Six Poets (20 page)

Coming up England by a different line

For once, early in the cold new year,

We stopped, and, watching men with number-plates

Sprint down the platform to familiar gates,

‘Why, Coventry!' I exclaimed. ‘I was born here.'

I leant far out, and squinnied for a sign

That this was still the town that had been ‘mine'

So long, but found I wasn't even clear

Which side was which. From where those cycle-crates

Were standing, had we annually departed

For all those family hols? … A whistle went:

Things moved. I sat back, staring at my boots.

‘Was that,' my friend smiled, ‘where you “have your roots”?'

No, only where my childhood was unspent,

I wanted to retort, just where I started:

By now I've got the whole place clearly charted.

Our garden, first: where I did not invent

Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits,

And wasn't spoken to by an old hat.

And here we have that splendid family

I never ran to when I got depressed,

The boys all biceps and the girls all chest,

Their comic Ford, their farm where I could be

‘Really myself'. I'll show you, come to that,

The bracken where I never trembling sat,

Determined to go through with it; where she

Lay back, and ‘all became a burning mist'.

And, in those offices, my doggerel

Was not set up in blunt ten-point, nor read

By a distinguished cousin of the mayor,

Who didn't call and tell my father
There

Before us, had we the gift to see ahead –

‘You look as if you wished the place in Hell,'

My friend said, ‘judging from your face.' ‘Oh well,

I suppose it's not the place's fault,' I said.

‘Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.'

Larkin is famous for his fear of death. He's also famous for his fear of life. When I first read Larkin, it wasn't the fear of extinction that rang a bell; I was still young enough to think that bells like that only tolled for other people. It was recognition of a different sort, familiarity not so much with the feelings he was talking about as with the places. And the sense that, most of the time to most people, nothing much happens. Life is elsewhere. There were the provinces for a start, where nothing ever happened; libraries, where I'd spent half my life; churches, where I'd spent the other. Until I read Larkin – and in particular ‘I Remember, I Remember' – I'd never imagined such experiences, or non-experiences, could be the stuff of poetry, still less the credentials for writing, or that anybody could write, not about the something but the nothing that happens anywhere.

When he first started writing poetry, before he learned the sound of his own voice, Larkin wrote like Auden. Then, when he got to university, it was Yeats. Finally, he discovered Hardy, whom he liked, he said, because he taught him that he didn't have to ‘jack himself up' into poetry. It could be ordinary and about ordinary things, which suited him.

His childhood he characterised as ‘a forgotten boredom'. His father was the city treasurer of Coventry and they don't seem to have got on.

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.

But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern,

And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don't have any kids yourself.

This poem seems to show that Larkin didn't get on with his parents but, as he said in an interview, he did get on with them; it was just that they weren't very good at being happy. The poem, which certainly doesn't jack itself up, echoes a short one of Hardy's.

I'm Smith of Stoke, aged sixty-odd,

I've lived without a dame

From youth-time on; and would to God

My dad had done the same.

Even if Larkin hadn't got on with his parents, I still think he was wrong to complain about it. If your parents do fuck you up and you're going to write, that's fine because then you've got something to write about. But if they don't fuck you up, then you've got nothing to write about, so then they've fucked you up good and proper.

The problem arises in the first instance because we think of novels as something made up but poems as messages from the heart. Larkin must be telling the truth about himself because that's what poems do – just as, in Housman's case, his poems were flags of distress, an SOS from the soul. But a poet can counterfeit. He can put on a personality and impersonate just as a novelist can. And the ‘I' that writes is never quite the same as the ‘I' written. Kingsley Amis, who knew Larkin well, says that some of Larkin's poems were by
the man he knew, but others were by someone else entirely. The ‘I' is always the eye. It is not always
I
.

This next poem was possibly occasioned by the marriage of an ex-girlfriend; it's certainly very different from the last one.

Marrying left your maiden name disused.

Its five light sounds no longer mean your face,

Your voice, and all your variants of grace;

For since you were so thankfully confused

By law with someone else, you cannot be

Semantically the same as that young beauty:

It was of her that these two words were used.

Now it's a phrase applicable to no one,

Lying just where you left it, scattered through

Old lists, old programmes, a school prize or two,

Packets of letters tied with tartan ribbon –

Then is it scentless, weightless, strengthless, wholly

Untruthful? Try whispering it slowly.

No, it means you. Or, since you're past and gone,

It means what we feel now about you then:

How beautiful you were, and near, and young,

So vivid, you might still be there among

Those first few days, unfingermarked again.

So your old name shelters our faithfulness,

Instead of losing shape and meaning less

With your depreciating luggage laden.

Larkin went to Oxford at the start of the war, then became a librarian, working in various places before landing up at Hull University, where he remained for the rest of his life as librarian of the Brynmor Jones Library. The library had been endowed by Sir Brynmor Jones, who once came there on a visit. Meeting him in the library, Larkin said, was like being in St Pancras Station and coming across St Pancras.

The library was to Larkin as textual criticism was to Housman: something at which he excelled but which made no demands on his other life. But he cared about it.

New eyes each year

Find old books here,

And new books, too,

Old eyes renew;

So youth and age

Like ink and page

In this house join,

Minting new coin.

This next poem is about a return visit to Oxford, and in the background, as so often in Larkin (and Hardy), is the railway.

‘Dockery was junior to you,

Wasn't he?' said the Dean. ‘His son's here now.'

Death-suited, visitant, I nod. ‘And do

You keep in touch with –' Or remember how

Black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight

We used to stand before that desk, to give

‘Our version' of ‘these incidents last night'?

I try the door of where I used to live:

Locked. The lawn spreads dazzlingly wide.

A known bell chimes. I catch my train, ignored.

Canal and clouds and colleges subside

Slowly from view. But Dockery, good Lord,

Anyone up today must have been born

In '43, when I was twenty-one.

If he was younger, did he get this son

At nineteen, twenty? Was he that withdrawn