The New Criterion

The title of Richard Palmer’s book comes from a passage in T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”:

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

These lines are more ominous than Palmer’s book requires. He merely claims that Philip Larkin was not—or not entirely—the glum, racist, sexist, misogynist he often appears to have been: he is not justly thought of as the man who swapped pornographic magazines with Robert Conquest and racist obscenities with Kingsley Amis. Larkin wore such deliberate disguises, Palmer maintains, to protect himself. His true self did not coincide with his appearances at every point. Palmer wants to rescue Larkin from his most offensive performances as if they were merely tactical. In the noxious passages, he didn’t mean what he said, or he was mocking the people who enjoyed such sentiments.

Palmer’s book raises, without appearing to want to, a difficult question of interpretation. I would like to accept W. B. Yeats’s claim, in “A General Introduction for My Work,” that a poet “is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.” If that were true, we would be justified in ignoring the miserable bundle—the man’s imperfect life —and attending solely to the finished poems, the beautiful, well-wrought urns that stand apart from their maker. In another version of the same notion, a poem is a dramatic monologue even when it seems not to be. If we think we hear Larkin’s voice in “Church Going” or “An Arundel Tomb,” we are mistaken, it is an auditory hallucination, an impersonal echo proceeding from his creative engagement with the English language in one of its accredited poetic forms. He himself, the old bundle munching his dry cereal, is out of the picture.

I respect those admonitions and obey them so far as I can. I have no problem in thinking that the “me” in the passage I’ve quoted from “The Hollow Men” is not T. S. Eliot in person as he would be if he were signing a check or filing his Income Tax return. How, then, I interpret that “me” is a nice question in the theory and practice of reading. But when a student in a class of mine at New York University puts up her hand and says “Will the real Philip Larkin please stand up,” I’m stumped. The request can’t be set aside, coming as it does from a young American woman who takes Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” for gospel. Selves must be acknowledged. Or when I read Yeats’s “Among School Children,” which begins: “I walk through the long schoolroom questioning,” I can’t help knowing that, in February, 1926, Senator Yeats visited St. Otteran’s, a Montessori school in Waterford, the occasion of the poem. It is a desperate device to think of the implied speaker as someone else or as Yeats in one of his more recondite disguises or masks.

I make these remarks in the hope of understanding Palmer’s book and how its parts are brought together. He is a scholar of jazz, as Larkin, too, eventually became. The first half of the book is an exposition of Larkin’s experiences in jazz: listening to 78s when he was an undergraduate at Oxford; comparing notes with Amis and other enthusiasts; and in later years—1961 to 1971—reviewing jazz records for the Daily Telegraph. He enjoyed the reviewing, and was pleased to bring his reviews together as All What Jazz. Five of his poems, including “For Sidney Bechet,” issue from jazz in one way or another. “Jazz for Philip Larkin,” Palmer says, “was an image of the world, of being at home in that world.” On the whole, Larkin liked traditional jazz. Louis Armstrong was his favorite; he became fretful and then hostile when Miles Davis and John Coltrane started ruling the roost. But here again Palmer labors to show that Larkin was not totally hostile to those masters; occasionally he found an almost good word to say for them, aspiring to his better, kinder self.

In the second half of the book, Palmer runs through several of Larkin’s poems, again with the same intent, trying to take the harm out of them where harm is evident. He thinks it regrettable that Larkin’s most popular poems are “This Be the Verse” and “Vers de Société,” where the harm can’t be removed. If we read Palmer’s book along with Larkin’s Selected Letters, we find our sense of his development as a poet mainly confirmed, but with minor adjustments.

We follow the early influence of Auden, then of D. H. Lawrence, then of Yeats, who was soon displaced by Hardy. Palmer tones down Hardy’s preeminence, despite Larkin’s insistence on it in Required Writing and elsewhere. He gave up on Auden when Auden lit out for the United States at the sound of war. He lost interest in Yeats. The writers he liked were those who didn’t compete with him: Barbara Pym most consistently, followed by Vernon Watkins, Gavin Ewart, John Betjeman, Paul Scott, Dick Francis, and a few more detective story writers. He disliked Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn, Robert Lowell, Seamus Heaney, Hugh MacDiarmid, William Golding, Iris Murdoch, and Amis in his middle years of fame and money. He loved Mrs. Thatcher and detested Arthur Scargill, President of the Yorkshire National Union of Mineworkers. He never forgot negative comments, such as Charles Tomlinson’s that Larkin’s poems and those of his associates gave a reductive account of human possibility; or Donald Davie’s, which questioned whether or not Larkin was solely responsible for the choice of poems in The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse; or Frank Kermode’s disagreement with him about myth.

Palmer has no doubt that Larkin became—until his genius dried up after High Windows (1974)—“one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers,” but he is mainly concerned to ascribe to him a high degree of spirituality without religious belief. His most strenuous effort to turn Larkin into an Anglican atheist rather than a mere atheist is elicited by “Dockery and Son.” The poem ends:

Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.

After the grandiloquent generalization, the “something hidden from us” could be one’s genetic structure, one’s parents, childhood, schooling, the social and economic situation around one. I grew up as a child of lower-middle-class Roman Catholic parents in Warrenpoint, a small town in Northern Ireland. That must count for something, though “chose” doesn’t quite cover the way I lived my early adult life. I started on a life that was there, one of the few that lay in front of me. Palmer allows for this kind of interpretation, but he prefers another one:

Second, to any Christian or theist reader, that “what” could indicate God Himself—as “hidden from us,” choosing and willing our destinies for us and working through circumstances in life to bring us to a certain place (“works which He prepared in advance for us to do”) that we sometimes manage to understand towards the end of our lives. Either way, the “something” is not left: it is that which does the choosing for us. Larkin may not have been a seeker after God, but he struggled in the same way as do many men and women with the notion of predestination versus free will.

I can’t disprove this, but I’m not persuaded. It is much too pious, by comparison with the compelling sense of Larkin’s poems that has been enforced on me by the evidence of letters and other poems. If “any Christian or theist” includes me, I find repellent the notion of “something hidden from us” choosing my life. I’m responsible for the choosing, within strong circumstantial limits.

Palmer’s procedure, which amounts to a habit, is to keep talking about disguises, masks, and personae: when he quotes passages from Larkin’s poems that he doesn’t like, he calls them instances of irony or parody. In his commentary on “Church Going”—“a masterpiece of feinting, narrative subversion, and ‘deliberate disguise’”—he distances himself from “the characters glossed in stanzas three to five,” and finds that in the last stanza Larkin “turns back to his own self.” It follows that for the first several stanzas Larkin is not speaking in his own person, and that he becomes sincere only in the last one; also, that he comes to his own self by throwing the disguises away. The “it” is the church he visits; he doesn’t, in the standard phrase, go to church:

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

“That ‘compulsion,’” Palmer says, “has both a yearning quality and a mode of expression which all theists will recognize as the language of divine symbology.” The holy ground, I may remark, has never been recommended as a place to grow wise in, but as a place to grow humble in, or, at worst, resigned.

In his zeal to declare Larkin some kind of residual Christian, if not quite a Christian, Palmer trips over himself, gets things wrong. By omitting the word “are” from his quotation of “Next, Please,” he has Larkin writing nonsense. Still on “Church Going”:

In Four Quartets, Eliot reflects, “I have knelt/ Where prayer is valid.” Larkin may not have “knelt,” but his “serious” exploration of a primary quest is perhaps one of the most telling reasons why his work remains so absorbing and much-loved.

Eliot did not reflect any such thing. He wrote this in “Little Gidding”:

You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.

By citing Eliot’s “kneel” and misquoting the whole thing, Palmer draws Larkin into Eliot’s different context and makes a mishmash in which every impulse has only to be serious to be called Christian. As a Christian, I say: thanks a lot, but no thanks.

I didn’t know Larkin at all well. We were members of the Board of the Poetry Book Society, an attribute of the Arts Council of Great Britain. The Board met in London every three months: it was our duty to choose the best new book of poems and to recommend some further books only less meritorious. Larkin’s attendance record was spotty; he rarely felt inclined to spend six hours or more on the train from Hull and back to attend a probably boring meeting. On one occasion a fellow member of the Board, Charles Monteith, a director of Faber and Faber, brought Larkin and me to lunch at the Travellers’ Club. I recall Monteith’s splendid voice, but not a word from Larkin. He was known to be hard of hearing; in later years, he wore two hearing-aids.

At our Board meetings, he said nothing unless the word “library” or “librarians” was spoken. It sometimes was, because we were trying to extend our membership and someone was likely to suggest that librarians would be a good prospect. Larkin, Librarian of the University of Hull, immediately offered to write a circular letter to librarians in every college and university in the U.K. to advertise the pleasures of joining the PBS. That done, he lapsed into his customary silence. When I retired from the Board, I never met him again. On June 11, 1985 he fell ill and went into a coma following an operation on his esophagus. He lingered for some months, but died on December 2.

Larkin seems to me a very good minor poet. He has written about thirty short poems of lyric meditation which I have read many times and keep going back to, starting with “Maiden Name,” “Church Going,” “The Whitsun Weddings,” “At Grass,” “Show Saturday,” “To the Sea,” and “The Building.” What to make of his Collected Poems? Eliot’s question, in “What is Minor Poetry?” is helpful: “Has this poet something to say, a little different from what anyone has said before, and has he found, not only a different way of saying it, but the different way of saying it which expresses the difference in what he is saying?” Larkin found that way, in enough poems to constitute a life’s creative work. I would say the same of John Crowe Ransom’s poems, which sometimes come into my mind along with Larkin’s: good minor poets. “Great” is not warranted.