Letters
Vol. 15 No. 8 · 22 April 1993
From Pat Rogers
Alan Bennett’s remarkable appraisal of Philip Larkin (LRB, 25 March), touching, funny and just as it is, may perhaps bear one small qualification. Bennett writes: ‘That Hull was the back of beyond in the Fifties wasn’t simply a London opinion; it prevailed in Hull itself.’ He cites his own experience at an interview for a university job in 1959, and quotes the professor’s opening comments in support of the view that ‘a slow and stopping train southwards was some kind of lifeline.’ This may have been true of those who arrived from London, or Oxbridge. It wasn’t always the case with natives or with people who had come from regular England, or further afield. I could have introduced Bennett to plenty of people at that date, varied in age, gender and class, who had no such hankering for the slow train. Around 1959 I played in a soccer team where only three of us had ever been to London.
Larkin, of course, had reached Hull via Wellington, Leicester and Belfast. It’s not altogether news that he did harbour urges for public recognition which could not be satisfied on Humberside. But he may have come to realise that something, like nothing, can happen anywhere – in Hull as in Coventry; and one suspects that the myth of the Hermit of Hull relies on the metropolitan assumption that anyone who lives in Hull is ipso facto not quite inhabiting the real world.
For all Bennett’s wonderful human insight, and his enduring Yorkshire connections, he may not be the best equipped to deal with these facts. And, if I can say it without rudeness, the best place may not be the LRB, whose Scotland year by year turns out to consist almost wholly of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and whose awareness of normal England (the Wellington which is now Telford; Hitchin; Gainsborough; Bournemouth; Rugeley; Chelmsford, Redditch, and so on) is not always as sharp as it could be.
Pat Rogers
De Bartolo Chair in the Liberal Arts
From Joan Anholt
Alan Bennett’s review of Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life by Andrew Motion takes the line of sympathy with the biographer, appreciation of the poet and – in the main – disgust or hostility towards the man. This, I imagine, will be the general reaction.
There are, however, two relationships with women which Bennett omits to analyse, and which for me stand out in the Selected Letters, throwing different lights on this complex and not altogether despicable character. The first is the friendship and, for three years, ‘passionate but intermittent affair’, as Anthony Thwaite puts it, with Patsy, the charming Roedean and Somerville-educated wife (at that time) of the second Baron Strang. Larkin, after a clandestine weekend with Patsy, refers to ‘that shadowy and furtive land we inhabit together’, and addresses her variously by a plethora of Times Valentine Day sobriquets: ‘white bear’, ‘sugarbush’, ‘valuable honey-bird’, ‘fabulous giraffe’, ‘exquisite political prisoner’. One letter from Mallaig is started in a snatched moment ‘while Monica is still dressing’. Here the crabby, misanthropic, self-pitying poet appears in the guise of a playful, infatuated, adulterous young lover. (Four days later he was addressing Winifred Arnott as ‘delicious Winifred’ and ending: ‘with you in spirit always – the breeze hot on your neck, the bramble catching your skirt’.) The other important but purely Platonic – and, for a long time, only epistolary – friendship that Bennett does not mention was that with Barbara Pym, whose work he genuinely admired (as much as he hated Iris Murdoch’s), and for whom he had a quite disinterested affection.
One must finally agree with Bennett’s opinion that the poems, ‘without which there would be no biography’, remain undamaged by the exposure of the life, just as those of Hardy and Auden do – and that this is a fair and patient account of that life. Larkin the kindly professional (another aspect of the man) wrote to a would-be woman poet of his acquaintance, ‘a poem is usually a highly professional thing, a verbal device designed to reproduce a thought or emotion indefinitely; it should have no dead parts, and every word should be completely unchangeable and immovable.’ That was the voice of the true artist.
Joan Anholt
Lyme Regis, Dorset
Vol. 15 No. 9 · 13 May 1993
From John Saville
I was a colleague of Philip Larkin for thirty years, from the day he arrived in Hull until he died in 1985. We were friends, although not very close. We never, for instance, ate in each other’s house, partly because my wife did not particularly like him, but more because outside our professional interests in library matters, and excluding traditional jazz and poetry, we had little in common. Until 1956 I was an active member of the Communist Party and since that date I have remained an open and committed socialist within the Marxist tradition. My especial concern for library affairs pre-dated Larkin’s arrival, and it continued throughout the Sixties and Seventies when I was among his most consistent supporters: on the campus in general, and for many years on the University Library Committee.
My closest link with him was through the development of the labour Archive. In the early Sixties, I had taken on the job of editor of a projected Dictionary of Labour Biography, and it was in the course of work on the Dictionary that I began to come across collections of papers of labour and socialist activists, and of their organisations, that needed a home and proper archival attention. At the time the University Library had only a few manuscript collections, and Larkin – whose politics were well-known – was from the beginning warmly supportive of what later, on one occasion when we were lunching together, he described as my ‘subversive’ archive. He was consistently helpful and encouraging. He financed from Library funds visits to view possible acquisitions; he never disputed the fees which sometimes were required, the negotiations for which he left to me; and it was mainly for the Labour Archive that he first engaged Norman Higson on a part-time basis.
One of my main objections to Andrew Motion’s biography (LRB, 25 March) – I have a quite large number of less important criticisms of fact and interpretation – is the misshapen and unbalanced structure of his volume. Larkin was a professional librarian. He spent more of his waking hours for thirty years on Library affairs than on any other work. He took his duties seriously, as Motion shows in the discussion of Larkin’s role in the plans for the extension of the Library; but while Motion can point to this page or that on Larkin’s professional career, the effect is disjointed and incomplete, and he fails to do justice to Larkin’s deep commitment to his professional duties. Over the years Larkin assembled a highly competent staff who almost without exception both liked him and respected him. As did his academic colleagues outside the Library. The record of libraries in British universities in the post-war decades is by no means a story of successful endeavour or of strenuous academic pressure to improve facilities. At the University of Hull Larkin developed a much superior library than was to be found in most institutions of comparable size, and it was a considerable achievement.
‘He was a selfish man much given to showing love and kindness.’ So Motion writes in the Introduction, but apart from the extraordinary efforts Larkin made on behalf of Barbara Pym, there is little evidence of Larkin’s kindness in this biography. Yet there are many examples that could, and should, have been recorded. Motion has allowed himself to be overwhelmed by his discoveries of Larkin’s private life; and much else has been missed. I suppose this is how Eng. Lit. approach their subject these days.
I find the sentiments expressed in the published letters which Thwaite selected deplorable, and I regret the attitude they represented. This is a Larkin I did not know but I cannot say that I was very surprised at what was revealed. The 20th century has been full of revelations of the contradictions and the paradoxes of the public and the private. I never thought Larkin was more than a very interesting minor poet whose work I much enjoyed. The Larkin I knew for thirty years was always polite and courteous, well-informed about the University, sometimes very funny, and consistently committed to the Library. He made a major intellectual contribution to the University of Hull, and I had great respect for him. For the Larkin I knew I do not propose to withdraw that respect.
John Saville
The University, Hull
From George Houston
Pat Rogers’s reference to the train to Hull (Letters, 22 April) reminds me of an academic colleague who, while a lecturer at Leeds, applied for and was appointed to a post at Aberdeen University. On hearing this, a friend and lecturer at Hull University expressed astonishment. ‘Aberdeen! But it’s so far away from everywhere.’ The reply might have even occurred to Alan Bennett. ‘But it’s not far from Aberdeen.’ Strachur, by the way, is only 55 miles from Glasgow.
George Houston
Strachur Argyll
Vol. 15 No. 10 · 27 May 1993
From Paul Seabright
Alan Bennett’s piece on Philip Larkin (LRB, 25 March) was so subtle about the impact of the art on the life (and especially Larkin’s tendency to use his ‘fall-back position as Great Poet’ as a let-out for banal everyday selfishness) that it was a surprise to see Bennett approach the question of the impact our knowledge of the life should have on our reaction to the art by citing Auden: ‘Time … will pardon Paul Claudel, Pardons him for writing well.’ The surprise is partly that forgiveness or otherwise doesn’t seem to be the issue in appraising the work, unless you think the poetry’s literary merits rest on its claim to be a peculiarly authentic piece of moral reportage, which implausibly grants to poetry as poetry a degree of innocence we have long since ceased to ascribe to prose auto-biography. (Then again, Bennett remarks that one of Larkin’s comments on his childhood ‘comes from a poem not an interview, so Larkin is telling the truth rather than the facts’, so perhaps he does believe poetry to be this innocent.) But even if forgiveness is somehow complicatedly in question, Auden’s authority is particularly suspect here, the more so since by ‘writing well’ he seeks to sidestep the most obvious objections to a quite untenable doctrine. Auden in his epitaph on Yeats resembles nothing so much as an ambitious cardinal, scheming to engineer the canonisation of a predecessor in the hope that a generation of similarly ambitious cardinals will do the same for him. In its religious form, the Great Immortality Scam nowadays attracts fewer subscriptions from intellectuals than it used to, but its secular version is alive and flourishing like the pyramid-selling operation which in more ways than one it really is. It’s not often suggested of top models, for instance, that Time will pardon them for looking beautiful, but then it’s writers and not models who set themselves up to do the pardoning. Pace Auden, it’s not Time that is ‘indifferent in a week To a beautiful physique’, but the community of writers, who naturally think writing skill and not physique should determine the distribution of forgiveness. Like the selling of indulgences, this comes to seem like quackery rather than monstrous injustice as soon as one ceases to subscribe to the metaphysics behind it.
Paul Seabright
Université des Sciences Sociales,
From Neville Smith
I must disagree with your correspondent Pat Rogers (Letters, 22 April). Alan Bennett had it spot on. Hull was the back of beyond in the Fifties and with its present timetable and pricing policies British Rail seems bent on making it that way in the Nineties. I was welcomed to Hull in 1958 (never having been more than ten miles from Liverpool in my 18 years) with the words ‘Welcome to Nowhere. Next Stop the Sea.’ This was said by a chap from Goldthorpe, wherever that was. It was also a view shared by the natives I came to know and who became my friends. It wasn’t the slow train to London that was a lifeline, it was the train to Leeds, the nearest city with some life.
What was there in Hull? Well, on Friday nights there was the Windsor Hall Jazz Club with the 2.19 Jazz Band with Lew Lewis (later, novelist Ted Lewis) on piano, and on Saturday nights there was the Students’ Union dance with the 2.19 Jazz Band and er … that was it. Perhaps Pat Rogers remembers the great excitement of 1959 (not the polio epidemic) but the opening of the Hoi Sun, Hull’s first Chinese restaurant, or maybe he was playing football at the time and missed the shock of the new?
I’m glad my old teacher John Saville (Letters, 13 April) has good things to say about Philip Larkin. Not only was he a great librarian, I know for a fact that he did many quiet kindnesses for people. Unfortunately, my contemporaries and I never knew that person. I only knew the old baldy at the issue desk, when I brought in an overdue book, telling me that there was a waiting list for it and staring through me when I pointed out that it had last been taken out seven years before. I remember the miserable bugger sitting next to me on a six-hour bus trip to Leeds organised by the Jazz Society to hear Duke Ellington, and never saying a word. I remember the curt sod’s reply to the Jazz Society’s invitation to speak: ‘Jazz died with Paul Whiteman.’ And his reply to me when I asked if he’d like to read my series of articles called ‘All What Jazz’ in the Hull University Socialist Journal Left – ‘I shouldn’t think so.’
My last encounter with the librarian occurred outside the university at the bus stop waiting for the 24. It began to rain stair-rods. Larkin put up his umbrella. Seeking shelter, and being much smaller. I edged towards him. There were only the two of us there. He looked at me. I smiled and said: ‘I did enjoy The North Ship.’ He stared down at me and said: ‘If you think you’re sharing my umbrella you’ve got another think coming.’ And with that he pressed the catch on his umbrella so that it folded down closer around his head.
At Hull, if asked about our poet, we would have instantly thought of Buddy Holly look-alike Roger McGough and his readings at the Catholic Society. If asked about our famous writer, we would have instantly, and proudly, mentioned Richard Hoggart. Being in Adult Education, he was off-campus and thus rarely seen.
I wish I had known John Saville’s Larkin and I wish the poet’s diaries had not been shredded. I have heard, from one who caught a glimpse of them, that there was a very shameful reference in them. Apparently Larkin used to sneak into Boothferry Park, his black-and-yellow hiding his face, and records this in a draft of a poem called ‘Long Tigers Days’ which begins ‘They fuck you up this football team …’
Talking of football, your reviewer Ian Hamilton (LRB, 22 April) clearly belongs in the Southern Softie Supporters’ Club. ‘Indignations in soccer,’ he writes, ‘are short-lived: they have to be.’ What is this? Part of being a fan is about long-held indignations. My longest-held indignation is about an Everton v. Bolton game in 1953 and I’m still pretty unhappy about the result of Bill Nicholson’s first game in charge of Spurs. Hamilton, being a Spurs fan, has no need to remind me of the score. Secondly, ‘to love Gascoigne, you have to love football.’ Well, to love Gascoigne, you have to love tricky alehouse footballers.
Neville Smith
London W14
Vol. 15 No. 13 · 8 July 1993
From Tim Trengove-Jones
It is a pity that the current Larkin controversy should, in your columns, have degenerated to the level of fond reminiscence and affectionate anecdote (Letters, 22 April and 13 May). Apologia conducted on such a plane is unequal to the challenge posed by Larkin’s work and disappointing as responses to Alan Bennett’s troubled piece (25 March) and John Bayley’s spirited after-piece (22 April). For, surely, it is not a question of whether Larkin was a great librarian or ‘a very interesting minor poet’ (his competence as librarian has never been at issue, and the calculus defining him as ‘minor’ has never been articulated).
John Bayley praises the poet for being ‘shamelessly himself’ and for ‘not bringing anything in from outside when he wrote’. But Larkin’s meaning and value, even in Professor Bayley’s latest account, are established precisely through their being antithetically inscribed against views of literary production (poetic impersonality, the death of the author) which constituted the very context out of which Larkin wrote and which he was used – and is still used by Professor Bayley – to combat. Arguably, had he not, for example, been so self-consciously after Eliot, he would never have been heard of. Furthermore, specific Larkin poems only take their meaning from their negotiation with something ‘outside’. And to say that Larkin, ‘like his hero Lawrence, was shamelessly himself’, overlooks the crucial, traumatised element of self-disgust and self-doubt in Larkin, as well as eliding (as Professor Bayley’s argument requires) the very great struggle Larkin waged with Lawrence as agon. And, finally, to claim that in Larkin we find ‘language transforming the place of horror, the place of boredom’, is to be quite untrue to Larkin’s principled agnosticism about the power of poetic language to be in celebration, quite untrue to the unremitting irony and heroic negativity to which Larkin submitted art’s highest claims.
If Larkin matters as ‘the poet of personality’, we need to ask why this is. And if he is indeed the hero of an embattled individualism, we must be sure not to gloss over the evidence of quite what a difficult, dismal and finally botched career this alleged humanist had of it. And, finally, we need to interrogate rather more closely the possibility of separating the singularity of the personality from the authentic weight of the artistic achievement, and to acknowledge fully the role of institutional practices in any such critical achievement. Because Larkin ‘despised English departments’, Professor Bayley tells us, ‘they do not forgive him’. Most of Larkin’s longtime admirers have remained loyal, and many, like Professor Bayley, have been or are in English departments. As though wishing to minimise the role of institutions, and certainly advancing his claims for individualism one step further, Professor Bayley concludes by claiming that ‘everyone has their own Larkin.’ But the voice of authority immediately contradicts this apparent pluralism: ‘Andrew Motion[’s] good intentions seem to speak from beyond too great a gap in culture and time.’ The tone of the centre still claims for itself and for Larkin the last – and better – word.
Tim Trengove-Jones
University of the Witwatersrand
