'Your Saddest Lyric Is a Social Act'

Some deaths are still impossible to believe, and I don’t mean family or longtime friends. Rather, public figures distant in time and space who never knew we existed. Charles Mingus is one. For a time in the seventies his music was almost all I listened to. He died in 1979. A year later we lost Bill Evans. Two years earlier, Nabokov. Call them father-figures, not to get Freudian about it, all gone before I turned twenty-eight. 

In December 1985, I read in the New York Times of Philip Larkin’s death at age sixty-three. (“So young,” he says, retrospectively.) I had been reading him for fifteen years as though his poems were private correspondence intended only for my eyes. I don’t think I had ever spoken with anyone about Larkin, but I never knew a lot of people who read poetry. Our relationship was “personal,” unlike mine with almost any other poet. Though death was ever his theme, his own seemed improbable.

 

Within two months, Clive James published the 166-line “A Valediction for Philip Larkin” in the London Review of Books. I was in my newspaper office in the Albany County Courthouse when I learned of Larkin’s death. James was in Kenya. His immediate reaction on hearing the news:

 

“No tears were shed.

Forgive me, but I hardly felt a trace

Of grief. Just sudden fear your being dead

So soon had left us disinherited.”

 

Read the whole thing, please. Here is the emotional and poetic heart of the poem:

 

“The seeming paradox is a plain fact –

You brought us all together on your own.

Your saddest lyric is a social act.

A bedside manner in your graveyard tone

Suggests that at the last we aren’t alone.

 

“You wouldn’t have agreed, of course. You said

Without equivocation that life ends

With him who lived it definitely dead

And buried, after which event he tends

To spend a good deal less time with his friends.”

 

Clive James, it’s hard to believe, died almost two years ago, on November 24, 2019.

 

[James’ poem is collected in several places, including Somewhere Becoming Rain: Collected Writings on Philip Larkin (Picador, 2019), his final book.]