Mark Ford on Philip Larkin

Ralph Steadman, "Philip Larkin"

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon at the beach, sitting under our blue umbrella-tent (using rocks instead of pegs to hold it in place), re-reading Clive James's four wonderful essays on Philip Larkin in his Reliable Essays (2001). Why Larkin? Because Mark Ford’s absorbing “Here you are talking about duck again” (London Review of Books, June 20, 2019) got me thinking about him. I relish Larkin’s style, particularly his devastating candor (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad”).  

Ford reviews Philip Larkin: Letters Home, 1936-77 (edited by James Booth). It’s a great piece, brimming with interesting quotation from Larkin’s letters and poems. Here’s a sample:

Larkin’s own sense that he had discovered his echt persona in poems such as ‘Spring’ (‘and me,/Threading my pursed-up way across the park,/An indigestible sterility’) or ‘Wants’ (‘Beyond all this, the wish to be alone’) – both composed in 1950 – is reflected in some of his letters to his mother, as when he describes himself, writing from Belfast, as ‘enjoying life as far as it’s my character to do so’. Occasionally the inhibitions that stifle him are played off an elated sense of the world around him that mirrors the economy of the poems, in which the reader is often made aware – or at least invited to believe – that it is because Larkin is a ‘pursed-up … indigestible sterility’ that his vision is ‘mountain-clear’. ‘Can you feel the autumn where you are?’ he asks his mother, again from Belfast, in August 1953:

It seems to hang in the air here, and sharpen my senses, and again I feel a sense of a great waste in my life. We must go again up that road to the wood where we found the scarlet toadstool and listen to the wind in the trees. I’m sure it’s beautiful at this time of year. Here the moon is large and lemon-yellow and drifts up into the sky at night like a hollow phosphorescent fungoid growth. Do you watch it?

Beneath these words is a sketch of an old creature in a mob-cap, knitting before a window that looks out onto rooftops and a full moon, as if she were comically anticipating his own great moon poem, ‘Sad Steps’ of 1968. A couple of years later, shortly after moving to Hull, Larkin finds himself unexpectedly moved by the sight of ‘clumps of Michaelmas daisies, chill blurs of mauve’, growing in a churchyard, and is driven to reflect that ‘outside my own miserable cramped absurd life, the world is still its old beautiful self.’

Did Larkin have an “elated sense of the world around him”? Yes, but it was fragile. His dominant mood was pessimism. Ford writes, 

‘Begin afresh, afresh, afresh’, as the last line of ‘The Trees’ (1967) would put it. But Larkin too was involved in a lifelong battle with melancholia: ‘bloody awful tripe,’ he wrote on the manuscript of this uplifting paean to spring, as if unable to allow the poem to escape his grasp without being marked by his own self-lacerating misery.

Clive James describes Larkin as a pessimist with one saving grace: “The voice was unmistakable. It made misery beautiful.”