Hello Gentle Reader,
Few poets carve through the niceties of window-dressing in a manner as eloquent and straightforward as Philip Larkin. The poem, “This Be The Verse,” opens with the line: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” Curiosity, be it from shock or agreeance, compels readers to continue through the poem, while Larkin in his usual no-nonsense and forthright manner continued to provide his assessment of the condition of parental failings, as not a singular event but one of routine fatalistic inheritance. Each generation adding its own signature complex, imprint and fuckery into the lives of unsuspecting children, as Larkin put it: “Man hands on misery to man.” Finally concluding with the most logical answer, which runs contrary to our economic systems and primal urge to reproduce, “Get out as early as you can,/And don’t have kids yourself.” Philip Larkin is that staunchly English postwar generation poet. One stripped of all delicate constitutions and sensibilities. A complete tonic and bitter pill to the romantics of old, channeling the palpable sense of loss and devastation left behind in a postwar world. A world whose foundations had forever shifted by unquantifiable destruction, desolation, and disregard for any previous precedence of possibility. Girded with an impenetrable sense of the ironic, and with a cynic’s edge, Larkin surveyed the hardboiled landscape and its people adrift within ruin, reduced further by rations, and with little in regards to prospects to look forward to. Philip Larkin rose to prominence with the others of his generation, who collectively were referred to as: “Angry young men,” a collective of young British writers from working class and middle-class backgrounds, who began publishing in the 1950’s. Included in their ranks was John Osborne, whose play, “Look Back in Anger,” is credited for sparking the movements prominence and denominating the term; Kingsley Amis, John Braine, and Alan Sillitoe; while Harold Pinter, Doris Lessing, and Iris Murdoch are regarded as associates. Each of them balked and raddled their chains and struck their ire out against the morally bankrupt sociopolitical system of the era. Philip Larkin much like Kingsley Amis, proved to move beyond what would become a diminutive product of its time, much as all movements are. Larkin’s poetry retained both breadth and depth to maneuver beyond the immediate and ruminate on the eternal. Larkin retained a palpable quality to his work, to the point it veered on prosaic. Speakers and voices are provided further shape and form. Not concealed in image or metaphor. Where other poets plucked and planted from flowerbeds and fields of flowers, Larkin carved his out of concrete.
Often caricaturized and parodied as a toad, in a tongue and check homage to the poem: “Toads,” were Philip Larkin takes aim at the misery induced by the drudgery of work, masterfully captured in the second stanza:
With its sickening poison –
Just for paying a few bills!
That’s out of proportion.”
And while the poem rollicks to a crescendo of rebellion; Larkin deflates and brings the speaker back down to reality:
To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all to well, that’s the stuff
That dreams are made on:”
As the practicalities of life in all their prudent measures, inevitably means suffrage in the hardscrabble monotony of work and no fortune. Whereby one lives within their means. Those always imperfect means. It brings to mind that quote from Herta Müller’s novel “The Appointment,”:
“From here to there it’s all just the farty sputter of a lantern. And they call that having lived. It’s not worth the bother of putting on your shoes.”
Philip Larkin’s professional life as a librarian ran in parallel to his work as a poet, jazz critic, and casual novelist. There are competing theories of whether or not Larkin held his professional life in serious contempt. Private correspondence reveals a curmudgeonly tone regarding the nature of work. Larkin’s poetry provides further evidence to his dismissive opinion on the nature of work. This theory has of course won out, being cast and certified in bronzed truth: Larkin viewed the mundane as a chore to endure, not enjoy. Contrary, however, further records and transactional documents from his librarianship days, showcase Larkin in a completely different context, one who enjoyed the routines, structures, and orderliness of daily work. Neither poem or letter will provide any enlightenment into Larkin’s own personal views of his professional life and literary endeavours. Its easy to speculate that without the repetitive schedule of his professional obligations, Larkin’s authority on observing the quotidian components of a normal life and subsequent goals of elevating the everyday, would be significantly cheapened and disingenuous. This echoes the weary complaints of Horace Engdahl, who in an interview with La Croix in 2014, criticized the professionalization of writing. Now days, writers are manufactured and fabricated through graduate degrees and masters of fine arts programs, then entering into a symbiotic waltz with literary institutions, universities, and write. Gone, Engdahl laments, are writers engaged with the actual business of life, referencing T.S. Eliots career as a bank clerk.
The poem “Mr. Bleaney,” is one of elegiac observation of a life of mediocrity which amounts to nothing, but a bare room in a third-rate bordering house. The cost-of-living has its economic principles and aesthetics are ranked lower on the list or concern and approval. Mr. Bleaney’s world is contained within such meager borders. The inventory of the room leaves little to the imagination, all the while the current occupant of the room attempts to summon Mr. Bleaney, or at least come to understand his predecessor’s routine, inner thoughts, and life, which includes summer holidaying at Frinton-on-sea, and Christmases at his sisters in Stoke. It becomes apparent that the former resident, Mr. Bleaney’s life was one so lacking in any sense of life it had been reduced to seasonal routines and cycles. There is no significant occurrence or growth within the titular characters life. Nothing remarked as being exceptional or extraordinary or out of place. Mr. Bleaney’s attempts at gardening are observed at being equally futile, showcasing a lack of ability to instill the proper conditions for growth and development. Philip Larkin ends the poem with the final two stanzas:
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned
And shivered, without shaking off the dread
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don’t know.”
The metrics to measure life are clearly applied to Mr. Bleaney, who lived a transparent life. A complete ghost, who became interred to the structures and routines of his orderly existence. A man neither in the way or out of the way, but merely apart of it. Adrift in current. Much like the speaker of “Toads,” who fantasies about telling his employer to ‘Shove,’ the pension, Mr. Bleaney is winningly reduced by circumstance and expectation. Those prudent provisions of life, all the accountancy of what one needs and the transactional exchange of service or labour to acquire those requirements. The current occupant questions the lack of material and accomplishments that decorate Mr. Bleaney’s life, and wonders in turn if this constitutes to a life at all? At no point in time is Mr. Bleaney remarked as to having any sense of enjoyment or distraction to partake in. He exists within a complete grey zone. deprived of colour and void of form. This is Philip Larkin at his most poignant, questioning the fates and meanings of one’s own life, and the entrapments of living a mediocre life. Mr. Bleaney cuts a haunting figure, who in Larkins vision removes the contemplation of the meaning of life away from the ostentatious heights of philosophical ponderings and theological edicts, and anchors it into the world through an otherwise shapeless and characterless everyday man, whose entire life slipped him by, and in its place was an ordered routine and distracted with the squatting toad work, and obliged in the lack of agency in his life, never confirming or denying his contentment in his solitary existence.
Philip Larkin’s poetry can become moored in the mire of cynical pessimism as the defining doctrine and only authority regarding the notion of realism. Regardless, Larkin’s poetry does retain a concern for the quotidian details, those otherwise palpable concerns of life, with all of its daily struggles, established ruttish routine, immovable social structure, and often soul crushing realities. Whether or not daily life (or life in general) was but an exercise in enduring task and chore, or a middlebrow drama in which each of us were presented with our own scenes and episodes within its never-ending soap operatic cycles; Larkin proved to be a poet who thought deeply and cared greatly for the concerns of an existential questioning regarding the meaning to life; human beings inherent freedom; the physical manifestation of time as both experience and governing factor; and the ever present reality of death; all the while lamenting on individuals fated inability to find it, while resigning themselves to a state of mediocrity. Reading the poem “Mr. Bleaney,” one particularly mackerel day in February was enough to solicit chills, looking out into a landscape of varying shades of grey and white with streaks of blue and clotted cream, accompanied by tuffs of exposed brown freeze-dried grass and wonder to what extent are you finding yourself neatly wrapped up within the confines of a mediocre existence, further marked with milestones to signify the holiday or Christmas dinners with obliging siblings. The case of Mr. Bleaney is Larkin’s elegy for the nameless, faceless, and shapeless individuals who go through life in a structured daze; all the while remaining an ominous forewarning to others to recognize their own life passing them by into a state of transparency, where the inconsequential, the mediocre, and limited expectancy becomes the death sentence of good enough and as good as it gets.
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
M. Mary
No comments:
Post a Comment