Philip Larkin's Centenary

Miles Leeson reflects on the significance of Larkin on the centenary of his birth, 9 August 2022

Everyone – at least the literary critics for the UK broadsheets and beyond – is having their say on Philip Larkin this month, the centenary of his birth. There are a few, perhaps inspired by the decision to ‘drop’ Larkin from a recommended GCSE reading list (although it seems odd to give Larkin to younger teenagers in 2022), who have come to if not bury him, at least inform us that we have, in literary terms, moved on. And yet the majority of articles, by some margin, are celebratory, even laudatory, in celebrating his place in the firmament amongst the great ones – should we be surprised?  

Following his death in 1985 and his memorial in poet’s corner, it was assumed that he had become the first truly canonical writer of the post-war period, but this was shaken somewhat by the revelations in Andrew Motion’s magisterial biography in 1993 that brought to light a series of (by turns) unsavoury, unflattering, and, frankly, repugnant private writings that were never meant to come to our attention. The publication of John Sutherland’s Monic Jones, Philip Larkin and Me in 2021 (an excellent book, by the way) only confirmed the impression that Larkin was, at his worst, truly appalling.

Perhaps too much biography, however compelling, taints our vision of the work as much as completely avoiding the matter. Not that we can escape it, soaked as we are in clickbait opinion; even The Spectator in March (getting in early) confronted us with ‘Philip Larkin’s Big Problem’. It is up to you if you want to find out exactly what this may have been, but consider yourself warned.

A refuge from all of this is back in the collected works, supplemented by the two (rather good, but perhaps not vital) short novels ‘Jill’ and ‘A Girl in Winter’, both fictions indebted to verse, and in his lesser-discussed photography. The Larkin we meet here is always trying to get out from underneath a particularly difficult situation; his childhood, ‘a forgotten boredom’, living with his Nazi-sympathising father; the ‘toad work’ of Belfast, Leicester and Hull; his difficulties with women; with sex, ‘a little late for me’, of course; his aging mother; and of course, his own impending death in ‘Aubade’:

Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.

And yet his concern for the particular, captured in both his most famous works; ‘Church Going’, ‘High Windows’, and the Chichester-favourite ‘An Arundel Tomb’ (the Tomb is in our Cathedral, not in Arundel’s) runs up against what James Marriott in The Times has called the ‘ordinary, boring suffering’ of his life. That he is the quintessential poet of male middle-aged depression is both a caricature, and broadly true.

Yet Larkin in his best work reminds us that desire is not only universal but fleeting, that the drudgery of a life can be transfigured by shifting our attention outside of ourselves, even if only onto ‘the strength and pain of being young’ that is ‘undiminished somewhere’, or on to those fleeting moments of pleasure that we get from the commercialisation of life. When he escapes the influence of Hardy, Auden and Yeats in his later work he gives voice to, and inhabits, that post-war anxiety that we find in the very best literature of the period, distilled for us into thirty or forty lines of crystalline verse.

He will certainly outlive his rather divisive friend Kingsley Amis, whose own centenary just past gathered far less comment. Will we be reading Larkin a century hence? I’m minded to say that we will. Richer than Housman, arguably more adept than Auden, he may well become the preeminent British poet not only of the post-war period but of the entire twentieth century. Although not quite at the same level of profundity as Eliot, he runs him rather close in his observation and connection to the mundanity and briefness of life, infused with a romanticism that brings his best work to life. He was ‘one of those old-type natural fouled-up guys’ but his silence in the near-forty years since his death leave us with his words, continually echoing.

Miles Leeson
Chichester 2022

Miles will lecture on Philip Larkin: The Escapologist in a live online session, Wed. 14 December 2022, 6.00 pm British time (GMT).

Links

• BBC radio programmes on Larkin presented by Simon Armitage, starting 8 August 2022. Available on BBC Sounds.
• Alan Bennett on Larkin, LRB, 1993.
• Philip Larkin Society website.