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‘One of those old-type natural fouled-up guys’: The belated Englishman in Philip Larkin's poetry

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 23; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502360902782343

1470-1308

Praseeda Gopinath,

Poetry Analysis and Criticism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Philip Larkin, ‘Church Going’, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), pp. 58–59. Hereafter cited in text. Becky Conekin, Frank Mort and Chris Waters, introduction, Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain 1945–64 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1999), p. 3. See Eric Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 11, and Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-nationalism (London: New Left Books, 1977), p. 317. Also see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), p. 6. See Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995). George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality (New York: Howard Fetig, 1985), p. 23. Indeed, the cultural uproar in 1993, precipitated by the publication of Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life, and The Selected Letters: Philip Larkin only served to emphasize his perceived centrality to the discourse of Englishness and the English literary canon, as the quintessential poet of post-war Englishness. This cultural perception of Larkin as bard of post-war Britain made the revelations of his sexism, racism and xenophobia seem like a national betrayal. There were acrimonious debates in the media about the terms of Englishness: whether it could be freed from the taint of imperialism, and whether it was a valid term of cultural identity in a multi-racial, multi-cultural devolutionary Britain. Some of the major articles that focused on this discussion: John Bayley's ‘Becoming a Girl’, London Review of Books, 25 March 1993, p. 10 and ‘Aardvark’, London Review of Books, 22 April 1993, p. 11; Martin Amis ‘Don Juan in Hull’, The New Yorker, 12 July 1993, pp. 74–82; Lisa Jardine ‘Saxon Violence’, The Guardian, 8 December 1992, pp. 6–7b. Stephen Regan, ‘Introduction’, Philip Larkin (London: St. Martin's Press, 1993), p. 1. Of course, in true Larkinesque fashion, this is how Larkin imagined his future American biographer would characterise him. On the tense relationship between immigration and devolution in post-war Britain, see Bill Schwarz, ‘Reveries of Race: The Closing of the Imperial Moment’, Moments of Modernity, eds. Conekin, Mort et al., pp. 189–208. Tom Paulin, ‘She did not change: Philip Larkin’, Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 240. Alan Sinfield and Alistair Davies offer a handy summary of the Welfare state: ‘It set up a system of social security, providing pensions, sickness and unemployment benefits; it created a free National Health Service, … a much expanded secondary school system and provided opportunities for those from poor homes to go on to university; and it set in motion extensive plans for housing and re-development. At the same time…it also laid the foundations of…the ‘mixed economy’ by taking into public ownership the coal, iron and steel industries, road haulage, the railways and public utilities'. Davies and Sinfield, British Culture of the Postwar: An Introduction to Literature and Society 1945–1999 (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 51. Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (1988), p. 63. E. M. Forster, ‘Notes on the English Character’, Abinger Harvest and England's Pleasant Land, ed. Elizabeth Heine (London: Andre Deutsch, 1996), pp. 10–13. Heaslop with his callow and self-satisfied adherence to his ‘duty’ as a ‘servant of the Government’ is a parody of public-schoolboy idealism. Meanwhile, Forster's representation of Cyril Fielding's ideas of manly fair play and male friendships – again derivative of the public school ethic – reveal how they disrupt English manliness precisely because they cross taboo racial lines even as they are inflected by the homoerotics of empire. In this, I agree with Graham Dawson's consideration of English masculinity ‘as a jumbled repository of unsorted traces from the past’. Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 5. Donald Davie, ‘Remembering the Thirties’, Collected Poems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 34. Green, ‘British Decency’, Kenyon Review, 21.4 (1959), pp. 507–509. For culturally situated examinations of Larkin's exploration of sexual and gender dynamics, see Janice Rossen, ‘Difficulties with Girls’, New Casebooks: Philip Larkin, ed. Stephen Regan (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), pp. 135–190; Steve Clark, ‘“Get Out as Early as you Can”: Larkin's Sexual Politics’, New Casebooks: Philip Larkin, pp. 94–135; James Booth, introduction, Trouble at Willow Gables and Other Fiction, by Philip Larkin (London: Faber and Faber, 2002). For an influential postcolonial analysis, see Seamus Heaney, ‘Englands of the Mind’, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), pp. 150–169. Davie, ‘Landscapes of Larkin’, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 71. John Goodby, ‘“The Importance of being elsewhere”, or “No man is an Ireland”: self, selves and social consensus in the poetry of Philip Larkin’, Critical Survey (1989), p. 132. Goodby also notes that despite Larkin's avowed commitment to the British Empire, ‘Larkin allows Belfast to become Ireland’ (p. 133). Philip Larkin, Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–1982 (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), p. 68. Philip Larkin, Required Writing, p. 79. Nigel Alderman, ‘“The Life with a hole in it”: Philip Larkin and the Condition of England’, Textual Practice, 8.2 (1994), p. 282. As delineated in Edmund Burke's famous characterization of the forms of English government (and indeed English life) as being a natural extension of the English landscape, where nations, peoples, land, and civilization are organically linked (p. 120). Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) ed. J.C.D Clark (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 184. Goodby, p. 134. On class, nation, and twentieth-century English masculinity, see Perry Anderson English Questions (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 20–22. Clarendon Commission Report on Public Schools published in 1869 cited in The Victorian Public Schools: Studies in the Development of an Educational Institution, eds. Brian Simon and Ian Bradley (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1975), p. 153. Connell, p. 39. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke argues for the integrity of English civilization while defending the inequality of possession and social inequality. He points out that the appropriate flow of ideals – and national riches – through the hierarchical structure of ‘customs’ and ‘establishments’ of English society is beneficial to all. Burke, Reflections on Revolution in France, p. 333. Robyn Wiegman, ‘Unmaking: Men and Masculinity in Feminist Theory’, Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory, ed. Judith Kegan Gardiner (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 43. See, for example, George Orwell, ‘England Your England’, A Collection of Essays (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1946), pp. 252–278. For historical and cultural analyses, see Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge 1991), pp. 8–18; Raphael Samuel, introduction, Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, Vol.1 (London: Verso, 1989). Segal, Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, p. 3. Segal, Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, p. 20. Solitude and solitary wholeness as leitmotifs in Larkin's work as evidenced by the sheer number of poems – ‘Reasons for Attendance’, ‘Wants’ in The Less Deceived (1955), ‘Here’, ‘Mr. Bleaney’ in The Whitsun Weddings (1964), ‘To the Sea’, ‘High Windows’, and ‘Vérs de Société’ in High Windows (1974) – make sense in the light of the compulsive coupling and social cohesion necessitated by the ideology of domestication. As Larkin aged, the theme of each volume shifted from solitude to oblivion, and an intense focus on what Raphael Inglebien calls the ‘nihilistic sublime’. Inglebien, Misreading Englishness: Poetry and Nationhood since the Second World War (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), p. 220. To reinforce this point, only the male speakers in Larkin's poems have a problematic relationship with marriage and domesticity. Female speakers in such poems as ‘Wedding Wind’ and the earlier ‘Deep Analysis’ wholly identify with their surrender to marriage and the domestic ideal. In fact, these poems are acknowledged as Larkin's most Lawrentian poems because of their emotional intensity and immediacy. Larkin's crush on, and ‘few messy encounters’ with, Oxford roommate, Philip Brown, as noted in Andrew Motion's biography – and his penchant for writing salacious stories about schoolgirls at boarding schools under the pseudonym of Brunette Coleman – does point to a willingness to consider sexuality outside the rigidly constrained boundaries of heterosexual behaviour. The scope of this article does not allow a full-fledged exploration of Larkin's willingness to explore alternative sexualities, but it does seem worth pointing out that his discomfort with his gender inheritance – the tightly-reined, and obsessively detached middle-class Englishman – led to apparently fruitful escapist attempts into realms of pleasure-filled sexualities. Larkin, Collected Poems (1988), p. 150. Victorian and Edwardian codes of English manly behaviour distinguished the gentleman from the primal working class figure – and the primitive native – through an ascetic cultivation of restraint and appropriate distribution of affect. As James Eli Adams argues with reference to Victorian manliness: ‘The gentleman was thereby rendered compatible with a masculinity understood as a strenuous psychic regimen, embodied as charismatic self-mastery’. Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 7. Martin Francis, ‘The Labour Party: Modernisation and the Politics of Restraint’, Moments of Modernity, p. 153. It makes an appearance in Wild Oats in The Whitsun Weddings where the appearance of a ‘bosomy English rose’ ‘sparked/The whole shooting match off’, an indication of masturbation (p. 112). Steve Clark, ‘Get Out as Early as you Can’, p. 95. Eric Hobsbawm, The Jazz Scene (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), p. 215. Simon Frith, ‘“Playing with Real Feeling” – Jazz and Suburbia’, Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), p. 58. For Larkin's thoughts on jazz, see Philip Larkin, Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces, 1955–1983 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 185–298. At the moment of its consolidation, middle class manliness, according to Catherine Hall, ‘depended for [its] articulation on a sense of difference’ from native men, native and white women, and the working classes at home (p. 184). Catherine Hall, ‘The Economy of Intellectual Prestige: Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill and the Case of Governor Eyre’, Cultural Critique, 12 (Spring 1989), pp. 167–196. John Baxendale, ‘“…into another kind of life in which anything might happen…”: Popular Music and Late Modernity, 1910–1930’, Popular Music, 14.2 (May 1995), p. 148. Larkin's work was not alone in this focus on Englishmen and Englishness; he was part of the Movement, a loose conglomeration of writers such John Wain, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Elizabeth Jennings, and Donald Davie, who, as Robert Conquest proclaims, argued for a return to a ‘robust’ poetry, ‘empirical in its attitude’ to counter the metaphorical and linguistic excesses of the poets of the Forties and before. Robert Conquest, ed., New Lines: An Anthology (London: Macmillan & Company Ltd, 1956), pp. xiv–xv. Similarly, Blake Morrison writes, ‘The identity of the Movement has … com[e] to stand for certain characteristics in English writing – rationalism, realism, empiricism – which continue to exert their influence today’. Blake Morrison, The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 9. Anthony Easthope, Englishness and National Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 185. Easthope charts the tradition of empiricist discourse and its imbrication in the construction of Englishness and English national identity from Francis Bacon to The Guardian.