British Eccentrics
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing BRITISH ECCENTRICS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL The British Isles have always been fertile with eccentrics. Those peculiar bipeds are familiar to us from the pages of Charles...
...Stevie, the youngest, remained the baby throughout her life and never left the London suburb where the family moved when she was three...
...The two had relatively long lives, though in Smith's case death was viewed as a welcome guest...
...Smith's intimates included many prominent novelists of the day...
...Neither of the poets caught on with the majority of American readers in their lifetimes, though both have cult followings over here...
...Larkin perpetually lamented the guilt that tended to inhibit illicit sex among the members of bis generation...
...Not that either kept away from the literary scene altogether...
...Her novels are mannered, self-obsessed, and sometimes anti-Semitic (it is not surprising to learn that the first, Novel on Yellow Paper, was suspected by many critics to be the pseudonymous creation of Virginia Woolf...
...To appreciate Larkin, reacquaint yourself first with the feathery touch of Clarence Day and Christopher Morley...
...His satiricial quatrains praise oblivion with simple misanthropic snarls: Man hands on misery to man, It deepens like a coastal shelf...
...While partially blind to the occasional artificiality of our own bards, we are quick to spot posturing in our British cousins...
...To many Americans, their jangly rhymes and satirical subjects merely add up to light verse—too long connected here with the froth of Ogden Nash and Phyllis McGinley...
...If Larkin still reads like some pompous Pooh-Bah to you, try associating him with the Cracker Barrel philosophers Josh Billings and Will Rogers, and you might begin to relish his dry wit...
...When the young Stevie attended church with her family, she would lustily belt out a different hymn from the one the congregation was singing...
...Afterward, I suspect, you will also have your own strong opinions on whether or not those gifted and absorbing poets strike a universal chord...
...Spalding has uncovered a few abortive affairs—including one with George Orwell—and a few lesbian episodes...
...Loneliness clarifies," he mused...
...Larkin and Smith both held bookish jobs unconnected with their writing...
...Instead, for years readers mistook what were really "light verse" skits for feminist polemic...
...Her poems are often about never feeling like an adult: But oh the poor child, the poor child, what can he do Trapped in a grown-up carapace, But peer out of his prison room With the eyes of an anarchist...
...If Smith nurses her childishness, he may be said to caress an adolescent cynicism...
...Stevie Smith was christened Florence Margaret Smith in Hull, England, in 1902...
...Do Smith and Larkin "travel, " or is their work comparable to certain local wines, delicate in their own locale but flavorless when exported...
...Anthony Thwaite, a fine poet in his own right, has edited Philip Larkin: Collected Poems (Farrar Straus Giroux, 330 pp., $22.50), which gathers up for the first time not only the five books of poetry Larkin published but 83 poems previously uncollected...
...Tiny, with blunt-cut bangs and bobbed hair, she had the figure of a prepubescent and dressed like a gamine—hence her masculine nickname...
...Ah me," she wrote, "sweet Death, you are the only god / Who comes as a servant when he is called...
...One must bear this cultural tendency in mind to properly appreciate characters like Stevie Smith and Philip Larkin...
...Two recent volumes offer Americans another introduction to these, in many ways, quintessentially English personalities...
...In 1969 she wasawardedtheQueen'sGoldMedalfor Poetry...
...He was a university librarian in, coincidentally enough, provincial Hull...
...His poems recount unsatisfactory affairs—the most desirable women out of reach, the passion for those available quickly fading to annoyance, spells of jealousy, bouts of misunderstanding, boredom...
...Smith, in Edwardian fashion, was extremely secretive about her private life...
...He, too, was unmarried and led a circumscribed existence...
...Of course, oddballs exist all over the world...
...Both the biography and the anthology provide an excellent opportunity to assess the carrying power of two voices usually regarded in this country as basically regional...
...That is not to say it would be entirely wrong to perceive Smith, for example, as a poet whose whimsical persona attracted more admirers than her poetry...
...And Larkin's relentless gloom, his taste for seediness and the drama of petty betrayals, can be taken for bad Graham Greene done up as verse...
...Stevie Smith's bravura public readings of her own work, together with the childlike doodles she drew to illustrate her poems and the bizarre clothes she favored, brought her a notoriety similar to that stirred up a generation earlier by Edith Sitwell...
...Those immune to her charm felt she never outgrew a childish cruelty rooted in the illusion that life is a game...
...Many people thought this girl-woman delighfully fey...
...In England, however, they quickly became celebrities...
...Read Frances Spalding's Stevie Smith and Philip Larkin: Collected Poems first of all for the pleasure they afford...
...With that information in mind, it could be instructive to place "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" alongside Smith's work and imagine how Plath might have improved those poems if she had possessed the older woman's skill at irony...
...Yet I believe Americans too easily allow it to eclipse these poets' considerable virtues, perhaps because we have let our own tradition of satire and light verse lapse...
...Larkin's attitude toward death vacillated...
...The adult always seemed bewildered when friends parodied in her novels or verses suddenly dropped her...
...Dotty letters also continue to appear in the London Times, dashed off by curmudgeonly colonels arguing that Christopher Marlowe was the real William Shakespeare, or by prolix vicars applying Levitical Law to the matter of pub closing hours...
...In the poignant "Aubade" he describedit as "The anesthetic from whichnone come around...
...Nevertheless, Elizabeth II graciously made much of her, and even listened patiently to a verse about the particularly gruesome murder of some children...
...He "pegged out," as he might have put it, in 1985, after a stoical battle with throat cancer...
...Get out as early as you can...
...Upon the death of John Betjeman, Larkin was Her Majesty's choice as the next Poet Laureate...
...This damning criticism has been made many times...
...Frances Spalding's Stevie Smith: A Biography (Norton, 331 pp., $ 19.95) is an enthralling account of the quixotic spinster...
...Larkin, to his dismay, was widely praised as a man of unshakable integrity...
...Still, their comparative isolation only heightened the public's interest: Smith was more in demand as a reader than even Auden...
...The difference with Britain is that there idiosyncrasy seems to be cultivated...
...Despite her call, she lived until 1971, when she died from a brain tumor after brave months of suffering and disintegration...
...In his most quoted poem, he ruefully designates the "Annus Mirabilis" of moral liberation: Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (Which was just too late for me)— Between the end of the Chatterly ban And the Beatles first LP...
...As for Smith, Spalding makes the interesting disclosure that Sylvia Plath was one of her most ardent fans...
...Her most enduring emotional relationship was with her aunt...
...Characteristically, she wrote to a friend, "I'm sure HM would rather pin it on a doggy-dear than me...
...The mother was an invalid who, long before her early death, put the household in the hands of a domineering sister, affectionately called "Auntie Lion" by her two nieces...
...Although Larkin was 22 years Smith's junior, he was partly responsible, as a reviewer, for persuading readers to accept her as a serious poet and not merely as a writer of light verse...
...Larkin's appraisals of his colleagues dominated the Sunday book reviews for years...
...She attempted suicide several times...
...The well-known "Not Waving, But Drowning" attains a chilling black humor, but too often one is disturbed by an irritating daft archness in her work...
...The ordinary nature of their employment no doubt helped the two poets avoid the effete tone that mars the work of too many of their contemporaries...
...American poets have much to learn from the two British eccentrics—particularly not to take themselves so seriously, to worry less about fads in form, and to aim at a broader audience...
...Contemporary poetry in the United States derives from the larger-than-life voices of Walt Whitman and T.S...
...Her father abandoned the family for a seafaring life as purser with The White Star Line...
...We have grown rusty at speaking in the humble, humorous tones natural to Larkin (whose model was Thomas Hardy), or evoking the sad laughter that ripples through Smith (who was deeply influenced by Edward Lear...
...Neurotically modest, he refused...
...By middle age she chose to replace the torments of passion and uncertainty with the more temperate pleasures of simple friendship...
...She passed up higher education for a typing school, then worked as a personal secretary at a small publishing house in London...
...I think the question has not been resolved...
...Those peculiar bipeds are familiar to us from the pages of Charles Dickens or Evelyn Waugh, the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, and the Monty Python television series...
...Eliot...
...And don't have any kids yourself...
Vol. 72 • September 1989 • No. 14
