Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, Shaped to the comfort of the last to go As if to win them back. Instead, bereft Of anyone to please, it withers so, Having no heart to put aside the theft
And turn again to what it started as, A joyous shot at how things ought to be, Long fallen wide. You can see how it was: Look at the pictures and the cutlery The music in the piano stool. That vase.
Thinking Anew: Philip Larkin in his `Wondering what to look for’ speaks for many today
It is a reminder that most of us seek a deeper and richer understanding of the meaning and purpose of life
Gordon Linney Saturday 28 October 2023
In his poem Church Going, Philip Larkin describes leaving an empty and underused church building that he had wandered into: “Back at the door I sign the book/ donate an Irish sixpence/ Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.” But then he continues: “Yet stop I did: in fact I often do/ And always end much at a loss like this/ Wondering what to look for/ wondering too/ When churches fall completely out of use/ What we shall turn them into…”
At one level, he is addressing the fact that churches in the West as we have known them are struggling with falling attendances and ageing congregations. This is both sad and challenging for those still committed, especially clergy who are being asked to do more and more with less and less while, at a leadership level, there is a lack of a credible vision to share with the wider world. There seems to be an inability to articulate a message that addresses the felt needs of people today. Instead, we get bogged down in endless discussions about issues that divide and exclude people, such as the role of women in the church and gender identity.
Philip Larkin: in Church Going, he describes leaving an empty and underused church building that he had wandered into. Photograph: Barry Wilkinson
Exclusivism has little appeal to more widely travelled younger generations that have a greater appreciation of the human diversity that was known to and understood by Jesus. The church he founded was intended to reach out to the margins of society, to welcome the least of our brothers and sisters, and even our enemies. As Fr Richard Rohr put it: “When any church defines itself by exclusion of anybody, it is always wrong. It is avoiding its only vocation, which is to be Christ. The only groups that Jesus critiques are those who include themselves and exclude others from the always-given grace of God.”
Larkin in his “Wondering what to look for…” speaks for many today. It is a reminder that most of us, religious and so-called non-religious alike, seek a deeper and richer understanding of the meaning and purpose of life.
In his book Broken Signposts, former bishop of Durham Tom Wright says that we need relationships at every level in order to be human, especially in “today’s rootless society”. He writes: “We sense that something is amiss with the way things are. We want to find, as we say, ‘true love’ not just in the often-trivial sense of the ideal romance, but something that is solid, lasting, utterly reliable, and constantly life giving. That is why, even in today’s cynical world, most people love to celebrate a wedding. It appears to be raising a flag of hope in the midst of a world of broken dreams. It points to something much, much more than itself. There is an important paradox there: the deep love that has brought these two particular individuals together into this challenging and demanding commitment and relationship is not, after all, just about them. It is about all of us. About the world. About (as St John would say) God and the world. About Jesus.”
In tomorrow’s gospel, Jesus tells his followers what is key to a meaningful life: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind ... You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” This is not just about doing; it is about being – being in love with God and each other, the God who the First Epistle of St John insists is love. In every moment of love shared, a kiss, a hug, a generous deed, God is real and present, recognised or not.
“Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,” wrote Larkin the agnostic about his church visit and goes on to explain: “It pleases me to stand in silence here; A serious house on serious earth it is… /And that much never can be obsolete /Since someone will forever be surprising /A hunger in himself to be more serious /And gravitating with it to this ground…”
After years of scandal, Philip Larkin finally has a spot in Poets’ Corner
James Underwood Published: December 2, 2016 9.47am GMT
Philip Larkin, one of English poetry’s most recognisable voices, has been memorialised in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner.
His ledger stone was unveiled on Friday December 2 alongside tombs and memorials commemorating some of the finest writers in English literary history, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and T S Eliot. The ceremony took place 31 years to the day since Larkin’s death.
This is an occasion foreseen by Larkin himself, whose place in Poets’ Corner would probably have been guaranteed had he accepted the Poet Laureateship in 1984. Larkin was touted for this role as early as 1972; on that occasion it went to John Betjeman, a poet he admired. When Betjeman died in 1984, Larkin was the obvious choice. He didn’t share the public’s enthusiasm, but was reflective about his place in literary history: “I think there will be a space for me,” he told his mother.
Although a household name – a rare thing in poetry – Larkin had spent three decades dodging attention. Reports of the so-called Hermit of Hull’s reclusiveness were exaggerated, but it’s true that he largely avoided public roles – and what role in British poetry is more public, more bardic, than the laureateship? Larkin wasn’t joking when he told one acquaintance: “I just couldn’t face the 50 letters a day, TV show, representing British Poetry in the ’poetry conference at Belgrade’ side of it all.” To Andrew Motion, a later Laureate, he wrote: “Think of the stamps! Think of the stamps!”
Having politely declined, Larkin knew he had gifted Ted Hughes – a poetic rival – a spot in Westminster Abbey. But when Larkin died the year after, he was already known as Britain’s “unofficial Laureate”. One obituary hailed him as “the funniest and most intelligent English writer of the day, and the greatest living poet in our language”. Perhaps the spot unveiled in the Abbey was always his.
Poets’ Corner.Wikimedia Commons
Posthumous scandal
But this outcome wasn’t always so certain. Scandal in the 1990s threatened to obliterate Larkin’s reputation. The publication of a Selected Letters in 1992, containing foul-mouthed tirades against women, ethnic minorities, and the working-class, was swiftly followed by Motion’s 1993 biography, which revealed Larkin’s heavy drinking, pornographic habits, and multiple infidelities.
Influential cultural critics rushed to denounce Larkin. Lisa Jardine lambasted his “Little Englandism”, boasting “we don’t tend to teach Larkin much now in my department of English”. Tom Paulin spoke of Larkin’s “quasi-fascism”, and the “distressing and in many ways revolting compilation which imperfectly reveals and conceals the sewer under the national monument Larkin became”.
This was a troubling and hysterical reaction to biographical disclosures. However regrettable, Larkin’s bigotry was performative and insincere; much of his behaviour was also judged against puritanical moral standards. More pernicious was the reinterpretation of his work in the light of these new perceptions of his life. Bizarrely, poems hitherto loved for their humanity were suddenly dismissed as the eruptions of a bitterly prejudiced man.
Assessments today tend to be less extreme, but the way we think about Larkin is still jammed somewhere between celebratory and condemnatory impulses. The Philip Larkin Society has campaigned over many years for a Poets’ Corner memorial, but the previous dean rejected this on the grounds of Larkin’s agnosticism, and an unofficial policy requiring writers to be dead for 20 years.
As neither criterion prevented Hughes from being commemorated in 2011, it’s not unreasonable to wonder whether other anxieties were at play. The current dean expressed a different view: “I have no doubt that his work and memory will live on as long as the English language continues to be understood.” His sentiment wisely refocuses attention on what matters most: the poetry.
Poets’ Corner
Poets’ Corner is one of the most famous areas of Westminster Abbey. The tradition of burying or commemorating the nation’s best writers there began in the 16th century, when a tomb was erected for Chaucer, buried in the abbey 250 years earlier.
English literary history is extraordinarily diverse, and scholars have subjected its canon – as both a concept and a holding place – to extensive critique since at least the 1980s. But as a reflection of literary history, Poets’ Corner is selective and partial, and it may be a long time before the south transept becomes less male and less white.
But then it was never “designed”, and chance has played its part in the erratic evolution of this collective memorial as much as cultural conservatism. Chaucer, for example, was buried there because of his day job as clerk of works to the Palace of Westminster; that he wrote The Canterbury Tales had nothing to do with it. And while 2016 has been a year of Shakespearean saturation marking 400 years since The Bard’s death, 124 years went by before the most famous name in English literature entered Poets’ Corner. Larkin’s 31 years isn’t much compared to that.
Larkin’s emotionally ambivalent attitude to Christianity is surely not unique these days. In Church Going, one of his most magnificent works, the narrator finds himself “at a loss”, unable to accept religious “superstition”, or even explain why he visits the church. But something pulls him there nonetheless – perhaps because “so many dead lie round”. Larkin keenly felt his own relation to the poetic dead; a stone bearing his name now lies close to at least two writers he worshipped, Thomas Hardy and D H Lawrence. There is much in Larkin’s work to suggest he would have been moved by this act of “awkward reverence”.
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old?
No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
In a poem he wrote in 1953 about perusing a photo album that belonged to Winifred Arnott—one of the many objects of his frequently anticlimactic erotic pursuits—Philip Larkin had this to say about the art of picture taking:
But o, photography! As no art is, Faithful and disappointing! That records Dull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds, And will not censor blemishes Like washing-lines, and Hall’s-Distemper boards,
But shows a cat as disinclined, and shades A chin as doubled when it is, what grace Your candor thus confers upon her face! How overwhelmingly persuades That this is a real girl in a real place,
In every sense empirically true!
The narrator’s words are nonsense, of course—or at best true only in their most narrow, uninteresting sense. If you frame a photo such that it includes a washing-line and do nothing to manipulate the image, then you’ll indeed get a photo that includes a washing-line. But photography offers manifold opportunities for manipulation, in every sense.
So does poetry. Andrew Motion, Larkin’s first biographer, reported that Winifred provided a fact check for Larkin’s poetic license in a letter she wrote in 1986: "[T]here were in fact two albums not one, there’s not a picture of me wearing a trilby hat (though there is one of me in a beret and moustache for Rag Week). On the other hand, I’m afraid to see, there’s definitely my double chin, he got that right. And there’s also one of me bathing …"
Larkin's mother Eva / Courtesy of the estate of Philip Larkin
That photo—tame by today’s standards, but sufficiently exciting for Larkin to joke sweatily in the poem, "So I am left … To wonder if you’d spot the theft/Of this one of you bathing …"—is included in The Importance of Elsewhere, a selection of Larkin’s photography (the poet was what you could call a "serious amateur") accompanied by biographical material by Richard Bradford. It is no overstatement to say that this selection is dominated by women, from Eva, the mother on whom Larkin doted, to the dizzying series of ladies he chased and occasionally even obtained. Besides Winifred, here we see Ruth and Jane, Patsy—a South African who happened to be married—Judy, Betty (Larkin’s longtime secretary), Maeve, and, of course, Monica Jones.
Larkin photographed them all, and there are some awkward implications conveyed here: Bradford illustrates how Monica, Patsy, and another woman as yet unidentified by scholarship were all snapped by Larkin in the room he rented in Belfast while working at Queen’s—and all in very similar poses. As in life, so in these photos: Monica is a considerable force. The longest serving of Larkin’s girlfriends, she carried on with him from his twenties to his final ambulance ride, despite numerous physical and emotional infidelities.
Loathed by Larkin’s intimate Kingsley Amis, who preferred ditzier girls who didn’t occupy his friend’s best attentions, she found herself cruelly (and unfairly) pilloried in Lucky Jim as the histrionic, louche Margaret Peel. But far from hysterical, Monica—Oxford educated like Phili, and a University lecturer in English—was devoted and possessed considerable character. She was also the only one of Larkin’s women who had the capacity to appreciate just what he was achieving.
It is remarkable that she also had the humanity to stress that none of those achievements were necessary grounds for her admiration. Consider this letter, included by Bradford, written by Monica after she heard Philip reading the bleak, ironic (evergreen commentary on a Larkin poem, that) Mr Bleaney on the BBC in 1955:
Mr Bleaney sounded so very like you – yr catalogue of the room’s shortcomings! Like you & like me – I smiled at the radio as if I were smiling at you as it was read. And I like your poetry better than any that I ever see – oh, I am sure that you are the one of this generation! I am sure you will make yr name! … Oh Philip – I don’t know what to say. You will believe me because you know it doesn’t make any difference to me whether you are or not, I shouldn’t think any less of your value if yr poems seemed to me bad & if everyone said so…
Monica’s presence in these photographs—intelligent, self-possessed, witty, often sad—gives some credit to Larkin’s line about "a real girl in a real place": she looks exactly as you would expect such a woman to look, and here one can see her grow from a young, newly appointed lecturer who has dressed for a date—and who has an obvious crush on her photographer—to a woman at the wrong end of middle age, wearing a house dress and staring out a window (something that comes up from time to time in Larkin’s poems) with a featureless expression.
For all the voyeuristic pleasures of these photographs, I can’t recommend putting too much trust in the commentary. Bradford’s control of detail in his earlier full-dress biography of Larkin was described by one critic at the time as "sketchy," and I cannot report that the situation is different here—nor does Bradford appear to have been much aided by his present editors.
Fans of Leicester City on their way to the club ground / Courtesy of the estate of Philip Larkin
The problems begin when the author of the book’s foreword is alternatively described as Mark Hayworth-Booth or Mark Haworth-Booth, depending on which page you happen to encounter his name. (I believe that the latter is correct.) Turning to the text itself, at one point Bradford says of Larkin, "He wrote in Further Requirements…" This is, at best, embarrassingly imprecise. Further Requirements, a collection of miscellaneous short prose, was published years after Larkin’s death; Bradford is referring to one piece included in that collection.
Such imprecision doesn’t inspire one to allow much benefit of the doubt when one sees, on pages that face one another, two photographs of Monica described as being taken three years apart, even though her hair, jewelry, glasses, and overall presentation appear to be identical. Finally, for a book about photographs taken by someone who, though an amateur, was nonetheless devoted to his hobby, it is nowhere clear that Bradford has anything to say about, well, photography.
The text is at its best when it directly treats the connections between the photographs and Larkin’s literary work, of which there are many: lonely churches and rail lines abound here. But too often the words seem meant to fill space, usually with information one could find in Bradford’s earlier book, or indeed in the more recent (and quite good) biography by James Booth. There is a really fine book to be got out of the relationship between Larkin’s photography and poetry. Someone should write it.
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