pointing to east and west located as mirage on a horizon offshore. The real political spaces of England are
colonized,defeated, second-rate. If Larkin’s subject is the abandoned nation-state,
the slow dying of old England half-allegorized as neglected monument, absent
space, or devious old man (‘Nothing to be said’, ‘MCMXIV’), then the correlative of
this is American ascendancy—captured in the glib assumptions of Jake Balakowsky
in ‘Posterity’—and the abandonment of old colonies and Europe to the Russian
sphere of influence (‘Homage to a Government’ and ‘When the Russian tanks roll
westward’). The attitude to the US is exemplified in the famous attack on Auden in
America. Auden’s irreparable decline involved the conversion of ‘a tremendously
exciting English social poet’ into ‘an engaging, bookish American talent, too verbose
to be memorable and too intellectual to be moving’.^6
Whilst Larkin articulated the resentments buried beneath the Cold War special
relationship, other Movement poets looked west for (nuclear) comfort. Thom Gunn
espoused the Beat-anarchic freedoms that American youth culture afforded poets,
then moved permanently over there. But the freedom is articulated through fake
combat readiness, through Gunn’s ironic admiration for the military culture of the
new superpower, captured in the title of his first collection,Fighting Terms.Forhim,
American sexiness had something to do with the homoerotic appeal of the raw cold
warrior: the freedoms of the young warrior male, the tough on his motorbike (‘Lines
foraBook’,‘OntheMove’)posinginPresley’s‘postureforcombat’(‘ElvisPresley’).^7
Donald Davie, though intent on a liberated idea of Europe, and keen to attend
to the particularities of English culture, joined him. His act of expatriation is partly
an act of exasperation, created by the stripping of power from the UK:
British is what we are
Once an imperial nation,
Our hands are clean now, empty,
Cause for congratulation.^8That stripped-down status has had a knock-on effect on the language, for Davie. The
English language feels itself ‘too poor|Spirited’, broken by ‘Humiliation, corporate
and private’, by fear of ‘the inauthentic|Which invades it on all sides|Mortally’, the
English poet dreaming of expatriation as a release.^9 The move, crucially, is towards
superpower. Writing to an American friend, the Yeats scholar Curtis Bradford,
Davie admits as much, envying America’s ‘manifested copiousness’:
[I] envy you out of England. Man with man
Is all our history; American,
You met with spirits.^10(^6) Larkin, ‘What’s Become of Wystan?’, inRequired Writing, 127 and 123.
(^7) Thom Gunn, ‘Elvis Presley’, inCollected Poems(London: Faber, 1993), 57.
(^8) Donald Davie, ‘From the New World’, inCollected Poems(Manchester: Carcanet, 1990), 147.
(^9) Davie, ‘To Enrique Caracciolo Trejo’, ibid. 163–5.
(^10) Davie, ‘A Letter to Curtis Bradford’, ibid. 99.