Poet as Pessimist

...He tells it variously in several poems...

...Marsh also addresses the grim revelations about Lar-kin's character, disturbingly emerging from his biography and letters, posthumously published in the early 1990s...

...Religion used to try, That vast moth-eaten musical brocade Created to pretend we never die...

...But that, too, ends because I was too selfish, wwithdrawwn,/ And easily bored to love...

...It can be argued that the lion's—or at least lioness's—share of his troubles stemmed from misfortune with women...

...In "Church Going," we find the bicycling atheist nevertheless drawn to an empty church: Hatless, I take off / My cycle-clips in awkward reverence...

...Marsh offers 15 compelling reasons well worth pondering...

...Here some of Marsh's pertinent observations are called for...

...Courage is no good: It means not scaring others...

...To go from metaphysical fiasco to the more personal one, consider "Annus Mirabilis," starting with: Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me)— Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles'first LP...

...Yet, as Marsh demonstrates, what mastery was here in rhyme and off-rhyme, meter and stanza, enjambment and imagery—forms a consistency that made up for in frequency...

...This is well documented in Anthony Thwaite's presumably definitive edition of the Collected Poems, which includes some worthwhile unfinished efforts as well as less interesting juvenilia, written in the shadow of Yeats, Hardy, and Auden...

...Grossly oversimplified, Larkin was the poet of social and sexual fumbling, of maladjustment and insecurity, atheism and the fear of death, who consoled himself as best he could with satire of the world and mockery of himself...

...haven't you noticed mine...

...Do society, socializing with others, help...

...A radical, if you will, in his espousal of jazz, but a conservative radical, as in most things...

...But then, think of Eliot, Housman, and Ransom...

...Everything proves we play in separate leagues...

...But that nimble versifier was hardly the poet of our complex age, who had to confront his own unimportance in an industrial-capitalist society...

...The last, very easygoing affair (no talk of dreaded marriage) was with Philip's secretary, Betty Mackereth, begun the very year when the affair with Bren-nan was finally consummated...

...For him, Lar-kin is the poet of despair made beautiful, with "not a trace of posturing...

...As Clive James reminds us in an essay cleverly entitled "Don Juan in Hull," Larkin published only one collection of poems per decade...

...To me, the characteristic poet of that period was Philip Larkin...

...When I see a couple of kids And guess he's f—g her and she's Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, I know this is paradise Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives— Bonds and gestures pushed to one side Like an outdated combine harvester And everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly...

...Death is no different whined at than withstood...

...sensual, in his seemingly unrequited libido, despite some sexual relationships...

...She represented Larkin's need for parallel involvements to prevent full commitment to either lover...

...I Remember, I Remember" reminds us that we cannot blame things on our particular geographical constrictions: "Nothing, like something, happens everywhere...

...Sydney Larkin was an autocrat and Hitler admirer who treated his wife, Eva, as a house servant...

...He concludes that the church is "a serious house," And that much never can be obsolete, Since someone will forever be surprising A hunger in himself to be more serious, And gravitating with it to this ground, Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in, If only that so many dead lie round...

...And religion...

...Man hands on misery to man...

...I wonder if Anyone looked at me, forty years back, And thought, That'll be the life...

...Larkin was the homme moyen sensuel (an oft-quoted phrase, by the way, whose origin remains obscure) par excellence...

...Martin Amis, son of Kingsley, who knew Larkin well, writes: "Life was happening to Larkin, but he had no talent for that, remaining to the end, single, childless and site-tenacious...

...I would agree with David Lodge, whose take was, "Revelations about a writer's life should not affect our independently formed critical assessment...

...On a scholarship to Oxford, Philip— an awkward, gangly youth with thick glasses and a stammer—was not popular, though he made a few lasting friendships, notably with Kingsley Amis...

...On the other hand, as he was mortally afraid of marriage and fatherhood, caring for her became, for many years, a handy excuse for not committing to any woman...

...Alleviating also, I would add, a reader's unhappiness, finding a companion in misery...

...They may not mean to, but they do...

...In a letter of January 13, 1985, he wrote a friend that he was happily able to replace his favorite Parker pen, which developed a leak, with its exact replica...

...It is, as "Toads" says, something that squats on the poet's life: Six days of the week it soils / With its sickening poison— / Just for paying a few bills...

...for example, in "Letter to a Friend about Girls," the friend being Kingsley Amis...

...Not a happy family situation, even though Sydney, though strict, was often helpful to his son...

...Being brave Lets no one off the grave...

...To this I would add another dichotomy in Larkin, one well defined by the great Spanish Jesuit writer Baltasar Gracian 370 years ago: O life, you should never have begun,/ But since you did, you should never end...

...But they were f—d up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another's throats...

...Thus, Marsh argues that There is a sense in which Larkin's whole oeuvre can be said to be about writing, since so much is devoted to exploring interactions between a lone, isolated speaker and the world he observes...

...Larkin was the unofficial head of The Movement, an influential group of poets who strove to bring poetry down from the clouds of romantic rhetoric...

...As Marsh puts it, "Larkin's subject matter is the neurotic post-war male, and nobody does him better...

...And this new, extremely useful book, Philip Larkin: The Poems, by Nicholas Marsh, should make this abundantly clear without making the claim in so many words...

...What makes Larkin's poems especially interesting is that they can be read as autobiography, which most other John Simon writes about theater for Bloomberg News...

...Concurrently, he carried on with Maeve Brennan, a fellow librarian at Hull, in a naive and escapist relationship...

...Or lied...

...Gloom and doom everywhere...

...Failing in other directions, Philip settled on librarianship as a career, and slowly worked his way up as assistant librarian in Wellington, Leicester, and Belfast, becoming full librarian at the University of Hull until his death in 1985...

...Similarly, in "Reasons for Attendance," the speaker stands outside the lighted glass / To watch the dancers inside, interested but unjoining...

...Even so, seclusion may not be the solution either, as sitting by a lamp more often brings / Not peace, but other things...

...But religion is not the answer to the fear of death, as "Aubade" states: No trick dispels...

...and to constructing a permanent uncertainty about what he feels, what he thinks, and what he wants and why he wants it...

...They may, however, confirm or explain reservations about it...

...Lar-kin and Betjeman were friends, and I see the remark as a friendly tribute...

...This betokens neither indolence nor infertility, only painstaking revisions, often stretching, with interruptions, across the years...

...By December 2, he was dead...

...His truly lasting relationship, for a while overlapping with Ruth, was with Monica Jones, a strong-minded university lecturer in English...

...Are these the high windows of a church or of a high-rise...

...Not so, as "Vers de Societe" tells us: I could spend half my evenings,if I wanted, Holding a glass of washing sherry, canted Over to catch the drivels of some bitch Who's read nothing but Which...

...But I have read them again, and they do...

...They have their world, not much compared with yours, But where they work, and age, and put off men By being unattractive or too shy, Or having morals—anyhow none give in...

...The first girlfriend was the novelist Patsy Avis, later Strang, who, though married, had a miscarriage by Larkin and incorporated him in a novel...

...Grant that, and all the rest makes sense as well...

...In the same piece about Betjeman, Larkin wrote, "It was Eliot who gave the modernist poetic movement its charter in the sentence 'Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult,'" which Larkin felt Betjeman disproved...

...Ten years...

...Enright, Elizabeth Jennings, and Robert Conquest...

...The Building," which awaits all of us, is a terrifying poem about a hospital waiting room...

...But special, too, with his two fine novels and his major poetry...

...Wild Oats" is really about Ruth, whom he meets in the company of "a bosomy English rose," whom he dare not accost, but settles instead for seven years with "her friend in specs I could talk to...

...That's out ofproportion...

...He goes on: "Despite [Larkin's] assiduous self-characterization as an indecisive, misanthropic, irritable and irritating man, the poems remain entertaining, pleasing, and fascinating...

...He And his lot will all go down the long slide Like free bloody birds...

...So the poems serve as therapy, as Amis sees it, alleviating life...

...poets' cannot...

...And, to return to "Reasons for Attendance," as some opt for sociability and some for withdrawal, both are satisfied, /Ifno one has misjudged himself...

...Though no longer made, parts, as a salesman assured Larkin, would be available for 10 years...

...Unhappiness is ordinary and everyday and in abundant supply...

...Some poems did not make it into these collections, and a small handful was written after them...

...The four collections are The North Ship (1945), The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964), and High Windows (1974...

...The family is no help, and neither is history, as we learn from "This Be the Verse": They f—k you up, your mum and dad...

...Chief among them, for me, is that "balanced structures are pleasing . . . [they] constitute the 'shape' of a Larkin poem: this is its aesthetic appeal, its 'beauty.' Each poem is a closed system, made up of contrary energies held in equilibrium...

...Alan Bennett, a big fan, wrote, "I could not see how [the poems] would emerge unscathed...

...It reads in part: I see how I've been losing: all the while I met a different gauge of girls from yours...

...To Ruth Bowman, whom he met when she was 16, he became briefly engaged, but the spotty affair (rarely consummated because of her Catholicism) dragged on for seven years...

...Either way, they capture the sun of ostensible clarity and hopefulness, but beyond it is the infinite empty sky: nothingness, beautifully conveyed through the fatalistic triple thump of the closing line...

...the total emptiness we travel to And shall be lost in always...

...In "The Whitsun Weddings" he is on a train to London, mounted at various stops by wedding couples seen off by ridiculous wedding parties: fathers had never known / Success so huge and wholly farcical...

...And immediately, Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless...

...What follows owes a good deal to Marsh's book which, though primarily intended as a textbook for a Larkin seminar, makes equally good reading for the non-seminarian...

...It is no cure for...

...Brennan's theory was that the "dichotomous" Larkin distinguished between love, an illusion, and sex, a reality...

...They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you...

...Though not among the good many critics quoted by Marsh, Clive James has come up with some poignant and pertinent formulations...

...Four stanzas of the accessible, conversational Larkin, turning in the fifth into the highly imaged, elliptic, elitist, ambiguous Larkin—obscure, as James would have it, "out of over-refinement...

...Get out as early as you can, And don't have any kids yourself...

...Larkin was born in 1922 in Coventry, where his father was borough treasurer...

...For many, the problem arose from what Lisa Jardine described as "a steady stream of casual obscenity, throw-away derogatory remarks about women, and arrogant disdain for those of different skin colour or nationality"—"rotten with class-consciousness," Germaine Greer weighed in...

...No God any more, or sweating in the dark About hell and that, or having to hide What you think of the priest...

...To Larkin, these weddings are "a religious wounding...

...Work is no solution, either...

...They became lovers in 1950, but didn't live together until, sick, she moved into his house for his last two years...

...Time now to look at a typical Larkin poem, "High Windows...

...He observes that superstition, like belief, must die, / And what remains when disbelief has gone...

...They included Kingsley Amis, John Wain, D.J...

...The glibly bourgeois Betjeman did not feel himself an outsider, as the true poet of the age cannot help being...

...Like Leopardi, Larkin is "disconsolate yet doomed to being beautiful...

...Average he was in his, in many ways, very English provincialism...

...He was also a great but selective enthusiast of jazz, about which he published a volume of essays, championing the music of Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, and Bix Beiderbecke, against the likes of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and such...

...Wherever he was, he greatly improved the library and, on the whole, enjoyed his work until the 1970s and '80s, when funds diminished and computers, which he disliked, came in...

...There were only five documented sexual relationships in Larkin's life...

...I wonder who inherited the pen...

...Still, when you consider how much Auden, Hardy, and Yeats produced, this was a rather modest output...

...It deepens like a coastal shelf...

...Widowed, Eva became dependent on her son, often living with him and cramping his style...

...This results in "purity—a hopeless affirmation of the only kind we want to hear when we feel, as sooner or later everybody must, that life is a trap...

...In life, Larkin may not have been as pessimistic as in his poetry...

...by John Simon In his valuable collection of essays and reviews, Required Writing, Philip Larkin wondered—in a piece about Sir John Betjeman— "Can it be that, as Eliot dominated the first half of the twentieth century, the second half will derive from Betjeman...

...That'll see me out," Larkin concluded...

...when an affair turned into reality, it came to eventual grief...

...He hugged melancholy to him in the poems—for the poems, it might even have been...

...So, too, in his editing of The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse, where many of his selections were highly conservative for such an innovator...