A Pilgrim’s Digression

Philip Larkin, the jowly, bald man in black-rimmed spectacles, stubs out a cigarette in a souvenir ashtray. On the ashtray is depicted the Tower of London, complete with heads on pikes.

Mr. Larkin is looking out the window of his rented room, glumly watching the high window across the street, where a young woman sits at a desk in her own rented room, writing. He has seen her on the street with a young man, both of them quite affectionate towards one another. Every time he sees two young people together, he wonders are they fucking and is she wearing a diaphragm or taking the pill.

Sex only became legal in 1963, you know.

At night, Larkin gets potted and falls asleep in his chair, waking at four to watch the gray winter light gradually stain the curtain edges. Always in the corner of his eye, just out of focus, is the dark thing that will one day stand out plain. Many things in life never happen at all; this one will.

However, when he finally buys a home at age 60, the poet mows his own yard. He once killed a hedgehog with his mower, and he wrote a poem about it. He listens to Sydney Bechet and sometimes writes well-regarded Jazz criticism. Alone, the poet and University librarian catalogs his pornography collection.

About two or three years ago, I discovered the poetry of Philip Larkin. I had read about him in a New Yorker magazine article years before. During college, I worked in a discount department store called Big Lots, and on my breaks I would read the New Yorker. This was about 1994 or 1995 that the article appeared, apparently in response to the official biography of Larkin, in which various shocking aspects of his personality had been brought to light.

I did not read his poetry, or the biography, for another ten years, but eventually I did come to a rediscovery of the poet.

It’s odd how these things come about, odd the quirks of fate that draw us into the powerful orbit of the people who will impact our lives for decades. For better or worse, Larkin’s poetry speaks to me as few works of literature have, ever.

Larkin’s poetry is almost all about death; yet it is not the “coming to terms with death” poetry that most people prefer. Larkin suggests there is no coming to terms with it. Death is only to be feared; feared for the nothingness of it. Feared because at one’s death, there will be no tasting, touching, feeling ever again, and no afterlife. Death is an aneasthetic from which we do not come round, he says in “Aubade.”

Misogynistic, crabby, gloomy, self-centered, anti-social, crude, preocuppied with death, Larkin is also lyrical, tough, straight-forward, and able to capture the most mundane of life’s moments in brilliant, deceivingly simply poetic verse.

A home left unoccupied becomes, in 10 brief but incomparably tight verses, a metaphor for the wasted life, “a joyous shot at how things ought to be, / Long fallen wide.”

A man goes to rent a room, and the landlady tells him all about the previous tenant, Mr. Bleany, who stayed there “till they moved him.” And the new renter, while trying to maintain an ironic distance from the departed roomer, nonetheless stands not in contrast but in comparison to the deceased.

In the poet’s imagination, Mr. Bleany lies on his “fusty bed” shivering, trying to shake off “the dread,” but in reality it is the poet’s death that is the subject of the poem.

Simple poems. No one ever spends an inordinate amount of time teasing out the theoretical possibilities of a Philip Larkin poem. His poems are about death. That is all the thesis statement ye need to know.

Why do I return to Larkin at times like these? I have my own shadows lurking at the corner of my vision. I should be reading happy poems.

I am lucky to be reading anything, however. back in January, it took me a month to read Philip Roth’s brief and equally depressing Every Man. Afterwards, I began reading Stephen King’s new novel, Lisey’s Story, thinking it would be pleasant to revisit an author who once gave me a lot of pleasure. The book proved too daunting, however. It is very long, and I don’t derive much pleasure from a book that requires any kind of sustained time commitment.

It’s sad to look back at my teenage self, who could read a Charles Dickens novel in a couple weeks and a Stephen King novel in a few days. Now, I am pretty much confined to poetry, magazine articles, the throwaway “free” newspapers given out at Metro stops. That is, if I read at all. Lately, I’ve just been sleeping.

Larkin, however, is different. I can read his entire “Collected Poems” in about a week of riding the train. He did not have much output, and his poems are brief. Back a year or two ago, when I was most intently reading Larkin, including his biography and whatever articles I could find on his life and poetry, I read his book of collected poems probably ten times. I would read it through one week, then again the next. I carried it with me wherever I went, whether out to lunch or to the can.

I don’t know what I find in its pages. Nothing so corny as a “kindred spirit.” That kind of thinking leads to a young man named Chapman carrying his dog-eared copy of The Catcher in the Rye to the murder of John Lennon.

Larkin is no one’s kindred, nor anyone’s spirit. He is the kind of person who felt aloof sitting at home in his room.

Although this probably sounds as crazy or as foolish as if I were to refer to him as a “kindred spirit,” sometimes I feel as if Larkin expressed, better than I ever could, my own dark feelings.  Maybe I don’t have to be a writer, because Larkin said it all for me.

All this was to say, I read some Larkin again, at lunch today.  It felt good to hear the tinkle of the ice in the glass, to see the familiar, dour face behind the gray cloud of cigarette smoke.  “Ah, there you are,” he seemed to say.  “I’ve been expecting you to return.”