Hinterland

In his centenary year, Philip Larkin – the greatest English poet of my lifetime – must not be cancelled

The centenary of Philip Larkin’s birth is coming on August 9, and the chorus of commemoration one might have expected has not yet materialised. This worries me. Parts of the media, desperate to fill space, usually jump on any anniversary, however mediocre the person being lauded. Yet the Larkin celebrations do not even seem to be on the radar.

I consider him the greatest English poet of my lifetime. Larkin took the banalities of life and presented them as concise and original perceptions. Take an unfinished poem of 1953: “At thirty-one, when some are rich/ And others dead,/ I, being neither, have a job instead.” His muted diurnal existence is expressed in poem after poem, typified by “Church Going”, where he describes his inability to pass a church without going inside, although he is usually disappointed by what he finds. But then much of what Larkin writes is a reflection of disappointment – in love, or about getting older and the inevitability of death, or about the ordinariness of mid-20th century English life.

If that suggests Larkin lacks profundity, nothing could be further from the truth. From the clarity of his simple observations he draws eternal lessons, as in “An Arundel Tomb”, where he muses on the effect, or otherwise, of a grand memorial – “Side by side, their faces blurred,/ The earl and countess lie in stone.” The effort to immortalise the dead comes to nothing, whatever the expense and craftsmanship: but there is, in the poet’s mind, one consolation: “What will survive of us is love.”

His descriptions are rich: in “The Whitsun Weddings”, as the poet leaves Hull on a train and sees the Humber, he writes of the place “where sky, and Lincolnshire, and water meet”, while he sits in a railway carriage bathed in “the tall heat that slept/ For miles inland”.

Larkin is an Englishman, steeped in a sense of the English past. His poetry is that of a man conscious he is living in an old country, affected by the signs of its antiquity, not just in churches and monuments, but in human traits. His 1960 poem “MCMXIV”, conveys how quickly the present becomes the past, thinking of the men of 1914, on the bank holiday weekend when war was about to be declared, “the sun/ On moustached archaic faces”. Larkin conjures up that vanished age through its everyday matters:

The farthings and sovereigns, And dark-clothed children at play Called after kings and queens, The tin advertisements

For cocoa and twist, and the pubs Wide open all day.

He was famous for his difficulties with girls – as his friend and conspirator Kingsley Amis would have put it – and perhaps summed up those best of all in these lines:

The difficult part of love Is being selfish enough, Is having the blind persistence To upset an existence

Just for your own sake.

What cheek it must take.

He was famous, too, for his gloom, communicated with astonishing economy. In “Dockery and Son”, going back to Oxford more than 20 years after he was an undergraduate (“black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight”), now dressed in a dark suit, he acknowledges a remark from a don. The scene is encapsulated in just five words: “Death-suited, visitant, I nod.” He goes on: “Life is first boredom, then fear./ Whether or not we use it, it goes”.

That gloom seeps out in comic form in “Annus Mirabilis”, when he talks of sexual intercourse beginning in 1963 – “which was rather late for me” – and in “This Be the Verse”, about what “your mum and dad” do to you. His political cynicism mounts as his poetic muse fades: “When the Russian tanks roll westward, what defence for you and me?/ Colonel Sloman’s Essex Rifles? The Light Horse of the LSE?” (Sloman was vice chancellor of Essex University).

But then – and this brings us back to why the bunting is not being put out for Larkin – he was rather Right-wing. Perhaps, as I predicted last year, he is being shunned for his bilious private doggerel – written for like-minded friends – that poured abuse on trades unions, Labour ministers and immigrants. Is our last great poet in the process of being cancelled? Surely not: but we shall know for certain by August 9.

Larkin’s poetry is that of an Englishman conscious he is living in an old country