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Larkin's Eggs 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 Collected Poems 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 Philip Larkin 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- High Windows, 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.
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