'Sodding Good and Touching Was the Poem'

Kingsley Amis’ daughter Sally was born on January 17, 1954, two days after her father published his first and finest novel, Lucky Jim. Three days later, Philip Larkin completed “Born Yesterday” (The Less Deceived, 1955) and dedicated it to the little girl: 

“Tightly-folded bud,

I have wished you something

None of the others would:

Not the usual stuff

About being beautiful,

Or running off a spring

Of innocence and love --

They will all wish you that,

And should it prove possible,

Well, you’re a lucky girl.

 

“But if it shouldn't, then

May you be ordinary;

Have, like other women,

An average of talents:

Not ugly, not good-looking,

Nothing uncustomary

To pull you off your balance,

That, unworkable itself,

Stops all the rest from working.

In fact, may you be dull --

If that is what a skilled,

Vigilant, flexible,

Unemphasised, enthralled

Catching of happiness is called.”

Some parents, I’m sure, would be offended if a friend wished their newborn daughter ordinariness, as though that were a demeaning curse. Our impulse is to herald every new baby as a potential super-hero. One expects Larkin to keep things in a minor key. He wishes Sally something rarer: the heavily qualified happiness that often eluded him. In replying to Larkin’s gift, Amis wrote to his friend: “Sodding good and touching was the poem, moving me a great deal as poem and as friendship-assertion. I think it’s about the nicest thing anyone could do for any new-born child.” Larkin’s wish is true to his sensibility, less cynical than pragmatic. When Faber & Faber let the novels of Barbara Pym go out of print, Larkin wrote the publisher a generous letter of protest: 

 

“I like to read about people who have done nothing spectacular, who aren’t beautiful and lucky, who try to behave well in the limited field of activity they command, but who can see, in the little autumnal moments of vision, that the so called ‘big’ experiences of life are going to miss them; and I like to read about such things presented not with self-pity or despair or romanticism, but with realistic firmness and even humour.”

 

Today would have been Sally Amis’ seventieth birthday. The sad coda to her story is that she died five years after her father, in 2000, at age forty-six, at least in part as the result of alcoholism, a very ordinary death.

 

[The Amis letter to Larkin is included in The Letters of Kingsley Amis (ed. Zachary Leader, 2000).]