Untold Stories (70 page)

If I like the Fitzwilliam for its clutter, I also like another Cambridge museum for its lack of it, though Kettle's Yard is not a museum at all but the home of Jim Ede, who gave it to the university in 1966. It caters to all my notions of art and interior decoration; the paintings (Ben Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis), while individually delightful, are integral to the overall decorative scheme, even starting at the skirting board; nowhere else have I seen pictures hung so close to the ground. Jim Ede, too, thought that paintings were not always best seen undeflected: ‘I remember how in Arezzo,' he writes, ‘I went to see the Piero della Francescas, and saw nothing but an old faded curtain by an open window making shadows across the pictures.'

And so it is at Kettle's Yard, the paintings part of an assemblage and subject to the changing light. There's a mixture of old and modern furniture and though I don't always like the stones and
objets trouvés
on top of tables and chests (the decorative charms of pebbles and driftwood for me strictly limited) and though I would never paint a room white… here the whole house glows.

I would be happy to live in Kettle's Yard, feeling that if I did my life would be better, or at least different. It passes one of the tests of a congenial interior, that you feel you would like the food that is cooked there. At Kettle's Yard you can practically smell it.

A good subtitle for a biography of Denton Welch might be
A Bike in the
Hedge
, so much are his leisure and his journals taken up with picnicking in fields, looking round country churches or exploring the overgrown parks of once grand houses. The bike would not be locked, as this was Kent in the 1940s, a county (though it had seen the Battle of Britain) still sunk in rustic tranquillity and seclusion.

He had been banqueting too.

Having just had his first book published he identified with Charlotte and the prospect of fame. Earlier, not untypically, he had been watching a loutish boy picking cherries and another mowing a field.

There was no forgetting what he had been doing on the same June day eight years before. Then his bike hadn't been in the hedge but crushed on a Surrey road when, as a young art student, he'd been knocked down by a car, the injuries condemning him to the life of an invalid and leading ultimately to his death in 1948 at the age of thirty-three.

Tough, single-minded to the point of selfishness and often difficult to live with, he raged against the turn of fate that had wrecked his life, and though it's tempting to say that without it he would not have been a writer, I'm not sure this is true. From early childhood, as James Methuen-Campbell's book makes plain, he seems to have had a particular slant on the world and though his accident may have concentrated his energies it did not create his sensibility. A child who at the age of seven could remark ‘in a slow, earnest, thoughtful voice that “a flea would despise the amount of lemonade I've got, Mother”' was never going to be ordinary, and his experiences with his family in China made their contribution. After holidays spent rooting through the junk shops of Shanghai and on a solitary walk coming across a severed human head in the undergrowth, it's hardly surprising he failed to fit in at Repton.

When Denton Welch began to write such occurrences were not slow to find their way into his stories and novels, which were nothing if not autobiographical. What the accident did was add urgency to the process, and though he regularly complained of how little his circumstances allowed him to accomplish, by the time of his death he had accumulated a substantial body of work and acquired a distinctive voice.

To begin with I knew nothing of his fiction, first reading about him when his journals were published four years after his death. In those days I could afford few books, certainly in hardback, and so wrote my name in them as I seldom do nowadays. My copy of the journals is also dated, with ‘December 1952' written in my still-childish hand. This was a few months after I had been conscripted. Utterly unlike any person I had come across, I felt he was a sympathetic voice and – a characteristic of books read when young – seemed to be speaking particularly to me. So I took the book with me into the army as, I suppose, a token of a different
sort of life, a ‘civilised life' I probably thought of it then, though it was nothing like the life I'd known.

The military life meant regular kit inspections, your army belongings, boots, best BD, mess tins, etc. all laid out on the squared-off bed. Nor was it just the army side of things that was on display, as your locker had to be open too, your whole life available for scrutiny should the inspecting officer so choose. I imagined the journals being flicked open by a disdainful swagger stick at some offending page and read out with sarcastic comments for the benefit of the other conscripts.

Still, his work wasn't entirely unsuited to the barrack room, particularly during the war years, a time when reading (and writing) became almost an act of faith. Servicemen reading on barrack-room beds were testifying to their conviction that there was a world elsewhere. The early paperbacks slipped handily into the outside BD trouser pocket, as did
Horizon
or
Penguin
New Writing
, and reading James Methuen-Campbell's account of his life it almost seems as if even
Vogue
was a light in the darkness. So though Denton Welch took and prided himself on taking no notice of the war, wartime and the austerity that followed were the time of his life.

In this regard, though, it's a blessing that his accident banished him from the metropolis. How much less idiosyncratic would his life have been, certainly to read about, had he landed up in Soho or Fitzrovia, the doings of which, particularly in that period, are amply documented and over-described.

Kent, where he spent most of his invalid life might seem dull by comparison, but had much to recommend it. The setting of Samuel Palmer's valley of vision, now with its evidences of war, was one of those evocative landscapes that Piper and Ravilious were recording elsewhere. But the war didn't interest Denton Welch, not in its scenic aspects anyway, and it never obtrudes onto his own canvases; no Nissen huts here or surrealist barrage balloons, no bomb damage even, his paintings resolutely personal and obscure (and not always very good).

But his journals are a different matter. Minor writers often convey a more intense flavour of their times than those whose range is broader and
concerns more profound. Here the war is met with at every turn, but transmuted into an idyllic pastoral of soldiers bathing, prisoners harvesting and planes crossing the moonlit sky to the sound of distant singing from the pub. As drunken servicemen ride their girlfriends home on the handlebars, Welch's diaries sometimes read like the script for a documentary by Humphrey Jennings or notes for a film by Michael Powell.

In a letter to Barbara Cooper, secretary to John Lehmann, in October 1943 he gives his hobbies as ‘old glass, china, furniture, little pictures and picnicking alone' and, though Ryvita has never had much charm for me, lovingly detailed as one of the ingredients of his wartime picnics even that gritty dimpled cardboard acquires glamour. Dashing off on his bike to antique shops (the prices absurdly cheap), exploring churches and dilapidated follies – to me in 1952 he sounded to have an ideal life. And a smart one, too. To a boy brought up in the provinces this ailing ex-art student seemed to have moved effortlessly into a charmed circle, with letters from E. M. Forster, lunch with Edith Sitwell and tea at Sissinghurst with Harold and Vita. It was probably only her suicide that stopped Virginia Woolf from figuring here.

What I didn't appreciate then was the guts Welch must have had and needed to have. At eighteen I thought that to be ‘sensitive' was a writer's first requirement – with discipline and persistence nowhere – whereas he never allowed himself to languish. His spinal injuries no more kept him off his bike than sickness and high temperatures did from the typewriter, and it was this no-nonsense approach both to his disability and to his work that made him impatient of those occasional fans who sought him out expecting a wilting aesthete.

For the same reason he would probably have been uneasy to find himself on so many sensitive bookshelves in the late forties and fifties, when books said more about their readers than they do now. His writings would be found alongside such textbooks of proscribed affections as Housman's poems, the novels of Forrest Reid and Mary Renault and (as a chronicle of unhappy love)
The Unquiet Grave
: coded texts that spoke more plainly than their owners sometimes wanted or even knew.

Certainly much of what Denton Welch wrote trembled on the brink of sex, which gives it much of its energy, though in the journals it is never plain whether anything ‘went on'. In 1952 I assumed he was of necessity exercising discretion, but, as James Methuen-Campbell makes clear, often catheterised and racked by his physical inabilities, Denton Welch was very much an onlooker and non-participant. But at eighteen I was an onlooker and non-participant myself, so that probably rang bells too.

In the description of the closeness between himself and his companion Eric Oliver, what I found reassuring was his frankness about the intensity of their association, at least on Welch's side… and one-sided associations were the ones with which I was myself familiar. And he plainly wasn't shy. Sitting chatting to naked boys in hay fields seemed fairly unshy to me, though the mixture of his knowingness and their seeming naivety was typical of the times and would not last. By the sixties it's not only the Nissen huts that have gone, but an innocence too.

Or perhaps not quite. In the early sixties I was in America for two years, during which time my parents took to reading the books I had left at home. This made me slightly apprehensive, though all it meant was that my father became an early and unlikely fan of Nancy Mitford and it was my mother who first took to reading Denton Welch's journals. What she picked up on were his visits to junk and bric-à-brac shops, since this was an inclination she shared. When he was younger my father had been a bit of a carpenter and made toys, so when she gave it to him to read what caught his fancy was the cleaning and restoration of the doll's house. What I had been apprehensive about, the sexual undertones, seemed wholly to pass them by, leaving it, ironically, to Philip Roth's
Portnoy's
Complaint
as the first book of mine to which my father took real exception.

Scarcely reaching middle age, it's hard to think that had he lived Denton Welch would now be in his eighties. To me he will always be that frail, curly-haired high-foreheaded young man who sits at the chequerboard table with the lustres and the candles in the frontispiece to the journals that I bought in 1952.

His subject matter had a richness and a colour that links him with very unlike writers, such as Dylan Thomas, Edith Sitwell and Christopher Fry, all of whom were standing out against the drabness of their times. The nearest he had come to active service was in the battle against beige, so it was fitting that in June 1945 he should have had a picture in the Victory number of
Vogue
, ‘a rendering of a room in his cottage in Kent, where colour plays an important part'. He writes, ‘Do not think that brilliant colour is difficult to live with. It is always stimulating and refreshing; and change to a neutral-toned, colourless room would be exhausting, lowering and depressing.'

There was never much danger of that in his life or in his art; he went out still full of colour, and more than fifty years later it is unfaded.

Larkin was such a fastidious critic of his own work that anyone making a selection from his poems finds the job virtually done already. It's true that since the publication of the
Collected Poems
in 1988 there turns out to be much more verse to choose from but, reviewing the poems I've selected (using and being very grateful for that volume), I find that I've chosen only a handful of poems that were not originally included in Larkin's best-known volumes of verse,
The Less Deceived
(1955),
The Whitsun
Weddings
(1964) and
High Windows
(1974).

It may be, of course, that since these are the collections I know best familiarity has influenced my choice, but I think not. It was only with
The
Less Deceived
that Larkin achieved his characteristic voice, that wry, lugubrious, thoroughly unheroic tone which can turn so unexpectedly tender and lyrical and which made him, apart from Betjeman perhaps, the best loved of contemporary English poets. There are echoes of this tone in the earlier poems, prefiguring phrases that one would like to single out and preserve, but Larkin as we have come to know him really dates from
The Less Deceived
.

At least one theme of Larkin's poetry, though, emerged before the style evolved with which he could express it and this is why the selection begins with ‘Traumerei' (1946), which spells out Larkin's fear of death, the selection virtually ending with ‘Aubade', which (thirty years later) does much the same. Between those fearful brackets I have arranged the poems in order of publication, beginning with poems taken from
XX
Poems
(1951) then
The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings
and
High Windows
, finally folding in, as the cooks say, a few of the poems written after 1974 and which were first printed in the
Collected Poems
.

If Larkin does not require much selection nor does he need much introduction, his verse so lucid and explicit that his virtues as a poet require only the briefest tour. This, I'm sure, would be Larkin's own wish. Back in 1980
The South Bank Show
did a TV programme on Larkin which, surprisingly, had his blessing, though he would not himself appear. I was interviewed and persuaded to say why I liked his poetry. This was a mistake. ‘There's an awful lot of Alan Bennett,' he wrote to Anthony Thwaite, the letter as published kindly omitting what I'm sure were further strictures.

Fifteen years dead Larkin is still a looming presence so I will try and be terse. He writes with clarity and a determined ordinariness that does not exclude (and often underpins) the lyrical. He is always accessible, his language compact, though occasionally arcane. Fond of compound adjectives – air-sharpened, rain-ceased, bone-riddled – he shares this with Hardy, with whom he invites comparison though his sentiments are less gawky, what they have most in common a deep, unshiftable despair.

My perspective on Larkin is not the usual one in that I know his poetry chiefly from having had to read it in recitals and to record it on cassette. I understand little of metre or scansion or the structure of verse, but to read Larkin aloud is to become aware of his skill as a craftsman. The writing supports the reader but with some give: the verse feels sprung as a dance floor is sprung, with rhymes and half-rhymes turning up unexpected and unforeseen just when one needs them, stepping-stones across the poem. The rhymes are generally unobtrusive, widely separated and it sometimes takes three or four readings before one uncovers them.

Larkin spent most of his working life at the University of Hull, where he was the librarian of the Brynmor Jones Library. Hull suited him and England suited him and he never wanted to leave either, though he wouldn't have minded going to China, he said, if he could come back the same day.

He was a poet of England, or of England at a certain time, because to list Larkin's poetic locations is to realise now, less than two decades after his death, how diminished is the England he wrote about. It's not just ‘The shadows, the meadows, the lanes/ The guildhalls, the carved choirs' that have gone. They haven't particularly, just changed their character under a deluge of visitors. What scarcely lasted his time was a much dingier world – churches, cemeteries, station hotels, digs, local trains, bikes, the seaside, parks, libraries. Larkin's world is no longer ours. The unvisited church is now so unvisited it has mutated into a carpet warehouse or a furniture cave; the cemetery has been landscaped and incorporated into a heritage trail and the precinct (Larkin's poetry largely pre-precinct) has swallowed the coach-party annexes and the banquet halls up yards. The fumes and certainly the furnace glare of Sheffield are no more, his awful pie would be quality controlled and if Whitsun remains it's only on the Church calendar and provokes no rush to the altar; the ‘Spring Bank Holiday Weddings' would not be quite the same.

Only the moon, strong, unhindered, dashing through the clouds or thinned to an air-sharpened blade … only the moon persists in a world that, even in Hull, has changed, if not beyond recognition certainly beyond any poetic impulse Larkin had in his sad unwriting years to recognise it. This change is acknowledged, just, in his last notable poem, ‘Aubade' (1977). Unpack the phrase ‘all the uncaring/Intricate, rented world' and you have much of what has happened to England since his death – or his two deaths, the death of poetry and the death of the man. Typical, he might grumble, that someone in such dread of death should be made to go through it twice.

Larkin's gloom has to be faced and sometimes, I've come to think, faced down. It gets under the skin as Hardy's never does. Though this may be because he's our contemporary, it's also that where melancholy is concerned Larkin is such a missionary. It's not enough that he sees the world as he does; we must see it too and feel as depressed about it.

‘You're trying to preserve something,' he writes. ‘Not for yourself but for the people who haven't seen it or heard it or experienced it.' Or:

Of course, a poem sometimes does both and the person one wants to get up and sock is Larkin himself.

Thus it is that whereas when I first read him it was his sadness that appealed, these days the poems I like best are those from which his depression and disenchantment are most absent – ‘Church Going', for instance, ‘The Whitsun Weddings', ‘An Arundel Tomb', ‘Maiden Name' and ‘The Explosion' – none of them poems that can be said (perish the thought) to be cheerful: they would also include ‘MCMXIV', which is not cheerful at all. But they are all poems in which the reader is not required to endorse or go along with what in some of the poems, ‘Aubade', for instance, I now think of as a bullying (and, to my mind, specifically male) despair.

My perspective on this is of someone who has had to stand on the stage and read the poems, when it becomes a predicament. Declaiming lines like ‘Life is first boredom then fear' or ‘Courage is no good/It means not scaring others', and sensing an audience nodding I feel I want to dissociate myself from the poem and even slip in a disclaimer (‘Just because I'm reading this doesn't mean that I believe it'). There is, after all, more to courage than that.

It would not be the same if Larkin himself were doing the reading, not that he ever (or very seldom) did, saying he didn't care for poetry recitals because he didn't fancy going round the country pretending to be himself. Yet anybody who does recite his poems has to some extent to pretend to be Larkin because if they're not then they haven't earned the right to preach the misery being Larkin seemed to involve.

Maybe all I'm saying is that his poems shouldn't be read aloud, at any rate in public. No great loss, he would have thought. Better read alone, under a lamp, hearing the noise of the wind.

Though I said at the start that, beginning with ‘Traumerei' and ending
with ‘Aubade', this selection is bracketed by Larkin's fear of death, I have allowed one poem to escape those parentheses simply in order to finish on a relatively cheerful note. This is ‘The Trees' and I've often thought that it makes a pair, a pendant as they say in art history, with Hardy's ‘Proud Songsters' – the trees, as it were, and the birds in the trees, both poems coming as close to optimism as either poet allows himself.

I have read ‘The Trees' often in recitals but once, when I was reading with Judi Dench, she was assigned the poem, the last line of which is:

I had read the poem umpteen times without sensing the obvious point that each ‘afresh' should be differently inflected, which was how Judi read it. It was as if a bud was opening. I have never managed to read it like that myself but I'm sure that's how it should be done. It's unlikely, but it might even have pleased the poet.