A Great Larkin Story (Not Mine)

David Yezzi's post and David Lehman's comment following bring up the basic issues all Larkin lovers (I don't think there ARE any Larkin haters, except maybe Czeslaw Milosz) mull over frequently.  When you read Andrew Motion's biography you see what a controlling, often obnoxious personality he was; the compartmentalizing of his love/emotional life is particularly repellant.  My favorite index to this side of his character is the spanking; he found spanking young girls very titillating and belonged to at least one circle of fellow spanking-lovers, the members (!) of which traded spanking magazines among themselves.  Thus assuring a spanking good time was had by all!  (I love the word 'spanking.'  Perhaps I'm a closet spanker.  Wanker, more likely.)  And of course, as both Davids imply, this control-freak aspect permeates his work and career, along with his great erudition, love of jazz, amazing intelligence, and all the other qualities that blend to give us these fabulous poems which I personally have loved since I was fortunate enough to discover them.

But my story is only indirectly about this stuff; and it comes to me from Phil Levine, another great admirer of Larkin, who was visiting England with his wife, Franny--this would be sometime in the late 60s or early 70s--and who wangled an extraordinarily rare and precious appointment with Larkin for dinner.  I don't have the details as to how this came about, but I know Phil relates it as an event that was so rare--a visiting American poet granted an audience with the Bath librarian--that he regarded it with awe and gratitude.  He and Franny were tremendously excited and felt greatly privileged; they showed up at the restaurant and eagerly awaited the poet.  Phil was particularly keen on talking to him about jazz: Artie Shaw, Coltrane.  Phil was friends with guitarist Kenny Burrell in Detroit.  Larkin was about a half hour late, or more; and when he showed up he was exceedingly shy.  Conversation was imposingly difficult; and about 15 minutes into it, Larkin contrived to spill a pitcher--not a glass, a pitcher--of water all over his stomach and lap.  He jumped up, made apologies about going to get towel--and never came back!  Phil and Franny never saw him again.

I love this story for many reasons, not least of which is Levine's ingenuousness and enthusiasm, though the joke is on him: as he tells it, he's completely on Larkin's side.  And of course it's a quick look into the personality of maybe the best British poet of the last half-century; certainly one of them.

Comments

[Stacey]

This is hilarious, Jim. What a way to get out of an uncomfortable situation. I'll have to try it some time. At least he didn't spill coffee.
Speaking of spanking, though. One of my favorite books is Spanking the Maid, by Robert Coover. When I met Coover, I asked him how he came to write the book. He explained that during a visit to England he discovered the Brit's love of spanking, and a cache of those magazines, in the library where he was doing research. They were Victorian-era guides for how to discipline household help. He couldn't remove the journals so he had to copy passages in long hand into his notebook. They were the inspiration for the novel, which is about the relationship between a man and his maid (w/lots of spanking) though Coover said it was really about "language."

[jim cummins]

Oh god, that's great: really about language! The language of love. I've never read "Maid" but I really like Coover's work; I'll track it down tomorrow. Thanks! Maybe the Brits are onto something; perhaps we should spank more young women in this country. It might be good for the young women, too; don't you think? Maybe this is a social engineering program we can all get, er, behind.

[Stacey]

Yes and I have to say there was a note of condescension in his voice when he said it was about language, as if I was a real dope for missing the the point. Still, I love that book (at the time I read it, I was working for a real monster so it seemed to mirror my life (thwack!). (See how literature teaches us that we're not alone?)And I like his other books too, especially Gerald's Party (a great "bum" scene in there too), and The Convention, which I think was published as a chapbook, and the one about Nixon (can't recall the title).

[DL]

That's a great story about the meeting of the two Phils. I read Larkin when I was at Cambridge back in 1971 or 72 and had even daydreamed about going to Hull to see him, but Hull is a long trip from London, and Larkin never answered the letter. I still remember which poem of his initiated me into the club: "Poetry of Departures."

[jim cummins]

David, I would love to remember the similar poem for me; I've spent the last half hour leafing through the Collected. I just remember reading a stretch of his work being fascinated because the personality revealed was not exactly congenial (reread "To His Wife" or "Talking in Bed"), yet the work--the voice, the world--was so compelling, so semblable and frere. Ones I remember from that time would be "Toads," "Vers de Societe," "Annus Mirabilis," and of course "Poetry of Departures" and "This Be The Verse." Oh, and definitely "Self's the Man," which almost caused me to have a mild infarction. Stacey, I think for a certain stretch of time, probably from Wittgenstein through the day before yesterday, "language" was a mystical term for non-mystical writers, "numinous" as the Jungians say; if not an archetype, at least a nexus of value that they couldn't define but which provided a really handy little club they could use. Whap, whap. I never mind condescension; in fact, it reassures, since it's so obviously an overcompensatory move. Speaking of Larkin and Coover and condescension, Julian Barnes was here a while back; at one odd combustion moment, we began reciting,the two of us, "This Be The Verse"--we were like a 6-cylinder engine hitting on 3 or 4 cylinders, but we made it through. I was pleased, but then saw he was condescending to me. I didn't mind, though; he was beginning a book tour. Good luck, man.

[DL]

To say that "Spanking the Maid" is really about language -- and in a patronizing tone -- is to sum up a quarter century of academic discourse.
I once heard an enthusiastic disciple of Derrida say that the Crusades were "largely" a linguistic battle. "Language invaded the universal problematic," he said, quoting Derrida, but before I could get him to clarify, he was off and running to his next assertion: "Meaning is Fascist."

[jim cummins]

Beautifully put.