ZT:A necessary but melancholy book

Larkin’s complete poems
Sean O’Brien


If some readers find that this immense, meticulously edited volume provokes unease, gloom or even perhaps dislike, that can hardly be attributed to its tireless and scrupulous scholarship, can it? The benefits of the most complete and accurate record of a poet’s work must be self-evident, surely. We are able to know more, or at any rate read more, of what the poet wrote. The familiar canon is augmented; sidelights and new relations may appear; the poet’s opinions about how his work was proceeding, and what in it should be published or preserved, are brought to light. All these must be gains. If nothing can escape the eye of God, the scholar should seek to emulate the Creator in this regard.

Of course, though, the scholar, in this case Archie Burnett, is not a creator but a collator and an assembler, a commentator, a discerner or imposer of order. And he is not alone: others are likely to have attempted to cover the ground before, and others may come after (although in Larkin’s case that may be unlikely to happen for some time). Burnett corrects errors and adjusts understandings. He may be in the driver’s seat, but he did not build the car and does not own it. If the poet’s work is a secondary world, the scholar’s is tertiary, and he must be content to act as a servant and to seek his satisfaction in service done and perhaps also, as in this case, in blows meted out to other, perhaps lesser servants, who swerve from the path of righteousness through error, mistranscription or vagueness about the categories to which various findings belong. A. T. Tolley, a lifelong devotee of Larkin’s work, is here treated with scorn. While the facts may be on Burnett’s side he sounds like Malvolio, and we know what happened to him.

No one (not even Archie Burnett) can be certain what Philip Larkin would have made of this Complete Poems. He appears to have had the respect for scholarship proper to a librarian; but he was also sceptical of “the dutiful mob that signs on every September”, and inclined to parody. And he could hardly have failed to notice that his four (slim, carefully organized) published volumes of poems here occupy ninety pages out of 729 (not including introductory matter). Everything that Burnett considers “completed by Larkin, or, viewed in their context [as] self-contained” is here – about 250 poems from 1936–46, about thirty from 1946–50, and 250 from 1950 until Larkin’s death in 1985. The last group has grown since the first of Anthony Thwaite’s two editions of Collected Poems (published respectively in 1988 and 2003), with the addition of items contained in Larkin’s correspondence, which have appeared in works such as Kingsley Amis’s Letters (2000), edited by Zachary Leader, and Larkin’s Letters to Monica (2010), also edited by Thwaite. But even this is not the whole of it. Burnett explains: “To record even only variants in wording from the extensive drafts in the eight large workbooks, and from other manuscripts bearing early drafts, would require a large and complex apparatus criticus, and would be an altogether more elaborate and ambitious undertaking than is appropriate to this edition”.

Even allowing for this limitation of scope, the book is physically unwieldy. It is also inconvenient in its separation of text and commentary, while the poems themselves – presumably the reason for any of this immense labour – are crammed onto the pages, and as a result poems and even stanzas are often broken awkwardly across page-divisions. This happens, for example, to the end of “Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel”, and to “Ambulances”, “The Trees”, the second part of “Solar” and “Show Saturday”. This is not, of course, an edition intended for the general reader: Thwaite’s two Collected Poems continue to serve that purpose, although they contain errors, or limited accounts of some poems’ composition, which Burnett has brought to light.

Once these reservations are expressed, what benefits does Burnett’s edition offer? The four volumes, The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows, are reprinted here in Larkin’s original ordering (as they are in the second of Thwaite’s Collecteds; his first, controversially but usefully, followed the order of composition). In addition there are twenty-three pages of “Other Poems Published in the Poet’s Lifetime” and a staggering 199 pages of “Poems Not Published in the Poet’s Lifetime”, plus three pages of “Undated or Approximately Dated Poems”. By far the greatest number of poems Larkin did not publish date from before the 1950s. Collected Poems (1988) included a generous selection of these, and many, many more appeared in Early Poems and Juvenilia, edited by Tolley (2005). Burnett, in what is by far the longest section of this book, reprints these and adds still more. Self-contradictory statements in Larkin’s will, reported in Andrew Motion’s biography (1993), are adduced to legitimize these inclusions. There is the lengthy commentary on all these elements. There are also sections on Larkin’s youthful private collections of his poems and on dating. It is not an easy book to use, but it contains the latest and most accurate information.

The juvenilia, as has been clear for some time, is often accomplished but rarely interesting. It absorbs models such as W. H. Auden and W. B. Yeats without having anything to add to them, and it still seems true that Thomas Hardy was the most important imaginative trigger for Larkin’s discovery of what he could do on his own account, which often meant leaving apparently larger topics to take care of themselves while he worked at dramatizing particular cases. What readers must really hope for is some further significant unpublished work from Larkin’s maturity. At this stage, it seems unlikely that any is going to turn up to add to “Love Again” and “The Dance”. “The Dance”, 158 lines, unfinished and dating from 1963–4, is printed here in a version incorporating later changes than are to be found in the work of Burnett’s predecessors – though the introduction of “able” into the lines in stanza nine, “How right / I should have been able to keep away, and let / You have your innocent-guilty-innocent night”, looks like an error, since it makes poor sense grammatically and none at all metrically; while the last completed stanza is run together with the opening lines of the next, abandoned one. As it stands, the poem seems hamstrung by a surfeit of local and circumstantial detail about which Larkin was so brilliantly selective elsewhere. Had the poem succeeded, we might have had an equivalent of “Broadcast”, with separation by distance from the loved one replaced with separation by the immediate, uncomfortable, even tormenting social context of the staff dance. The theme – romantic irresolution, embarrassment at the sudden power of a feeling allegedly outgrown – interferes with the method, so that the poem begins to seem diffuse, despite its unifying context. This in turn prompts the thought that what Larkin had before him might have made a short story, but it seems he had long since given up writing fiction.

Elsewhere, there is a series of parodies, “All Aboard the Gravy Train”, dating from 1956, which appeared in Amis’s Letters. Here Larkin sets about his fellow New Lines poets, Amis himself (the least interesting because least hostile), Robert Conquest, Donald Davie, D. J. Enright, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Jennings and John Wain. The results are cruel and clever, but only Gunn seems to have captured Larkin’s imagination. “The Wild Ones” conflates modern soldiery with the Trojan war, and Larkin has his way with the peremptory rhythms of Gunn’s early work:

“He guessed how soon these would be taught to weep,
To value white-towered Argos, to understand
Battle is more than shooting from the hip –
Patroclus frying in the bloodsoaked jeep
And crew-cut Achilles two-timed on the sand.”

Is this really enough? There is clumsy spontaneity: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow / And shuts the buggers up below”, from a letter to Monica Jones dated 1962. Following a harsh review of Larkin’s Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse we find what seems an unwarranted slur on Donald Davie’s motives. “Davie, Davie, give me a bad review”, to the tune of the song popularly known as “Daisy, Daisy”, concludes: “But let’s be fair, it’s got you a chair, / Which was all it was meant to do”. There is also material, such as the verse included in a letter in 1978, which clearly exhausted itself in the act of being written down:

“If I could talk, I’d be a worthless prof
Every other year off
Just a jetset egghead, TLS toff
Not old toad: Frank Kermode.”

There is the misfiring vulgarity of “Administration”, included in a letter in 1976 when Amis was gathering material for The New Oxford Book of Light Verse, but which Larkin wisely decided was best left unpublished:

“As day by day shrewd estimation clocks up
Who deserves a smile, and who a frown,
I find the girls I tell to pull their socks up
Are those whose pants I most want to pull down.”

Other considerations aside, there seems to be a metrical hitch in the run of monosyllables in the last line.

And there is stuff which is not merely offensive but vile, like the item included in a letter to Thwaite in 1977, a fragment of a poem marking the Queen’s Silver Jubilee:

“After Healey’s trading figures,
After Wilson’s squalid crew,
And the rising tide of niggers –
What a treat to look at you!”

The metre, as far as it goes, seems Betjemanesque (as in “Up the ash tree climbs the ivy, / Up the ivy climbs the sun”). The sentiment, if that’s the word, is hard to square with the achievement of “For Sidney Bechet”, but the contradiction is a familiar one and it seems to endure, albeit discreetly, among some educated people of Larkin’s class and background to this day. Few can have been in doubt that Larkin was capable of racism, although there are perhaps some who would argue that lines like these are an attempt to outrage an imagined audience of liberals rather than an expression of conviction. Whatever the case, these are not lines for which Larkin should be remembered, and nor are these:

“Morning, noon & bloody night,
Seven sodding days a week,
I slave at filthy work, that might
Be done by any book-drunk freak.
This goes on till I kick the bucket:
FUCKITFUCKITFUCKITFUCKIT.”

Burnett corrects the text of this so that the original version, from a letter to Monica Jones dated November 27, 1968, is restored. In Letters to Monica, the last line was broken up into individual words. The reader may feel that the entire undertaking is being satirized here, as though by a malign literary emanation in which Larkin and Amis have combined to lampoon an academic failure of perspective. Burnett contents himself with the textual facts and in this case adds no further commentary on this forgettable Woolworth’s version of “Toads”, though it’s surprising that the faint Yeatsian echo in “book-drunk” (“blood-dimmed”) didn’t draw his attention, given that elsewhere he takes the trouble to explain what a “caff” is.

Larkin once characterized his sexual imagination as “a hortus siccus”, and the climate of this no doubt necessary but melancholy book comes to seem rather similar. Readers of Larkin will be familiar with his gradual and chilling decline towards silence, but the riches of the four books of poems published in his lifetime survive that desolation, even if in some ways they seem to foretell it.

Sean O’Brien’s Collected Poems are due to be published later this year. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1055222.ece