TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/050889/05088900.066

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.6 KB | 120 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 97

No Tears, but No Comfort


By Paul Gray


    COLLECTED POEMS
    by Philip Larkin;
    edited by Anthony Thwaite Farrar, Straus & Giroux;
    330 pages; $22.50

    Philip Larkin, the pre-eminent poet in English of his time,
died, after a brief struggle with cancer, in 1985, at age 63.
Soon afterward his diaries were shredded, as he had instructed,
at the library of England's Hull University, where he had worked
for 30 years in self-elected obscurity. His manuscripts and
unpublished poems escaped a similar fate thanks to a
contradiction in his will: one clause called for the destruction
of these papers, while another allowed trustees of the estate
the right to decide which ones merited publication. Given the
choice between guillotine and press, the issue can hardly have
been in much doubt. Larkin might have had mixed feelings about
his Collected Poems, which contains more than 80 pieces never
before seen in print and some two dozen previously uncollected
in book form. But the poet's army of admirers -- solitary types,
for the most part, who are often surprised to bump into fellow
enlistees -- need suffer no such scruples. This volume only
enhances Larkin's imposing stature.

    The nature of his triumph, though, is elusive and peculiar.
Larkin and his contemporaries inherited the scorched earth of
modernism -- the towering shadow cast by Yeats, the
multilingual complexities introduced by Eliot and Pound, the
daunting technical virtuosity of Auden. Starting out, Larkin had
the good taste to imitate all these (except Pound), with some
Dylan Thomas thrown in for good measure. He got out from under
his predecessors only when he learned to lower his voice, to
submerge complexities of thought and feeling beneath a serene,
limpid surface.

    A turning point seems to have been reached in 1948, in the
never-before-published "An April Sunday brings the snow."
Larkin remembers his father, recently dead, and the plum jam
preserves he had put up: "Which now you will not sit and eat./
Behind the glass, under the cellophane,/ Remains your final
summer -- sweet/ And meaningless, and not to come again." The
fatalism of that last line strikes Larkin's most distinctive
note. He is not a poet to seek out for soothing assurances.
Mortality haunted him. At age 24 he writes, "Death is a cloud
alone in the sky with the sun./ Our hearts, turning like fish
in the green wave,/ Grow quiet in its shadow." Some 31 years
later, this confession:

    I work all day, and get half-drunk
    at night.  Waking at four to soundless dark,
    I stare.
    In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
    Till then I see what's really always
    there:
    Unresting death, a whole day
    nearer now . . .

    Rubbing noses in such gloom is only one of the demands
Larkin makes on his readers. He also boasts (and sometimes
complains) about his exclusion from everyday life, his marginal
role as a bachelor librarian, living alone and not growing
mellow with age. In fact, Larkin makes of his infirmities a
caricature, given to grim, plain speech: "Man hands on misery
to man./ It deepens like a coastal shelf./ Get out as early as
you can,/ And don't have any kids yourself." This apparition
even mocks literature. Admitting that his youthful joy in
reading has paled, he advises, "Get stewed:/ Books are a load
of crap."

    Such directives do not seem calculated to make a poet
beloved, which Larkin was and is. What rescues his work from the
slough of depression is the fun he makes of being alive,
between parenthetical darknesses, and of himself:

    Sexual intercourse began
    In nineteen sixty-three
    (Which was rather late for me) --
    Between the end of the Chatterley ban
    And the Beatles' first LP.

    These are his five most famous lines; all Larkinites have
them by heart. In the expanded context of the Collected Poems,
though, this stanza seems not only funny but also perfectly
serious. Every generation imagines that the next one will have
things easier. In "High Windows" Larkin wonders if his elders,
thinking of him, expected that "He/ And his lot will all go down
the long slide/ Like free bloody birds." It has not worked out
that way, the poet suggests, even as he ironically envies the
children of the swinging '60s their tantalizing, illusory
liberties.

    Ultimately, the sense of conditional freedom illuminates
all his best work, which is to say nearly everything in this
book. Oddly enough, given his Oxford education and bookish life,
Larkin was one of the century's greatest pastoral poets. "At
Grass" (about retired racehorses) and "First Sight" (about
winter-born lambs) are hymns to the inexorable rhythms of the
seasons, to which each human, unfortunately, has only a
short-term invitation. "Church Going" deals with a man-made
structure. A wayward cyclist stops out of curiosity and enters
an empty house of worship: "Once I am sure there's nothing going
on/ I step inside, letting the door thud shut." That offhand
"nothing going on" builds slowly to signify a loss of faith, of
ritual and communal practices. There are no tears, but neither
is there comfort; we are, for better and worse, all on our own.

    Is such loneliness preferable to the enforced communities
of our forebears? Larkin does not pretend to know, or say.
Instead, his poems address the selves that most people prefer
to keep hidden during works and days: the nagging voice that
wonders whether one choice was worth an infinity of losses.
Impossible to answer; impossible, while reading Larkin or after,
to forget.