Cultural Cohesion (12 page)

The crux of the matter is John's love for Jill—a thousand dreams and one kiss. Jill is a clear forecast of the Larkin dream girl in the poems. But if John is Larkin, he is hardly the Larkin we know to have dominated his generation at Oxford. He is someone much closer to the author's central self, the wounded personality whose deprivation has since been so clearly established in the poems. What is remarkable, however (and the same thing is remarkable about the poems, but rarely comes into question), is the way in which the hero's desolation is viewed in its entirety by the author. The author sees the whole character from without. The novel does something which very few novels by twenty-one-year-old writers have ever done. It distances autobiographical material and sets events in the global view of mature personality.

As if to prove the point,
A Girl in Winter
is a similar story of callow love, but seen from the girl's angle. The book perfectly catches the way a young woman's emotional maturity outstrips a young man's. Katherine, a young European grappling with England (an inversion of the Larkin-Amis nightmare in which the Englishman is obliged to grapple with Europe), is morally perceptive—sensitive would be the right word if it did not preclude robustness—to an unusual degree, yet Larkin is able to convince us that she is no freak. While still an adolescent she falls in love with her English pen-pal, Robin, without realizing that it is Robin's sister, Jane, who is really interested in her. Time sorts out the tangle, but just when Katherine has fallen out of love Robin shows up on the off-chance of sleeping with her. Katherine quells his importunity with a few apposite remarks likely to make any male reader sweat from the palms, although finally she sleeps with him because it's less trouble than not to. Yet Katherine is allowed small comfort in her new maturity. The book is as disconsolate as its predecessor, leaving the protagonist once again facing an unsatisfactory prime.

A contributory grace in both novels, but outstanding in
A Girl in Winter
, is the sheer quality of the writing. Larkin told Oakes that he wrote the books like poems, carefully eliminating repeated words. Fastidiousness is everywhere and flamboyance non-existent: the touch is unfaltering. Katherine “could sense his interest turning towards her, as a blind man might sense the switching on of an electric fire.” Figures of speech are invariably as quiet and effective as that. The last paragraphs of
A Girl in Winter
have something of the cadenced elegance you find at the close of
The Great Gatsby
.

Why, if Larkin could write novels like these, did he stop? In hindsight the answer is easy: because he was about to become the finest poet of his generation, instead of just one of its best novelists. A more inquiring appraisal suggests that although his aesthetic effect was rich, his stock of events was thin. In a fictional texture featuring a sore tooth and a fleeting kiss as important strands Zen diaphanousness always threatened. (What is the sound of
one
flower being arranged?) The master lyric poet, given time, will eventually reject the idea of writing any line not meant to be remembered. Larkin, while being to no extent a dandy, is nevertheless an exquisite. It is often the way with exquisites that they graduate from full-scale prentice constructions to small-scale works of entirely original intensity, having found a large expanse limiting. Chopin is not too far-fetched a parallel. Larkin's two novels are like Chopin's two concertos: good enough to promise not merely more of the same but a hitherto unheard-of distillation of their own lyrical essence.

III.  
Y
EATS
VS
. H
ARDY IN
D
AVIE'S
L
ARKIN

In recent months Philip Larkin, based as always in Hull, and Donald Davie, back in Europe from California, have been conducting a restrained slugging match concerning Larkin's fidelity to the
locus classicus
in modern times, as defined—or distorted, if you are of Professor Davie's persuasion—in
The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse
. Important issues have been raised, and it will be some time before any keeper of the peace will be able to still them. The time is propitious for an assessment of Professor Davie's
Thomas Hardy and British Poetry
, which in a normal climate might be politely—and erroneously—half-praised as a well-bred squib, but for the duration of hostilities demands to be regarded as live, heavy-calibre ammunition.

Professor Davie is a poet of importance—of such importance, indeed, that his academic title can safely be set aside for the remainder of this article—and from poets of importance we want works of criticism that are less safe than strange. There is nothing safe about this volume, and a lot that is strange.
Thomas Hardy and British Poetry
is a surprisingly odd book, but it is also a considerable one. In fact, the forces ranged against each other in the current squabble can now be said to be more evenly matched than might at first appear.

A good part of the secret of what Larkin really thinks about art is distributed through the pages of
All What Jazz
, and if you want to take the weight of Larkin's aesthetic intelligence, it is to that collection (and not so much to his so-far uncollected criticisms of poetry in
Listen
, although they count) that you must go. On the Davie side, we are given, in this new book, a view of his thought which is at the very least as luminous as the one made available in
Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor
. When Davie talks about Hardy he sounds like Larkin talking about jazz. To put it crudely, on their pet subjects they both talk turkey. But this doesn't mean that either man makes himself plain. Larkin worships Bix Beiderbecke and deplores Charlie Parker, believing that Parker destroyed with arid intellectualism the art to which Beiderbecke contributed by lyrical instinct. Conveying this distinction, Larkin apparently makes himself clear; but it would be a suicidally foolish critic who thought that such a distinction could be used unexamined as a light on Larkin's poetry. In poetry, Larkin is Beiderbecke and Parker combined: his criticism chooses sides among elements which are in balance within his complex creative personality. Similarly with Davie: his critical position calls for an even more cautious probing, since he is less aware of self-contradictions by the exact measure that he is more receptive to Literary influence.
Thomas Hardy and British Poetry
raises confusion to the level of criticism: it is a testament to Britain's continuing fertility as an intellectual acreage in which ideas will flourish at rigour's expense, the insights blooming like orchids while the valid syllogisms wither on the vine.

Davie starts by proposing Hardy as a more important influence than Yeats on the poetry of this century. The distinction between
is
and
ought
is not firmly made, with the result that we spend a lot of our time wondering whether Hardy has been the big influence all along, or merely should have been. “But for any poet who finds himself in the position of choosing between the two masters,” Davie says, “the choice cannot be fudged; there is no room for compromise.” The reason why there is no room for compromise is not made as clear as the ordinary reader might require. “Hardy,” it is said, “has the effect of locking any poet whom he influences into the world of historical contingency, a world of specific places at specific times.” Yeats, apparently, doesn't have this effect: he transcends the linear unrolling of recorded time and attains, or attempts to attain, the visionary. Davie says that the reader can delight in both these approaches, but that the writer has to choose. It is difficult, at first, to see why the writer can't employ the same combinative capacity as the reader. Difficult at first, and just as difficult later.

The other important thing happening at the beginning of the book concerns Larkin. Davie mentions Larkin's conversion from Yeats to Hardy after
The North Ship
in 1946, thus tacitly proposing from the start that Larkin was doing the kind of severe choosing which Davie asserts is essential. Neither at this initial point, nor later on when Larkin is considered at length, is the possibility allowed that Yeats's influence might have lingered on alongside, or even been compounded with, Hardy's influence. One realizes with unease that Davie has not only enjoyed the preface to the reissue of
The North Ship
, he has been utterly convinced by it: instead of taking Larkin's autobiographical scraps as parables, he is treating them as the realities of intellectual development. Larkin conjures up a young mind in which Hardy drives out Yeats, and Davie believes in it.

But Davie's main comments about Larkin are postponed until some sturdy groundwork has been put in on Hardy. We are told that Hardy's technique is really engineering, and that he is paying a formal tribute to Victorian technology by echoing its precisioned virtuosity. A little later on we find that Davie doesn't wholly approve of this virtuosity, and is pleased when the unwavering succession of intricately formed, brilliantly matched stanzas is allowed to break down—as in “The Voice,” where, we are assured, it breaks down under pressure of feeling.

A crucial general point about technique has bulkily arisen, but Davie miraculously succeeds in failing to notice it. At one stage he is almost leaning against it, when he says that Hardy was usually “highly skilled indeed but disablingly modest,” or even “very ambitious technically, and unambitious every other way.” For some reason it doesn't occur to Davie that having made these admissions he is bound to qualify his definition of technique in poetry. But not only does he not qualify it—he ups the stakes. Contesting Yeats's insistence that Hardy lacked technical accomplishment, Davie says that “In sheer
accomplishment
, especially of prosody, Hardy beats Yeats hands down” (his italics). Well, it's a poser. Yeats's critical remark about Hardy doesn't matter much more than any other of Yeats's critical remarks about anybody, but Davie's rebuttal of it matters centrally to his own argument. He is very keen to set Yeats and Hardy off against each other: an opposition which will come in handy when he gets to Larkin. But keenness must have been bordering on fervour when he decided that Hardy had Yeats beaten technically in every department except something called “craft”—which last attribute, one can be forgiven for thinking, ought logically to take over immediately as the main subject of the book.

Davie argues convincingly that we need to see below the intricate surface form of Hardy's poems to the organic forms beneath. But he is marvellously reluctant to take his mind off the technical aspects of the surface form and get started on the problem of what technical aspects the organic form might reasonably be said to have. “We must learn to look through apparent symmetry to the real asymmetry beneath.” We certainly must, and with Hardy Davie has. But what Davie has not learnt to see is that with Yeats the symmetry and asymmetry are the same thing—that there is no distance between the surface form and the organic form, the thing being both all art and all virtuosity at the same time. Why, we must wonder, is Davie so reluctant to see Yeats as the formal master beside whom Hardy is simply an unusually interesting craftsman? But really that is a rephrasing of the same question everybody has been asking for years: the one about what Davie actually means when he praises Ezra Pound as a prodigious technician. Is it written in the stars that Donald Davie, clever in so many other matters, will go to his grave being obtuse in this? Why can't he see that the large, argued Yeatsian strophe is a technical achievement thoroughly dwarfing not only Pound's imagism but also Hardy's tricky stanzas?

Davie is continually on the verge of finding Hardy deficient as a working artist, but circumvents the problem by calling him a marvellous workman whose work tended to come out wrong for other reasons. In “During Wind and Rain” he detects a “wonderfully fine ear,” which turns out to be a better thing than “expertise in prosody”—the wonderfully fine ear being “a human skill” and not just a “technical virtuosity.” It ought to follow that knowing how to get the ear working while keeping the virtuosity suppressed is of decisive importance to poetic technique. It ought to follow further that because Hardy couldn't do this—because he wasn't even aware there was a conflict—he spent a lot of his time being at odds with himself as a poet. What Davie is struggling to say is that Hardy wasn't enough of an artist to make the best of the art that was in him. But the quickness of the pen deceives the brain, and Davie manages to say everything but that.

The strictures Davie
does
put on Hardy are harsh but inscrutable. There is in Hardy a “crucial selling-short of the poetic vocation.” In the last analysis, we learn, Hardy, unlike Pound and Pasternak (and here Yeats, Hopkins and Eliot also get a mention), doesn't give us a transformed reality—doesn't give us entry “into a world that is truer and more real than the world we know from statistics or scientific induction or common sense.” This stricture is inscrutable for two main reasons. First, Hardy spent a lot of his time establishing a version of reality in which, for example, lovers could go on being spiritually joined together after death: nothing scientific about that. Second, even if he had not been at pains to establish such a version of reality—even if his themes had been resolutely mundane—his poetry, if successful, would have done it for him. In saying that Hardy's poetry doesn't transform statistical, scientific reality, Davie is saying that Hardy hasn't written poetry at all.

It should be obvious that Davie, while trying to praise Hardy as an artist, is actually diminishing him in that very department. Less obviously, he is also diminishing art. To look for a life-transforming theme, surely, is as self-defeating as to look for a life-enhancing one. Good poetry transforms and enhances life
whatever it says
. That is one of the reasons why we find it so special. In this case, as in so many others, one regrets the absence in English literary history of a thoroughly nihilistic poet. The Italians had Leopardi, who in hating existence could scarcely be said to have been kidding. Faced with his example, they were obliged at an early date to realize that there is poetry which can deny a purpose to life and yet still add to its point.