Poetry Notebook (4 page)

Philip Larkin,
The Whitsun Weddings
(1964)

Philip Larkin is the most extreme case of a great modern poet who was threatened with a second death when his poems were edited into chronological order for a
Collected
Poems
that forgot even the titles of the separate volumes published in his lifetime. Luckily the mistake has been corrected since, and a compendium which restores the original groupings is now
available: but it was a close-run thing, because the design of each slim volume was critical to its overall effect. Of the three mature volumes, the second one,
The Whitsun Weddings
, would
be my pick for a favourite, although in fact I was introduced to him through the first,
The Less Deceived
, and for years kept it with me, convinced that nothing could come near it. But the
true proof of Larkin’s supreme art was that he could go on so intensifying his achievement that he defeated the law of rising expectations. With a tonal range stretching effortlessly from
colloquial punch to highflying sonority,
The Whitsun Weddings
turned out to have everything, including a title poem whose last line about the arrow shower (‘Sent out of sight,
somewhere becoming rain’) became a call sign for a generation. It even had the portents of death that mark the third volume,
High Windows
, and the volume beyond, the one never
completed, that would have contained the blood-chillingly desolate ‘Aubade’. There might not, at first blush, seem to be much joy in him; but he gets the whole truth of life’s
transience into unforgettably beautiful poetry, and it is hard to think of a greater source of joy than that.

In my click-bait list of five favourite poetry books, all the poets are important but in my view none of them, not even Yeats, should be called revolutionary. That very
adjective is an incongruous diversion into the tumult of politics, whereas poetry is written in pursuit of something more stable, even if not serene. As Richard Wilbur once argued (and his book of
critical arguments,
Responses
, is an exemplary prose work about poetry) there might be the occasional revolution in poetry, but it will always be a palace revolution. If he had written that
statement after the collapse of the Soviet Union, instead of before it, he might have added that when the stretch of history instigated by the Russian revolution had finally run its course,
Mayakovsky, who had convinced himself that his poetry was a historic political instrument, finally stood revealed as having been important only in the history of his art. This should be importance
enough, but even by that measure, the mission of the poet is to enrich literary history, not to change it. When the academic study of a poet begins to concentrate on his supposedly game-changing
impact on the history of literature, it’s time to watch out. All too often it will be a case of the publicity outstripping the event. After the Second World War, Ezra Pound was still alive,
and already it was being taken as gospel, throughout the burgeoning international network of academe, that he was the incarnation of modern poetry. His posthumous reputation reinforced that status:
the living thaumaturge became an eternal guru. For a while I tried to believe it myself, until I realized – too gradually, alas – that the key requirement of admiring him was to be
insufficiently receptive to anyone else.

In recent times I have gone back to Pound’s
Cantos
to find out if I was correct in so thoroughly getting over my initial enthusiasm for them, or it. (Whether
The Cantos
is, or are, a singular or a plural, is a question that I believe answers itself eventually, but only in the way that a heap of rubble gradually becomes part of the landscape.)
Fifty years ago, when the mad old amateur fascist was still alive and fulminating, I fell for the
idea
of his panscopic grab bag the way that I was then apt to fall for the idea of love. As
that sweet-if-weird moment in that sad-if-stilted passage in
The Pisan Cantos
has it: ‘What thou lovest well remains, / The rest is dross.’ I especially liked the sound of that
at a time when my knowledge of eternity was nineteen years long.

When I fell out of love with
The Cantos
I fell all the way out, but one of my critical principles, such as they are, is to take account of the history of my critical opinions, on the
further principle that they have never existed in some timeless zone apart from the man who held them, but have always been attached to him, like his hair, or, lately, like his baldness. There is a
promising analogy there, somewhere: my hair yielded baldness as my enthusiasms yielded disenchantment. First the one thing, then the other, and the second thing clearly definable only in terms of
the first.

But just as we can scrutinize the ageing remains of our bodies in the mirror and decide that these loose remnants would not even be here to be looked at if we had not been strong and healthy
when we were young, so we can look back to when we were wrong, and decide whether we were as wrong as all that. Youth and health have their virtues even in envious retrospect, and perhaps some of
our early and ridiculous appreciations were pure and nourishing. Maybe, that is, we later overcorrected, like one of those terrible old men who write articles against the sexual laxity of youth
when they are no longer capable of pursuing their notorious careers as indiscriminate lechers. Maybe we overdid the disillusionment.

In the case of
The Cantos
, I don’t think I did. I think I can nowadays go right through the long text of that doomed project and show that although it has some arresting passages,
they are not quite as arresting as their author meant them to be, and indeed claimed them to be by the way he chose their diction and set them into position. I hasten to admit that for my younger
self the claims seemed valid, and that I could not have been more arrested if I had been caught breaking into a liquor store. Back there in the late fifties, in the cafeteria of Manning House, the
Women’s Union building at Sydney University where the male aesthetes were generously allowed to hang out between lunch and dinner, I used to sit alone at a table fortified with a revetment of
books containing, or dealing with, or else directly relevant to,
The Cantos
.

My basic
Cantos
collection was the impressively fat Faber and Faber 1954 edition that held everything previously published from Canto I to Canto LXXXIV, including the sequence that had
been separately published as
The Pisan Cantos
. (Somehow the Roman numerals seemed historically significant in themselves: as, clearly, they had to Pound, even while what he was fond of
referring to as the Fascist Era was still running. When the Era was over he called it ‘the Dream’.) Visible from afar in its strident yellow wrapper, that thick, black-clad book –
black as a shirt, now I come to think of it – was the Faber edition. A well-off but wildly original architecture student called Douglas Gordon outranked me because he had brought the New
Directions edition back from a trip to the US, and in those twilight days of the old Empire a US edition of anything seemed more outlandish, more international. Gordon, always ready to prove that
he could quote even the non-lyrical stretches of
The Cantos
at length, died cruelly young a few years later: I don’t suggest that the two facts were related. Gordon was nuts all right
– nobody who had seen him in the university revue playing Richard III in Australia’s first public example of a black leather posing pouch could doubt that – but he was probably
born that way. I’ve just remembered that it was Gordon who got me started on Pound, like a drug pusher with a genuinely religious connection to the product. He had caught me reading Eliot and
he had said: ‘The
Quartets
, eh? It’s OK, but he’s a minor poet. The
major
poet is Pound.’ Next day I was reading Pound for the first time.

I also had the 1957 fascicle, exotically entitled
Section: Rock-Drill
, with the super-exotic subtitle ‘85–95
de los cantares
’. (The foreign language, whichever
one it was, seemed particularly resonant at a time when I could read scarcely a word in any language but English: a lesson, there, in the dangerous enticement of unfamiliarity.) For once devoid of
roman numerals, a third collection,
Thrones: Cantos 96–109
, had only recently been published. Along with all these
Cantos
books, and the always attendant collection of
Pound’s shorter poems,
Personae
, was my treasured copy of his big book of essays,
Make It New
; and, of course, the inevitable copy of Hugh Kenner’s commentary,
The
Poetry of Ezra Pound
. The books were stacked up around the edge of the table. In the middle of this redoubt, my notebook was open to receive the jewels as I unloaded them from the main text. I
can’t remember ever having been more excited in my life, but even at the time I spotted a difference between what I was up to and the way I had first read ‘Rhapsody on a Windy
Night’. When I was reading Eliot, I had forgotten my participation in the event of reading. Posturing inside my gun pit of Poundiana, I was in no danger of forgetting myself. In my capacity
as literary editor of the student newspaper
honi soit
, I accepted and printed long, sententious articles about Pound that I myself had written and submitted.

Finally I decided that I had been having myself on, as we say in Australia. On the ship to England I was reading late Yeats and early Auden, and my opinion of Pound was deflating fast. In London
I insanely wasted the last of my eating money on a beat-up first edition of Pound’s early prose scrapbook,
Pavannes and Divagations
, extracted from a dust pile in a Chancery Lane
second-hand bookshop, but I already knew that the thrill of his poetry was irreversibly gone, and for a subsequent half-century I held the opinion that the would-be sublime bits of his central
extravaganza were undone by the solemn insistence with which they claimed their own worth. All too often, in conversation, I scornfully quoted that supposedly many-layered line from
The Pisan
Cantos
, ‘the ant’s a centaur in his dragon world’, pointed out that not even an ant who had studied Dante would be able to attach any meaning to it, and wound up my case with
the quick assurance that all the other putatively memorable bits in The Cantos (‘ “In the gloom the gold / Gathers the light against it.” ’ etc.) had never repaid the
investment necessary to memorize them in the first place.

I was wrong about that. A lot of the ‘good’ stuff in
The Cantos
really is worth the sweat of digging it out, even if you conclude that rather less sweat went into dreaming it
up than Pound was wont to claim. But you can say that he was asking for the impossible in ever wanting the thing to be taken as a unity. At one point, late in his life, he even admitted this,
saying that he ‘could not make it cohere’. The failure was implicit in the language of the admission. In a unified work of art, the coherent vision must be at least partly present at
the launching point: the work can’t be expected to produce the whole of its own impulse. But really nobody since Hugh Kenner in his heyday, when he was the arch example of the brilliant
critic with greater communication skills than his nominal subject (if you wanted to know what Ezra Pound, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and William Carlos Williams were
really
on
about, you waited until Kenner had spoken), has seriously believed that
The Cantos
is, or are, all of a piece. In the UK, Clive Wilmer has lately been given whole pages in the
TLS
to
continue with the old-style defence of
The Cantos
, but even Wilmer would concede that a lot depends on the consciously lyrical bits – what the Victorians would have called ‘the
beauties’ – actually being beautiful. I wouldn’t want to sail in and say they aren’t. Certainly they still try. The typical deliberately gorgeous passage in
The
Cantos
is working harder to be aesthetically loaded than a room decorated by Whistler, and time has added to the effect in just the same way. Something so perfectly in period acquires the
pathos of freeze-dried evanescence.

To take a much praised example, the opening stretch of Canto XVII – a rhapsodic Arcadian evocation which will be more or less reprised many times throughout the magnum opus – is
clearly meant to be nothing except lovely, but it is everything except specific:

And more (‘And the water green clear, and blue clear’) in the same vein, or seam: more then, and much more of more or less the same thing later, again and again. At
irregular intervals, usually after a long excursus on economics and/or the pervasive evil of the international conspiracy of usurers, the vision returns, but the hope that it will snap into focus
next time is never fulfilled. Instead, there is yet another rearrangement of standard components: the effect is at its most persuasive in the long lyrical sweep of Canto XLVII, but the props look
well-worn even there, and elsewhere you are all too often reminded of how the Soviet press, as the Chinese press still does today, used to set up the leader’s clichés in ready-made
slugs of type so that his latest speech could be reported in jig time. Palaces, terraces, marble columns, clouds, green sea, rocks, sea under the rocks, rocks under the sea, columns above the
clouds, and so on for ever.

What Pound did instead of specificity was to toy with a kit of parts, each of them producing not much more than a blurred suggestion of neoclassical architecture with its edges outlined in neon,
like a Vorticist version of a painting by Alma-Tadema. Pound
said
he was specific – as his criticism reveals, bringing the thing out in all its thingness is practically the key item
among his poetic desiderata – but he said so more than he did so. If it weren’t for its quirky syntactical mounting, would the ‘first pale-clear of the heaven’ be any more
than a stock phrase for the break of day? Aren’t ‘the cities set in their hills’ just cities in the hills? And does saying ‘still’ and ‘stillness’ over and
over really make things seem still?