Saturday, April 15, 2023

How fake news, hoaxes and humbug are about race

BY COLIN DICKEY

NOV. 9, 2017 8:30 AM PT

In August, PEN Center USA withdrew its prize nomination of John Smelcer’s young-adult novel “Stealing Indians,” citing concerns that Smelcer’s claims to be a member of the Ahtna tribe were fraudulent, and that his writing was, in the words of one critic, “rife with stereotypes and riddled with errors.” As novelist Marlon James asked on a public Facebook post (more or less rhetorically), “Why does this always happen? Why do these people keep making the same stupid mistakes?”

Kevin Young’s new work of nonfiction, “Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News” offers a rich and thorough answer to James’ question. Chronicling the history of such fakers as Smelcer, Young offers a long history of the hoax, beginning with a series of famous humbugs from P. T. Barnum’s sideshow. Barnum began his career by exhibiting a woman named Joice Heith, whom he claimed had once been George Washington’s nanny (putting her age at 161 years old) — an early example in a long line of black Americans put on stage to be gawked at by whites for who they were and, crucially, who they were not.

Barnum’s humbugs set the stage for a long and winding tour of impostors and forgers: from 19th century Spirit photographers like William H. Mumler and Barnum, to Clifford Irving’s hoaxed “Autobiography of Howard Hughes” in the 1970s to recent newspaper fabulists Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, and on and on right up to Rachel Dolezal, who resigned her position at a local NAACP in 2015 when it was revealed she was a white woman who had been portraying herself as black. And while it can be tempting sometimes to see hoaxes as more or less victimless crimes (certainly Barnum thought they were), Young’s litany instead makes clear that there’s far more at stake here.

“Bunk’s” examples demonstrate that again and again, the archetypal hoax involves a white person adopting the posture of a minority figure. In literary (and sometimes literal) blackface, plagiarists ventriloquize voices from the hood that never existed: Margaret Selzer, for example, who renamed herself “Margaret B. Jones” in her fictionalized 2008 memoir “Love and Consequences,” transforming herself into an orphaned half-white, half-Native child raised in South-Central Los Angeles by a black foster family.

Why this persistent need among some white people to imagine themselves as marginalized?

Meanwhile, other whites adopt Asian guises (Michael Derrick Hudson publishing poetry under the name “Yi-Fen Chou”), or claim to have survived the Holocaust, as Swiss Gentile Bruno Grosjean did when he reinvented himself as child Auschwitz survivor Benjamin Wilkomirski in his faked memoir “Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood.” John Smelcer’s deceptions are hardly original in this regard.

Why this persistent need among some white people to imagine themselves as marginalized? Young suggests that these hoaxes, in some way, may be necessary for white supremacy: inevitably, it takes white people pretending to be black, Native American, and Jewish in order to fulfill the stereotypes that white people have about those communities. Take Archibald Belaney, for example, a white Briton who in the 1920s wrote a series of works as Grey Owl, either an Apache or Ojibwe (the story kept changing). Even after he was unmasked, defenders still claimed he was honoring the Native American tradition he was imitating, or that his environmental message was valid even if the messenger was not. But as Young points out, to render Belaney “an environmentalist ahead of his time, or his hoax as somehow honoring Native ways, is to ignore the ways in which Grey Owl’s very ideas of extinction and ‘the Wild’ are tied up not only with each other but also with white stereotypes about Indigenous peoples.”

Just as hoaxes like Jones’ play up ghetto stereotypes, a hoax like Belaney’s stokes “the suspicion that Natives are just fake whites.” The hoax, Young’s examples reveal, “is rather a kind of coded confession, revealing not only a deep-seated cultural wish … not of what’s true but of what we truly believe.”

But it is not just a history of hoaxes Young is after; “Bunk” also offers a tour of the “hoaxing of history”: how the hoax threatens to overwrite actual history in favor of its pablum and nonsense. “The history of the hoax is chiefly the hoaxing of history: a forgery pretending it has one, inevitably better and older than it really is; the plagiarist or impostor or spirit photographer insisting that no history exists except what I say there is.”

When Grosjean’s fabulism was called out, he responded by appending an afterward to “Fragments” stating that while his memoir may bear little connection to actual facts, there was value in it nonetheless — not as fiction but as a true picture of faulty memory. Such spurious contortions do real damage to how we see and understand the world, offering consolation to Holocaust deniers and those who are unwilling to face history as it is.

Young compares a work like “Fragments” to another Holocaust memoir, Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” noting that it, too, involved some deal of artistic license — but that “this is not the same as untruth.” As opposed to hoaxers, artists enlarge, rather than reduce the world: opening up possibility and imagination, breaking stereotypes rather than embodying them. “The hoax,” Young writes, “is the very absence of truth, which usually means art is absent too — hoaxes regularly substitute claims of reality for imagination, facts for form, acting as if artifice is the antithesis of art…. Besides the cost to truth, and to lived and lost lives, a collateral yet not insignificant cost is to the idea of fiction.” A hoaxer takes the strange and wondrous world and reduces it to pre-packaged goods, because the hoaxer knows they’re easy to swallow that way. By not risking anything new, “hoaxes actually diminish experience as not big enough to sustain us.”

Young is perhaps better known as a poet, his most recent collection “Blue Laws” was longlisted for the National Book Award, and he was named poetry editor of the New Yorker earlier this year. “Bunk,” like his previous nonfiction book “The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness,” which won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize in 2012, is long, overstuffed with anecdote and argument, a stylistic counterpoint to his spare, minimalist poetry. Its 477 some pages (plus another hundred of notes and sources) may seem daunting to some readers, but it’s a wild, incisive, exhilarating tour through Western culture’s sideshows and dark corners. Like a sideshow barker, Young writes with unbridled enthusiasm, a showman’s conviction, and a carny’s canny, telling a story that at times defies belief.

And every word of it is true.

Dickey is the author, most recently, of “Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places.”

“Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News”

Kevin Young

Graywolf: 480 pp., $30

LOS ANGELES TIMES

Tuesday, March 28, 2023

Poet and selfie pioneer / Philip Larkin's photographs offer 'a new perspective'

Poet and selfie pioneer: Philip Larkin's photographs offer 'a new perspective'

By Vincent Dowd

Arts reporter, BBC News

5 November 2015

Much has been written about the poet Philip Larkin since he died - not all of it complimentary. Almost all his notebooks were destroyed in accordance with his will but thousands of his photographs survived.

Now 200 images have been collected in a book which tries to cast a light on a man whose writing still draws in new readers 30 years after his death.

Author Richard Bradford previously wrote a biography of Philip Larkin in 2004, followed three years ago by a study of the poet's long friendship with Kingsley Amis.

So, is making a selection of the 6000 or so surviving photographs taken by him just a minor afterthought? The pictures, carefully preserved at the Larkin Archive in Hull, prove the poet was an accomplished amateur photographer. But does the new book have anything of significance to reveal?

Professor Bradford says some lovers of Larkin's work will simply enjoy seeing additions to the biography.

"The young Philip's first encounters with photography were using the camera his father owned," he says.

"So we see Sydney Larkin at home in Coventry and of course there are holiday pictures. They're mainly just standard family situations, but by the time he's 20 you can see Philip's become a thoughtful photographer well beyond the average."

'Devoted to photography'

The young Larkin acquired a Houghton-Butcher camera and then a Purma Special. In the 1950s he owned a more expensive Rolleiflex Automat.

"Mainly the developing was done professionally at some expense, not just at the local chemist," adds Bradford. "Philip was devoted to photography almost to the end of his life."

Professor Bradford admits it's a puzzle that Larkin almost never mentions photography in his letters.

"I can't really explain why it doesn't come up more when it clearly meant so much to him," he says.

Philip Larkin's photograph of Monica Jones — Image caption,
Several photographs feature Larkin's muse Monica Jones, who had a long relationship with the poet

Photography is at the centre of only one of Larkin's poems, though it's one of the most loved - Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album, published in 1955. It's typical that in the poem, he calls photography "faithful and disappointing".

Part of the new book's interest lies in the pictures Larkin took of the women in his life, especially of Monica Jones with whom he was involved for almost 40 years.

"Philip took great trouble with portraits of Monica," says Bradford. "She could be highly photogenic, as you see in the early black and white picture taken in Leicester in 1947.

"I also included a colour shot of Monica in Scotland 24 years later. Philip and Monica Jones went on a great many holidays together.

"Though his relationships were complex, her friendship was the most consistent."

As well as Jones, the book includes his photographs of Maeve Brennan and his secretary Betty Mackereth, both of whom he became romantically involved with. He also photographed Hilly Amis, Kingsley Amis's wife, lying on a Welsh beach.

There are also a large number of self-portraits. "It's been suggested that Philip invented the selfie which may be a bit tongue-in-cheek," says Bradford.

"But he set up some of the self-portraits beautifully. If you look at the ones of him shaving or having breakfast in his flat in Pearson Park in Hull they're very striking.

"In some he's used a full-length mirror and a timer to get exactly the picture he wants. He thought things out very carefully."

'Recording the world'

Does Richard Bradford think all this self-portraiture amounted to vanity?

"I don't think so: he never flatters himself. In the era of the selfie-stick we're used to people shooting off lots of pictures of themselves. I think what Philip was doing was recording the world he lived in.

"I think people don't understand quite how much written material Betty Mackereth was required to destroy at the end of his life: it was vast.

"And there are something like 8000 surviving letters to his mother. So, in that context of writing so much, it was also natural to photograph so much.

"But it's clear that in the mid-1970s, when Philip felt his literary muse was starting to desert him, he also finally began to lose interest in photography. In some way the two went together."

Hilly Amis — Image caption,
Many of the photos are holiday snaps, including this one of Kingsley Amis' wife Hilly

The Importance of Elsewhere works as a contribution to social history - it's interesting to see Britain changing during Larkin's lifetime, often in ways he disliked. But if he hadn't been in control of the shutter, would we really be interested in the photographs?

"There's no doubt Larkin was one of our most important poets after World War Two. I would also say that, with the exception of John Betjeman, he became the most popular," says Bradford.

"The photographs offer us a new perspective on that life. To Philip, photography wasn't an inconsequential hobby - it was important to him.

"I haven't set out to write a scholarly book: it's for the general reader. But if someone wanted to dig deep into the thematic and stylistic parallels between his writing and his photography, I suspect there's material here for half-a-dozen doctoral theses.

"Thankfully I don't have to write them," he adds.

"I simply think if people understand his photography more they'll understand the man more. And they'll see more in what he wrote."

The Importance of Elsewhere: Philip Larkin's Photographs is published by Frances Lincoln Publishers on 5th November.

BBC

Sunday, March 26, 2023

Philip Larkin / The Impossible Man

Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin, the Impossible Man

How the most exasperating of poets met his match

By Christopher Hitchens

IN MAY 1941, Philip Larkin was the treasurer of the Oxford University English Club and in that capacity had to take the visiting speaker George Orwell out to dinner after he had addressed the membership on the subject of “Literature and Totalitarianism.” Larkin’s main recollection: “We took Dylan Thomas to the Randolph and George Orwell to the not-so-good hotel. I suppose it was my first essay in practical criticism.”

Nudged and intrigued by this potential meeting of minds, I once attempted a comparison and contrast between Larkin and Orwell, as exemplars of a certain style of “Englishness.” Both men had an abiding love for the English countryside and a haunting fear of its obliteration at the hands of “developers.” (Here I would cite Larkin’s poem “Going, Going” and Orwell’s novel Coming Up for Air.) Both were openly scornful of Christianity but maintained a profound respect for the scripture and the Anglican liturgy, as well as for the masterpieces of English ecclesiastical architecture. (See Larkin’s poem “Church Going” and the same Orwell novel, as well as numberless letters and reviews.) They each cherished the famous English affection for animals and were revolted by any instances of human cruelty to them. (Here consult Larkin’s poem “Myxomatosis,” about the extermination of the country’s rabbit population, as well as at least one Orwell work that’s too obvious to require mentioning.)

In somewhat different ways, Orwell and Larkin were phlegmatically pessimistic and at times almost misanthropic, not to say misogynistic. Both also originated from dire family backgrounds that inculcated prejudice against Jews, the colored subjects of the British Empire, and the working class. Orwell’s detested father was a servant of the Empire who specialized in the exceptionally nasty subdivision that traded opium between India and China, and Larkin’s detested father was a professional civil servant who came to admire the “New Germany” of the 1930s, attended Nuremberg rallies, and displayed Nazi regalia in his office. But these similarities in trait and background produced radically different conclusions. Orwell educated himself, not without difficulty, out of racial prejudice and took a stalwart position on the side of the workers. Larkin energetically hated the labour movement and was appalled at the arrival of immigrants from the Caribbean and Asia. Orwell traveled as widely as his health permitted and learned several foreign languages, while Larkin’s insularity and loathing for “abroad” were almost parodic. In consequence, Orwell has left us a memory that elevates English decency to one of humanity’s versions of grace under pressure, whereas the publication of Larkin’s Selected Letters in 1992, and a biography by Andrew Motion in 1993, posthumously drenched the poet in a tide of cloacal filth and petty bigotry that was at least somewhat self-generated.

I now wish I had understood enough to push my earlier comparison a little further. For there is another aspect of “Englishness,” netted in discrepant ways by Harold Pinter and Monty Python, in which both men had a share. This is the world of wretched, tasteless food and watery drinks, dreary and crowded lodgings, outrageous plumbing, surly cynicism, long queues, shocking hygiene, and dismal, rain-lashed holidays, continually punctuated by rudeness and philistinism. In Orwell’s early fiction, all this is most graphically distilled in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, but it is an essential element of the texture of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and was quarried from the “down and out” journalism of which he produced so much. A neglected aspect of the general misery, but very central once you come to notice it, is this: we are in a mean and chilly and cheerless place, where it is extraordinarily difficult to have sex, let alone to feel yourself in love. Orwell’s best shorthand for it was “the W.C. and dirty-handkerchief side of life.”

Larkin’s own summary was, if anything, even more dank: he once described the sexual act as a futile attempt to get “someone else to blow your own nose for you.” These collected letters reflect his contribution to a distraught and barren four-decade relationship with Monica Jones, an evidently insufferable yet gifted woman who was a constant friend and intermittent partner (one can barely rise to saying mistress, let alone lover) until Larkin’s death in 1985. During that time, he strove to keep her to himself while denying her the marriage that she so anxiously wanted, betrayed her with other women sexually, and eagerly helped Kingsley Amis to employ her as the model for the frigid, drab, and hysterical Margaret Peel in Lucky Jim.

On an initial scrutiny, Letters to Monica struck me as rather thickening the squalid atmosphere of some of the preceding accounts. But so unalleviated—I almost wrote artless—is its tone that the material takes on a certain integrity and consistency. Not unlike Larkin’s paradoxical infatuation with jazz, it helps furnish a key to his muse. The key in both cases—which is why artless would be such a mistake—is that about suffering, he was seldom wrong. The dismal paltriness of the suffering doesn’t really qualify this verdict.

One of his ways of keeping Monica while keeping her at bay—they did not cohabit until very near the end, finally forced into mutual dependence by decrepitude on his part and dementia on hers: perhaps the least romantic story ever told—was to make an over-full confession of his own inadequacies as a male. “I’m sorry our lovemaking fizzled out,” he writes after a disappointing provincial vacation in 1958. “I am not a highly-sexed person.” This comes after a letter in which he invites her to consider their affair in the light of “a kind of homosexual relation, disguised: it wdn’t surprise me at all if someone else said so.” And even earlier—it is not as if this is the record of a hot thing cooling—he writes, in December 1954, “If it were announced that all sex wd cease as from midnight on 31 December, my way of life wouldn’t change at all.” This naturally prompts one to review one of his best-known poems, “Annus Mirabilis”:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

The lines can easily be read as a non-literal satire on the exuberant 1960s in general. The less-quoted succeeding verse is arguably more revealing:

Up till then there’d only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for a ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.

In Larkin’s mind, marriage was invariably a trap set by females: a ring in exchange for some perfunctory sex and then a lifetime of domestic servitude and—even more appalling—the rearing of children. Once again the poetry is unambiguous. “The Life With a Hole in It” conveys the cringe with greater complexity, but “Self’s the Man” is not unrepresentative:

He married a woman to stop her getting away
Now she’s there all day.
And the money he gets for wasting his life on work
She takes as her perk
To pay for the kiddies’ clobber and the drier …

Even “The Whitsun Weddings,” in which he manages to write with some tendresse about a famous northern-English nuptial tradition, closes with an extremely melancholy metaphor of energy mutated into futility, or possibly potency into liquefaction: “A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower / Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.” And as for the thought of parenthood, not just by or from oneself, but even of oneself, we need look no further than the celebrated poem that probably convinced his admirer Margaret Thatcher that he wasn’t the family-values type. “This Be the Verse” opens by saying, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad / They may not mean to, but they do”; and it closes by advising, “Get out as early as you can / And don’t have any kids yourself.” There are virtually no references to children in Larkin that are not vivid with revulsion, the word kiddies being the customary form the automatic shudder takes.

No keen analyst is required to unravel this. Larkin had not only a bombastic fascist for a father, but a simpering weakling for a mother. Sydney Larkin had the grace to die early but his widow, Eva, lingered on, querulous, demanding, and hypochondriacal (and extremely unwell), for decades. She may not have meant to make her son’s life a nightmare of guilt and annoyance, but she did. This resulted in Monica Jones’s winning at least one round. On no account, she told her man, should he be blackmailed into living with Eva. “Don’t be robbed!” she beseeched him. “Don’t be robbed of your soul.” If she couldn’t have him, she at least wouldn’t surrender him to that form of “the other woman.”

To have read Larkin’s Letters and Motion’s biography is to be in on a rather dirty joke that surreptitiously permeates these pages. Larkin may not have been highly sexed in the conventional sense, but he was a heroic consumer of pornography and an amateur composer of sadomasochistic reveries, which he often shared with his worldly friends Robert Conquest and Kingsley Amis. He didn’t much like the capital city, but would never visit London without spending good money, or paying through the nose, as one might say, with the vendors of semi-licit glossies in the Soho quarter. Why Andrew Motion maintains that Larkin didn’t have specialized tastes, I cannot think: he was in constant search of material featuring schoolgirls, flagellation, and sodomy. (In 1958 to Conquest: “I agree Bamboo & Frolic are the tops, or rather bottoms: do pass on any that have ceased to stimulate.”) This celebrated fixation is also thought by some to be “quintessentially English.” At his death, along with many other private papers, the vast library of a hectically devoted masturbator had to be hastily destroyed. (He obviously had not mistaken his calling as an archivist.) Once one knows this, many of the letters to Monica become instantly intelligible. He comments slyly but learnedly on the buggery implications of the D. H. Lawrence novel that was then on trial in the courts. “You and your bottom,” he elsewhere writes fervently.

I lay in bed one morning last week remembering one after-breakfast time when you were looking out of my kitchen window … You were wearing the black nylon panties with the small hole in!

You must look a wonderful sight in fur hat & boots—nothing else? Holding a rawhide whip? (You see how naturally my imagination composes aesthetic montages for you.)

On and on his plaintively suggestive appeals recur, and—this is somehow impressive—she never seems to take the hint. What Larkin wanted was a Nora Barnacle, and what he got was—Margaret Peel. The sole exception seems to prove my rule: in late 1958, he plumbs the depth of abjectness by writing to her in apology for what clearly must have been a bungled episode of anal penetration:

I’m sorry too that our encounter had such unhappy results for you! I really didn’t expect such a thing, though I suppose it might have been predicted. I am sorry. It does rather spoil the incident, even at best, which was very exciting for me anyway. Let’s hope all rights itself soon.

Not since Hemingway so overdid the lapine pillow-talk in For Whom the Bell Tolls has any man referred to a woman as a rabbit with such regularity and intensity. Most of the letters are addressed to either “Bun” or “Bunny,” and not a few are illustrated with drawings of rabbits, references to rabbits in literature, or condemnations of British government policy toward rabbits. The obsession did yield the fine poem “Myxomatosis,” which I mentioned earlier, but Larkin’s attempt to make a Beatrix Potter nursery story out of the standoff is often in jarring contrast to the content. The sad grovel I quoted from above is concluded by the sentence: “You sound as if you want comforting Fat rabbit lovely pretty rabbit,” which is a lot to bear for those of us who respect Larkin for his lack of sentimentality. And rabbits are, above all, philoprogenitive … Incidentally, all resemblances to Orwell break off at this point: the author of Animal Farm had a tough enough time with women but was eager for marriage and anxious for children, preferring to adopt rather than go without.

This collection is an accidental success as a period piece. The Britain of the immediate post-war era was in many ways even more austere and impoverished than the Britain of the Depression, with bad and scarce housing, for example, made very much worse by the recent aerial bombardment. Larkin, who once told an interviewer, “Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth,” found his poetic promptings in the overcrowded, overworked, underfed society that he so much purported to resent. Not only that, but his chosen career as a librarian led him to live in Belfast, Ireland’s (and Britain’s) most immiserated and forbidding city, at the cusp of the 1940s and ’50s. His political sympathies can scarcely have been Republican, but a description of an Orange Day rally is one of the best short evocations of massed boorish fanaticism I have ever read. “It was a parade of staggering dullness (every face wore the same ‘taking-himself-seriously’ expression) & stupefying hypocrisy.”

Indeed, those of the Terry Eagleton crew, who have become so righteously fixated on the later “revelations” of Larkin’s racism and xenophobia, might be surprised at the absence of jingoism and nastiness in these letters. He is very strict with Kipling’s excesses, for example, accusing him of betraying his talent in order to be a crowd-pleaser (“hunts with the pack”). Perhaps the uneasy memory of parental Nazism is too close, even though this makes it the more eerie to notice that he never, ever alludes to the then-recent horror of the Third Reich, either in these pages or in any others. Alternative diagnoses include Motion’s opinion that he didn’t quite surrender to reactionary impulses until he became much older, and the high likelihood that much of what he did write in that vein was designed to amuse friends in private letters, by way of outraging the new forms of correctness. A thwarted and furtive sex life, one may speculate, would have been no obstacle in the formation of a carapace of contempt for modernity and its hedonistic outriders.

And this returns us to the luckless Monica, whose possibly Aspergerish manners he strove in vain to correct. “I do want to urge you, with all love & kindness, to think about how much you say & how you say it …” Deploying—in a different but surely conscious declension—the most deadly word in the English vernacular, he warned her: “You’re getting a habit of boring your face up or round into the features of your listener.” That was in 1952, with almost 30 years of on-again, off-again stretching still before the pair of them. But he must have caught something of value in her opinions, because he took seriously her part-grammatical objection to line four of the closing stanza of “Church Going,” which is today perhaps his best-loved poem. Ought it to have been “And so much never can be obsolete,” instead of “that much”? Look and see. Even if, like me, you cannot imagine changing a word, you notice that she was a shrewd and attentive reader. (Here might be the place to say that Anthony Thwaite’s meticulous footnoting and cross-referencing have made this book much more capacious and lively than it might have been, as well as affording us a unique view of some of Larkin’s most lapidary poems when they were still fluid and in formation.)

Rising above the low-level rancor and tedium that can make the scrutiny of private anomie so lowering to the spirit, Letters to Monica obliquely shows the civilizing effect that even the most trying woman can exert on even the most impossible man. With the exception of the occasional rather weak joke in passing, Larkin respected Miss Jones too much, it seems, to try any of his vulgar prejudices or cheaper doggerel on her. Most impressive of all, I found, was that even his anti-libidinous propaganda could yield its warm and poetic aspect. Take this stern epistle from 1951:

I think—though of course I am all for free love, advanced schools, & so on—someone might do a little research on some of the inherent qualities of sex—its cruelty, its bullyingness, for instance. It seems to me that bending someone else to your will is the very stuff of sex, by force or neglect if you are male, by spitefulness or nagging or scenes if you are female. And what’s more, both sides would sooner have it that way than not at all. I wouldn’t.

Such an ostensibly repressive and limited view, with its unimaginative image of “both sides,” had been given the most starkly beautiful expression by a poem that Larkin wrote the preceding year. “Deceptions,” suggested by a harrowing anecdote of forced prostitution from Henry Mayhew’s history of the London poor, implicitly vindicated the ruined female victim by pleading indirectly that her foul client was also a pathetic loser and that she, the innocent sufferer, might even turn out to have been “the less deceived.” He by no means omitted to picture the raw, latent violence of her own trauma. (“All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.”) Gem-hard, it is also an immediately striking piece of imaginative sympathy. Reviewing it, D. J. Enright gave Larkin a rare moment of (almost) unmixed pleasure by saying, as Larkin proudly reported to Monica, that “I persuade words into being poetry & don’t bully them.” A critic could not have approached more nearly to the core of Larkin’s gift.

It is inescapable that we should wonder how and why poetry manages to transmute the dross of existence into magic or gold, and the contrast in Larkin’s case is a specially acute one. Having quit Belfast, he removed himself forever to Hull, a rugged coastal city facing toward Scandinavia that, even if it was once represented in Parliament by Andrew Marvell, in point of warmth and amenity runs Belfast a pretty close second. Here he brooded biliously and even spitefully on his lack of privacy, the success of his happier friends Amis and Conquest, the decline of standards at the university he served, the general bloodiness of pub lunches and academic sherry parties, the frumpy manipulativeness of womenfolk, and the petrifying imminence of death. (Might one say that Hull was other people?) He may have taken a sidelong swipe at the daffodils, but he did evolve his own sour strain and syncopation of Wordsworth’s “still, sad music of humanity.” And without that synthesis of gloom and angst, we could never have had his “Aubade,” a waking meditation on extinction that unstrenuously contrives a tense, brilliant counterpoise between the stoic philosophies of Lucretius and David Hume, and his own frank terror of oblivion. Many of Larkin’s expeditions to churches were in fact an excuse to visit cemeteries or memorials, in spite of his repudiation of the fantasy of immortality, and with another of the finest poetic results of these—“An Arundel Tomb”—it turns out he had taken Monica along as a companion and later accepted some of her thoughtful proposals concerning its final form. We might agree to find it heartening that, in consequence of a dead-average middle-English Sunday stroll, as the other half of an almost passionless relationship, Philip Larkin should notice the awkwardly conjoined couple on an ancient stone coffin lid and, without forcing, let alone bullying, the language, still tentatively be able to find: