HOW OFTEN DOES THIS HAVE TO BE SAID?
Recently I was reading for review
a book of anecdotes about the book-collecting trade, when I came across a
passage that chilled my heart.
The book was rare-book-seller
Rick Gekoski’s Lost, Stolen or Shredded
(Profile Books, 2013), in which the author narrates tales of literary works and
art-works which have somehow gone missing or been destroyed.
One of his chapters deals with
the diaries of Philip Larkin.
As Larkin lay in hospital with a
terminal illness, he instructed his secretary to destroy his voluminous private
diaries. She did as she was told, meaning that said diaries never became part
of an auction lot or wound up in the archives of a wealthy American university.
As Gekoski notes, Larkin was probably prudent to have his diaries destroyed
because (if comments from his friends are any guide) they probably consisted in
large part of his masturbation fantasies.
When I was younger, and first
encountering Larkin in such anthologies as George MacBeth’s Poetry 1900 to 1965, Larkin was seen as
a pre-eminently, and even severely, intellectual poet. But later I was aware
that, especially after his death, it became common knowledge that the
never-married heterosexual Larkin had a taste for pornography and in his
private correspondence expressed many grumpy reactionary views which
right-thinking liberals would regard as “inappropriate”. He routinely referred
to “wogs”, “niggers” etc. and stood for cricket and warm beer and the roast
beef of old England.
And so we come to the paragraph
in Gekoski’s book, which chilled my heart. Here it is:
“Following
the publication of the Larkin letters in 1992, various critics were duly
offended. Tom Paulin, who has deep reserves of indignation, put the case
clearly, describing the contents as ‘a distressing and in many ways revolting
compilation which perfectly reveals and conceals the sewer under the national
monument Larkin became.’ Joining the chorus of disapprobation, Professor Lisa
Jardine, of the University of London, described their author as a ‘casual,
habitual racist and an easy misogynist’, observing with some pleasure that ‘we
don’t tend to teach Larkin much now in my department of English. The little
Englandism he celebrates sits uneasily within our revised curriculum.’ Even
Alan Bennett, himself capable of a bit of smutty puckishness, remarked that
Larkin looked a bit like a rapist, and noted unsettling resemblances to John
Reginald Halliday Christie, the Rillington Place serial killer.” (p.116)
Tom Paulin’s comment is merely
rhetoric and Alan Bennett’s is plainly nonsense. (What, pray tell, does a
rapist look like? Perhaps a bit like you, dear reader.) But of these comments,
the worst is Lisa Jardine’s. Jardine rejoices that “we don’t tend to teach Larkin much now in my department of English”
and that his values “sit uneasily within
our revised curriculum”. What she is, in effect, saying is that her English
department teaches texts on the criterion of the acceptability of the author as
a human being; rather than on the merit of the texts as pieces of writing. Yes,
there is indeed some “Little Englandism” in the later published poems of Larkin
(especially in the collection High
Windows, with its particularly inane title poem). But most of his brash
prejudices were expressed in his private correspondence and are not part of his
published poetical work. To wipe away Larkin like this is to pretend that he
didn’t write some of the best – and most significant – English-language poems
of the mid-20th century.
I do not wish to confuse two
quite separate issues here. Commenting on values
expressed in a piece of literature is a perfectly valid (indeed essential)
function of literary criticism. I recall an angry novelist once telling me that
my review of the novelist’s work showed that I was “a moralist – not a critic”.
As the novel in question made all manner of moral statements of its own (about
people’s values, attitudes and the organization of society), I fail to see how
the two roles can be separated – unless we adopt an extraordinarily narrow view
of what is meant by morals. This is not, however, an invitation to ignore the
quality of a piece of writing because we disagree with its expressed values.
But this is quite different from
commenting on the values expressed by an
author outside his/her published work. And certainly it has nothing to do
with praising or deploring a body of writing on the basis of what we think of the writer’s personal life and habits.
For this
reason, I give this week’s “Something Old” the exasperated heading “How Often
Does This Have to be Said?”, as I have tried to make this point often enough
before on this blog. Good writing is not necessarily produced by pleasant
people. Pleasant and even admirable people may be mediocre writers. What I am
saying goes against the cult of the literary biography, but it still has to be
said.
Let us
assume that Philip Larkin was a racist, misogynist, reactionary and habitual
wanker. (I’m not saying this is proven. I’m just saying “let’s assume”.) In
other words, let’s assume that Philip Larkin was as bad in his way as you are
in your’s hypocrite lecteur, mon
semblable, mon frère [et ma soeur]. This would still not diminish or take
away from the brilliance of Church Going,
The Whitsun Weddings, Toads, Vers de Societe and An Arundel Tomb. If, in 1992, Lisa
Jardine and her department couldn’t see this, it doesn’t prove that their
“revised curriculum” recognised quality. It simply means they had a tin ear.
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