by James Booth
But the issue of Larkin’s supposed racism only came to the fore after his death, with the publication of his letters. In the 1970s the controversy focused instead on his loud attack on ‘modernism’ in the Introduction. In his initial approach to Mitchell, Larkin had written diffidently: ‘I thought it might amuse you to read the introduction, which is a jeu d’esprit not perhaps to be taken very seriously.’86 There is something puzzling in his fatalistic anticipation of the trouble he was making for himself. He was determined to have his say, while at the same time he hoped not to be taken seriously. He repeats later to Charles Monteith that the Introduction was ‘really only a jeu d’esprit in the manner of Mencken or someone like that’, and anticipates that ‘to pass it off seriously will earn me the biggest critical clobbering I have ever experienced’.87 As publication approached he attempted to disarm criticism by suggesting that the book be promoted as a ‘freak publication’. He wrote to Faber’s Sales Director: ‘I don’t think it will earn me anything but execration [. . .] Treat it like a book by T. S. Eliot on all-in wrestling.’88 To Anthony Thwaite he wrote: ‘Try to imagine a book by Humphrey Lyttelton saying that modern poetry is no good, while at the same time charmingly admitting he’s never read any since 1940, and you will get some idea of how mine will be handled.’89
But however hesitant he may have been it is clear that by prefixing the Introduction to the volume Larkin intended to cause controversy in literary circles and to secure a readership beyond the jazz world:
If it has any interest at all, I think it is the thesis of the introduction, namely, that post-Parker jazz is the jazz equivalent of modernist developments in other arts, such as are typified by Picasso and Pound in painting and poetry. I don’t think this has actually been said before, and, while it may not be wholly defensible, I think it sufficiently amusing to say once.90
In the Introduction Larkin turns the story of his personal taste into an engaging comic tale of hubris and punishment. Having, he explains, lost touch with jazz in the later 1940s when he lived ‘in a series of provincial lodgings where jazz was not welcome’, he had remained largely unaware of the transition from ‘trad’ to ‘mod’. When he was reunited with his record collection in 1948, he was content for a time ‘to renew acquaintance with it and to add only what amplified or extended it along existing lines’. Consequently when he began to review records for the Telegraph in 1961 he was ‘patently unfitted to do so and should have declined’.91 Retribution for his hubris followed as the records arrived month by month at his door:
Had jazz been essentially a popular art, full of tunes you could whistle? Something fundamentally awful had taken place to ensure that there should be no more tunes. Had the wonderful thing about it been its happy, cake-walky syncopation that set feet tapping and shoulders jerking? Any such feelings were now regularly dispelled by random explosions from the drummer (‘dropping bombs’), and the use of non-jazz tempos, 3/4, 5/8, 11/4.
The accessible, happy Negro jazz of his youth had, he discovered, been spoiled by experimental free forms and (warming to his theme in a riot of alliteration) ‘all the tawdry trappings of South America, the racket of Middle East bazaars, the cobra-coaxing cacophonies of Calcutta’.92
Eventually, after months of puzzlement and dismay, it at last it dawned on him that what had happened to jazz was only a version of what had already alienated him in the other arts: ‘this was modern jazz, and Parker was a modern jazz player just as Picasso was a modern painter and Pound a modern poet. I hadn’t realized that jazz had gone from Lascaux to Jackson Pollock in fifty years, but now I realized it relief came flooding in upon me after nearly two years’ despondency.’ What had seemed merely a private disappointment revealed itself as an aspect of a larger cultural crisis with which he was already familiar. Parker, Davis and Coltrane were ‘modernists’, and ‘the term “modern”, when applied to art, has more than chronological meaning: it denotes a quality of irresponsibility peculiar to this century, known sometimes as modernism, and once I had classified modern jazz under this heading I knew where I was’.93
The Introduction to All What Jazz has served to perpetuate the image of Larkin as a pugnacious philistine. But it is not its basic argument which has made it notorious. Though, as he claimed, the jazz angle of his attack on modernism is original, his is otherwise, as he wrote, ‘an ordinary tale, and perhaps hardly worth telling’.94 Ever since the 1920s, when Eliot proclaimed that modern poetry must inevitably be ‘difficult’, voices have been raised to warn that modern art is losing its audience through obscurity and wilful experimentation. Larkin expresses a common and widespread concern which still persists: ‘I dislike such things not because they are new, but because they are irresponsible exploitations of technique in contradiction of human life as we know it. This is my essential criticism of modernism, whether perpetrated by Parker, Pound or Picasso.’95 What makes Larkin’s treatment of the issue such a strenuously provocative read is the shamelessly point-scoring manner in which he puts his case. The final rhythmic phrase here, ‘Parker, Pound or Picasso’ has an alliterative bounce which disrupts the tone of serious debate. And there is histrionic bluster in his picturesque list of modernist ‘irresponsibilities’. ‘Piqued at being neglected’, Larkin tells us, the modernist artist has:
painted portraits with both eyes on the same side of the nose, or smothered a model with paint and rolled her over a blank canvas. He has designed a dwelling-house to be built underground. He has written poems resembling the kind of pictures typists make with their machines during the coffee break, or a novel in gibberish, or a play in which the characters sit in dustbins. He has made a six-hour film of someone asleep. He has carved human figures with large holes in them.96
Comic verve sweeps aside any sense of critical proportion.
He goes on to satirize the appropriation of art by the educational establishment, adopting the voice of a Further Education lecturer in a novel by Kingsley Amis:
‘You’ve got to work at this: after all, you don’t expect to understand anything as important as art straight off, do you? I mean, this is pretty complex stuff: if you want to know how complex, I’m giving a course of ninety-six lectures at the local college, starting next week, and you’d be more than welcome.’97
This is good fun. Moreover many readers will sympathize with Larkin’s irritation at Yves Klein’s publicity stunt in which models covered with paint rolled across canvases, and will share Larkin’s irritation at ‘concrete’ poetry in typographical shapes. Many also will be left cold by Andy Warhol’s 1964 ‘anti-film’ of John Giorno asleep for five hours and twenty minutes. Other readers, however, will object that the idea of typographically shaped poetry goes back as far as George Herbert in the seventeenth century, while Picasso’s Guernica (‘both eyes on the same side of the nose’), Beckett’s Endgame (characters in dustbins) and Henry Moore’s statues (‘with large holes in them’) are certainly not ‘in contradiction of human life as we know it’, any more than is Le Corbusier’s ecologically inventive architecture (‘a dwelling-house [. . .] underground’).98 Nor had these highly successful artists much reason to feel pique at being neglected. That is mere wishful thinking on Larkin’s part. His jeu d’esprit did indeed earn him, as he had forecast, ‘the biggest critical clobbering I have ever experienced’.99 And he deserved it.
Earlier in his career Larkin had been unwilling to pick public quarrels about art. He had been hesitant in 1956 about being too closely identified with Robert Conquest’s claim that New Lines represented a new ‘empirical’ poetic ‘Movement’. Now he cast discretion to the winds, and let rip, spoiling for a fight. There is little point in engaging with the details of his attack; nor does Larkin really intend the reader to do so. There may be some truth in what he says, but he says it with too much intemperate gusto. His moral indignation may be genuine, but it is also hectic. In Larkin’s defence, however, it could be said that his Introduction suffers, to some extent, from the way the word ‘modernism’ has changed in
usage over time. As happened also with ‘Romanticism’, what began as a polemical strand within a period has ultimately become the label for virtually every artist of the time. The term ‘modernism’, or ‘Modernism’, is now used in a much broader way than it was in 1968. Then it would have seemed highly provocative to call D. H. Lawrence a ‘modernist’. Now it is normal. Earlier in his career Larkin had been sensitive to ‘modernity’ in the more inclusive sense. His earliest ideas on jazz have the heady tone of T. S. Eliot or Wyndham Lewis theorizing about the ‘modern’ spirit in art: ‘The modern unconscious has chosen to symbolize its predicament of subjection through the mode of a subject people; its predicament of imprisonment through the unvarying monotony of the 4/4 rhythm; its panic at the predicament through the arresting texture of the jazz tone.’100 At this point it seems he would have described his beloved blues as ‘modern’ or even ‘modernist’. A quarter of a century later, Larkin specifies as his target something narrower than this, that quality ‘known sometimes as modernism’. What he is attacking is not so much what we would now call ‘modernism’ as extreme avant-gardist experimentalism. And, though his examples are loosely and provocatively chosen, he has a point.
The Introduction to All What Jazz did the poet real damage by perpetuating in the minds of a readership deaf to the implied inverted commas in his writing the image of a reductive one-dimensional Larkin. The brilliance with which he ‘pretends to be’ himself in the Introduction has persuaded too many readers that this is actually Larkin. Thus one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, a man with the widest and most exact appreciation of the various arts of his day, and with the most delicate and organic sense of literary history, ends up in the preposterous position of announcing: ‘I don’t like modernist art.’101 Amusing though it is, there is something dismaying about his attempt to reduce himself to a philistine.
What ultimately raises the Introduction above this level is its personal, biographical narrative. He never quite accepts his own attempt to make a serious theory out of his unique individual experience, constantly questioning his own claim to authority, and conceding that, after all, the real problem may be simply that his tastes are old fashioned. At the beginning and end of the essay he takes a longer perspective, placing himself in an objective historical context: ‘For the generations that came to adolescence between the wars jazz was that unique private excitement that youth seems to demand. In another age it might have been drink or drugs, religion or poetry.’102 He presents the book very much as the work of a middle-aged man.103 In the early pages of the Introduction he paints an intensely nostalgic picture of two schoolboys playing and replaying records in a room overlooking a tennis court, sharing their private jazz secret. In the thirties, he reminisces, jazz ‘was a fugitive minority interest, a record heard by chance from a foreign station, a chorus between two vocals, one man in an otherwise dull band. No one you knew liked it.’ He recalls battering away on the drum kit his father had bought him.104 The Introduction to All What Jazz is ultimately as much elegy as polemic. As he wrote later: ‘My objection to modern jazz is not that it is pretentious, but simply that it isn’t anything like the jazz I loved and began collecting [. . .] What comes after may be technically brilliant and racially justified, but it leaves me cold.’105 He was outraged less by irresponsible modernist art than by the realization that he was no longer young: ‘Something, I felt, had snapped, and I was drifting deeper into the silent shadowland of middle age. Cold death had taken his first citadel.’106 One factor in his dislike of more recent jazz, indeed, might have been his increasing deafness, which took the freshness off his experience of new sounds.
At the end of the essay he foreshortens this long perspective in a vision of the declining years of all the jazz-loving Dockerys of his generation, as they slip into the shades. These are the men for whom he wrote his reviews:
Sometimes I imagine them, sullen fleshy inarticulate men, stockbrokers, sellers of goods, living in 30-year-old detached houses among the golf courses of Outer London, husbands of ageing and bitter wives they first seduced to Artie Shaw’s ‘Begin the Beguine’ or The Squadronaires’ ‘The Nearness of You’; fathers of cold-eyed lascivious daughters on the pill, to whom Ramsey Macdonald [sic] is coeval with Rameses II, and cannabis-smoking jeans-and-bearded Stuart-haired sons whose oriental contempt for ‘bread’ is equalled only by their insatiable demand for it [. . .] men whose first coronary is coming like Christmas; who drift, loaded helplessly with commitments and obligations and necessary observances, into the darkening avenues of age and incapacity, deserted by everything that once made life sweet.107
This gorgeous purple prose, funny and at the same time moving, is hugely cathartic.
18
Politics and Literary Politics
1968–73
Aware, as he wrote in an early letter to Sutton, that when it came to politics ‘I don’t know anything at all about anything, and it’s no use pretending I do,’1 Larkin’s instinct was to avoid the subject. In November 1967, after presenting a rare jazz-record recital to undergraduate students, he wrote that, even when his deafness allowed him to hear what his audience had said, he did not know what to answer: ‘Which side are we on – North or South Vietnam? Aawgh.’2 Only once did the question of politics crop up in discussion with Jean Hartley. Jean recalls: ‘An emotional scene ensued during which we each voiced our gut reaction to the other’s views.’ She told him:
‘I have to be a socialist out of sheer self-preservation. A hundred years ago my counterpart would have been sent up chimneys or had to scrub someone else’s floors from dawn to dusk as my mother did.’ He shrugged disbelievingly and eased his jacket out of the iron-pronged chair which always managed to trap him. Socialism, for Philip, was on a par with modern jazz – a descent into chaos. Eventually we had a tacit agreement not to discuss politics.3
The argument had no effect on their personal friendship.
Larkin had anticipated the general election of 1964 with uneasy detachment, attempting to associate Monica with his own distaste: ‘You’ll hate it more than I shall, I expect, as you are more politically conscious.’4 However, as the political temperature rose under the Labour government of Harold Wilson (1964–70), he increasingly began to take sides, expressing right-wing Cold War attitudes: hostility towards union militancy, contempt for leftist intellectuals and fear of the Soviet Union. The influence of Monica’s unreflecting conservatism was reinforced by the wider perspectives of Robert Conquest. On 19 August 1968 Larkin wrote to Conquest that he was reading his friend’s magisterial account of Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, The Great Terror, ‘as a change from writing my frigging annual report’.5 Three days later, to the dismay of Western socialists, 2,000 Soviet tanks and 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops brutally suppressed Czechoslovakia’s attempt to develop ‘Socialism with a Human Face’.
Closer to home, the University was undergoing its own political upheavals. The 1960s saw an unprecedented democratization of the education system with the introduction of ‘comprehensive’ schools and a rapid expansion in University provision following the 1963 Robbins Report on Higher Education. A new generation of students arrived on campus with no recollection of the war or of post-war austerity, and with an idealistic social agenda. In May 1968 student protests led to a national strike in France and unrest on the streets of Paris. Hull saw its own provincial version of this revolt. In June 1968 the Student Union voted for an occupation of the Administration Building and Larkin found himself briefly imprisoned, along with others attending a meeting of Senate. A sign reading ‘Under New Management’ was posted on the door. He described the episode to Barbara Pym with exasperated resignation:
Well, we have had our sit-in, our baptism of fire: I expect you saw it in the papers early last month. It was a disagreeable experience: I suppose revolutions always are. I wish I could describe it, or say something penetrating about it [. . .] The universities must now be changed to fit the kind of people we took in: exams made easier,
place made like a factory, with plenty of shop-floor agitation and a real live strike.6
The students’ demands were voiced by a Joint Politics and Sociology undergraduate, Tom Fawthrop, who had walked out of his examinations, calling on others to do the same. (No other student had followed him.) Fawthrop became an instant national celebrity, writing a book, Education or Examination, and speaking in support of sit-ins in other universities:
Exams are more a matter of luck than judgement [. . .] Actually doing a question in forty minutes – it’s not an intellectual exercise. If you can do it in 40 minutes the essay isn’t worth doing. In other words, can three years’ work be adequately assessed by twelve or fifteen hours of exams? Critics of the system argue that it does not allow for the possibility of creativity and originality which a genuine educational process should seek to encourage.7
Larkin the bohemian poet might perhaps sympathize with Fawthrop’s idealism, but the University Librarian was outraged at his irresponsibility. ‘Did you see that poncing student of ours shooting off his mouth to the Press Association?’ he wrote to Conquest. ‘The guy who tore up his exam paper? What has actually happened is that he’s been treated exactly the same as if he had failed the exam (since our regulations don’t have any provision for people tearing up exam papers) –’.8 In his poems at this time Larkin envies the freedom of the young; in his letters he resorts to the slogans of generational and class prejudice. In a letter to Monica he refers to students as a ‘filthy pack of commie bastards’.9 He wrote to Barbara Pym more wittily: ‘It may sound snobbish, but I do think that now we are educating the children of the striking classes.’10