'All This Christmas Idiocy Bursts Upon One'

For its definition of curmudgeon, the OED rightly quotes Dr. Johnson’s in his Dictionary: “An avaricious churlish fellow; a miser, a niggard.” I think the meaning has subsequently shifted several degrees. Miserliness is no longer central. Rather, a curmudgeon is usually an old person, most often a man, who is surly, cranky, complaining, invariably negative in his opinions. His emotional range is narrow. He is costive and lazy with his feelings. 

I sense that true, marrow-deep curmudgeons are relatively rare compared to curmudgeonly poseurs. The latter enjoy the attention playing the crusty cynic gives them. Of course, true and assumed curmudgeonliness may coexist in the same person, which brings us to Philip Larkin, who was more emotionally nuanced than most of his critics. That he was a depressive is likely, but an interesting depressive with a vigorous sense of humor. When he asked an interviewer “Who is Borges?”, he knew precisely who the Argentine fellow librarian was. He enjoyed the provocation. Take his ever-tested tolerance for Christmas. Here he writes to his mother on November 14, 1971:

 

“The thought of Christmas depresses me. Please don’t go to trouble. Every year I swear I’ll never endure it again, & make you promise to be sensible, & now here you are talking about duck again, just as if I had never shouted and got drunk & broken the furniture out of sheer rage at it all . .  All I want is an ordinary lunch, and no fuss. Get a good piece of beef that will last a day or two, and potatoes for baking. To hell with Christmas.”

 

One suspects Mrs. Larkin nodded her head and said, “Oh, Philip,” as she had a thousand times before. Here he is with Monica Jones, writing three days after Christmas in 1950:

 

“Not much of a haul this Christmas! A laundry bag (asked for), a 10/6 book token, a second-hand tie, & a pair of expanding cufflinks enamelled in blue with large P’s in cursive script on them. That’s all, that’s all, that’s all, that’s all. Shan’t get very fat on all that, eh?”

 

Eight days before Christmas in 1958, he writes to Judy Edgerton:

 

“What an awful time of year this is! Just as one is feeling that if one can just hold on, it won’t get any worse, then all this Christmas idiocy bursts upon one like a slavering Niagara of nonsense & completely wrecks one’s entire frame. This means, in terms of my life, making a point of buying about six simple inexpensive presents when there are rather more people about than usual, and going home. No doubt in terms of yours it means seeing your house given over to hoards of mannerless middle-class brats and your good food & drink vanishing into the quacking tooth-equipped jaws of their alleged parents. Yours is the harder course, I can see. On the other hand, mine is happening to me.”

 

Finally, to a fellow poet, John Betjeman, on December 16, 1976:

 

“Christmas, yes! Either people tell me what they want and I can’t get it, or they don’t tell me what they want and I can’t think of anything. I think it was Peter Warlock who said ‘It is a time of year I dislike more and more as I get older.’ Amen to that.”

 

This is a man who revels in out-Scrooging Scrooge. His biographer, James Booth, shares a revealing anecdote:

 

“He made a tradition of the staff Christmas parties at which he supplied the drinks while the ‘girls’ provided the food. Maeve Brennan recollects: ‘He joined in the long, extended congas through the book stacks with sheepish enthusiasm . . . going out of his way to put everyone, even the youngest junior, at ease.’”