When Mom Is the Muse
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing WHEN MOM IS THE MUSE BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL WHEN PHILIP LARKIN died in 1985 at age 63, his poetic reputation was at its peak in his native England. Critics and the reading public...
...He hopes to refashion his persona into a new creation—gay in every sense, and above all beyond the control of those who made him dissatisfied with himself...
...They are the progeny of the two masks above many a theater proscenium...
...A new crop of young writers is already beginning to spar against their influence, but these two fine poets indelibly summon the archetypes of Comedy and Tragedy for their generation...
...Motion's book attempts to explain how the literary persona related to the person...
...or how a poem picked up on this or that image...
...She wants his behavior to reflect his distinguished lineage...
...Nor did he ever quite detach himself from his mother's apron strings...
...At the least, it will put the ocean between Jimmy and his disapproving parents, who want him to settle down to their notion of a "normal" life...
...The operatic crises he anticipated as a young man have instead resulted (here, anyway) in seriocomic resolutions, as happily enchanting as the denouements of A Midsummer Night's Dream or The Tempest...
...The web of family entanglements isn't so easy to evade, and with relatives this charming, the reader would not want it any other way...
...When after many years she at last succumbed to his entreaties, he immediately initiated an involvement with his secretary—all the while assuring Jones of his continuing devotion...
...In a country of diminished prospects and "angry young men" he became the bard of disappointed lives...
...he has truly become "a different person" through the power of her nature and his art...
...Attitudes that read as irony in the lyrics turn out to be for real in the man...
...Sydney Larkin was a self-educated accountant who despised those less resourceful than himself and idolized Adolf Hitler, blaming "foreigners" for all of England's woes...
...By the end of the second year Jimmy's analysis has concluded, and through it—plus a few other love affairs—he has learned a bit more about himself...
...But the adult Merrill—a consummate stage manager—quietly shows that naive misunderstanding may well ripen into the revelation that spurs the writer to create...
...Ultimately, their dialogue becomes an internalized chat between poet and muse...
...Each chapter concludes with a leap ahead in time, letting us in on the secrets that the 1950s could not know: what happened to a certain person later on...
...During his holidays with Jones he would correspond with his "sweetheart," Maeve Bren-nan, a library colleague whose Catholic mores kept her from sleeping with him...
...The writers include Alice B. Toklas, W.H...
...His wife, Eva, conformed to his disdainful stereotype of women...
...A Different Person can also be enjoyed as a travelogue, most poignant for its glimpses of a Europe wholly unlike today's...
...His landscapes are similarly peopled with a cast of vivid characters...
...he could not seem to attach both emotions to the same person...
...Fear of repeating the misery of his upbringing kept him gun-shy of marriage...
...In short, Larkin held crude racist sentiments, treated women badly, and was a champion whiner who bitched about everything from his post as head librarian at the University of Hull to food and the weather...
...In A Different Person: A Memoir (Knopf, 271 pp., $25), Merrill gives us a straightforward prose recollection of a two-year sojourn in Europe, beginning in 1950 when he was a 24-year-old aspiring writer...
...Jimmy and his mother conduct an ongoing argument about lifestyles...
...Born four years later than Larkin and raised in the prosperous postwar United States, James Merrill too found it necessary to shadowbox for his poetic identity with the vatic cadences of Yeats and Eliot—not to mention Wallace Stevens...
...Both the son's and the mother's desires have been fulfilled: He has achieved the success he always dreamed of, and she has been part of the process...
...Merrill's descriptions evoke the images of churches and palazzi better than any snapshot...
...As the story opens, "Jimmy" is planning to explore the Continent and settle in Rome with his newfound love, Claude, another would-be writer...
...The account can be read as a bittersweet Bildungsroman about the author's transition to adulthood...
...As long as she lived, he used her as an excuse to evade a serious commitment to anyone else...
...He wasn't exactly kidding when he wrote sourly, Man hands on misery to man...
...Yeats and Eliot?mage-like figures given to sibylline pronouncements on historical cycles and the Eternal Verities of Art...
...that Merrill has preserved a souvenir we have just seen him buy in some long gone bazaar...
...Ready to return stateside, he seems on the verge of becoming James Merrill, the poet...
...The poets of his generation were struggling to shake off the influence of their predecessors...
...When he discovered the poetry of Thomas Hardy, who eschewed grand topics in favor of ordinary human sadness, Larkin broke free...
...On the other hand, his political views came to closely resemble his father's—though his heroine was the more acceptable Margaret Thatcher...
...But the recent publication of his letters in Britain, and now Andrew Motion's Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life (Farrar Straus Giroux, 570 pp., $35), has cast the poet in anew light and thrown his fan club into consternation...
...Larkin encompassed both parental voices, but softened their effect in his verse by often suggesting disapproval of the attitudes expressed...
...Although his poetry tends to interweave the quotidian with episodes borrowed from myth, grand opera or gangster movies, it has often veered into autobiography...
...Most entertaining are the poet's family members as they traipse through Europe: his father, the much-married financier: half-siblings...
...At its deepest level the book is about transformation—the alchemy by which one becomes a writer, a process Merrill has always envisioned as somewhat magical...
...Each of them hopes a year abroad will provide material for future masterpieces...
...His true muse, moreover, was none other than his mother...
...Yet whenever he fancies that he has gained a measure of independence from her...
...His tone seemed to match the national mood in a country ruefully coming to terms with its reduced importance abroad and the need to tighten belts at home...
...Larkin's feelings toward other women in his life vacillated between lust and romantic yearnings...
...When Eva died in 1977 he told friends he was finished as a writer, and the prophecy proved accurate: He fell into silence at the very moment that he was receiving the greatest critical attention of his life...
...Auden and "Freddy"—Jimmy's best friend from school days, known to the rest of us as the Christian nov-elist Frederick Buechner—and we meet such interesting eccentrics as an adventuress calling herself the Princess Conan Doyle...
...And don't have any kids yourself...
...He was praised for portraying the full ambivalence of human motives, and for illuminating a kind of sad beauty in the unhappiness we all encounter...
...Larkin's mistresses were horrified to discover—following his death—the extent of his disloyalty...
...As Motion demonstrates, Larkin knew his perennial unhap-piness and tortured relationships formed the raw material of his art...
...Larkin's themes caught the imagination of postwar British literary culture...
...Critics and the reading public alike hailed him as a truth-teller—someone who recognized just how bleak and disappointing existence can be...
...It deepens like a coastal shelf...
...Place Merrill alongside Larkin and the pair exemplify dual aspects of post-Eliotic verse...
...Soon both youths are in therapy, too drained to compose poems...
...Get out as early as you can...
...In one of the story's leitmotifs...
...His manipulations recall the novels of his close (platonic) friend, Barbara Pym, where strong female characters remain devoted to weak, treacherous men...
...Philip's longtime lover, Monica Jones, succinctly described the maternal household as "one in which if you'd cooked lunch you had to lie down afterwards to recover...
...One can imagine the cupola of Rome's Sant'Ivo, "where concave and convex stagger forth from the corkscrew skylight as though a New England meeting house had drunk too much rum...
...Still, his love poems move us precisely because they embrace the ambiguity of real feelings, in which passion frequently mixes with cruelty and fondness mingles with distaste...
...The older Merrill acknowledges that, as he sees himself turning into "books on the shelf...
...What made this endearing rather than depressing was Larkin's gift for infusing his verse with a wry compassion, even as he savaged the absurdities of society, the indignities of old age, or the rotten hand he felt life had dealt him...
...The core of its theory is bluntly expressed by Larkin himself in one of his most quoted poems, "This Be the Verse": "They f?you up, your mum and dad./They may not mean to, but they do./They fill you with the faults they had...
...A timid hypochondriac and hysterical clinger, she embittered the family with her self-pity...
...Of course the youthful, conflicted protagonist sees them somewhat differently...
...Mama is somehow revealed as the inspiration for the change...
...Just as Larkin countered with an earthiness forged out of Hardy and resentment, Merrill has combined insights culled from psychoanalysis (especially about the fluidity of personality) with the slangy rhythms of popular songs by George Gershwin and Cole Porter (where transience is frequently a theme) to contribute to "the perpetual freshening of language...
...In life, the man coped less well...
...Alas, foreign inspiration proves insufficient to avert the foundering of romance—due largely to Jimmy's immature expectations...
...English literary journals have reacted to these revelations much the way their American counterparts did when folksy Robert Frost was unmasked as a ruthlessly ambitious backbiter...
...his mother with her new husband and stepdaughter...
Vol. 76 • November 1993 • No. 13
