Vol. 4 No. 20 · 4 November 1982
pages 6-9 | 9617 words
Larkin and Us
Barbara Everett
- Larkin at Sixty edited by Anthony Thwaite
Faber, 148 pp, £7.95, May 1982, ISBN 0 571 11878 X
- The Art of Philip Larkin by Simon Petch
Sydney University Press, 108 pp, £5.95, September 1982, ISBN 0 424 00090 3
‘What days for?’ asks a poem in The Whitsun Weddings. It’s a good opening line, with that abruptness and immediacy most Larkin openings have. And it’s a good question, making it plain – among other things – that living is not really what poems do: they only chart the results of asking questions like these, bringing
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Letters
Vol. 5 No. 3 · 17 February 1983
From Bernard Richards
SIR: Barbara Everett’s sense of discrimination seems to desert her for a moment in ‘Larkin and Us’ (LRB, Vol. 4, No 20). She says that ‘there seems little difference in the images’ provided by Beckett in ‘a play in which the characters sit in dustbins’ and the Larkin ‘characters in long coats deep in the litter-baskets’ of ‘Toads Revisited’. But surely these images are light years apart. The Beckett image could only belong to some surrealist nightmare; the Larkin characters have their feet firmly on the ground (surely Barbara Everett doesn’t think they have climbed into the receptacles) and are grubbing about in the refuse in a way that connects them to our world. Not quite to say they are ‘one of us’, but we could become one of them – if our luck ran out.
Bernard Richards
Brasenose College, Oxford
