Martin Amis, in a lecture in 1997, remarked that “In 1985, the year of his death, Philip Larkin, a big, fat, bald librarian at the University of Hull, was unquestionably England’s unofficial laureate: our best-loved poet since the war . . . . Ten years later, Larkin is now something like a pariah, or an untouchable.” The poems, those three slim volumes of the mature poetry, had been eclipsed by the Selected Letters, edited by Anthony Thwaite, which revealed what Tom Paulin chose to call “the sewer under the national monument” (TLS, Letters, November 6, 1992), and by Andrew Motion’s biography (1993).
Those letters, previously unpublished poems, biographical materials and unfinished lesbian erotica may have transformed Larkin’s reputation, and for the worse, but they have given Larkin studies a new lease of life. His executors, Thwaite and Motion, famously faced with a “repugnant” will (was it Alan Bennett who noticed the unhappy aptness of that legalism?), have ensured that a steady stream of documentation continues at intervals, and Faber, who do pretty well off the corpses of twentieth-century poets, are now publishing Further Requirements, edited by Thwaite, a collection of essays, interviews and book reviews which Larkin himself did not select for his Required Writing (1983). (Next year, we will be treated to the girls’ school stories, with their gentle sapphic S&M, the forerunners of the infamous “spank mags” Larkin always had to hand.)
When the surprisingly fat Collected Poems was posthumously published, Larkin’s own decisions of inclusion and exclusion turned out to have been extremely well judged; there are very few poems one would move in or out of his selected corpus. Likewise, one might expect this new collection of prose to be “surplus to” rather than “further”. In fact, it will be a delight, at least to those who loved, and still love, Larkin’s dry, self-deprecating posed fogyness, and his modest little observations; amid the reiterations, which do suggest how far Larkin had calculatedly honed his apparently offhand critical positions, there are little treasures. And in the new era of “sewer” Larkin, the book has something to say about that journalistic and academic kerfuffle. For just as critics laboured with the two Larkins revealed in his correspondence, here is Larkin, as if self-referentially, on the letters of Evelyn Waugh:
there is a constant barrage of remarks such as “Alfred Duggan kicked the bucket”, “Two [dance] bands, one of niggers and one of buggers” and “there are 2 jews in this club.” This may be part of Waugh’s epistolary irony, and understood as such by his correspondents, but they support Claire Luce’s quick judgment that he had “no heart”. Yet against them can be set his letters to his wife and family, nearly always affectionate, sometimes charming, as if a totally different person had held the pen.
Larkin said, of Eliot,
I think we want the life and the work to make sense together; I suppose ultimately they must, since they both relate to the same person. Eliot would say they don’t, but I think Eliot was wrong.
But he also wrote, in an appreciative review of Peter Ackroyd’s unauthorized biography, that “If Eliot wished to live quietly, succeeding in avoiding notice, living and partly living, without making his life a continual allegory, then he had a right to. There was pain, there was dignity, finally there was happiness. Let it go at that.”
Reading Larkin’s unsystematic, sometimes self-serving, often contradictory comments, we do get some insight into the contradictions of his legacy; even in his last will and testament, Larkin was not certain what he willed, unsure of what he wanted to attest.
Not to prevent it is my will’s fulfilment;
willing it, my ailment.
There is also evidence in these interviews, introductions and short notices, of a more flexible Larkin than the redneck version being widely touted, and a modest one; he frequently quibbled with the idea he was a “major” poet (“Please don’t think that I’m great. If I’m noticeable, it’s because we’re in a trough at the moment . . . . If I seem good, it’s because everyone else is so bad”). What we get here is, for the most part, a sane and unassuming pleasure in some durable, if old-fashioned, artists and ideas.
Another resonant passage occurs in Larkin’s speech honouring his hero, D. H. Lawrence:
The other week I was reading one of the books on him that nowadays seem to come out every month or so. It was well-researched and deeply interesting, and for a while I could not think what had made it different from other similar books . . . . Then I realized that the author was trying neither to make me like Lawrence nor dislike him; in fact I could not tell whether he liked or disliked him himself. And I had to realize that the age of proselytizing is over. We are all Lawrence converts nowadays, or at least converted to the fact that he is there, like Wordsworth or Hardy.
We’re not yet there in Larkinland, of course; hatred is still pitched against apologetic platitudes. For a long time, Larkin criticism contented itself with the few and constant themes of the work; the self-conscious rejection of Modernism as Larkin understood it (which was not well); and issues of class and nationality. There were attempts to complicate this picture – Barbara Everett’s ongoing and surprisingly successful attempt to trace Symbolist influences in the work, for example, which led to Larkin calling Andrew Motion’s small 1980 study “rather l’école d’Everett – Larkin as Mallarmé and so on”. In the same letter, Larkin took his usual stance of pretending that his French was “strictly plume de ma tante”, and added “it’s curious that M should crop up again.” Everett, though, has established a case that even Larkin wouldn’t have been able to wriggle out of; but parochialism was always part of the packaging.
With the Letters, and then the Motion biography, came the unedifying readings of Larkin’s work in light of the man; racist, sexist, tight-fisted, Thatcher-worshipping. Tom Paulin, having earlier produced some widely contested and overdetermined political readings, switched to moral judgments that took us further still from the actual poems, and others joined in. The unease of the Academy in dealing with a Conservative (and conservative) writer had led to two stances: one the outright condemnation of Larkin, and the steady attempt to relegate him from his decades-long place as one of the only major English poets of the twentieth century; the other an attempt by people who still liked the work (and indeed the man) to bring him into a more acceptable fold (such as suggesting that he was a bit of a Modernist after all). This perhaps says more about the Academy than the poems, and Larkin himself was alert to this; “I sometimes think my few poems serve as a mirror in which the critic finds his own qualities”, he wrote slyly to Barbara Everett. This has not stopped the critics; and perhaps it is only through their ingenious new approaches that Larkin’s reputation can now be partly restored, the protest graffiti scrubbed from the monument.
Even so, given his mock ignorance of “Abroad”, Philip Larkin, were he still alive, might have been surprised by the company he is keeping these days. “It is not certain that Nietzsche would have enjoyed reading Larkin”, comments Ian Almond in New Larkins for Old, edited by James Booth. A story about Bakhtin “would have endeared the Russian thinker to Larkin”, suggests V. Penelope Pelizzon. Camus, Derrida (“Larkin’s proto-Derridean undecidability”), Foucault, Lyotard, Sartre (many times) and Wittgenstein all get a mention too. Larkin’s “Poetry of Departures” apparently uses Kierkegaardian terminology (the word “crowd”) and moves “in the process from a Heideggerian ‘they’ to a communal ‘we’”. Who would have thought the old boy had so much foreign blood in him?
There are some interesting pieces here, none the less. George H. Gilpin’s riveting account of the poet’s affair with Patricia Avis (Patsy Strang) draws on archive material and adds a few insights into Larkin’s private life; it also reveals that Avis was briefly pregnant before miscarrying. M. R. Rowe’s sympathetic piece on the lesbian writing is good enough to vindicate Faber’s decision to publish the books. Barbara Everett’s article on “Larkin’s Money” (adapted from an article in the TLS, September 19, 1997) opens up a promising seam, though she could have extracted more from the topic; the idea of economy in Larkin, of the difference between gift and transaction, exchange, or hoarding, ramifies extensively through the poetry; this, and the valuable insights into Lawrence’s influence, explored by Terry Whalen and other contributors, can be used to slightly reorient Larkin’s perceived politics towards what Steven Regan ambitiously described elsewhere as “an imaginative declaration of resistance and solidarity against the aggressive and demeaning self-interest that has characterized the final decades of the twentieth century”. That may be pushing it, admittedly, though Larkin’s values, partly because of their incoherence, are rarely as straightforward as critics would have us believe; he may have adored Mrs Thatcher, but he would have loathed full-blown Thatcherism – he was that sort of Conservative – and the cracks were beginning to show even by his death in 1985. In addition, an essay by Steve Clark is extremely interesting on the nature of Larkin’s anti-Americanism; he was that sort of Conservative, too.
There are also some predictable eccentricities. John Carey’s approach to the two Larkins is old-fashioned in its terms, broadly dividing Larkin into “masculine” and “feminine” voices (he concedes the “risk of gender stereotyping” without sounding remotely bothered, accepting it as a “rough and ready” convenience); but Pelizzon reminds us, as if we could forget, of Bakhtin, of the fashionable word “heteroglossia” and of Rabelais, carnivalesque, theatricality and ritual. Both are engaging with the unremarkable fact that Larkin could take on personae, and alter register, tone and diction within a poem. Raphael Ingelbien traces the “influence” of Eliot on Larkin’s poetry, citing the Four Quartets, and is no more convincing than John Osborne, who cites The Waste Land instead, kindly alerting us that the word “unreal” is common to both poets. Liz Hedgecock, in her article on a furtively myth-kitty Larkin, also cites the “Unreal City”; I suspect that she is right that Larkin would have hated her conclusion.
In fact, we do know what Larkin would have made of much of this. Asked by John Haffenden, in an interview reprinted in Further Requirements, “what if a critic construed a poem in a way you felt you didn’t mean?”, Larkin simply replied, “I should think he was talking balls.” Likewise, we know how he would have responded to the more vulgar criticism: of Roy Hattersley’s performance on the South Bank Show in 1982, he wrote, deliciously and memorably,
It gave me some idea of what a writer in Russia must feel like: arraigned in public for bourgeois formalism, counter-revolutionary determination and anti-working class deviation. That great bloated unsmiling accuser and his silent audience was the most depressing thing I’ve had to endure for a long time.
James Booth’s own essay is something of a corrective, with its stoic restatement of a rather less fashionable view:
Literature is not an adjunct of history, and the value of a poem is not dependent on whether it accurately registers any particular socio-political moment. It is a matter of how beautifully and memorably it embodies thought and feeling in words. Larkin and Heaney are poets; what will remain permanently interesting about them is their poetry.
Less dramatically, it is not that political readings are not of value – “thought and feeling”, after all, are not neatly separable from the political. It is more that, in this case, the readings are either forced (the seeking of imperial allegory in straightforward lyric poems) or a little like shooting fish in a barrel, it being no revelation that Larkin had some right-wing views. (It is fair to say that they were views shared by vast numbers of his countrymen at the time.) In all but a couple of poems, they do not figure; and “Homage to a Government”, the most reviled example, ends with a note that could be taken up by any of today’s anti-capitalists, in its bitter appraisal of merely commercial society. To say this is not to condone Larkin’s vile private prejudices; it is just to remember that they were indeed private. The public man, and the published work, are mostly a different matter, with the exception of some disgusting passages in the jazz writing. The poems are still wonderful; their terrible cramping effect on subsequent English poetry is hardly Larkin’s fault.