Philip Larkin suggests we classify jazz writers as “either Wells or Gibbon, onwards and upwards or decline and fall.” In today’s lingo, Wells was a “progressive,” a Fabian socialist, always future-oriented, who made excuses for Lenin (whom he met in Moscow in 1920 and interviewed). Gibbon, a more honest writer, saw ruin as inevitable in human affairs. He was no visionary. Larkin, hardly a lover (though a careful listener) of bop and other “modern” strains of jazz, sided with Gibbon. As ever, he is an agent provocateur. One is never entirely certain of his sincerity. He often says things to irk the Wellses of his day, the au courant and fatuously optimistic, and they usually take the bait.
As a jazz critic, Larkin is fairly often wrong but
always interestingly wrong. When he knocks Davis or Coltrane, he always moves
me to listen to them again, perhaps more critically, questioning their
excesses. We can learn from Larkin’s errors and provocations, and I think his
Wells/Gibbon taxonomy has applications in other arts, especially literature.
Larkin writes:
“Behind this confrontation, I fancy, lie a number
of opposed prejudices. The Wellses want to extend terms, to stretch points, to
see things change. The Gibbons want words to keep their meanings, to be
definite, to see things stay the same.”
Larkin is seldom strident. In his tastes and
judgments, he never genuflects before rigid ideology. He is a more playful Yvor
Winters (whose sense of humor is frequently ignored). Form is preferable to
chaos. That seems indubitable, which does not translate into “Form: Good. Free Verse:
Bad.” There’s plenty of crap on both sides of that divide. A casual anecdote
Larkin included in his address to the Antiquarian Bookfair in 1972 is
revealing:
“Within reach of my working chair I have reference
books on the right, and twelve poets on the left: Hardy, Wordsworth, Christina
Rosetti, Hopkins, Sassoon, Edward Thomas, Barnes, Praed, Betjeman, Whitman,
Frost and Owen. True, I reach to the right more often than to the left, but the
twelve are there as exemplars.”
Who would expect Whitman at arm’s reach from
Larkin? And where’s Auden?
[“Wells or Gibbon?” was originally published in
the Daily Telegraph on August 15, 1970, and later collected in All
What Jazz (1970) and Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982
(1983).]
I am surprised by Larkin's inclusion of Christina Rosetti, though perhaps I shouldn't be. Every time I read a poem of hers I'm amazed both at how good she is and by her relative neglect.
ReplyDelete“The diatonic scale is what you use if you want to write a national anthem, or a love song, or a lullaby. The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously.” Philip Larkin
ReplyDelete“As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of poets: those who want to tell stories and sing songs, and those who want to work out the chemical equation for language and pass on their experiments as poetry.” Simon Armitage
“Originality is being different from oneself, not others.” Philip Larkin
“What is life? The journey of a crippled and sick man walking with a heavy load on his back up steep mountains and through wild, rugged, arduous places, in snow, ice, rain, wind, burning sun, for many days without ever resting night and day to end at a precipice or ditch, in which inevitably he falls.” Giacomo Leopardi
My first thought, and maybe others' too, on reading that list, was "Who's this Barnes?"
ReplyDeletehttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/william-barnes
One could just as easily take the view that conservative writers make excuses for fascists (of which examples abound). It's a tired game, and a tedious exercise. Better to forgo ideology and hew to the particulars of their art. This is certainly more interesting than the alternative.
ReplyDelete