THE UNIVERSITY OF HULL ‘I don’t really notice where I live’: Philip Larkin’s Literary Nationalities being a Thesis submitted for the Degree of PhD in the University of Hull by Birte Wiemann, M.A. (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany) December 2012 i Contents Contents ............................................................................................................................ ii Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................... iii Abbreviations ................................................................................................................... iv Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 Not only in England, but anywhere in the world ............................................................... 6 Chapter 2 ‘And that will be England gone’: Larkin’s Pastoral ......................................................... 51 Chapter 3 ‘Looking out at the continual movement of mad Irish’: Larkin and Ireland.................... 86 Chapter 4 ‘Like a slightly unconvincing translation from a French Symbolist. I wish I could write like this more often’: Larkin and France ........................................................................ 120 Chapter 5 ‘My chief expectancy centres on these records that are reputedly on their way from Yankland’: Larkin and Jazz ............................................................................................ 160 Chapter 6 ‘I prefer my own taste in these things’: Larkin’s American Frontier ............................. 200 Chapter 7 ‘Quite at a loss with the Oxfordshire dialect’: Larkin and Germany ............................. 235 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 266 Bibliography .................................................................................................................. 269 ii Acknowledgements My thanks are due to my supervisor Prof. James Booth at the University of Hull for accepting my proposal for a PhD thesis on Philip Larkin out of the German blue and for tirelessly scribbling valuable suggestions on the margins of a veritable stack of drafts. I am also grateful to Dr. David Wheatley at the University of Hull for sharing his immense wealth of literary knowledge with me. The staff of the Graduate School at the University of Hull always had an open ear for the worries that go hand in hand with part-time study in a foreign country. Prof. Michael Gassenmeier and Prof. Frank Pointner at the University of Duisburg-Essen have shown me the merits of a dead-end. My colleagues at Cargo Records Germany have always been very supportive, especially during the long periods in which I swapped my desk at the office for a table in the Brynmor Jones Library. I would also like to thank Michael Schuster for letting me recreate the true Larkin experience by strewing books all over his attic and for listening sympathetically to the accounts of my new finds and theories without ever having read a single Larkin poem. Finally, I would like to thank my parents who have supported and tolerated my hunger for books and the English language from day one. This thesis is dedicated to them. iii Abbreviations All references to the works of Philip Larkin are incorporated in the text using the following abbreviations: AGIW A Girl in Winter AWJ All What Jazz FR Further Requirements LJ Larkin’s Jazz LM Letters to Monica RW Required Writing SL Selected Letters All other citations may be found in the notes. NOTE: In order to avoid confusion between the 1988 and the 2003 editions of Larkin’s Collected Poems and the newly published Complete Poems I am refraining from referring to a specific volume. Although I have used Thwaite’s 1988 version of the Collected Poems, all of Larkin’s individual poems cited - unless otherwise indicated - are clearly identified by their respective titles. iv Philip Larkin’s Literary Nationalities Introduction ______________________________________________________________________ Introduction With the journalist’s playfulness John Haffenden implicitly accuses Philip Larkin of “narrow-mindedness” and “cultural chauvinism” in his well-documented interview from 1981. Philip Larkin replies with two counter-questions: “But honestly, how far can one really assimilate literature in another language? In the sense that you can read your own?”1 If it was impossible to read, understand and emotionally react to literature in a foreign language as opposed to literary works composed in one’s native language, the foreign Larkin scholar would arrive at a dead-end before he or she has even crossed the Channel to England. The appeal of Larkin’s poetry would be restricted to a relatively small English target group. Is it this specific group Larkin has in mind when he says that “you write for everybody. Or anybody who will listen”?2 A look at the standard works of Larkin criticism almost makes this likely; most Larkin critics are either comfortably sharing Larkin’s own nationality or are at least Irish, Scottish, Welsh, American or Canadian native speakers of English. Thus, we hardly seem to be in a position to judge safely whether Larkin’s own poetry can be assimilated elsewhere. It is thus that Larkin’s oeuvre - prompted, to a large extent, by the poet’s own gruff assertion of comfortable insularity - is all too often perceived on narrowly English terms. Larkin’s cultural and national identity is taken for granted; his disparaging comments about abroad (“I hate being abroad. Generally speaking, the further one gets from home the greater the misery.”3) are taken at face value. Perhaps it takes the perspective of a foreign European and non-native speaker of 1 Philip Larkin, Further Requirements Interviews, Broadcasts, Statements and Book Reviews 1952-1985, Anthony Thwaite (ed.), Faber and Faber Limited, London, 2001, p. 54 2 Philip Larkin, Required Writing Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982, Faber and Faber, London, 1983, p. 59 3 Ibid., p. 55 1 Philip Larkin’s Literary Nationalities Introduction ______________________________________________________________________ English to crack open dated perceptions. Indeed, Larkin’s engagement with cultural Otherness is profound. Tim Trengrove- Jones notes that “Larkin’s aesthetic took root and found its mature expression through specific moments of contact with the German, the French, and the Dutch”4 only to conclude paradoxically that these points of contact with the European Other cement Larkin’s position of English insularity. Larkin’s cultural identity will remain firmly English; his poetic engagement with cultural Otherness between Europe and America, however, transcends notions of petty insularity by a long stretch. His engagement with Ireland, France, America and Germany is so obviously premeditated that we can speak of literary nationalities. Jean-François Bayart’s comment that “we identify ourselves less with respect to membership in a community or a culture than with respect to the communities and cultures with which we have relations”5 is of particular significance in this context. Furthermore, Larkin’s negotiations of literary nationalities constantly exhibit points of contact with Marc Augé’s theory of non-place. It is against this background that the theory of the universality - as opposed to an assumed Englishness - of Larkin’s poetry is developed. In the context of political and sociological theories of nation and cultural identity I will argue that Larkin’s identity in his poetry is expressed through an awareness of common humanity as opposed to cultural exclusiveness. Introducing the ancient Stoics’ idea of cultural identity as concentric circles that denote self, family, city, nation and so on, I will argue that the universal appeal of Larkin’s poetry lies in the fact that he is always as intimately conscious in his writing of the outermost circle of ‘common humanity’ as he is of narrower more socially, politically or geographically limited self- definitions. In this he differs from Betjeman and Hughes who remain more English than 4 Tim Trengrove-Jones, “Larkin and Europe”, in: English Studies in Africa, 35:2 (1992), p. 55 5 Jean-François Bayart, The Illusion of Cultural Identity, 2005, Hurst&Company, p. 95 2 Philip Larkin’s Literary Nationalities Introduction ______________________________________________________________________ Larkin because they define themselves within the categories of the inner circles: class, nation, economic group. It is Augé’s non-place in its familiarity that enhances the impression of universality in Larkin’s work. When Larkin mourns the loss of the “fields and farms” and “the meadows, the lanes” in “Going, Going”, elaborates on the “wind-muscled wheatfields” and the “[t]all church-towers” of “Howden and Beverley, Hedon and Patrington” in “Bridge for the Living” he negotiates not only the markers of English culture but also the (English) poetic tradition of pastoral. If Larkin’s non-place in its universal particularity comes at the Stoics’ concentric circles from the outside and touches on common humanity first, then Larkin’s version of provincialism perhaps entails sculpting the province in its particular universality as the smallest recognizable fragment within the circles of cultural identity. It is the less-deceived quality of Larkin’s approach to the poetic tradition that paradoxically makes a poem like