Looking on the bright side…

In total contrast to the life-affirming dedication which made Nick Musgrove a pivot of my university's community until his untimely death (see previous blog entry), you could adopt the Philip Larkin Self-Help Mantra. It works for me!

The only good life 

is to live in some sodding seedy city 

and work 

and keep yr gob shut 

and be unhappy

I shall post it on my office door. Preferably in Comic Sans so that nobody ever knocks.

Just Larkin About

Here's a bitter, satirical poem from Philip Larkin which may strike a chord. It's called 'A Study of Reading Habits':

When getting my nose in a book
Cured most things short of school,
It was worth ruining my eyes
To know I could still keep cool,
And deal out the old right hook
To dirty dogs twice my size.

Later, with inch-thick specs,
Evil was just my lark:
Me and my coat and fangs
Had ripping times in the dark.
The women I clubbed with sex!
I broke them up like meringues.

Don't read much now: the dude
Who lets the girl down before
The hero arrives, the chap
Who's yellow and keeps the store
Seem far too familiar. Get stewed:
Books are a load of crap.

Weekend compendium

Hello all. As I've had to come into the office to press one button on our electronic administration system, I thought I'd say hello.

Last night I went into the nearest metropolis to munch sausages and drink beer with friends, before seeing the Mighty Hotpants Romance perform: imagine a raucous mix of 50s girl-group vocals, X-Ray Spex guitars and deadpan lyrics delivered in broad Lancashire. A winning combination, I'm sure you'll agree. Tonight's entertainment is a party at an illustrious professor's house, to celebrate his transfer to Princeton. I'll be the one at the back looking through his bookshelves.

Meanwhile, I should apologise to the Royal Mail. Not all of my birthday cards and presents were stolen. Most of them were just a few days late. I'm charitably going to assume that my dad's card has been lost, rather than not sent at all.

Finally, I had a very incongruous reading experience yesterday. I went from the last chapter of Motion's biography of Philip Larkin, featuring his death, to the last volume of Moomins comic strips (sadly, there are some printing errors which detract from the pleasure). From dying poet, trapped in his downstairs loo piteously mewling 'hot, hot' as his face pressed against the pipework, to jolly Scandinavian creatures gambolling in the forests.

The Moomins

Very much not a Moomin.

Legendary letters

Whenever I sit down to write a letter, all that comes out is stilted, formulaic rubbish. I blame my mother and school, actually: all those thank-you letters and notes home which carefully avoid the truth ('Dear parents, today I was beaten up for knotting my tie in an uncool way. Today's vegetarian meal was… ham. My books have been confiscated. There appear to be paedophiles amongst the staff' just wouldn't have got past the censors). The other reason for my epistolary circumspection is that I spend a lot of time marking essays, and we're encouraged to be kind and progressive.

'Dear X. Thanks for your essay. You've spelled your name correctly, if not mine, and it's printed on actual paper. You've selected the correct alphabet, though the traditional order of letters appears to be unfamiliar to you. Your work indicates a high degree of facility with regard to Wikipedia and Allfreeessays.com, and you've obviously managed to find your way onto campus to hand in this piece. While I am impressed by these transferable skills, I must in all conscience suggest that actually reading the novel you're writing about might possibly be helpful'.

No, that wouldn't do at all.

So I'm always thrilled by people who write letters which express what they mean in the way they'd have spoken it. Larkin and Amis wrote hilarious letters to each other in a private kind of language. Hunter S. Thompson's complaint letters are terrifying, and Mark Twain (real name, Samuel Clemens) gave idiots both barrels. Pharyngula presents this one, in response to a quack medicine retailer.

Nov. 20. 1905

J. H. Todd
1212 Webster St.
San Francisco, Cal.

Dear Sir,

Your letter is an insoluble puzzle to me. The handwriting is good and exhibits considerable character, and there are even traces of intelligence in what you say, yet the letter and the accompanying advertisements profess to be the work of the same hand. The person who wrote the advertisements is without doubt the most ignorant person now alive on the planet; also without doubt he is an idiot, an idiot of the 33rd degree, and scion of an ancestral procession of idiots stretching back to the Missing Link. It puzzles me to make out how the same hand could have constructed your letter and your advertisements. Puzzles fret me, puzzles annoy me, puzzles exasperate me; and always, for a moment, they arouse in me an unkind state of mind toward the person who has puzzled me. A few moments from now my resentment will have faded and passed and I shall probably even be praying for you; but while there is yet time I hasten to wish that you may take a dose of your own poison by mistake, and enter swiftly into the damnation which you and all other patent medicine assassins have so remorselessly earned and do so richly deserve.

Adieu, adieu, adieu!

Mark Twain

Time for a new tie

Philip Larkin had this to say about ageing, which may not resonate now that everyone other than the Queen and the Pope all wear t-shirts to work:

…there's no difference between 25 and 26, it's just like wearing a different tie; but once past 35 it's impossible not to feel that each year is taking one further from what is desired and pleasant and nearer to what is loathed and dreaded UNLESS… you have wound yourself thoroughly into life by conceiving and gratifying a chain of desires.

(Letter to Maeve Brennan, 1961).

and to Judy Egerton:

The sense of approaching forty is strong upon me, and [of] having completely wasted the time of twenty to forty, when power should be greatest and relish keenest. Anything I do now will be a compromise with second or third best. I suddenly see myself as a freak and a failure, and my way of life as a farce. 

(Letter to Judy Egerton, May 1961)

Larkin's score by 35: two novels, two volumes of poetry, regular media work, oversaw the building of Hull University Library, one of the best in the country.

I'm indifferent to a change of digit, but tomorrow I reach 35.

Pearls before swine

I'm in a funny mood today - keeping an eye on cricket, tonight's World Cup semi-final and the Tour de France, but with odd bits of poetry going through my head at the same time.

I'm re-reading some Larkin at the moment, a thrilling and simultaneously unpleasant experience. That led me to R S Thomas, perhaps the greatest poet of the last hundred years, and whom Larkin not-quite hilariously referred to as 'Arsewipe Thomas'.

Specifically, wondering about Larkin's posthumous reputation made me think of Thomas's bitter, despairing, 'Death of a Poet'.

Laid now on his smooth bed

For the last time, watching dully

Through heavy eyelids the day's colour

Widow the sky, what can he say

Worthy of record, the books all open,

Pens ready, the faces, sad,

Waiting gravely for the tired lips

To move once -- what can he say?

His tongue wrestles to force one word

Past the thick phlegm; no speech, no phrases

For the day's news, just the one word ‘sorry';

Sorry for the lies, for the long failure

In the poet's war; that he preferred 

The easier rhythms of the heart 

To the mind's scansion; that now he dies

Intestate, having nothing to leave

But a few songs, cold as stones

In the thin hands that asked for bread.

I wonder if he had it in mind the last time I saw him give a reading. It was in Bangor University's main lecture theatre. Thomas has just published Between Sea and Sky: Images of Bardsey, a collaboration with Peter Hope Jones, the photographer. Thomas was very old and frail, and many of us suspected it was his last public appearance. Some more mercenary people thought so too: whereas I asked him to sign Between Sea and Sky, the book-dealers were hovering like vultures, getting him to sign much older and valuable editions solely to increase their value.

…smoke in slow suspended skeins

I'm on a Larkin binge at the moment. This annoys me a lot. As a human being, he was basically repulsive. Behind the librarian's façade (Wellington, near Telford; Leicester University; Hull University), writhed a racist, misogynist git - exactly what you'd expect from the son of a man who had a bust of Hitler on his mantelpiece!


But. But, but, but. Virtually none of this appears in the poetry nor, apparently, in his day to day relationships. Does he self-censor, or are his opinions some kind of performance for Kingsley Amis and his other friends?


Here's 'An Arundel Tomb'. The last line is engraved on the headstone of Maeve Brennan, one of the several women with whom he had prickly, uncertain relationships.

An Arundel Tomb

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd —
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

From The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin (Faber&Faber)

Man hands on misery to man

Sylvia Plath's and Ted Hughes's son, Nicholas, has killed himself. We don't know the complexities of his life, but he couldn't have had the best of starts - mother killed herself when he was one year old. This seems to sum it up:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don't have any kids yourself.

Philip Larkin, 'This Be The Verse'.