Authors: Thomas Mallon
Across the ocean and down a few decades, one finds a kind of sallow analog to Mencken in the appallingly entertaining letters of Philip Larkin. Everyone was sure they had him right: as sturdily English as a Burberry bumbershoot, someone whose image belonged on a tin of biscuits. A bachelor poet of highly regarded but comprehensible verse, a top-drawer, unprolific, unbohemian artist, he seemed sedate and reassuring. Even as his literary fame increased,
Larkin made his daily living as the University of Hull’s librarian. When anyone told Mrs. Grundy that high art and middle brow convention weren’t compatible, she had only to point to Mr. Larkin down the road. Would anyone argue that the author of
The Whitsun Weddings
and
High Windows
, the editor of
The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse
, had been undeserving of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry or the Companion of Literature? Hardly.
There had been some curious utterances from him (that unfortunate first line “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”), but whatever private sorrows his poems might contain or imply, they were precise, even appreciative, evocations of English life. Even in his twenties he was certain he didn’t want to fill his verses with “filthy thought or symbols or construction.” He could build a poem around “just a man eating a tomato and a bit of cheese and reading a sensitive letter with the sun flooding the earth and feeling bloody fine.” He was so
levelheaded
, the opposite of the crazy romantic artist of myth.
Of course, the stupid sods (as he would have said) had it all wrong. “For the last 16 years,” he wrote his friend Norman Iles in 1972, “I’ve lived in the same small flat, washing in the sink, & not having central heating or double glazing or fitted carpets or the other things everyone has, & of course I haven’t any biblical things such as wife, children, house, land, cattle, sheep etc. To me I seem very much an outsider, yet I suppose 99% of people wd say I’m very establishment & conventional. Funny, isn’t it?” He didn’t even have the peace and quiet a miserable bachelor is supposed to. His neighbors below
“bang doors
as if they are perpetually quarrelling or are new to houses with doors. One night I counted 38 such in 2 hours—or an average of almost once every three minutes.”
In private, he wasn’t so much Britannia’s approving bard as a stuffed bull in the English china shop, loathing all its Dickensian pieties. His favorite John O’Hara line was “Christmas stank,” and each year he greeted the arrival of that “vile season” with a disgusted sigh: “And now Christmas is coming again, as if we hadn’t enough to put up with.”
When his
Selected Letters
first appeared in England, Larkin’s unvarnished reactionary views seem to have surprised all but those who knew him personally, and they provoked much tut-tutting in the literary chattering classes. Politicized by the sixties, though not in the approved way, Larkin had been revolted by revolution and its “pot-smoking young swine,” those “little subsidised socialist sods,” and their aging comrades in arms among the Hull faculty: “one hag said she hadn’t been so excited since Spain!” He adored Mrs. Thatcher (“The Leaderene”) when she came along, but he knew his politics were “really no more than gouts of bile,” a tributary of his pleased malcontentment, his chosen unhappiness.
Crimped and crabbed and complainingly pinched into shoes he refused to change, he disapproved of most everything. “Life’s colourful pageant is passing me by,” he declared, and he insisted it keep moving right along. He judged his own life wasted but “never thought it wd be a dull world if everyone was like me.” It is impossible for a reader of his letters to regard them as anything but the strongest possible testimony to the truth of C. P. Snow’s observation “What you want is what happens to you.”
Jazz was his Dionysian escape, a displacement of his own internal fits. But as the years went by, he listened to it with less and less of an ear. “I sit half-stewed each night,” he wrote in July 1957, “while the leaves rustle outside, & the LP platters steadily work their way down the revolving spindle.” At some point in the evening, he’d wake with a start, blinking his way out of the bag—expecting to write poetry? “I am quite unable to do anything in the evenings—the notion of expressing sentiments in short lines having similar sounds at their ends seems as remote as mangoes on the moon.” The fact is he was always tired, and would have been so even without the booze, or with more self-discipline. His librarian-ship wasn’t some charming sinecure. It was, like most people’s jobs,
work
—work that left him “worn to a ravelling” and eventually supervising a hundred employees. He would have preferred an independent income. He envied the few authors, like his closest writer friend, Kingsley Amis, whose books could actually support a life, and he had no trouble resenting the loudly overlauded (“At Ilkley
literature festival a woman shrieked and vomited during a Ted Hughes reading. I must say I’ve never felt like shrieking”). His own need to make a living, long after he was a famous man of letters, left him a “Sunday writer” whose books were few and far between. “Sodding reviewing” was another remunerative distraction (he called a collection of his literary journalism
Required Writing)
, and on most weekends it was hard to find the energy to be even a Sunday writer: “My Sunday morning consists of plodding across Pearson Park, past the children’s playground, & then on the other side I buy 4 Sunday papers of steep scurrility & vanish into a drab premises called the Queen’s Hotel, where in a fireless room I settle on an imitation-leather couch and drink a pint or two of pallid Hull beer, scanning headlines of rare promise (‘When the Girl Guide Was Late Home’) and sometimes being glowered at by a large yellow cat …” Year after year, he wrote in 1958, “the literary life goes on, apart from producing no literature.”
He was xenophobic as only a postwar Little Englander could be, despising “filthy abroad,” which consisted variously of Wopland, Frogland, Hunland and, most detestably, America. He had a deep-seated need for dreariness, preferring the dry food and mean little gas fires of his native land to any Yank-imitating attempts at flash. He craved sooty windows the way others do bright lights.
Larkin spiked his letters with impotent revenge fantasies, the sort of vicarious violent imaginings indulged in by Lucky Jim Dixon, the character created by his friend Amis. For a fellow worker at the library (“old bagface”) the poet had plans: “I speculate on nailing a kipper under her table, privately printing at my own cost a pamphlet proving that her maternal grandmother married a Barbary ape, bribing a corner boy to knock her up at four in the morning.” For years his letters were wildly scatological. He was probably more bowel-bound than any writer since Swift, letting shit serve as a sort of anti-Poetry, something with which he could smear and devalue the art he longed to produce and feared he couldn’t: “souls are made in the world, not in books, and I must rise up and go—and have a crap.” He compared the act of publishing a book to “farting at a party—you have to wait till people stop looking at you before you can behave normally again.”
In his letters, he often acts the filthy, disagreeable little boy, and though he cleaned up his mouth as the years went by (and was a perfect gentleman when writing to women), he never stopped making the capitalized Tourette-like outbursts that come mid-sentence in his communications to Amis: “pocking Miss Jane Exall wouldn’t be nearly so nice in reality as it is in my imagination
WHEN I’M TOSSING MYSELF
.”
He advertised his misery to friends and took pride in making himself look as awful as he could: “I went to the local Austin Reeds on Saturday and bought some dreary clothes, real chartered-accountant stuff, dead sharp. My duck-green felt hat will slay you: it has a trick of making my neck seem longer & my cheeks more pendulous. I love that.” He eventually looked like “an egg sculpted in lard, with goggles on …”
Oscar Wilde once claimed to have put only his talent into his work, saving genius for his life. To his own existence, Larkin brought
“self-disgust
, with all my heart …” Back in 1993, dismayed American reviewers of Andrew Motion’s Larkin biography tended to focus sympathetically on the subject’s unhappiness. If this was an improvement upon earlier British excoriations of the letters, it still missed the distinction between happiness and fulfillment. The former may be what one wants, but the latter is what one needs, and as such is much more profound. Philip Larkin’s natural temperament was deeply, depressingly fulfilled.
What some people can’t forgive about him, more than his unattractive prejudices, is that he was pissed off rather than righteously angry; his letters reveal him to have been less poetic than any poet has a right to be. One American poet writing about the storm over the letters and the Motion biography sighed: “There is no reason that lyric sadness and disappointment cannot be linked to a democratic and progressive social action. It is rare but possible.” But as Larkin might have said: so fucking what? The spreading of sweetness and light remains a poet’s noblest prerogative, but his first duty is arguably to be himself. The fact is, Larkin had a perfect right to sing, as well as listen to, the blues. The thin volumes of poetry he produced within the cracks of his damp sixty-three years rank with the best of this half century, and his self-pity is better written
than most everyone else’s passionate cries on others’ behalf. The letters of this working writer are bleakly exhilarating, and to his bloated, humbugging shade, one wishes, every year, a very merry Christmas.
NO ONE EVER
cracked wiser than he.
S. J. Perelman is known to some film enthusiasts only as a onetime scriptwriter for the Marx Brothers (an identity whose persistence exasperated him), but to better-read legions he was a contributor, for almost fifty years, to
The New Yorker
, a magazine toward which his feelings were also decidedly ambivalent—in part because of “their fussy little changes and pipsqueak variations on my copy.”
The truly funny are not often cuddly, and in his letters Perelman oscillates almost exclusively between low and high dudgeon. His “quicksilvery” intelligence and tongue are irritated into action by a reliable roster of dislikes that includes politicians, New York City and most of the exotic stops on his six round-the-world trips. Nothing pricks him more sharply than “that misbegotten flea-pit called Hollywood,” whose studio flunkies are a “flock of beetle-brained windsuckers with necks hinged so they can yes Darryl Zanuck.” His descriptions of Mike Todd, with whom Perelman worked on
Around the World in 80 Days
, constitute by themselves a wild thesaurus of invective.
When he’s talking about friends like Dorothy Parker or his own children, Perelman’s letters can seem not just dyspeptic but cruel. Still, if the man is sometimes off-putting, the style he puts on is unfailingly top-drawer. Perelman doesn’t just play on words; he plays with, off, against, around and through them. A report from the early lean years of his marriage: “The babe and I have settled down with our schnozzles to the grandstand at 92 Grove Street for the winter and are wondering what’s delaying the wolf.” A quarter century later, to his daughter away at college studying the classics: “Why don’t you take a half hour off from declining irregular Greek verbs—after all, you can’t keep declining verbs
forever
, one must eventually suit you.”
He cooked up a lingo in his own American melting pot—big-city slang mixed with Ivy League literary allusions and spiced up with Yiddish—and he slung the product with exceptional speed and consistency. After his wife’s death in 1970, Perelman, depressed at being alone and disgusted with life in the States, emigrated to England, only to return two years later, when he found himself short of linguistic capital: “I think I need a shot in the arm of Manhattan’s violence, filth, disorder, but chiefly our American idiom.” All his letters are performances, so dense with the same battery of effects that their recipients tend to blur. Unlike most accomplished letter-writers, complainers or otherwise, he doesn’t automatically cultivate a different mood and voice for each correspondent; he lavishes the same dizzy virtuosity on all of them.
Particular circumstances, though, can call forth their own shtick: Betty White Johnston was a young screenwriter at Paramount with him in the early 1930s, and years after she got married and moved to Alabama, Perelman was still innocently drooling proposals for a reunion: “Consider … that all this mutual esteem, bottled up over a decade, may erupt like cordite when we finally get within pinching radius of each other. Don’t trifle with nature, girl. Be fair to your glands; they’ve been fair to you.” These mash notes are the most charming things Perelman ever put in the mail, lovely enough to make one wonder if she didn’t keep postponing the rendezvous just to keep getting the letters.
With less pulchritudinous correspondents, Perelman didn’t always relish performing for free. His own incoming mail sometimes consisted, in his nightmare rendition, “of old L. L. Bean catalogues, threats from collection agencies, and vilifying letters from factory girls who claimed I had deflowered them and left them in an interesting condition.” His responses to it were often agitated enough to tempt the editor of his selected letters into calling them not
Don’t Tread on Me
, their eventual title, but
Jaundice vs. Jaundice
or
Miasma, and Welcome to It
.
BY THE END OF THE
eighteenth century, according to the historian Jeremy Black, “the habit of writing to the newspapers was well-developed.”
Not all the writers were disciplined controversialists; many of their offerings supplied more news than views. Editors had to keep the papers full, especially when, says Black, “the posts from the continent were delayed by wind.” Domestic letter writers took up the slack, and in a pinch, the editor might make up some correspondence himself. Eventually, impassioned communications to newspapers—Zola’s “J’Accuse” letter to
L’Aurore—
came to nudge history and reform, and epistolary outpourings on different sides of every issue have given signals to both contemporary politicians and latter-day historians.