BY EDWARD HIRSCH

Revealing the dark side of the best-loved English poet of his generation, the recently published biography and selected letters of 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 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the word "great" is perhaps tion of his first book, (1945), as mildly inapplicable to a writer of well as previously unpublished and such slender output and narrow range.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, (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: Thatcher and turned it down. Larkin always (1955),which made his mark and established refused to be in any way publicly involved his voice; (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 (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 sometimessaid 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. Larkin was the unofficial laureate of The shadows, the meadows, the lanes, a gray, postimperial, postwar England. The guildhalls, the carved choirs. There'll be books; it will linger on e cultivated a stellar, anti-intellectual In galleries; but all that remains pose as one of the lesser deceived. For us will be concrete and tyres. H Larkin made no secret of his anti- cosmopolitanism, his anti-Americanism, his Larkin's England is an Edwardian pastoral hatred of "the aberration of Modernism, that that has been desecrated by a relentless en- blighted all the arts." He took every opportu- croaching modernism ("greeds/And garbage nity to whack the Modernist giants (Pablo are too thick-strewn/To be swept up now"). Picasso, Ezra Pound, Charlie Parker). He also It is a provincial glory, besieged and vanishing. made much of his literary conversion from Larkin's anxiety about the social and po- Yeats to Hardy, which he defined as a rejec- litical developments of the 1960s was directly tion of grand rhetorical gestures and an accep- expressed in such satirical poems as "Natu- tance of human limits. Hardy gave him confi- rally the Foundation Will Bear Your Ex- dence in his own authoritative pessimism. penses," "Take One Home for the Kiddies," Thereafter Larkin always insisted on an em- and "Homage to a Government,"which takes pirical, antiheroic, antitranscendental poetic. up the subject of Britain's withdrawal from a He took a skeptical, commonsensical ap- dominant military role on the world stage. proach to poetry, ridiculed anything that "Homage" publicly articulates what Larkin smacked of "literature," and pretended to be told Barbara Pym privately-that he was a nonreader. One of his best-known poems, "A "deeply humiliated at living in a country that Study of Reading Habits," concludes, "Books spends more on education than on defence." are a load of crap." Or, as he told an inquisi- Here is the last stanza: tive interviewer, "I read everything except philosophy, theology, economics, sociology, science, or anything to do with the wonders of Next year we shall be living in a country nature, anything to do with technology-have That brought its soldiers home for I said politics?" lack of money. The statues will be standing in the same Of course this is absurd coming from a Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly university librarian. The pose is belied both by the same. the quality of Larkin's writing-you don't get Our children will not know it's a to write the way Larkin did without being an different country. acute reader-and by the sly, mostly buried All we can hope to leave them now is money. range of references in his work, especially to

SOUR MAJESTY 115 French Symbolism. In another format he adrnit- 30-odd thick volumes of his diary, which she ted, "I've always been a compulsive reader," and subsequently did. The rest of his papers sur- acknowledged keeping 12 poetic exemplars vived, and the damage is profound. within reach of his working chair: Thomas Hardy, William Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti, he publication of Larkin's Letters cre- Gerard Manley Hopkins, Siegfried Sassoon, Ed- ated a controversy in England that has ward Thomas, William Barnes, Winthrop Praed, Tnot yet subsided and will go on echo- John Betjeman, Walt Whitrnan (!), Robert Frost, ing for years. Almost all of the discussion has and Wilfred Owen. Many of Larkin's opinions focused on the most repellent aspects of the seemed part of an elaborate put-on, a vast pri- correspondence:Larkin's racism, his xenopho- vate joke. Yet there was also a truth expressed in bia, his misogyny. It is as if he had exposed the Larkm's stance against reading that may, after all, sewer of the English soul. Certainly that is not suggest an anxiety about the "unmanliness" of what the editor of these Letters had intended. literary activity. As his work progressed, he in- "What is remarkable," Anthony Thwaite creasingly fenced off more and more of the out- writes in his tactful, somewhat hopeful intro- side world, eventually excluding other people's duction, "is how consistently Larkin emerges, thoughts and ideas entirely, dispensing with whoever he is writing to. Books, poems, jazz, other people's passions by filing them away ac- cricket, drink, the daily grind of 'the toad, cording to the Dewey decimal system. work,' exasperation with colleagues and friends, gossip about them, depression at the his past year, however, a "national trea- state of the world and of himself, concern with sure" became, to judge by the ferocious whatever concerned the person to whom he Tdebates in the English press, a national was writing, occasional delights in the occa- problem. The carefully erected barrier be- sional delight he experienced-all are here, in tween Larkin's private life and his public per- the vividly speaking voice of someone who, sona was breached by the publication of two even when he was joking, told the truth as he books by his literary executors: Anthony saw it." After this mild description, it is a Thwaitels voluminous edition of the Selected shock to turn to the often foul-mouthed letters Letters of Philip Larkin, which contains over 700 themselves. These letters, especially the ones letters to more than 50 recipients, and Andrew to his male cronies Kingsley Amis, Robert Motion's judicious biographical account, Conquest, and Colin Gunner, were a time Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life. In England the bomb that has now exploded. Many readers Letters appeared first and the biography after- suspected Larkin's prejudices all along-his ward; in the United States the process has been attitudes kept seeping into his poems, reviews, mercifully reversed. The biography is out this and interviews-but not many were aware of month, and the Letters will be published in the virulence with which they were privately December. Late in his life Larkin reviewed expressed. What began as a set of grim jokes lives of Auden and Cecil Day-Lewis and de- and biases slowly hardened into a catalogue clared he was "rather depressed by the re- of intense hatreds. Larkin never pretended he morseless scrutiny of one's private affairs that enjoyed being LarkinÑULif is first boredom, seems to be the fate of the newly dead. Really, then fear," he summarized in "Dockery and one should burn everything." That "remorse- Sonu-but the Letters indicate the depth of his less scrutiny" has now turned in his direction. self-absorption and self-disgust, his ever- Larkin was constitutionally unable to burn deepening misery and despair, his rancid view anything himself-he was as ambivalent of other people. about this as about almost everything else- Many of the letters are uncontroversial. but on his deathbed he instructed his long- There is an exemplary, well-known corre- time companion, Monica Jones, to destroy the spondence with Barbara Pyrn-one of the few

116 WQ SUMMER 1993 writers he truly admired-and a friendly se- to mock and denigrate. Hence the lifelong un- ries of letters to his editors at Faber & Faber, dergraduate prank that he shared with Amis in particular Charles Monteith. There are of signing off with the word "bum" at the end youthful, exuberant letters to his schoolmates of letters: "Man that is born of woman hath but in which he talks about his ambition to be a a short tune to burn," "The Tories may lose the novelist, his early enthusiasm for Auden and election owing to Mrs. Thatcher's bum," and Lawrence, his devotion to jazz. He writes so forth. Larkin moves easily from irreverently chatty letters to female friends, carries on a joking about individuals to lacerating groups. savvy business correspondencerelating to his He calls the Irish "driveling slack-jawed black- poems, and writes warmly to other writers guards," and exclaims, 'What dreary no-good who are promoting his work. But Larkin's cunts these foreigners are." His racism is es- misanthropy is always lingering and gives a pecially repellent. He advises Arnis to "keep decided cast to the correspondence. "Bugger up the cracks about niggers and wogs"; he everything & everybody," he says. His scorn speaks of "fat Caribbean germs pattering af- begins at home. Near the end of his life he calls ter me in the Underground." He announces, himself "a pregnant salmon" and describes his "And as for those black scum kicking up a din "sagging face" as "an egg sculpted in lard, on the boundary-a squad of South African with goggles on." "I hated myself so much I police would have sorted them out to my sat- was trying to disappear altogether," he jokes isfaction." Here is a little ditty on "How to Win in italics at the bottom of one letter. "So now the Next Election" that he sent to Conquest, we face 1982," he confesses in another, Gunner, and Monteith: "gargantuanly paunched, helplessly addicted to alcohol, 'tired of livid and scared of dyin', Prison for strikers, world famous unable to write poet." Bring back the cat, Larkin's self-disgust quickly spilled over Kick out the niggers- to others, and not many escaped his bile. He How about that? especially mocked anyone connected to litera- ture. "I have a huge contempt for all 'groups' Larkin's letters sometimes make a spec- that listen to and discuss poetry," he wrote. In tacle of being offensive, at least partially for the his characterizations, Emily Dickinson be- shock effect-"Ooh, Larkin," he feigns, "I'm comes "Emily Prick-in-son," the poets David sorry to find you holding these viewsu-but that Jones "a farting prick" and W. D. Snodgrass makes his opinions no more funny or palatable. "a dopy kid-mad sod." The critic H. E. Bates Here is the "unwritten" Jubilee poem to becomes "H. E. Bastard," and in a splenetic Her Majesty that Larkin sent to Thwaite: catalogue Larkin asks, 'When will these sod- ding loudmouthed cunting shtstuffed After Healey's trading figures, pisswashed sons of poxed-up bitches learn After Wilson's squalid crew, that there is something greater than literature?" And the rising tide of niggers- Nor are Larkin's friends exempt. Anthony What a treat to look at you! Powell was taken aback to find himself de- scribed as a "creep" and a "horse-faced This is the "unofficial" quatrain buried under dwarf." About Kingsley Arnis, to whom he is the "official" one, the political undertow, the permanently linked, Larkin says, "The only racist joke that should be inscribed on the reason I hope to predecease him is that I'd find backside of the stone in Queen's Square gar- it next to impossible to say anything nice about den. The shadow-side of Larkin's right-wing him at his memorial service." politics was a fury against everything Other: The letters show that Larkin's poetics of Jews, blacks, women, immigrants, academics, preservation were countered by an equal need trade unions. He despised everything and

SOUR MAJESTY 117 everybody, especially himself. Semitism (which scarcely figures into the cor- The letters are only the tip of the iceberg. respondence), and the definitive influence of "Please believe me,"Larkin told an adolescent his parents, especially his beloved father, who friend, "when I say that half my are spent was a prewar Nazi sympathizer. Far from for- in black, surging, twitching, boiling HATE!!!" getting his childhood in Coventry, Larkin re- It is no longer possible to discount this aspect membered it all too well. He never recovered of Larkin's character, which was so inextrica- from his parents' cramped, loveless marriage, bly tied to his creativity. His wretchedness a "bloody hell" he vowed never to repeat. He was extreme. Apparently, the letters are mild seems to have combined something of his in comparison to the diaries. The evidence mother's excruciating timidity (as a child he suggests, as Andrew Motion says, that "even was nearsighted and stammered badly) with his most candid letters only hint at their inten- his father's authoritarianism, thus trapping sity." The one person who glimpsed some of himself between opposing impulses. Larkin the diaries, his friend Patsy Strang, reported always attributed his negative feelings about that they were sexual logbooks ("very mastur- travel ("filthy abroad he calls it in the letters) batory") and, in Motion's characterization, "a to two trips he took to Germany with his fa- gigantic repository for bile, resentment, envy, ther. Motion acutely speculates on the ambiva- and misanthropy." Larkin may have hated the lence and shame Larkin must have feltÑf'em Modernists, but he had more in common with barrassment at best, humiliation at worstr'- them than he supposed. He now takes his about being in Germany in the late 1930s. By place in a line of reactionary 20th-century writ- the late 1920s Larkin's father had already be- ers-from Yeats, Pound, and Eliot to D. H. come, as one acquaintance said, "an active and Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis-whose lives impenitent admirer of Germany's postwar (and works) were fueled by repulsive right- recovery, and of Hitler's role in achieving wing hatreds. But what was for an earlier gen- this." Larkin vehemently denied that his father eration a rising tide of democracy and level- was a fascist, acknowledging that Sydney ing modem values was for Larkin a flood that Larkin was "the sort of person democracy had already taken place. He has just about didn't suit." Larkin sometimes mocked his drowned. His defense, in '," father's opinions, but, as Motion notes, he was a tone of sardonic chuckling, a grim, half- "never actually disagreed with him-never comic misery: sympathizingwith the suffering of others, and sometimes even making a few mildly anti- Man hands on misery to man. Semitic and pro-German remarks of his own." It deepens like a coastal shelf. Larkin's anti-Semitism surfaces in his late Get out as early as you can, poem "Posterity," where his satirically named And don't have any kids yourself. biographer, Jake Balokowksy, laments:

Motion's biography is helpful in dedpher- "I'm stuck with this old fart at least a year; ing the clues to Larkin's character and in cre- ating a context for his opinions. Larkin led an I wanted to teach school in Tel Aviv, outwardly uneventful life-he was so self-di- But Myra's folks"-he makes the money vided and focused on writing that he mostly sign- kept from doing anything-but a secretive, "Insisted I got ten;,;:?.'' tumultuous inner life. He thrived off his own refusals and flourished on his own pessi- Larkin's anti-Semitism is rarely this overt, but mism~.Motion locates Larkin's problems his attitude toward the Jew as the despised somewhere among his repressed homosexu- Other magnetized many of his other hatreds. ality (never acknowledged), his latent anti- Larkin also picked up many of his father's

118 WQ SUMMER 1993 negative opinions about women. He had little Revolted by the idea of family responsi- or no contact with girls during his childhood bilities, Larkin also felt victimized by his own and adolescence, and prejudice replaced desires and often turned to pornography for knowledge. Women became for him remote consolation. The fact that his letters cany on and unimaginable. They sent him, as he con- a steady stream of casual, pornographic, and fessed to his schoolmate James Sutton, "rigid misogynistic remarks obfuscates but does not with fright." Larkin's sexual anxiety and dif- obliterate his sexual frustration and alienation, fidence soon turned to sneering: "Women his sexual envy, bewilderment, and fear. It was (university) repel me inconceivably," he told largely because of his feelings about women Sutton. "They are shits." "FUCK ALL that he came to define life as "an immobile, WOMEN!" he writes elsewhere. "I am quite locked,/Three-handed struggle between/Your fed up with the whole business. . . . Sex is de- wants, the world's for you, and (worse)/The signed for people who like overcoming ob- unbeatable slow machine/That brings what stacles. I don't like overcoming obstacles." you'll get." ("The Life with a Hole in It1'). Those obstacles were mostly insurmountable Women became for him symptomatic of the life and lifelong since Larkin's personality exquisitely he would never lead, the incarnation of balanced sexual attraction with sexual revulsion. unfulfilled, unfulfillable desires, Motion narrates the story-or nonstory-of Larkin's sexual conflicts were repeatedly Larkin's handful of stalled love affairs, especially played out in his work from the earliest poems with Monica Jones and Maeve Brennan ("Yes, in The North Ship to his final lyrics. In "Reasons life is pretty grey up in Hull," he wrote to Rob- for Attendance" he opposes "the wonderful ert Conquest in 1966, "Maeve wants to marry feel of girls" to his own solitary calling to "that me, Monica wants to chuck me."). His contradic- lifted, rough-tongued bell/(Art, if you like)." tory feelings left him at a permanent standstill. The problem was that he was still beset and Larkin thought of marriage as a "revolt- bewildered by his own desires, terrorized by ing institution," and his intense physical and a solitude he had chosen but could not entirely emotional needs were countered by an equally tolerate ("Only the young can be alone freely," intense fear of connection and commitment. he concludes in "Vers de Soci6te") and des- He was convinced women used sex to snare perately needed to defend. He felt victimized men into marriage, which he thought of in the for having chosen "a life/ Reprehensibly per- most conventional domestic terms. In the fect" ("Poetry of Departures"). Hence the bit- cartoonish situation of "Self's the Man,"for ter resentment of the first stanza of "The Life example, poor, emasculated Arnold is run with a Hole in It": ragged because of his ~lselflessness'l: When I throw back my head and howl He married a woman to stop her getting People (women mostly) say away But you've always done what you want, Now she's there all day, You always get your own way -A perfectly vile and foul And the money he gets for wasting his Inversion of all that's been. life on work What the old ratbags mean She takes as her perk Is I've never done what I don't. To pay for the kiddies' clobber and the drier And the electric fire, Larkin's work charts the forms of his dep- And when he finishes supper rivation in terms of women: the turmoil of los- Planning to have a read at the evening paper ing the girl, of desiring the beautiful girl he It's Put a screw in this wall- cannot have and not desiring the unattractive, He has no time at all. . . . problematic one he might get, of being too

SOUR MAJESTY 119 middle-aged for the sexual revolution. Larkin misery; he is imprisoned with his own inex- is known as a great poet of mortality, of aging cusable desires. Rather than express blame and death, but, as his biographer suggests, directly, the poems tend to celebrate and ex- "Reading his poems in chronological se- acerbate the wound of lovelessness. Larkin's quence, it is clear that his obsession with death poems are not introspective.They do not lead is inextricable from his fascination with love him to "greater understanding." They are and marriage." What Motion calls "fascina- clenched, acerbic, unforgettable-the voice of tion" is more accurately described as fasci- bitterness itself. They are brokenhearted and nated revulsion. utterly perfect and defensively armored. At times they are irresistibly funny and highly he specter of the white male poet turn- quotable, and many readers have found them- ing reactionary in later life is hard to selves reciting them from memory. Their lyric Tface and even harder to think about melancholy, splendid phrasing, and corrosive clearly. What are its implications? English brilliance are like a magnet to poetry readers. But poetry is not inevitably aligned with reaction- what is being magnetized? The poems move ary politics-one thinks of Byron and from the wry irony of "Annus MirabW- Shelley-and there is no reason that lyric sad- ness and disappointment cannot be linked to Sexual intercourse began a democratic and progressive social action. It In nineteen sixty-three is rare but possible. In Larkin's case, however, (Which was rather late for me)- as in many others, the poet's narcissistic Between the end of the Chatterley ban wounds found outlet in a hierarchical politics And the Beatles' first LP. of exclusion. It is not sufficient to say, as the London Times did, that "what matters about to the grander resentment of "Sad Stepsu- Larkin is the handful of melancholy and funny poems that captured the mood of his times." . . . a reminder of the strength and pain The problem is that Larkin's attitudes, now Of being young; that it can't come again, made explicit in the Letters and biography, are But is for others undiminished somewhere. shot through his work. They are not "acciden- tal" or merely unworthy of him. They shadow to the putrefying envy and jealousy of "Love his poems like an unwelcome aura. They are Again"- stitched there like threads that we suspected were present all along and now can see. Natu- Someone else feeling her breasts and cunt, rally, this affects our unraveling of his work. Someone else drowned in that Larkin's need to preserve was balanced by an lash-wide stare, equally intense desire to desecrate, and hatred And me supposed to be ignorant, was the flip side of his gloomy tenderness. Or find it funny, or not to care, "What will survive of us is love," he wrote in Even . . . but why put it into words? "," but rage was the under- belly of his art. Here the voyeuristic fury turns to helplessness and then to frustrated silence. By the end of his arkin's late personal lyrics show us the life's work, Larkin's world had been hope- world from the point of view of some- lessly reduced; all that was left was the open L one who feels that love has been com- sore of lovelessness and the prospect of pletely withdrawn from him. Hatred is one "unresting death," endless oblivion. reaction to that withdrawal, an ugly solace Larkin made no secret of his final baffle- and refuge in a place where privation reigns. ment and dread. It was all he had left, his con- He feels cheated and blames others for his cluding weapon. He despised other people but

120 WQ SUMMER 1993 could not bear to be alone ("Vers de Soci6te"); for it in poetry. Resentment had run dry. he was disgusted by "the whole hideous in- It is altogether remarkable then to turn verted childhood of aging ("The Old Fools"); back to a poem such as "High Windows" and he felt his mind going blank from the blinding find the same self-damaging rage transfig- glare of death "not in remorse," he said, for ured, the same constellation of feelings re- "the good not done, the love not given," but made. The unrelieved arc and movement of at the thought of total emptiness, "the sure this poem with its crafty mix of dictions and extinction that we travel to/And shall be lost characteristically ironized longings is Larkin at in always" ("Aubade"). He went on complain- his artistic peak. It moves from a sardonic and ing but knew that complaints wouldn't save profane bitterness about sex and religion to a him ("Death is no different whined at than final wordless perception of high windows: withstood); he raged against others but knew that rage devoured itself. He had found his When I see a couple of kids last wrenched place in an unloved, unlovable And guess he's fucking her and she's universe. His viewpoint narrowed further and Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, further until in the end all that remained of the I know this is paradise heart's knowledge was a clear lens for view- ing unacceptable death: Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives- Bonds and gestures pushed to one side Like an outdated combine harvester, Where has it gone, the lifetime? And everyone young going down the Search me. What's left is drear. long slide Unchilded and unwifed, I'm Able to view that clear: To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if So final. And so near. Anyone looked at me, forty years back, ("The View") And thought, That'll be the life; No God any more, or sweating in the dark The view into oblivion was so chillingly personal, painful, and direct that ultimately About hell and that, or having to hide the poet wanted only to obliterate it. He longed What you think of the priest. He for obliviousness itself, an end to the old And his lot will all go down the long slide wound, the agony of consciousness: Like free bloody birds. And immediately Rather than words comes the thought of It will be worth it, if in the end I manage high windows: To blank out whatever it is that is doing The sun-comprehending glass, the damage. And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless. Then there will be nothing I know. My mind will fold into itself, like fields, The visionary clairvoyance at the end of like snow. this poem points to an eternal realm, a ("The Winter Palace") Pascalian emptiness beyond the confines of language. It is rapturous and terrifying and This poem is dated November 1,1978, and free. "High Windows" reminds us that art it is no surprise to discover that from then on exists beyond biography, that Larkin, too, was the mind folding back entirely into itself a vehicle for his feelings, that the sourness of would not be able to sustain more than a hand- his life could also be transformed into the ful of occasional lyrics. There was nothing left spirit's majesty.

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