What will survive of us (The Whitsun Weddings - Philip Larkin)

Member Name: mpafp

Product:	The Whitsun Weddings - Philip Larkin
Date:	11/12/02 (1347 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Bitter, sulky, Divine revelation

Disadvantages: n/a

One of the strangest chaps I?ve ever seen, performance poet Christopher Twigg, wrote a song (considered by many Tonbridgians to be his finest) called ?Phillip Larkin?. It includes the words ?You can?t come in under my umbrella, even though the rain is pouring down? before working up to a painfully funny falsetto ?Come in!?

The downright meanness of the sentiment expressed in these words is a reflection of the popular image of Larkin. We see him as grumpy, selfish and a bastard. He was, and that?s why I like him.

Larkin?s world is unpretentiously down-to-earth. It is a world of ?groping back to bed after a piss? and being ?fucked up?; a world grounded in plain-speaking coarseness. And yet this coarseness acts as a foil to set off the most beautiful moments of transcendent revelation. Larkin said ?deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth?, but from this world of deprivation Larkin offers us a glimpse of something more:

?...and immediately
rather than words, comes the thought of high windows;
the sun-comprehending glass,
and beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless?

Larkin is often accused of being a racist and a woman-hater. Perhaps it is worth mentioning that the personal life of an artist does not detract from his art: Picasso?s unpleasantness does not make his paintings any less brilliant, nor does the committed Christianity of the composer of ?A Calypso Carol? elevate that song to anything more than undiluted shite. In any case, the first accusation is answered by Larkin?s response - when on a panel presiding over the appointment of a minor post at, I think, Hull library ? to the question ?And what do we think of our coloured friend?. ?We give him the job?, was the immediate reply.

Woman-hating is a more difficult charge to answer. His disdain for his mother (?silly old fool?) and sister (?the only person I am absolutely sure of my own su
periority to?) seems, at times, to expand to womankind in general. In one of his letters he expresses annoyance at the fact that a man should have to spend money on taking a girl out without automatically getting a fuck at the end of it. He did, however, feel hopelessly inadequate when it came to girls, and it seems to me that his attitude was more of an act, put on as a way of dealing with that inadequacy. Which of us hasn?t at some point felt an exasperation at the activities of the opposite sex? Is it really so hard to empathise with the man?

In any case, the gentler side of Larkin?s attitude to women is, I feel, expressed in my favourite Larkin poem, Sunny Prestatyn:

Sunny Prestatyn

'Come To Sunny Prestatyn'
Laughed the girl on the poster,
Kneeling up on the sand
In tautened white satin.
Behind her, a hunk of coast, a
Hotel with palms
Seemed to expand from her thighs and
Spread breast-lifting arms.

She was slapped up one day in March.
A couple of weeks, and her face
Was snaggle-toothed and boss-eyed;
Huge tits and a fissured crotch
Were scored well in, and the space
Between her legs held scrawls
That set her fairly astride
A tuberous cock and balls

Autographed 'Titch Thomas', while
Someone had used a knife
Or something to stab right through
The moustached lips of her smile.
She was too good for this life.
Very soon, a great transverse tear
Left only a hand and some blue.
Now 'Fight Cancer' is there.

Larkin shifts quickly from the earthly to the divine in a manner which is quite awe-inspiring. ?The Whitsun Weddings?, published in 1964 (one year after ?sexual intercourse began?) is one of his finest collections. Buy this, and then buy more.

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