Philip Larkin (36 page)

By coincidence, at this point the
Spectator
relocated the typescript of ‘Church Going’ and published it on 18 November, only days before
The Less Deceived
was published. On seeing the poem Charles Monteith of Faber immediately wrote to Larkin inquiring whether he had enough poems for a volume. Larkin had to reply that he was too late. Already finding his dealings with George Hartley difficult, he commented ruefully in a letter to Monica of 24 November: ‘Just suppose
The Spr.
had published it
when they had it
 . . . Hartley need never have entered my life [. . .]’
⁴⁹

The book was an immediate success and Larkin’s reputation was made. On 22 December
The Times
named
The Less Deceived
one of their books of the year. There were favourable reviews in the
Times Literary Supplement
, the
New Statesman
and the
London Magazine
. The 700 copies were sold rapidly and the types were reset for a new impression. Larkin was benefiting from one of those chance intersections between the career of an individual artist and the current of popular culture which make a particular book seem an expression of the
Zeitgeist
. As Britain emerged from the war a new cultural consensus had been building which was at this very moment taking a local poetic habitation and a name in the form of the ‘Movement’. In 1954 Anthony Hartley, responding to works by Amis, Gunn and Davie, had written an editorial in the
Spectator
defining a new literary spirit: ‘bored by the despair of the Forties, not much interested in suffering, and extremely impatient of poetic sensibility, especially poetic sensibility about “the writer and society” [. . .] The Movement, as well as being anti-phoney, is anti-wet; sceptical, robust, ironic’.
⁵⁰
Despite Anthony Thwaite’s satirical objection that its supposed members all denied knowledge of it, the term rapidly gained currency.
⁵¹
The Less Deceived
was hailed as a foundational text of the ‘Movement’, and ‘I Remember, I Remember’, ‘Toads’ and ‘Church Going’ came to be regarded as key ‘Movement’ works. The labelling was confirmed when in 1956 Larkin’s poems appeared in three anthologies alongside those of the other ‘Movement’ poets: D. J. Enright’s
Poets of the 1950s
, Robert Conquest’s
New Lines
and G. S. Fraser’s
Poetry Today
.

In the ‘Statement’ written for
Poets of the 1950s
Larkin gave an account of his poetic practice which united no-nonsense ‘Movement’ plain speaking with intense Romantic idealism. He insisted: ‘I make a point of not knowing what poetry is or how to read a page or about the function of myth.’ This may seem an odd assertion, given his fascination with the Pygmalion story. He is, however, thinking not of organic mythic patterns but of the fashionable dropping of classical or biblical names. He continues with Hardyesque clumsiness: ‘I write poems to preserve things I have seen/thought/felt (if I may so indicate a composite and complex experience) both for myself and for others, though I feel that my prime responsibility is to the experience itself, which I am trying to keep from oblivion for its own sake.’
⁵²
Beneath the affectation of plain language, this is Walter Pater: ‘Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end [. . .] To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.’
⁵³
But Larkin covers his tracks with an offhand, ‘conservative’ disclaimer: ‘Why I should do this I have no idea, but I think the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art.’ By a deft sleight he proclaims the unfathomable mystery of inspiration in the tones of a regular unpoetic bloke. However, the effort is a strain, and his Platonic idealism will not be baulked: ‘As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe.’
⁵⁴

Robert Conquest, editor of
New Lines
, was to become one of Larkin’s regular correspondents. The two men met for the first time in September 1955 when Philip and Monica stopped off in London on their way to a holiday on Sark. Five years older than Larkin, Conquest had been educated at Winchester, Grenoble and Oxford, and after serving seven years in the army, was now working in the Foreign Office.
⁵⁵
Surprisingly the two men became fast friends, their relationship cemented by their shared taste for pornography.
New Lines
included poems by Larkin, Amis, Davie, Enright, Thom Gunn, John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, John Wain and Conquest himself (the same list as in Enright’s volume with the addition of Thom Gunn). Larkin is the dominating presence, represented by eight poems.
⁵⁶
He was, however, uncomfortable with the polemical tone of Conquest’s Introduction, which claimed that the poetry of the fifties ‘submits to no great systems of theoretical constructs nor agglomerations of unconscious commands. It is free from both mystical and logical compulsions and – like modern philosophy – is empirical in its attitude to all that comes.’
⁵⁷
Before the anthology appeared Larkin wrote uneasily: ‘no doubt I shall come in for a good deal of anti-Movement sniping’.
⁵⁸

By all definitions the ‘Movement’ foregrounds plain indicatives: empiricism, realism, scepticism and clearly legible irony. It would be difficult to find a less apt description of Larkin’s work. It is, in retrospect, astonishing that so many early commentators should have read the label rather than the poems, and accused Larkin of offering ‘intense parochialism’ and a ‘stepped-down version of human possibilities’.
⁵⁹
By the early 1960s the label had become firmly fixed. Al Alvarez’s Introduction to the Penguin
volume
The New Poetry
, entitled ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ (1962) cites the ‘common sense’ and ‘gentility’ of Larkin’s ‘Church Going’ in an attack on the ‘Movement’. Larkin’s speaker, Alvarez alleges, offers in ‘concentrated form [. . .] the image of the post-war Welfare State Englishman: shabby and not concerned with his appearance; poor – he has a bike not a car; gauche but full of agnostic piety; underfed, underpaid, overtaxed, hopeless, bored, wry.’
⁶⁰
Alvarez’s caricature is utterly inaccurate as a description of Larkin’s speaker, who shows not the slightest sign of being shabby, underfed, poor, overtaxed or bored. Larkin is not concerned to speak for a sociologically defined generation, and the poetry is diminished by assuming that he does. It is scarcely surprising that the poet adopts such an acerbic tone in referring to Alvarez in later letters. Alvarez’s crude misreading, repeatedly cited, continues to dog his reputation to this day.

But, as Larkin realized, whatever the drawbacks of the ‘Movement’ label, it gave his work a ‘brand’ image, and in the literary world, as elsewhere, this is a great aid to publicity. For better or worse, his simplified ‘Movement’ persona took its place in the nation’s cultural consciousness, and over subsequent decades he could not resist pretending to be this persona: ‘there’s not much to
say
about my work. When you’ve read a poem, that’s it, it’s all quite clear what it means.’
⁶¹
Already in 1956 the ‘Movement’ was familiar and established enough to generate self-parody. Amis collected together a sequence for publication, ‘
All Aboard the Gravy Train: Or, Movements among the Younger Poets
, by Ron Cain’.
⁶²
Larkin produced for the occasion a droll Larkinesque piece, ‘The local snivels through the fields’.
⁶³
The poet is discovered, among mums in felt hats, on the final stretch of his train journey back from holiday, comfortably enjoying his disappointment at the end of the spree which the labels on his luggage ‘shout’ about. In a comic zeugma the mothers are laden with: ‘Baby-sized parcels, bags of plums / And bones of gossip’. And the poem ends in a virtuoso anti-climax as the journey ‘runs out’ in a lopsided ‘feminine’ misrhyme:

Death will be such another thing,

All we have done not mattering.

This may be self-parody, but there is tragic conviction in the gloss he gave to Monica: ‘
Nothing
will be good enough to look back on. I know that for certain: there will be nothing but remorse & regret for opportunities missed not only for getting on the gravy train but for treating people decently.’
⁶⁴

For better or worse the ‘Movement’ remains a relevant category to Larkin’s work, though exactly what it implies is disputed. David Lodge later gave ‘Movement’ poetics a moral and academic rationale. The ‘Movement’ poets, he wrote, ‘aimed to communicate clearly and honestly their perceptions of the world as it was. They were empiricists, influenced by logical positivism and “ordinary language” philosophy.’
⁶⁵
But Larkin was as much a Jungian as a logical positivist in the mould of Gilbert Ryle or A. J. Ayer; and in any case, his poetry evokes moods and attitudes rather than proselytizing on behalf of a world view. Blake Morrison has identified the ‘Movement’ with an anti-Romantic return to tradition,
⁶⁶
with ‘caution and consolidation [. . .] orderliness and rationalism [. . .] neutrality and loss of nerve’.
⁶⁷
Conquest, on the other hand, writing in 2009, is surprised at the reductive literalism with which his Introduction to
New Lines
was interpreted. Far from being ‘anti-Modernist’, he took it as read, at the time, that ‘We had, indeed, all been brought up on, and had digested, “Modernism” of every type.’
⁶⁸
Larkin certainly had.

In serious contexts Larkin consistently rejected the label of ‘Movement’ poet, asserting that he had no common programme with the other writers. He had some acquaintance with Donald Davie, and with John Wain, who had been a freshman in St John’s when Larkin was in his third year. But his only close associate in the group was Kingsley Amis, with whom he was increasingly out of sympathy: ‘we have inevitably had less time for each other during the last five years or so’.
⁶⁹
In later years he mentions the label with irritation: ‘Bob Conquest’s
New Lines
in 1956 put us all between the same covers. But it certainly never occurred to me that I had anything in common with Thom Gunn, or Donald Davie, for instance.’
⁷⁰
Ironically, it was because Larkin’s voice was so independent and unprogrammatic compared with those of the other poets of the ‘Movement’ that he became its pre-eminent representative in the public mind.

12

Hull

1955–7

Arriving in Hull in March 1955 Larkin stayed briefly in University-owned accommodation while he looked for somewhere more permanent to live. In late March he moved into a room in 11 Outlands Road, a modern semi-detached house just off the main road between the University and Cottingham. Here he was badgered by the noise from the landlady downstairs; ‘her filthy radio
floods the whole house.
’
¹
This uncomfortable episode is reflected in ‘Mr Bleaney’, completed on 19 May.
²
No other poem by Larkin has such plain, colourless rhymes: abab (‘stayed / till / frayed / sill // land / took / hand / hook’). The poet declares that how we live ‘measures our own nature’, so the lonely working-class caricature Bleaney who formerly occupied his room is probably a fair image of what his own life is worth. The language is truculently unpoetic (‘My bit of garden’, ‘stub my fags’, ‘Stuffing my ears’), and elegy enters the poem through a bad pun. While living here Mr Bleaney worked at a factory making car-bodies.
³
As the landlady explains, ‘He stayed / The whole time he was at the Bodies, till / They moved him,’ reminding us that we all stay in our bodies until ‘They’ move us. Mr Bleaney’s room is the most prosaic and literal of spaces; but it is also intensely metaphorical: a figure for failure. ‘I’ll take it,’ the poet says, fatalistically stepping into the shoes of a sad man who keeps the garden properly in order, does the football pools to a system and spends ‘Christmas at his sister’s house in Stoke’.
⁴
In letters to Monica over the next few years Larkin looked back to these early days in Hull when he was ‘living the life of Bleaney’, and would speak of ‘Bleaney’ as his fate or nemesis.