Narrative and Voice in Postwar Poetry

Neil Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138836501
• eBook ISBN: 9781317892489
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Poetry in English since the Second World War has produced a number of highly original narrative works, as diverse as Derek Walcott's Omeros, Ted Hughes' Gaudete and Anne Stevenson's Correspondences. At the same time, poetry in general has been permeated by narrative features, particularly those linguistic characteristics that Mikhail Bakhtin considered peculiar to the novel, and which he termed "dialogic". This book examines the narrative and dialogic elements in the work of a range of poets from Britain, America, Ireland, Australia and the Caribbean, including poetry from the immediate postwar years to the contemporary, and novel-like narratives to personal lyrics. Its unifying theme is the way in which these poets, with such contrasting styles and from such varied backgrounds, respond to and creatively adapt the language-worlds, and hence the social worlds in which they live. The volume includes a detailed bibliography to assist students in further study, and will be a valuable resource to undergraduate and postgraduate students of contemporary poetry.

Chapter One
Art and Populism: Larkin from the Margins

At one point in Peter Reading’s Final Demands the reader is confronted, on facing pages, with two stylistically very contrasting texts. One is a ‘song’, to the tune of the National Anthem, supposedly written by an invalid Victorian lady, which exhorts ‘Britons’ to ‘strike home’ at the ‘proud Church of Rome’ and ‘pray that she may fall/Never to rise.’ The other is an example of graffiti versified in Reading’s trademark elegiac distich: ‘MURDER THE FUCKING SHITE POPE’.¹ As an illustration that utterances at opposite ends of the social and stylistic hierarchy, and temporally separated by more than a century, are linked by a persistent prejudice – and that the overtly anti-social gesture of one is covertly authorised by the official discourse of the other – Reading’s device is a stark but effective ideological exposé.

I was reminded of this by a more fortuitous juxtaposition in Andrew Motion’s biography of Philip Larkin. On one page he quotes the final stanza of the elegiac High Windows poem, ‘Cut Grass’, and especially the lines, ‘Lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace,/And that high-builded cloud’. On the opposite page Motion reproduces the now notorious ‘instructions on “How to Win the Next Election” – to be sung to the tune of Lillibullero’ from a letter by Larkin to Robert Conquest, with lines such as ‘Bring back the cat’ and ‘Kick out the niggers’.² If one were to consider these as artfully juxtaposed texts, like Reading’s song and graffiti, one could attribute to them a more subtle version of Reading’s effect. ‘Cut Grass’ is ostensibly a very traditional evocation of transience, by means of pastoral imagery: the grass of the title, mown corn and a series of images of white blossom shed, transposed in the final lines to the larger scale of the cloud. But in the two lines quoted another note is sounded. ‘Lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace’ sounds more like a lament for a vanished rural England, and this effect is reinforced by the archaism, ‘builded’ with its echo of ‘Jerusalem’. ‘Queen Anne’s lace’ is a name for various species of umbelliferous plant, ‘especially cow-parsley’ (SOED), a coarse and vigorous roadside weed that does indeed have beautiful white blossom in early summer but does not usually inspire the elegiac feelings evoked by Larkin’s line. The name ‘Queen Anne’s lace’ is evidently chosen for euphony, for the beautiful music of the line, but also for the ‘pastness’ that it evokes: compare Derek Walcott’s phrase ‘the archaic elegance//of Queen Anne’s lace’.³ Larkin himself made the most dismissive comment on this: ‘Its trouble is that it’s “music”, i.e. pointless crap. … About line 6 I hear a wonderful Elgar rhythm music take over, for which the words are just an excuse.’⁴ The reference to Elgar suggests that Larkin was conscious of the patriotic undertone.

I think most admirers of Larkin would agree that ‘Cut Grass’ shows less than his full poetic range, but they may be less willing to agree that the squib in the letter to Conquest has any relevance to the poem. My argument is that the embedding of a genteel patriotic nostalgia (Queen Anne’s lace not cow parsley, builded not built) in an ostensibly universal pastoral lament for the passing of youth and beauty is a recognisable conservative discourse which, while it does not necessarily presuppose a reactionary and racist political accompaniment (in this way the connection is less direct than in Reading), is perfectly compatible with it and potentially reinforces it.⁵

The squib itself is, however, when considered in its context, a more complex utterance than it might appear. When the Selected Letters were published such utterances – together with the evidence that the obscene language of poems like ‘High Windows’ and ‘This Be The Verse’ was not assumed for poetic purposes but was a regular part of Larkin’s epistolary style – caused a scandal. Left-wing critics such as Terry Eagleton and Lisa Jardine seized on them as the definitive essence of Larkin’s oeuvre. Eagleton lambasted the poet in a Channel Four ‘J’Accuse’ programme and Jardine assured Guardian readers that ‘we don’t tend to teach Larkin much now in my Department’.⁶ On the other hand sympathetic critics tend to skirt the issue: Andrew Swarbrick for example refers to the controversy but does not quote any of the offensive texts. My view is that while the sentiments in the squib I have quoted are self-evidently repellent and indefensible, on the other hand they don’t make, for example, ‘Dockery and Son’ a less good poem, but they might affect the way we understand Larkin’s oeuvre as a whole.

I want to consider ‘Prison for strikers’ in terms of context and what the Bakhtin school called ‘addressivity’ (see Introduction, p.2). Voloshinov’s assertion that a word is determined as much by the addressee as by the addresser is obvious from any collection of correspondence, but Larkin’s letters are exceptional in their sensitivity and adaptation to the addressee. For a man who, at least in his later years, is supposed to have been a cauldron of rage and prejudice – and who gives vent to much rage and prejudice in the letters – there is not a single wounding word for the receiver. This might be described as hypocrisy (since he certainly wrote woundingly about friends to third parties) but it might also be called courtesy. A particularly strong example can be seen in the tone of the letters to his old schoolfriend Noel Hughes, towards whom he felt extremely angry about Hughes’s contribution to the Larkin at Sixty volume.

The effect of the squib I have quoted is reinforced by a stream of more casual racist and anti-working class outbursts in the letters Larkin wrote in the last fifteen years of his life. There is no doubt that they represent something that he genuinely felt. Particularly saddening is his statement that he had stopped going to the Test matches at Lords because there were ‘too many fucking niggers about’.⁷ However, these remarks are, in the Selected Letters, confined to a small group of correspondents, particularly Conquest, Kingsley Amis and Larkin’s schoolfriend Colin Gunner who re-established contact in 1971 (though there is evidence from letters to other correspondents in Motion’s biography).⁸ If, in the words of Voloshinov quoted in my Introduction, a word is ‘the product of the reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener, addresser and addressee’, and if, as he goes on to say, ‘I give myself verbal shape from another’s point of view, ultimately, from the point of view of the community to which I belong’,⁹ even the most repellent utterances have to be examined in context.

In the version of the letter to Conquest given in Selected Letters, the squib is followed by the exclamation, ‘Yeah man.’¹⁰ This is obviously from the lexicon of jazz, famously a passion of Larkin’s from adolescence until shortly before his death. References to jazz in the letters to Conquest are casual, but Conquest belonged to the same group of friends as Amis, to whom Larkin’s letters are full of jazz enthusiasm. He will surely have recognised the reference. How does it affect the meaning of the squib in this particular context? It reminds me sadly of a letter that Larkin wrote at the age of seventeen, quoted by Janice Rossen but unfortunately not printed in Selected Letters, in which he invites his friend James Sutton to imagine the sounds he makes when listening to Louis Armstrong:

‘(moan, moan) … yowse suh! … give, Louis, give! … (moan, groan) … man, jam dat ole horn like nobodies bizzness! … Yeah! … (moan, grunt) … slap dat bass, you niggah! … In the groove there! … (lament, shiek [s/c]) … take it away, youleader-man [sic]!’¹¹

There is nothing racist about the young Larkin’s imitation of Black American idiom here, at least by the standards of 1939. He delightedly and self-mockingly immerses himself in this language, and even uses the word ‘niggah’ in the affectionate manner in which it is often used by Black Americans themselves, the manner in which Derek Walcott addresses his character Achille as ‘my nigger’.

In 1963 Larkin wrote a piece called ‘The End of Jazz’, which was reprinted in All What Jazz:

The American Negro is trying to take a step forward that can be compared only with the ending of slavery in the nineteenth century. And despite the dogs, the hosepipes and the burnings, advances have already been made towards giving the Negro his civil rights under the Constitution that would have been inconceivable when Louis Armstrong was a young man. These advances will doubtless continue. They will end only when the Negro is as well housed, educated and medically cared for as the white man.

Larkin sees two consequences arising from the putative success of the Civil Rights movement; that desegregation would destroy the culture that had produced jazz, and that ‘the contemporary Negro jazz musician’ would ‘disclaim the old entertainment, down-home, give-the folks-a-great-big-smile side of his profession that seems today to have humiliating associations with slavery’s Congo Square.’¹² Near the end of his life, when as we have seen he habitually vented crude prejudice about Black immigrants to Britain, he is reported to have acknowledged that the book ‘now reads very anti-black, insofar as most of the people I bollock are black,’ but added in mitigation, ‘most of the people I praise are black too.’¹³ Looked at from the perspective of Larkin’s present reputation as a virulent racist, what is striking about the passage from All What Jazz is its thoughtfulness, its acknowledgement that art arises out of a social context, and its conventional liberal sentiment. It is also remarkable that, near the end of his life, Larkin seems to have been concerned that All What Jazz read ‘anti-black’. In a letter of 1971 to Charles Monteith, discussing possible approaches that might be taken in a study of Louis Armstrong, he suggests ‘a cultural work, taking Armstrong as a kind of Trojan horse of Negro values sent into white civilisation under the cover of entertainment.’¹⁴ This might be construed as racist, if Larkin were not himself so obviously an example of this process.

It seems that Larkin’s enthusiasm for Black American musicians and his prejudice against Black British immigrants were compartmentalised. For a moment, in that ‘Yeah man’, they come together and in consequence a certain irony enters into Larkin’s discourse. It is impossible to know whether this irony was intended, but there is another irony in the squib that can surely not have been accidental. An unfailing topic of the correspondence with Conquest is their shared enthusiasm for pornography: this very letter contains a leering reference to the appointment of a headmaster at Roedean, which echoes an earlier letter, quoted by Motion, in which Larkin says about a story published in the magazine Swish, ‘I wanted to know if the head master stuck his cock up her bum or up her cunt.’¹⁵ Against this background, the Une ‘Ban the obscene’ in the squib can only have been a joke – and one which implicitly recognises the absurdity of signing up for a ‘package’ of reactionary prejudices.

The expression of racism and associated reactionary attitudes always takes the crudest imaginable form in Larkin’s letters. There is no attempt to justify the prejudice or to argue a position. This is partly no doubt because the letters in question tend to be written to sympathetic friends, but it might also be seen as a baleful twist on Larkin’s reputation as a poet of the common man: prejudice at street-level. This would be a mistaken interpretation, however, as another epistolary squib, beginning ‘I want to see them starving,/The so-called working class’ and repeated in letters to Conquest and Amis, makes plain.¹⁶ Although these verses are more obviously tongue-in-cheek than ‘Prison for strikers’, the persona adopted here is I believe much more consistent with the subject-position of Larkin’s most distinctive poetry than any ventriloquised common-man point of view, and can be traced a long way back – for example, in a memorandum that he wrote for himself on his last day at Wellington public library:

I have exactly two and a half hours of degradation left… and then no more books for Dad, lovers, Westerns, snot-faced children …just, oh … freedom! (Till the buggery starts at Leicester [University Library], Still, it’ll be high-class buggery.) …

Spent the morning typing out poems in Council time. My only regret is that I wasn’t using a Council typewriter and Council paper. Nothing seems more fitting to me than that the money of oafs should be devoted to the furtherance of sensitive and imaginative work.¹⁷

Twenty-five years separate this from the ‘Prison for strikers’ letter, and I do not want to minimise the importance of the historical changes that bear on the changes in Larkin’s public and private discourse. But I do want to maintain that the later crude and apparently populist expressions of reactionary prejudice are not incompatible with this explicitly élitist concern for ‘sensitive and imaginative work’. ‘Prison for strikers’ may be an indulgence in full-blooded, undiscriminating prejudice, but my analysis of its context suggests that it isn’t a commitment to it, or to the vulgarised form of popular solidarity that its language suggests (or to any kind of solidarity).

Critics have attempted to contextualise Larkin’s consciousness socially and hist...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1. Art and Populism: Larkin from the Margins
• 2. Constructs for the Inarticulate: The Late Poems of Sylvia Plath
• 3. Crow in its Time: Trickster Mythology and Black Comedy
• 4. Hughes, Narrative and Lyric: an Analysis of Gaudete
• 5. Against Confessionalism: Anne Stevenson’s Correspondences
• 6. Utterance and Resistance: Geoffrey Hill
• 7. ‘The Mulatto of Style’: Derek Walcott and Hybridity
• 8. Les Murray and the Vernacular Republic
• 9. Language, Nationality and Gender: Seamus Heaney and an English Reader
• 10. Peter Redgrove: Composition as Transaction
• 11. Tony Harrison: Author and Subject in The School of Eloquence and v.
• 12. ‘Tother keeps chaingin is VOICE’: Heteroglossia in Peter Reading
• 13. Carol Ann Duffy: Outsideness and Nostalgia
• Bibliography
• Index