mus Heaney), finding the same disgust and constraint in the poetry, tended to as- sume that Larkin's official voice was an ad- equate spokesman for the unofficial one. By the time Larkin died in 1985, at the age of 63, he had created an official self- portrait of the artist as bitter, disillu- sioned, lonely, resentful of any energy and happiness enjoyed by others—even while he insisted that their energy was doomed and their happiness an illusion. But this partial portrail was no more truthful than any other official one. Larkin suffered all the bitterness of his official prose, but the alternative truth spoken quietly by his poems was a shy, persistent vision of freedom and exaltation. Larkin seems to have been embar- rassed by his own vision, and did his best to help readers ignore it. Most of the re- viewers of his have been too busy quoting bis famously caustic aphorisms to look for anything else, and it is hard to blame them. His deceptively unreflective style, the formal perfection of his rhymed and rhythmical stanzas, served as an effective camouflage for Larkin's vortices of feeling. More than any other British writer of his time, he seemed to transform the material bleak- ness of the austere 1940s and 1950s, and then the moral bleakness of the moneyed 19H()s and 1970s, into an inescapable statement of the bleakness of almost everything. In Larkin's official version of the hu- man condition, life started badly and LarkinsEggs ended worse. From the moment you were born it was already too late to change for the better, because "They BY EDWARD MENDELSON fuck you up, your mum and dad." And the poem thai opened with this line closed with the advice that logically fol- Collected Poems lowed: "And don't have any kids your- self." If you try to think of art as a com- by pensation for life's failures (as the edited with an introduction hy Anthony Thwaite unofficial Larkin in fact believed), the of- ficial Larkin offered the disillusion of (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 330 pp., $22.S0) long experience: "Get stewed:/Books he worst disservice Philip through interviews, lectures, and essays. are a load of crap." And if you dared to Larkin's readers did to him The unoflicial one argues with itself in look toward something better, Larkin was believing what he told novels, plays, and poems. The official brought you down to earth in one poem them. A writer, like a gov- voice either has all the answers or at least after another that looked with unrelieved ernmentT, speaks with two voices, an offi- knows how to clarify and contain the horror toward "the whole hideous in- verted childhood" of old age—"and cial one and an unofTicial one. Only the question. 1 he unotBcial voice has noth- then the only end of age." The building second is truthful. In a government, the ing but questions. most likely to appear in a Larkin poem is two voices are easily distinguished. The In most writers the official voice is the the hospital, imagined repeatedly as a official spokesman stands behind a lec- voice of clarity and optimism, while the cliff lowering over the hopes of anyone tern and reads a prepared statement say- unofficial voice points to the dilemmas still living. ing ihat everything is under control and and darknesses that the official voice ig- progress is assured on all fronts. The nores. In Larkin, this pattern was re- Larkin's laments over the decrepitude unofficial spokesman cups his hand over versed. His official voice spoke in essays of age were so constant in the poems he a telephone in the back room and quietly and interviews about permanently low- published in his lifetime that it isn't sur- tells a reporter that all hell has broken ered expectations, and adopted a comical- prising to find more of the same among loose. ty aggressive tone of provincial disgust the 80 poems first gathered in the post- A writer's two voices are equally dis- with everything in the contemporary humous Collected Poems. One almost pre- tinct, although readers have a natural world, including Larkin himself. His crit- dictable poem begins: tendency to conflate them. The official ics (with the honorable exceptions of Bar- I feared these middle years. voice speaks smoothly and consistently bara Everett, Andrew Motion, and Sea- The middle sixlies.

JUNE 5, 19B9 TllK Nt'w BI.K. 29 When deftness disappears he waits for death to climb the stairs and that escape the bounds of earth. The And each eveni is open the door. But the poem ends with mere j u x t a p o s i t i o n of two kinds of cheap Freighted with a source-encrusling doubt. the arrival of death s opposite: clothing shows And turned to drought. Light cringed. The door swung inwards. How separate and unearthly love is. Or, more accurately, it would be unsur- Over the threshold Or women are, or whal they do. prising to find such a poem about old age Nothing like death siepped, nothing like Or in our young tinreal wishes if Larkin had actually written it. The Seem to be: syntheiic. new. death paused. And natureless in ecstasies. poem he wrote instead—deliberately Nothing like death has such hair, arms so misquoted a couple of lines back— rai.sed. In the world of matter and the flesh, the speaks of 'these presen( years, / The Why are your feet bare? Was not death lo only possible objects of an unreal wish middle twenties," and was written when come ? are synthetic, natureless. and inevitably he was only 26. This suggests that when Why is he not here? What summer have disappointing. A few years later Larkin he wrote in the same way in later years he you broken from? discovered that the real object of his wish used age and death partly as disguising The emotional force of this poem de- was not an object at all. but a bright emp- symbols of a different tiness entirely beyond kind of foss. In fact. Lar- the changes of nature kin dwelled from the start and the heaviness of on losses that were abso- matter. lute and pervasive. And Like any more explic- his sense of loss was less a it mystic, Larkin could satiric protest against the name that emptiness condition of the universe only in terms of what than an explicit sense it was not. A poem with that he was lost or di- the laconic title "Here" vided from something— called it "unfenced exis- something that was de- tence . . . untalkative, out sirable, calm. lovely, of reach"—silent and be- unalterable, and utterly yond the grasp of words. inaccessible. Ihe title poem of Lar- Even in the rare mo- kin's last book of poems. ments when Larkin mod- , begins in ulated his bitterness to his characteristic official turn briefly sentimental mixture of sexual jealou- over (he possibili(\ of sv and compensatory dis- happiness, the happiness gust, but the poem ends he imagined lay some- far beyond it. Envying where over the horizon. in four-letter detail the outside (he life he could sexual freedom of the perceive. The erotic en- young, he guesses that, ergies of the couples on when he was young, he the train to London afier was envied in the same the Whit sun weddings way for his freedom from swell "Like an arrow- religious dread. Then, as shower / Sent out of he senses through gener- sight, somewhere be- ations of envy the vanity coming rain." In "Sad of human wishes, words Steps" the "strength and suddenly give way to pain / Of being young" is vision: lost for Larkin but "is for others undiminished immediately somewhere." The direc- Rather than words tion marker always URAWI comes (he thoughl of points somewhere else. t ; H\ J.ACK COlfClHI.I N KOR IIIK NKW ; p 11 u 1.1 <-, high w indow s: The sun-comprehending Larkin's lost or distant treasure came pends on its refusal to identify itseli as glass. into clearer focus as it grew more distant. eilher a wishful fantasy or a grateful rec- And beyond il, (he deep hltic air. lha( In his early poems it took the vague form ollection. Larkin pointedly titled it "Un- shows of an elusive and imaginary lover whose finished Poem"—he could never de- No(hing, and is nowhere, and is endless. absence Larkin found more moving than scribe the satisfactions that might have Larkin's revelation following rage aligns tbe presence of any living woman could followed its final stanza. When an alter- him with earlier poets whose visionary be. In his later poems, it transformed native to death arrived in his later poems, sense was more explicit. Yeats among itself into a vivid intensity beyond under- it never arrived in so human a form. schoolchildren, "thinking of that fit of standing, a celestial emptiness more In "The Large Cool Store," ten years grief and rage" that turned a childish day compelling than anything earthly and after "Unfinished Poem," the contrast of lo tragedy, suddenly saw a vision in hu- tangible. Whatever form it took, it was daytime's sensible clothes and night's man form: always exempt from time and death. rtiillcd and fantastic lingerie propels Thereupon my heart is driven wild: In an unsettling and exhilarating Larkin. in a course of a few lines, from his She stands before me as a little child. poem, written when he was 29 and first initial fantasy of t b e separateness and un- printed in this collection, Larkin begins carthliness of women to the recognition And George Herbert—a miniaturist, like the poem in a mood of gothic horror as that it is not women but his unreal wishes Larkin, who looked out from narrow

30 THK NKW RtRBi.lC JUNE 5. 1989 places to the infinite—felt the same vi- sionary transformation as a personal appeal: But as I rav'd and grew more fierce and wilde At every word Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child\ And I leply'd My Lord. Larkin's consoling vision could not share the personal drama of theirs, partly because Larkin wore the protective reti- cence that is the 20th century's vulgar tongue. (Wandering into a church, he is carefuf to remember that he is out of place; "Hatless, I take ofT/ M\ cycle-clips in awkward reverence.") But it is not sim- ply the fault of his century that his conso- lations never speak inviting words or wear a human face. Once or twice, the ideal and the human coincide, as in "Un- finished Poem," or in a late unpublished love poem four lines long tiiat ends "there was one constant good:/she did not change." (The poem is a rare glimpse into Larkin's real private life that was apparently far less bleak than the life portrayed in his poems.) But in his dark- er moods he believed that Only one ship is seeking us, a black- Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back A huge and birdless silence. Iti her wake No waters breed or break.

n his poems Larkin often re- sponds to death's invitation by knocking back a stiff drink and wisecracking abou( the indif- ferent universeI . But he also knew that he was isolated most of all by his own persis- tent refusal of a world that might have asked for his company had he been will- ing to listen. An early poem begins envi- ously, "1 see a girl dragged by the wrists/ Across a dazzling field of snow." Al- though in some later poems Larkin mocked his own youthful fantasies of "the women 1 clubbed with sex," in this poem his jealous wish, startlingly, is not to be the willful taker but tbe willingly taken—"to be/As she is, " "As she laughs and struggles, and pretends to fight." "Nothing so wild, nothing so glad as she/Rears up in me," he adds. Larkin thought liimseH uniquely disbarred from that wild glad surrender that others somehow managed lo partake in. His last substantial poem, "Love Again" (as in many poems throughout his career, love for someone who is certainly in bed with someone else), interrupts its own envi- ous complaint in the same way "High Windows" does, but this poem turns away from words toward a private empti- ness, not an infinite one: why pva it into word.s? Isolate rather this element That spreads through other lives like a tree And .swavs them on a sort of sense

JUNES. 1989 THF. NFW RKPtHik: 31 And say why il never worked for me. lation Larkin only pretended to accept. ple on "An Anindel Ibmb" Something lo do with violence Watching young couples dancing, in prove A long way back, and wrung rewards. "Reasons f>>r Attendance." he first in- Our almost-instinct almost true: And arrof[an) eiemily. sists that hi.s lonely satisfaction in art is What will sur\ive of us is love. "Violence/A long way back." At ihe end richer than their Joint satisfaction in sex. And the Show Saturday out in farm of his life, [jrkin's voice suddenly speaks and then cancels thai insistence in the country- gives its visitors something that as if from ihc analyst's couch lo reveal pri- fmal line: deserves the same kind of permanence. valp truths that his olTicial plain-speaking Therefore I stay out

^ei stop I did: in fact 1 And yet the whole plan of the book olien do, seems mistaken. Thwaite prints all of .•\nd always end much at a Ijrkin's completed poems in chronolog- loss like this . . . ical order (although the earliest poems |""] are gathered at the back). This arrange- Strange to it now. I watch ment obscures tbe craft with which I-ar- the clondless scene: kin arranged his poems wheti he gath- I he siime clear water ered them into his hooks, and created over .smoothed peb- sequences of poems that were as careful- bles , . . ly organized as the individtial poems [•'To the Sea"l themselves. Thwaite lists the contents of And he has an adoles- I-arkin's books in an appendix, but a bare cent's delight in clos- list bas none of the Iiterar\ and emotion- ing his poems with al force of a sequence whose significance bright sententious unfolds itself as the reader turns over the bopes. sometimes pages. carefully scuffed lest Editors should be wary of the tempta- a more cynical part tion to build large urban renewal pro- of himself snicker at jects that reqtiire dismantling the smaller them. ITie stone cou- structures left behind bv an author. The

S2 THK NtW RKFt BUC JUMES, 1989 author knew his own work better than knew, when be prepared it, would be his the editor ever will, and had his reasons last. Near the beginning of that volume. for selecting and arranging his poems in High Windows, those windows opened [he way he did. Ideally, the first collected onto the emptiness of Larkin's solitary edition published after a poet's death vision. But in the final poem, "The Ex- should be based on the last collected edi- plosion," Larkin invoked a lost conjugal tion thai the poet himself prepared. If. happiness recovered in one sunlit mo- like Larkin. tbe poet never prepared such ment of vision at the very instant that an edition, tben the posthumous edition sudden death brought happiness to an should reproduce tbe contents of tbe end. An explosion destroys a mine, and books the poet published during bis life- as the tremor dims the sky, time. Any unpublished and uncollected for a second poems belong in the back, divided from Wives saw men of the explosion the publisbed poems by a gap tbat re- Larger than in life they managed— spects the gap Imposed by the poet who Gold as on a coin, or walking wrote tbem and rejected them. A chro- Somehow from the sun towards them. nological edition like Thwaite's has many virtues, but the poet should be giv- One showing the eggs unbroken. en a few years to maintain his own ar- rangement first. EDWARD MKNDELSON teaches F.nglish The concludmg poem in Ihwaite's and comparative literature at Columbia collection is a commissioned throwaway University. The first volume of his edi- about drinking at parties. Larkin cbose a tion of tbe complete works of W. H. Au- very different poem to conclude the last den was recently published by Princeton \olumc he published—a volume that be Universitv Press.

JUNE 5, 1989 IHt: NKW RKI-IHI K: 33