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Larkin
Larkin book cover
Author: Warren Hope  
ISBN

1-871551-35-8 £7.99
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Visible and Invisible Larkin - A review of Larkin, by Warren Hope, by Martin Blyth
- [First published in About Larkin 12 April 2002]
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To be an admirer of Philip Larkin and his poetry can pose the same problem that women’s breasts posed for Kingsley Amis, or at least, for one of his lecherous heroes: ‘I was clear on why I liked them, thanks, but why did I like them so much?’ Your neighbour may not know a lot about poetry, but he knows you’re in the Larkin Society, and wonders what regularly impels you on pilgrimages to Hull, London, Coventry, Wellington, or wherever. Why go chasing after the memory of a person condemned by right-thinking people for his attitudes to race, pornography and politics, not to mention his random rubbishing of modern jazz, art and poetry?
Ah, solving that question might bring a protracted and possibly one-sided conversation over the garden fence or dinner table, and lay bare embarrassing differences in literary and personal tastes. Lending a copy of Andrew Motion’s biography might impose an onerous task on your neighbour. So how can his curiosity be resolved? Surely not by offering a more manageable volume such as a student guide? Wouldn’t that be merely a paperback full of crammable quotations, dates, facts and opinions for those approaching Larkin with examinations in view?
Not if it was the Greenwich Exchange Student Guide to Philip Larkin, and not just because it eschews the anticipated format in favour of a long essay with five chapters. And not only students, or your neighbour, would benefit from reading this calm, wise, succinct assessment of the poet’s life and work. This is a view from another land, where his poetry is perhaps more likely to be judged on its literary merits, regardless both of his private life and proclivities, and of any piquant or nostalgic colouring from English history, social custom or landscape.
Some explications of the latter may occasionally be needed, but they do not impede the flow of the discourse. I am not qualified to compare its literary opinions with others, but I am clear on why I like them, thanks. It is because they arise from a view of the poet as another human being whose personality contained its own set of challenges, limitations, and sadnesses; but whose art was able to express them in a form that makes his perceptions valuable to others.
There is thus no need to gloss over or apologise for any shortcomings in that personality, even to readers who expect poets to be outwardly bohemian but fundamentally ‘sound’. Warren Hope’s manner of approach quietly discredits the prurient caricature of Larkin in Alan Bennett’s review of the biography. ‘Bitterly outspoken Philip and unselfconsciously lyrical Philip were two aspects of the same person. To reject the one is to diminish if not to reject the other. To reject either because of opinions expressed in private letters to old friends or because of repugnance for the defensive postures of a frightened, lonely man would be to prefer social conventions to poetry.’ It is indeed as simple as that.
There was what Amis called ‘the visible Philip’, the non-gamesplaying hearty of undergraduate days, noted for his foul mouth, drinking, smoking, belching and farting, as well as his comic sense. Then there was the invisible one: the man of genuine sympathy described by Maeve Brennan. a man who could write poems with a dreamy, timeless simplicity, such as ‘At Grass’, ‘First Sight’ and ‘Cut Grass’, redolent of that vanished world depicted in ‘MCMXIV’, where he might have felt more at home.
Larkin’s ‘clear, witty and understated’ poetic voice, and concern with the real world of ordinary people, helped to make him that twentieth-century rarity, a popular poet. He was prepared to renew contact with the common reader – indeed he averred that a poem could hardly be said to exist, in a practical sense, if it could not achieve its intended impact on ‘anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, anytime’.
The Less Deceived was a collection that ‘seemed to come fully developed out of nowhere in 1955, when echoes of the booming abstractions of Dylan Thomas had not quite died away. In fact it was preceded by a series of false starts during a long and demanding apprenticeship. Larkin was ‘born as a poet with his father’s death and all but died as a poet when his mother died.’ Written within a few days of Sydney Larkin’s funeral in 1948, ‘An April Sunday brings the snow’ is the first unmistakable Larkin poem. ‘Vers de Société’ (1971) is not just witty and amusing light verse, but ‘a moving confession of failing inspiration’, a loss that Larkin feared would be complete and permanent by the time he reached the age of fifty in 1972.
Many other poems are discussed at length, against a carefully drawn biographical background. Two are used to illustrate how Larkin’s powers varied over the years. A lesser poet might have ended ‘Church Going’ (1954) at the reflection that ‘the place was not worth stopping for’. Larkin went on to discover the persistence beyond belief, of ‘a hunger … to be more serious’. in ‘The Old Fools’ (1973) there is no comparable discovery: ‘in part because of the theme but also because of failing inspiration, the poem ends where it began, with unanswered and perhaps unanswerable questions…’
Warren Hope acknowledges the outrage produced by disclosures in the Biography and the Selected Letters – not only among self-righteous literati, but also among those who felt betrayed by ‘a popular poet who had reconnected poetry with a relatively large audience’. He reminds the reader that antagonism began while Larkin was still alive, inflamed by the philistine posture of the Introduction to All What Jazz (1970) and the choice of poems for The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973). The Biography and letters reveal attitudes and vices that offend ‘what might best be called the liberationist ethic of universal love and understanding, an ethic with little tolerance for individuals, only abstractions.’
In Hope’s view, Larkin’s reputation in his lifetime, like the subsequent reaction against him, was exaggerated. Its proper assessment depends upon accepting both the visible Philip and the invisible one – not only ‘the joking, drinking, outspoken companion;’ of Amis and Robert Conquest, ‘but the lonely, unhappy, insecure bachelor, the loyal but frustrated son, perhaps even more sexually ambivalent than the record so far shows…’
Poems by Larkin are likely to attract readers as long as English is read. ‘It would not surprise me if many of these prove to be modest lyrics, the outpourings of “invisible Philip”’, rather than those poems that most helped to fuel the blaze of his contemporary fame’, Warren Hope concludes, before giving Larkin himself the last word, on how he wished readers to respond to his poems:

I really want to hit them, I want readers to feel yes, I’ve never thought of it that way, but that’s how it is.

Somewhere in that, perhaps, lies the answer to the question; ‘Why do we like them so much?’
- Martin Blyth
Martin Blyth produces a website for comment and coverage of the United Kingdom poetry scene from the customer's point of view.


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