Legend has it that once, at a dismally inept amateur boxing match in Hull, Philip Larkin turned to his neighbour with the words ╥Only connect.╙ In its way, this is typical of Larkin. Not only that he should thus introduce a hallowed Forsterian nostrum into a coarse context, but also that he should yearn for aggression and directness.
Introducing Betjeman╒s work to American readers, he began with relish: ╥The quickest way to start a punch-up between two British literary critics is to ask them what they think about the poems of Sir John Betjeman.╙ The nice thing about Larkin is that he was a reactionary. Or, put it another way, a counter-puncher. He enjoyed hitting back at received progressive opinion on Picasso, Pound, Charlie Parker and pulling out the troops.
His poetry, though we are used to it now, is full of explicit aggression against the idea of poetry itself. His first book, The North Ship, shows a young writer hypnotised by the example of Yeats, the old spell-binding tenor he was to repudiate with the help of Hardy: ╥When I came to Hardy it was with the sense of relief that I didn╒t have to try to jack myself up to a concept of poetry that lay outside my own life ╤ this is perhaps what I felt Yeats was trying to make me do.╙ After two novels, Jill and A Girl In Winter, Larkin returned to poetry with a voice of his own ╤ a voice content with the middle range.
The note it strikes is apparent in the title, The Less Deceived, the authentic Larkin note of sceptical disenchantment. And a poem like I Remember, I Remember takes the standard literary presentation of childhood, backs it into a corner and dishes out a tremendous pasting.
Larkin had little time for poetic props and easy atmospherics. Groping back to bed after a piss, one poem begins, identifying the speaker with l╒homme moyen sensuel, before going on to ridicule artistic treatments of the moon as ╥Lozenge of love. Medallion of art.╙
Larkin censored nothing on the grounds that it was unpoetic. His verse, like Betjeman╒s, was ╥resigned to swallowing anything╙.
A camera himself, rejoicing in disruptive accidents to compositional decorum, he remarked to a photographer who was about to take his picture: ╥I tell this to all photographers: I am not bald, I do not have a double chin, and this doesn╒t exist.╙
╥This╙ was his ample stomach. It wasn╒t vanity. It was a wry comment on vanity and its absurdity, followed by a rich guffaw. He included himself with the mass of humanity. And when Larkin praised writers it was always for this: his reservations about Tennyson (╥vapid onomatopoeics╙) are balanced by praise for his ╥gruff ability to hit the nail on the head in matters of common concern.╙ He likes Hardy because he is direct ╤ a man speaking to men. He reveres Wilfred Owen: ╥His secret lies in the retort he had already written when WB Yeats made his fatuous condemnation ╘passive suffering is not a theme for a poetry. Above all, I am not concerned with poetry.╒╙
Neither was Larkin. And yet, having disposed of it, having written it off, he can touch us easily and directly with the real thing, without the capital P Poetry, when it comes, is earned. It has to live in a world where people grope back to bed after a piss, where people fuck each other up, where boys puke their hearts out behind the gents. Only then can the moon be seen for what it is.
A mixed blessing, is what one takes away from Larkin. But a blessing nevertheless. To return to EM Forster, his phrase applies in full to Philip Larkin: ╥Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.╙
