James Booth Somewhere Becoming Rain: Collected Writings on Philip Larkin by Clive James
About 50 years ago, Clive James tells us, he received “one of the great compliments I’d been paid in my life” when Philip Larkin attended a performance of songs which Pete Atkin and he gave in the University of Hull. Larkin admired James’s writing. In a letter reproduced in this volume he tells James he is “delighted” by his appreciation of the jazz reviews in Larkin at Sixty (1982), and in 1983 James’s Brilliant Creatures gave him “a week’s cackling”.
James responded by becoming Larkin’s champion in the literary press, cutting off at the knees “accredited arts experts” who insisted “the old fool had never been worth bothering with” and those in “the lifestyle press” who patronised him as a “perverted misogynist utterly unlike themselves”.
In this volume Tom Paulin, Bryan Appeyard and Bonnie Greer are all left sprawling on the pin of James’s wit. James’s argument is always the same: “All the evidence — and most of it is in his poetry — suggests that he could hear the fizz when light hit the window.” For all his magisterial gravitas, James’s concern is always to share his pleasure in the poetry.
James’s exact ear bypasses accepted opinion, even when it is promoted by Larkin himself. Larkin’s account of his early development “conjures up a young mind in which Hardy drives out Yeats”. But it is obvious to James that “the large, argued Yeatsian strophe” is as influential on later Larkin as Hardy’s “tricky stanzas”. However, James never quite sees through Larkin’s most carefully-laid false trail: his supposed insular anti-modernism. In his review of Collected Poems James tells us that Larkin’s “resolutely prosaic organisation of a poem is its passport to the poetic”. Though true to a limited extent of “The Whitsun Weddings”, this is not true of “Absences”, which as Larkin said himself “sounds like a slightly unconvincing translation from a French symbolist”.
In his review of Required Writing (1983) James glimpses that more is going on here than Larkin admits: “While forever warning us of the impossibility of mastering foreign languages, he has the right Latin and French tags ready when he needs them.” But he still believes that Larkin holds to a Betjemanian “bolt-hole version of England” and “attaches little meaning to the idea of internationalism in the arts”. He goes on: “Betjeman was the young Larkin’s idea of a modern poet because Betjeman, while thinking nothing of modern art, actually got in all the facts of modern life.”
some of the pieces in this volume have the status of historical documents. In his 1989 review of Collected Poems, edited by Anthony Thwaite, James shares the disappointment of most reviewers at seeing the “hard fought-for poise” of the sequences in the three mature volumes dispelled by Thwaite’s groundbreaking chronological reordering and his insertion of “new” poems from the workbooks. “Larkin”, James regrets, “now speaks a good deal less for us all and a good deal more for
himself, than was his plain wish.” But James declines to lambast Thwaite, as others did. “On the other hand, to be given, in whatever order, all these marvellous poems that were for so long unseen is a bonus for which only a dolt would be ungrateful.”
In contrast his review of Andrew Motion’s biography, A Writer’s Life (1993), tastes sour. Its title, “Getting Larkin’s Number”, suggests a hostile demystification. Larkin seems as much the victim as the beneficiary of this “unsparing” biography: “How much more the poor tormented genius had to hide than we ever thought.” Thwaite’s volume enlarged the oeuvre; the biography seemed set to diminish the poet. James ends with an oblique rebuke: “Those who revere Larkin’s achievement should be less keen to put him in range of mediocrities who would like to better themselves by lowering him to their level, matching his feet of clay with their ears of cloth.”
one remarkable feature of these essays is their developing narrative. James is constantly revising his judgments. In 1974 he concluded that “Show Saturday” offers “an extended, sumptuous evocation of country life”. Forty years later he conceded that the poem is “listless”. A footnote in his review of Motion’s biography indicates he radically changed his estimation of Eva Larkin on reading her correspondence with her son in Letters Home (2018).
In this respect he differs from Motion, who has maintained no ongoing engagement with Larkin’s writing. The second edition of his biography (2018) has a new introduction describing Motion and Larkin’s “friendship with holes in it”. But its text is a word for word reprint of the 1993 volume, without correction or revision. He still, for instance, detects “titillation” and “sado-masochism” in Larkin’s early schoolgirl novel Trouble at Willow Gables (under the nom-de-plume Brunette Coleman) which “staggered” James by “the way it wasn’t pornographic”.
Agree with him or not, James’s criticism is a constant delight, since it arises always from unprescriptive reading and rereading. He constantly hits important nails, unnoticed by others, on the head. He praises Larkin’s “childishness … The paddling at the seaside, the steamer in the afternoon, the ponies at Show Saturday — they are all done with crayons and coloured pencils. He did not put away childish things and it made him more of a man.”
T.S. Eliot, he writes, enjoyed the plebeian pleasure of the music hall, but his essay on Marie Lloyd remains a “one-off” because of his “hierarchical aesthetic”. In contrast, Larkin’s “For Sidney Bechet” “saluted the great saxophonist not just as a master, but as his master”. In his 1986 Valediction for Philip Larkin James writes: “Profound glee charged your sentences with wit.”
Your saddest lyric is a social act.
Just so. Insights of this quality are rare, and we get more than our fair share of them in this volume.
limited.” And this meagreness of vocabulary is particularly grievous on the negative side of the ledger, for “although there is a well-worn vocabulary of praise to describe good wine — it can be muscular, well-knit, complex, fragrant, etc — there is no equivalent glossary to describe what is bad”.
If Waugh’s terms of praise therefore tend towards the conventional, bad wine was on the other hand his perverse muse. Addressing a flight of young Italian Merlots and Cabernets, he noted that some were good but “they are none of them ready to drink yet (unless, like the Italians, you enjoy the tastes of tannin, stalk, ink, fruit juice, sherbert [sic], iron and sundry fermentation gases)”. The more far-fetched eulogistic comparisons offered by others, especially of wines Waugh had found disappointing, might receive short shrift: “I think I drank a good Chinon about twelve years ago . . . but my last five attempts have been failures, so now I have given up. People say it reminds them of violets and wild strawberries, but I feel they must be mad.”
waugh was more forgiving to his own occasional extravagances of metaphor and simile on grounds of stylistic principle. He was adamant that wine writing “should be approached from a position which is always several degrees over the top”; it “should be camped up: the writer should never like a wine, he should be in love with it; never find a wine disappointing but identify it as a mortal enemy, an attempt to poison him”. Some of his own more baroque essays in that field got him into hottish water with the Press Council and Race Relations Board, but he managed to escape unscathed.
Waugh started writing about wine for Tatler before moving on to Harper’s and Queen and the Spectator, where he set up and organised the wine club. Despite the occasional extravagances of the prose in which they were couched, these columns were down-to-earth and practical, and were guided by Waugh’s good if traditional judgment about wine.
His own tastes were classic: Burgundy made in the old style (he had a weakness for the sophisticated, sometimes slightly mysterious, English bottlings of Burgundy that were for a long a speciality of Avery’s), the greater clarets, fine Sauternes and Barsac. But he also realised that the prices of these wines were rising to the point where they were beyond the reach of all but the very richest drinkers, and so he was energetic in hunting down delicious, less expensive substitutes.
He scored some palpable hits, which demonstrate how, even though his palate was conventional, his judgment and intelligence were bound by neither convention nor snobbery.
One of his great strokes was to draw attention to the glorious, subtle wines of Château Musar in the Lebanon, when the very thought of Middle Eastern wine would in many quarters have been scoffed at. However, in respect of this wine he must surely have regretted the operation of one of the paradoxes he identified in persuasive wine-writing, for “the effect of making a wine more popular is almost invariably to increase its price”, and therefore the wine-writer is the enemy of his own bank balance, and consequently of his own pleasure. Château Musar now commands a price that rivals some of the lesser second growths of Bordeaux. Another moment of acuity was Waugh’s early alertness to super-Tuscans such as Tignanello and Sassicaia.
His enthusiasm for the wines of the Rhône valley, particularly Hermitage and Condrieu, although of course not discoveries in the manner of Château Musar, was nevertheless very good guidance for the slightly cash-strapped consumer. Ditto his promotion of the wines of Alsace, still somehow underrepresented in our cellars and wine-lists.
of course, waugh was not infallible. Sometimes his advice was bad. Anyone who followed his tip to buy 1975 ports has probably regretted it. Some judgments seem either perverse or slightly ignorant. “I have no German, Alsatian or Loire wines in my cellar — not because I do not buy them occasionally but because, like Californian wines, I do not feel they are cellar material.” Goldkapsel Rieslings from the Mosel? Vendanges Tardives from Alsace? The almost immortal sweet Chenins of Bonnezeaux and Vouvray?
His prognoses could also go awry: “I do not think the British will be able to buy good French wine for much longer.’’ But this is wrong, not because the great French wines have become more plentiful, still less that they have become cheaper, but rather because there is now much more good French wine.
The techniques of wine production — in the vineyard and in the cellar — are now much better understood, and technology has enhanced the winemaker’s control of in particular fermentation. The result is that regions which used to be uniformly disappointing (white Bergerac from the 1970s, anyone?) now produce oceans of cleanly-made, fresh, honest wines. They are not Mon
trachet but nor are they meant to be.
Waugh may have undergone a partial change of mind on this score, as he noted the good effects that have followed the introduction of temperature-controlled fermentation in Sancerre and Ménétou Salon. However, he still can find nothing good to say about sweet Loire wines. Perhaps we should be grateful. This may have helped slightly to hold down the prices that those of us who love them have to pay.
Waugh died in 2001, and for several years before his death had ceased to write regularly about wine, instead devoting his energies to the Literary Review. As a consequence, there are some areas of silence in these columns that might strike today’s readers as needing comment or explanation. One such area is the wines of New Zealand, ubiquitous and plentiful in English wine lists today, but apparently never mentioned by Waugh. His opinions about Kiwi wines would probably have been divided.
On the one hand, he was always searching (without, alas, recorded success) for Pinot Noirs that could supply something of the pleasure and experience of great Burgundy but at a fraction of the price.
Some of the Pinots of the South Island, and those grown just north of Wellington at the southern tip of the North Island, might well have pleased him on grounds of taste, though he could only have sighed over the prices demanded for the best of them, and he might have found some of them too pale for his liking.
in new zealand Sauvignon Blanc, however, one of the most disruptive and trend-setting wines of recent decades, he would have found confirmation of an aspect of the modern English taste in wine against which he waged a relentless crusade, namely a “depraved taste for semi-sweet wine”.
“We like our wine sweetish with a touch of acid to give it bounce, white and low in alcohol,” Waugh noted, and although he is here thinking primarily of cheap German wine, New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc also ticks many of these boxes. People tend to think, mistakenly, that these are dry wines, because they are so vividly acidic (and the grapes are often harvested before phenological ripeness in order to ensure that initial acidic ‘cut’ in the resulting wine).
But wines can be both fully sweet and thrillingly acidic — for example, some of the great sweet wines of Germany and Vouvray. New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc is of course not fully sweet, but it often contains a surprising amount of unfermented sugar. The prominent acidity conceals the fact that it is really an off-dry wine, and therefore a bit closer to New Zealand Pinot Gris than the very different flavour profiles of those two types of wine would at first suggest.
Waugh might well have concluded that the popularity of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc at English middle-class parties was evidence of our inability to wean ourselves from sweetness in wines. He might also, however, have taken a little satisfaction from the fact that so many of the consumers of these wines think they are drinking something dry, and pat themselves on the back for it. This is the tribute paid by ignorance to discrimination.
However, it remains true that if you serve a truly dry wine (such as properly-made Chablis) to many people they will not really enjoy it, although usually they will pretend to. That honesty about our wine likes and dislikes which Waugh hoped to instill is, just as much as ever, still to seek.
Perhaps we should be grateful he could find nothing good to say about sweet Loire wines. This may have helped hold down the prices those of us who love them have to pay