Belonging and Estrangement in the Poetry of Philip Larkin, R.S. Thomas and Charles Causley

Rory Waterman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409470878
• eBook ISBN: 9781317175230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Focusing on the significance of place, connection and relationship in three poets who are seldom considered in conjunction, Rory Waterman argues that Philip Larkin, R.S. Thomas and Charles Causley epitomize many of the emotional and societal shifts and mores of their age. Waterman looks at the foundations underpinning their poetry; the attempts of all three to forge a sense of belonging with or separateness from their readers; the poets' varying responses to their geographical and cultural origins; the belonging and estrangement that inheres in relationships, including marriage; the forced estrangements of war; the antagonism between social belonging and a need for isolation; and, finally, the charged issues of faith and mortality in an increasingly secularized country.

Chapter 1
Provincial and Universal:
Traditions and the Poet-Reader Relationship

Larkin, Causley and Thomas all had a champion in John Betjeman (1906–84): a poet who essentially treated modernism as though it had not happened, famous for writing about the world as he experienced it in realist terms, and quite the most popular English poet of his generation. Betjeman composed a gushing ‘Introduction’ to Thomas’s Song at the Year’s Turning, which ended: ‘The “name” which has the honour to introduce this fine poet to a wider public will be forgotten long before that of R. S. Thomas’,¹ and elsewhere he referred to Causley and Larkin as ‘my two top’ contemporary poets.² After accepting the Laureateship in 1972, Betjeman told Larkin: ‘You were the one I wanted for the job – not that I was consulted – and failing you Charles Causley’.³

Like Betjeman’s, the work of Larkin, Causley and Thomas typically emphasizes common and often provincial experiences. All would surely have approved of Frost’s maxim that ‘You can’t be universal without being provincial […]. It’s like trying to embrace the wind’.⁴ A benchmark in their poetic development was when each came, with conviction and early in their poetic careers, to focus on his own life and the lives of people around him. Thomas’s juvenilia, published in the Bangor college magazine under the pseudonym Curtis Langdon and in 1939–40 in The Dublin Magazine, were, as Byron Rogers notes, ‘recklessly derivative’,⁵ not to mention wistful and lightweight. They are the poems of someone who has not yet developed a voice of their own or found anything original to say, and who therefore sticks to generalities:

I know no clouds

More beautiful than they

That the far hills shroud

At the end of the day.⁶

This is, at best, reminiscent of the least significant of the poems Larkin published in The North Ship (1945) at the same stage in his poetic development (‘the static / Gold winter sun throws back / Endless and cloudless pride’ (‘VIII: Winter’, Larkin Complete, p. 9)). Certainly, it is a far cry from the stark impressions of local and personal life that were to make Thomas’s name in early mature poems such as ‘A Peasant’ and ‘Country Church (Manafon)’. Thomas soon came to believe, like Frost, that one of the greatest talents of a significant poet is the ability ‘to make private and personal and dear things universal’.⁷ And similarly, Causley and Larkin only started producing their best work after they decided to focus on the world immediately around them.

Comments made by Causley in a personal notebook reveal that he shared Thomas’s values – and also that, above all, he prized Betjeman for his ability to make the personal universal:

[He] has taught us that what is ‘local’ is to be […] valued. That if what is local is at the same time to be dependable / unpretentious, without guile & above all true to itself & its setting, it will in due course also prove itself to be universal: part of the general human experience.⁸

In 1961 Causley wrote to Larkin to request permission to use his poetry in an anthology,⁹ and to tell him ‘how greatly I admire your work’.¹⁰ This was more than just casual politeness; elsewhere, he referred to Larkin as ‘arguably the finest living poet writing in English’.¹¹ Causley appreciated in Larkin many of the things he also admired in Betjeman. At the back of another notebook, dated ‘24/10/73’, Causley wrote with approval that his near-contemporary in Hull ‘reflects common exp[erience] & common concerns’,¹² and quoted Larkin thus: ‘When I came to Hardy it was with a sense of relief that […] one could simply relapse back into one’s own life and write from it’.¹³ This evidently reinforced Causley’s feelings about his own poetic ambitions, and the following year he paraphrased the bulk of it, stripped of negative tinges (such as ‘relapse’), in a piece of unpublished autobiographical writing:

It took me a long time to discover that the creative writer has no need, necessarily, to search for his subjects. They will find him. Anyway, they are usually no farther away than the end of his nose.¹⁴

In other words, a creative writer can both be universal and honest without recourse to things beyond his personal experience.¹⁵ Like Betjeman, Causley wanted to explore wider human concerns through local and personal ones – to be personal and provincial but not parochial. Whilst Thomas, Larkin and Causley did very different things with this desire, it is evidently one they shared.

***

These three poets, however, cannot be grouped together in anything but the loosest terms, and the temptation to overemphasize similarities between them and with others should be resisted – as they certainly resisted it. Michael Hanke notes that Causley dismissed ‘whatever had a group flavour’,¹⁶ and he did not belong to any literary school or movement. He is often described either as a balladeer or as a Cornish poet – but Causley is singularly the most highly acclaimed English-language literary balladeer of his generation, and regionalism is not in itself an ideology or literary movement. Comparably, though Thomas’s work has been linked to a nebulous ‘Anglo-Welsh school’ – with some resistance from the writer – which is more a grouping on national and ideological grounds, rather than on stylistic ones.¹⁷ Larkin’s case is slightly more problematic, though ultimately he is no less resistant to literary conglomeration. Larkin’s work has been seen to typify the ethos of the Movement, a loose collection of poets of the 1950s ostensibly interested in directness of expression and the use of traditional poetic forms. Moreover, David Lodge’s definition of Movement writers, that they ‘aimed to communicate clearly and honestly their perceptions of the world as it was’ and were ‘influenced by […] “ordinary language” philosophy’,¹⁸ could describe any of Larkin’s last three collections, the bulk of his mature oeuvre.¹⁹

However, as Alan Jenkins points out, ‘Denying the existence of the Movement, or denying that, if it existed, one had any part in it, seems to have started almost at the same time as the Movement itself’.²⁰ Larkin resisted being linked to ‘this drivelling movement business’,²¹ even though he counted among his friends and favourite contemporaries certain contributors to the New Lines anthology that initially brought the Movement poets together. Its writers were, he asserted, disparate: he had ‘no sense at all, really’ of belonging to a group with definite aims, and ‘it certainly never occurred to me that I had anything in common with Thom Gunn, or Donald Davie, for instance, or they with each other’.²² After all, the spirit of the Movement was non-deferential and only collaborative by coincidence – ‘anti-bardic, anti-romantic’, in Ian Hamilton’s words.²³ Elsewhere, Larkin did acknowledge that New Lines ‘presented nine poets with only twelve years between their ages who constituted a recognisable […] spearhead of style and feeling’, but also noted that this similarity was itself ‘unintentional’,²⁴ a coincidence that might reflect a spirit of the age but which had nothing to do with a collectivist impulse.²⁵ Moreover, his poetic voice is distinctive. Not only was he the most widely read poet of the Movement, his voice is, as I hope to show in this chapter, unique, though it shares aspects with some of his fellow Movement poets and draws on many other influences.

Nevertheless, the body of Larkin’s mature work can be said to typify the perceived tone and aims of the Movement. Larkin’s early influences (as epitomized in his first collection The North Ship (1945)), had wholeheartedly included Yeats²⁶ and, as Anthony Thwaite notes, briefly T. S. Eliot,²⁷ and the eighteen-year-old Larkin’s literary philosophy had been a reductive, fundamentalist take on a modernist outlook: ‘a poet never thinks of his reader. Why should he? The reader doesn’t come into the poem at all’; and ‘Poetry is nobody’s business except the poets’ & everybody else can fuck off’.²⁸ It is perhaps because of such proclamations that B. J. Leggett insists Larkin’s opinions about the importance of the reader are ‘far from consistent’,²⁹ but this conclusion can only be reached if one ignores the chronology and conflates the undergraduate and recently graduated Larkin with the mature writer. As soon as his convictions developed they were unshakable.³⁰

The polemical ‘Statement’ Larkin provided for Poets of the 1950s (1956) has come to be regarded as something of a touchstone for the Movement aesthetic. It sets out the objection to modernist obfuscation clearly, eschewing any need to rely on advanced learning and insisting on realist common sense:

As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief in ‘tradition’ or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which last I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people. (Required Writing, p. 79)

As Donald Davie notes, the quotation marks are ‘derisive’:³¹ the ‘tradition’ Larkin has no time for is, in David Timms’s words, ‘something above and beyond life’³² – the mythical and metaphysical aspects of classical texts – and often ‘above and beyond’ the average reader too. It is the ‘tradition’ of classical myth that requires considerable erudition and should, Larkin suggests, be abandoned in favour of a focus on life as it is lived by real people in real situations. This is an ideology that takes it for granted that a reader’s straightforward enjoyment matters, that ‘poems belong to their readers’ and should be ‘entertaining to read’.³³ A poet must take care not to confound.³⁴

Larkin, then, tends to write in a demotic idiom and, in the words of James Booth, his poetry gives the impression of coming from ‘no airy-fairy littérateur, but a “regular” citizen’.³⁵ He was, as Davie notes, interested in ‘getting rid of pretentiousness and cultural window-dressing’ (‘Imag...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tabole of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Provincial and Universal: Traditions and the Poet-Reader Relationship
• 2 Home, Leaving and Finding One’s Proper Ground
• 3 Kissing with the Eyes Closed: Love and Marriage
• 4 Between the Wars
• 5 Searching for the Best Society
• 6 Awkward Reverence: Faith and Mortality
• Bibliography
• Index