Philip Larkin (63 page)

fine stuff: a comforting world of its own – you are a great fat oaf, three quarters drunk, sitting on a bench with a jug of beer in your hand, surrounded by cronies as ugly and disgusting as yourself. You are all smoking clay pipes: there’s a good fire in the hearth. One man is flat out on the floor, having spewed (dogs are licking it up), another is pissing out of the back door. The candlelight shows patched clothes, broken cupboards: outside is wind, mud, winter.
But you are all right
.
⁹

Over the months and years he had elaborated on this image. On 23 November 1967 he wrote to Monica: ‘I think about Jan Hogspewer (flor. 1600) sometimes these days – I would write a poem about him if I believed poems about works of art were licit.’
¹⁰
The image sounds exclusively masculine; nevertheless he alludes to it in letters to Monica as a hard-core alternative to their cosy rabbit-burrow. On 10 December 1967 he writes: ‘Darling: I do look forward to your being here. We shall be two Hogspewers together. Friday is it?’
¹¹

Finally, after this long gestation an imagined Brouwer painting became the basis for one of his most original late works, ‘The Card-Players’, completed in three days, from 6 to 8 May 1970 on two pages of Workbook 7. This is his fourth and final mature sonnet to be published, and like the others it has its own unique formal structure.
¹²
No division is indicated after line 8, eliding the traditional progression from expository octave to reflective sestet. The picturesque squalor of the ‘lamplit cave’ is built up without pause over thirteen lines, with a false conclusion, one line early, on the sordid couplet rhyme ‘farts / hearts’. The final, typographically isolated fourteenth line then leaps out, unexpectedly, in an exclamation of brutal euphoria: ‘Rain, wind and fire! The secret, bestial peace!’ The feeble half-rhyme of ‘peace’ with ‘trees’ satisfies the scheme only nominally; the final line is effectively unrhymed, its denial of literary decorum matching the poem’s denial of social decorum.
¹³
The sonnet becomes a symbolist ode, its final apostrophe recalling similar effects in Gautier, Baudelaire and Laforgue, and of course Larkin’s own ‘Absences’, written twenty years earlier.

Like Brouwer’s paintings, the poem transfigures its low-life subject in a sublime celebration. The storm outside and the scene inside the ‘cave’ both embody the four elements of nature: Earth (mud, clay, mussels, ham), Water (piss, rain, ale, gob), Air (belch, snore, gale, ‘wind’ in both senses), Fire (cinder, smoke, lamp, grate). The elements are in continuous flux between inner and outer worlds. The rain outside mingles with Hogspeuw’s piss, and when Dirk pours himself ‘some more’ the grammar makes it sound as though it is rain as much as ale that he is pouring. The ‘mud’ of the cart-ruts outside is also the ‘clay’ of Dirk’s pipe. Dirk’s cinder and Prijck’s fire relate to the element of fire in the outside world. The ‘Rain, wind and fire’ of the final line are the elements as much of the interior world as of the exterior.
¹⁴
Rather than looking upwards for transcendence, as do ‘Absences’ and ‘High Windows’, ‘The Card-Players’ finds profundity below. In this chthonic world the composed self-possession the poet usually guards so jealously is euphorically cast aside. All the barriers between outer and inner which preserve his self-possession are transgressed. Almost uniquely in his work this room is exposed to the elements, its door wide open on the dark.
¹⁵
Larkin has, like Brouwer, fused together a selfish, secular poetry of low life with a selfless spiritual poetry of ineffable epiphany.
¹⁶

The most original element is the farcical ‘double-Dutch’ of the characters’ names: Jan van Hogspeuw, Dirk Dogstoerd, Old Prijck. Though recognizable as ‘Dutch’, they bear only a superficial relationship to the language; ‘speuw’ is not far from the Dutch
spuwen
, but the extra ‘e’ makes hyper-Dutch nonsense of it, while the other elements are crude English projections of Dutchness. ‘Hog’ should be
barg
, ‘Dog’
hond
, ‘turd’
drol
; while
prijk
and
prijken
have no sexual connotation in Dutch.
¹⁷
Clearly the poet knows no Dutch; nor does he want to know any. His concern is not to blend the two languages, but to invent an idiom which evokes the context of a Dutch genre-painting by
sounding
like Dutch to an English-speaker. It is a complex effect, similar to the false-French of ‘Immensements’ in ‘Sad Steps’. Paradoxically, however, the mistranslation shows the opposite of cultural provincialism. Rather it acknowledges the universal cultural currency of this image of peasant earthiness, familiar in the work of Flemish painters such as Bruegel, Teniers and Brouwer.
¹⁸
Larkin made clear that, unlike Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ or Berryman’s ‘Winter Landscape’, his poem makes no reference to an actual painting.
¹⁹
The scene described is, nevertheless, a perfectly visualized Brouwer composition.

‘Dublinesque’, completed on just over a page in the workbook between 1 and 6 June 1970,
²⁰
though very different, is also heavily mediated, and set in a mythic past. This is no literal nostalgic recollection of his holiday in Ireland the previous year. He told Maeve Brennan that the poem’s origin was ‘a dream – I just woke up and described it’.
²¹
This is the ‘Dublinesque’ of a sensitive tourist who knows his Joyce and his Jack B. Yeats. The light is ‘pewter’, the afternoon mist brings on the early lights in the shops, above ‘race-guides and rosaries’. As in a dream the poet feels euphoric gratitude at being spectator at the mourning ritual of the streetwalkers in their wide flowered hats, leg-of-mutton sleeves and ankle-length dresses. There is ‘an air of great friendliness’:

And of great sadness also.

As they wend away

A voice is heard singing

Of Kitty, or Katy,

As if the name meant once

All love, all beauty.

It is an exquisite, fragile poem, like ‘The Explosion’: just this side of sentimentality.

While in his poems he was conjuring these elusive epiphanies, his social image in Hull was hardening into that of an irascible hermit. A recently arrived lecturer in American Studies, who occupied the flat below his for a short time, remembers hearing him striding about his room alone reciting
Macbeth
with great feeling.
²²
Another lecturer in American Studies, who occupied the same flat with his wife in 1970–2, invited him to tea and found him distantly amiable. He played with their cats and they discussed jazz. But then, when the lecturer left Larkin a note suggesting they might share the shed in which he kept his bicycle, the response was an official letter from the Estates Office indicating that the shed was for Larkin’s sole use. Later he asked the poet to sign a copy of
The
Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse
, intended as a wedding present for some friends. Larkin rebuffed him, remarking that copies of his books were beginning to turn up in second-hand bookshops shortly after being signed. However, this refusal gave Larkin an uneasy conscience. Later the same day he phoned, asking if he might come across from the Library and sign the book after all, since he realized that recipients of a wedding present were unlikely to sell it on.
²³

Larkin’s spell in Oxford working on his anthology disrupted his usual drafting processes. He completed no poems in his workbook for nearly a year between ‘Dublinesque’ on 6 June 1970 and ‘Vers de Société’ on 20 May 1971.
²⁴
He did however complete two poems outside the workbook. ‘Poem about Oxford’ is inscribed on the flyleaf of an illustrated history of Oxford which he gave to Monica at Christmas in 1970. Movingly, he inserted the draft in the manuscript of his Brunette Coleman novella of three decades earlier,
Michaelmas Term at St Bride’s
, which he must have reread at this time. As in ‘To the Sea’ Larkin was returning nostalgically to his earlier life. The poem is dedicated ‘for Monica’, and is possibly an anniversary poem, ten years on from ‘Talking in Bed’. The form is the favoured metre for occasional verse in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, anapaests in alternate rhyme, with the added joke of carefully contrived ‘slapdash’ double rhymes (‘touchstone / much tone; certain / Girton; notecase / Boat Race; cake-queues / break-throughs’). Larkin pitches his tone carefully to suit the poem’s addressee. Its nostalgia is edgily anti-nostalgic, and there is ‘Hogspewer’ cynicism in the mockery of the ‘arselicker’ who stays in Oxford. Since they had shared the city ‘without knowing’, emphasis inevitably falls on generic period detail, in a kind of ‘Oxonesque’. Apart from ‘more durable things’ (their first-class degrees and literary educations), they shared ‘Dull Bodley, draught beer, and dark blue, / And most often losing the Boat Race –’. And, in a beautiful zeugma, to these poignantly trivial memories ‘You’re added, as I am for you.’

On 14 April 1971 Larkin enclosed in a letter to Anthony Thwaite a typed version of ‘This Be The Verse’ with slightly different wording from that finally published.
²⁵
Like the previous poems it is allusive and mediated. He joked: ‘I’ve dashed off a little piece suitable for Ann’s next Garden of Verses’, alluding to the annual of new writing for children,
Allsorts
, which Ann Thwaite edited between 1968 and 1975.
²⁶
The title refers to Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Requiem’ (‘This be the verse you grave for me’), published in
A Child’s Garden of Verses
, 1885.
²⁷
The reference is, however, highly ironic, and this is one of Larkin’s most original works. He reasserts his own voice against the literary clutter of the previous months in the confident Armstrong-like trumpet line of this, his most pungently ‘Larkinesque’ comic poem. No doubt also, in a familiar dialectic of contraries, he felt the need to answer the filial piety of ‘To the Sea’ with something less ‘bloody dull’. His elliptical late style is evident in the way the first line appropriates, and as it were copyrights, the most commonplace of phrases. The sentence ‘your parents certainly fuck you up’ or ‘your mum and dad always seem to fuck you up’, or even Larkin’s precise formulation, ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’, must have been uttered millions of times in ordinary conversation. But simply by ordering the words into a neat tetrameter in a brisk abab stanza of facile rhymes, he makes it into an unforgettable aphorism:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

This sentiment will now always be a quotation from Larkin. The casual inflections are perfect for recitation, and the malicious relish of that final insinuating phrase ‘some extra, just for you’ has the verbal taste of vermouth in a martini. The poem takes the imperious form of a crude syllogism: thesis, antithesis, synthesis: i) Your parents fuck you up; ii)
but
they were fucked up too; iii)
because
we are all fucked up. To add to the fun the concluding synthesis modulates into ripe fatalistic orotundity (‘Man hands on misery to man’), and portentous ‘apocalyptic’ imagery (‘It deepens like a coastal shelf’). The poem’s sentiment is sad, but the poem is full of
jouissance
. This must bid fair to be the funniest serious English poem of the twentieth century. It must also already rival Gray’s ‘Elegy’ in the number of parodies and pastiches it has generated.

The following month Larkin completed ‘Vers de Société’ (20 May 1971), reworking the antisocial theme of ‘The Card-Players’, but replacing Hogspeuw’s sordid cave with a civilized withdrawing room of aesthetic privacy. In a recasting of the unpublished ‘Best Society’ of exactly twenty years earlier, the ageing poet accepts defeat at the hands of society. Torn between an evening with a ‘
crowd of craps
’ and the solitude of his breathing gas fire and darkly swayed trees outside, he decides to reject Warlock-Williams’s invitation, unwilling to see more of his ‘spare time’ flow ‘Straight into nothingness by being filled / With forks and faces’. The lamp, the wind, the moonlit windowscape offer implicitly to repay his time with poetic inspiration. But he no longer feels unquestioningly obedient to the call. ‘The time is shorter now for company,’ and solitude no longer seems unambiguously the best society. The contemptible room of social intercourse
offers at least an escape from loneliness; ‘sitting by a lamp more often brings / Not peace, but other things.’ At the end he returns from the shifting rhyme-schemes of the middle stanzas to the direct aabbccdd couplet stanza with which he began, and begins to write – not a poem, but an acceptance of the invitation. ‘Beyond the light stand failure and remorse / Whispering
Dear Warlock-Williams: Why of course
–’. There is perhaps a private, self-derisive joke in the use of the word ‘remorse’ which Bruce Montgomery had so ridiculed in Larkin’s early Yeatsian poetry.