'I Like Things that Make Me Like Them at Once'

A handy, unscientific gauge of literary worth, one most readers can endorse, is pleasure: does this book (poem, story, essay, play) please me? Does it delight? Does it surprise on first reading and after? Does it say something we didn’t know needed saying? Does it interestingly calibrate truth and beauty? Will I read it again? In “The Pleasure Principle,” Philip Larkin reclaims the title phrase from the dour clutches of Freud: 

“[A]t bottom poetry, like all art, is inextricably bound up with giving pleasure, and if a poet loses his pleasure-seeking audience he has lost the only audience worth having, for which the dutiful mob that signs on every September is no substitute. And the effect will be felt throughout his work.”

 

That dutiful mob is students and faculty. Larkin is writing in 1957, when poetry was already being professionalized. Professors laid claim to poetry and poets turned into professors. Poems were to be “studied,” not enjoyed; dissected like frogs in biology class. Of course, things have grown grimmer in the subsequent sixty-four years. Poems must be strident, unambiguous and instantly accessible. Larkin rather half-heartedly proposes a solution:   

 

“[I]f the medium is in fact to be rescued from among our duties and restored to our pleasures, I can only think that a large-scale revulsion has got to set in against present notions, and that it will have to start with poetry readers asking themselves more frequently whether they do in fact enjoy what they read, and, if not, what the point is of carrying on. And I use ‘enjoy’ in the commonest of senses, the sense in which we leave a radio on or off.”

 

Take “To the Sea,” written in 1969 and collected as the first poem in High Windows (1974). Larkin wrote of it: “I am not too keen on it myself – it seems rather Wordsworthian, in the sense of being bloody dull.” This is Larkin’s customary mock-self-revulsion, not to be confused with humility. How is an inland-born Midwestern American to enjoy a poem about English holidays on the shore? It triggers nostalgia and its opposite, memories of the pleasures and tedium of the beach. Ours is an age when humans seem absent from poems, replaced by verbal gestures. Larkin, who started as a novelist, has a fiction writer’s interest in people and their behavior. Here are the poem’s closing lines:

 

“If the worst

Of flawless weather is our falling short,

It may be that through habit these do best,

Coming to the water clumsily undressed

Yearly; teaching their children by a sort

Of clowning; helping the old, too, as they ought.”

 

And here is how he closes “The Pleasure Principle”: “[T]he following note by Samuel Butler may reawaken a furtive itch for freedom: ‘I should like to like Schumann’s music better than I do; I dare say I could make myself like it better if I tried; but I do not like having to try to make myself like things; I like things that make me like them at once and no trying at all (Notebooks, 1919).’”

 

Larkin died on this date, December 2, in 1985, at the age of sixty-three.

 

[“The Pleasure Principle” is collected in Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982 (1982.]