Anti-modern

By Christopher Porterfield

REQUIRED WRITING: MISCELLANEOUS PIECES 1955-1982 by Philip Larkin; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 328 pages; $17.95

If merit determines Britain's next poet laureate--not necessarily a safe assumption--then Philip Larkin, 61, will get the job. In that event, the Queen's subjects had better brace themselves for a jolt. Larkin can speak for England, but it is the gray, postimperial England of rationed hopes and undercutting humor, the England of Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim, which was dedicated to Larkin and is regarded as his youthful portrait.

Larkin, Librarian of the University of Hull since 1956, feels a "need to be on the periphery of things." Despite a growing reputation as a poet, built up at roughly ten-year intervals by four spare collections of verse, he hates to give readings, lectures or TV appearances because "I don't want to go around pretending to be me." Politically he is an unabashed Thatcherite; culturally he is a virtual reactionary who maintains that modernism has "blighted all the arts." Most of his poems are sprucely rhymed and metered; yet his themes are decline, loss, things not working out. As he puts it, "Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth."

Larkin's idiosyncrasies sparkle throughout Required Writing, an immensely readable gathering of his nonfiction prose. The topics reflect the diversity of freelance journalism, from the poems of Andrew Marvell to the novels of Ian Fleming, from jazz to a bachelor's speculations about why people get married. Larkin seems to have seized upon each assignment as an opportunity to puncture what has been overpraised, to praise what has been overlooked, or to make some wry self-revelation. Sometimes he does all three at once, as in his discussion of W.H. Auden. He recalls finding the famous older writer "frightening" when he met him, but he does not hesitate to slap down Auden's post-1940 American output as "too verbose to be memorable and too intellectual to be moving," well below the energetic, socially committed English Auden of the 1930's.

Predictably, Larkin has little patience with the idea that poets should keep the child in themselves alive. It was the "pseudo-immaturity" in Emily Dickinson, he argues, that left her "appearing to posterity as perpetually unfinished and willfully eccentric." He deplores the contemporary tendency to venerate "almost any poet who can produce evidence of medical mental care." Poetry, for Larkin, is emphatically "an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are." For him the two writers who have done that best in recent times are Thomas Hardy ("many times over the best body of poetic work this century so far has to show") and John Betjeman, the last laureate, who is cited as "a poet for whom the modern poetic revolution has simply not taken place."

The section of jazz reviews that ends the book enables Larkin to thresh out his quarrel fully with modernism. He writes warmly about his youthful passion for the likes of Armstrong, Beiderbecke and Ellington, but charges that Bebop Saxophonist Charlie Parker destroyed it all with music that gave "the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously." Parker thus joins Pound and Picasso in Larkin's unholy trinity of decadent experimenters, and jazz's evolution becomes a capsule version of the "degeneration into private and subsidized absurdity" that he believes is overtaking all the arts. What has been lost, Larkin insists, is his conception of the right relation between artist and audience: the artist obliged to be clear and expressive, and above all to give pleasure; the audience, unbullied by modishness or obfuscation, free to ask for its money back if it is uncomfortable or bored. It is a standard, not so incidentally, to which Required Writing would measure up splendidly. --By Christopher Porterfield