|
by Robert
Gore-Langton
Philip
Larkin, the miserable old git, has never had it so good. Sir Tom Courtenay is
about to play him on stage. Faber is reissuing his Collected Poems this month.
And on television there’s a new and (by all accounts) sympathetic film about
him, Love Again, coming up on BBC 2. (Love Again sounds as though it should star
Hugh Grant, but in fact Larkin is played by the brilliant baddie from Daniel
Deronda, Hugh Bonneville.) The bald, Hull-based poet who once claimed that
‘depression is to me as daffodils were to Wordsworth’ is having his day,
albeit posthumously.
The general view hitherto has been that
Larkin (1922–85) was a fine poet but a creep of the first order. Of course,
being character-assassinated is par for the course if you’re a top poet. Ted
Hughes had terrible trouble with a gruesome clique of grave-desecrating feminist
harridans, who more or less accused him of personally shoving his wife’s (the
poet, Sylvia Plath) head into the gas oven when she killed herself. A would-be
Plath biographer once told me in all earnestness that she could not complete her
book because Mystic Ted had put a spell on her. (Ted and Sylvia: The Movie,
starring Gwyneth Paltrow, is on the way.)
Until recently, you were
unlikely to hear a good word about Philip Larkin — misogynist, racist,
rightist Eeyore, and the most magnificently un-PC poet of modern times. The
morose university librarian who wrote some of the best lyric poetry of the last
60 years was surely the Alf Garnett of the poetry world. His letters (many
written in the jazzy slang he dug) to mates like Kingsley Amis are stuffed with
jokes about blacks, women, liberals and Irishmen. There is something to offend
just about everyone. The BBC press release that accompanies the forthcoming film
mentions the reactionary ‘saloon-bar’ nature of his views, and, although the
word ‘regrettable’ isn’t used, you know that’s what they mean.
Larkin was happy to spell
out exactly where he stood. ‘I’ve always been right-wing.... I suppose I
identify the Right with certain virtues and the Left with certain vices. All
very unfair, no doubt. Thrift, hard work, reverence, desire to preserve —
those are the virtues, in case you’re wondering; and on the other hand
idleness, greed and treason.’ Instead of displaying solidarity with the
oppressions of the working man, as modern poets are supposed to, Larkin regarded
the unions as a work-shy rabble led by droning, chippy Glaswegians. Indeed,
Larkin’s outrageous wind-up persona makes this outwardly drab, tall, reclusive
figure endlessly entertaining if you’re in the mood.
He was true blue in almost
every respect. His enthusiasm for mucky books was an appalling own goal for his
reputation as a distinguished man of letters. He loved the top-tier titles in
newsagents and complained that he couldn’t get sufficient filth in Hull where
he worked at the university library for much of his life. When he bought himself
a television, he was bitterly disappointed. ‘Where’s all this porn they talk
about? I’ve seen three bummes and two payres of tittes [sic] since slapping my
money down. Why can’t they show naked women or pros and cons of corporal
punishment in girls’ schools?’
It’s worrying to think
that today Larkin would find his house full of paedo-cops rummaging through his
hard disk for spanking websites featuring teenagers in St Trinian’s uniform.
But Larkin wasn’t short of girlfriends, though that’s the impression he
gave. The forthcoming BBC film will feature the long-suffering women in his life
(his secretary, a fellow-librarian and a lecturer), all of whom he two-timed and
refused to marry in a plot worthy of an Alan Ayckbourn comedy. Indeed, how this
Casanova of Humberside managed to get away with this convenient (for him)
arrangement without being beaten up in his own library beggars belief. Yet he
regarded himself as a total failure in the romance department (‘useful to get
that learnt’), his loser persona the pervading voice of the poems.
In his literary tastes he
was refreshingly straightforward — his journalism is fabulously lucid. He
regarded A.E. Housman’s observation that he could recognise poetry ‘because
it made his throat tighten and his eyes water’ as being perfectly sound. For
all his deep knowledge of English verse, Larkin liked poems that pretty much
anyone could read and enjoy. He hated ‘the boring too-clever stuff. Poetry
that can’t be understood without footnotes: “See the picture ‘A dog buried
in the sand’ among the Black Paintings of Goya in the Prado.” Why the
fucking hell should I?’ he railed.
His jokiness — he’s a
gift to a good actor — shouldn’t hide the fact that he was genuinely gloomy.
Death follows life, and the thought depressed him deeply. But for a depressive
he knew how to enjoy himself. He hated hunting but he wasn’t short of trad
English enthusiasms: he was mad about books, porn, whisky, jazz and cricket, all
of which enlivened the daily grind of ‘the toad, work’. Of these loves, the
greatest was jazz. Come to think of it, his total worship of those ‘antique
negroes’ who could really blow a horn (‘oh, play that thing!’) is the
healthy flipside of his racism.
Perhaps his most famous
line, ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’, should have been an album track,
not a poem. On the parental front he isn’t seen at his best, it’s true. He
famously described his Coventry childhood as ‘a forgotten boredom’, even
though he remembers it in precise detail. His dad was a jam-making Nazi (and the
city treasurer of Coventry) who kept a statuette of Adolf Hitler on the
mantelpiece. Philip hated his mum and was publicly nasty about her — though
not as nasty as John Osborne was about his. In her later years Larkin wrote,
‘My mother, not content with being motionless, deaf and speechless, is now
going blind. That’s what you get for not dying, you see.’ Nasty. But then
again Philip was a very dutiful, attentive son. There’s a paradox almost
everywhere you turn with him.
Larkin is read today not
because he was a Meldrewish curmudgeon, but because he was a genius at writing
poetry that illuminates the corners of ordinary life in all its sadness. He was
the English verse Sinatra. If you don’t like Larkin the man, there are still
those wonderful poems. Would the reclusive old grump have enjoyed the current
celebration of his life and work on stage and telly? Of course he wouldn’t. To
him it would have been a glitzy hell. As the jazzer poet said himself, ‘It’s
all showbiz now. Not my scene, Dad.’
|
