While we’re still at the getting-to-know-you phase of our bloggy relationship, I’d like to clarify something that, to judge by comments on the Larkin post, wasn’t clear: for me, quotation does not mean I’m Alan Jacobs, and I endorse this statement. Rather, quotation means, Here’s something worth considering. If I endorse the statement I quote, I will say so. Usually. When I remember.
So why would I quote Philip Larkin on the subject of modernism if I don’t agree with him? Why would I find his views “worth considering”? Answer: because when someone who wrote this and this and this comments on artistic form, he’s worth listening to, because he obviously knows a good deal about artistic form. I might not listen to him about anything else, but I’ll hear him out on a subject in which he has considerable professional skill.
For the record, I think Larkin’s tastes were far too narrow, and they blinded him to the real achievements of his immediate artistic predecessors, and to developments in jazz in his own time. But his comments reveal a relatively common view among the artists in the generation after the great Modernists, that those titans (Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, et al.) had strayed too far from the language and experience of the common people, and that art needed to be pulled back towards general accessibility. And you know, while I’m glad we have Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf, I’m also glad we have that next generation, including Larkin, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, and of course Auden (who managed to run the gamut from sheer simplicity to outrageously inaccessible complexity).
On a possibly related note, that post elicited some vitriolic comments about Larkin that I didn’t approve. Insofar as those were prompted by my apparent endorsement, my apologies. But we don’t do vitriol on this blog. Strong views, yes, even strongly expressed, but when comments veer into the personally abusive I don’t approve them, even when they’re directed at highly unpleasant characters like Larkin.
I am uneasily aware that a comment which I myself made upon Alan Jacobs’s earlier Larkin post might have exceeded the permissible vitriol level (certainly the comment did not appear on-screen). If that is the case, then I wish to apologize to Dr. Jacobs; in fact it would probably be as well if I apologized to Dr. Jacobs anyway.
The sheer odiousness of Larkin as a human being makes me – and should, I think, make all those with the slightest regard for political conservatism or basic political civility – cringe at the thought of him being regarded as a Great Moral Authority. That he was thus regarded, particularly before the 1990s’ revelations of how unutterably sordid his private life (actually a pretty public form of “private” life) was all along, cannot be denied. For proof, consult almost any edition of Britain’s Spectator from Larkin’s lifetime or from the few years after his death.
And yes, normally I am all in favor of differentiating between the artist and his work. But sometimes, when the life is sordid enough, such differentiation becomes pernicious even if we still believe it to be possible. Cases in point: Salvador Dali, Eric Gill … and, I would argue, Larkin.
Leaving aside for the moment Larkin’s prose: Whether Larkin’s poems will outlive personal memories (good or bad) of their creator I cannot say. My own belief is that at least 99% of them will not, and that the purely provincial animus actuating Larkin will no more interest most 21st-century readers than will the purely provincial animus of his British televisual contemporary and analogue, Alf Garnett. What is surely beyond dispute is that Larkin’s world-view, on even the most charitable interpretation, suffered from a permanent case of arrested development.