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The Poems of the Less Deceived

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The Poems of the Less Deceived CHAPTER 9 TIME AS SPACE The poems of The Less Deceived (and also the volume as a coherent text) provide ample evidence that although Larkin thought of his responsibility to experience as a guiding principle, he also doubted that it could serve as an organizing and constructive force in poetry. Facing and representing this paradox played a central role in the unexpected success of the book. In this volume the most important experience to be transferred into the verbal form of poetry is the passing of time. In some of the central poems he transformed the experience of time into metaphors of space, a method he kept on using in his later poetry.1 This is sometimes analogous with the representation of time units, with the difference that when time is envisioned as space, it is frequently indivisible. Such poems are typically those in which Larkin, overtly or covertly, applies the technique of photography. In some other cases (most spectacularly in the poems about train journeys) visible continuity in space is constructed as a metaphor of time. Photography and the past The opening poem of The Less Deceived is “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album”.2 It is easy to find this position symbolic: this is the 1 This method strengthened the symbolism of some parts of the poems. In “The Rhetoric of Temporality” Paul de Man writes that in a symbol (in contrast with allegories) the connection between reality and its representation is spatial rather than temporal. Andrew Motion draws attention to the typically symbolic function of the image of “sand-clouds” in “Dockery and Son”, an image that has “no precise connection with the poem’s dominant pattern of images”. Motion adds that “they fleetingly fulfil the function that Yeats expected of symbolism” (Philip Larkin, Contemporary Writers series, 14). As I mentioned previously, a further example of the same symbolism is the image in the last two lines of “The Whitsun Weddings”. 2 Larkin, The Complete Poems, 27-28. István D. Rácz - 9789004311077 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:12:53PM via free access 176 Philip Larkin’s Poetics first significant volume of the central figure of the Movement, which has itself been characterized as “creative photography”.3 On the other hand, Andrew Motion has pointed out Larkin’s ambivalent attitude: although this poem can really be read as a prototype of Movement verse, it also alludes to its limits,4 since it “expressly states the losses of a narrowly literal attitude to experience”.5 The duality of Larkin’s belief and disbelief in experience as the only source of poetry6 can particularly be seen in these lines: “But O, photography! as no art is, / Faithful and disappointing!” This is what Movement poetry can also become: “faithful” but “disappointing”, which latter suggests something discouraging and deceptive at the same time. It will be noticed that the reference to “disappointment” is both to the experience represented by photography and the photos themselves (also as metonymies of art). The text is a symbolic love poem; however, its symbolism is concealed by the realism of descriptive details, the mimetic level of the text and its referential language. Larkin wrote it to Winifred Arnott, the woman he was in love with in Belfast, and if one reads it in the context of his letters to her, it is also the basic text of a long discourse of love.7 Its sexual symbols are overt: the woman offers her own self by letting him have the album (“At last you yielded up the album”); the male speaker first wants to satisfy his eyes (“My swivel eye hungers from pose to pose”); then, jealously, he separates her from his rivals (“Not quite your class, I’d say, dear, on the whole”). The photographs he is watching make him believe (either by convincing him or deceiving him) that the experience of possessing the woman is a real one: “That this is a real girl in a real place, 3 Kuby, An Uncommon Poet for the Common Man, 154. 4 Motion, Philip Larkin, Contemporary Writers series, 83. 5 Ibid., 82. 6 The “Statement” refers to non-literary experience as the only authentic source of good verse, but Larkin keeps on questioning his own thesis. What he wrote in a letter to Winifred Arnott about the poem also reveals the paradox richly represented in the text: “The Album starts pedestrianly, I’m afraid, but verses 4-6 and the last one satisfy me. Between them, they constitute a sort of ave-atque-vale, the two of them” (Selected Letters, 225). The “pedestrian” part may be inferior to the rest of the poem, but it is needed as a gesture of preserving a situation. The “hail and farewell” that Larkin points out is also a signifier of the poet’s attitude to experience and literature. 7 It would be out place here to enter the debate as to whether private letters should be treated as parts of a writer’s life work. My position is this: once they have been published we cannot ignore them. István D. Rácz - 9789004311077 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:12:53PM via free access Time as Space 177 // In every sense empirically true!” Larkin’s two major values meet. Beauty has become true, not unlike in Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and, more significantly, in “The Eve of St. Agnes” (a poem that Larkin found particularly interesting), where sexual intercourse signifies beauty transformed into truth. But before the reader of this poem could be enchanted by the charm of symbolic love-making, s/he has to realize that this is only one half of what could be called the core of the text. Its literal meaning, on the other hand, is that the male desire represented here is satisfied only symbolically, only in the speaker’s imagination. The artistic value of the poem is based upon the tension between these two latent meanings. This is corroborated by another duality: that between personality and impersonality, the intricate mask technique of the text. The mask is not only that of a jealous person: it is also that of the learned man of letters. Intertextuality shapes the meaning. The poem recalls Cecil Day Lewis’s “The Album” both in its title and through its subject matter. Larkin’s pleasure and Schadenfreude (which he felt on learning that somebody thought his poem superior to Day Lewis’s) expressed in a letter to Winifred8 provides evidence that he knew his older fellow-poet’s work. As the situation in the two poems is basically the same, Larkin’s text can also be read as a provocative and witty response to the previous one. In Day Lewis the representation of the everyday situation is only a starting point to achieve the surrealism of the closing stanza, where the possession of the woman by the man is complete; his desire is fulfilled, since he is offered even her past, her whole personal history: I close the book, But the past slides out of its leaves to haunt me And it seems, wherever I look, Phantoms of irreclaimable happiness taunt me. Then I see her, petalled in new-blown hours, Beside me – ‘All you love most there 8 Larkin, Selected Letters, 300. István D. Rácz - 9789004311077 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:12:53PM via free access 178 Philip Larkin’s Poetics Has blossomed again,’ she murmurs, ‘all that you missed there Has grown to be yours.9 The present has grown out of the past organically. The “yielding” in the last line of Day Lewis’s poem becomes a symbolic beginning in Larkin: “At last you yielded up the album”. But the closure of the poem, in poignant contrast with Day Lewis’s, suggests that no personal past can be possessed by another subject: So I am left ....................................................................... … to condense, In short, a past that no one now can share, No matter whose your future; calm and dry, It holds you like a heaven, and you lie Unvariably lovely there, Smaller and clearer as the years go by. In poetry there is only one way for a man to completely contain a female subject: by constructing her as a figure and making her speak. (The phrasing “making her speak” is imprecise: in most cases it is arguably the implied poet who “speaks” through the mask of the persona.) It is no accident that the second poem of The Less Deceived is “Wedding Wind”. The poem representing the passing of time in the artificial spaces created by photography is followed by a text constructing both the idyll of a static space and the feeling of terror. Arranging some of the poems in pairs in a book of poetry is a frequent editing principle, since in this way the two texts, read together, can form further contingencies of meaning. Yeats used this device frequently: some “pairs” of poems complementing each other (and also forming contrasts) are “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” and “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” in The Wild Swans at Coole, or “The Second Coming” and “A Prayer for my Daughter” in Michael Robartes and the Dancer. Larkin’s “Lines…” and “Wedding Wind” are also complementary pieces. The speaker in the former is a man, while the latter constructs a female voice; from the point of view of the implied poet 9 Poems of C. Day Lewis 1925-1972, London: Jonathan Cape and The Hogarth P, 1977, 125. István D. Rácz - 9789004311077 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:12:53PM via free access Time as Space 179 the first is based on desire, the second on symbolic possession.
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