Vol. 10 No. 18 · 13 October 1988
pages 3-5 | 2557 words
Phil the Lark
Ian Hamilton
- Collected Poems by Philip Larkin, edited by Anthony Thwaite
Faber/Marvell Press, 330 pp, £16.95, October 1988, ISBN 0 571 15196 5
Philip Larkin, we are told, left instructions in his will that certain of his writings had to be destroyed, unread. His executors obeyed: the word is that several of the poet’s notebooks, or journals, are now ashes. Did Larkin expect to be so obeyed? Or did he imagine that perhaps someone, somehow, might take a peek at the material before it reached the flames? And if such a thought did cross his mind, why didn’t he destroy the stuff himself? He must have known that, by not doing so, he was bequeathing at least the possibility of a dilemma. But then some of his most moving poems contrive a subtle, unsettlable dispute between revelation and concealment. There is a wanting-to-be-known that can desolate or undermine our self-sufficiency.
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Letters
Vol. 10 No. 22 · 8 December 1988
From Graham Martin
Ian Hamilton’s admirable review of the Collected Larkin (13 October) was nevertheless surprising in its outright praise of ‘Aubade’. To poems about mortality every bosom of course returns a prompt echo, but mine also retorts that life offers more pressing, and indeed more reasonable fears:
wreck of body,
Slow decay of blood,
Testy delirium
Or dull decrepitude …
The death of friends, or death
Of every brilliant eye
That made a catch in breath.
To which Yeatsian list we have to add: starvation, imprisonment, torture, perhaps not likely in this country (yet), but happening as I write in so many others.
Yeats in different mood praised ‘such men as come/Proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb’, Larkin’s view of which can be imagined. Perhaps ‘Aubade’ has this dimly in mind? ‘Courage is no good’ etc. But the problem isn’t death, but life, and we never really find out what frightened Larkin about that, though some poems touch the nerve and flinch away. ‘Aubade’ articulates this central bafflement and refusal, the source of Larkin’s inability to break beyond self into an inhabited world. ‘Such attics cleared of me! Such absences!’: this is generous and memorable, except that absences is what they are not. That Larkin knew this needs no arguing, nor unhappily does the fact that, as poet, such knowledge seems to have been all too rarely available to him.
Graham Martin
Open University, Milton Keynes
