The Ideal of Culture

by Joseph Epstein

  Larkin’s poems at first reading may seem dark, depressive even. “Deprivation is for me,” he said, “what daffodils were for Wordsworth.” The imperfection of life was his subject, the inadequacy of his own endowments for living it his context. Sometimes the darkness can be overdone. In the poem “Dockery and Son” (1964), he writes, “Life is first boredom, then fear,” to which one wants to reply, “So stop complaining, have a beer.” The next line in this poem reads, “Whether or not we use it, it goes,” to which the only proper response is, “Stop your blubbering and wipe your nose.”

  Yet, for the vast most part, far from being depressing, Larkin’s poems, written with a wondrous precision and lucidity, and a comic élan that can produce outright laughter, have the effect of lifting one’s spirits, as truth-telling often does. Not only aesthetically but in just about every other way, Larkin was a man set against his time: modernism in the arts, left-wing politics of the kind that appeals to academic intellectuals, admiration of youth—none of it was to his taste. This, as we shall see, has cost him.

  Philip Larkin was haunted by death, as perhaps all of us with normal attentions spans are, but more than most. Fear of marriage, or what it would do to him personally, was another major inhibitor in his life. In his poem “Love” (1962) he wrote: “How can you be satisfied / Putting someone else first / So that you come off worst? / My life is for me. / As well ignore gravity.”

  “I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any—after all most people are unhappy, don’t you think?” he told an interviewer. Self-depreciation, self-mockery, self-doubt came naturally to him. Aging, depression, failure, senility, mortality, from these unpromising subjects he made riveting poems. “The ultimate aim of a poet,” he wrote, “should be to touch our hearts by showing his own.”

  Monica Jones, the woman with whom Larkin had a relationship that spanned decades, wrote to him after the publication of The Less Deceived, the collection of poems that in 1955 made his reputation, with prophetic correctness: “I’m sure that you are the one of this generation! . . . I feel more sure of it than ever before, it is you who are the one.” He, too, was confident of his own future fame. When he missed a visit from the Queen at the opening of the Hull University Library, of which he was chief librarian, he wrote to his mother: “Ah well, one day I shall meet her as Philip Larkin, not the paltry librarian of a piffling university.” He knew his quality. “I don’t think I write well—just better than anyone else,” he wrote to Anthony Thwaite.

  Philip Larkin died in 1985, at 63, the same age as his father, a parallelism he prophesied. His last years were not easy ones. He lost much hearing, suffered impotence, both sexually and artistically. The year before his death, he wrote to his friend Kingley Amis:

  So now we face 1982, sixteen stone six, gargantuantly paunched, helplessly addicted to alcohol, tired of livin’ and scared of dyin’, world famous unable-to-write poet, well you know the rest.

  He was not exaggerating his fame. A television profile of him was done on the BBC. Honorary degrees rolled in. He was awarded the Queen’s Medal for Poetry. His portrait was commissioned by the National Gallery. He had a carefully cultivated oeuvre that included a dozen or so imperishable poems, one among them, “This Be The Verse” (1971), the funniest poem in the English language. At his death, Philip Larkin’s reputation seemed solid and secure.

  Not long after the house came down. 1993 was an annus horribilis. The previous year had seen the publication of Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940–85 edited by Anthony Thwaite, and Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life by Andrew Motion. (Both men had been chosen by the poet as his literary executors.) The letters were filled with jokes about women, put-downs of labor politicians and student radicals, an interest in pornography, regret over the loss of the British empire and more. He compared getting a woman into bed as “almost as much trouble as standing for parliament.” The critic A. Alvarez, who badly misread Larkin’s poetry, he called “El Al”; the novelist Salman Rushdie, “Salmagundi.” He referred to Catch-22 as “the American hymn to cowardice,” the IRA as “these mad, murdering, Irish swine.” The word “wog” often appears in these letters. The publication of these letters laid Larkin open to the kind of critics and biographers who cherry-pick unacceptable opinions in order to attack him.

  In Mr. Motion, poet laureate of England between 1999 and 2009, he found such a biographer. If there was anything ostensibly degrading, however derisory, to be said about Philip Larkin, Mr. Motion found it and worked it into his biography. He claimed Larkin detested his parents; he made him out to be a racist, a right-winger, an exploiter of women. In the Motion biography, Larkin is nailed to the cross of political correctness. How could a man holding such views, the reasoning ran, be a great poet?

  Not the least value of James Booth’s biography of Philip Larkin is the antidote it supplies to Andrew Motion’s. James Booth takes a few swipes at Mr. Motion’s obtuseness, but his Philip Larkin is, far from a polemic, true to its subtitle, exploring Larkin’s Life, Art, and Love. The author has achieved a proper balance, rare in books about writers, between the life and the art, always intent on showing how the life influenced the art, which in the end ought to be the only reason for interest in the life.

  Mr. Booth is wise enough to distinguish between indiscretions in letters to friends and actions in the world. He also has the sense of humor required of anyone who writes about Larkin and which is so evidently missing in Andrew Motion. James Booth’s biography reveals a Philip Larkin more complex, three-dimensional, and subtler in every way than Andrew Motion ever dreamed possible.

  Larkin may have written the immortal line about how one’s mum and dad fuck one up, but he nevertheless liked his parents and was himself the model of the good son. He admired his father’s competence—he was a civil servant in Coventry—and appreciated that he introduced him, at any early age, to literature of a sophisticated kind. Larkin cared for his mother through her long widowhood (she died at 91), and wrote to her at least twice a week; Mr. Booth notes that there are more than 4,000 of his letters to her in the Larkin archive. His parents, meanwhile, according to his 10-years-older sister, “worshipped him.”

  “I wouldn’t want it thought that I didn’t like my parents,” Larkin told Miriam Gross, who interviewed him for the London Observer. “I did like them. But at the same time they were rather awkward people and not very good at being happy.” Their marriage caused him to see in marriage a kind of mutual prison, reducing the potentialities of both parties. If Larkin was in any way disappointing to the five or so women with whom he had serious relationships, it was owing to his inability to assent to marriage. Not that he was entirely happy with his bachelor life. He often wrote, in poems and in letters, of the possibility that he had missed out on the fuller life provided by wife and children. But he couldn’t pull the trigger on marriage. Married or single, neither, for Larkin, was a true solution, but he went with single.

  That the three women with whom he had continuous affairs wished to marry him is not alone a sign of a nesting instinct in women but a testament to Larkin’s decency, tenderness, kindness as a lover. Whatever he may have said jokingly in his letters, many of them to Kingsley Amis and to Robert Conquest, in his actual treatment of women he was as far as possible from being a brute. When Monica Jones became ill he brought her to Hull, established her in his apartment, and cared for her in a devoted husbandly way. When the seriously Catholic Maeve Brennan, another of the women with whom he had a lengthy relationship, made plain that she held strong views on pre-marital sex, Larkin seems by and large to have acceded to these views. No one did more than he to revive the reputation of the novelist Barbara Pym. Despite the misogynist bluster of his letters, he was charming and attentive to women, around whom, his biographer avers, he always felt most at ease.

  As for Larkin’s politics, they were scarcely central to his art or his personality. He was supposed to
be an ardent nationalist in politics, yet Mr. Booth quotes a letter he wrote to Monica Jones in which he remarks that “my God, surely nationalism is the surest mark of mediocrity.” Larkin was not a right-winger; he was instead anti-left, which is not at all the same thing. As for his alleged racism, this is a label that should not be stuck upon a man who adored the music of Fats Waller and Duke Ellington and thought Louis Armstrong a genius.

  “Books are a load of crap,” from his poem “A Study of Reading Habits” (1964), is another of Larkin’s best-known lines, and one that went a long way to establishing his reputation as a philistine. The notion is absurd for any poet whose major influences were Auden, Yeats, Hardy, and the French symbolist Jules Laforgue. What he was opposed to, as he made perhaps too plain in the introduction to All What Jazz (1970), his collection of writings on jazz, was modernism in the arts, as represented by such figures as Ezra Pound, Pablo Picasso, and Charlie Parker. He disliked such arts “not because they are new, but because they are irresponsible exploitations of technique in contradiction of human life as we know it.” He could be amusing about such art. He called Kafka’s The Trial “that gloomy convincing piece of bullshit.” He thought Robert Lowell “balmy,” and never passed up a chance to mock Ted Hughes, whom he thought “no good at all.”

  Larkin’s views have been too often conflated with the coarser views of Kingsley Amis. The two men, James Booth shows, were not as close as Andrew Motion and others believed. At Larkin’s funeral, Amis remarked, “I sometimes wonder if I really knew him.” The answer was that he didn’t. Until now, with the publication of Mr. Booth’s biography, no one did. James Booth’s Philip Larkin is a salutary reminder that biography need be neither iconoclastic nor reveal dark secrets to help readers understand the subtle richness of a complex man.

  Willa Cather

  (2013)

  Willa Cather’s literary reputation is even now, nearly 70 years after her death, less than clear. In her day—born in 1873, she published her main novels and books of stories between 1912 and 1940—she was regarded as insufficiently modernist, both in method and in outlook. She was later found to be a poor fit for academic feminism, for she wrote about the great dignity of female strength and resignation in the face of the harshest conditions. Advocates of gay literature who inhabit universities under the banner of Queer Theory have attempted to adopt her, taking her for a lesbian—she never married and had no serious romantic relationships with men—but her lesbianism remains suppositious at best. The powerful critics of her day and of ours have never lined up behind her. All she has had is readers who adore her novels and stories.

  I am among them, and if pressed I should say that Willa Cather was the best novelist of the 20th century. Not all of her novels were successful: One of Ours, Lucy Gayheart, Sapphira and the Slave Girl don’t really come off. But those that do—O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), My Antonia (1918), A Lost Lady (1922) The Professor’s House (1925), Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), and Shadows on the Rock (1931)—do so with a grace and grandeur that show a mastery of the highest power.

  Willa Cather’s great subject was immigration to America, chiefly among northern Europeans, their endurance in the face of nature’s pitiless hardships, and what she calls “the gorgeous drama with God.” Her prose was confidently cadenced and classically pure, never—like that of Hemingway or Faulkner—calling attention to itself, but instead devoted to illuminating her characters and their landscapes. (No one described landscape more beautifully than she.) Snobbery, egotism, politics never marred her storytelling. She wrote with a fine eye for the particular without ever losing sight of the larger scheme of the game of life.

  Cather’s favorite of her own novels, Death Comes for the Archbishop, her account of two missionary French priests settling what will one day be New Mexico, strikes so exquisite a note of reverence that many people took its author for a Catholic. She wasn’t. Born a Baptist, she later became an Episcopalian. In one of the letters in the recently published collection The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, Cather writes to a sociologist at the University of Miami named Read Bain that she was not a Catholic nor had she any intention of becoming one. “On the other hand,” she wrote,

  I do not regard the Roman Church merely as “artistic material.” If the external form and ceremonial of that Church happens to be more beautiful than that of other churches, it certainly corresponds to some beautiful vision within. It is sacred, if for no other reason than that it is the faith that has been most loved by human creatures, and loved over the greatest stretch of centuries.

  That we have The Selected Letters of Willa Cather at all is a point of interest in itself. Willa Cather intensely disliked having her private life on display. She carefully promoted her books, frequently chiding publishers for their want of effort at publicizing them and stocking them in book stores. But she didn’t think that promoting and publicizing extended to promoting and publicizing herself. She eschewed writing blurbs for the excellent reason that “sometimes the best possible friends write the worst possible books.” She gave few interviews, and when she wrote something about another person in a letter, she not uncommonly asked that her recipient keep it in confidence. Like Henry James, she burned many of the letters sent to her.

  “We fully realize that in producing this book of selected letters,” write the editors of The Selected Letters, “we are defying Willa Cather’s stated preference that her letters remain hidden from the public eye.” Their justification is that now, 66 years after her death in 1947, with her artistic reputation secure, “these letters heighten our sense of her complex personality, provide insights into her methods and artistic choices as she worked, and reveal Cather herself to be a complicated, funny, brilliant, flinty, sensitive, sometimes confounding human being.” The letters, in their view, flesh out in a useful way the skeletal figure of the pure artist that Cather preferred to project.

  Nothing in The Selected Letters touches directly on the vexed question of Willa Cather’s sexuality—on, that is, whether or not she was a lesbian. The reason is the paucity of the letters to the two women with whom Cather was closest during her adult life. The first was Isabelle McClung, in whose family’s house she lived while a journalist and high-school teacher in Pittsburgh. Isabelle later married a violinist named Jan Hambourg from a Jewish family of musicians, which was painful for Cather, who didn’t much care for him. When Isabelle died, in 1938, Cather felt it as a great subtraction. The second, Edith Lewis, with whom Cather shared apartments in New York and vacation homes in Grand Manan Island in the Bay of Fundy and in Maine, worked in publishing and later as a copywriter. She assisted in innumerable ways, from proofreader to nurse during Cather’s many late-life ailments. Lewis survived Cather and wrote a rather anodyne memoir of her after her death.

  Hermione Lee, Cather’s least tendentious biographer, refers to Edith Lewis’s status as that of “wife” to Willa Cather. But she also allows that there is no evidence of the novelist ever having been the lover of either Isabelle McClung or Edith Lewis. If Cather’s and Isabelle McClung’s had been an active lesbian relationship, it is highly unlikely that Isabelle’s father, a judge known for his conservative outlook, would have permitted Cather to live in his house. Nor would Cather have traveled and lived so openly with Edith Lewis if theirs was a lesbian relationship, for there were few things that Willa Cather more greatly contemned than scandal. Case closed, or so one would like to think, though it probably never will be, for, as La Rochefoucauld had it, dirty minds never sleep.

  Willa Cather was born in Virginia and, fortunately for her art, her family moved to Nebraska when she was nine. The move was jolting in every sense, physically and psychologically. The Nebraska landscape was barren, conventional cultural life there nearly non-existent. Her father, a gentle man of great dignity, arranged farm loans, at which he was only moderately successful. Her mother did not easily take to life on the prairie.

  Cather wa
s the oldest in a family of seven children, with two sisters and four brothers. The town of Red Cloud, where the Cathers settled, was without many amenities, but she found there an Englishman named William Drucker who instructed her in Greek and Latin. German-Jewish neighbors kept a decent library to which they allowed her access. Her initial impulse was to become a physician. She dressed boyishly, was called Willie. In some of her letters in later life she writes of her insensitivity to her family, but in regard to her surroundings she was one of those children on whom not much was lost. Great writers are in training for their art long before they are even aware they wish to be writers.

  Willa Cather grew to know the Bohemian, Swedish, Norwegian, German farmers with whom her father did business, and to love the land despite its droughts, scorching sun, brutal winters, and unforgiving severity. She would later come to love the Colorado of the cliff dwellers, of whom she wrote in The Professor’s House, and the Southwest even more. “I do not think my heart ever got across the Missouri river,” she wrote to an old Nebraska friend. To her publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, she wrote during a holiday in Red Cloud: “I get more thrills to the square mile out of this cornfield country than I can out of any other country in the world.”

  Some of Cather’s more interesting letters are to publishers and editors. The first major publisher for her novels was Houghton Mifflin, where she dealt with an editor named Ferris Greenslet. She felt her books treated as second-class merchandise there, and in 1919 she left Houghton Mifflin for the firm of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Knopf, who was then 26 years old and who had begun his firm four years earlier, was eager to have Willa Cather’s books on his list. The move was providential, and profitable to both author and publisher. The young Knopf brought out her books in handsome editions, and always treated their author as the literary equivalent of a grande dame, which was, one learns from her letters, the least she expected.