Autumn once
more. I walk in the marshes, thinking of Philip Larkin. A superbly intense poetic
practice that wrings a multi-leveled precision from every line, every word. A life's
work of dense, virtuosic, deeply thought out, brief lyrics. A laser
technique applied within an intentionally narrow range.
His dates
are 1922 to 1985, but don't look to his poems to find out what Larkin thought
of World War II. Or the Cold War. On the evidence of his poems Philip Larkin did not
think about the Cold War. Or about his exemption from military service in the early
forties (poor vision) when the mere continued existence of his country was in doubt. If
it ever bothered him, he didn't write about it.
His topics were the universals,
or a particular set of them. According to biographer Jame Booth -- "Philip
Larkin: Life, Art and Love" (2014) -- he chose an artistic path while still a
young: to live the common life and "write out of his own life." Not
as a novelist, recreating a time and a place, telling an engaging story, but as
a scientist of the heart, examining the heart and the psyche's deepest
emotions. "The novel is about other people," Larkin wrote in a letter. "Poetry is about yourself."
A poem is
an emotion, he replied once when asked to provide his own definition,presented in as compact and compelling a way as can be done.
I love this
definition, though I know my own approach to poetry is nothing like it and I
could not approach Larkin's standard if I tried. I'm not a perfectionist. I
think Larkin was.
Just as
interesting is Booth's big-picture summary of his poetic career. Larkin had two
major subjects, Booth writes, that divide his career neatly between younger and
older periods. The younger Larkin's subject was marriage: why, that is, this
well-worn two-by-two passage through adulthood remained for him the path not
taken. He liked women; he wanted sex. He either chose for the reasons best
expressed in some of his own 'younger' period poems to stay apart from the
ordinary condition of breeding adults; or was simply incapable of entering it.
I am
inclined to think that Larkin concluded that only the more radical solitude of
the unmarried state would enable him, or maybe force him, to write his best,
most deeply felt work. (Though he never exalted the 'exceptional' state of the
artist the way some of the aesthetes or a significant poet like Rilke, say,
did.) The other explanation is that he suffered from some sense of a disqualifying,
exiling wound. This is the poet, after all, famous for writing "They fuck
you, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do."
As Booth's
book shows, Larkin was particularly loyal to both his parents. The care and
attention he showed his widowed mother through frequent visits and an endless
string of chatty, attentive letters puts most other sons to shame,
especially since being with Mum appears to have been more obligation than
pleasure. It was an obligation he paid with good grace. His relationship to his
father, a prince in the realm of accountants, not poets (and an admirer of
Hitler), involved an eccentric sense of duplication. Larkin told people that he
would die in his sixty-third year, because his father had.
And then,
astonishingly, he did die in the same year; and of the
same disease.
Hence, the
single, obsessive theme of the second half of Larkin's poetic career: death. English
poetry, it sometimes seems to me, is all about time. However good things are,
we can't escape the final sorrow of our condition. However poorly things may be
going, we always know they will end.
It's not a rationalist
turn of mind to see life this way, at least in Larkin's case. It's a deeply
emotional one. He's outraged that death is always in the rear-view mirror.
The
"early" poems included by editor Anthony Thwaite in "Philip
Larkin: Collected Poems" exude a certain formal feeling, to borrow a
phrase from Emily Dickinson, the betrayal of a young man with an anxious mind being
hard on himself. In these poems he's a face in a crowd, but not part of it. He's
the recording angel, or perhaps the surgeon, exposing its inner workings, the
hard logic of human life.
Later, when
he comes into his own suffering, the distance from the crowd is not a pose, and
his voice is wholly convincing, often indulging in a black humor funnier than
Beckett.
No
bohemian, never a radical, rebel or outwardly nonconformist, Larkin seeks a
profession after graduation and plays the game of life by the ordinary rules. A
librarian, he rises in the profession, becomes the boss. He likes "the old
England" in a time of change, but is forced to be part of the changes,
overseeing the construction of a new library for a growing University in a backward
province, Hull, famously described as "on the road to nowhere in
particular." He liked it, Booth writes, for that reason.
But he
refuses the essential conventional commitment, marriage, and the daily invovlement with another
human being it entals. He sought sex, but sex was difficult because it tended
to draw you into intimacy, and then into commitment, and commitment drew you to
marriage. A lifelong bachelor, he liked pornography. He was a hit with his friends'
wives. He was a different 'Philip' to everyone who knew him, complaining about
one friend to another.
Courteous,
respectful, hard-working, a good boss, middle-class. He rode his bicycle and
visited old churches long after everyone else drove a car. When, after a biking
accident, he learned how to drive, the loss of this form of regular
exercise may have cost him his only way of keeping healthy. He liked to drink.
On certain
subjects, the subjects he put his stamp on -- the inevitability of
disappointment, for example: nothing ever really lives up to our hopes and
expectations, does it? -- it's hard for me to believe that anyone has ever
written anything as good.
For instance, "Next, Please":
Always too eager for the future, we
Pick up bad habits of expectancy.
Something is always approaching; every day
Till then we say,
Watching from a bluff the tiny, clear,
Sparkling armada of promises draw near.
How slow they are! And how much time they waste,
Refusing to make haste!
Yet still they leave us holding wretched stalks
Of disappointment, for, though nothng balks
Each big approach, leaning with brasswork prinked,
Each rope distinct,
Flagged, and the figurehead with golden tits
Arching our way, it never anchors; it's
No sooner present than it turns to past.
Right to the last
We think each one will heave to and unload
All good into our lives, all we are owed
For waiting so devoutly and so long.
But we are wrong:
Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.
When still not
thirty, he wrote the poem above and some others that define the existential
questions of the human conditon, as Larkin saw it. On the necessity of 'forsaking all others' in the married state, he wrote the scathingly
ironical (and hypothetical) "To My Wife," summing up in 14 matchless
lines how a universe of choice sinks to a singularity. An excerpt:
Matchless Potential! but unlimited
Only so long as I elected nothing...
No future now. I and you now, alone.
So for your face I have exchanged all faces...
Now you become my boredom and my failure,
Another way of suffering...
Larkin's
personal solution, as he said himself, was no solution at all. A boredom of
solitude rather than with 'my wife'; alcohol, pornography, and a complex of
relationships enduring long enough (and sometimes overlapping) that it's hard
to call them affairs. Relationships, as we would say today.
And he did
produce the poems.
The age-old,
widely shared dissatisfaction with our human inability to appreciate the
present (until it's past) shows up again in his rigorously honest poems. In
"The March Past," a sudden, brief procession of music and flags takes
the spectator out of himself, but when, as the poem says, the "music
drooped" all that remained was
... a blind
Astonishing remorse for things now eneded
That of themselves were rich and splendid
(But unsupported broke, and were not mended)...
And then,
the final recourse, the choice of his life's true path, he addresses in "Best
Society."
...
Once more
Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.
And what he
is, at base, despite all the poems and all the days, and all the choices and
all the regrets, is a being always looking over his shoulder for the approach of that "black-sailed"
ship "towing at her back/ A huge and birdless silence."
Those
leaves will dry out, and the color will fail until all the fallen leaves appear
uniformly 'brown, old, dead' or any number of unattractive appellations. 
When the leaves come down it's time to look at them. All over town they're creating
compositions, textures, ephemeral works of color shape, patterns, and mixtures
of all these elements on the canvas of earth's surfaces. Those surfaces in densely
populated ares are generally hard, impervious. But for a week or two, they'll
appeal to the senses.
Artists try
to achieve some of the same effects in museums -- ephemeral, changing,
disappearing -- with light machines, timers, filters, varieties of shadow and
light, and natural materials that fade over time. But nature, the tilt of the
earth, the apparent revolution of the sun spinning sine curves through the years,
does it every year and all the time. Autumn is one its more stunning
effects. 
The same
effect, a stunning transformation of the look of surfaces, this sublime cultivation of
appearances, is duplicated in the trees. And while many leaves are on the ground,
still many more remain in the trees. 
