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Jonathan Raban on Larkin--II From early on, the ordinary pleasures of life made a habit of eluding him. At Oxford, he made passes at girls, but: "every encounter was a disaster. Margaret Flannery, for instance, 'edged toward him but made him giggle.' Hilary Allen of St. Hilda's upset him by beating him at table tennis. Another girl, when he took her a bunch of flowers, alarmed him so much merely by opening the door to his knock that he was literally unable to speak to her; he thrust the flowers into her arms and fled. A fourth, when he tried to kiss her in a punt, told him: "I'd sooner not, thanks." After this strings of defeats Larkin retired hurt, sheltering behind the antagonism which had protected him in the past. "Cunt and bugger Oxford women," he wrote to Sutton . . . . He had no better luck with boys. He tried to make love to a medical student at his college (St. John's), who reported to Motion: "There were a few messy encounters between us, yes. Nothing much. Philip's sexuality was so obscured by his manner of approach and his general diffidence that frankly I would be surprised to hear that he ever had sex with anyone." Larkin came closest to experiencing requited passion in the solitary pursuit of art---in listening to Count Basie and Sidney Bechet, as in reading Lawrence, Yeats, Auden and Hardy. Even in his 50s, when he was having convoluted (and consummated) affairs with Monica Jones, Maeve Brennan and Betty Mackereth, his preferred form of sexuality was masturbating alone over pictures in magazines. One of the several themes of Motion's book is how cunningly Larkin came to contrive and to sustain his lonely exclusion from the world. It was often hard work to stay so alone and so unsatisfied, but it was work for which Larkin had an extraordinary talent. From the time he left Oxford in 1943, to take up a magnificently obscure position in the urban district public library at Wellington in Shropshire, he always managed to give himself reason to grieve over being in the wrong place with the wrong person in the wrong era---and, conversely, to be haunted by the brilliant prospect of the counterlife he had thus sidestepped, the happiness he had ensured would not be his. In "The Importance of Elsewhere", Larkin wrote: "Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home,/Strangeness made sense." The poem is dated June 1955---three months after Larkin left Belfast (where he was an assistant librarian at Queen's University) to take up the job in Hull, where he would spend his remaining thirty years. The last line goes: "Here [in England] no elsewhere underwrites my existence." This wasn't strictly true. His poems are possessed by the idea of elsewhere. Their disappointment with the here-and-now is a rankling homesickness compounded with amnesia: there is no telling where home was, precisely, but it is not here. Again and again, they point to the other country of the past, that misty elsewhere, in which things were done differently, and better. In Ulster, Larkin's true-blue brand of Toryism led him to become a Loyalist, and while there he wrote a curious poem, "The March Past", about an Apprentice Boys' parade. This annual show of Protestant force rouses in him: "...a blind/Astonishing remorse for things now ended/That of themselves were also rich and splendid/(But unsupported broke, and were not mended)." His nostalgia is couched in terms so inexplicit that these lines might summon almost anything, from William of Orange trouncing Catholics at the Battle of the Boyne to a mild repining for the glories of country house life in the heyday of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy. The essential logic seems to be that things were rich and splendid *because* they are now ended---a thought that often drove Larkin to crocodile tears. In "An Arundel Tomb", he wrote a tender hymn to a marriage (an institution that he treated as hell on earth in most contexts), the couple in question having been safely dead for six centuries. In "Church Going", the church becomes an object of fond reverie only after Larkin has emptied it of people, stripped it of its roof and filled it with sheep and mildew in four stanzas of loving ruination. When Larkin wants to make us feel warm about something, he turns it into history, gangster-style, at gunpoint. The sepia photo of grinning young men standing in line to enlist for service in the Flanders trenches ("MCMXIV") brings out an upwelling of sweet sorrow ("Never such innocence,/Never before or since...") because we know the men are very shortly going to be blown to smithereens---as in "The Explosion" we weep for the miners, seen in the fullness of their lives just at the moment when the fatal tremor shakes the pithead village. As the young man opens his fist to show a clutch of unbroken larks' eggs, he's---history. The mysterious and lovely ending to "The Whitsun Weddings" delivers more death on a grand scale. Motion reveals that the image of the "arrow shower/Sent out of sight" was prompted by a visit to the cinema (with Monica Jones) to see Laurence Olivier's Henry V. We are at Agincourt, the English archers have just loosened their bows, and a lot of French peasants are going to snuff it when the shower turns into rain at the other end of the battlefield. So the luckless honeymooners are in for it, their great day made poignant by the doom that is being planned for them in the poem's final lines. One cannot help being reminded of the way that Larkin felt about people like this when they were alive, with no immediate prospect of extinction. "I want to see them starving,/The so-called working class,/Their wages weekly halving,/Their women stewing grass..." Dead, they became legitimate objects of sentimental feeling, material for Larkin's peculiar kind of taxidermal elegy. His rare attempts to find something to celebrate in contemporary England tend to fall flat. The 1973 poem "Show Saturday" is like a big, crowded, somewhat overcolored canvas of a Suffolk horse fair by Sir Alfred Munnings; a craftsmanly re-creation of a country show, complete with farmers, craft and produce stalls, pony-club children, wrestlers, chainsaw contestants and "mugfaced middleaged wives/Glaring at jellies" ("wives" always get it in the neck in Larkin's work, like the "unspeakable wives" in "Toads", the "grim headscarved wives" in "Here" and the "bearded wife" in "The Dance"). The show is the backbone of rural England, the Tory Party taking a well-earned day off, and Larkin here is in an uncharacteristically expansive mood as he shepherds the poem to an uplifting envoi: Let [the show] stay hidden there like strength, below It is a rhetorical collapse. Motion suggests that the passage is charged with a private double meaning: Larkin visited the Bellingham Show in Northumberland with Jones, and the "regenerate union" is as much his and hers as it is that of the good people of England. Yet even if one glosses it with this in mind, the last sentence strikes a wan and hollow note. The show, with all its bright and noisy quiddity, simply won't perform the solemn function that Larkin assigns to it, and the end of the poem only serves to remind one of how very deeply affirmation goes against Larkin's grain. What he excelled at was a kind of acrid self-cancellation. In the conduct of his life, whenever he made an emotional move, he quickly rescinded it. Motion's account of why Larkin began an affair with his secretary, Betty Mackereth, in 1975, shortly after Maeve Brennan, a library junior, had at last consented to go to bed with him, is to the point here (read as if these were characters in fiction, it is also extremely funny): "As Maeve finally yielded, her romantic elusiveness was destroyed and his attraction to her was bound to diminish. Furthermore, the sacrifice of her religious principles raised again the specter of marriage---for Larkin at least, if not for Maeve herself. He felt that he had set in train a series of obligations which were likely to lead to the altar. There were other kinds of frustration as well. Because he and Maeve went to bed---even in their new, revitalized relationship---only on 'very rare and isolated occasions', Larkin's sexual appetite was stirred but unsatisfied. By turning to Betty he was therefore taking for himself while giving of himself---not only gaining his pleasure but securing his independence. Betty reactivated the dramatic struggle between life and work on which his personality had always depended." One can watch Larkin going through the same canny hoopla in his letters: a warm and appreciative letter to X is followed, often on the same day, by a warm and appreciative letter to Y in jeering dispraise of X, and so on. Bad faith was a form of good faith; it meant that Larkin was still keeping his options open. As he wrote in "To My Wife" (1952): "Choice of you shuts up that peacock-fan/The future was...." Even as the fan faded from peacock to molted starling, Larkin set great store by refusing to close it. Something very similar happens in the work. From early on, the shit-and-piss talk, with which Larkin regaled the boys in his letters, began to enter the poems as the language of life: nasty, brutish and four-lettered, to be set against the solemn Tennysonian idiom of art. In many of his best poems there is an exquisitely delicate balance between an interior voice, thinking aloud in the rarefied silence of the lamp-lit study, and the demotic voices---rude, inconsequential---of the street outside. Art is pitched head-on against life, and there is the teasing possibility in all these poems that art may lose---that the poem may become swamped in chatter, or in scatology. When "The Whitsun Weddings" was about to be broadcast on the BBC in 1959, Larkin warned the radio reader: "Success or failure of the poem depends on whether it gets off the ground on the last two lines. It is asking a lot of a reader, I know, to achieve a climax in so small a compass, but unless this image succeeds with the listener I am afraid the poem will seem no more than pedestrian." The narrowness of the triumph---the against-the-odds transcendence of art over life in that last-minute swoop---made the poem. Larkin here was playing a dangerous game brilliantly. By the time his last collection, *High Windows*, was published in 1974, it had ceased to be a game. The poems had turned into battles between a life that was increasingly frightening and disgusting and an art that was increasingly fine-spun and febrile. One after another, the poems start in low demotic---the language of intolerable life: When I see a couple of kids What do they think has happened, the old fools, Jan van Hogspeuw staggers to the door They fuck you up, your mum and dad Groping back to bed after a piss... Sexual intercourse began My wife and I have asked a crowd of craps From these desperate and squalid beginnings, the poems climb, against all likelihood, to heights like the tragic serenity attained at the end of "High Windows" (which begins: "When I see a couple of kids..."): Rather than words comes the thought of high windows; Poems don't get much closer to miracles than that. Andrew Motion has some unsettling news about "High Windows." Larkin finished the poem in February 1967, working from a draft he had written in the spring of 1965. The draft ending ran: Rather than words comes the thought of high windows The three words jeer desolately at the lines immediately above them on the page. Larkin---horse shit. Gibber gibber. His later work bears the message that poetry can be made out of a sour and unsatisfied life, but it comes with the self-lacerating caveat that no poetry is so secure that it can escape the suspicion of being a rhetorical trick, a phony prettying-up of the life it purports to transfigure. In this tormented mistrust of his own art, at least, Larkin was an exemplary modernist. After his death, two women each believed that the poem "When first we faced, and touching showed..." was meant for her alone, and one of them, Maeve Brennan (who worked with Larkin for thirty years and whose affair with him lasted for seventeen), said to Motion: "I wonder whether I really knew him at all. He had feet of clay, didn't he? Huge feet of clay." The author of The Less Deceived maintained his sacred privacy behind a fence of interlocking betrayals and evasions---and it was no wonder that he came to fear that the person most deceived by these stratagems had been himself. The solitude that he spent a lifetime dodging and lying to keep intact was always solitude for art's sake---time "repaid/Under a lamp, hearing the noise of wind,/And looking out to see the moon thinned/To an air-sharpened blade." For the bargain to work, there had to be an unfinished poem under that lamp; but after the publication of High Windows, the desk was nearly always empty, and the poems that did occasionally appear there were rarely among Larkin's best. The strikes and counterstrikes of life and art in High Windows had taken Larkin to the brink of paralyzed silence. Out of this impasse came one magnificent poem---"Aubade", begun in 1974 and finished in 1977. An *aubade* (dawn serenade) is an early morning poem in which the writer parts with his mistress after a last night of love. Larkin's 4 a.m. "Aubade" is a desperate and hungover leave-taking from life and art: ...this is what we fear---no sight, no sound, The poem makes plain that, more than almost anyone alive, Larkin knew what being dead was like. It was in writing that he was able to think and link, and death presented itself to him as a kind of eternity of writer's block, a state of unbeing with which Larkin had long been miserably familiar. Most things never happen: this one will In a letter to Barbara Pym, Larkin described "Aubade" as "the death- throes of a talent", and though the phrase is meant to come across as mournful-jocular, Larkin in his Eeyore mode, it tells the exact truth about what the poem does. Larkin was always scared that the bargain he had made was a bad one. As early as 1966, he was confessing to Monica Jones: "I feel I am landed on my 45th year as if washed up on a rock, not knowing how I got here or ever had a chance of being anywhere else....Of course my external surroundings have changed, but inside I've been the same, trying to hold everything off in order to 'write'. Anyone would think I was Tolstoy, the value I put on it. It hasn't amounted to much. I mean, I know I've been successful in that I've made my name & got a medal & so on, but it's a very small achievement to set against all the rest." Fifteen years later, or thereabouts, he told Motion: "I used to believe that I should perfect the work and life could fuck itself. Now I'm not doing anything, all I've got is a fucked-up life." Both these verdicts cry out to be contradicted, but the reader, balancing Larkin's poems with his letters and his life, is likely to find them wretchedly hard to gainsay.
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