Philip Larkin (62 page)

In his Preface Larkin thanks ‘Miss M. M. B. Jones for her constant encouragement and for many valuable suggestions for the book’s improvement’.
⁶²
The eighteenth-century Georgic pastiche by Victoria Sackville-West (no. 250) seems specifically intended for her. Judy Egerton felt that Monica played a key part in ‘buttressing his resolve’ or, as some might feel, his stubbornness.
⁶³
Other inclusions are compliments to particular friends. The anti-Soviet propaganda of Sir Alan Herbert’s poem (no. 246) would appeal to Robert Conquest, while Amis and Conquest would both appreciate Edgell Rickword’s ‘Augustan’ satire on a fashionable literary avant-gardist (no. 302). Larkin’s jazz friends would be amused by Robert Garioch’s ‘I Was Fair Beat’ (no. 402), in which the speaker recalls in broad Scots dialect ‘a nicht amang the cognoscenti’, during which he heard ‘modern jazz wi juicy / snell wud-wind chords [. . .] // Man, it was awfie.’

But the most idiosyncratic strand is the large number of poems concerning animals. Larkin wrote to Douglas Dunn on 16 January 1971: ‘Most of it is about animals (you know I’m a life member of the RSPCA). Perhaps OUP could get a subsidy from them.’
⁶⁴
And shortly before the volume appeared he joked to Judy Egerton that it would be better titled ‘the Oxford Book of
Nineteen & a Half Century’s Right-Wing Animal-Lovers Verse
’.
⁶⁵
Some of the animal poems are genuine finds: Patricia Beer’s ‘The Lion Hunt’ (no. 510) for instance, and Hal Summers’s ‘My Old Cat’ (no. 415). Others have little more effect than to remind the reader that the anthologist is Philip Larkin. Dorothy Wellesley’s ‘Horses’ (no. 240) can have been included only because of its anticipation of ‘At Grass’, while F. R. Higgins’s more moving ‘The Old Jockey’ (no. 284) clearly earned its place for the same reason. Other anthologists would surely have overlooked Ralph Hodgson, but the author of ‘At Grass’ cannot resist including the lengthy evocation of animal retirement ‘The Bull’ (no. 114). Hodgson’s ‘Hymn to Moloch’ (no. 116), attacking the trade in bird-feathers, is also a natural choice for the author of ‘Take One Home for the Kiddies’. Startlingly, the allocation given to Hodgson, 272 lines, dwarfs that of Housman or Edward Thomas. But this number is exceeded by Sir John Squire’s ‘The Stockyard’ (no. 180), dedicated to Robert Frost, with its harrowing description in almost 300 lines of the slaughterhouse at Chicago, ‘the filthiest place in the world’.

As his time in Oxford ran its course Larkin became fatalistic and dispirited: ‘as I feared, I’m drawing English poetry in my own image, & it isn’t going to make a good book’.
⁶⁶
Nevertheless his choices among his contemporaries and successors largely avoid contentiousness. He restricted his own representation to 191 lines. Though he included only 35 lines by Sidney Keyes, he rose above his personal antagonisms to include 137 lines by Ted Hughes, 151 lines by Donald Davie and 49 lines by Charles Tomlinson. Thom Gunn is given 123 lines. Kingsley Amis has an overgenerous 144 lines in comparison with Anthony Thwaite’s 111 lines (including the Larkinesque ‘Mr Cooper’). At the time, however, none of these allocations caused concern. Instead, with a certain arbitrariness, Dan Davin of Faber objected to the exclusion of the Scottish communist Hugh MacDiarmid and the visionary ‘Apocalyptic’ poet David Jones. Given the by now compromised nature of the whole exercise, Larkin could easily have given way. But he felt at bay. In a letter of 2 April 1971 he disputed Davin’s suggestions in a bristling tone, concluding sulkily: ‘I know this is a matter of opinion, and
tot homines quot disputandum est
⁶⁷
and all that, but this is no more than saying that I am the editor and not anyone else.’ He continues: ‘I am so averse from [MacDiarmid’s] work that I can hardly bring my eyes to the page, but I agree a lot of people will expect to find him there [. . .] if you like I will make another effort to find some stretch of his verbiage that seems to me a trifle less arid, pretentious, morally repugnant and aesthetically null than the rest.’
⁶⁸
In what looks very much like a rueful private joke, he eventually gave MacDiarmid 191 lines, exactly the same number as himself. Arbitrarily, however, he dug in his heels over David Jones. Davin did not have the heart for another quarrel, and Jones remained excluded.

The anthology was finally published on 29 March 1973. It immediately became apparent that the lack of coherence in the selection process extended also to the mechanics of its compilation. Monica Jones, having exerted her influence on his choices, might have been expected to have brought the discipline of her scholarly profession to the proof-reading of the volume. But she had not done so. Christopher Ricks wrote to Larkin to draw his attention to the fact that his carelessness with xeroxed pages had caused the omission of half of William Empson’s ‘Aubade’. The same fate had befallen the last two stanzas of Thom Gunn’s ‘The Byrnies’. Larkin was mortified. He wrote to Thwaite in April 1973: ‘I can see myself joining Bowdler & Grainger: “
to
larkinize
”, v.t., to omit that part of a poem printed on verso and subsequent pages, from a notorious anthology published in the latter half of the twentieth century.’
⁶⁹

The expected clamour from the critics ensued, Donald Davie in the vanguard. ‘Recoiling aghast from page after page’, Davie accused Larkin of not taking poetry seriously, and of privileging ‘amateur verse’ over the poetry of David Jones, Elizabeth Daryush, I. A. Richards and Roy Fisher. ‘This volume is a calamity,’ he declared, adding gleefully: ‘and it’s very painful that it falls to me to say so.’
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Larkin responded with disdain, reflecting, in a letter to Jon Stallworthy on 14 May 1973, that Davie ‘must feel like a mill that has been given a lovely big lot of grist’.
⁷¹
He resorted to the defence that he was appealing over the heads of the academics and professional literati to the genuine audience of the common man and woman. ‘I made twentieth century poetry sound nice.’ ‘My taste’, he bravely proclaimed, ‘is much more akin to that of the ordinary person than it is to that of the professional student or practitioner of literature.’
⁷²
There is some truth in this. And in hindsight it does seem that much of what was confidently alleged against the volume was beside the point. Whoever is chosen to edit an official collection of this scope, the resulting volume will be bound to contain a large number of good poems. It will also, inevitably, bear the individual stamp of its editor. Moreover, the large anthology is so capacious a genre that any reductive summary or evaluation will be bound to be partial and arbitrary. Every reader encounters a quite different Larkin
Oxford Book
, depending on which combination of its 207 poets he or she happens upon. Over time the volume has performed its intended function of introducing readers to the variety of modern poetry as effectively as any conceivable alternative could have done.

19

Larkin’s Late Style

1969–72

Larkin’s public and professional commitments were driving his poetry deeper and deeper into a private space. It was not until nearly nine months after his ‘political poem’, ‘Homage to a Government’, that he completed his next poem. As one might expect it shows him at his most intimate and personal. He confided to Barbara Pym in a letter of 8 October 1969: ‘I have just written a poem, which cheers me slightly, except when I read it; when it depresses me. It’s about the seaside, & rather a self parody.’
¹
In ‘To the Sea’ the speaker is pleased to find the rituals he remembers from his youth still ‘going on’. Larkin wrote to Monica that the poem ‘was aimed at being a Boudin, in its own way of course’, referring to the French painter Eugène Boudin (1824–98).
²
As in a Boudin painting, exactly observed details depict ‘The miniature gaiety of seasides’: the low horizon, the white steamer ‘stuck in the afternoon’, the ‘uncertain children [. . .] grasping at enormous air’, and the rigid old in their wheelchairs feeling a ‘final summer’. The poet reminisces about his childhood spent searching in the sand for cigarette packets with their cards of ‘Famous Cricketers’, and concludes, with the afternoon fading, the steamer gone and the sunlight ‘milky’:

If the worst

Of flawless weather is our falling short,

It may be that through habit these do best,

Coming to water clumsily undressed

Yearly; teaching their children by a sort

Of clowning; helping the old, too, as they ought.

There is indeed a self-parodic element in the studied hesitancy of tone (‘If the worst’; ‘It may be’), and the familiar Larkinesque assumption that flawless weather makes us feel inadequate. The halting last line is sincere and heartfelt, but the tone is weary and a touch pious. Larkin wrote to Anthony Thwaite on 13 January 1970: ‘I am very pleased to know that you liked “To the Sea”, though I am not too keen on it myself – it seems rather Wordsworthian, in the sense of being bloody dull.’
³

‘The Explosion’ was completed three months later in January 1970. Like ‘At Grass’, written exactly twenty years earlier, it was suggested by a film. At Christmas Larkin had watched a television documentary on the mining industry with his mother, which had included the moving ballad ‘The Trimdon Grange Disaster’, by ‘The Pitman Poet’ Tommy Armstrong (1848–1919). Mindful of his public distrust of poems not based on direct experience, he told Monica: ‘
Don’t tell a soul
where I got the idea from.’
⁴
Sixty-nine miners had been killed in an explosion at Trimdon, Durham on 16 February 1882 at 2.30 in the afternoon. In Larkin’s poem, however, the explosion takes place, more symbolically, at noon, and for the sake of its central image of the eggs, the season is changed to early summer. The tone is highly mediated. The pitmen, in their beards and moleskins, recall early scenes from Lawrence’s
Sons and Lovers
. This is one of Larkin’s most riskily artificial poems. He claimed that he was at first unaware that it was falling into the trochaic metre of Longfellow’s
Hiawatha
.
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The effect is of archaic formality, though if the reader tunes into the metre too consciously it can sound over-insistent and mechanical. The image of the eggs, which one of the miners finds as he chases after rabbits, may also seem sentimental: ‘Came back with a nest of lark’s eggs; / Showed them; lodged them in the grasses’. After the explosion, these eggs reappear in the vision of the wives who:

saw men of the explosion

Larger than in life they managed –

Gold as on a coin, or walking

Somehow from the sun towards them,

One showing the eggs unbroken.

The reference to the men seeming ‘Gold as on a coin’ sounds forced, with its awkward period allusion to sovereigns; and ‘Somehow’ sounds loosely emotive. Moreover, the image will fail to deliver its full meaning of ‘unbroken’ life for some readers. The miner has already killed these eggs by pulling the nest up. Lodging it back ‘in the grasses’ will not help. He has ensured that, broken or unbroken, they can never hatch.
⁶

A short meditation, ‘How’, followed, completed on a single workbook page on 10 April 1970. Like ‘To the Sea’ it has an element of the self-parodic with its repeated Larkinesque adverbial phrases: ‘How high they build hospitals! [. . .] / How cold winter keeps [. . .] / How few people are.’ He gave the poem to Ted Tarling, ‘a local chap who I think deserves encouraging’,
⁷
for publication in the autumn 1970 issue of his little magazine
Wave
, printed in Hull on Tarling’s own hand-operated press. Tarling’s imprint, the Sonus Press, also published Joan Barton’s volume
The Mistress
, the title poem of which Larkin included in
The
Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse
. Tarling was an artist of some accomplishment, and later two of his gouaches hung in Larkin’s house.
⁸

Larkin’s next completed poem is again the product of an indirect, secondary inspiration. Since 1965 his imagination had been haunted by the image of brutal, peasant contentment which he had encountered in the paintings of the seventeenth-century Flemish artist Adriaen Brouwer. On 15 May 1965, he had written to Monica that the Acquisitions Department of the Library was agitating for the return of a book of Brouwer’s paintings which he had borrowed: