Authors: Clive James
Larkin often said he wrote poetry out of an impulse to preserve. Unfortunately all who knew him seem to have contracted that same impulse: there is no souvenir they want to forget. The process
began when Anthony Thwaite put together a posthumous
Collected Poems
which included all the poems Larkin had so carefully left out of his individual volumes. It was an impressive editorial
feat, but the general effect was to blur the universal secret of Larkin’s lyricism by putting his personal secrets on display.
The
Letters
continued the process, revealing how thoroughly Larkin could indulge in racism, sexism and all the other isms when he was trying to shock his unshockable friends. To anyone
who knew him, or just knew of him, it was obvious that he was talking that way merely to vent his inner demons: in his public persona he was the soul of courtesy, and until his sad last phase, when
his
timor mortis
got the better of him, it was impossible to imagine his being rude or unfair to anyone of any colour, sex or political persuasion.
But to know him is getting harder all the time. Too much information is piling up between the public and the essential man. Andrew Motion has done a meticulous job with this biography but its
inevitable effect must be to make the selfless dedication of its hero’s work seem self-seeking beyond redemption. Already it is almost too late to point out, for example, that if Larkin made
racist remarks in order to be outrageous, then he was no racist. A racist makes racist remarks because he thinks they are true.
Having to argue like this means that the game is lost. No young reader will ever again read Larkin’s great tribute to the black jazz musician Sidney Bechet (‘On me your voice falls
as they say love should/ Like an enormous yes’) and respond to it with the pure admiration it deserves, since it so exactly registers the equally pure admiration Larkin felt for one of the
great men in his life. The most that over-informed new young readers will be able to feel is that the old racist had his decent moments. The possibility will be gone to appreciate that Larkin was a
fundamentally decent man; that in his poems he generously shaped and transcended his personal despair to celebrate life on our behalf; and that if he expressed himself unscrupulously in private it
was his only respite from the hard labour of expressing himself scrupulously in public.
Still, it is always good to know more, as long as we don’t end up knowing less. Here are the details to prove that the picture Larkin painted of himself as a perennial loser didn’t
necessarily match the way he seemed, even if it was a precise transcription of how he felt. He came up to Oxford as a shy boy with a stammer but to his fellow undergraduates he was an attractive
figure, the kind of wit who makes his friends feel witty too. To the end of his life there were always people eager to crowd around him if he would only let them. Until almost the very end, Larkin
was careful not to let them waste his time. He chose his loneliness. Like his diffidence, it was a wish fulfilment, at odds with the facts.
As a librarian he was a success from the start, rising with each move until, as the guiding light of the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull, he was one of the chief adornments of
his profession. Since tact, judgement and self-confidence were necessary at each step, his picture of himself as a ditherer isn’t to be trusted. The rabid reactionary turns out to be an
equally misleading exercise in self-advertisement. It was on Larkin’s instructions that the Brynmor Jones Library built up its Labour Archive, with the Fabian Society Library as chief
treasure; now why should a rabid reactionary have done that? Well, one of the answers must surely be that if he felt that way, and even if he talked that way, he didn’t actually
act
that way.
It would certainly help if this possibility could be kept in mind when it comes to the question of women – the only question that really matters to the lifestyle press, whose reporters are
currently having a marvellous time patronizing Larkin as a lonely, furtive, perverted misogynist utterly unlike themselves. The old women who went as young girls to borrow books from his first
library remember him well for his impeccable manners and helpfulness. His first mistress, Ruth Bowman, wrote: ‘I’m very proud of you, dear Philip, and I love you very much. The fact
that you like me and have made love to me is the greatest source of pride and happiness in my life.’ Fifty years later she still remembered him as ‘relaxed and cheerful, entertaining
and considerate’. At a guess, it was his entertainment value that drew his women in, and his manifest stature as a great artist that kept them loyal through thick and thin.
Admittedly the thin could be very thin. There weren’t
that
many mistresses, but he formed the habit of keeping several on a string at once, so that a few would have looked like a
lot if he had wanted to present himself as the Warren Beatty of the literary world. Instead, through his poems and every other available means of communication, he complained endlessly about being
rejected by the women he wanted, accepted only by those he didn’t, and never getting enough love. This was damned ungallant of him and he was lucky to be forgiven.
It seems he almost always was. The woman to whom he did the most lying, Maeve Brennan, was annoyed enough after she found out to say that she was bitterly disappointed, but apparently still
didn’t believe that she had wasted her time. Even more convincingly, Monica Jones, to whom he told most of the truth, was there till the end, although the jealousies she suffered along the
way must have been almost as great as her love.
Yet his misery was real, and they loved him in spite of it, not because of it. They all had to cope as well as they could with the certain knowledge that he was even more scared of marriage than
he was of death. You don’t need Freud’s help to guess that the primary lesion might have had something to do with his parents. ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’ is
clearly one Larkin line that can be taken as what he thought. Andrew Motion tells us more than we knew before about Dad, who admired the Nazis, although he could scarcely have admired them for
helping Germany to achieve its economic recovery in the 1920s (Motion must mean the 1930s). When young Philip confessed his shyness, Dad’s reply (‘You don’t know what shyness
is’) can’t have helped with his son’s stammer. He did help, however, with his son’s reading: Dad was a well-read man.
On the evidence of this biography, a more likely source of horror at home seems to have been Mum. She could never let go of him or he of her, despite her inability to express herself in anything
except platitudes. Mercifully only one fragment of one of her thousands of letters is quoted. It works like one of those revue sketches featuring Terry Jones in a headscarf talking falsetto:
‘Here we seem to have a succession of gloomy evenings. It looks as though it will rain again, like it did last night. Have at last heard from Kenneth. He has written such a long and
interesting letter thanking me for the handkerchiefs. I have written to thank him . . .’
Somewhere back there, we can safely assume, lay the source for a feeling of failure that could overcome any amount of success. But finding out more about how Philip Larkin was compelled to
solitude can only leave us less impressed by how he embraced it – the most interesting thing about the man, because it was the key to the poet. It would be obscurantist to want the work of
post mortem
explication stopped. But Larkin’s executors, in their commentaries, need to be much less humble on his behalf, or else they will just accelerate the growth of this
already burgeoning fable about the patsy who has been overpraised for his – we have the authority of Mr Brian Appleyard on this point – minor poetry.
Andrew Motion has done something to show that Larkin chose the conditions in which to nourish his art, but not enough to insist that art of such intensity demands a dedication ordinary mortals
don’t know much about. To suggest, for example, that Larkin’s last great poem
Aubade
broke a dry spell of three years is to ignore the possibility that a poem like
Aubade
takes three years to write, even for a genius. Those who revere Larkin’s achievement should be less keen to put him in range of mediocrities who would like to better
themselves by lowering him to their level, matching his feet of clay with their ears of cloth.
Independent Sunday Review
, 4 April, 1993
Renaissance man is a description tossed around too lightly in modern times – actors get it if they can play the guitar – but for Pier Paolo Pasolini nothing less
will do. From the moment he hit Rome after the Second World War until the moment his own car hit him in 1975, Pasolini single-handedly re-embodied about half the personnel of Burckhardt’s
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
. He was poet, novelist, scholar, intellectual, sexual adventurer, reforming zealot, creator of large-scale visual spectaculars – and all
these things equally. To make a comparable impact, Raphael would have had to be elected Pope. To make a comparable exit, Michelangelo would have had to fall out of the Sistine Ceiling. Pasolini was
a front-page event in every field he entered, including death. A boy he picked up in his Alfa Romeo sports car ran him over with it and left him helpless in the dust. Beat that, Renaissance! Not
even Cola di Rienzo got trampled by his own horse.
Pasolini’s sensational demise happened at Ostia, once the port where Julius Caesar took ship and Cleopatra came ashore. The ancient location widens Pasolini’s frame of reference
still further, to include the whole of Italian history. He was such a national figure that it becomes easy to lose sight of the individual. In a new biography (
Pasolini Requiem
, Pantheon)
Barth David Schwartz mercifully doesn’t, but his whopping book isn’t helped by the bad practice of cramming in all the incidental research to prove that it has been done. European
reviewers like to call this an American habit, but really it is a virus with no respect for borders. A more specific stricture to place on Mr Schwartz might be that a prose style so devoid of verve
is no fit instrument to evoke a hero who crackled with energy even when he was being stupid. But Mr Schwartz, though a plodder, plods briskly enough to make his subject breathe, and some of the
specialized knowledge was well worth going to get. In addition to his prodigious archival burrowings and the conducting of interviews on the scale of a door-to-door electoral canvass, Mr Schwartz
seems to have acquainted himself personally with the sexually ambiguous (though unambiguously violent) Roman low life that was Pasolini’s stamping ground, or prancing ground. The biographer
is to be congratulated not least for coming out alive. The biographee, after all, got killed in there.
As for what he was doing in there, the first answer is obvious: he was cruising, although that word understates his predatory celerity. Better to say that he was pouncing. Quick off the mark and
dressed to kill, he was a cheetah in dark glasses. In the
borgata
, the slumland of the Roman periphery, the population was mostly immigrants from the south who had come in search of
prosperity and found misery. Petty theft and casual prostitution made up most of their economy. For a well-heeled and voraciously promiscuous homosexual like Pasolini, it was a dream come true.
There were boys to be had for a pack of cigarettes or just a ride in his car.
He did his best to have them all. It remains astonishing, when you look at the shelf of books and rack of films signed with his name, that he found the energy to copulate even more prolifically
than he created. People who knew him well were astonished, too. On location in North Africa for a film, his colleagues would retire exhausted to their tents after a long day and meet him coming out
of his, all set to cruise the dunes.
But the spontaneous and seemingly everlasting abundance of sexual gratification was also the wellspring of his politics. The second and less obvious answer to the question of why he spent so
much time in the lower depths was that he found them ethically preferable to the heights. He thought the truth was down there. Unlike other articulate, well-paid enemies of bourgeois society,
Pasolini could actually point to an alternative. It wasn’t a pretty alternative, but that was one of the things he hated about the bourgeoisie – its concern with mere appearances.
He hated everything else about the bourgeoisie as well, but in that respect he holds little interest except as an especially flagrant example of the modern middle-class intellectual blindly
favouring, against common reason and all the historical evidence, a totalitarian substitute for the society that produced him. Valued by the PCI, the Communist Party of Italy, for the publicity he
brought it, Pasolini was allowed more latitude than any other mouthpiece. He often spoke against Party doctrines, and used the space given him by the Party’s own newspapers to do so. But he
was reliable, not to say predictable, in his denunciation of capitalism, neo-capitalism, consumerism, the bourgeoisie, bourgeois consumerism, bourgeois democracy, neo-capitalist democracy,
consumerist democracy, and, for that matter, democracy itself, which he thought, or said he thought, could never achieve anything more than ‘false tolerance’ so long as it was infected
by bourgeois consciousness.
It hardly needs saying that Pasolini had bourgeois origins himself: you don’t get that kind of stridency except from someone in a false position. Raised under Fascism in a small town in
Friuli – a province in the north-east of the country, where it bends towards Trieste – young Pier Paolo, a natural student, picked up the firm grounding in the etymology of the Friulian
dialect which underpinned his lifetime achievement as a scholar and master of the Italian language. But he picked up no grounding at all in the life of the proletariat. He never did a day’s
manual labour then or later.