Larkin in the TLS (by David Yezzi)

If you are a Philip Larkin fan and you haven't yet seen the April 3rd issue of the TLS, then you are in for a treat. There is an amazing behind-the-scenes account by John Shakespeare of Larkin giving his first interview, in 1956, just after the publication of The Less Deceived but before anyone knew who he was. The article reprints contemporary correspondence between Shakespeare and Larkin that shows Larkin engaging in the most assiduous image management. He could have been a PR man. It's brilliant and a bit weird. Interspersed, however, are some very amazing statements about poetry (with which you might agree or disagree), such as this:

Most people say that the purpose of poetry is communication: that sounds as if one could be contented simply by telling somebody whatever it is one has noticed, felt or perceived. I feel it is a kind of permanent communication better called preservation, since one’s deepest impulse in writing (or, I must admit, painting or composing) is to my mind not “I must tell everybody about that” (i.e. responsibility to other people) but “I must stop that from being forgotten if I can” (i.e. responsibility towards subject). . . . Of course, the process of preservation does imply communication, since that is the only way an experience can be preserved, and that explains why obscurity is so often a disadvantage; the distinction between communication and preservation is one of motive, and I think the latter word gives a very proper emphasis to the language-as-preserver rather than language-as-means-of-communication. In other words it makes it sound harder, which it is!

No wonder the poor fellow only averaged around four poems a year. But what poems!

Comments

[DL]

Thanks for this great lead, DY. It is a treat, as promised. Larkin in interview mode shows himself at his best (a witty maverick) but also at his not so nice (a xenophobe )-- as when he was asked what he, a librarian, felt about other librarians who had made names for themselves as writers, such as Jorge Luis Borges. "Who is Jorge Luis Borges?" Larkin replied, adding that the literary librarian he really admired was Archibald MacLeish. I am convinced that Larkin's great poems reflect not only the wit but also the less admirable traits. Do you think I am the more deceived in thinking so?

[jim cummins]

DL: No, but you might be the less received at, say, a Larkin conference.

[David Yezzi]

Hi, DL! Glad you liked the Shakespeare piece. I think Larkin’s confessed xenophobia (he was less-deceived on this point) was sometimes a pose, as when he said that he did not read poets in other languages. It seems clear from his own poems that he read the French Symbolists carefully (and in French!). Best, DY

[DL]

From the letters to his intimates, I agree that Larkin took a pleasure in exaggerating his own bad attitudes and incorrect behavior. A pose, but a curiously endearing one.