ONAN THE LIBRARIAN
With the BBC about to show a film about
Philip Larkin, Robert Gore-Langton praises
the poet who knew how to offend everyone
PHILIP LARKIN, the miserable old git, has never had it so good. Sir Tom Courtenay is about to play him on stage. Faber is reissuing his Collected Poems this month. And on television there's a new and (by all accounts) sympathetic film about him, Love Again, coming up on BBC 2. (Love Again sounds as though it should star Hugh Grant, but in fact Larkin is played by the brilliant baddie from Daniel Deronda, Hugh Bonneville.) The bald, Hull-based poet who once claimed that 'depression is to me as daffodils were to Wordsworth' is having his day, albeit posthumously_ The general view hitherto has been that Larkin (1922-85) was a fine poet but a creep of the first order. Of course, being character-assassinated is par for the course if you're a top poet. Ted Hughes had terrible trouble with a gruesome clique of gravedesecrating feminist harridans, who more or less accused him of personally shoving his wife's (the poet. Sylvia Plath) head into the gas oven when she killed herself. A wouldbe Piath biographer once told me in all earnestness that she could not complete her book because Mystic Ted had put a spell on her. (Ted and Sylvia: The Movie, starring Gwyneth Paltrovv, is on the way.) Until recently, you were unlikely to hear a good word about Philip Larkin — misogynist, racist, rightist Eeyore, and the most magnificently un-PC poet of modem times_ The morose university librarian who wrote some of the best lyric poetry of the last 60 years was surely the Alf Garnett of the poetry world. His letters (many written in the jazzy slang he dug) to mates like Kingsley Amis are stuffed with jokes about blacks, women, liberals and Irishmen. There is something to offend just about everyone. The BBC press release that accompanies the forthcoming film mentions the reactionary 'saloon-bar' nature of his views, and, although the word 'regrettable' isn't used, you know that's what they mean.
Larkin was happy to spell out exactly where he stood. 'I've always been right wing. . I suppose I identify the Right with certain virtues and the Left with certain vices. All very unfair, no doubt. Thrift, hard work, reverence, desire to preserve — those are the virtues, in case you're wondering; and on the other hand idleness, greed and treason.' Instead of displaying solidarity with the oppressions of the working man, as modern poets are supposed to. Larkin regarded the unions as a work-shy rabble led by droning, chippy Glaswegians. Indeed, Larkin's outrageous wind-up persona makes this outwardly drab, tall, reclusive figure endlessly entertaining if you're in the mood.
He was true blue in almost every respect. His enthusiasm for mucky books was an appalling own goal for his reputation as a distinguished man of letters. He loved the toptier titles in newsagents and complained that he couldn't get sufficient filth in Hull where he worked at the university library for much of his life. When he bought himself a television, he was bitterly disappointed. 'Where's all this porn they talk about? I've seen three bummes and two payres of tittes [sic] since slapping my money down. Why can't they show naked women or pros and cons of corporal punishment in girls' schools?'
It's worrying to think that today Larkin would find his house full of paedo-cops rummaging through his hard disk for spanking websites featuring teenagers in St Trinian's uniform. But Larkin wasn't short of girlfriends, though that's the impression he gave. The forthcoming BBC film will feature the long-suffering women in his life (his secretary, a fellow-librarian and a lecturer), all of whom he two-timed and refused to marry in a plot worthy of an Alan Ayckbourn comedy.
Indeed, how this Casanova of Humberside managed to get away with this convenient (for him) arrangement without being beaten up in his own library beggars belief. Yet he regarded himself as a total failure in the romance department ('useful to get that learnt'), his loser persona the pervading voice of the poems.
In his literary tastes he was refreshingly straightforward — his journalism is fabulously lucid. He regarded A.E. Housman's observa tion that he could recognise poetry 'because it made his throat tighten and his eyes water' as being perfectly sound. For all his deep knowl edge of English verse, Larkin liked poems that pretty much anyone could read and enjoy. He hated 'the boring too-clever stuff.
Poetry that can't be understood without footnotes: "See the picture 'A dog buried in the sand' among the Black Paintings of Goya in the Prado." Why the fucking hell should I?' he railed.
His jokiness — he's a gift to a good actor — shouldn't hide the fact that he was gen uinely gloomy. Death follows life, and the thought depressed him deeply. But for a depressive he knew how to enjoy himself. He hated hunting but he wasn't short of trad English enthusiasms: he was mad about books, porn, whisky, jai and cricket, all of which enlivened the daily grind of 'the toad, work'. Of these loves, the greatest was ja77. Come to think of it, his total worship of those
'antique negroes. who could really blow a horn ('oh, play that thing!') is the healthy flipside of his racism.
Perhaps his most famous line, 'They fuck you up, your mum and dad', should have been an album track, not a poem. On the parental front he isn't seen at his best, it's true. He famously described his Coventry childhood as 'a forgotten boredom', even though he remembers it in precise detail. His dad was a jam-making Nazi (and the city treasurer of Coventry) who kept a statuette of Adolf Hitler on the mantelpiece. Philip hated his mum and was publicly nasty about her — though not as nasty as John Osborne was about his. In her later years Larkin wrote, .My mother, not content with being motionless, deaf and speechless, is now going blind. That's what you get for not dying, you see.' Nasty. But then again Philip was a very dutiful, attentive son. There's a paradox almost everywhere you turn with him.
Larkin is read today not because he was a Meldrewish curmudgeon, but because he was a genius at writing poetry that illuminates the corners of ordinary life in all its sadness. He was the English verse Sinatra. If you don't like Larkin the man, there are still those wonder ful poems. Would the reclusive old grump have enjoyed the current celebration of his life and work on stage and telly? Of course he wouldn't. To him it would have been a glitzy hell. As the ja77er poet said himself, 'It's all showbiz now. Not my scene, Dad.'
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