Delving into the critical quagmire of Philip Larkin’s reception as a poet, and a very controversial person, is at once time-consuming and shocking. Prior to reading John Sutherland’s biography of Larkin’s wife, Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me (2021), I had no idea whatsoever of the couple’s abhorrent racism, anti-Semitism and misogyny. Towards the end of the biography, Sutherland writes of a ‘nagging question: did the anti-Semitism, racism, and what would now be judged as gutter politics originate with her, or him?’, before expressing a personal loss at his discovery of Monica Jones’s reprehensible worldview: ‘This has been an ordeal to write. I have lost part of the Monica Jones I once knew in the place where I was most hopeful I would find her again.’
This leads us onto a pertinent and longstanding question when tackling the much, and rightfully, contested literary ‘canon’: what should we do, and how should we react, when such uncomfortable truths are uncovered about poets whose texts have been subconsciously subsumed by popular culture? (I can name countless times when, if ever a conversation turns towards poetry by heart, one or more people churn out to the well-known opening lines of Larkin’s This Be The Verse (1971), ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.’) During the 1990s there was, understandably, much debate surrounding Larkin’s status as both poet and person. This piece attempts to grapple with these aspects, and hinges on the question of how — or indeed if — we can separate poet from person.
Some of Philip Larkin’s early poetry is a taste of brevity and quietude; the lines contained in the poetry collection by Anthony Thwaite, Collected Poems, are often self-consciously succinct, occasionally stinging and consistently potent. Larkin’s images in the episodic series of poems, The North Ship (1945), feel at once transient but yet leave a lasting impact on the mind. ‘Dawn’ is a personal favourite of mine. A mere six lines conjure instant feelings of loneliness, the quiet feeling of waking at dawn to a solitary sound:
To wake, and hear a cock
Out of the distance crying,
To pull the curtains back
And see the clouds flying —
How strange it is
For the heart to be loveless, and as cold as these.
The North ship: IV ‘Dawn’
The words ‘crying’, ‘loveless’ and ‘cold’ encapsulate the entirety of the poem. In fact, each line hinges around a single word and could simply read: ‘wake’, ‘crying’, ‘back’, ‘flying’, ‘strange’, ‘loveless’. The rhyme scheme is simple; the rhythm a gentle lulling like the waking of its speaker at dawn, breathing slowly and steadily rising into the day ahead. Perhaps the three words, ‘crying’, ‘loveless’ and ‘cold’ also capture the darker side of Larkin’s personal life — and also a large part of his strained marriage with Monica Jones.
It was in Alan Bennett’s anthology, Six Poets: Hardy to Larkin, where Bennett scathingly recollects that for Larkin, ‘a crude difference between novels and poetry is that novels are about other people and poetry is about yourself.’ But this personable element to Larkin’s poetry, searingly honest and yet refreshingly novel, on this poem’s re-reading, is what makes Larkin one of the most comforting poets to read — if one can forget his reprehensible world views. The poems themselves are free of meta-textual pretence and rigmarole, though even this view has been contested by critics like Andrew Motion: ‘For readers and writers committed to modernism and its outcomes, Larkin still represents everything dismal about little England: he strikes them as inverted, curmudgeonly, imaginatively timid, shot through with prejudice.’ This remark is almost incontestable, though I would argue against the ‘imaginatively timid’ aspect. Motion does, however, go on to complicate the critical discourse: ‘True, there are poems in which the shadow of his social opinions pushes him to the side of his own talent as a writer. But elsewhere in his work, and very often, he is driven by a desire to fulfil himself by escaping certain aspects of himself. His greatness depends on this paradox.’
Larkin’s poetry seems in many ways the opposite to T. S. Eliot’s. Whereas Eliot’s self-consciously, and even pretentiously, crafted footnotes at the end of The Waste Land point his reader to endless classical and Biblical sources which seem almost circular in their instructions, Larkin’s simple and practical method of dating almost every poem he wrote from 1944 until his death in 1985 summarises his clarity of thought and lack of pretension — and indeed ease in expressing thought and feeling in the realm of the daily, pragmatic, and even dull moments of human existence. There are still glimmers of beauty in Larkin’s poetic world, though the shadow which now effaces his collection is too part of his legacy. Perhaps, knowing now what we do about the person, the poetry becomes ‘loveless’ and ‘cold’ like the waking at dawn.
Roots & Wings 