Larkin, Philip

Few English poets after the Earl of Rochester in the seventeenth century dared to use the “four-letter” words or the crude argot of the street. D.H. Lawrence, who was so daring in his novels, was less adventurous in his poetry. Even in the postwar period, when frankness and directness were very much the supposed hallmarks of the new British literature of John Osborne, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, Sylvia Plath, and Ted Hughes, most poets actually shied away from what William Wordsworth had called “the language of ordinary men.”

The major exception was Philip Larkin (1922–1985), an enigmatic, shy, reclusive academic librarian who passed most of his life at Hull University in the north of England. He became a major voice in English poetry from the 1960s, articulating the frustrations and dreary lives of ordinary people in a modern welfare state—anonymous, secularized, and banal—at the end of an era. His early poems were low-key, subtle, and profound. In “Church Going” (1954) he reflects the passing of the church as a dynamic force in the land, the ignorant persona of his poem having only a limited physical sense of “some brass and stuff up at the holy end.” Yet even he is also sensitive to “a tense, musty unignorable silence / Brewed God knows how long.” The ironic significance of the casual blasphemy is typical.

Larkin is very much the poet of the little conforming man, a cog in the machine of a grinding urban existence, wishing to protest but lacking the necessary courage. In “Toads” (1955) his would-be rebel laments: “Ah, were I courageous enough / To shout stuff your pension! ” According to the Oxford English Dictionary this is the first recorded instance of the common idiomatic use of stuff . Later demotic idioms burst out startlingly, in this comment on “the sexual revolution” of the 1960s:

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm
I know this is paradise.
(“High Windows” 1967)

However, this supposed permissive “paradise” comes with knowledge, in the form of this ironic and twisted version of Freudian psychology:

They fuck you up your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
(“This Be The Verse” 1971)

Alone of his contemporaries, Larkin also admitted into his poems a subject still largely taboo, what Lawrence had called “the dirty little secret” of masturbation: “Love again: wanking at ten past three” (“Love Again” 1979). ( Wank , a peculiarly British word, is a colloquialism recorded from the late nineteenth century.) These fairly shocking instances caused little comment, since they were largely contemporary idioms.

In 1984 Larkin turned down an offer of the prestigious position of Poet Laureate. Al- though he wished his papers to be burned after his death, only his diaries were destroyed. The publication of his Selected Letters in 1992 revealed an author who was not only surprisingly active sexually, but very outspoken and cantankerous. When he was nineteen he commented on a poem of his own: “I think that this is really bloody cunting fucking good,” regarding another as “buggering fine” (1992, 12). He complained to his lifelong (and equally conservative) friend Kingsley Amis about the steadily lengthening of the Christmas holidays: “Eventually the whole bloody fucking arseholing country will be on its back from Guy Fawkes’s night [November 5] to St. Valentine’s Day” (1992, 635). However the furor provoked by the Selected Letters arose from other revelations, that Larkin was politically reactionary and frankly racist. References to “la divine Thatcher” and to “the successive gangs of socialist robbers who have ruled us since the last war” (1992, 635) did not go down well, although such views were not uncommon when the letters were actually written. Far more provocative were his racist comments, such as “we don’t go to [cricket] Test matches now, too many fucking niggers about” (1992, 584) and “Thanks for the card from Coonland” [Morocco] (1992, 690).

As a consequence of these comments, the associations of Larkin’s work rapidly changed from being “melancholy, cynical, reflective of fin de siècle Britain” to “bigoted, racist, reactionary.” The fact that these were private letters unintended for publication and written to like-minded correspondents was largely ignored. One professor of English in Britain, Lisa Jardine, wrote publicly of her experiences when she and her department at the University of London consequently devised a course to “recontextualise” Larkin and so “edged Larkin from the center to the margins” (in Dunant, ed., 1994, 111). In many ways the private Larkin of the letters was expressing the kind of racism that could be heard in pubs, clubs, football stadiums, and canteens. But in print it was unacceptable.