For all his faults, and they were many, Philip Larkin must hover like a grey fog, a black cloud, or cold morning dew, over every contemporary English poet. Ian Hamilton was wrong to consign him to oblivion. Larkin is still very much around, albeit as some sort of troubling ghost—a Noel Coward-type phantom, sucking cynically on a cigarette holder—not blood—cast in fake greenish hues: more elephant-man or elephant in the room than genuinely scary revenant.
Larkin is the stuff that ghosts are made of… always larkin’ around, as ghosts proverbially do… A bad joke turned curse passed down the generations from grandparents depicted in old photos in their odd-looking hats and coats through a more puritanical generation of parents onto children who have no kids themselves… Larkin diligently bore that curse like a badge of honor and has now passed it on to us.
Poor taste—be it political or poetic—was Larkin’s forte. Unashamedly parochial in scope, he squirrelled his selfmost thoughts away in a Hull University Library and honed his seemingly inevitable inherited prejudices into a finely-crafted filigree of reflections on modern and post-modern Angst. Even his most exquisitely-crafted and sensitive creations—An Arundel Tomb, The Whitsun Weddings—for all their brilliance, have a rancid, subtly vicious, edge… Posthumously he left us Aubade—one of the finest but least comforting poems ever written on the subject of impending death—as if he were some cackling uncle in a crude but now classic Hammer Horror movie.
Like all ghosts, Larkin is sad, beckoning, pleading to be laid to rest; lost between one world and the next. He harks back to a past that never existed and bewails an already-existing future that somehow passed him by… He is caught in the cracks of time…
Just as the passage from life to death may be a longer and more nuanced process than we have previously imagined, so the route from fame to oblivion is a much bumpier slope than the sheer fall from a cliff-face that Ian Hamilton sadistically envisages his once-feted victims must endure…
Few share the luck of a Shakespeare, who managed quietly to shuffle off his mortal coil and leave a mighty bundle of immortal work behind, freed of the faintest whisper of himself. Most hurl themselves or are tumbled into oblivion along with the entirety of their cherished life’s work, leaving more of their unfinished imperfect lives for gossips to peruse than the neatly-packed baggage of their work. At best a footnote, at worst only infamy remains. Ezra Pound springs to mind…
And then there are the ghosts… Poets who left their work unfinished in this life… the red-eyed zombies busily clambering back up over the cliff-face to reclaim and rework their oeuvre, obsessing their kith and kin…
Such ghouls must be every true poet’s inspiration… Like it or not—Larkin, groping his studiedly prosaic-poetic way, drunk, night after night, back to bed after a piss, was one of these…
*
Philip Larkin died in the restroom of a cerebral hemorrhage, while trying to pass stool. He keeled over, lodging himself between the radiator and the door, thereby impeding efforts to rescue him and at the same time scalding his face… “Hot, hot,” were his somehow apt last words.
In his later years he had been abandoned by a long-term lover who had grown tired of his ongoing commitment issues. Raging against the dying of the light, he returned to an old flame. The reunited couple spent Larkin’s last months in an orgy of boozing and extreme right-wing rants, which, unfortunately, were recorded for posterity… I imagine that he would not really like to be remembered that way…
This was the man who had written, stonily but tenderly, of an Arundel tomb dedicated to a Medieval knight and his beloved, as if it were a coy piece of 1950s schoolboy graffiti scratched in its chalky surface:
“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”
Every time I set pen to paper to write verse or step inside a church, the ghost of Philip Larkin is there bothering me…