After the publication of Thwaite's Selected Letters and Andrew Motion's biography in the early 1990s, there was an outpouring of loathing for Larkin the man; a hysteria of disapproval that some feared would eventually destroy his reputation as a poet, too. Painfully, we learned of his racism, his supposed miserliness and misogyny, the juggling of his women, the porn, the booze, the wanking. The sensible critics were, of course, able to separate the work from the life; for them, the poems would sail on, serene and beautiful. But alas, sensible critics seemed, at the time, to be far too thin on the ground. Tom Paulin famously referred to "the sewer under the national monument Larkin became". Professor Lisa Jardine, having dispatched Larkin as a "casual, habitual racist and an easy misogynist", gleefully noted that "we don't tend to teach Larkin much now in my department of English. The Little Englandism he celebrates sits uneasily within our revised curriculum." . . .
So X has written great poetry, which means it's worthwhile writing his biography. Then the biography reveals a nasty side to X, which means his great poetry can't have been so great after all. This must make people who think like that uneasy about the work of those not yet dead and detectable. When they read the words of living poets, song writers and novelists do they reserve their appreciation because they don’t yet know what the poet, song-writer or novelist really thought? Will they have to pore over Douglas Dunn’s letters, Ray Davies’s emails and Julian Barnes’s texts before they can be sure that it's okay to admire their creative work? It would be very inhibiting to the enjoyment of poems, songs and novels of living artists, if you had to run their authors through a full security check of proper attitudes and evidence of a well lived life. As Larkin said:- “One never knows what lies coiled in people’s hearts.”
Two decades on and it is clear that the poems are safe. In the universities, where he continues to be taught, it is presumably understood that, as John Updike put it, the drama of his greatest poems hinges on the breaking of Larkin's crustiness, his prejudices, followed by "a generous, deep-breathing self-transcendence"; in other words, that the work has everything to do with life, and also nothing at all.
Larkin was damned for his opinions and prejudices rather than his actual deeds. Victorians tended to write hagiographies rather than biographies that revealed the dirty all but a Victorian looking at Larkin’s life would have deplored his dodgy treatment of his lady friends, and then would have stressed his care of his mother - he wrote to her and visited her far more than the average male would communicate with his mother - and his competence at his job as head librarian of the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull.
Meanwhile, outside academia, Larkin remains the most quoted, the bestselling and the most beloved of English poets. His poems – scrupulous, precise and ascendingly lovely – are true and wise: they speak to us of the big things, of birth, marriage and, above all, death. "You start by arguing in your head with those who call him minor," says the writer and poet Blake Morrison, who knew Larkin. "No, you think, as late-20th-century poets go, he is one of the best. And then you think, no, fuck it, as 20th-century poets go, he is one of the best… and that keeps on expanding all the time. He is a great poet. The problem for me, now, is getting him out of my head." . .
Larkin's racism is uncomfortable and indefensible, even when you put it in the context of his times. The charges of misogyny, though, are about to start looking a whole lot more flimsy. In the autumn, Faber will publish Larkin's correspondence to Monica Jones, a selection of the surviving 7,500 pages of letters and cards he wrote to her between 1946, when they first met, and 1985, the year of his death. (Monica lived in Leicester, where she taught English at the university; she only began sharing Larkin's home shortly before he died.) These letters, discovered after her death, are highly personal and, being so great in number, they chronicle Larkin's feelings more intimately than anything we have read before. Like the Selected Letters, they catch his wit, and his abiding sadness. But they also reveal Larkin's deep love and admiration for a woman who was clever, eccentric, loud, unusual, flamboyant, opinionated and strong. In my experience, misogynists tend not to go a bundle for women with minds of their own.
I look forward to reading Larkin’s letters to Monica Jones, or to anyone else. He was an entertaining letter writer. In the Selected Letters he whinges with great style. Here he is writing to his friend Judy Egerton (17 Dec 1958):-
What an awful time of year this is! Just as one is feeling that if one can just hold on, if it just won’t get any worse, then all this Christmas idiocy burst upon one like a slavering Niagara of nonsense & completely wrecks one’s entire frame. This means, in terms of my life, making a point of buying about six simple inexpensive presents when there are rather more people about than usual, and going home. No doubt in terms of yours it means seeing your house given over to hoards of mannerless middle class brats and your good food & drink vanishing into the quacking tooth-equipped jaws of their alleged parents. Yours is the harder course, I can see. On the other hand, mine is happening to me.
To his friend Patsy Murphy (10 January 1958):-
Otherwise not much is happening. . . From the inner recesses of my being, where the sibylline voice of poetry resides, silence. From my record-player, some Handel & Elgar. From the radio, more & more & more Kingsley. From the post, bills. From downstairs, the cries of children, often and deafeningly shrill, as A. Powell puts it. From Newcastle, insistent invitations. From St. John’s, news of another garden party (at the last I was so boozed I made advances to someone’s wife, pissed in a bath, & read the opening paragraph of The Wings of the Dove) in June. From the grave - how many miles? Brrr.
(The opening paragraph of The Wings of the Dove struck a chord. Many people have read that sober, and got no further. I can imagine the surreal effect of reading that ungripping piece of prose would have on you, drunk.)
Anyway, I’ll give Larkin the last word on reading about poets instead of reading their poetry:-
To Judy Egerton (10 June 1960):-
The other night I went to a boys’ school near York & held an ‘informal discussion’ about poetry, thereby confirming my opinion that this is one of the least profitable ways of spending an evening. It reveals one’s own muddleheadedness in a disagreeable way, and yet strengthens one’s conviction that the only things one can do about literature are to write it, read it, or publish it: all this jaw is pure waste of time. Brr.
Luckily for me, I'm young enough that when Tom Paulins' coals are raked over in 30 years time I shall enjoy many a sneer and self-righteous chuckle at his expense - and then I shall burn all my personal papers, for no one is good and kind and decent 24 hours a day and in every line they write...
Posted by: David K | 15 July 2010 at 03:27 PM