The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump
Page 7
By night, snow swerves
(O loose moth world)
Through the stare travelling
Leather-black waters.
…
Lit shelved liners
Grope like mad worlds westward.
From “The Whitsun Weddings,” a feeling of epiphanic arrest, as the promise of young lives (or so the poet sees it) goes down the long slide to drudgery:
…We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.
Then, too, there are the lines that everyone knows and everyone automatically gets by heart: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” “Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three.” “Never such innocence again.” “And age, and then the only end of age.” “What will survive of us is love.” This is a voice that is part of our language.
* * *
*
It is important to understand that Philip Larkin is very far from being a poet’s poet: he is something much rarer than that. True, Auden was a known admirer of Larkin’s technique; and Eliot, early on, genially conceded, “Yes—he often makes words do what he wants.” But the strong impression lingers that the poets, in general, “demote” Larkin on a number of grounds: provinciality, lack of ambition, a corpus both crabbed and cramped. Seamus Heaney’s misgivings are probably representative: Larkin is “daunted” by both life and death; he is “anti-poetic” in spirit; he “demoralises the affirmative impulse.” Well, these preference synonyms are more resonant than most, perhaps; but preference synonyms they remain (still, Heaney is getting somewhere in “The Journey Back,” where the imagined Larkin describes himself as a “nine-to-five man who had seen poetry”). No: Larkin is not a poet’s poet. He is of course a people’s poet, which is what he would have wanted. But he is also, definingly, a novelist’s poet. It is the novelists who revere him.
Particularly in his longer poems, which resemble Victorian narrative paintings, Larkin is a scene-setting phrasemaker of the first echelon. What novelist, reading “Show Saturday,” could fail to covet “mugfaced middleaged wives / Glaring at jellies” and “husbands on leave from the garden / Watchful as weasels” and “car-tuning curt-haired sons”? In “The Whitsun Weddings” the fathers of the brides “had never known / Success so huge and wholly farcical”; in “To the Sea,” immersed in the “miniature gaiety” of the English littoral, we hear “The distant bathers’ weak protesting trebles” and “The small hushed waves’ repeated fresh collapse…”
Many poems, many individual stanzas, read like distilled short stories, as if quickened by the pressure of a larger story, a larger life. The funny and terrifying “Mr. Bleaney” (a twenty-eight-line poem about the veteran inhabitant of a bedsit) has the amplitude of a novella. And Larkin’s gift for encapsulation is phenomenal. Admire this evocation, in “Livings III,” of the erudite triviality of high-table talk in, as it might be, All Souls, Oxford—and Larkin does it in rhyme:
Which advowson looks the fairest,
What the wood from Snape will fetch,
Names for pudendum mulieris,
Why is Judas like Jack Ketch?
“Livings I” begins: “I deal with farmers, things like dips and feed.” And after a single pentameter the reader is lucidly present in another life.
Larkin began his career as an exceptionally precocious writer of fiction: he had two pale, promising (and actually very constricted) novels behind him, Jill and A Girl in Winter, by the age of twenty-five. Twenty-five, and two novels. The reason he gave for abandoning his third (to be called A New World Symphony) is, in my view, dumbfoundingly alien. Which brings us to the more fugitive and subliminal component of the fascination Larkin excites in all novelists and in all students of human nature. The poems are transparent (they need no mediation), yet they tantalize the reader with glimpses of an impenetrable self: so much yearning, so much debility; an eros that self-thwarts and self-finesses. This is what rivets us: the mystery story of Larkin’s soul.
* * *
*
Every serious devotee will have read not only the Collected Poems (1988) but also Anthony Thwaite’s edition of the Selected Letters (1992) and Andrew Motion’s A Writer’s Life (1994). Thus, in our response to Larkin the man, there is a Before and there is an After.
The transition, if you recall, was prodigiously ugly and violent. It began with an attack by the poet Tom Paulin (in the correspondence columns of The Times Literary Supplement):
race hatred…racism, misogyny and quasi-fascist views….For the present, this selection [the Letters] stands as a distressing and in many ways revolting compilation which imperfectly reveals and conceals the sewer under the national monument Larkin became.
Here we see, up close, the fierce joys of self-righteousness. You will also notice how quaintly commissarial Paulin’s words now sound. For this there is a historical explanation. The Letters, and Motion’s disaffected Life, appeared during the high noon, the manly pomp, of the social ideology we call PC (a.k.a. Westernism, Relativism, and—best—Levellism). All ideologies are essentially bovine; and Paulin was simply the leader of the herd, which then duly stampeded.
Next, like a toiling enactment of the domino effect, came the business of “demotion.” “Essentially a minor poet,” decided one literary air-sniffer. “He seems to me more and more minor,” decided another. Yet another, in a piece nobly entitled “Larkin: The Old Friend I Never Liked,” suddenly spoke for many when he said that Larkin’s poems “are good—yes—but not that good, for Christ’s sake.” And so the trahison continued, slowly winding down as the ideology lost stamina. Its efforts were of course quite futile. Today, long After, Larkin is back to being what he was Before: Britain’s best-loved poet since World War II.
*
But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
And shivered, without shaking off the dread
That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don’t know.
“Mr. Bleaney”
* * *
Larkin’s life: he was wifeless and childless; he was a nine-to-five librarian, who lived for thirty years in a northern city that smelled of fish (Hull—the sister town of Grimsby). There were in all five lovers: the frail, bespectacled teenager, Ruth; the neurotic “poetess,” Patsy; the religious virgin, Maeve; the “loaf-haired secretary,” Betty (buoyant, matter-of-fact); and, overspanning them all, the redoubtable Monica Jones. There were, after awhile, no close friends: pen pals, colleagues, acquaintances, but no close friends.
What follows is a personal assessment of Larkin’s character, and one that reflects a preoccupation that can fairly be described as lifelong. It began in the 1950s, when Larkin was an occasional houseguest at Glanmor Road, Uplands, Swansea. As I now see it, my parents teasingly mythologized Larkin as a pedophobe and skinflint: “Ooh, don’t go near him,” my mother used to say, semiseriously. “He doesn’t like children. And he hates giving you your tip.” My “tip” consisted of three big black pennies; my older brother, Philip—Larkin’s namesake and godson—got four. The poet unenergetically played his part (the doling out of the pennies was always a grim and priestly ritual). These rare visits continued; he came to Cambridge, London, Hertfordshire. Thinking back, I sense a large, grave, cumbrous, yet mannerly figure—and someone distinctively solitary: unattached, unconnected.
I started to read him in my early twenties; we had some professional dealings (he reviewed the odd book for the Statesman, and I badgered him for poems); now and then we corresponded; and I spent about half a dozen evenings with him (and others). The closest we came to any kind of intimate exchange was at a drinks pa
rty in the late 1970s. We talked about his poem “Money” (see below). Then I praised him for his courage in learning to drive and buying a car (no other poet I knew would ever go near a steering wheel). Then it went like this:
“You should spend more, Philip. No, really. You’ve bought the car, and that’s good. Now you—”
“I just wish they wouldn’t keep on sending me all these bills.”
“Well, it costs a bit to run a car.”
“I just wish they wouldn’t keep sending me all these bills.”
If given the slightest encouragement, I might have gone on to suggest, with juvenile impertinence, that he move to London and…and what? Well, start to live, I suppose. “He didn’t listen,” I said to my father as I drove him home. “He just went on and on about his bills.”
Larkin died in 1985. And when the Letters and the Life appeared, almost a decade later, I wrote a long piece in his defense. I should say that I too was struck by Larkin’s reflexive, stock-response “racism,” and by his peculiarly tightfisted “misogyny.” But I bore in mind the simple truth that writers’ private lives don’t matter; only the work matters. A better understanding of the Larkin puzzle would come later. But I felt a premonitory twinge about this, in 1992, when I construed the nature of Larkin’s feelings about my father—supposedly his closest friend.
It was always clear to everyone that Kingsley loved Philip with a near-physical passion. Philip probably felt the same, at first (and Kingsley remained his most rousing correspondent). But in his letters to others he seldom mentions my father without sourness. We could adduce envy (sexual and material). Yet there is also a social distaste that feels wholly unworthy: the fastidious suspicion with which the bourgeois regards the bohemian. Kingsley was effectively spurned in the Letters; but he never spoke ill of Philip (and continued to read two or three of his poems every night, all the way to his own death, in 1995). Still, I remember my father defeatedly saying, on his return from Larkin’s funeral, “It sounds odd, but I sometimes wonder if I ever really knew him.”
No conceivable disclosure could make me demote Larkin’s work. But I have come to find his life ever more estranging, and this involves a reevaluation of his character. The long process of assimilating Philip Larkin has been complicated by a process of my own: the aging process, and what it means.
* * *
*
Nikolai Gogol, who deliberately starved himself to death at the age of forty-two, had this to say, in Dead Souls (1842), about the river of time:
As you pass from the tender years of youth into harsh and embittered manhood, make sure you take with you on your journey all the human emotions! Don’t leave them on the road, for you will not pick them up afterwards! Old age…is terrible and menacing, for it never gives anything back, it returns nothing!
Implicit here, though, is the suggestion that old age does or can give something back: all the human emotions, in the form of memory. The past goes on being present, especially the erotic and romantic past (and a sense of youth remains, vicariously refreshed by one’s children). This is an indispensable and, I believe, a near-universal resource.
Now consider the abysmal capitulation of Larkin’s letter to Monica Jones in 1956:
Hum. Ha. Ah, don’t talk about our lives and the dreadful passing of time. Nothing will be good enough to look back on, I know that for certain: there will be nothing but remorse & regret for opportunities missed…
This is near-nihilistic: he was thirty-four. And, sure enough, in a letter of 1973 to a fellow poet, Larkin wrote: “Middle age is depressing anyway. The things one tries to forget get bigger and bigger.” This is a psyche trapped in neutral gear: he was fifty-one.
Why did Larkin abandon his third novel? I quote from a letter of July 6, 1953, to the poetess Patsy (described by Kingsley, in a letter to Philip, as “the most uninterestingly unstable character” he had ever met; she went on to die of alcohol poisoning at the age of forty-nine):
You know, I can’t write this book: if it is to be written at all it should be largely an attack on Monica, & I can’t do that, not while we are still on friendly terms, and I’m not sure it even interests me sufficiently to go on.
The novel “should” be an attack on Monica? Well of course. What else is there to write about?
The attack on Monica was published six months later. But its author was Kingsley Amis and its title was Lucky Jim—where Monica is remade as the unendurable antiheroine, with her barn-dancer clothes, her mannerisms and affectations, her paraded sensitivity, and her docile-hostile adhesiveness. And Lucky Jim was mentored by Larkin. In his one concession to gallantry, Philip made Kingsley change the girl’s name—from Margaret Beale to Margaret Peel. The real-life Monica’s full name was Monica Margaret Beale Jones.
In 1982 I had dinner with Philip and Monica (and with my brother, father, mother, and stepfather). At the time I found the occasion only mildly bizarre, and wrote about it cheerfully enough in a memoir published in 2000 (though I see that I did describe Monica as “virile.” This understates the case). Ten years on, I look back at that evening with something close to horror. In Monica’s presence, Larkin behaved like the long-suffering nephew of an uncontrollably eccentric aunt. And she was the love of his life.
But that was the kind of life it was. Larkin cleaved to a Yeatsian principle: seek “perfection of the work rather than perfection of the life” (this is what he means, in “Poetry of Departures,” by “a life / Reprehensibly perfect”). All the same, there must be a life. And it isn’t fanciful to surmise that the gauntness of Larkin’s personal history (with no emotions, no vital essences, worth looking back on) contributed to the early decline of his inspiration—and, indeed, of his physical instrument. Self-starved, like Gogol, he died at sixty-three.
Larkin is the novelist’s poet. He is most definitely this novelist’s poet. And it is symmetrical, at least, that my final attempt to parse him will be in the form of prose fiction. If I do get anywhere with a (cautiously) novelized Larkin, I may rest assured that I won’t be telling his shade anything it doesn’t know. Larkin’s self-awareness, his internal candor, was without blind spots. Here are the first and last stanzas of the sixteen-line “Money.” It shows, as clearly as any poem can, that Larkin siphoned all his energy, and all his love, out of the life and into the work. That he succeeded in this is a tragic miracle; but it is still a miracle.
Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:
“Why do you let me lie here wastefully?
I am all you never had of goods and sex.
You could get them still by writing a few cheques.”
…
I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down
From long french windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.
* * *
*
In quality, Larkin’s four volumes of verse are logarithmic, like the Richter scale: they get stronger and stronger by a factor of ten. My selection reflects this. From The North Ship (1945), one poem out of thirty-two; from The Less Deceived (1955), eleven out of twenty-nine; from The Whitsun Weddings (1964), twenty-four out of thirty-two; from High Windows (1974), twenty-two out of twenty-four. There are four uncollected poems (among them “Aubade”); I also include two unpublished poems, “Letter to a Friend About Girls” and (after much hesitation) “Love Again.”
“Love Again” is there because it is the only poem in which Larkin tries to account for what he called his “neutered” nature. The attempt fails, partly for technical reasons. As he remarked to an ex-colleague, “It broke off at a point at which I was silly enough to ask myself a question, with three lines in which to answer it.” “Love Again” concludes:
…but why put it into words?
Isolate rather this element
That spreads through other lives like a tree
And sways them on in a sort of sense
And s
ay why it never worked for me.
Something to do with violence
A long way back, and wrong rewards,
And arrogant eternity.
“Well, of course,” Larkin continued, “anyone who asks a question by definition doesn’t know the answer, and I am no exception. So there we are.”
Postscript. Some years after Larkin’s death I had a half-hour chat with Kingsley about “Love Again.” The poem begins, “Love again: wanking at ten past three.” And I relayed an anecdote of Anthony Thwaite’s: while editing the Collected Poems a proofreader asked him if the n in wanking was a misprint. Well, waking certainly would be more romantic (and it would also tend to obscure the fact that the poem is set in midafternoon). Anyway, Larkin, true to “the Movement” he led, was always Against Romanticism. If we were to submit to the “biographical fallacy,” and wondered about the identity of the poem’s “her” (“Someone else feeling her breasts and cunt, / Someone else drowned in that lash-wide stare”), then we would conclude that she is the virginal and religious Maeve (his one self-confessed “romance”), for whom the word wanking was in any case a mystery…
Kingsley and I, between the two of us, managed to recite the poem’s closing lines (quoted above). And my father said, almost with vexation, “Violence? What violence?” Nobody has ever suggested that there was any physical violence (even “a long way back”) in the Larkin household. But ponder this. Sydney Larkin, a pompous male supremacist and a reflexive sexual harasser in the workplace, was a notoriously passionate admirer of the German Nazi Party. And isn’t it fair to say that the NSDAP was the most destructive cult of violence known to history? Sydney twice took Philip to Germany in the mid-1930s; and he continued to root for Hitlerism even after September 1939, and even after the historic blitzing of his hometown Coventry (November 1940), and even after VE Day, and beyond. Now the funny thing is that Philip loved and honored his father. On postcremation day in early 1948, Larkin wrote to an old friend: “I felt very proud of him: as my sister remarked afterwards, ‘We’re nobody now: he did it all.’ ”