John Bayley

Most novels, if they come off, are orgies of self-congratulation, shared between the writer and the reader, who unconsciously understand both what is going on and what is needed. To enjoy a novel is by extension to enjoy oneself, and novelists in their various ways accommodate the process. Although the rules are always changing, both sides know the game. And as the form becomes more self-conscious, the writer – Henry James is the obvious example – indicates both inside and outside his novel how the reader will divide the work with him and share the spoils. In this partnership we become lucid and wise. Even the most unlikely circumstances are arranged for our self-satisfaction.

Why is Larkin so different from other poets of today? The naive question is not easy to answer, although every appreciative critic and lover of poetry has his own solution, and his own diagnosis of Larkin’s virtues. Long ago the Poet Laureate referred to him as ‘the John Clare of the building estates’, a decidedly quaint though no doubt a heartfelt compliment, in line with Eric Homberger’s later summing-up of Larkin as ‘the saddest heart in the post-war supermarket’, or the more magisterial pronouncement that his poetry is ‘representative of the modern English condition: a poetry of lowered sights and diminishing expectations’. These judgments suggest his glum accuracy about places and emotions – particularly his own – an unillusioned accuracy beautifully, and in a very English way, satisfying both the poet and ourselves with what another critic has called ‘a central dread of satisfaction’. As Larkin has himself wryly remarked: ‘Deprivation for me is what daffodils were for Wordsworth.’ What is perfect as a poem is what is imperfect in life.–

‘New’ poetry can mean two things. When Ezra Pound said ‘make it new’ he was willing the advent of Modernism, the birth of a consciousness transformed by the disintegrations and realities of the 20th century. But ‘new’ or ‘contemporary’ poetry refers more simply to changes in fashion, the growing up of new groups of designers and a new generation of consumers. Like film images or pop songs, the new in this sense is recognisably different from the poetry scene a generation ago, but how much has happened except that times have changed and required something else to be characteristic of them?

The flowering of European Jewry in the days before 1914 is a cultural phenomenon comparable to the ‘golden’ periods of national art in Spain, France and England, even to the great years of the Italian Renaissance. Like other such peaks of civilisation, it might have faded of its own accord had it not been brought to a tragic end by the xenophobia engendered by two world wars, by Nazism and Soviet Fascism. It was, above all, cosmopolitan. Not for nothing (a favourite phrase of Russian critics) did Mandelstam observe that Acmeism, the literary movement which he helped to found in 1910 in St Petersburg, took as the inspiration for its poetry the whole European cultural tradition.