This be the verse

Michael Henderson

27 November 2010

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Philip Larkin, who died 25 years ago this week, was a truly great poet. His personal habits are utterly irrelevant

Spending pleasurable hours looking for books is not like drilling for oil. Recently, however, while browsing in the excellent Slightly Foxed bookshop in Gloucester Road, the black stuff spewed out like a geyser. A hardback collection of Philip Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings was on offer for £40. It wasn’t a first edition from 1964, which would have put another nought on the price. The book belonged to the fourth impression, published four years later, but it came with an inscription from another famous writer, who had presented it to an actress friend.

‘I hope you like these poems,’ he had written. ‘They are what I wanted the play to be — very English and full of affection and dissatisfaction. All my love. A.’ The ‘A’ was Alan Bennett, the actress Nora Nicholson, and the play, Bennett’s first for the stage, Forty Years On. Viewed from this distance, those words may be interpreted as a tribute from a superb writer, who was establishing an identity that is now much loved, to a great one. The Whitsun Weddings is not only Larkin’s finest collection of poems; it may also be the finest collection published in English in the second half of the last century.

Leonard Bernstein, the polymathic American musician and educator, who could recite the collection’s title poem from memory, went further. He considered Larkin to be the greatest poet of the 20th century, bar none, which might be overdoing things. Larkin, an early admirer of Yeats and Auden, eventually acknowledged Hardy as his supreme influence, and it isn’t difficult to see him as Hardy’s long-term successor. Both writers were provincial, in the best sense (and, in Larkin’s case, the worst), and found qualities of unforced lyricism in subjects that were often melancholy. Only England could have produced them.

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mike craig

November 28th, 2010 10:55pm Report this comment

Its fascinating to read summaries of Larkins life and talent. The most interesting comment I can recall was from the diaries (I think) of Alan Bennett.

He had previously published a very sour post mortem appraisal of Larkin. Subsequently, in musing on him, he wrote that Larkin would probably despise him. Implicit in this was Bennetts uneasy recognition of Larkins stature versus his own i.e. that Larkin might be right (this is all in Bennetts favour by the way, I worship the man).

Other attempts to pin Larkin down, even those supposedly friendly, usually fail.

The effect is of a kind of ludicrous condescension. The real Larkin is untouched.

The facts used (in these attempts to defend what needs no defense) are now standard and always subtly wrong.

For instance: "Larkin was not a racist, see his worship of jazz" etc.

But he once suggested that it would be interesting to note how the capture of white western culture (mainly music, but he seemed to mean more than that) by black culture had affected the white culture. He did not seem to think it was at all positive (I think this was in a reference to Louis Armstrongs influence).

Oh well. The great white whale is still out there - some one, some day, will write an evaluation that comes close to measuring up (The two Amis's were miles short and a speak as a great fan of both).

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