THE intensity of Philip Larkin’s poetic genius was matched only by his political bile. Immigrants were scum; prisoners were swine; trade-unions were filthy moneygrubbers. But this lack of charity, together with the author’s mistress-strewn life and scornful views on religion ("It's absolute balls," he said on reading the Bible. "Beautiful, of course. But balls."), are now being overlooked by the Dean of Westminster. Larkin, it was announced last week, will soon have a flagstone at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, near the tombs of fellow literary luminaries Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles Dickens and the memorial of Ted Hughes.
What the Dean also seems to have overlooked, however, is Larkin’s curmudgeonly view of his new neighbours. What would Larkin think of his posthumous companions? To go by the opinions expressed during his lifetime, not much.
Chaucer, the first poet to be buried in Poets’ Corner, may be regarded as the greatest poet of the Middle Ages, but Larkin’s attitude to him was more mocking than reverential. As an undergraduate at Oxford, he drew satirical cartoons to poke fun at "The Canterbury Tales", in which he said, “we do not find any great striving towards artistic greatness.” He found Chaucer too sanguine, too lacking in “tragic intensity" to have written "Macbeth”. A few years later, while hurrying down a dusty narrow stack in a library, he chanced upon “an anonymous book of drivel dated 1895”, which, he said maliciously, he’d “sooner pore over than over Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Blake, Keats, Shelley, Byron or AE (George Russell).”
In a letter to his mistress Monica Jones, he compared the realism in Chaucer to the Daily Mail, a popular British newspaper—to the latter’s advantage. “I don’t think I really liked books, not old books anyway,” he wrote. “I could never feel that Chaucer was as real as the Daily Mail, & so I was never an academic.” In another letter, he parodied the opening lines of the prologue from "The Canterbury Tales", by teasing Monica, who didn’t like birds, about being woken by the “shapely twitterings” of those that “sleep all night with open eye.” “I hope these purple passages don’t embarrass you,” he added.
He was far ruder about Dickens, whose “queer names, queer characters”, “aggressive rhythms”, and “piling on of adjectives,” was like a spur to his spleen. Larkin’s reading habits were irrevocably shaped by his father, whose excellent library contained “the principal works of most main English writers” with the curious exception of Dickens. “He cannot be considered a real writer at all; not a real novelist,” Larkin wrote to Monica Jones. “His is the garish, gaslit, melodramatic barn where the yokels gape.” As for the Victorian novelist’s “irrepressible vitality,” Larkin wasn’t impressed. “It strikes me as being less ebullient, creative, vital, than hectic, nervy, panic-stricken…How serenely Trollope, for instance, compares.”
Of course, some of this was just Larkin being characteristically perverse. He might have professed to prefer that anonymous book of drivel to Chaucer or Shakespeare, but as a guest on BBC’s "Desert Island Discs", he fulsomely described his hero Louis Armstrong as “a combined Chaucer and Shakespeare of jazz.”
And when he wrote that letter to Monica disparaging Dickens, he had just finished "Great Expectations", which he admitted to having “enjoyed much of”. He evoked his solitary situation with comic pathos by comparing himself to Miss Havisham sitting in a “putty-coloured fit of torpor.” He was no doubt disappointed when "Bleak House" turned out to be quite good too. “There is more to thrill, & less to irritate or bore, me than in any other I’ve read,” he declared. “Every Chesney Wold paragraph is splendid & every Inns of Court paragraph too.”
But he didn't let this soften his unfavourable view of Dickens. He dismissed Herman Melville’s "Moby-Dick" as “fishy Dickens”, and in 1955 he mused, “As for people who may come to mean more to me—Dickens perhaps? I don’t think so.” Not surprisingly, he felt rather smug on discovering that Samuel Butler, a novelist he admired, was equally sniffy about Dickens. “Apparently Handel is buried next to Dickens in W. Abbey!” he wrote to Monica. “B disapproves of this. Of course B is rather a nasty old woman in some ways, but I always liked him.”
The last poet to be memorialised at Westminster was Ted Hughes in 2011. This was, in part, Larkin's doing. In 1984, when he turned down the poet laureateship, his chief regret in doing so was that it would now go to Hughes, whose poetry was "no good at all." "The thought of being the cause of Ted's being buried in Westminster Abbey is hard to live with," he told his friend Kingsley Amis.
Unhappiness was always Larkin’s bailiwick—he revelled in it. Deprivation, as he once said, was his daffodils. This state certainly inspired him to write some of the simplest and most beautiful poetry in the English language. Who else but this old misery guts could discern that spring’s “greenness is a kind of grief”? Or depict death as an “anaesthetic from which none come round”? In this light his new companions couldn’t be more perfect. If he'd been memorialized beside his exemplar, Thomas Hardy, or D. H. Lawrence, whose letters he used to read, “one or two, as one takes aspirin” to combat bouts of “literary depression and pretentiousness”, he would have been condemned to an eternity of performance anxiety. Now he can stew happily in his putty-coloured torpor and grumble delightedly about being stuck with Chaucer and Dickens, “Morning, noon & bloody night,/ Seven sodding days a week.”
