Philip Larkin, the greatest poet you may have never read or heard of, was born in 1922, the annus mirabilis of modernism — of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, Aleister Crowley’s My Life As A Drug Fiend, Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, and a host of minor works that would have been major in any other year.
The Waste Land would set the principle that art must be difficult, resistant, referential; Ulysses that it must reach back into ancient myths but then transmute them in modern form. Hesse’s and Crowley’s works were a foretaste of the 1960s and the appetite for the esoteric, and the belief that there was more out there, more life, more wisdom, more… more. Larkin, arriving among them, would come to be the poet whose body of work threw that all into doubt.
Three slim volumes of his mature work, published between 1954 and 1974, and 20 or so uncollected poems were all we had of him before his death, aged 63, in 1985. But they were sufficient for him to be recognised as not merely a major poet, but one people got by heart. His short poems, the longest only 80 lines, and his shortest single stanzas went to the marrow of life without prevarication, illusions of sorts, or the need to find there some deep invocation of myth or religious consolation. He was capable of great lyrical beauty.
Latest face, so effortless
“Latest Face”
Your great arrival at my eyes
No one living near could guess
Your beauty had no home till then
Precious vagrant, recognise
My love and do not turn again
Of everyday directness:
Most people know more as they get older:
I give all that the cold shoulder.I spent my second quarter-century
Losing what I had learnt at university.And refusing to take in what had happened since…
…
It will be worth it, if in the end I manage
To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage.Then there will be nothing I know.
“The Winter Palace”
My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.
Of punk:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad
“This Be The Verse”
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you
And finally of soaring, transcendental beauty, best seen in the longer poems such as “An Arundel Tomb”, which starts as a tourist visit to a noble couple’s memorial in Chichester cathedral:
Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone
…
Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.
Which then sets off a six-stanza chase of the tomb inhering through the intervening centuries, as disappears anything and everything that whoever had the tomb made believed would last, and ends with what is I guess for many people would be the most important stanza in post-WWII poetry in English:
Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
Well, you gotta read the whole thing. For many, Larkin is the poet you were never introduced to in the years of high school or university when there might have been some chance that poetry could get you, and you it. Though he is now on numerous reading lists, and in the UK, in his posthumous decades, is not so much a major figure as a cultural weather condition, a great brooding cloud stretching over the green and pleasant land. For decades he was squeezed between the two sides of modern poetry, the difficult referentiality or expressionist transfiguration tradition from Eliot to Sylvia Plath, and the loose, direct, free verse of the Beats and Kenneth Koch and the New York School.
Larkin’s work was known, read and loved by poetry readers, namely in Britain, but that was still an audience in the tens of thousands. He was seen, when verses such as “They fuck you up” broke loose, as a sort of hardcore John Betjeman, the poet laureate of playful triple-rhymed verse, presenting documentaries on Victorian churches with his teddy-bear Archibald Ormsby-Gore. Larkin has outlived all that to become a global poet, whose capacity to combine the vernacular, the surreal, the edged and the lyrical is now recognised globally — and who has been, for some time, the presiding spirit of a post-empire, post-Thatcher, post-everything Britain.
Philip Larkin is a strange God to have, even in a disappointed nation. Born in Coventry in 1922 to a city administrator and a mother who would live, to her son’s chagrin, into her 90s, attended a middle-rank public (i.e. private) school. Tall, shy and stammering, he went up to Oxford in 1940, at a time when the war had killed off the last of the brilliant world of the interwar years, imposing a grey austerity. His father had been both a cultured man, reading deeply, from Thomas Hardy to Ezra Pound, and also a fervent admirer of the Nazis, his staff forcing him to remove a wind-up Hitler doll from his office during the Blitz.
The poetry Larkin had been writing from his teens was first Auden pastiche, and then lyrics written under the spell of Yeats, resulting in a slew of Celtitsch babble eventually collected, in 1945, in a semi-repudiated volume The North Ship (“I saw three ships go sailing by / Over the sea, the lifting sea…” Yeccchhh). By then, however, Larkin was starting to get a handle on the contradiction that would make his extraordinary work possible. The dominant British poetry of the time was that of the “apocalyptics” — Dylan Thomas, George Barker and others, all Yeats’s children, starting a poem at high, and quickly heading to 11 (“Not less light shall the gold and the green lie / On the cyclonic curl and diamonded eye, than / Love lay yesterday on the breast like a beast…” is Barker at his far from most fulgurous).
But the country in which all this was pouring out was a bomb-cratered, half-starved, broken-down wreck, an empire that had lost the war it had just won. Larkin’s letters record an early varsity jauntiness — jazz, pubs, a group of knowing mates — gradually winding down to a low and sustained melancholy, as he took a job as a regional librarian, did the exams, lived in a rented-out room, and tried, and mostly failed, to talk to girls. Trying to be a novelist (his two novels show he wasn’t one), he faced a crisis that eventually produced the necessary swerve, whereby the hunt for meaning in a transcendent myth became an exploration of its absence, as per one of the first post-Yeatsian efforts:
Waiting for breakfast, while she brushed her hair,
“Waiting For Breakfast, While She Brushed Her Hair”
I looked down at the empty hotel yard
Once meant for coaches. Cobblestones were wet,
But sent no light back to the loaded sky,
Sunk as it was with mist down to the roofs.
Drainpipes and fire-escape climbed up
Past rooms still burning their electric light:
I thought: featureless morning, featureless night.
Very minor Larkin, and still more exciting than most verse by most other people, the verse is notable not only for putting a void at its centre — a dark, no-space under a grey sky — but for echoing one of the worst “woe is civilisation” bits of The Waste Land, a scene in which a flapperish young gel brings home “a small house agent’s clerk”, has unresisting sex with him, and when he leaves:
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.
Civilisation is dead! These sex-people are like robots, like gramophones! This whole section is narrated by Tiresias, cursed by the Gods. Oy vey. Back in Larkinland, there’s no portentous loss while you resign yourself to the fact that you’ve got to buy a girl breakfast. There are just drainpipes and damp and the rest of the day.
“Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth,” Larkin said in a famous Paris Review interview, and after this sudden swung-round aesthetic, he never looked back. Part of a network of similarly realist, “anti-mythological” poets who were dubbed, in 1954, “The Movement”, Larkin’s connection to them — his close friend Kingsley Amis, DJ Enright, Elizabeth Jennings and others — was not much more than the occasional chat when in London from whichever regional library he was working at.
The pattern of his life was set. While others got on the university teaching gravy train or lived off reviews, commissions, features, BBC radio gigs, and were entering Britain’s version of bohemia — pints, pubs, smokes, terrible pies, assignations in borrowed bedsits, a feigned philistinism — Larkin became librarian at the University of Hull and ended up running it.
The poetry now coming out revealed the influence of a new master, Thomas Hardy, in its austerity, precision and doom-hung thanatomania — “there is an evening coming in across the fields / one that lights no lamps” — which would vie for dominance with a simpler, anti-imaginary scepticism: “Why should I let the toad, work / squat on my life?”. The muse is not deprivation, so much as absence, summoned up either in numinous scenes that owe something to surrealist art, as in, erm, “Absences”: “Rain patters on a sea that tilts and sighs / Fast-running floors, collapsing into hollows / Tower suddenly, spray-haired”.
Larkin would later remark that such work sounded like that of a different, more European poet, and wondered what had happened to him. The answer, as he well knew, was Monica. Monica Jones — lecturer in English at Leicester University, bottle-blonde, sharply dressed and, as recorded in the letters, not averse to red stockings and suspenders — began an affair with Larkin in 1950 that would last until his death, Larkin refusing to let her move in with him until she had shingles and he cancer.
Known as an exacting teacher (and one of those academics who — you could do this in those days — never published a word), Jones beat the surreal thematising out of him, through that most practical of criticisms, ridicule of any poem containing “sinister balls”. Some have cursed Monica for killing the poet Larkin might have become, but she was right. Restricting the theme and setting of poems to the strictly real, using surreal imagery as a light touch, the 70 or so poems that would be the rest of his life’s published work are often relentlessly pessimistic, as in “Send No Money”:
Half life is over now,
And I meet full face on dark mornings
The bestial visor, bent in
By the blows of what happened to happen.
The face in the morning mirror, as a bent-in “bestial visor”, just that one touch, lifts it out of being a kitchen-sink recitative. But there is also the ecstasy of the everyday, not imposed on the world but drawn from it, as in “An Arundel Tomb” or the end of “The Whitsun Weddings”, where the narrator realises his London-bound train is picking up the newly married couples of Whitsun weekend, the seventh Sunday after Easter. As the formalities drift into the distance, the sense not merely of sexual but existential excitement grows and then falls away:
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
“The Whitsun Weddings”
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.
With the Whitsun Weddings volume (1963) and High Windows (1974), Larkin vied with Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill for the title of greatest post-war British poet, among those who went out of their way to read poetry; among those who read it when it was in the TLS or Spectator, he was unquestionably number one. He had taken on the realist aesthetic, but infused it with extraordinarily surreal yet controlled imagery, which set each poem spinning. None of “The Movement” poets had even tried to lift out of the realist frame, aside from forays into whimsy or sardonic wit. Much of their work recedes in the rearview, jotting-ish and way too loose. Since 1955 Larkin had never looked back.
He’d never looked happy either. Though his letters to Monica have a mordant wit, they sometimes skip the “wit” bit. Through the ’50s and ’60s, Larkin complains of boredom, fatigue, dyspepsia, envy of lives like Kingsley Amis’ that he doesn’t actually want, dead libido, and, after one of the weekend church-going visits that would form the subject matter of his deep and moving poem “Churchgoing”, that it would all be better if he had a friend, one mate to come along with him.
It’s harrowingly pathetic. He claimed to hate work, yet he became Britain’s best university librarian, ceaselessly innovating everything from manuscript display to temperature control. He played up the amused, miserabilist role for the public, but success, age and fame bought no serenity. His poetic output dried almost totally after his mother died, save for light verse and a 50-line poem, “Aubade”, plain, direct, not his best piece, but perhaps the most chillingly focused atheist account of death ever done. It’s the British ordinariness of it that terrifies:
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.
He published it in a chapbook edition, knocked back the poet laureateship in 1984, and that was that. Monica moved in, as she had always wanted, and with hundreds of thousands of pounds in the bank, they lived on cask red wine and tomato sandwiches. Larkin died at 63, the same age as his father had, as he had always feared he would. Monica lived on for three more ghastly decades.
From his death, things moved fast. The Philip Larkin they had then vanished in the next few years. The image of the amiable, old, grumpy toad did not survive the release of letters and biographical materials by his two literary executors, Andrew Motion and Anthony Thwaite, both average post-Movement poets themselves, whose dutiful work came off, no doubt unintentionally, as bloody patricide.
It had always been known that Larkin was a Tory, having made the predictable shift from left to right (“Oh, I adore Mrs Thatcher!”). Now what was revealed was not only exchanges between himself and Amis and others, of cheap racist humour in limerick form, etc, but that he had spent decades going up to London with poet-historian Robert Conquest (highly respected author of The Great Terror) to buy pornography in Soho. It was this secret, it was surmised, that had caused him to knock back the laureateship — and the scrutiny it would bring.
In the ’70s and ’80s, left-wing poets had assailed his reputation, arguing that his use of national imagery as a correlative for personal disappointment was a positive nostalgia for imperial rule. For a while, as the first wave of political correctness revved up in the ’80s and ’90s, his public star dimmed somewhat. But he never stopped being read. For all the nasty schoolkid exchanges in the letters — a reminder that in the 1940s he had written a lesbian boarding-school romp, Trouble at Willow Gables — no one could remember him being publicly racist or sexist. Porn? No one cared about that by 1993. Buying porn sounded archaic, like driving a steam-powered road train. Besides, there was now something else. Turned out that the Hermit of Hull had a harem.
Revelations that Larkin, while in a long-term but geographically distant relationship with Monica, had engaged in overlapping relationships with Hull friend Maeve Brennan from 1961 to 1978, and his secretary Betty Mackereth from 1975 to 1978, spin the poet’s image round on its heel. Monica had been little known publicly, and one inevitable way of reading Larkin’s work had been as that of the innocent, looking on at the great dance of life, giving the work a poignancy.
Now, as it turned out, it wasn’t Monica at that broadcast; it was Maeve, who he was cheating on Monica with. As details of the story came out — such as the three women carpooling to visit him while in hospital — an air of farce descended. For a time Larkin the character eclipsed the poetry, with Tom Conti playing the role of Lucky Phil in a West End farce called, what else, Larking With Women.
That too now appears to have passed. The Philip Larkin that is emerging is a global one, increasingly read across the world, in a way that resituates the Englishness of the poems, hitherto all-encompassing, as the lost imaginative landscape of the narrator, a relatively consistent figure through most of the mature works. For our era, for any era, this is the everyman of a post-religious culture: one in which meaning and happiness are based on the fulfilment of desire, or on the belief that such fulfilment would deliver that.
But what we want is somehow always to one side, in the rearview, will be arriving tomorrow. In its place is resistant Being, everyday shittiness, and Larkin couldn’t be poet laureate of England, because he was the poet laureate of that. Eliot’s and Auden’s struggles, with life’s meaning in a world that God was quitting, now seem ancient, dilemmas we have to think ourselves into. But life will still be shitty in five hundred years’ time, and Larkin’s poems will read in some way like Shakespeare’s most direct bits do now, poetry about just getting on with it.
Larkin’s victory over the inert and indifferent matter of life came because he worked every part of a poem, from the strength of its idea, to its unflinching attitude, its uncanny otherness in the selection of its images, and its adamantine form. They work not least because of that trick that was Monica’s contribution, or one of them: that with the outer form of an English poet going on about pastured racehorses and train stations, one could do things that retained their capacity to amaze.
Larkin is a far more European philosophical poet than many who might seem more likely candidates for the title. His work is full of voids, nothingnesses, mirrorings, hyperobjects, deliquescent transformations, shifting non-desires. Sartre, Freud, Celine and others; who knows how much of them he had read, if any at all, but his work is far more aligned with them, than with most English poets, which is deliciously paradoxical for the most English of poets. What most poetry today will deny you — the depth of uncanny ideas combined with the deep pleasure of micron-perfect rhyme and scansion — Larkin delivers throughout the whole body of his work.
There is finally, in his achievement, a heroism, a determination to track down elusive Being to its lair, somewhere between the crisp packets and the housedust, through the relentless drive to live a life as frustrated and disappointing as everyone else has. Whether he could have done otherwise is utterly beside the point. You will not be haha disappointed by him, if you haven’t read him yet. If you think you don’t like poetry, you do; you just didn’t like, back then, the things they told you poetry was.
This piece was amended on September 5, correcting an incorrect line in the poem “This Be The Verse“.
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