Larkin and Finding Yourself In the Rubble

On the value of poetry

No royalty-free images of Larkin, so have a lark instead. Image by Dimitris Vetsikas from Pixabay

Larkin. A little bit racist, a little bit misogynist; hell, every bit the modern man. (These things have never gone away. The internet has revealed multitudes of intelligent people holding ignorant opinions.) But you know what, as extraordinary artists of the past go, he isn’t the worst. Caravaggio was a murderer. Eric Gill was a paedophile. Hunter S Thompson was an A-grade dangerous arsehole. George Orwell, a man revered for his vision of the future we are living through — snitched on his friends to the authorities.

I draw the line at Eric Gill, but the rest? Humans are complex, messy creatures. Great artists, some of the messiest. And Larkin pretty much has my heart forever. Very few poets have touched the essence of being human so deeply, yet so accessibly. He is a touchstone for honesty, compression and technical skill.

We did Byron and Keats at school. My English teacher introduced me (first in book form, then in person) to Ted Hughes. My brother Peter gave me Roger McGough. No one introduced me to Larkin. I did that for myself. At twenty or so, studying for my BSc in Biology, I opened High Windows and read the first poem, ‘To the Sea’. A beautiful poem I thought, and went to read it again, and then realised: it rhymed. A tight rhyme scheme all the way through, so subtle I hadn’t noticed it. How had he done that? My first thought was give up writing poetry. My second thought, after a couple of weeks of sulking, was find out how he did it. I only wrote free verse then (rhyme being for babies and historical consumptives) but reset my sights: learn how to write a poem that rhymed without drawing attention to the fact. This was in the era before creative writing degrees and the internet, so I had to figure it out myself. It took a few years.

‘Poetry? Why not write something useful?’ said the cabbie

My passion for Larkin’s poetry only grew from the High Windows moment. He died a few months later. After his death, I buried myself in his Collected. And as some of my students will know, one of his poems lives permanently in the back pocket of my brain: ‘Aubade’.

This poem’s brilliance has never left me since I accidentally memorised it in 1999, experiencing Larkin’s fear of death as a protective blanket around me when I felt, in the wake of leaving my abusive husband, a renewed surge of the suicidal urge. Over and over, I’d recite it aloud to myself in my flat in the small hours, a glass of painfully cheap red wine in my hand, my three small boys asleep in the back room.

“This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says No rational being

Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,   

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,   

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.”

Larkin was afraid of death: I needed to be. When you hear the Grim Reaper calling your name, you’d best look for something to cling to. I clung onto Larkin. And through this poem, and through a friend who offered me a sofabed, and through thinking what an insult my suicide would be to my (cancer-slain) brother, I edged around the precipice and got away from the cliff-edge.

Life-writing and light-sharing

A couple of lines from the first verse come back to me often: “An only life can take so long to climb / Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never…”

“Wrong beginnings.” Where do I start on that subject? The memoir will decide. But boy has it taken me a long time to climb clear of those beginnings. Wrong beginnings set off such a trail of ‘wrong’ things (decisions, behaviours, husbands) that it’s amazing any of us who were fucked up by our Mum and Dad (who ‘may not mean to, but they do’) end up being functional, let alone moderately successful. And like proper mountains, every time I think I have climbed clear and can maybe stop climbing now, I realise it is was an optical illusion caused by my angle of ascent, and there is a new peak ahead.

After my last, very personal newsletter (and some similarly personal material shared on social media), one person commented that they would like me to return to ‘lit crit.’ (Several others, in contrast, thanked me for shining a light on something difficult that brought them hope or courage). I don’t think ‘lit crit’ has ever been what I am doing here (in my newsletter, blog, Substack, what have you) or in the world at large. I am exploring the creative life and, more generally, the experience of being human. I am arguing for the value of stories and poems. I will do more of that. In these strange, dark times, where Governments are persuading young people to drop the arts and humanities, we have never needed good stories, and good poetry, more.

Words like Larkin’s, poetry, stories, help us through the dark times. Our own darkness, and the violent roar of our wider extinctions.

Last night, I was at the Southbank to support my 21-year-old Ukranian student, Dariia Lysiuk, one of the five shortlisted writers for the £15,000 Footnote x Counterpoint Prize. (I was surprised to find I knew one of the others; Steve Tasane has been one of my writing friends for 25 years). Every well-told story of an individual life (and there were five right there) shines a light on our shared humanity. Inspires us to press on against our own hardship. Invokes compassion and understanding of others. Truly, what is more valuable?

Art and enlightenment

‘Climbing free’ of those ‘wrong beginnings’, you gradually get lighter. Both in weight and illumination terms. And then, maybe, you can become a light for others.

If you have a poem that has helped you through dark times, share the title and poet in the comments. (Not the whole poem, for copyright reasons.) There is usually at least one point in every life where we need to be thrown a rope. Who knows when the poem you share will be someone else’s?