Today is the centenary of Philip Larkin’s birth. I’ll take the Collected Poems of the shelf later, but although that’s something I haven’t done for a while phrases, or even whole poems, of his cross my mind all the time. So many of us identify with Larkin because at his best his work combines a curmudgeonly, thwarted sense of life not being what you expected (or what was expected for you) with redeeming moments of tenderness.
I wasn’t familiar with the poem in the link below before I saw a link to journalist Rachel Cooke’s contribution to the New Statesman’s celebratory issue. I can’t put my response better than she does:
‘… a man listens to a concert on the radio knowing that the woman he quietly adores is there in the hall in person – “Your hands, tiny in all that air, applauding” – struck me then as infinitely beautiful: its aching fondness; its foreshadowing of loss; the way it balances both these things, and yet still finds, in all its sublime concision, words to convey the orchestra, the music, the audience.’,
Your Larkin thoughts please.
Like PL, i grew up in Coventry and went to Hull Uni.
Met him very briefly in the Spring of 1977 or 78, the story of which I will recount later
I went to the exhibish at the Brynmor Jones in 2017. It was in questionable taste – basically all of his stuff laid out for all to see, books, clothes, bric-a-brac like a kind of midcentury car boot sale. His glasses I found oddly moving… And he had huge trousers.
Sorry to disappoint, but contrary to myth he didn’t actually like the Beatles. They interested him as a cultural phenomenon but if you read the reviews he was fairly unimpressed by the music.
Crackin’ poet. Is that all that really matters? Yes it is. What survives of us etc
There seems to be a mini industry in his personal effects. Grayson Perry owns one of his socks. As for the trousers, it is said that Larkin was unusually well-endowed and had to have his trousers specially tailored.
He was, in his last years, surprisingly fat. Not the gangly article from the famous Monitor film.
Alan Bennett is a bit of a Larkin bore (TMFTL), but his account of the memorial service in Writing Home is quite funny.
His squareness, his professionalism and dedication as a librarian is one of my favourite things about him, strangely. The idea of the poet as some kind of Heathcliff figure, which has persisted into the modern sense of the rock star and still gives no-marks with no talent an excuse to behave like a child: he’s like a great monolith of reproach to all that bollocks. Which is funny, because he adored the Romantics and was formally heavily influenced by them. But there he is, 9 to 5, project managing the building of the Brynmor, going to librarianship conferences. A grown-up who also happened to be as great an artist as these islands have ever produced.
See also: TS Eliot, or ‘Toilets’ as he’s known to adolescent boys everywhere.
I once mentioned the anagram on Twitter and the editor of his collected letters told me that Eliot loved wordplay and smutty humour, and was delighted by it.
Alan Bennett wrote a TV play in the eighties about Kafka called The Insurance Man. As far as I remember, it portrayed Kafka as a diligent and senior employee of a large insurance firm who was good at his job and enjoyed it, and just wrote on the side.
There’s scope for a trilogy of Insurance Men, to include two others, who also had very successful careers in the industry while producing quite radical art, in Charles Ives and Wallace Stevens. How they found the time, let alone the energy, to run two more or less separate lives is beyond me.
Kenneth Horne ran Chad Valley Toys while swapping pleasantries with J Peasmould Gruntfuttock and the like.
Here’s a BBC article on that exhibition. No trousers, but a pair of women’s knickers.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-40496677
Although it’s probably his best know line, What will survive of us is love, has always seemed to me as quite, ambiguous in the context of the whole poem, particularly the preceding line: Our almost instinct almost true.
I would argue that at least as famous is the line about your parents.
Not your parents per se, David…😏
He’s one of the very greatest. I don’t see him as curmudgeonly so much as head-over-heels in love with a world that’s as difficult and frightening and sad as it is beautiful. I fell in love with him at A Level, wrote my undergrad dissertation on him, and my wonder and awe and love for his work has only grown as I’ve got older. Two decades of unpacking poetry for a living has, as with Shakespeare, only made me more awestruck.
He’s such a human writer, and I can’t think of any poet who’s as capable of drawing out the universal from the particular quite like him. He’s so funny, and so full of life and love: it’s all there, alongside the sadness.
Happy hundredth, PL.
Sexual intercourse began in 1963 (a little late for me)….
Not exactly. He enjoyed a remarkably liberated sex life, at one point managing to compartmentalise three lovers, one of whom was his secretary/PA, Betty Mackereth. She continued to supervise his complex diary until he died, well after their sexual relationship ended.
His librarian and leadership skills are often underestimated. People loved him, accepting him as he was. He inspired and motivated those who worked for him. He left every library in a much better state than when he joined. Hull’s was modernised and transformed.
He is also my favourite poet, hedgepig. Beautiful work. Do you still have your dissertation?
‘Supervise’ is one way of putting it. On his orders, she shredded the lot.
Faithful to the end.
Almost certainly don’t have the dissertation any more! 25 years and it would’ve been hard copy. Maybe it’s at the bottom of a box in my folks’ house.
It was a study of the influence jazz had on his poetry which tried to show that a love of highly emotionally expressive experimentation within strict formal structures was central to his taste in both. (He hated bop, hated free jazz: he was a Chicago and Dixie man all the way. Armstrong, Pee-Wee Russell, Beiderbecke, Jelly Roll.)
Lesh play shome hot mushic!
Jazz is how I came to meet him from time to time.
My father worked at Hull University and formed a friendship with Philip* through a shared interest in jazz. There were occasional visits for record playing evenings. Famously during one of these I came down from my room to ask them to turn the volume down. At the time I was starting work in the greenhouses at 05:00 and was therefore going to bed somewhat early. This anecdote was wheeled out on a Radio 4 programme many years ago, thankfully I wasn’t identified
There was other socialising, Philip and Monica came for a meal at least once. Most of this came about while I was at university or had left home so my knowledge is sketchy.
As far as I know @hedgepig ‘s summary of his taste in jazz is spot on. My father was a keen devotee of Duke Ellington, whom Philip wasn’t so keen on. My father always hoped that he’d warmed Philip’s tepid take on the great man.
* He was around our family enough for me to always think of him by his given name and to remember him as being good company.
A couple of years ago I chanced upon (possibly here) the following quote from a letter to his mother.
“Do not worry about the past: it is, after all, past and fades daily in our memory & in the memories of everyone else. Further, it can’t touch the future unless we let it. Every day comes to us like a newly cellophaned present, a chance for an entirely fresh start … we are silly if we do not amble easily into the sun while we can, before time elbows us into everlasting night & frost.”
Ah man, I have the proper fanboi envy now. Amazing stuff, @aardvarknever. The closest I ever got to him, given he died when I was 7, was that his bibliographer (no, not Jake Balakowsky) was an old friend of my late godfather’s, and I got to meet him (Barry, not PL) and talk Larkin when I was about 17. It was like talking to god from the next room along. I’ll never forget it.
As promised – from a book I wrote a few years back. Stuff about Kenya at the front and rear is for context
Although I didn’t know it at the time, Kenya proved to be the final destination in my globe-trotting career. For the lazy travel writer, there are always quick soundbites (‘Where East meets West!’) that can be used to sum somewhere up for their even more lethargic readership. In Kenya, that soundbite would read something along the lines of ‘where corruption meets chaos’.
If unchecked venality ever became an Olympic sport, Kenya’s politicians would run rings around their rivals as silkily as its athletes routinely do in each Games’ 3,000 metres Steeplechase. The reason why they were allowed to get away with theft on such a grand scale? Hardly anybody in the country could be bothered to lift a finger to try and stop them.
When I started studying at Hull Uni in October 1975, I was just in time to catch the fag-end of the 1960s protest movement. As such, I was always amongst the first to man the barricades on almost any political act open to me during what was a febrile time for debate.
Wearying of the usual cast of faux radicals during one occupation of the University Admin block in the summer of 1977, I and a friend called ‘Malcolm Fine’ went outside for a crafty spliff. While we were talking, Malcolm, who helped edit the student newspaper, was approached by an anonymous-looking but unfailingly polite gentleman.
The self-effacing chap turned out to be none other than Philip Larkin.
Despite his apparently being a real stud muffin with as many as three ‘lady friends’ on the go at around this time, the poetic champion was refreshingly free of airs and/or graces. Years later, I read an interview in which Mr. L was asked why he didn’t embark upon reading tours as had his equally lauded if arguably more ‘glamorous’ fellow poet Ted Hughes. A quizzical look on his face, big Phil had replied, ‘But why would anyone want to pay to see me pretending to be myself for a couple of hours?’
Right now, Mr. ‘they fuck you up, your mum and dad’ was primarily concerned that the sit-in Malcolm and I had abandoned might spread to Hull’s impressive university library, which he then ran. After reassuring him this was unlikely to happen, Malcolm kindly introduced me and told the perpetually harried-looking Mr. L that, like him, I had moved to Hull from Coventry. I’d love to be say we spent ages shooting the shit about the fortunes of our shared and now terminally declining hometown and its football team, but he didn’t seem remotely so inclined.
Our offer of a toke of the spliff politely refused, Mr. L did, however, take time to subvert his image of having no time for undergraduates. Graciousness itself, he kindly took a few minutes to talk to us about poetry. As he hadn’t published anything for quite some time, I took my life in my hands and asked him if he still wrote. He replied rather mournfully that his only waking thought as he grew older was his own imminent death.
Eight years later, when I was in Bahrain, the writer of the immortal lines ‘All that survives of us is love’ finally succumbed to cancer at the age of just 63.
One of the obituaries of his death I read mentioned Aubade, the last major poem he apparently ever wrote. True to his word to Martin and I all those years before, it was all about waking up in the morning and thinking about what little time was left to him. Looking back more than 40 years and realising that I am now the same age as Larkin was when he died , I can honestly say I know just how he felt.
Being young and therefore bulletproof, death was understandably the last thing on the minds of the students at Nairobi University when they took to the streets in June 2000. Regrettably, while the whole country was drowning in a sea of sleaze, corruption was equally low down on their lengthy list of real and imagined injustices.
The extent of Kenya’s leaders’ dishonesty and greed in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s was – and still is – the stuff of legend. Take the poorly paved road outside a client’s office locals laughingly called the ‘Superhighway to Shit Creek’. The ‘link’ had cost some well-meaning NGO millions of US dollars in grants and yet was full of Sea of Tranquillity-sized potholes and petered out after a couple of hundred yards. Like the shell-shocked victims who’d spent the last 22 years being steam-rollered into submission by Daniel Arap Moi (a.k.a. ‘’Nyayo’, or ‘Footsteps’), this particular road was going nowhere.
And what were the students who were being filtered into the fast lane to a brighter future on this truncated thoroughfare doing to right this particular wrong? In the Paris of 1968, pausing only to write witty despatches such as ‘Underneath the tarmac, the beach’, they’d have been tearing up the paving stones to erect barricades, or throw at their hated capitalist oppressors.
In the Kenya of the first year of the 21st century, the students’ concerns were a little less vague and a whole lot more pressing. They’d downed pens and taken to the streets because the TV in one of their dorms had packed up ahead of that night’s live match from Euro 2000.
A few months ago, the book circle of which Kaisfatdad and I are members read Larkin’s second and final novel, “A Girl in Winter” (1947). We liked it a lot. If you’re only familiar with PL’s poetry, I can certainly recommend this novel, too.
I am a huge fan. I wrote this a while back.
The Collected Haikus of Philip Larkin
The church seemed empty.
Bit of a dump, took off clips.
Shrugged, then biked it home.
*
Brides from Hull to Leeds.
They’ll have kids and fuck them up
like my lot. Yours too.
*
Marie all tied up
in a brown bag from Soho.
Slowly unstapled.
*
Neighbour’s baby screams
so told to turn Bechet down.
Now we both suffer.
*
Poetry has gone.
Deserted me for Ted Hughes.
Yes, Ted fucking Hughes!
*
Silent libraries
are havens where I hide from
the burden of verse.
*
New jazz to slag off.
Nine hundred words. Typing ‘shit’
‘till the ribbon snaps.
*
Entered suburbia
and bought a new mower. Feed
lost hedgehog with scraps.
*
Letter from Kingsley
saying Thatcher has his vote.
She’ll kick them all out.
*
Poor hedgehog is dead.
Minced by the Qualcast. Blood and
grass rinsed from the blades.
*
Throat cancer they said.
Doctor tight-lipped as life went
on. Seagulls whooping.
*
Will there be statues?
Bored kids memorizing lines
whilst cursing my bones?
*
Told nurse I was bound
for the inevitable.
Think she was Polish.
*
A name on a grave
is, ultimately, all that
will survive of us.
Brilliant!
My only quibble is the ‘z’.
Good point. Larkin would have hated that.
He would have hated the Hull toads, that’s for sure
They are superb haikus, though. I particularly like the ‘shit’ one. And the Ted Hughes one. Great work!
Agreed, they are genuinely brilliant, eddie. The first two save a lot of time having to read the actual poems.
I don’t agree. The -ize spelling is older than -ise and in Larkin’s day was the house style of Faber. From the first edition of High Windows, for example: ‘One no longer cicatrized…’
And in my day was the house style of Jonathan Cape.
Only ‘One Year Out’ replying to this – if you’re a fan of Larkin, my wife Lyn produces a podcast dedicated to him called Tiny In All That Air – the Philip Larkin Society podcast.
I love Larkin.
I live in Earlsdon Coventry. He would have walked or cycled past my home hundreds of times in the 1930s.
There’s a lovely little book called Larkin About in Coventry by Chris Arnott, a near neighbour of mine. I am an occasional walk leader for the Earlsdon Walk on Thursday mornings. I’m currently preparing a Larkin themed walk for this autumn.