'Nothing Is Promised'

“Nothing is promised. That is the bargain.” 

In a high-school creative writing class, our teacher required us to write every day in a journal. I kept mine in my regular loose-leaf school binder. Periodically we turned them in and Miss Murphy, mostly so she knew we were dutifully completing the assignment, would collect them, read our daily passages and occasionally comment. She must have been a paragon of tact, reading all that teenage maundering.

 

I burned the journal long ago but I remember intentionally not treating it with the banality of a diary. Once I included a short story I had written based on something in The Fixer by Bernard Malmud. I commented on current affairs (1968 offered plenty of grist). I wrote a poem about Jan Palach and one about Martin Luther King Jr. after his assassination. I remember commenting on passages from Eric Hoffer’s newspaper column and I wrote the lyrics to a song based on Dylan’s “Desolation Row.”

 

The lasting impact of this assignment, which stretched across my junior and senior years, was to get me in the habit of writing every day. I resisted the gravitational pull of solipsism and wouldn't let the desire to produce a daily masterpiece leave me paralyzed. This apprenticeship came in handy a few years later when I got my first job as a newspaper reporter. Editors don’t want to hear about your lack of inspiration. I already had a built-in sense of deadline.

 

I thought of these things while reading Robin Saikia’s poem “Larkin’s Typewriter.” Mike Juster introduced me to a poet previously unknown to me. Saikia describes the fallow period Larkin experienced in the final years of his life:

 

“Dawn breaks on the workhorse Olivetti.

What secrets can its sworn-at ribbon tell

Of muse-deserted years? The kettle clicks,

The curtains lift on Hull, unchanged, unlit.

A bicycle ticks cooling in the hall.

 

“He trusts the desk, the hour, the body’s drag

Toward duty. Poems come, or do not come.

One learns to keep one’s temper with the void,

To praise the silence for its accuracy.

 

“Outside, the trains rehearse departures.

Inside, the page resists, as it should.

Nothing is promised. That is the bargain.

Still, something like truth gets hammered out.

By lunchtime, even doubt has earned its keep.”

 

In his 2014 biography of Larkin, James Booth writes:

“His life was a success. . . . On the personal level he knew that he had the love and respect of those around him. His day-to-day life was packed with affections and epiphanies. And he gained the profoundest satisfaction from writing his poetry. He was, nevertheless, haunted by failure. . . . Towards the end, after his poetic inspiration had died, his despairing moods became more frequent. He told Andrew Motion: ‘I used to believe that I should perfect the work and life could fuck itself. Now I’m not doing anything, all I’ve got is a fucked up life.’”