'The Unique Emotional Language of Our Age'

On learning of certain deaths we’re left feeling momentarily desolate. This holds even for people we have never met and know only through their works or by reputation. I felt that way when Louis Armstrong died. He was always there, always reassuring, and then he was gone. Some shoring in life, a piece of its foundation, is removed. With time, the desolation fades, only to return as a pang when we remember the dead. 

I learned Philip Larkin had succumbed to “the anaesthetic from which none come round” the old-fashioned way: I read it in the newspaper. I had an office with a banging radiator in the Albany County Courthouse when I worked as court reporter for the long-defunct Knickerbocker News. I bought the New York Times from the newsstand in the lobby and read his obituary (p. B-12!), which described the poet as “a reclusive librarian.”

 

I feel no desire to defend him against stupid slurs. Larkin comes to seem like an ally in life. His gift is almost always manifest. He gets slandered as cranky and sour, but how many cranks can write like this, from “Reference Back”?:

 

“Truly, though our element is time,

We are not suited to the long perspectives

Open at each instant of our lives.

They link us to our losses: worse,

They show us what we have as it once was,

Blindingly undiminished, just as though

By acting differently we could have kept it so.”

 

Larkin’s death widened the distance between us and the tradition, receding in time, of Auden, Hardy, Housman and Wordsworth. When a voice of plainspoken eloquence is silenced, frauds grow emboldened. Larkin’s leaving leaves us more vulnerable to the calculating and their naïve followers. In his 1961 review of Charles Delaunay's life of Django Reinhardt (Jazz Writing: Essays and Reviews 1940-84, 2004], which carries the Johnsonian title “Lives of the Poets,” Larkin pushes aside poets and other writers to make way for jazz musicians as our rightful representatives:

 

“In a way it has been the jazzman who in this century had led ‘the life of the Artist.’ At a time when the established arts are generally accepted and subsidised with unenthusiastic reverence, he has had to suffer from prejudice or neglect in order to get the unique emotional language of our age recognised.”

 

Larkin, the least fatuous of poets, likewise made a memorable contribution to the “unique emotional language of our age.” We all recognize Larkinesque moments. Larkin died forty years ago, on December 2, 1985, at age sixty-three.