Philip Larkin and the Importance of Elsewhere

A C T A U N I V E R S I T A T I S L O D Z I E N S I S

FOLIA LITTERARIA 36, 1993

N e il Roberts

PHILIP LARKIN AND THE IMPORTANCE OF ELSEWHERE

The Importance o f Elsewhere is L ark in ’s poem a b o u t living in Irelan d , w here “ strangeness m a d e sense” because foreignness proved him “ separate, n o t u n w o rk ab le” . T h e poem concludes:

Living in England has no such excuse: These are my customs and establishments

It would be much more serious to refuse. Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence1.

H is po etry o f course is massively com m itted to “h e re” , n o t “ elsew here” - his Collected Poem s m ig ht have carried as an epig rap h his rem a rk th at he did n o t ta k e holidays because they sym ptom ised an “ im po te nt hatred o f everyday life” . M an y o f his m ost distinctive and strang est effects come from an acceptance o f presence, and o f the present, from th e cultivation o f a state o f m ind th a t eschews escapes into spatial o r tem p oral elsewheres. T h e im p o rta n ce o f elsewhere is the large place it occupies in th e com m o n consciousness, an d it defines the distance we have to travel w hen reading L arkin.

T w o ch aracteristic sm all exam ples o f the pow er th a t the absence o f “ elsew here” gives to th e poetry are Talking in B ed and H om e is so Sad. In the form er th e “ u nique distance from iso latio n ” is a th rea t because n o th in g shows why

It becomes still more difficult to find W ords at once true and kind,

Or not untrue and not unkind (129).

1 Ph. L a r k i n , Collected Poems, ed. Thwaite, Faber and Faber, London 1988, p. 104. All the references in the text will be to this edition.

T h e speaker does n o t take refuge in im agining other, m ore perfect states o f intim acy. “ Lying to g eth er” is the goal o f desire, and the failure o f the couple is u nm itigated because no m ore desired situ atio n “ underw rites their existence” . T h e title o f H om e is so S ad em ploys the em otional keyw ord o f L ark in ’s poetry and - as we shall be seeing in an o th er, m ore startling exam ple - the sadness is caused by undiluted presence:

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, Shaped to the com fort o f the last to go As if to win them back. Instead, bereft O f anyone to please, it w ithers so, Having no heart to p u t aside the theft A nd turn again to w hat it started as, A joyous shot at how things ought to be,

Long fallen wide. Y ou can see how it was: Look at the pictures and the cutlery.

The music in the piano stool. T hat vase (119).

T he deictic is alw ays strange in literature, and L ark in ’s use intensifies the strangeness, especially in the last two words. T he com m and to look a t objects to be foun d in m ost houses can be accepted as a com m and to im agine the examples one is m ost fam iliar w ith, and the m usic in the p ian o stool w orks as a m eta p h o r o f ab an do n m e nt, b u t “T h a t vase” is so very particu lar, and yet I d o u b t if m an y readers visualise a p articular vase w hen they read it. It is a phrase w hose gram m atical form is full o f a sense o f presence and specificity, yet the vase is actually ab sent and highly generalised. It w orks so pow erfully because w hat it effectively signifies is presence itself, once m itigated by being experienced as a transitio n to som ething else - “ A joyous shot at how things ou g ht to b e ” - b u t now stripped o f the m eaning form erly bestow ed by the “elsewhere” o f the imagined future. (Sound is also especially im po rtant here, as I discovered w hen discussing the poem w ith a group o f A m erican students: it w orks only if you pronounce “ vase” in the English way, to rhym e with “cars” , n o t in the A m erican way, to rhym e w ith “ case”). T he significance o f “T h a t vase” is m ade explicit in the cognate poem (also abo ut hom e), Reference B a c k :

Truly, though our element is time,

We are n ot suited to the long perspectives Open at each instant of our lives.

They link us to our losses: worse,

They show us w hat we have as it once was, Blindingly undiminished, ju st as though

By acting differently we could have kept it so (106).

T h e present was once “ blindingly undim inished” , b u t th a t was w hen it w as the fu ture, an elsew here serving to m itigate an other present. It is dim inished sim ply by becom ing the present.

I f there is a strangeness in the w orking o f “T h a t vase” in H om e is so Sad, there is a t least no m ystery ab o u t the app ro priaten ess o f the w ord “ s a d ” in the poem . W ha t do we m ake, though, o f the sam e w ord in the final stan za o f M o ney?

I listen to money singing. It ’s like looking dow n From long french windows at a provincial town, The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad

In the evening sun. It is intensely sad (198).

Sad because it is a B lakean scene o f the social injustice w rou gh t by m oney, o f slum s affronted by insanely o pulent and indifferent churches?

I simply do not believe this, partly because it docs not cohcre w ith the rest o f the poem , which I shall qu o te shortly, but m ainly because “ long french w indow s” “ provincial” and “ evening sun” are as im p o rtan t to the total c o n n o tatio n as the details which m ight seem socially significant. It strikes m e as m ore m ysterious th a n th a t. W hen figurative language in poetry is obscure it is usually because the g round o f the com pariso n is u nstated and h a rd to deduce, as in “ the evening is spread ou t against the sky/L ike a pa tie nt etherised u pon a tab le” . But L arkin ’s art, while far from m atchin g the o ften crude em pirical simplicities o f his public persona, is n o t {pace A ndrew M o tio n and cu rren t critical opinion generally) sym boliste. “ M oney singing” is like “ look ing dow n etc.” in respect o f the fact th a t b oth are “ intensely s a d ” . T he problem is know ing why this feeling should atta ch to either o f them . W e need the rest o f the poem:

Q uarterly, is it, money reproaches me: “ Why do you let lie here wastefully? I am all you ever had o f goods and sex.

You could get them still by writing a few cheques” . So I look a t others, w hat they do with theirs:

They certainly d o n ’t keep it upstairs.

By now they’ve a second house and car and wife: Clearly money has something to do with life In fact, they’ve a lot in comm on, if you enquire:

You can’t pu t off being young until you retire, A nd however you bank your screw, the money you save

W on’t in the end buy you more than a shave (198).

T he poem obviously w orks by an ab ru p t shift o f register. A s in H igh Windows and T his be the verse a light verse m a n n er associated w ith less th an the full L ark in sensibility yields to a poetic plangency th a t is all the m o re pow erful for the co n trast. T he poem is a kind o f dialogue, n o t ju st betw een the p oet and m on ey, b ut o f this latter voice w ith the garrulous pseudo-colloquial perso na o f the first three stanzas. B ut w hat o f m oney

and sadness? M oney is pure potentiality; as long as you hold on to it your existence is underw ritten by the elsew here o f w hat you have n ot yet spent it on. A nd, as the bleak m eaninglessness o f “ a second car and house and w ife” implies, the joyful shot at how things ought to be will end up dim inished as ever. T he provincial tow n (including the “ french w indow s” from which it is viewed) owes the peculiar intensity and m clancholy o f its presence to being, like the dom estic details in Home is so S a d or the hotel in Friday N ight at the R oyal Station H otel, anachronistic and so com pleted. It will disappear but th a t is not the m ain reason for the sadness (one could

not accuse L arkin o f being nostalgic ab out the slums): ra th er that, like the

hom e, its presence is unm itigated by any sense o f becoming.

A n essay ab o ut presence in L ark in ’s poetry has to say som ething ab o ut Here, no t ju s t because o f the p oem ’s them e and title, but because it is one o f the finest exam ples o f L ark in ’s m ost consum m ate and elaborated m anner. Like I Rem em ber, I Rem em ber, D ockery and Son and The Whitsun Weddings the poem is based on a railw ay journey. T his is n o t exploited in quite the set-piece fashion o f The Whitsun Weddings, bu t it is perhaps m ore deeply interfused into the structure. T h rou g h o u t the poem ’s thirty-tw o lines, until the last tw o o r three, there is a tension between travelling and arrival. T he first three quarters o f the poem are a single sentence whose subject is the participle “ Swerving” and m ain verb “ G ath ers” . W e seem constantly to be arriving, bo th geographically and gram m atically, but the expectation is constantly proved prem ature. In the first eight-line stanza we have “ swerving

to solitude” bu t we are taken beyond this in “ G athers to the arrival of

a large tow n” . T he first Here follows im mediately: “ H ere dom es and statues, spires and cranes cluster [...]” , and we seem, as the m o tif o f the train-journey natu rally suggests, to have finally arrived in a tow n. A nd indeed the poem does dwell in the tow n for a stanza and a half, though in a restless fashion, m oving between the “ raw estates” , the plateglass shopping centre and the “ fishy-sm elling/ P as to ra l” o f the po rt. I have never been able to understand how the “cut-price crow d” can be “ residents from raw estates” m iles from the shopping centre while “dwelling/[...] W ithin a term inate and fishy-smelling/ P astoral o f ships up streets [...]” . H ow ever th at m ay be, the w ord “ term inate” reinforces the sense o f arrival only to be belied three lines later by “ out beyond its m ortgaged half-built edges [••■]” • It is unclear w hether we are still on a train, bu t by some m ode o f travel we have reached an o ther Here: one where “ silence stands like heat [...] leaves unnoticed thicken, / H idden weeds flow er, neglected w aters q uicken” . B ut nor is this ou r term inus:

And past the poppies bluish neutral distance Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach

O f shapes and shingle. H ere is unfenced existence: Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach (136-137).

O ne m ight say th a t the poem is constan tly deferring presence. N one o f its brilliantly observed details has to take qu ite the full w eight o f presence like the vase in H om e is so S a d o r the provincial tow n in M oney. T h e travelling eye rests lightly, if intensely, on w hat it sees. T h e jo urn ey is a repeated sub stitutio n o f one “ H ere” by an oth er, until it reaches the p oin t at which su bstitu tion can no longer be m ade. H ere, at the final Here, there is n o longer brilliantly observed detail b u t a perplexing vagueness: only “ shingle” has any specificity; otherw ise there is the con centratedly vague “ bluish n eutral distance” and the alm ost sinistcrly nonspecific “ sh ape s” . T his final destinatio n is, in the term s o f our discussion, paradoxical: it is “ H e re” , b u t it is also elsewhere: “ ou t o f rea ch ” . T he half-line “ H ere is unfenccd existence” could be accented to suggest th a t this, secretly, has been the goal o f th e jo urn ey all along, and look how it disapp oints. A ro m an tic quest for freedom has been rebuffed. C ertainly the poem has passed throu g h and left behind all determ inate presences, and this is w hat it is left w ith. O n o ne reading o f this un m istakab ly sym bolic scene, we are being sent back to fenced existence, to the d eterm inate, to the full sad w eight o f presence; on ano th er, perfectly com patible, the vague, inaccessible an d uncom m unicative end o f the jou rn ey “ prefigures” , in A ndrew M o tio n ’s w ords, “ the inevitable em ptiness o f d ea th 2.

I will conclude by referring m o re briefly to two m ore o f L arkin ’s finest and m ost cha racteristic poem s, M r B leaney and D ockery and Son. In M r Bleaney the poverty o f the circum stances th a t signify presence is explicit: n o t just “T h a t vase” b u t “ F low ered cu rtains, thin and fray ed” . N evertheless, the poem exemplifies m y them e because the speaker has clearly reached a point at which “no elsewhere underw rites his existence” . T he fear th a t “how we live m easures our ow n nature” m ight be especially acute if we live in “one hired box” , but the notion that o ur “ natures” are determ inate and m easurable by our circum stance at all is unwelcome, especially if the circum stances are unchanging. “ O ne hired bo x ” very obviously connotes d eath , bu t so less obviously do the unchanging hom e o f H om e is so Sa d and the anachronistic tow n o f M oney.

D ockery and Son is a m o re pow erful poem th an M r Bleaney, p artly because the recognition th a t in M r Bleaney is inspired by grossly bleak circum stances is here extended to any circum stances w hatever:

Where do these

Innate assumptions come from? N ot from w hat We think truest, or m ost w ant to do:

Those w arp tight-shut, like doors. They’re more a style O ur lives bring with them: habit for a while,

Suddenly they harden into all w e’ve got

And how we got it; looked back on, they rear Like sand-clouds, thick and close, embodying F or D ockery a son, for me nothing,

N othing with all a son’s harsh patronage (153).

Seam us H eaney has attem pted to leaven the dom inance of the “ anti-heroic, chastening, h um anist voice” in L arkin by picking o u t a strand o f “ repining fo r a m o re crystalline reality” w hich, w hen it finds expression, opens up m om ents “ which deserve to be called visionary” . T his stran d he identifies as “ a stream o f light” w hich suggests th a t “ L arkin also had it in him to w rite his ow n version o f the Paradiso3. T his is a welcome and valid em phasis b u t it leaves us w ith a L ark in divided betw een a poetry o f “ co m m entary” and “ intelligence” and a “ visionary” poetry th a t springs “ from the deepest strata o f L ark in ’s poetic s e lf ’. H eaney aspires to rcscue L ark in ’s poetry from those w ho w ould label it “ a poetry o f low ered sights an d patently dim inished ex pectations” , bu t in effect he hands over the bulk o f the poetry, and th e m ost distinctive, to th a t definition. It is well to be told o f a L arkin w ho could be assim ilated to the D a n te o f the Paradiso or the S hakespeare o f S onnet 60; b u t the L arkin I have attem pted to describe is also visionary, and if his vision o f unm itigated presence does n o t console, we have plenty o f o th er poets to do th at for us.

D epartm ent o f English Literature U niversity of Sheffield

Neil Roberts

PHILIP IA RKIN I MIEJSCA, W KTÓRYCH N AS NIE МЛ

Nawiązując do tytułu jednego z najważniejszych wierszy w poetyckiej spuściźnie współczesnego poety angielskiego Phiłipa Larkina, autor artykułu podejmuje tem at konfliktu między obecnością, k tó ra nie spełnia naszych oczekiwań, a rom antycznym i marzeniami o ucieczce do miejsc, w których nas nie ma. Wiersze Larkina to poezja obecności, m ocno osadzonej w wymiarze „tu i teraz” , w idać to szczególnie wyraźnie w konsekw entnym stosow aniu przedimków określonych, w bogactwie konkretnych obrazów codziennej rzeczywistości. Choć ta obecność, statyczna, nieruchoma, pozbaw iona możliwości w yboru, jest źródłem charakterystycznego dla poezji L arkina sm utku, poeta zdaje się wykluczać możliwość istnienia jakiegokolwiek „gdzie indziej” . Jedynym miejscem, które w wizji poety może być przeciwstawione naszej obecności, jest śmierć.