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Revealing the Dark Side of the Best-Loved English Poet of His

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Revealing the Dark Side of the Best-Loved English Poet of His BY EDWARD HIRSCH Revealing the dark side of the best-loved English poet of his generation, the recently published biography and selected letters of Philip Larkin sent shock waves through the litera y world. How might readers respond to the work of a man who gleefully raved against women, minorities, and almost everybody else, including himself? Edward Hirsch ponders the question. hilip Larkin has increasingly thony Thwaite's edition of the Collected Poems come to seem the greatest English (1988), which also includes Larkin's early po- poet after W. H. Auden, though ems, written from his teens up to the publica- the word "great" is perhaps tion of his first book, The North Ship (1945), as mildly inapplicable to a writer of well as previously unpublished and such slender output and narrow range. Yet he uncollected lyrics. The arrangement dilutes was, as Auden himself said in a 50th-birthday Larkin's scrupulous effects and well-ordered tribute, "a master of the English language," a individual collections, but it also gives a fuller poet whose near-perfect phrasing, emotional sense of the writer at work, his clustering honesty and directness, and clarity of artistic themes and chronological development. purpose permanently stamped his generation. Larkin's bibliography also contains two early Larkin essentially wrote from personal expe- novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947), rience, his verbal antennae precisely attuned written in his early twenties (his first overrid- to unhappinessÑ1'happines writes white," ing ambition was to be a novelist), and two he said, quoting the French novelist Monther- nonfiction miscellanies, All What Jazz:A Record lant. He understood poetry as "emotional in Diay 1961-1971 (rev. ed. 1985) and Required nature and theatrical in operation," and his Writing:Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982 (1983). carefully honed style combined a self-depre- Larkin's reputation was further enhanced by eating, razor-like wit with an unshakable the controversial success of his edition of The sense of worldly disappointment, of desires Oxford Book of Twentieth-Centu y English Verse unfulfilled and dreams thwarted. His famow (1973), which succeeded Yeats's Oxford Book of remark to an interviewer that "deprivation is Modem Verse (1936). Larkin's edition gave ca- for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth" nonical authority to his traditional poetic values is both funny and acute since the misery of di- and anti-Modernist tastes, his commitment to minished and unfulfilled experience is his en- formal poetry written for a general readership. during subject. Indeed, it is difficult to think of The voice of disillusion was also a conserver of him as young-this man who seemed to have English traditions. been born middle-aged, regretting a past that never took place and terrified of oncoming death. fter the death of his friend The tone of sour majesty, of sardonic resignation Sir John Betjeman in 1984, infused with wordless romantic yearning, is Larkin was generally expected something we might call Larkinesque. to become the next poet lau- During his lifetime Larkin became one of reate of England. The rumor the best-loved English poets, a reclusive figure persists that he was passed over because of the at the heart of the English sensibility. His for- profanity in his work satirizing family values midable reputation basically rests on three ("They fuck you up, your mum and dad),but thin, irreplaceable volumes whose combined in truth he was offered the position by Mrs. contents come to 85 poems: The Less Deceived Thatcher and turned it down. Larkin always (1955),which made his mark and established refused to be in any way publicly involved his voice; The Whitsun Weddings (1964),which with poetry. (He once said about poetry read- made him famous in England ("It turned his ings, "I don't want to go around pretending to voice into one of the means by which his coun- be me.") He found appearing in public an or- try recognized itself," his biographer Andrew deal, jealously guarded his privacy, and suf- Motion writes); and High Windows (1974), fered what would turn out to be a near-termi- which converted him into something of an nal writer's block. ("Poetry has deserted me," English national treasure and made him. inter- he was already complaining in 1967.) He nationally known. These were gathered to- thought the laureateship had become "show- gether and chronologically rearranged in An- biz" and was not surprised when Ted Hughes, SOUR MAJESTY 113 whose work he disliked, accepted the position. seethed inside him. Larkin never hid his nega- But if Hughes, a romantic primitivist who glo- tive opinions of others, but he parceled them ries in preindustrial Albion, became the offi- out and displayed them with a witty tact. In cial laureate, then Larkin remained until his Required Writing, for example, one encounters death, as Donald Davie suggested, "the effective his offhanded sense of other people ("Every- unofficial laureate of post-1945 England." Davie one envies everyone else"), his commitment to observed that "we recognize in Larkin's poems bachelorhood ("I see life more as an affair of the seasons of present-day England, but we rec- solitude diversified by company than as an ognize also the seasons of an English soul." affair of company diversified by solitude"), his distaste for children ("Until I grew up I arkin drew a thick curtain between his thought I hated everybody, but when I grew private life and his public persona. He up I realized it was just children I didn't like"), L dismissed his childhood in the smallish his ideas about being abroad ("I wouldn't Midlands city of Coventry as "a forgotten mind seeing China if I could come back the boredom" and encouraged the notion that same day"), and his conservative political nothing had ever happened to him. At Oxford views ("Iadore Mrs. Thatcher"). He was right- during the war years ("Oxford terrified me," wing and said, "I identify the Right with cer- he admitted later) he wrote both poetry and tain virtues and the Left with certain vices." He prose and was associated with the generation was also a monarchist and one of his last po- of Kingsley Amis and John Wain. Afterward, ems, dated March 2,1978, is a quatrain writ- he worked as a librarian in Wellington, Leices- ten to commemorate the Queen's Jubilee. He ter, and Belfast before settling down at the called it "a lapidary lark": University of Hull. For the last 30 years of his life he cultivated his disguise as an ordinary In times when nothing stood person-a working chap, a bachelor, a but worsened, or grew strange, middle-brow. 'Whatever a poet is supposed there was one constant good: to look like, it's not me," he said typically. He she did not change. was, by all accounts, unfailingly courteous, bald and bespectacled and increasingly deaf, The poem is now inscribed on a memorial formal in a dark suit and tie ("death-suited), stone in Queen's Square garden. stem but amiable, quiet and shy, but also droll Larkin believed that "the impulse to pre- and at times wickedly funny. He obviously serve lies at the bottom of any art," and many took a great deal of pleasure in expressing of his poems preserve the memory of a fading himself as Philip Larkin, in his own playful England. 'Never such innocence,/Never be- articulate refusals and his unyielding posture fore or since," he writes in his hymn to old of bleakness. He liked turning his dislike of England, "MCMXIV." In a sense, Larkin's things into a spectacle for his friends and de- mature tone settles down into a knowing ac- lighted in comic exaggerations. 'To say that he ceptance of Englishness, of what it means to had a sense of humor,"the novelist A. N. Wil- be English. The poem "The Importance of son cautioned about Larkin's antic humor, Elsewhere," which he wrote after living in "would be to imply that he sometimes said things Belfast for five years, begins, "Lonely in Ire- which it was safe to take wholly seriously." land, since it was not home,/Strangeness Not many detected the level of rage that made sense,"and concludes, Edward Hirsch is a professor in the creative writing program at the University of Houston. He is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, the Nation, and the New Republic, and the author of four books of poetry, For the Sleepwalkers (1981), Wild Gratitude (1986), The Night Parade (1989), and Earthly Measures, to be published by Knopf in January 1994. Copyright @ 1993 by Edward Hirsch. 114 WQ SUMMER 1993 Living in England has no such excuse: The sadness associated with Britain's loss These are my customs and establishments of power is not just a personal neurosis; it re- It would be much more serious to refuse. flects the pessimism of Larkin's class facing its Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence. reduced place in the world. Larkin is not usu- ally such an overtly political poet; rather he There is a Larkin of cricket and English presents himself as a lyricist of dwindled pros- seaside holidays, of country churchyards, na- pects, of leaves falling away from their trees tive coastlines, and small market towns. But and seasons fading, of people being pushed to he catches the country at a point where it is en- the side of their own lives. But the politics asso- dangered, hemmed in on all sides, on the ciated with Larkm's personal sadness are en- verge of disappearing.The stately cadences of coded in his work since his autumnal feelings of "Going, Going" are explicit: disappointment continually point to a national feeling of cultural decline and decreased irnpe- And that will be England gone, rial power.
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