Paying homage
Peter Levi
Larkin at Sixty edited by Anthony Thwaite (Faber £7.95)
hilip Larkin says that a poem is a comp- lete lete thing, like an egg; that suggests a family resemblance between this poet and his poems. His luck is proverbially bad, fate has a taste for jokes at his expense. During his time as an undergraduate, the Oxford Professor of Poetry was an ageing clergyman who wrote an epic poem in Spenserian stanzas on the History of Old King Cole (spelt Ceol). This innocent old man lived to be about 100. He was jobbed into the poetry chair by C. S. Lewis in order to keep out a non-Christian. It is not a bad example of Larkin's luck.
Some of the earliest published praise of his poems was for the fine phrasing of what was in fact a quotation from Tennyson. During the war he worked as a Librarian in Northern Ireland; it was not long before a London critic had him labelled as an Ulster regional poet, second only to the writers of Lallans. Later in life, when he visited the most romantic sounding of the Western Isles of Scotland, it turned out to be as flat as Holland, and neatly divided into fields of tulips. This book is another stroke of fate of the same kind. I once heard Anthony Thwaite say he thought of Philip Larkin as a saint of poetry. He figures in these pages as a tragicomic Saint Sebastian, an Eric Morecambe expressing himself by other means.
He is famous for having lived his life in decent obscurity and deliberate privacy. Somehow as a result of that life, he now suffers an invasion which most thicker- skinned people would find traumatic. His casual limericks and whimsical follies are paraded, with affection admittedly, but suppose someone had treated Eliot or Tennyson like that? We are even given a report from the second fifteen at school, that 'his height and weight ought to make him very useful in the lineout and the scrum'. All this in a collection of thin essays, without those advantages of slow pace or serious analysis or nourishing drabness which a full biography might offer. The contributors are obviously striving to give him pleasure. Sir John Betjeman, in a poem about his old teddy-bear, as good as anything he has ever written, is the likeliest to have succeeded. Most of the writers per- form predictably. Alan Bennett is much the funniest, and almost the best, although, or because, he seems to be the only one not to know Larkin personally. Kingsley Amis is wonderfully readable and brilliant, but one would like one day to see a sober treatment of that relationship. Clive James belabours the obvious with vigour, like a jester with a bladder on a string. Seamus Heaney writes movingly about Larkin's generosity of spirit. The young poets are awful and too full of themselves. The star of the whole collection is unexpected. It is Charles Monteith of Faber's, a retired publisher who has never to my knowledge written a book. He writes with tact, intelligence and a humour that fits in well with Philip Larkin' s.
Both Monteith and George Hartley of Listen and the Marvell Press write well because they have something to say. The critics in this volume seem to have had to invent something. The most useless is John
Gross on The Oxford Book of Twentieth- Century Verse, a rumbling, grumbling, empty piece, decorated with gloomy wit. It
is patronising about poets, and disapproves of Robert Lowell for saying that the an- thology was 'like a Larkin, not the best, but the longest to write'. Surely that is the best remark anyone has made on the subject. Several writers have discovered Philip Larkin's novels and his jazz criticism. But the true Larkin afficionados, and there are many thousands of us, have known about all that for years.
Some 10 years ago, Robert Lowell sug- gested in conversation that Philip Larkin was at that time the greatest living poet in the English language. Since then nothing has happened to alter the verdict except Lowell's own death. The real Larkin starts in the Fifties, and for 30 years now he has been the truest, most individual poet in Bri- tain. His weapons have not been silence and exile but sourness and irony. He gives more pleasure than any other living poet in English.
If all poets were transformed into birds, Robert Graves might be a fastidious osprey, Roy Fuller a cool-noted blackbird, Ted Hughes a rookery, Craig Raine a cuckoo in a clock. Philip Larkin might have to be a budgerigar. Reincarnation was being discussed, and everyone present was mak- ing their choice of the best life on earth. 'I'd like to come back as a budgerigar,' he said, `if I had to come back. You'd be well fed and you'd live a long time.' He was in All Souls then.
I hope I have made it plain enough that the readers of this book will probably enjoy it a lot more than the subject will. As a gesture of admiration and of love, it con- veys its message. It also has a pleasant cover, although that does display an awful new Faber Logo like a suppressed 'Ff
More of Larkin's luck? Outsiders owe a debt to Anthony Thwaite all the same.
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