POETS Day! Philip Larkin and Narrative

Last Saturday, 21 year-old Paul Skenes made his major league pitching debut for the Pittsburg Pirates against the Chicago Cubs. The top overall pick of the 2023 draft reached 100mph on seventeen pitches and struck out seven. He let Nico Hoerner get a homer off him and there was a runner on base in each of his four and some innings pitched, but it’s a pretty impressive first outing for a guy people have heaped lofty expectations on.

He was pulled after allowing two hits with no outs in the fifth and credited with a total of three runs allowed because those runners eventually scored, but that’s not a fair picture. What followed his exit was an inning of incompetence made all the more torturous because of a two-and-a-half-hour misery extending rain delay in the middle of it. The bullpen took the 6-1 lead with two runners on left them by Skenes, loaded the bases and walked six runs. Walked six runs. That hasn’t been done since the White Sox walked in eight in 1959. The inning ended 7-6.

The Pirates took back the lead and won the game; Skenes was awarded a no-decision. Bygones. But there are a few lessons here for the POETS Day reader. First, no one pitches a complete game anymore. Second, the people you work with are just going to screw everything up anyway, so you might as well get out as soon as the getting’s good. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Seize opportunities and save the workplace effort for when you’re not eager for the promise of a weekend.

But try a little verse first.

***

Afternoons
Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

Summer is fading:
The leaves fall in ones and twos
From trees bordering
The new recreation ground.
In the hollows of afternoons
Young mothers assemble
At swing and sandpit
Setting free their children.

Behind them, at intervals,
Stand husbands in skilled trades,
An estateful of washing,
And the albums, lettered
Our Wedding, lying
Near the television:
Before them, the wind
Is ruining their courting-places

That are still courting-places
(But the lovers are all in school),
And their children, so intent on
Finding more unripe acorns,
Expect to be taken home.
Their beauty had thickened.
Something is pushing them to the side of their own lives.

In the introduction to Philip Larkin: Poems Selected by Martin Amis, Amis writes of the poet, “Larkin is not a poet’s poet. He is of course a people’s poet, which is what he would have wanted. But he is also, definingly, a novelist’s poet.”

Larkin had a knack for evocative images. In a tight phrase, he could suggest a lifetime. The above poem, “Afternoons”, has one of what I consider the best examples with “And the albums, lettered/Our Wedding, lying/Near the television.” Like in the shortest story often attributed to Hemingway, “Baby shoes, for sale, never worn,” loose details leave much to us. It’s slight of hand, a storyteller’s trick, because when we give flesh to the tale we’ll do so with scenes that already resonate with us. There’s little risk in not relating to a reader that makes his own conveying connection. The talent is in knowing how to spur us to imagining. Larkin knew how.

He gives us a destination and a starting point and we don’t know the interim, but we do. There’s a couple that was full of hope and expectation, indulging in possibility, frozen and bound in a flash. What would be a cherished heirloom under different circumstances shares space with a box for watching other people’s lives. Captured images on the tv screen and in the book are a fantasy; unreal. It doesn’t matter what circumstances relegated the wedding album. There’s room for all manner of possibilities because it isn’t the story of one couple. There’s “An estateful.”

Amis highlights “mugfaced middleaged wives/Glaring at jellies” from “Show Saturday.” I know those women, and I suspect you do too. Larkin is brilliantly acerbic. He cuts cruelly because he cuts directly when mockingly describing habits and rituals of life he finds silly or undignified. When that insight is used to address his own shortcomings and failings, resulting circumstances, and his attempts to cope with them he’s often resigned and bitter.

“Love Again” is a great poem but it has a word in it that I, in an uncharacteristically British turn, don’t have a problem with, but most consider up there in the vulgarity hierarchy and women, in particular, say they hate. It’s been touched on, but I’ve never had a definitive conversation with editorial types about what I can and can’t print here. Frankly I’d rather not. So far, I’m allowed the occasional [REDACTED] and even a [REDACTED] if it’s not aimed at [REDACTED]. I think it’s a good idea not to ask for a clarifying policy when you’re perfectly comfortable wearing gray. The fullness of the poem’s naughtiness is here, though the fullness is only that one word.

The lines I want to mention aren’t the ones with the offender. “The drink gone dead, without showing how/To meet tomorrow,” is another compressed narrative. He knows drink, what it should do, and when it’s not up to the task. He knows what tomorrow holds and he’s been through this before. The poem is about a feeling of futility tangent to jealousy. He doesn’t have the woman he wants and someone else, at least he imagines someone else, does. But it’s not a specific woman. It’s knowing he’s not fit for love or companionship. He’s resigned to it, resigned to an unfixable past as controller of the present, and resigned to not knowing exactly what it was in that past that set the course. That he’s resigned to the promise of a drink and whatever notions of its giving he’s disabused is part of the greater narrative, but it can stand alone as rich in implication. It’s great storytelling. Shame he had to write “cunt.”

On the drink theme, maybe an autobiographical tidbit that led to the despondency of “Love Again,” he writes in “Dockery and Son,”

… Or remember how
Black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight
We used to stand before that desk, to give
‘Our version’ of ‘these incidents last night’?

In the poem, Larkin – I’m dispensing with the nicety of adding “allegedly” to “allegedly autobiographical” when discussing his poetic personas, even when it’s a fiction it’s an informed one – visits his old school and is told that Dockery, one of his younger classmates, has a son enrolled now. In following stanzas, he ponders this. Time passed. Dockery acted when he didn’t and now the opportunity is gone. You know he’s not pleased, but his is a stark assessment; harsh where handwringing might have ruled.

Like the wedding album in “Afternoons,” we’re given a beginning point; elite, defiant, and clever enough to think he can get away with being unruly. It’s a position where confidence hasn’t met a challenge. He isn’t that anymore. He’s been supplanted in the role by Dockery’s son and there’s no going back. He’s what happened in the interim.

Larkin had several noted relationships but from 1946 until his death in 1985, Monica Jones was hovering about somewhere. It looks like they were on again off again but it also looks as if there could never have been an off about it; an understanding that theirs is not exclusive. Very sophisticated, and all that. According to Martin Amis, she was the subject of the third novel Larkin never wrote. Amis quotes him in that introduction from a letter to another interest, Patsy Murphy:

“You know, I can’t write this book: if it is to be written at all it should be largely an attack on Monica, & I can’t do that, not while we are still on friendly terms, and I’m not sure it even interests me sufficiently to go on.”

This may be a point on which poets who also write novels and novelists who also write poetry are forced to choose a camp. Where the poet Larkin says no, the novelist Amis says, “The novel should be an attack on Monica? Well of course. What else is there to write about?” Amis, and I should say Martin Amis because his father, Kingsley Amis, Larkin’s longtime friend, figures in this next quote, adds this interesting bit for fans:

“The attack on Monica was published six months later. But its title was Lucky Jim — where Monica is remade as the unendurable anti-heroine, with her barndancer clothes, her mannerisms and affectations, her paraded sensitivity, and her docile-hostile adhesiveness. And Lucky Jim was mentored by Larkin. In his one concession to gallantry, he made Kingsley change the girl’s name from Margaret Beale to Margaret Peel. The real-life Monica’s full name was Monica Margaret Beale Jones.”

He left the bulk of his estate to her, so things worked out or continued along between Jones and Larkin.

“Wild Oats” doesn’t figure Monica Jones in, not directly at least. The poem is about a meeting in 1943. Larkin was smitten with Jane Exall, but unable to act. He was apparently intimidated by her looks and afraid of rejection, so he asked out her less attractive friend, Ruth. He and Ruth eventually got engaged but broke it off in 1950. He was to be haunted by Jane all his life, exchanging friendly but not intimate letters, and collecting photographs of her he kept in a dedicated album. It’s believed the poems “Sunny Prestatyn” (“She was too good for this life.”) and “Essential Beauty” (that unfocused she/No match lit up) were written with her in mind.

He never married. He kept a long-term relationship, even if sporadic, with Jones but never committed. Even when he seemed poised to commit to Ruth, he was enamored of a fantasy. Maybe Jones and everybody – there was Murphy, others as well – who wasn’t the ideal vision he conjured in ‘43 (which I assume the real Exall wouldn’t later compare to) were conveniences until some hoped for meeting that never came. It’s a sad story; frustrating because he brought it on himself.

Wild Oats

About twenty years ago
Two girls came in where I worked —
A bosomy English rose
And her friend in specs I could talk to.
Faces in those days sparked
The whole shooting-match off, and I doubt
If ever one had like hers:
But it was the friend I took out,

And in seven years after that
Wrote over four hundred letters,
Gave a ten-guinea ring
I got back in the end, and met
At numerous cathedral cities
Unknown to the clergy. I believe
I met beautiful twice. She was trying
Both times (so I thought) not to laugh.

Parting, after about five
Rehearsals, was an agreement
That I was too selfish, withdrawn,
And easily bored to love.
Well, useful to get that learnt.
In my wallet are still two snaps
Of bosomy rose with fur gloves on.
Unlucky charms, perhaps.