Collected Poems
Larkin, Philip
T he Collected Poems of Philip 1 Larkin, editor, jazz critic, and librarian at the University of Hull, have appeared four years after his death in a volume edited by Anthony Thwaite. The first thing...
...If trying to write like a poet leads you astray, then write like a man...
...We have already seen what a Orthodox Catholics: DON'T DESPAIR...
...The chief benefit of Mr...
...Loveless lives can make us as depressed as a bachelor considering a rented room...
...It is only fair to a poet who movesus to consider him on his own terms...
...Or nature, in its impersonal totality, gives a similar lift: ". . that highbuilded cloud/Moving at summer's pace...
...ZIP CODE mess parents make of it...
...Amazingly, while the REVIEW is a lightning rod for "papist" pilgrims, it is also ecumenical in spirit...
...When we hit that hour, as we regularly do, he is there, to show us around...
...Today there is a new Oxford Movement afoot in America...
...They may not mean to, but they do...
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...Catholics watched with a mixture of pity and amusement as the excellent Anglo-Catholic New Oxford Review argued and agonized itself into the [Roman] Catholic Church...
...What's more, contrary to the shibboleth that Catholicism is a superstitious religion for the ignorant, an unusually high proportion of the new Catholics consists of writers and intellectuals...
...The new converts are not attracted to the diluted Catholicism of the Hans Kungs, the Charles Currans, or those who sign ads favoring legal abortion...
...And we cover the full range of issues of concern to today's reflective and believing Christian...
...In fact, it is impossible...
...But with a poet as severe and self-censoring as Larkin, that is not necessarily a good thing...
...that is, false...
...He wanted, in Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a columnist for the New York Observer...
...It suggests the attitude he brought to his art, his career, his life—I'm the way I am, and if you don't like it, who asked you?—the attitude responsible for shaping the slim output preserved in this book...
...There is a vein of affection for things and creatures that, perhaps because they can't be held responsible for failing to return it, never flags...
...Well, useful to get that learnt...
...Now we can lay hands on him...
...I know a substantial number of recent converts like this and am much edified by their purity and ardour...
...Many poems," the flap copy boasts, "are collected here forthe first time...
...Yet even now there are converts, of exceptionally high quality, and their number is increasing with the tenure of the present Pope...
...He does us the favor, however, of not trying to be us...
...other words, to look this way...
...The first thing that strikes the reader is the photograph of Larkin on the jacket, which is notable for its aggressive ugliness...
...You know it when you see it done...
...He lived in a kind of perpetual four o'clock in the morning, and that's what he presents...
...But Larkin is almost never interested in drawing attention to his labor...
...Among them, it may be hoped, is another Chesterton, another Maritain, another SPECIAL DISCOUNT RATES O One-year subscription...
...Seven of them are my godchildren, and I must confess that some of us, to our shame, earnestly tried to delay them, on the grounds of the growing disorder in the Catholic Church...
...Sometimes, the style of genius is simply unique: Yeats's music, of all the high moderns, was most elusive—so much so that not even he always got it right...
...Eliot spoke of purifying the "dialect of the tribe...
...Larkin's men and women don't do any better...
...Even if a style is classical and replicable, what the imitator gains over his model in skill he is sure to lose in freshness, unless he brings some transforming element of his own to the task...
...John Dryden shucked off Baroque magnificence and encrustation...
...In an introduction to a reissue of The North Ship, his first volume, Larkin recalled a "hint" one of his literary mentors had given him years earlier: "Yesterday I destroyed about two thousand poems that mean nothing to me now...
...They shake their heads...
...The gesture Newman, another Ronald Knox, another Dorothy Day, another Gerard Manley Hopkins, another Edith Stein — converts all...
...They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you...
...His problem was what to do next...
...If you want to recapture the excitement of when you first really believed, if you feel inundated by "bad news" about the Church, if you despair of all the moral laxity and doubt and dissension within her portals but seek a remedy for that despair, or if you're searching for a "face" of Catholicism that is spiritually vibrant, solidly prolife, doctrinally sound, and socially engaged, it's time for you to subscribe to the NEW OXFORD REVIEW...
...Whether or not we use it, it goes And leaves what something hidden from us chose...
...Conversational rhythms and enjambments smudge the outlines...
...But plain speaking is not only a means of self-hypnosis for geniuses, it is a good way of getting honest, modest work done, and this, after a few youthful fumbles, is the path Larkin chose to pursue...
...It took months, and I never did find a copy of The Less Deceived...
...Aggressive implies will, and I use the word advisedly...
...46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1989 Another possibility, one which many of the great revivers of the language have thought themselves to be exploring, is plain speaking...
...So Robert Herrick wrote about his Tares and penates...
...But the REVIEW isn't just for converts...
...The poem "An Arundel Tomb" ends with the line, "What will survive of us is love...
...No, they are attracted by the Catholicism of the ages, the Magisterium, and the inspiring leadership of the current Pope...
...But I remember the time I had, a few years back, trying to get all of Larkin's individual volumes together...
...how we live measures our nature, And at his age having no more to show Than one hired box should make him pretty sure He warranted no better...
...Life is first boredom, then fear...
...Don't make faces at me, they say, I'm only telling you how the leech gatherers/roughs talk...
...22.50 Richard Brookhiser T arkin began writing as the last bright, clear-aired peak of English poetry, the high modernism of Eliot, Yeats, and Pound started to recede to landmark distance...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1989 Almanacked, their names live...
...It's good to see the young man who is satisfied with But we are pledged to work alone, To serve, bow, nor ask if or why becoming the older man capable of Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life...
...They forced their way past us anyway, thank God...
...Over the last quarter century, the number of converts to Roman Catholicism slowed to a trickle...
...Do memories plague their ears like flies...
...Get a few steps back from Larkin's seductive plain speaking, and his world looks severely limited: whether by the fate of his character, as he would say, or by choice, as of glass frames, as I would, doesn't matter...
...Larkin was a love poet...
...One use for the clunkers is a game of Spot the Influence...
...Larkin's —black, square, heavy—look like a prop from a Monty Python sketch on chartered accountancy, or a spare pair of General Jaruzelski's...
...If you don't, the future will...
...But it's only fair to us to consider him on ours as well...
...Most of our writers are cradle Catholics and a significant minority belongs to various other churches...
...and One sees, with a sharp tender shock, His hand withdrawn, holding her hand...
...This method is probably responsible for more bad poetry than any other...
...Apart from this, the volume is a curious enterprise...
...And what, with his consonances and his glasses, did Larkin write about...
...The love comes in two kinds...
...A drum taps: a wintry drum For technicians, they provide a study of development...
...23 (regularly $35) Such plainness of the pre-baroque Hardly involves the eye, until It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still Clasped empty in the other...
...The poems are arranged in chronological order, with an appendix of early poems at the end...
...higher than affection and, unlike love, fulfilled...
...Make check payable to NEW OXFORD REVIEW...
...The best thing a curious nonspecialist can do is begin with "At Grass," the twenty-first poem in the book and the first good one, then read on, ignoring all poems labeled TNS (for The North Ship) and skipping the appendix entirely...
...If you don't like it, who asked you...
...Anne Roche Muggeridge, daughter-in-law of convert Malcolm Muggeridge, has said in her recent book, The Desolate City: Revolution in the Catholic Church (Harper & Row): "Because the integrity of its message has been betrayed, the Catholic Church is in ruins...
...Mail to: NEW OXFORD REVIEW Room 263 1069 Kains Ave...
...Thwaite's selection is that it will put Larkin in the bookstores...
...At Grass" is a description of old racehorses...
...But the most dogged apostles of plain speaking who also happened to be Titans were probably William Wordsworth in England and Walt Whitman here...
...Pieces that have been previously published are identified by volume initials...
...Here and there, rarely, we get glimpse of a third mood, a raptur 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1989...
...When he does give us something unmistakably structured, it's usually in the jog trot of hymns and jingles: forms for which familiarity has bred indifference...
...it's all the future will have to see, because everything else will have fallen by the wayside...
...They fuck you up, your mum and dad...
...Metrically, it could be Hallmark, but don't look for it on Mother's Day...
...Of course, no one actually talked like Wordsworth or Whitman...
...What they were really doing, when they were writing at their best, was partaking of that experience which every great poet shares, and around which critics write and write without ever quite explaining it, when the passion for truth lifts a man up to beauty...
...But summer ends, or the record does, and we're back in the hired box: forerunner of the box we never vacate...
...These little packages he fills with his bitterest sentiments, so as to profit by the contrast...
...It's been everyone's problem for fifty years...
...Parting, after about five Rehearsals, was an agreement That I was too selfish, withdrawn, And easily bored to love...
...But, in offering the thought, Larkin first tells us that it is only "almost true...
...That doesn't mean his best poems aren't crafted...
...But now, a new wave of converts is entering the Church...
...Sometimes, as in "Love Songs in Age' or "Faith Healing," the contemplatiol of lovelessness breaks out in real rage But there is nothing to be done abou it...
...they Have slipped their names, and stand at ease, Or gallop for what must be joy...
...Larkin obviously didn't destroy the poems that are here exhumed, but that doesn't mean they are any good...
...If anything, Larkin should have destroyed a number of the poems he did publish...
...Big-L love means love of other people, and this is trickier...
...The answer is surprising, but unavoidable...
...These new Catholics and the extraordinary Pope to whom they belong are a very present comfort when one is tempted to despair...
...Among the converts to Roman Catholicism who write for the REVIEW are Paul C. Vitz, George William Rutler, Sheldon Vanauken, John C. Cort, Walker Percy, Thomas Howard, L. Brent Bozell, James J. Thompson Jr., and Peter Kreeft...
...Here is Auden pottiness, there is a whiff of Yeats...
...A little looking uncovers elaborate skeins of rhymes or half-rhymes, sometimes running through quite long stanzas...
...We are not responsible for our baldness or our wrinkles, which God gives us, but we can choose our glass frames...
...Berkeley, CA 94706 PAYMENT MUST ACCOMPANY ORDER 47 we set so much store by was only an artistic detail: A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace Thrown off in helping to prolong The Latin names around the base...
...They come because at the highest level of Catholic teaching, the doctrine of the faith, though much embattled, remains uncompromised and is as fearlessly proclaimed by John Paul II as by Peter, Paul, Ignatius, or Augustine...
...What lover worries much That a ghost bids them touch...
...Larkin may turn these feelings to furniture, to old clothes, to a dead hedgehog...
...The forum for the new generation of converts is the NEW OXFORD REVIEW, a monthly magazine that takes its name from the 19th-century Oxford Movement in England...
...One course he might have taken, which is an option open to all poets at all times, would have been to write "poetically”—to model his work on the rhythm and the ring of some great predecessor...
...The closest a couple in Larkin's poems come to love is not a real couple at all, but a pair of centuries-old stone effigies...
...14 (regularly $19) O One-year student, unemployed, or retired person's subscription $12 (regularly $16) O Two-year subscription NAME (Please print or type) STREET ADDRESS CITY STATE...
...I live in Manhattan, supposedly the publishing and bookselling capital of the country...
...Where jazz was concerned, Larkin was what is called a moldy fig: a fan of jazz before be-bop got to it, and he writes in one poem of Sidney Bechet that "On me your voice falls . . . /Like an enormous yes" (you won't find a better phrase-long definition...
...COLLECTED POEMS Philip Larkin, edited by Anthony Thwaite Farrar Straus Giroux/Marvell Press/330 pp...
Vol. 22 • October 1989 • No. 10
