Cultural Cohesion (14 page)

In
Required Writing
the Impulse to Preserve is mentioned often. Larkin the critic, like Larkin the librarian, is a keeper of English literature. Perhaps the librarian is obliged to accession more than a few modern books which the critic would be inclined to turf out, but here again duty has triumphed. As for loss, Larkin the loser is here too (“deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth”) but it becomes clearer all the time that he had the whole event won from the start.

Whether he spotted the daffodil-like properties of deprivation, and so arranged matters that he got more of it, is a complicated question, of the kind which his critical prose, however often it parades a strict simplicity, is equipped to tackle. Subtle, supple, craftily at ease, it is on a par with his poetry—which is just about as high as praise can go.
Required Writing
would be a treasure house even if every second page were printed upside down. Lacking the technology to accomplish this, the publishers have issued the book in paperback only, with no index, as if to prove that no matter how self-effacing its author might be, they can be even more so on his behalf.

Observer
, November 25, 1983; later included in

Snakecharmers in Texas
, 1988

POSTSCRIPT

To track the closing stages of Larkin's career was among the delights of being a literary critic in the late twentieth century, but the pleasure was not unmixed. Larkin's poetry was, and will always remain, too self-explanatory to require much commentary. Puzzle poems like “Sympathy in White Major” were few, and on the whole his work made a point of declining in advance all offers of academic assistance. So in praising his accomplishment there was always a risk of drawing attention to the obvious. After I tentatively suggested in print that the source of illumination in the central panel of the “Livings” triptych might be a lighthouse, Craig Raine thrust his impatient face very close to mine and hairily hissed: “Of
course
it's a lighthouse!” And of course it was. It's all there in the poem, if you look hard enough: and no one else's poetry ever so invited you to look hard and look again.

There was edifying fun to be had, however, in pointing out how Larkin's incidental prose was of a piece with his verse. As a device for self-protection, Larkin was fond of proclaiming his loneliness, misery and bristling insularity, but his prose is there to prove his generous and unprejudiced response to the spontaneous joys of life. With T. S. Eliot, the essay on Marie Lloyd is a one-off: clearly he loved the music hall, but he never contemplated allowing the instinctive vigour of popular culture to climb far beyond the upper basement of his hierarchical aesthetic. Larkin never contemplated anything else. His poem about Sidney Bechet saluted the great saxophonist not just as a master, but as
his
master. For Larkin, pre-modern jazz was the measure of all things: he wanted his poetry to be as appreciable as that. His touchstone for the arts lay in what came to be called the Black Experience.

Helping to make this clear turned out to be useful work, because after his death the scolds moved in. They wanted to dismiss him as a racist, and might have carried the day if a body of sane opinion had not already been in existence. He was also execrated as a provincial, a misogynist and a pornophile. He was none of those things except by his own untrustworthy avowal, usually framed in the deliberately shocking language he deployed in his letters for the private entertainment of his unshockable friends. In his everyday behaviour he did the best a naturally diffident man can to be courteous, responsible and civilized at all times, and in his poetry he did even better than that. In no Larkin poem is there an insensitive remark that is not supplied with its necessary nuances by another poem. To believe Larkin really meant that “Books are a load of crap” you yourself have to believe that books are a load of crap. The arts pages are nowadays stiff with people who do believe that, even if they think they believe otherwise: all they really care about is the movies. There are people reviewing books, even reviewing poetry, who can read only with difficulty, and begrudge the effort. No writer, alive or dead, is any longer safe from the fumbling attentions of the semi-literate literatus. But here again, the exponential proliferation of bad criticism can scarcely deprive the good critic of a role—quite the contrary. There has to be someone to save what ought to be obvious from the mud-slide of obfuscation, if only by asking such childishly elementary questions as: if you can't see that it took Larkin's personality to produce Larkin's poetry, what
can
you see? And if you can't accept Larkin's poetry as a self-sustaining literary achievement, what are you doing putting pen to paper?

Reliable Essays
, 2001

5

POETRY'S IDEAL CRITIC:
RANDALL JARRELL

As a figure representing the Poet's Fate, Randall Jarrell bulks large in the necrology of the American heavies: the patchwork epics of both John Berryman and Robert Lowell are liberally embroidered with portentous musings on his death. Is this, one wonders, what Jarrell's name now mainly means? The thought is enough to chill the bones.

Luckily Jarrell's publishers are now doing what they can to dispel the graveyard mists. Whether his
Complete Poems
did much for his reputation is debatable: his poetry, though he would have hated to hear it said, was a bit light on those Blakean “minute particulars” he thought good poetry should have a lot of—there was a tendency to the prosaic which rigorous selection did something to disguise. He once said that even a good poet was a man who spent a lifetime standing in a storm and who could hope to be struck by lightning only half a dozen times at best. Disablingly true in his case. One would memorize a needle thrust like “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” and wonder why someone who could command that kind of penetration should spend so much time lapsing into a practised, resourceful, elegant but in the end faintly wearying expansiveness. He thought that writing came first and that the Age of Criticism—i.e., of writing about writing—was a bad dream from which we needed to pinch ourselves awake. A bitter truth then, that his writing was merely distinguished whereas his writing-about-writing was inspired. Jarrell is poetry's ideal critic, and the current reissue of
Poetry and the Age
couldn't be more welcome. If ever there was a necessary book, this is it. A few more like it and there would still be a chance of saving the humanities for humanity.

A Shaw rather than a Beerbohm, a Sickert rather than a Wyndham Lewis, Jarrell had one of those rare critical minds which are just as illuminating in praise as in attack. We never feel, when reading him, that he is at his most concentrated when he is being most destructive. It is in the effort to draw our attention to merit that he achieves real intensity, and there are very few critics of whom that can be said. Yet there was nothing indulgent about his capacity for admiration. In his definitive essay on Frost, he grants—indeed rubs in—the poet's defects of personality with an epigrammatic disgust which would dominate the argument, were it not for his insistence that Frost's cracker-barrel Wisdom shouldn't distract us from the fact that being wise about life is nevertheless one of the things his poems do supremely well. Jarrel can see clearly that the best of Frost is the best critic of the worst, and that the Critical Task (a locution which would never have crossed his lips) is to demonstrate how good that best is—the best which we tend to reduce to the level of the unremarkable by being so knowing about the worst. Jarrell was against knowingness, and possessed the antidote: knowledge. His wide knowledge of literature impresses you at every turn. He alludes without effort, compares without strain, and makes being simple seem easy.

John Crowe Ransom and Walt Whitman are as well served as Frost. Speaking for myself, Jarrell's remarks helped give me the courage of my secret convictions about Ransom (I had thought it would be intellectual suicide to admit that his luxuriant diction struck me as a kind of strength); they were also instrumental in dismantling a self-designed, home-­constructed apparatus of formalistic priggery that had kept me from Whitman for ten years. Better introductions to such a brace of obfuscation-­ridden poets couldn't be imagined. Opening his Whitman essay, for example, Jarrell typically outlines the kind of misunderstanding he thinks needs to be eradicated:

But something odd has happened to the living, changing part of Whitman's reputation: nowadays it is people who are not particularly interested in poetry, people who say that they read a poem for what it says, not for how it says it, who admire Whitman most. Whitman is often written about, either approvingly or disapprovingly, as if he were the Thomas Wolfe of 19th-century democracy . . .

True when it was said, and true now. That Whitman was read by people who couldn't read seemed to me to be sufficient reason for refraining from reading much of him myself. Jarrell, though, had the confidence and independence to insist that to defend your taste by such a refusal is simply to connive at philistinism and encourage the view that Whitman was an ordinary rhetorician. On the contrary, he was an extraordinary one, whose worst language was not just awful, but unusually awful (“really
ingeniously
bad”), and whose finest flights were poetry about which there could be no argument. (“If the reader thinks that all this is like Thomas Wolfe he
is
Thomas Wolfe; nothing else could explain it.”) Quoting the passage from “I understand the large hearts of heroes” down to “I am the man, I suffered, I was there,” Jarrell says that Whitman has reached a point at which criticism seems not only unnecessary but absurd, since the lines are so good that even admiration feels like insolence. Jarrell's use of quotations approaches the mark Walter Benjamin set for himself, of writing a critical essay consisting of nothing but. The catch—that the quality of the quotation is self-demonstrating only to the reader who doesn't need telling—was one Jarrell recognized and was worried by. Luckily he didn't let it stop him.

The essay on Wallace Stevens is as important as the others already mentioned. Written as a review of
The Auroras of Autumn
, it measures the aridity of Stevens's later work by evoking the exfoliating fruitfulness of the earlier, and gets the whole of the poet's career into proportion without even a hint of cutting him down to size. But the strictures are gripping when they come. Of
The Auroras of Autumn
Jarrell says that one sees in it

the distinction, intelligence, and easy virtuosity of a master—but it would take more than these to bring to life so abstract, so monotonous, so overwhelmingly
characteristic
a book.

Italics his, and transfixingly placed.

With Jarrell, the urge to share a discovered excellence leads to a mastery of critical language which can only be called creative. The forms of Marianne Moore's poems, he writes,

have the lacy, mathematical extravagance of snowflakes, seem as arbitrary as the prohibitions in fairy tales; but they work as those work—disregard them and everything goes to pieces.

Not satisfied with that, he goes on:

Her forms, tricks and all, are like the aria of the Queen of the Night: the intricate and artificial elaboration not only does not conflict with the emotion bat is its vehicle.

If his experience had not been so rich, he could not have been so right: it takes range to achieve such a fine focus.

Scattered throughout this book are minor moments of the trouble which in a later collection of essays,
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket
, coalesced into a persistent anxiety. The foe of academic crassness and critical arrogance, Jarrell was obliged to rely on the good sense of those who read books for love. He knew they were in a minority but was too much of an American fully to accept the fact that this had something to do with inequality: he seemed to think that if you could just speak plainly enough you would break through. There is a distressing moment in
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket
when he tries to tell his popular-magazine audience that the word “intellectual” is not one to be frightened of since a mechanic or carpenter is just as much an intellectual about practical things as a poet is about literature. He chose not to notice that the two states of mind are not interchangeable, and probably never began to realize that his own critical writings, among the most readily intelligible of the century, depend for a good part of their clarity on a scope of cultural reference so broad that only the educated can take it in. Too much of a democrat to take pride in his own uniqueness, Jarrell hungered for an egalitarian society with uniformly high standards. Wishful thinking, but of a noble kind. Those sensitive to literature can be taught literature, but sensitivity to literature cannot be taught—a point which should be borne in mind by anyone who runs away with the idea that setting
Poetry and the Age
as a first-year text would humanize our university English schools overnight. It wouldn't, but it's a measure of Jarrell's gifts that even the most level-headed reader suddenly finds himself suspecting that it could.

New Statesman
, October 26, 197 3;

previously included in
At the Pillars of Hercules,
1979

POSTSCRIPT

Not knowing much about him apart from his work, I wrote about an ideal Jarrell. Later on I found out that his reputation among his American contemporaries was as a vituperative reviewer of their poetry. He was repaid for this habit by attracting vituperative reviews in his turn, retaliatory hatchet-jobs which led him first to an attempted suicide and then to a successful one: if that, indeed, was what his death was. The last point is still in dispute. But there should be no dispute about his cogent force as a critic. If it had been less, his fellow poets would have cared less when he carped: they could have dismissed him, with some justification, as a would-be poet envious of his rivals, and a shameless aspirant for academic preferment.

My colleague the late Ian Hamilton had a large knowledge of American literary politics. In London, as the most admired editor of his day, he was necessarily engaged in literary politics himself, but they were of a different kind, concerned entirely with poetry and never with its attendant prestige. He regarded the American poetic world as a living museum of egomaniacs trying to write their own descriptive tickets, and he built up hilarious anecdotal dossiers on all of them. There was a clear-cut cultural difference, which Hamilton was the first to analyse. In Britain, even the most important poets, and only when they felt like it, wrote poems one at a time. Later rather than sooner they would be collected into a book, for which there would be no prize more valuable than a week's supply of cigarettes. In America, the poetic heavies were always “working on a book of poems,” usually with the benefit of a large support system—a sojourn at the expense of the Corporation of Yaddo, for example—and almost invariably with the intention of winning a National Book Award at the very least. For the securing of the awards, the poet's hunger for self-­promotion and the upmarket media taste for the alpha celebrity went hand in hand: they were made for each other. There were always exceptions, and the exceptions were among the best: to my mind—if not to Hamilton's, which harboured little affection for formal bravura—Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht have been enhanced in their achievement by their ability to stay out of the loop, a reticence that was implicit in their care for craft. But you heard less and less about Wilbur, and never enough about Hecht. They didn't make enough noise. America was a different planet, inhabited by larger, if lumbering, beings.

The fruits of Hamilton's interplanetary observation can be read in his posthumous volume
Against Oblivion
, from which Jarrell emerges as an unsettling example of ambition on the rampage. I have no doubt that Hamilton's portrait of the real man was an accurate one, but equally don't doubt that my portrait of the ideal man is finally more true. The weakness of Jarrell's poetry is that he could never disappear into it. The strength of his criticism is that he could. We can't return to the state of naivety in which all we knew of him was what he wrote. But the critic's job is to get back to that first response despite subsequent knowledge. When Jarrell wrote about other poets, with his eye on their achievement rather than on his own ambition, he was a touchstone. Admittedly he found that easier to do if they were dead. If they were still alive, he sometimes sounded as if he was trying to kill them. Harsh reviews are written in Britain and Australia too, but usually in the belief that nobody will suffer irreparable damage. In America, and especially in Jarrell's generation, that belief did not hold; and the thought that Jarrell took a razor to his wrist because of what somebody said about him in a newspaper was powerful evidence that some of the energy of the American post-war literary world came from the childishness of its practitioners. Deadly serious about being thought successful as artists, they forgot that a better guarantee of seriousness would have been to pursue their art even if they were thought to have failed. The risk run by the adepts of a spiritual activity in a materialist society became threateningly clear: when all the measures are set internally, peer-group pressure can be fatal. Lowell, Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, Sylvia Plath: to any of them, nothing mattered more than the ticker tape that carried the stock market quotation of their status. A ten-point drop could send them to the window sill: for the artist concerned with his own share price, it is always 1929. High on the short list of good things that can be said about the Beat poets is that they sought out an audience and let it decide. The mandarins would have fared better if they had done the same. As things happened, the best and the brightest had too much respect for one another's opinion. Jarrell was merely among the most prominent. He should have cared less about what the others said. They all should have.

2003