degraded circumstances in which people live their lives, his ‘loaf-haired’ secretary
(‘Toads Revisited’, ‘an estateful of washing’ (‘Afternoons’), shopping for ‘Bri-Nylon
Baby Dolls and Shorties (Modes for Night)’ (‘The Large Cool Store’). In ‘The
Whitsun Weddings’, Larkin, travelling to London by train, looks out idly, recording
sensations:
now and then a smell of grass
Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth
Until the next town, new and nondescript,
Approached with acres of dismantled cars.
The last line has the anticlimax of Prufrock’s ‘I have measured out my life with
coffee-spoons’ (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock), but here the coffee is instant.
Larkin’s use of regular stanzaic forms, and of an artful syntax and diction masks the
originality of his subject-matter. At stations, wedding parties put newly-weds on the
train, ‘an uncle shouting smut’:
A dozen marriages got under way.
They watched the landscape, sitting side by side- An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,
And someone running up to bowl –
Like cricket, marriage is a spectator sport for the short-sighted Larkin. He watches,
separate from the newly married couples, but drawing slightly nearer. He shared the
interest shown by the poets of the Thirties in ‘mass observation’ of how most people
lived their lives, and he domesticated some of Auden’s techniques. A distance
between self and others, especially married others, is preserved. He values ordinary
collective institutions – marriage, seaside holidays, British trains, ‘Show Saturday’,
hotels, churches, the Lords’ Test Match, Remembrance Day parades, even ‘An
Arundel Tomb’; but he is outside them all. In ‘Dockery and Son’ he wonders, unen-
viously, why a contemporary of his already has a son at university. His own idea of
happiness is
the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
Larkin’s own reputation, established early and not fading, was contested by
those who disliked his grouchy anti-modernism, his dislike of foreigners and his
unedifying attitudes to sex. That fine poet Charles Tomlinson found Larkin self-
limiting, middlebrow and formulaic; Ezra Pound had held the same view of A. E.
Housman. Larkin admired Yeats and Auden, but he then took Hardy as his model;
he mocked Picasso and Pound. Of Mrs Thatcher’s remark, ‘If you can’t afford it,
you just can’t have it’, Larkin said with delight: ‘I thought I would never hear
anyone say that again.’ An ironic connoisseur of the boring and the banal, Larkin
was far more modernist, cultivated and literary than he pretended; he is intensely
if quietly allusive. But he played the Little Englander more morosely than his
adopted poetic uncle, John Betjeman; and the mask grew on him. He was also an
inveterate joker. The poet-librarian did not truly think, like the man in his ‘A Study
of Reading Habits’, that ‘Books are a load of crap.’ Subsequent publication of his
letters show him raging against contemporary pieties. But the poems are what
matter.
396 14 · BEGINNING AGAIN: 1955–80