`Life is Not Like That'

“I like to read about people who have done nothing spectacular, who aren’t beautiful or lucky, who try to behave well in the limited field of activity they command, but who can see, in little autumnal moments of vision, that the so called `big’ experiences of life are going to miss them; and I like to read about such things presented not with self pity or despair or romanticism, but with realistic firmness & even humour, that is in fact what the critics wd call the moral tone of the book.”

Philip Larkin might have been writing about fictional characters as diverse as Misail Poloznev, Lambert Strether, Leopold Bloom, Henny Pollit and Tommy Wilhelm. He was, in fact, trying to convince an editor to publish the novels of Barbara Pym, who had gone 14 years without seeing a book into print. Larkin’s advocacy, echoed by Lord David Cecil, resulted in the publication of Quartet in Autumn (1977) and Pym’s literary resurrection. What interests me, beyond Larkin’s loyalty and generosity to a friend, is his taste in books.

Larkin delighted in thumbing his nose at academics, fashionable critics and tastemakers in general. This most bookish of men, a librarian, reveled in rubbing their noses in his ersatz and not-so-ersatz philistinism. No clan is more snobbish or pack-minded than self-styled litterateurs, and Larkin happily baited them. In a 1979 interview, when asked what he enjoyed reading, Larkin answered:

“I read everything except philosophy, theology, economics, sociology, science, or anything to do with the wonders of nature, anything to do with technology – have I said politics? I’m trying to think of all the Dewey decimal classes. In point of fact I virtually read only novels, or something pretty undemanding in the non-fiction line, which might be a biography. I read almost no poetry.”

How much of this is an act is debatable, but it’s certainly refreshing and preferable to readers fawning over the latest “experimental” stillbirth. Elizabeth Bishop reports a similar honesty and taste in her friend Marianne Moore:

“Sometimes we went to movies together, to Kon-Tiki twice, I recall. I never attempted to lure her to any dramatic or `artistic’ films. Since Dr. and Mrs. Sibley Watson were her dearest friends, she must have seen his early experimental films, such as Lot in Sodom. I heard the sad story of two young men, however, who when they discovered that she had never seen Eisenstein’s Potemkin insisted on taking her. There was a short before Potemkin, a Walt Disney film; this was when the Disney films still had charm and humor. After the movie they went to tea and Marianne talked at length and in detail about the ingenuity of the Disney film, and nothing more. Finally they asked her what she had thought of Potemkin. Her opinion was brief but conclusive: `Life,’ she said, `is not like that.’”

Anyone who has sat through Eisenstein’s dreary melodrama, particularly in the company of a montage-mad professor of film studies, will quietly thrill to Moore’s plain-spoken verdict. No, life is not like that, though generations of cinematic sophisticates have convinced themselves otherwise. Later in “Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore,” Bishop reports Moore’s admiration for “spontaneity” and “gusto,” qualities sorely lacking in Eisenstein and much other oversold art.