The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (Vintage International)

by Martin Amis

  Biography, besides being a lowly trade, may also be attritional. Perhaps Motion (who knew Larkin, who knew Hull, and who is a poet) had his empathic powers blunted rather than sharpened by the years of (dedicated) research and (workmanlike) composition. Certainly his perspectives become fatally erratic. In his Observer piece, which contained more about-faces than a battalion parade ground, Motion spoke of the relationship between art and life: ‘All good biographers insist on separation, as well as connection.’ No, what they do, or what they end up doing, is insist on connection. And Motion connects ad nauseam: ‘obviously the spur’, ‘the message for Ruth in these poems’, ‘put these fears into the mouth of’, ‘the precise source … is easy to trace’, ‘arising from the continuing wrangle’, ‘prompted by Maeve’, ‘released the rage he had been storing’, ‘feeding off his suppressed rage with Eva’, ‘the only begetters of many of his poems’, and so on. Only begetters, however, are a romantic convention: poems don’t have only begetters. At one point, Motion says that the influence of one of Larkin’s women friends ‘extended beyond the poems in which she appears’ – appears, just as Marla Maples appears in The Will Rogers Follies. Biographers may claim separation, but what they helplessly insist on is connection. They have to. Or what are they about? What the hell are they doing day after day, year after year (gossiping? ringing changes in the Zeitgeist?), if the life doesn’t somehow account for the art?

  ‘You know I was never a child,’ wrote Larkin, at the age of fifty-seven. ‘I really feel somewhat at the last gasp. Carry me from the spot, Time, with thy all forgiving wave,’ he wrote at the age of twenty-seven. Arriving in Hull, aged thirty-two, he wrote to his mother, ‘Oh dear, the future now seems very bleak and difficult.’ It is in the word ‘difficult’ that we hear the authentic quaver of the valetudinarian. ‘I’m so finished,’ he wrote to a woman friend when the end really was getting closer. When it was closer still, he told Monica, with ‘a fascinated horror’, that he was ‘spiralling down towards extinction’. His last words were spoken to a woman – to the nurse who was holding his hand. Perhaps we all have the last words ready when we go into the last room. Perhaps the thing about last words is not how good they are but whether you can get them out. What Larkin said (faintly) was ‘I am going to the inevitable.’

  Inevitable in the sense that death could never be avoided – as a fate, and as a fixation. ‘I don’t want to write anything at present. In fact, thinking it over, I want to die. I am very impressed by this sort of unrealised deathwish of mine,’ Larkin wrote at eighteen. They probably have a name for it now, something like Early Death-Awareness Syndrome. What we get at forty or forty-five he had all along. He never did anything about it (you didn’t, then); he seemed to nurture this adolescent lassitude; he made it his own patch of melancholy, and tried to write the poetry that belonged there. Humanly, it turned him into an old woman – like his mother. ‘I bought a pair of shoes and they don’t even try to keep the water out.’ ‘I have an insensate prejudice against people who go abroad AT ANY TIME OF THE YEAR, but PARTICULARLY at Easter & Christmas.’ Given his opportunities for variety and expansion, he makes Mr Woodhouse, in Emma, look like Evel Knievel. ‘This is a hell of a week. Must get a haircut. Wanted to get another dark sweater from M and S’ – Marks & Spencer – ‘but doubt if there’ll be time or if they’ll have one.’ He was so worried about his weight that he took his bathroom scales on holiday. ‘I’ve just returned from Hamburg,’ he wrote in 1976 (it was his first trip abroad in twenty-four years). ‘They were all very kind, but oh the strain! The best thing was a little “mini-bar”, a kind of locked drink-cupboard in my hotel room.’ Colloquialisms like ‘news’, ‘deal’, ‘make my bed’, ‘deep freeze’, and ‘embarrassing’ similarly had him reaching for his inverted commas. ‘How very bold of you to buy an electric typewriter,’ he wrote to a friend in 1985.

  What redeems and monumentalizes this slow drizzle – what makes the Letters a literary experience and the Life just one thing after another – is the comedy of candour. Here melancholy still hurts, but it embodies its own comic relief; and dignity is not needed. ‘The US edition of [High Windows] is out, with a photograph of me that cries out for the caption “FAITH HEALER OR HEARTLESS FRAUD?” ’ ‘And then my sagging face, an egg sculpted in lard, with goggles on.’ None of my clothes fit either: when I sit down my tongue comes out.’ A Life is one kind of biography, and the Letters are another kind of Life; but the internal story, the true story, is in the Collected Poems. The recent attempts, by Motion and others, to pass judgment on Larkin look awfully green and pale compared with the self-examinations of the poetry. They think they judge him? No. He judges them. His indivisibility judges their hedging and trimming. His honesty judges their watchfulness:

  If my darling were once to decide

  Not to stop at my eyes,

  But to jump, like Alice, with floating skirt into my head …

  She would find herself looped with the creep of varying light,

  Monkey-brown, fish-grey, a string of infected circles

  Loitering like bullies, about to coagulate …

  – ‘If, My Darling’

  For something sufficiently toad-like

  Squats in me, too;

  Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,

  And cold as snow …

  – ‘Toads’

  Larkin the man is separated from us, historically, by changes in the self. For his generation, you were what you were, and that was that. It made you unswervable and adamantine. My father has this quality. I don’t. None of us does. There are too many forces at work on us. There are too many fronts to cover. In the age of self-improvement, the self is inexorably self-conscious. Still, a price has to be paid for not caring what others think of you, and Larkin paid it. He couldn’t change the cards he was dealt (‘What poor hands we hold, / When we face each other honestly!’). His poems insist on this helplessness:

  And I meet full face on dark mornings

  The bestial visor, bent in

  By the blows of what happened to happen.

  – ‘Send No Money’

  Most things are never meant.

  – ‘Going, Going’

  The unbeatable slow machine

  That brings what you’ll get.

  – ‘The Life with a Hole in It’

  Life is first boredom, then fear.

  Whether or not we use it, it goes,

  And leaves what something hidden from us chose,

  And age, and then the only end of age.

  – ‘Dockery and Son’

  My most enduring memory of Larkin is a composite one, formed from the many visits he paid to the series of flats and houses where I spent my first ten years, in Swansea, South Wales. My elder brother was Larkin’s godson and namesake, and Larkin’s visits were doubly welcome: it was the custom then for godfathers to give money to their godsons (and to their godsons’ brothers); in our family we called it ‘tipping the boys’. My godfather was Bruce Montgomery, who makes frequent – and decreasingly jovial – appearances in both the biography and the letters (thin talent; alcohol). When I was a child, Bruce was always jovial, and ridiculously generous. There was one occasion – it was Bonfire Night, in perhaps 1955 – when Bruce gave my brother and me the usual florin or half crown, plus a ten-shilling note: for fireworks. We couldn’t believe it. We were like the brides’ fathers in ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, never having known ‘Success so huge and wholly farcical’.

  It was different with Larkin. We were told that Larkin ‘didn’t really like children’ (‘children / With their shallow violent eyes’), and we tended to stay out of his way. When it came time for him to tip the boys, we would stand there with our palms outturned, quite flattered to think of ourselves as representatives of a menacing subgroup: children. The tip, always in the form of big, black old pennies, would be doled out in priestly silence. Threepence for Martin, fourpence for Philip (a year my senior). Later, sixpence for me, ninepence for him. The money still
meant a lot to us, because we intuited what it had cost Larkin to part with it. (He was, by the way, a genuine miser. In his last weeks, he lived off ‘cheap red wine and Complan’. He left over a quarter of a million pounds.) No, Larkin did not come out and gambol with us in the garden. (Neither, to be sure, did Bruce.) He did not tell us magical bedtime stories. But when I readdress my eager, timid, childish feelings in his presence, I find solidity as well as oddity, and tolerant humour (held in reserve, in case it was needed) as well as the given melancholy. ‘When will it get dark? When will it get dark?’ I kept asking, that Bonfire Night. The answer in Swansea, in that vanished world, was three o’clock in the afternoon – even earlier than in Hull, where ‘the lights come on at four / At the end of another year’. And it was always raining, whatever the season. I remember Larkin coming in from the rain, or preparing to go out in it: slightly fussy, cumbrous, long-suffering.

  Rain, as an element and an ambience, provides a backdrop to the life and to this very English story. ‘On 13 November Larkin travelled through heavy rain to Wellington for his interview, clutching his green-bound copy of The Public Library System of Great Britain.’ Heavy rain’, ‘driving rain’, ‘torrential rain’. Under the heading ‘FIVE DON’TS FOR OLD CREATURES’ Larkin wrote to his mother: ‘4. Don’t waste time worrying about rain. This is a wettish country. Lots of it falls. It always has done, and always will.’ What was Hull? Hull was as dull as rain. Rain was what Larkin felt marriages turned into; rain was what love and desire eventually became. ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ describes a rail journey to London in which the poet witnesses the aftermaths of wedding parties as, at every stop, the train fills up with ‘fresh couples’ about to begin their honeymoons and the rest of their lives. London approaches:

  and it was nearly done, this frail

  Travelling coincidence; and what it held

  Stood ready to be loosed with all the power

  That being changed can give. 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.

  Everybody knows ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’ and the thrilled finality of that poem’s closing stanza (‘This Be the Verse’):

  Man hands on misery to man.

  It deepens like a coastal shelf.

  Get out as early as you can,

  And don’t have any kids yourself.

  But there is always a sense of romantic balance in Larkin, however reluctant, however thwarted. ‘This Be the Verse’ has a sister poem, called The Trees’. After finishing it, Larkin wrote ‘Bloody awful tripe’ at the foot of the manuscript. But the last lines stand:

  Yet still the unresting castles thresh

  In fullgrown thickness every May.

  Last year is dead, they seem to say,

  Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

  New Yorker July 1993

  From the Canon

  Coleridge’s Beautiful Diseases

  Coleridge: Poet and Revolutionary, 1772-1804 by John Cornwell

  The critical biography has several claims to being a dead genre. The main aim of criticism, nowadays, is to provide intellectual stimulation; the main aim of biography (or so it seems to this reviewer) is to amuse the over-sixties. A knowledge of a writer’s life may give the odd insight into his work, but you don’t have to be a structuralist to see the dangers of studying them in tandem. What does the poet’s critical biographer do with the poems? Well, he’s indulgently knowing about the juvenilia, inclined to tick the author off for being ‘effusive’, ‘derivative’, etc. Then he cheers on the youthful work, pleased to see signs of ‘real development’, though he’ll still have a thing or two to tell him about ‘control’ and ‘self-discipline’. Next comes applause for the first ‘mature’ or ‘major’ verse, and for the rest the biographer will reckon to plant his feet so firmly in the facts of the poet’s life that he’ll be able to lever up his oeuvre on a biographical crowbar: this poem ‘reflects’ these events, that poem ‘lays bare’ those tensions – and the work has become a stupefied outpouring on the life. No biographer known to me can put on a fresh suit of clothes for the poetry, so perhaps it ought to be left alone and we should simply be told where the genuine criticism is to be found.

  Inside John Cornwell’s 400-page critical biography of Coleridge there is a 200-page uncritical one trying not nearly hard enough to get out. Unlike his predecessors, Mr Cornwell looks at Coleridge’s life (up to 1804) with patience and sympathy – qualities very much in demand when one contemplates the rumpus-room of delusion and credulity that form Coleridge’s early years. He ran away from Cambridge, enlisted in the Dragoons under a zany pseudonym (which Mr Cornwell, in the grand tradition of Coleridge biography, gets wrong – see Grigg’s edition of the Letters, I, 66), and was, understandably, discharged as insane. He hiked around England pretending to be a revolutionary, sneering at ‘WORLDLY PRUDENCE!’ and sponging off his friends. He dumped the ‘Pantisocracy’ scheme (whereby twelve couples were to live as intellectual subsistence-farmers in Pennsylvania) when Southey proposed taking servants along, but tried to revive it later, suggesting a West Indian plantation as venue and Negroes as home-helps. He took up the Shrewsbury Unitarian ministership one Saturday in January 1798 and dropped it the following Wednesday, by which time he had wangled an annuity out of his patrons. He jeered at Southey for considering a civic post; the book ends with him sailing to Malta to be secretary to the governor. Despite its unscholarly randomness, this part of Mr Cornwell’s book is successful; in particular, Coleridge’s wretched marriage, his opium habit and his illnesses are treated with consistent lucidity and intelligence.

  But what does the rest of the book think it’s doing? Mr Cornwell expounds that amorphous leviathan affectionately known as ‘Coleridge’s thought’ in a way that will merely bore and confuse the uninformed reader; and, more seriously, he whips back and forth from the discursive to the creative writings as if there were some kind of reliable equation between the two. It ‘may be very wild philosophy’, said Coleridge of a theory of Fenelon’s, ‘but it is very intelligible poetry’. Regard poetry as autonomous, said Coleridge; don’t go beyond it ‘in order by means of some other thing analogous to understand the former’. Mr Cornwell quotes both these remarks, with apparent approval, but without seeming to realize that this is precisely his own method. Unsurprisingly, when he comes to the three poems which clearly resist biographical or philosophical underpinning, he flounders. ‘Christabel’ is ignored. The Ancient Mariner gets a string of pedestrianisms plus a toiling analysis of its rhythms and vowel-sounds. And ‘Kubla Khan’ is reinterpreted so zestlessly that Mr Cornwell is forced to conclude that ‘whatever else one might say about “Kubla Khan”, it seems to be expressing in metaphorical form Coleridge’s consistent preoccupation with the tension and reconciliation of polarities’. An offer: sop for every poem of Coleridge’s (or anyone else’s) about which this could not be said. Possibly Mr Cornwell has something of interest to say about the verse, but the requirements of the conventional biography keep his hands well tied here.

  The book might have gained in coherence if it had stuck to the blurb’s purview: ‘The early decline of Coleridge’s poetic powers is one of the more poignant episodes in the history of literature.’ In fact, the issue detains Mr Cornwell for only a few paragraphs, and the usual reasons are given: Coleridge spread himself too thin intellectually, unhappy home life, overshadowed by Wordsworth, opium, sickness, anxiety. On this last point Mr Cornwell says, ‘he knew only too well that to realise his true potential he must be free of anxiety’. And here he shows a fundamental lack of empathy. If the anxiety were not there, nothing else in Coleridge would be there: the vicious-circle psychosomatic illnesses, compleat Self-knowledge, so mixed with intellectual complacency’, hypochondria coupled with appalling self-neglect, and, in the poems, the rootless apocalyptic fear of the Mariner, ‘Pains of Sleep’ and ‘T
he Wanderings of Cain’. The paradox was never more fetchingly (if obliquely) stated than by Coleridge himself

  It is a theory of mine that Virtue & Genius are Diseases of the Hypochondrical & Scrofulus Genus … – analogous to the beautiful Diseases, that colour & variegate certain Trees.

  Witness how Coleridge set about his genitals when he developed an endocele. Rather than consult a doctor he applied ‘fumigations of Vinegar’, ‘Sal ammonica dissolved in verjuice’, ‘three leaches’, ‘hot cloaths’ and poultices ‘of bread grated & mixed up with a strong solution of Lead’. Net gain? Five ‘angry ulcers’. Coleridge was the sort of man who would always come up with something to get him down.

  His biographers generally give Coleridge a hard time, and with Norman Fruman’s recent sniping at the work (Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel) it seemed that Coleridge was due for one of those ominous (and pointless) ‘reassessments’. But William Empson’s compassionate essay, introducing his and David Pirie’s selection of the verse, should restore stability to the critical stock-exchange; and now we have a sympathetic, if uninspiring, view of the life. Is it worth asking how much of Coleridge is likely to survive? His philosophy has had some influence, though largely in America; the criticism has given us nothing we could not have done without (the famous Fancy/Imagination distinction, for example, is just another pretence that we can officially separate the excellent from the less excellent). And what is left of the verse? The Conversation Poems do what little they do well; there are a few incidental successes, already mentioned; ‘Dejection: A Letter’ is too personal and ‘Dejection: An Ode’ too formal to repay close study. Only the obvious three remain, while writers with more good poems somehow stay decidedly less great. Perhaps Coleridge’s status is not threatened by this, or any, paring-down simply because of the age at which we first come to him. If Keats is the poet of adolescence, Coleridge is the poet of childhood; his world of lonesome roads, flashing eyes and demon lovers settles in the mind too early to be exposed by the sober light of adulthood.