adam piette
foolish decisions being made to our detriment on the other side of the Atlantic’.^1
Forthat, the logic told the Prime Ministers, from Attlee to Macmillan, the UK
needed atomic, then thermonuclear capability. But when they got it, they could
not compete with Soviet and American technological developments in order to
sustain it—everything fell apart when the US dropped Skybolt, when the V-force
of thermonuclear bombers became obsolete, when the UK had meekly to follow
NATO commands and take on Polaris.
For British citizens, poets included, the contraction of empire which the War’s
costs had accelerated, with the independence of India, Burma, and others, the shock
of the austerity programmes, the wealth and prestige of the new superpower partner,
constructed what is now a very familiar set of gripes and muffled resentments. It
is a commonplace to argue that the Movement poets, with their Little Englander
Anglo-Saxon attitudes, retreated into contemplation of small-scale domestic issues
and the ventriloquizing of a middling, middle-brow, semi-defeated, suburban type.
That this ‘Larkinian’ figure was miming the contracted post-imperial nation is
unquestionable. That that figure might also be a Cold War projection is less often
conceived.
If Larkin admires Betjeman for being out of step with modernity, for his ‘insular’
and ‘regressive’ themes,^2 this has partly to do with the decision to concentrate on a
reduced post-imperial Englishness. As Jed Esty has argued inA Shrinking Island,it
was the loss of empire which led to this insular regressiveness, as though England
had to be reconceived as a limited region rather than a centre of a global network.^3 It
is typical of Larkin’s style here to defend Betjeman not only against the modernizing
welfare planners, but specifically against a hypothetical American reader: ‘I can well
imagine the American demurring, however.’^4 Larkin knows that the contraction of
the Empire must entail a relation of dependency upon the US. The planners, Larkin
would say, were modernizing the island in order to offer England up as trophy to
American power.
Larkin’s poetry consistently aligns the depredation of old England with American
values. The 1961 ‘Here’ imagines some neglected edge of England harbouring
‘removed lives’, just beyond ‘the poppies’ bluish neutral distance’.^5 Old England,
in other words, is lost in a beyond more distant than a dream of the First World
War, suspended in some impossible neutralzone beyond foreign encroachment.
The empire remains as a free power beyond America’s Cold War containment
(‘unfenced existence’), but only in the unreal form of an illusionary memory
(^1) Harold Macmillan, quoted in Peter Hennessy,The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War
(London: Penguin, 2003), 62.
(^2) Philip Larkin, ‘It Could Only Happen in England’, inRequired Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces
1955–1982(London: Faber, 1984), 206.
(^3) See Jed Esty,A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England(Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2005). 4
5 Larkin, ‘It Could Only Happen in England’, 215.
Larkin, ‘Here’, inCollected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber, 1990), 136.