No Tears, but No Comfort

By Paul Gray

COLLECTED POEMS by Philip Larkin; edited by Anthony Thwaite

Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 330 pages; $22.50

Philip Larkin, the pre-eminent poet in English of his time, died, after a brief struggle with cancer, in 1985, at age 63. Soon afterward his diaries were shredded, as he had instructed, at the library of England's Hull University, where he had worked for 30 years in self-elected obscurity. His manuscripts and unpublished poems escaped a similar fate thanks to a contradiction in his will: one clause called for the destruction of these papers, while another allowed trustees of the estate the right to decide which ones merited publication. Given the choice between guillotine and press, the issue can hardly have been in much doubt. Larkin might have had mixed feelings about his Collected Poems, which contains more than 80 pieces never before seen in print and some two dozen previously uncollected in book form. But the poet's army of admirers -- solitary types, for the most part, who are often surprised to bump into fellow enlistees -- need suffer no such scruples. This volume only enhances Larkin's imposing stature.

The nature of his triumph, though, is elusive and peculiar. Larkin and his contemporaries inherited the scorched earth of modernism -- the towering shadow cast by Yeats, the multilingual complexities introduced by Eliot and Pound, the daunting technical virtuosity of Auden. Starting out, Larkin had the good taste to imitate all these (except Pound), with some Dylan Thomas thrown in for good measure. He got out from under his predecessors only when he learned to lower his voice, to submerge complexities of thought and feeling beneath a serene, limpid surface.

A turning point seems to have been reached in 1948, in the never-before- publi shed "An April Sunday brings the snow." Larkin remembers his father, recently dead, and the plum jam preserves he had put up: "Which now you will not sit and eat./ Behind the glass, under the cellophane,/ Remains your final summer -- sweet/ And meaningless, and not to come again."

The fatalism of that last line strikes Larkin's most distinctive note. He is not a poet to seek out for soothing assurances. Mortality haunted him. At age 24 he writes, "Death is a cloud alone in the sky with the sun./ Our hearts, turning like fish in the green wave,/ Grow quiet in its shadow." Some 31 years later, this confession:

I work all day, and get half-drunk

at night.

Waking at four to soundless dark,

I stare.

In time the curtain-edges will grow

light.

Till then I see what's really always

there:

Unresting death, a whole day

nearer now . . .

Rubbing noses in such gloom is only one of the demands Larkin makes on his readers. He also boasts (and sometimes complains) about his exclusion from * everyday life, his marginal role as a bachelor librarian, living alone and not growing mellow with age. In fact, Larkin makes of his infirmities a caricature, given to grim, plain speech: "Man hands on misery to man./ It deepens like a coastal shelf./ Get out as early as you can,/ And don't have any kids yourself." This apparition even mocks literature. Admitting that his youthful joy in reading has paled, he advises, "Get stewed:/ Books are a load of crap."

Such directives do not seem calculated to make a poet beloved, which Larkin was and is. What rescues his work from the slough of depression is the fun he makes of being alive, between parenthetical darknesses, and of himself:

Sexual intercourse began

In nineteen sixty-three

(Which was rather late for me) --

Between the end of the Chatterley

ban

And the Beatles' first LP.

These are his five most famous lines; all Larkinites have them by heart. In the expanded context of the Collected Poems, though, this stanza seems not only funny but also perfectly serious. Every generation imagines that the next one will have things easier. In "High Windows" Larkin wonders if his elders, thinking of him, expected that "He/ And his lot will all go down the long slide/ Like free bloody birds." It has not worked out that way, the poet suggests, even as he ironically envies the children of the swinging '60s their tantalizing, illusory liberties.

Ultimately, the sense of conditional freedom illuminates all his best work, which is to say nearly everything in this book. Oddly enough, given his Oxford education and bookish life, Larkin was one of the century's greatest pastoral poets. "At Grass" (about retired racehorses) and "First Sight" (about winter-born lambs) are hymns to the inexorable rhythms of the seasons, to which each human, unfortunately, has only a short-term invitation. "Church Going" deals with a man-made structure. A wayward cyclist stops out of curiosity and enters an empty house of worship: "Once I am sure there's nothing going on/ I step inside, letting the door thud shut." That offhand "nothing going on" builds slowly to signify a loss of faith, of ritual and communal practices. There are no tears, but neither is there comfort; we are, for better and worse, all on our own.

Is such loneliness preferable to the enforced communities of our forebears? Larkin does not pretend to know, or say. Instead, his poems address the selves that most people prefer to keep hidden during works and days: the nagging voice that wonders whether one choice was worth an infinity of losses. Impossible to answer; impossible, while reading Larkin or after, to forget.