Another volume of Philip Larkin’s letters has been published. It adds little to our understanding of the man or his work, Robert Messenger argues in The New Criterion: “The issue of whether Larkin was naughty or nice has occupied critics and scholars on both sides of the Atlantic since the publication of the Selected Letters, edited by Anthony Thwaite, in 1992, and the official life, written by Andrew Motion, the following year. The violence of the viewpoints is extreme. And there is plenty of evidence for Larkin as misogynist or racist. There is also good evidence for him as kind colleague and doting lover. It is all utterly irrelevant. I almost typed depressing. The latter is the better word. Poetry is older than civilization, yet in the last fifty years, it has all but died out. Only a tiny number of poets have added anything to the public conversation during this period. Among them Larkin is pre-eminent . . . If I am glad in any way to have read Letters Home, it is because it has supplied a footnote for the ages, ‘A significant proportion of the socks recovered from 105 Newland Park [the poet’s house in Hull] by the Philip Larkin Society in 2004 following the death of Monica Jones have been carefully darned, some with non-matching wool or in two colours. See Plate 5A.’ Yes, there is a color photograph of Larkin’s socks in the book. The mills of academe grind on. Almost simultaneously with Letters Home came a second heavily annotated volume of Sylvia Plath’s correspondence. These two poets have a torrid academic existence. It makes some sense in the American’s case: not only was her life tragically short and her work incomplete by any measure, but she is also one of feminism’s great martyrs. Larkin’s work is complete. His poetic gift died out almost a decade before his death—a reason he turned down the offer of the poet laureateship in 1984. His poetic notebooks make this clear. We see him whole in his published volumes and even in the round by reading the sixty-one extra poems Thwaite included in the two versions of the Collected Poems.”

Speaking of letters, another volume of T. S. Eliot’s letters has also been published. This brings us to seven thousand pages in eight volumes, and we’re only at 1938. Eliot died in 1965. Does the project transform Eliot into an institution, Robert Crawford asks (as if he weren’t already)? Perhaps. The latest volume does highlight one less discussed aspect of his work, however, and his life: Eliot’s names. “The way Eliot names himself is much more complicated than the way he names Emily. He signs himself variously in these letters: ‘Mr Possum’, ‘T.S.E.’, ‘T.S. Eliot’, ‘Tom’, ‘Herlock Sholmes’, ‘Uncle Tom’, ‘TP’ (short for ‘Tom Possum’ or ‘The Possum’), ‘T’, leaves a deliberate blank, ‘Possum’, ‘POSSUM’, ‘Tp’, ‘Secretary’, ‘Tom Eliot’, ‘T.S.’, ‘Th. Eliot/of Somerset’, ‘TP’, ‘THE MAN IN WHITE SPATS’, ‘Tom S.’, ‘UNCLE TOM’, ‘ANNOYED’, ‘O. Possum’, ‘T. Possum’, and ‘O Possum’ and, while masquerading as other Faber colleagues in spoof reports on his own book, ‘R. de la M.’, ‘A.P.’ and ‘H.R.’ – hardly a shocking number of self-presentations over 1100 pages, but suggestive of a certain fluidity . . . Taking ‘The Naming of Cats’ as a template, most of these names can also be grouped in ‘three different’ categories. There is the ‘everyday’ name: Thomas, T.S. Eliot and variants thereof. Then there is the ‘peculiar’ name of the creature – ‘Possum’ and its many variants. Lastly, there is the mysterious ‘ineffable’ blank – the deliberately empty space to which, nonetheless, names can be linked.”

Paul Waterman’s obscure lightness: “A lot of Boy for a Blonde is like this. Likewise, Love to the Town. Philosophical, perverse, oddly obscure, sometimes naughty, metrically clean and lucid everywhere . . . but mainly oddly obscure. Then come those strange three years of limericks, miraculous limericks that manage a feat not accomplished since Christmas 1872. Namely, they stand up to a hundred readings.”

I’ve read James Matthew Wilson’s latest collection of poetry, The Hanging God. It’s a lovely work of contemporary religious poetry. Read Emina Melonic’s review of it over at Law and Liberty: “In his new collection of poetry, The Hanging God, Wilson explores the good, the beautiful, and the true but also the odd. In the midst of this ordered universe, Wilson’s elaborate, complex, and graceful imagination offers us glimpses of human ugliness and peculiarities.”

Paul Hollander reviews a flawed book on the nostalgia for communism: “The long-term effects of the collapse of communism on the political attitudes of the people who lived under it deserve serious attention, especially in light of the initial hopes these historical events stimulated. Of late these favorable expectations have been replaced by mounting concern over the shift toward authoritarianism, most notably in Russia under Putin, followed by similar trends in Hungary and Poland. The most obvious, if partial, explanation has been the absence of democratic historical-cultural traditions in these countries, as well as the unmet expectations the fall of the communist systems generated among their populations. Another explanation of these trends, suggested by Dancing Bears: True Stories of People Nostalgic for Life Under Tyranny, is that human beings used to living under repressive governments over long periods find it difficult to adapt to their new freedoms, like the dancing bears liberated from their harsh routines.”

James Holzhauer has won $1.2 million in 16 Jeopardy! victories. Here’s his strategy.

We are living in very unfunny times, Andrew Ferguson writes: “Any bit of news can be made to be about Trump. The Times points me to Seth Meyers, who notes that a Dominican singer recently tried to break a world record by performing for 100 hours straight. Seth’s hot take: ‘“Big deal, try performing for 14 years,” said Melania.” (The Times, as America’s newspaper of record, adds helpfully: ‘referring to first lady Melania Trump.’) Again, a simple statement of fact is enough to substitute for a real joke. On TheLate Show With Stephen Colbert, Stephen Colbert (who else?) bravely ‘takes on’ congressional Republicans and their never-ending quest to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. ‘Remember “repeal and replace?”’ Colbert joshed. His audience showed premonitory signs of volcanic laughter. ‘“We’re going to repeal and replace”? Well, after nine years, they still haven’t gotten around to the “replace” part. [Lava gurgling from the audience.] They have no plan. [Burbling …] In fact, there is no plan to make a plan.’ Krakatoa! Too true! But … true is all it is. The two-step formula of a stand-up joke, setup followed by punch line, has been edited down to the first step and left at that.”

Essay of the Day:

In The New Criterion, Andrew Roberts discusses Churchill’s debt to Burke:

“In the third volume of his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Churchill wrote that Burke was ‘a great political thinker. . . . [He] was able to diagnose the situation with an imaginative insight beyond the range of those immersed in the business of the day and bound by traditional habits of mind.’ There were criticisms of Burke in that book, too, of course, but ones that Churchill knew had also been directed against himself. Churchill said that Burke was a man of principle, but that he lacked a strong and well-organized party to support him, which of course was true of Churchill for much of his life, but especially during the 1930s. (As Churchill said of his decision to cross the floor of the House of Commons not once but twice in his career, ‘Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.’)

“Just in case anyone had failed to spot the connections between Burke and Churchill, Churchill made them clear. ‘For years Burke was a voice crying in the wilderness,’ he wrote. ‘An orator to be named with the ancients, an incomparable political reasoner, he lacked both judgment and self-control. He was perhaps the greatest man that Ireland has produced. The same gifts, with a dash of indolence and irony . . . might have made him Britain’s greatest statesman.’ In the event it was Churchill himself—who was totally lacking in indolence but who relied heavily on English High Irony—who must be awarded that accolade.

“Churchill reached for Burke at many of the great debates and moments of his career, happy to acknowledge his debt to him. He quoted him in the free trade versus protection debate of July 1903; in his offer to Germany of a ‘naval holiday’ from fleet building ten months before the outbreak of World War I; and in his famous attack on Stanley Baldwin of December 1923. In Churchill’s Fourth of July speech in the last year of World War I, he stated that ‘The Declaration of Independence is not only an American document. It follows on the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights as the third great title-deed on which the liberties of the English-speaking people are founded. . . . The political conceptions embodied in the Declaration of Independence are the same as those expressed at that time by Lord Chatham and Mr. Burke and handed down to them by John Hampden and Algernon Sidney.’

“It might shock but will not surprise you to learn that not one of those gentlemen just named is to be found on the history curriculum of British schools today, a syllabus that leaps so directly from the Tudors to the Second World War that teachers refer to the phenomenon as ‘Henry to Hitler.’”

Read the rest.

Photo: Spring in Hallstatt

Poem: Rachel Hadas, “Fire Pit”   

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