Philip Larkin

[hdw]

For a more sympathetic view of Larkin than you usually get, see Rachel Cooke in the Observer Review section -

In search of the real Philip Larkin | Books | The Observer

Harry

[lionel]

Many of Larkin's letters are unbearably narrowminded, even racist, and there's a tendency to dismiss his work, retrospectively, because of this. But I love his poetry, his ability to sum up the (too late for him) past, to view with jealousy and loathing the present, and to see the future as disaster. A lovely poet, in spite of any shortcomings he may have had in, er, that obscure construct 'real life'.

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[hdw]

Rachel Cooke would agree with you. So would I. A lot of writers, artists and composers have been obnoxious characters you would cross the street to avoid, but that doesn't invalidate the art they created.

Harry

[Liam]

A lot of writers, artists and composers have been obnoxious characters you would cross the street to avoid, but that doesn't invalidate the art they created.

As one of my favorite professors (a famous Virginia Woolf scholar, no less) once said, "If it were to happen that I could come to Woolf to tell her how much I love her books, she'd probably slam the door in my face."

[lionel]

I don't know about this one. Now, we know DHL wanted to send the teminally sick, etc, to gas chambers much more, er, pleasant than the ones Hitler's mob devised, that he went through a period of beating up on Frieda in Cornwall, much to the horror of Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield. Rousseau once kicked an aunt (I think it was) downstairs. T. S. Eliot had very questionable views about Jews. B. S. Johnson's wife had to leave him because of his brutality, and on it goes.

But Virginia Woolf behave in such a frightfully un-middle-claass manner? I may be completely wrong, but I just don't remember hearing anything like such rude behavior on her part. Maybe someone'll say I'm very wrong, that she was in the habit of pulling wings off flies, slamming doors on cats just to hear them howl when their tails got trapped, ...

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[lionel]

To return to this, and to repeat that VW surely wouldn't have done this: you can't be talking about Mark Hussey, as he'd be aware of Melba Cuddy-Keane's Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, & the Public Sphere, which makes it quite clear that she listened to everyone - bus conductors, cleaning women, etc, and she recognized many of them as intellectuals.

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[JTolle]

A poem that unsettled me heavily when I first read it, yet completely evokes my most dismal feelings at times, even as a believer, and that I sincerely love, is Larkin's "Aubade". The man could be as horrible as he wanted, as long as I never dealt with him, and as long as he could write poems like this:

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

[lionel]

OK, let's wallow in it: one of my favorite Larkin poems:

Philip Larkin - Vers de Soci?t?

My wife and I have asked a crowd of craps
To come and waste their time and ours: perhaps
You'd care to join us? In a pig's arse, friend.
Day comes to an end.
The gas fire breathes, the trees are darkly swayed.
And so Dear Warlock-Williams: I'm afraid--

Funny how hard it is to be alone.
I could spend half my evenings, if I wanted,
Holding a glass of washing sherry, canted
Over to catch the drivel of some bitch
Who's read nothing but Which;
Just think of all the spare time that has flown

Straight into nothingness by being filled
With forks and faces, rather than repaid
Under a lamp, hearing the noise of wind,
And looking out to see the moon thinned
To an air-sharpened blade.
A life, and yet how sternly it's instilled

All solitude is selfish. No one now
Believes the hermit with his gown and dish
Talking to God (who's gone too); the big wish
Is to have people nice to you, which means
Doing it back somehow.
Virtue is social. Are, then, these routines

Playing at goodness, like going to church?
Something that bores us, something we don't do well
(Asking that ass about his fool research)
But try to feel, because, however crudely,
It shows us what should be?
Too subtle, that. Too decent, too. Oh hell,

Only the young can be alone freely.
The time is shorter now for company,
And sitting by a lamp more often brings
Not peace, but other things.
Beyond the light stand failure and remorse
Whispering Dear Warlock-Williams: Why, of course--

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[lionel]

Time for a little silliness. No one seems to have mentioned the forty model toads scattered in and around Hull for ten weeks to mark the 25th anniversary of Larkin's death:

http://www.larkin25.co.uk/larkin-with-toads.php

There are loads of photos of them on flickr, too:

larkin25 - Flickr: Search

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[lionel]

'Larkin with Toads', the 'mass participation public art event' - weekend report:

This weekend I visited all 40 toad sites in Hull, and discovered 37 well toads. However, Three Quarters Sky Toad is imprisoned in the Calvert Centre and can only be seen during weekday visiting hours; Kasey Toad is sick and detained in an unknown hospital; and Space Hopper is at the moment off exploring space.

Really, though, instead of toadspotting, wouldn't I be better employed reading Larkin's books? No, not at all: Larkin said '[b]ooks are a load of crap.' And as Larkin wasn't, er, averse to the French language, did he think that writers are just a load of crapauds?

Full report, with in-yer-face photos and comments, here.

[JTolle]

Perhaps I've judged Larkin (the man, not the poet) a little hastily in the past. That's unsurprising, since all I know of him I know from a few poems like "Aubade" and "This Be the Verse," some drifting notions of his racism, sexism, pessimism, and maybe one, or two, unflattering anecdotes. This wonderful, skeptical poem has altered my understanding of his relation to religion, his character, and his verse. I'll try to grab a volume of his work sometime soon.

"Church Going"

Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.

Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new -
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation - marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these - for which was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
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.

[Flower]

I had to read him at Uni and one thing which caught my eye was the fact that he at a very old age, had three relationships going with women simultaneously! Guess he had some tricks up his sleeves regarding women(?)

[Eric]

I'm afraid that one of the things that rather puts me off Larkin, apart from some of his poetry, is the sheer hypocrisy of all that poesy about cycling to churches and other wholesome middle-class pursuits while, as Flower suggests, being a right old hypocrite, larking around and screwing all those ladies but never quite deciding which one he wanted to marry. I can see the headlines in the News of the World: Hull University librarian bigamising - poet Larkin screws around on his bike - or similar.

His mum and dad must have fucked him up, one would opine, for him to need a harem for his pleasure.

All of this gets in the way of his poetry when I try to read him. I would rather read the Miloszes, or Elizabeth Jennings, or Dickinson, or Armitage, Stevens, Frost, Viiding, van de Woestijne, Ekelöf, Byggmästar, Lesmian, in fact, there are lots of poets I'd rather read than Larkin, with the exception of Andrew Motion, his disciple.

Am I being unfair? No doubt I am, but I cannot warm to the cult of Lilith Farkin.

[Eric]

In case you wonder whence those terribly rude words "fuck" and "up", please look at this poem by a not unknown Hull author:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked 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.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

What a misery-guts.

[Hamlet]

The Philip Larkin Society Website:-

http://www.philiplarkin.com/#

I've studied Larkin in the distant past, and as part of reading around him I even acquired a copy of his novel, "A GIRL IN WINTER" ... I never managed to get very far with the novel however -- but read and reread the poetry,. He appealed and at the same time, didn't appeal, provoked an ambguous response in me, but I was very young, and a little bit bored and put off by his musings; add to that, the poetry and the vibe of the poetry can be pretty bleak... but I'm sure that Larkin fans would be alarmed by this statement.

He seems to have viewed the world straight-eyed, Sunny Prestatyn, his take on a circa 1950s billboard poster, using sexualised language in places is humourous and engagingt, the language is simple, but abrupt, it ambushes you... he explains the progression of the poster as it is "modified" by unseen persons, with black felt-tip pens, the crotch of the girl in the poster is at first coloured in and her face is deformed over time by black scribblings, she was too perfect for this world, Larkin suggests the glamour of the girl in the poster attracts the vandalism and negative attention, and one day a rip appears, and then he ends his poem and stanza suddenly, with now a poster Cure Cancer, is there.

It's abrupt, and very final. A comment, perhaps on a more worthy use of the ad space. I particularly liked the opening line:-

She was slapped up one day in May...




eidt- all errors are mine as I am writing purely from memory.

[Liam]

Merged with the old thread on Larkin. Please search before you post, . (But no big deal).

[Hamlet]

Ahh, thanks Liam, I did a search but for some reason it didn't appear. Oh well.... we're good.

[Liam]

OK, I *believe* you.

[Hamlet]

ha ha. Verty funny, and pleased to see that the rest of the thread had the same "averse" reactions to Larkin as I did, but Flowers post was hilarious, as was Eric's reaction.

[Eric]

As soon as see the name Lilith Farkin, I see red. You will have seen my comments of the other thread. The greatest English poet since Andrew Motion.