'And on Another Day Will Be the Past'

Interviewer: “Isn’t there a danger in adducing one’s own temperament as the truth about life?” 

Philip Larkin: “A danger who for? Nobody pays any attention to what you write. They read it and then forget about it. There may be a lunatic fringe who believe that life is what writers say, not what they experience themselves, but most people just say, ‘Oh well, that’s what it’s like to be Larkin,’ and start thinking about something else.”

 

As always, Larkin is tonic. He snorts at the inflated persona adopted by many writers, as though arranging words on a page conferred prophet-like authority. His tone is irreverent and shouldn’t be mistaken for self-revulsion or a show of false humility. Most writers are congenitally equipped with a surplus of self-esteem and speak confidently of matters they know nothing about. In answer to the previous question, Larkin expresses his great admiration for D.H. Lawrence, the very model of novelist-as-crackpot. I’m with Max Beerbohm when it comes to the author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover: “Poor D. H. Lawrence. He never realized, don’t you know — he never suspected that to be stark, staring mad is somewhat of a handicap to a writer.”

 

Over the weekend Mike Juster wrote on Twitter: “I read a lot of poems each week to find a few I like & I think many of you will like, but I have to tell you that in the past week I have read more dreadful poems in major publications than ever before.

 

“This ‘whatever pops into my head is a great poem’ thing is killing poetry.”

 

Mike speaks for many of us. Much of the nominal poetry I see online is adolescent diary-fodder, poems without craft that don’t even work as interesting prose. Among Larkin’s friends was the poet Elizabeth Jennings who, like him, defied categories, poetic and otherwise, and was a genuinely independent soul. In Let’s Have Some Poetry! (1960), her introduction to the subject for young people, Jennings writes fondly of Larkin:

 

“Apart from his fastidious care for the precise verb, noun and adjective, and his impressive use of the conventional stanza form, Larkin’s chief quality seems to be a deep compassion which, though sometimes tempered by humour or irony, denotes a real concern for other people’s lives.”

 

Jennings goes on to quote lines from an early Larkin poem, “Wedding Wind” (The Less Deceived, 1955), the only one in which the speaker is a woman:

 

“All is the wind

Hunting through clouds and forests, thrashing

My apron and the hanging cloths on the line.

Can it be borne, this bodying-forth by wind

Of joy my actions turn on, like a thread

Carrying beads? Shall I be let to sleep

Now this perpetual morning shares my bed?”

 

Jennings judges the poem “beautiful,” and quotes with approval another poem from the same collection, “Triple Time”:

 

“And on another day will be the past,

A valley cropped by fat neglected chances

That we insensately forbore to fleece.

On this we blame our last

Threadbare perspectives, seasonal decrease.”

 

Jennings finds this and other early Larkin poems “melancholy though never self-pitying.” I detect no wish on his part to drag us into an egoistic slough of despond. The lines might occur to any thoughtful grownup who could write first-rate poetry. Larkin is often pegged as gloomy and obstinately refusing to look on the sunny side of life. Something to that. But his poems move some of us to exalt in their beauty and truth.

 

Larkin was born on this date, August 9, in 1922.

 

[Larkin’s 1980 interview with John Haffenden is collected in Further Requirements: Interviews, Broadcasts, Statements and Book Reviews, Faber and Faber, 2001.]