'Rather Late for Me'

“The words poetic and fatuous ought not to be synonymous; and to encounter a mind which is against mock society, mock poetry, mock spirituality—against any form of enslavement—is a benefit.” 

I think of fatuous as a gentle way of saying “stupid” when applied to a specific form of stupidity, the common mingling of naïveté, literal-mindedness and self-satisfaction. Politicians almost invariably are fatuous, as are most “celebrities.” The passage quoted above is the first sentence in Marianne Moore’s review of a collection of poems by John Wheelwright, published on July 12, 1936 in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Her review is mixed and less than enthusiastic. She praises Wheelwright’s “unlooked-for wording” and his inclusion of “exactly observed detail.” She never calls him fatuous but it’s helpful to know that Wheelwright at the time was a socialist with Trotskyist leanings.

 

Thirty-one years later, on July 12, 1967, Philip Larkin, the least fatuous of poets, finished one of his best-known poems, “Annus Mirabilis,” collected in High Windows (1974). The first stanza:

 

“Sexual intercourse began

In nineteen sixty-three

(which was rather late for me) -

Between the end of the Chatterley ban

And the Beatles’ first LP.”

 

Part of the reason this is not among my favorite Larkin poems is its topicality. There’s a cheapness to the name-dropping, as though Larkin were shilling for readers. The heart of the poem is the mock-self-pity: “rather late for me.” The D.H. Lawrence case was settled at the Old Bailey in November 1962. Please Please Me came out in March 1963. Larkin turned forty-one that year.

 

A month before he completed the poem, the Beatles had released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Jean Hartley, who with her husband published The Less Deceived (1955), wrote a memoir, Philip Larkin, the Marvell Press and Me (Carcanet, 1989). In it she writes: “He had an affection for the more romantic Beatles numbers. He bought Maeve [Brennan] a copy of ‘Yesterday’ and played it over and over.” In The Philip Larkin I Knew (2002), Brennan writes:

 

“Philip fell under the sway of the Beatles in the 1960s . . . long after the group disbanded, their tunes held a special place in his affections, for they stood for a happy and successful period of his life.”  

 

Larkin in his review of Wilfrid Owens’ Collected Poems in 1963 describes Yeats’ statement that “passive suffering is not a theme for poetry” as “fatuous.”

 

[Moore’s review can be found in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (ed. Patricia C. Willis, Viking, 1986). Larkin’s review of the Wilfrid Owens volume is collected in Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982 (Faber and Faber, 1982). Go here to listen to Larkin reading “Annus Mirabilis.”]