Driving Home, page 13
… a blind
Astonishing remorse for things now ended
That of themselves were also rich and splendid
(But unsupported broke, and were not mended)
His nostalgia is couched in terms so inexplicit that these lines might summon almost anything, from William of Orange trouncing Catholics at the Battle of the Boyne to a mild repining for the glories of country-house life in the heyday of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. The essential logic seems to be that things were rich and splendid because they are now ended—a thought that often drove Larkin to crocodile tears. In “An Arundel Tomb” he wrote a tender hymn to marriage (an institution that he treated as hell on earth in most contexts), the couple in question having been safely dead for six centuries. In “Church Going,” the church becomes an object of fond reverie only after Larkin has emptied it of people, stripped it of its roof and filled it with sheep and mildew in four stanzas of loving ruination.
When Larkin wants to make us feel warm about something, he turns it into history, gangster-style, at gunpoint. The sepia photo of grinning young men standing in line to enlist for service in the Flanders trenches (“MCMXIV”) brings out an upwelling of sweet sorrow (“Never such innocence, / Never before or since …”) because we know the men are very shortly going to be blown to smithereens—as in “The Explosion” we weep for the miners, seen in the fullness of their lives just at the moment when the fatal tremor shakes the pithead village. As the young man opens his fist to show a clutch of unbroken larks’ eggs, he’s—history.
The mysterious and lovely ending to “The Whitsun Weddings” delivers more death on a grand scale. Motion reveals that the image of the “arrow shower / Sent out of sight” was prompted by a visit to the cinema (with Monica Jones) to see Laurence Olivier’s Henry V. We’re at Agincourt, the English archers have just loosed their bows, and a lot of French peasants are going to snuff it when the shower turns into rain at the other end of the battlefield. So the luckless honeymooners are in for it, their great day made poignant by the doom that is being planned for them in the poem’s final lines.
One can’t help being reminded of how Larkin felt about people like this when they were alive, with no immediate prospect of extinction. “I want to see them starving, / The so-called working class, / Their wages weekly halving, / Their women stewing grass …” Dead, they became legitimate objects of sentimental feeling, material for Larkin’s peculiar kind of taxidermal elegy.
His rare attempts to find something to celebrate in contemporary England tend to fall flat. The 1973 poem “Show Saturday,” for instance, is like a big, crowded, somewhat overcolored canvas of a Suffolk horse fair by Sir Alfred Munnings; a craftsmanly re-creation of a county show, complete with farmers, craft and produce stalls, pony-club children, wrestlers, chainsaw contestants, and “mug-faced middle-aged wives / Glaring at jellies” (“wives” always get it in the neck in Larkin’s work, like the “unspeakable wives” in “Toads,” the “grim headscarved wives” in “Here” and the “bearded wife” in “The Dance”). The show is the backbone of rural England, the Tory party taking a well-earned day off, and Larkin here is in an uncharacteristically expansive mood as he shepherds the poem to an uplifting envoi:
Let [the show] stay hidden there like strength, below
Sale bills and swindling; something people do,
Not noticing how time’s rolling smithy-smoke
Shadows much greater gestures; something they share
That breaks ancestrally each year into
Regenerate union. Let it always be there.
It’s a rhetorical collapse. Motion suggests that the passage is charged with a private double meaning: Larkin visited the Bellingham Show in Northumberland with Monica Jones, and the “regenerate union” is as much his and hers as it is that of the good people of England. Yet even if one glosses it with this in mind, the last sentence strikes a wan and hollow note. The show, with all its bright and noisy quiddity, simply won’t perform the solemn function that Larkin assigns to it, and the end of the poem only serves to remind one of how very deeply affirmation goes against Larkin’s grain.
What he excelled at was a kind of acrid self-cancellation. In the conduct of his life, whenever he made an emotional move, he as quickly rescinded it. Motion’s account of why Larkin began an affair with his secretary, Betty Mackereth, in 1975, shortly after Maeve Brennan, a library junior, had at last consented to go to bed with him, is to the point here (and read as if these were characters in fiction, it is also extremely funny):
As Maeve finally yielded, her romantic elusiveness was destroyed and his attraction to her was bound to diminish. Furthermore, the sacrifice of her religious principles raised again the spectre of marriage—for Larkin at least, if not for Maeve herself. He felt that he had set in train a series of obligations which were likely to lead to the altar. There were other kinds of frustration as well. Because he and Maeve went to bed—even in their new, revitalized relationship—only on “very rare and isolated occasions,” Larkin’s sexual appetite was stirred but unsatisfied. By turning to Betty he was therefore taking for himself while giving of himself—not only gaining his pleasure but securing his independence. Betty reactivated the dramatic struggle between life and work on which his personality had always depended.
One can watch Larkin going through the same canny hoopla in his letters: a warm and appreciative letter to X is followed, often on the same day, by a warm and appreciative letter to Y in jeering dispraise of X, and so on. Bad faith was a form of good faith: it meant that Larkin was still keeping his options open. As he wrote in “To My Wife” (1952), “Choice of you shuts up that peacock-fan / The future was …” Even as the fan faded from peacock to moulted starling, Larkin set great store by refusing to close it.
Something very similar happens in the work. From early on, the shit-and-piss talk with which Larkin regaled the boys in his letters began to enter the poems as the language of life, nasty, brutish, and four-lettered, to be set against the solemn Tennysonian idiom of art. In many of his best poems there is an exquisitely delicate balance between an interior voice, thinking aloud in the rarefied silence of the lamplit study, and the demotic voices—rude, inconsequential—of the street outside. Art is pitched head-on against life, and there is the teasing possibility in all these poems that art may lose—that the poem may become swamped in chatter, or scatology. When “The Whitsun Weddings” was about to be broadcast on the BBC in 1959, Larkin warned the radio reader:
Success or failure of the poem depends on whether it gets off the ground on the last two lines. It is asking a lot of a reader, I know, to achieve a climax in so small a compass, but unless this image succeeds with the listener I am afraid the poem will seem no more than pedestrian.
The narrowness of the triumph—the against-the-odds transcendence of art over life in that last-minute swoop—made the poem. Larkin here was playing a dangerous game brilliantly.
By the time his last collection, High Windows, was published in 1974, it had ceased to be a game. The poems had turned into battles—between a life that was increasingly frightening and disgusting and an art that was increasingly fine-spun and febrile. One after another, the poems start in low demotic—the language of intolerable life: “When I see a couple of kids / And guess he’s fucking her and she’s / Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm …”; “What do they think has happened, the old fools, / To make them like this?”; “Jan van Hogspeuw staggers to the door / And pisses at the dark …”; “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”; “Groping back to bed after a piss …”; “Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three”; “My wife and I have asked a crowd of craps / To come and waste their time and ours: perhaps / You’d care to join us? In a pig’s arse, friend …” From these desperate and squalid beginnings, the poems climb, against all likelihood, to heights like the tragic serenity attained at the end of “High Windows” (which begins, “When I see a couple of kids …”):
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows;
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
Poems don’t get much closer to miracles than that.
Andrew Motion, however, has some unsettling news about “High Windows.” Larkin finished the poem in February 1967, working from a draft he had written in the spring of 1965. The draft ending ran:
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows
The sun pouring through plain glass
And beyond them deep blue air that shows
Nothing, and nowhere, and is endless
and fucking piss.
The three words jeer desolately at the lines immediately above them on the page. Larkin—horse shit. Gibber gibber. His later work bears the message that poetry can be made out of a sour and unsatisfied life, but it comes with the self-lacerating caveat that no poetry is so secure that it can escape the suspicion of being a rhetorical trick, a phony prettying-up of the life it purports to transfigure. In this tormented mistrust of his own art, at least, Larkin was an exemplary modernist.
After his death, two women each believed that the poem “When first we faced, and touching showed …” was meant for her alone, and one of them, Maeve Brennan (who worked with Larkin for thirty years and whose affair with him lasted for seventeen), said to Motion, “I wonder whether I really knew him at all. He had feet of clay, didn’t he? Huge feet of clay.” The author of The Less Deceived maintained his sacred privacy behind a fence of interlocking betrayals and evasions—and it was no wonder that he came to fear that the person most deceived by these stratagems had been himself.
The solitude that he spent a lifetime dodging and lying to keep intact was always solitude for art’s sake—time “repaid / Under a lamp, hearing the noise of wind, / And looking out to see the moon thinned / To an air-sharpened blade.” For the bargain to work, there had to be an unfinished poem under that lamp; but after the publication of High Windows, the desk was nearly always empty, and the poems that did occasionally appear there were rarely among Larkin’s best. The strikes and counterstrikes of life and art in High Windows had taken Larkin to the brink of paralyzed silence. Out of this impasse came one magnificent poem—“Aubade,” begun in 1974 and finished in 1977.
An aubade (dawn serenade) is an early morning poem in which the writer parts with his mistress after a last night of love. Larkin’s 4 a.m. aubade is a desperate and hungover leavetaking from life and art.
… this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
The poem makes plain that, more than almost anyone alive, Larkin knew what being dead was like. It was in writing that he was able to think and link, and death presented itself to him as a kind of eternity of writer’s block, a state of unbeing with which Larkin had long been miserably familiar.
Most things never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
In a letter to Barbara Pym, Larkin described “Aubade” as “The death-throes of a talent,” and though the phrase is meant to come across as mournful-jocular, Larkin in his Eeyore mode, it tells the exact truth about what the poem accomplishes.
Larkin was always scared that the bargain he had made was a bad one. As early as 1966, he was confessing to Monica Jones:
I feel I am landed on my 45th year as if washed up on a rock, not knowing how I got here or ever had a chance of being anywhere else … Of course my external surroundings have changed, but inside I’ve been the same, trying to hold everything off in order to “write.” Anyone wd think I was Tolstoy, the value I put on it. It hasn’t amounted to much. I mean, I know I’ve been successful in that I’ve made my name & got a medal & so on, but it’s a very small achievement to set against all the rest.
Fifteen years later, or thereabouts, he told Andrew Motion: “I used to believe that I should perfect the work and life could fuck itself. Now I’m not doing anything, all I’ve got is a fucked-up life.” Both these verdicts cry out for contradiction, but the reader, balancing Larkin’s poems with the letters and the life, is likely to find them wretchedly hard to gainsay.
New Republic, July 1993
I’m in Heaven
A YEARNING FOR ELSEWHERE, for a life beyond the one we’re leading, is universal, but America is unique in giving the idea a specific geographical location in the West. Though the West is a slippery and mobile entity. When Miles Coverdale goes to Blithedale to try the “life of Paradise anew,” he has only to ride a day’s journey inland from the smoky city of Boston; Hawthorne crowds that day with topographical and meteorological incident, laying on a snowstorm and a tempest and depopulating the countryside, so that by nightfall Coverdale is able to reflect, “I felt that … we had transported ourselves a world-wide distance from the system of society that shackled us at breakfast-time.” Blithedale, like its model, Brook Farm (in West Roxbury), may have a Massachusetts zip code, but it is located in spirit in that Far West of the American imagination where all utopias belong.
Now that California is elsewhere no longer, its problems as insistently here as those of Roxbury itself, the utopian burden has been taken up by the states to the north, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, where population density is lighter and the impact of recession has been less severe. The Pacific Northwest, with its dramatic and metaphysical geography of mountains, forest, desert, ocean coast, and inland sea, is still, just, West in the old sense; a worthwhile, if not a worldwide, distance from breakfast-time society.
Recent arrivals, like J. Z. Knight, who channels the spirit of Ramtha, the hedonistic thirty-five-thousand-year-old sage from Atlantis (“I give you the strength to find joy”) on her New Age ranch at Yelm, near Tacoma, have fitted easily into the region. Yelm is just another dot on a map already thickly dotted with the names of old utopian communities and schemes of salvation and revelation. Already Yelm has shown signs of following its predecessors down the dusty Brook Farm road of dissension and breakup. Shirley MacLaine & Co. have packed their bags, the Knights are now divorced (after an extensive hearing on the daytime TV circuit), but Ms. Knight goes on filling the thousand-seat arena at Yelm for “dialogues” with her old man of the sea.
On the far side of Puget Sound from Tacoma lies Home, a turn-of-the-century utopia where “the kingdom of heaven,” in secular lowercase, was to be established within the liberated self. Home was founded in 1896 on a wooded inlet-within-an-inlet named Joe’s Bay on the Key Peninsula. It grew out of Glennis, a bankrupt utopia thirty miles south of Tacoma, and was based on a merry conglomeration of principles, including single-taxism, anticlericalism, anarchism, socialism, nudism, and free love. By the time people reached Home (most came from the East Coast, some from Europe), they were well to the west of conventional radical thought, and the place became a famous shelter for all sorts of very far-western doctrines. Several members were Koreshans, holding that the accepted view of the world was inside-out and that the earth was not a globe but the interior surface of a sphere.
The community produced a succession of newspapers and magazines. Its first regular publication was Discontent: Mother of Progress, in one of whose early issues the laureate of Home, C. L. Penhallow, set out the somewhat spongy ethos of the place in a poem titled “Joe’s Bay”
I there a promise feel,
That in a future great,
I’ll find a realm that’s truly free
From taint of church or state.
Where each will live for all;
Where all will live for each;
And in an atmosphere of love,
They’ll practice what they preach …
Interestingly, the poem itself is profoundly colored by the taint of church that it tries to disavow: the literary tradition of C. L. Penhallow can be found in its entirety in the Methodist hymnal. Home—proud of having no church in its precincts—was at heart a congregation of staunch nonconformists bent on turning the form of the Sunday School picnic into a permanent way of life.
Syndicated articles by—and homegrown articles about—Emma Goldman were a staple feature of Discontent, and when Goldman was on a swing of the western states in 1898, she was talked into making a last-minute appearance at Home. (She came again in 1899.) The colonists were thrilled by her (“a jolly comrade, a good looking, sensible girl, who is even not averse to a little flirtation”), though she found them to be a bunch of happy cranks, too lightweight for her large designs on the world. They showed her their asparagus plots and their poems; then they went skinny-dipping. Goldman said Home was “the anarchist graveyard.”
What now remains of Home are the swelling rhododendrons, the gnarled apple trees, and bird-haunted spaces between houses—the square one-acre plots, the perfect balance between communitarian neighborliness and deep country isolation. The last relic of communal ownership is the broad village beach, which no houses directly abut. Home slowly evolved from utopia into suburb, with the last of the founding anarchists surviving into the 1950s. Heaven on earth became a dormitory suburb of Tacoma that reminds the passerby of how utopian was the original suburban urge; it has turned out to be not so much the graveyard of anarchism as the nursery of the upper-middle-class planned community.
The Pacific Northwest continues to be a magnet—the strongest regional magnet in the country, I would guess—for hopefuls and new-lifers of every imaginable cast. It feels like the last surviving corner of the United States to be widely promoted, in Blithedale terms, as “the one green spot in the moral sand-waste of the world.” People like to think of themselves as undergoing not mere relocation but full-blown resurrection here in the smoke- and cholesterol-free city of Seattle, where eternal life is thought to be a viable alternative to two packs a day. In the enlightened Northwest the recycling and saving of things (water, owls, paper bags, whales, urban neighborhoods) elides imperceptibly into the salvation of the self (the Self section in bookstores here is impressively larger than the History section). In this far-western stronghold of the second chance, second family, second career, it’s easy to find yourself beset by the thought that you have somehow passed over and entered the afterlife.
