No prizes for guessing what the grumpiest of modern poets thought of Christmas. It was a regular target for Philip Larkin’s eloquent gloom.
He aired his gripes to various correspondents, complaining that he was expected to send cards, buy presents, go to parties, and endure a whole ‘Niagara of nonsense’. He sometimes complained, or rather stoically related, that he was spending quality time with his sour mother, who habitually became ill with festive stress.
In a letter of 1960, Larkin told a friend he had been depressed over Christmas: ‘Of course such ghastly festivals as the one we have just endured make life seem blacker & bleaker and generally more savourless.’
It sounds like comic exaggeration, but it isn’t. Christmas really does have the power to heighten just-about-manageable gloom. ‘And now Christmas is coming again’, he writes to another friend, ‘as if we hadn’t enough to put up with.’
In another letter he says that it feels like ‘the straw that is going to break my back – Yule log more like.’ In another he says that it pains him more the older he gets.
Did he really see nothing good in Christmas? No glimmer of silver lining? Surely, amid the glumness, there is some bruised idealism, some memory of childhood magic, some hope.
Maybe Larkin shared my conflicted view of Christmas, under the surface of simple antipathy
There is reason to wonder whether his antipathy was as complete as he claimed. For surely Christmas has some elements that ought to appeal to Larkin. It is an authentic national tradition. For about a thousand years, English people have been celebrating it, and the old medieval core of the festival is still there, amid the modern glitz. You could say that carols are the most authentic cultural tradition that we have, still powerful as pop songs, after centuries.
Also, Christmas is democratic in a way Larkin surely found attractive. He valued culture that appealed to actual ordinary people, like the seaside, and country fairs, and pubs, and cheering the Queen, and maybe even church. He was sniffy about the pursuits of the metropolitan elite, like opera, and pretentious book-chat, and earnest debates about global human rights.
Christmas surely has this benignly ordinary, classless character. It is captured in Betjeman’s poem ‘Christmas’ which Larkin admired – he included it in The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse, which he edited. (By the way he also included Hardy’s lovely poem ‘The Oxen’, about the semi-survival of childhood Christmas faith into adulthood.)
Some will say that Larkin’s negativity about Christmas was down to two things: he had no cosy family to share it with, and he had no Christian faith. But this is only partly true, I think. For Christmas gloom can also attack those of us who are blessed with these things.
For me at least, it’s a love-hate thing. It is because of the power and beauty of the festival, in its ideal, imagined form, that its reality often feels burdensome. One has a glimpse of how good human culture could be – but this blurs with a horrible pressure to be the perfect bourgeois, full of munificent good cheer. A vision of pure social goodness jarringly cohabits with a narrower, more worldly ideal of domestic success, which makes people anxious.
Maybe Larkin shared my conflicted view of Christmas, under the surface of simple antipathy. Did it depress him because of its impossible taunting vision of harmony, of ‘life lived according to love’? I suspect so.
Something like this is neatly expressed in one of his poems. Oddly for our purposes, it’s a poem about summer – ‘Mother, Summer, I’. Though the speaker of this poem loves summer, it also makes him uneasy, for: ‘Too often summer days appear / Emblems of perfect happiness / I can’t confront…’
Merry Christmas.
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