entrances. In 1959 Larkin wrote to Judy [Edgerton
0:08:44] “I quite like his owl, I wish I felt so sure about his genius of
light, an abstract figure bearing a torch that is already scrawled in
rough over the front door.”
The figure, as many of you will know, puns the name of the
university’s founder, Thomas Ferens. Ferens in Latin means
bearing of carrying hence the University’s motto ‘Lampada ferens’,
bearing the lamp. Larkin always appreciated a good or, as here,
preferably a bad pun.
5
The original bearer of light, Lucifer, even more sinful than Eve, of
course, also rejected a heavenly mansion for the sake of something
more imaginatively interesting.
So for the whole of his mature life the poet-librarian entered his
place of work, which eventually became the tower of light we now
see, through the door beneath this light bearing figure. As the
library expanded over time and adopted new technology and as
Larkin became ever more deaf, he felt more and more isolated in
the metaphorical retreat he had created for himself.
In his symbolist poem, ‘Livings II’, written in 1971 the metaphor for
his work is, instead of a toad, a lighthouse keeper’s lonely
dedication to his lamp. And in this case, this is one of his poems
and he did write plenty of them actually which do you pretty
vertiginous metaphor proper, librarian Larkin sitting in his library
there is like a lighthouse keeper – make the simile out of it – in a
tower above the slavering suds of the sea.
Well, “My love is like a red, red, rose”, she’s got pillar box red
cheeks has she? No, you know, it’s that kind of metaphor, it’s an
emotional leap that one needs to swallow whole. But it’s there and I
think no one can deny it must have something to do with where and
how Larkin was working at the time.
’”Seventy feet down the sea explodes upwards relapsing to slaver
off landing stage steps, running suds rejoice. Barometers falling,
ports wind-shuttered, fleets pent like hounds, fires in humped inns
kippering sea pictures, keep it all off. By night snow swerves oh
loose moth world through the stair travelling leather black waters.
Guarded by brilliance I set plate and spoon and after divining cards.
Lit shelved liners grope like mad worlds westwards.”
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Larkin admired a houseman for the narrow yet unforgettable
metaphor he made of his own life. Here he makes a narrow
metaphor of librarian ship. The practical chore of tending the lamp
simplifies the speaker’s life to its essentials. He prefers his
satisfyingly uncomfortable tower to the sociable cosy inns of
warmth on the mainland with a leisure enjoyed by those without his
antisocial vocation, “Keep it all off.”
This innocuous Lucifer, guarded by brilliance, sits down in sullen
isolation to pass the time with his divining cards. In literal terms
perhaps library committee minutes or, more cynically perhaps, even
his poetry.
But let us return to the beginning. On the 7th of April 1946, when I
was exactly one year and one day old, a 23-year-old Philip Larkin
wrote to his friend James Sutton. “In my character there is an
antipathy between ‘art’ and ‘life’” – he puts them in inverted
commas, already he’s not quite sure about how you’re supposed to
take the words. You know, are they literal, are they metaphorical?
“In my character I find there’s an antipathy between ‘art’ and ‘life’. I
find that once I give in to another person there is a slackening and
dulling of the peculiar artistic fibres that makes it impossible to
achieve that mental clenching that crystallises a pattern and keeps
it still while you draw it.” As Sutton, to whom he’s writing, was an
artist so they often use artistic metaphors.
“This letting in of a second person spells death to perception and
the desire to express as well as the ability. Time and time again I
feel that before I write anything else at all I must drag myself out of
the water, shake myself dry and sit down on a lonely rock to
contemplate glittering loneliness. Marriage, of course, since you
mentioned marriage, is impossible if one wants to do this.”
7
Like Milton’s feminist Eve, in order to see the world clearly he
needs to be free from the constraints of domesticity. At this point
the young poet was entangled in his first relationship with Ruth
Bowman whom he’d met two-and-a-half years earlier when he’d
moved from Oxford to the library in Wellington in Shropshire. She’d
then been a 16-year-old schoolgirl and he’d just turned 21.
As things developed, of course, she naturally wanted him to marry
her. He, or part of him, certainly wanted to marry her. DH Lawrence
was a greater hero to Lark than Yeats and Lawrence was full of
contempt for artists who prefer art to life. Lawrence demands that
the reader join him in the thick of the scrimmage.
Larkin wrote to his school friend Jim Sutton how catching sight of
‘Sons and Lovers’ on his bookshelf he felt he could see the book
breathing slightly. So he was somewhat in awe of this organic life
affirming principle that Lawrence represented. Throughout his youth
he strained to achieve a Lawrencian commitment to life.
Now in September 1946, just as he left Wellington for a new post in
Leicester University College and things obviously became rather
intense with Ruth, he wrote ‘Wedding Wind’ dramatising the
ecstatic joy of a newly married farmer’s wife in terms which suggest
the [?? 0:15:26] women at the beginning of the rainbow.
Perhaps this poetic therapy would persuade him into action. The
woman in the poem has lain overwhelmed by happiness through
her windblown wedding night while her husband attended to the
frightened horses. “Now in the day all’s ravelled under the sun by
the winds blowing. He has gone to look at the floods and I carry a
chipped pail to the chicken run, set it down and stare. All is the wind
hunting through clouds and forests, thrashing my apron and the
hanging cloths on the line.”
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“Can it be born this bodying forth by wind of joy my actions turn on,
like a thread carrying beads? Shall I be let to sleep now this
perpetual morning shares my bed. Can even death dry up these
newly delighted lakes, conclude our kneeling as cattle by all
generous waters.”
Now that perpetual morning shares her bed death seems
impossibility. No wardrobes here.
The poem became a key work in Larkin’s construction of his mature
oeuvre. It’s the only one of that important early group of his poems
in which he adopts a woman’s voice which survives into his mature
oeuvre, he kept it until ‘The Less Deceived’ and put it in. That’s by
far the earliest poem in ‘The Less Deceived’ and obviously it meant
a lot to him.
And in a sense it is his first originative poem. Appropriately enough,
in view of the way his oeuvre was to conclude it is an ‘Aubade’, a
song greeting the dawn.
As an impersonal work of art the poem retains its perfection. As
therapy, however, it misfired miserably. Within days Ruth told him
that she might be pregnant. Dismayed, Larkin at once wrote a very
different ‘Aubade’.
In at the chiming of light upon sleep a male speaker cowers in his
bed in fear of the morning and more than morning which floods into
his room. He had been dreaming of a clenched evergreen world of
frost and unchanging holly. Now the light and warmth of morning
provoked procreative desire and pitch him into the cycle of nature.
He’s compelled to fulfil his biological destiny and expend himself.
From spring blossom comes fruit and with fruit comes decay. Love,
which is merely death’s harbinger, hangs everywhere its light and
9
he can’t escape it. With a wild pun on his failure to use a condom
he sees himself repeating the original sin of Adam. In this one
poem it’s almost unique I think, he gets the sin, vice, virtue
antagonism the other way around, antithesis the wrong way round.
“Unsheaf the life you carry and die cries the cock on the crest of the
sun. Unlock the words and seeds that drove Adam out of his
undeciduous grove.” It’s not a very good poem, it’s got a lot of
apocalyptic kind of language in it, very different from ‘Wedding
Wind’. He’s unsheathed his life in sex, spent his seed and his
wages are death.
In the event, after three more years of havering and accusing
himself of being a Willy wet leg, Larkin the artist made his choice.
He escaped to a job in Belfast across the Irish sea. He might be
able to create beautiful art out of a vision of marriage but as an
artist he could not himself make such a commitment to life.
As he wrote to Jim Sutton before setting out to Ireland, “Despite
my fine feelings, when it really comes down to terms of furniture
and loans from the bank something unmeltable and immovable
rises up in me, something infantile, cowardly, regressive. But it
won’t be conquered, I’m a romantic bastard. Remote things seem
desirable, bring them close and I start shitting myself.” “Remote
things seem desirable, bring them close and I start shitting myself.”
The time honoured manoeuvre by which male poets – this sounds
gendered, I’m not sure it is, I think Sylvia Plath’s problem was that
she married her muse. Had she kept Ted Hughes as a muse with
the respectable distance then it might have worked. But anyway,
the time honoured manoeuvre is, of course, the muse relationship.
10
Here one parks one’s life out of the way in order to concentrate on
art, mythifying one’s possible sexual partner, one’s life commitment
into an abstract muse which doesn’t cause nearly so much trouble.
Dante saw Beatrice for the first time when he was nine and she
eight. He was instantly taken with her and she remained his muse
after both she and he had married others and after she had died at
the age of 24.
Petrarch’s Laura was already married to someone else when the
poet first saw her and his passion for her was not one of carnal
desire and pursuit but of ideal inspiration though in Petrarch’s case,
as in Larkin’s I think, there is an ambiguity between Eros and agape
if you like.
Neither Ruth nor Monica Jones, whom Larkin met in Leicester and
who was his lover for 36 years, could possibly have been his muse.
His relationships with them lacked the essential difference. They
represented wives or entanglements. If you’ve been reading the
‘Letters to Monica’ you’ll see this isn’t in any sense an ideal muse
relationship and wasn’t even from the very start, although it’s
extremely intense and close as we’ll see.
Winifred Arnott, however, was most certainly a muse. Shortly after
his move to Belfast Larkin’s eye was caught by this 21-year-old
Library assistant. Nothing developed between them beyond a
casual friendship but for this very reason this is one of the most
poetically happy of all his relationships.
Winifred recollected later “He was a working colleague, seven
years older than me, already balding. I was 21, I didn’t think of him
like that.” Here’s the difference between the muse and the poet, it’s
11
vertiginous, you go from one to the other. There’s almost no
connection.
In ‘Latest Face’, written in February 1951, Larkin wrote with
Winifred in mind, the purest muse poem in his work. “Latest face,
so effortless your great arrival at my eyes. No one standing near
could guess your beauty had no home til then.” Very egocentric the
poet confronted with the muse, the muse his own creation really.
“Latest face, so effortless your great arrival at my eyes. No one
standing near could guess your beauty had no home til then.
Precious vagrant, recognise my look and do not turn again. Admirer
and admired embrace on a useless level where I contain your
current grace, you my judgement. Yet to move into real untidy air
brings no lasting attribute, bargains, suffering and love, not this
always planned salute.”
Despite the fact that he wrote Winifred’s name over and over again
on the draft this is an utterly dispassionate poem. The “vagrant
face” is not personalised and imposes no demands or obligations.
This “always planned salute” is precious precisely because it is
useful, it will have no issue.
Indeed the poet is fearful of what might ensue should “the statue of
your beauty walk”, springing to life like Pygmalion’s perfect statue.
He has no desire to pursue or to possess, he doesn’t want to wade
behind the face’s owner into the “real untidy air of bargains,
suffering and love.”
Here Larkin gives a different twist, but perhaps equally familiar, to
Yeats’s choice. This artist chooses, not between perfection of the
work and perfection of the life, but between the perfection of art and
the untidy imperfection of life. As in Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’
12
heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter.
Consummation would only bring disappointment.
When Winifred increased her muse inaccessibility by becoming to
someone else at the end of 1952 Larkin became a whole lot more
affectionate as she recalls, writing his great early masterpiece,
‘Lines of a Young Lady’s Photograph Album’. But real women, from
Dante’s Beatrice to Don Quixote’s Dulcinea del Toboso, have no
interest in their muse status. Muses exist only in the eyes of poets.
As she wrote later, she was too preoccupied with preparations for
her wedding to be bothered with the poems he sent her. “I felt ‘Oh
what a bore, I don’t want any more of this, I’ve left him behind’.” He
had chosen art, she had chosen life. A choice which, of course,
she’s never regretted.
In 1959 both Monica Jones’s parents died within a short period
leaving her inconsolable. Larkin’s misery at not being able to help
her in her distress is reflected in his greatest direct love poem. He
wrote a lot of indirect love poems, if one wants to interpret them in
that way, with Monica in mind but this one, I think, is pretty direct,
‘Talking in Bed’. It’s at the furthest remove possible from a muse
poem.
“Talking in bed ought to be easiest. Lying together there goes back
so far, an emblem of two people being honest. Yet more and more
time passes silently. Outside the wind’s incomplete unrest builds
and disperses clouds about the sky and dark towns heap up on the
horizon. None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why at this
unique distance from isolation it becomes still more difficult to find
words at once true and kind or not untrue and not unkind.”
13
As in the case of ‘Wedding Wind’, any potential therapy intended by
this great poem was totally ineffective. As art it is perfect, as life it is
useless. As Larkin’s other great model, Auden, famously wrote,
“Poetry makes nothing happen.”
Monica’s desolate grief traumatised the poet and left him with an
unshakeable lifelong loyalty to her which would last the duration,
however wearing and joyless their intimacy might and did ultimately
become. He says it explicitly in several letters. This was a turning
point in their relationship, he was committed but it didn’t have the
[allow 0:28:02] of the relationship with, say, Winifred.
In the following year, 1960, Philip found himself attracted by the
ingenuous joie de vivre of a young colleague he was coaching for
her librarianship examinations, Maeve Brennan. Maeve, Larkin’s
coy Hull mistress, was a perfect muse, innocent and inaccessible.
She lived with her parents and held to strict Catholic principles,
particularly when it came to pre-marital sex.
The key to their love was a total cross-purpose. She offered him the
perpetual insipience of unconsummated longing, remote things
seem desirable. He offered her a flattering, if somewhat overlong
courtship, which she expected to end in the sacrament of marriage.
And she carried on expecting this year after year after year.
She misinterpreted his aestheticism, if you like, as a spirituality
similar to her Catholic theological spirituality. It was, if you like, a
tale of two narcisms, that of the poet perfecting his art and that of
the feminine ego craving attention.
The poetic result of this relationship was broadcast occasioned by
Maeve’s attendance at a concert at the Hull City Hall in November
1961 to which Larkin listened live on the radio. “I think of your face
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among all those faces, beautiful and devout, before cascades of
monumental slithering. One of your gloves unnoticed on the floor
beside those new slightly outmoded shoes. Here it goes quickly
dark. Behind the glowing wavebands rabid storms of chording, by
being distant overpower my mind.”
He called ‘Broadcast’ “About as near as I get to a love poem. It’s
not, I’m afraid, very near.” And his relationship with Maeve did
indeed depend on him not getting too near. He seems to be
signalling this somehow in what he says about it.
What most excites the poet is their separation; she in the concert
hall hearing the music, he listening to the radio picturing her latest
face in his mind. The orchestra’s chords overpower his mind, not
through their sound but by being distant… by being distant. Remote
things seem desirable.
Her hands in the concert hall, tiny in all that air, applauding, come
to him on the air through his radio, not the “real untidy air of
bargains, suffering and love” but metaphorical electronic air, much
more exciting.
The contrast with ‘Talking in Bed’ is stark. In that poem “a unique
distance from isolation”, he means closeness obviously but he
expresses it by using the word ‘distance’ which, of course, is
extremely eloquent and tragic. But there the closeness of this
extreme distance from isolation made communication all but
impossible. Here the distance between the lovers imparts a delicate
bloom to the relationship.
Three years later in 1964 Philip wrote to Maeve while lying in bed,
the night before he was to join Monica in the retreat in
Northumberland which she’d bought for herself. “Writing in bed
15
ought to be easiest,” – this is to Maeve – “Writing in bed ought to be
easiest. It’s just midnight and I’m scribbling a note to you because if
I don’t heaven knows when I shall. I go up to Hexham tomorrow as
you. I shall hope to be agreeable to Monica and not to make the
visit a disappointment but one can never be sure how one will
behave.”
Talking to Monica in bed in close proximity was an ordeal, writing to
Maeve in bed at a distance is an unalloyed pressure. It seems
astonishing, cruel even, that Philip should so lightly refer in a letter
to Maeve to a bleak love poem so intimately associated with
Monica. But Larkin’s is a profoundly literary imagination. The
perfection of the poem’s art had already made it common cultural
currency and he quotes himself just as he would quote a familiar
tag from Byrom or from Auden. Chilling witness, perhaps, to the icy
dispassion of the poet’s choice of art over life.
Though Philip’s and Maeve’s feelings for each other were very
sensual - and as Jean has said n a recent paper, he told her that
she drew the line at premarital sex but “God knows, we do almost
everything else” – there still was the essential difference and this
was crucial I think and it’s what kept the relationship going.
It was not until two decades after their first meeting in the mid
seventies, as Maeve told Andrew Motion, she finally yielded to
temptation, adding “But only on very rare and isolated occasions
and at a cost of grave violation to my conscious since I never in
principle abandoned my stand on pre-marital sex.”
By this time, one might suspect, that by pre-martial sex Maeve
really means pre-mortality sex actually.
16
At about this same time the poet discovered, or created, a third
muse, the most interesting of the lot in many ways. Betty Mackereth
had become his secretary in 1957, two years after his arrival in
Hull. So they’d seen a lot of each other over the years and he’d
come to rely on her for support and advice.
By 1962, his fortieth year, he told Robert Conquest “I have
simplified my grub down to the chopped cabbage, grated carrot,
cheese with egg, raw, and Worcestershire sauce on the side with
milk and wholemeal bread and butter. This is at the instigation of
my secretary who’s certainly never ill and is full of energy.
Unfortunately she says it’ll be two years before the poison is
worked out of my system.”
As the years went by Betty, never ill and full of energy, came to
seem a force of nature to Philip. She represented the Lawrencian
life force which had so awed him in earlier life. WB Yeats, in his
final years, was famously injected with monkey juice, testosterone,
in order to restore his libido and his zest for life and it worked.
Larkin’s strategy was as effective but less mechanical than Yeats’s.
At the age of 52, in the summer of 1975, with a mix of motives from
life and from art, he began an affair with Betty. To the casual
observer this might seem a familiar story, the boss taking
advantage of his secretary in a sexual relationship free from the
complications presented by Monica and by Maeve. But Larkin had
the deeper motive of the artist.
The relationship was to give him the opportunity to write love poetry
again which he’d not had any occasion to do for over a decade. It
was the only way he would ever do it again which I think must be a
motive.
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From this affair with Betty Larkin spun his most original
reinterpretation of the muse relationship. This muse is no distant
beauty. She is physically accessible, an intimate friend even. What
gives her her inaccessibility is her vitality, her conviction of
longevity. And in this respect she’s as far off as any perfect
Beatrice or Laura.
The relationship is dramatised in the little known poem ‘We Met at
the End of the Party’, a really great work which will ultimately
become one of his well known late works. “We met at the end of the
party when most of the drinks were dead and all the glasses dirty.
‘Have this that’s left,’ you said. We walked through the last of
summer when shadows reached long and blue across days that
were growing shorter. You said ‘There’s autumn too.’ Always for
you what’s finished is nothing and what survives cancels the failed,
the famished, as if we had fresh lives from that night on and just
living could make me unaware of June and the guests arriving and I
not there.”
The anapaestic da-da-dum da-da-dum da-da-dum da-da-dum
meter is suited to companionable intimacy - it’s a peculiarly
ambiguous poem - but the imagery is powerful symbolic. The poet
and his lover encounter each other at the end of the party of life,
one of Larkin’s most resonant metonyms. She encourages him to
make the best of what remains but, always the aesthete, he is
unable to enjoy this spoiled, dirty remnant of his life. The precious
moment of insipience has gone and what remains is not good
enough.
He’s baffled by her cheerful ability to live in the present as though
“we had fresh lives” while he remains lost in the past imagining the
guests still arriving in June for the party of his life while he –
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somehow out of time, decades later, in Autumn – cannot find his
way back to meet them.
Betty recalls the real life debates between them which this poem
distils. “He said to me ‘My father died when he was 63.’ I mean he
was miserable, ‘And I expect I shall die when I’m 63.’ And I said
‘Yes you will, because you’re programming yourself to die at 63.’”
Larkin, of course, did die at the age of 63 of the same disease as
his father. Though he criticised Plath for living out a pre-determined
self-destructive myth in her work, in his own quiet way Larkin
perhaps did follow her example.
Betty, now in her eighties, plays bridge regularly and has only
recently given up her golf engagements. The lyric spark of Larkin’s
art flickered out 30 or more years ago, the unfailing vigour of his
muse’s life still continues.
But, as I suggested at the beginning, there is a second simpler
version of the artist’s abnormal life. In this version art neither
imitates nor is intimated by life. Life drops out of the equation
altogether.
In a pugnacious early letter the undergraduate Larkin quoted Walter
Pater’s famous slogan “Do you hear any disparaging talk about arts
for art’s sake? It annoys me.” He’s very young isn’t he? “It annoys
me.” “For what other sake can art possibly be undertaken? Let
them tell me that.”
On perhaps the most profound level Larkin’s life is always quite
irrelevant to his art. Though he needed to live in order to produce
his poetry, the poetry exists for its own sake, growing and
developing according to its own internal, formal principles.
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At the beginning of October 1944, a few days after completing his
first volume of poetry, ‘The North Ship’, which he later condemned
as mere juvenilia, Larkin began to write his drafts in a hardbound
manuscript workbook, the first of a series of eight in which, over the
next 35 years, he composed virtually his entire mature oeuvre. He
wrote in soft pencil, working on one stanza at a time and dated it
piece when it was complete. Extraordinarily methodical.
In hindsight it seems that the initiation of this first workbook marks
the beginning of his deliberate construction of an oeuvre.
From 1945 onwards a strict internal discipline, absent in his earlier
juvenilia, governs all the elements of his writing.
In a late interview he concluded that his attempts at novel writing in
the later 1940s had failed because he’d taken too poet an
approach. “They were oversized poems. They were certainly
written with intense care for detail. If one word was used on page
15 I didn’t reuse it on page 115.”
This is the principle which governs his poetry. Uncanny and
implausible though it may seem, he waits for the right time to use a
particular word, weighing whether its time has come, and once it’s
been expended he never uses it again. The same applies to
rhymes, forms and genres.
Larkin’s oeuvre does not consist, as does that of most poets, of
numerous overlapping works on similar themes and with similar
forms. And when I wrote my first book on Larkin I found this, I
thought “Oh I’ll find another poem like ‘Deceptions’ or I’ll find
another poem like ‘Absences’.” And I never could, there was only
one like that one.
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And everyone who’s tried to write on him will have found this. Every
poem is quite different from every other poem. As he put it in an
extraordinary metaphor “Poetry is not like surgery, a technique that
can be copied. Every operation the poet performs is unique and
need never be done again.”
Each poem is its own sole freshly-created universe and by the end
his oeuvre makes a complete set.
RJC Watt, in his extremely useful concordance to the 1988
collected poems, lists the frequency of occurrence of all the
individual words that Larkin uses. One startling statistic is the large
number which occur once and once only. And I think if you did the
math you’d find that this is unusual, there’s more of this in Larkin
than anyone else.
It may seem unremarkable in the case of out of the way archaisms,
vulgarisms or poeticisms, ‘undeciduous’, ‘Kodak distant’, ‘blent’,
‘almost instinct’, [‘blaut’ :32:12], ‘rat bags’, ‘luminously peopled’,
‘immensements’. Supposed to be the poet of plain, ordinary,
language. No way.
Readers familiar with Larkin’s poetry will easily identify the works in
which such hundred watt or five hundred watts as ‘unmolesting’,
‘blazen’, ‘unpriceable’, ‘natureless’ and ‘unmmendably’ occur. Many
of you will , I hope, be already putting the poems to the words. One
wouldn’t expect to encounter these words again in an oeuvre.
But the principle also applies to quite ordinary forty watt or sixty
watt words which give out a poetic-like, quite out of proportion to
their intrinsic power.
Unsatisfactory, for instance, makes four appearances in his mature
work, all in the same poem, ‘Reference back’. After using the word
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here Larkin knew better than to dilute its impact by ever using it
again. Wonderful appears only in ‘Reasons for Attendance’, “The
wonderful feel of girls.” Once he had made that phrase with the
word wonderful in he’s not going to use it again because you’d
remember the other one and it would spoil it. It’s true, believe me.
He uses swerving three times in the opening of ‘Here’ and never
again. A wardrobe, of course, occurs only in ‘Aubade’, welcome
occurs only in ‘The Importance of Elsewhere’. And one could go on
and find a lot more.
Obviously some common words, crucial words he has to use
several times but even then he’s very economical about the way he
does it.
As we’ve seen, many of Larkin’s poems feature attics of one kind or
another but the word attic occurs only twice in his published oeuvre,
once to describe the rapist’s disappointment in ‘Deceptions’, “As he
bursts into fulfilment’s desolate attic”; once to indicate the poet’s
sublime awe at the unpeopled sea in ‘Absences’, “Such attics
cleared of me! Such absences!”
The attic of ‘Deceptions’ is squalid and humiliating, the attics of
‘Absences’ are awesome and exhilarating.
Larkin ensures that the two appearances of the word in his work,
one singular and the other plural, mark the furthest ends of the
spectrum of emotion which the concept possessed for him. Both
poems were written in 1950 and he never uses the word again.
Although he talks about attics in poem after poem after poem he
never uses the word.
He did use attic in one more, in a lovely phrase, “An emaciate attic”
in ‘Unfinished Poem’ where he talks about lying in a bedroom at the
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top of a house listening to death in the streets below wreaking its
havoc and holding himself in and waiting and then death finally
comes up the stair at the end. But it wasn’t quite up to speed and I
think for that reason – I mean it’s a good poem – he didn’t publish
it, and I think the reason why was because it would have spoiled
the word.
And what told him? What was it? What uncanny instinct was it that
told him, although he was writing aubades fairly regularly
throughout his career, to keep the word back as the title of a poem
until he finally got to the one where he could really use it in the
proper way? Something must have told him because he could have
used in the late 1940s and 50s and he never did.
On one single occasion, thoughtfully providing the exception that
proves the rule, Larkin breaks his principle by repeating himself.
‘Afresh’ appears three times alongside ‘unresting’ in his
‘Celebration of Continuing Life; The Trees’. “Yet still the unresting
castles thresh in full grown thickness every May. Last year they
seem to say, begin afresh, afresh, afresh.”
Then in deliberate self-quotation the words recur in his final selfelegy Aubade where the poet’s terror of unresting death flashes
afresh to hold and horrify. It’s an effect which gets a real kick out of
the fact that you know he means you to remember ‘The Trees’ and
he knows you will remember ‘The Trees’ because he knows he’s
written so well that ‘The Trees’ is now a permanent part of the
canon and so you will remember it. That’s what great poets can do.
Shakespeare is the same and very few poets can do that.
Every formal aspect of Larkin’s work shows the same principle of
economy. Every poem, for instance, has its own unique unrepeated
flavour of rhyme. There are 17 unrhymed poems - I’ll go a bit
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quickly here, get the impression, it’s interesting – each one has a
different kind of crimelessness. The line endings – and you’ll
always know when the line endings come in Larkin even if the
poem doesn’t rhyme, he’s not like Hughes or Heaney where you
can’t tell, you know, might as well be prose if you just listen to it,
you’ve got to see it on the page before you know where on earth
where the line endings come, you always know in Larkin where
they are.
If you listen to where they are in the unrhymed poems, just listen
‘Afternoons’, flowing polysyllables and open vowels, ‘fading’, ‘twos’,
‘bordering’, ‘ground’, ‘afternoons’, ‘assemble’. In the pagan hymn
[Solar 0:348:25] the unrhymed line endings are rigorously
impersonal and austere; ‘you’, ‘distance’, ‘origin’, ‘flames’,
‘exploding’, ‘your’, ‘gold’, ‘horizontals’.
In the Hedgehog poem, ‘The Mower’, the lines end of disconsolate
monosyllables as if the denial of rhyme were a deliberately imposed
penance; ‘world’, ‘help’, ‘not’, ‘absence’, ‘careful’, ‘kind’, ‘time’. You
don’t need to quote the poem, just the rhymes will do. They’re not
rhymes, they’re just the unrhymed endings of the lines will do it.
At the opposite end of the spectrum Larkin’s perfect rhymes range
from the flat ordinariness of ‘Mr Bleaney’, ‘stayed’, ‘til, ‘frayed’, ‘sill’,
‘land’, ‘took’, ‘hand’, ‘hook’, through the snappier doggerel of the
shorter line, ‘This Be The Verse’, ‘dad’, ‘do’, ‘had’, ‘you’, and the
cynical couplets of ‘Money’ in which ‘sex’ rhymes with ‘cheques’
and ‘wife’ with ‘life’, to the full-throated open vowels of ‘The Trees’
reinforced by rich alliteration and an ornamental rhyme scheme, AB-B-A rather than A-B-A-B. ‘Leaf’, ‘said’, ‘spread’, ‘grief’, ‘again’,
‘too’, ‘new’, ‘grain’, ‘fresh’, ‘may’, ‘say’, ‘afresh’.
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Then [?? 0:49:37] or para-rhyme, subtly beautiful, ‘home’, ‘come’,
‘stands’, ‘ascends’ or queasily discordant, ‘glass’, ‘face’, ‘share’,
‘shear’, ‘failure’, ‘regalia’. That’s a lovely one, ‘failure’, ‘regalia’.
There are multiple rhymes or half-rhymes, either musical ‘thicken’,
‘quicken’, ‘distance’, ‘existence’, ‘hollows’, ‘follows’, ‘shallows’. Or
comic, ‘touchstone’, ‘much tone’, ‘breakthroughs’, ‘cake queues’.
Finally there are Larkin’s trademark bad rhymes in that riot of misrhyme ‘Toads’ ‘poison’ rhymes with ‘proportion’, ‘lanes’ with
‘sardines’, ‘bucket’ with ‘like it’, ‘pension’ with ‘made on’, ‘toad like’
preposterously with ‘hard luck’, ‘blarney’ with ‘money’ and ‘other’
slyly with ‘either’. That’s the best one of all actually, ‘other’ rhyming
with ‘either’.
Most genres appear only once. There’s a single morning elegy in
‘April Sunday Brings The Snow’, a single animal elegy, ‘The
Mower’, a single meditative graveyard elegy ‘Churchgoing’, a single
extended narrative poem, ‘The Dance’, and so on and so on.
Genres which recur adopt a new form of voice on every occasion.
The ecstatic female aubade ‘Wedding Wind’ is answered, as we’ve
seen, by the grim, masculine anti-aubade “At the Chiming of Light
Upon Sleep” and the style of each is totally different, he uses
different vocabulary, you know, it becomes apocalyptic in the
second poem for a moment which, of course, he usually doesn’t.
The tragic ‘Deceptions’ is recast as the comic ‘If My Darling’, both
dramatic monologues spoken by self-critical males apologising to
innocent women.
In 1961 he wrote ‘Naturally the Foundation will Bear your
Expenses’ in the blithe voice of a British academic freeloader on a
freebie. Seven years later in ‘Posterity’ he adopted the voice of a
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dissatisfied American academic unable to reconcile work and
family pressures as he grinds away at his biography of the old fart
Philip Larkin.
If one traces the key genre of epithalamium - wedding celebration,
through Larkin’s work, one finds every possible variation of angle
and style. ‘Wedding Wind’, ‘To My Wife’, ‘Long Roots’, ‘More
Summer’, ‘To Our Side of Earth’, ‘Maiden Name’, ‘The Whitsun
Weddings’, ‘The Dance’ and so on… and so on.
Larkin’s collected poets then reveal a poet over three decades
carefully deploying his thesaurus of words and his repertoire of
forms and genres in the most telling way possible.
This is why an oeuvre of only 112 published works – 176 including
the unpublished works which Thwaite in 1988 – seem so
substantial and also why so many poems are so memorable and so
quotable. Larkin’s mature volumes contain, it has been said, a
remarkable percentage of the definitive poems of his time. This is
because he aimed to make his version of any theme or genre, even
his take on any particular word, definitive.
You hear the word or the phrase, but the word sometimes, and you
get it whole, everything and you realise he’s copyrighted it and
whenever you use the word - it’s a bit irritating sometimes - you
know, you can’t say ordinary words. You know, “They fuck you up,
your mum and dad”, you know, how many people have said that,
you know? Now when you say it you’re quoting Larkin but you
weren’t quoting Larkin before he wrote it but plenty of people said it.
There you are.
It’s this organic, artistic ontogeny which explains why he was so
certain that by the time he reached ‘Aubade’ in 1977 his life was
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over. In literal terms this was his ‘Inner Funk About Death’ poem, in
artistic terms, as he put it, it marked the death of a talent. His
artistic life had been perfected.
He lived on another eight years, depressed and miserable, but his
poetry was complete so what was the point? At the end of his life
he told Andrew Motion “I used to believe that I should perfect the
work and life could fuck itself. Now I’m not doing anything and all
I’ve got is a fucked up life.”
There is tragedy and perhaps nobility here. Open-eyed Larkin
chose perfection of the work over perfection of the life and so
inevitably ended his days raging in the dark. Thank you.
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