Larkin, Distance, and Observation

Author(s): Neil Covey

Source: Modern Language Studies , Summer, 1993, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Summer, 1993), pp. 11-
25
Published by: Modern Language Studies

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'This article was written and accepted before the publication of Anthony
Thwaite's edition of Larkin's Selected Letters and Andrew Motion's Philip
Larkin: A Writer's Life. Their publication has not driven me to change my
argument. I believe they confirm it, for they show a man who was obsessed
about his own place (and displacement) as an artist. Motion's claim that
"Larkin's devotion to 'that lifted rough-tongued bell / Art, if you like)'
challenges the idea of himself as a writer that he liked to promote" is essentially
what I explore in this piece (xix).

Larkin, Distance, and Observation,

Neil Covey

The separation, isolation and loneliness of the individual, especially the

artist, is the theme or counterpoint of most of the poetry, if not all art,
composed from Wordsworth to the present. The greater the stress on
the uniqueness of our individuality, the more we have become separated
from every other thing, including each other.
-Robert Rehder, Wordsworth and the Beginnings of Modern Poetry

Philip Larkin explicitly opposed the Romantic visionary tradition

in much of his prose. Still, critics have occasionally attempted to place
him in just such company.2 This impulse to place Larkin in such a tradition
is valid, if only because so much of the mythology of the Romantic artist
remains embedded in post-Romantic culture. It is this embeddedness that
forms the basis for Robert Rehder's contention that most English poetry
from Wordsworth forward is concerned with (or at least assumes) an
individual consciousness and the isolation that stems from it. The power
of this myth has proven to be especially problematic for poets, such as
Larkin, who sought (no matter how ironically) some sort of popular
appeal, and who sought to portray a sympathy for common people in
their work. Certainly critics who have specialized in reading "literature"
accepted and continue to accept this myth. Though they were writing
somewhat late in Larkin's career and may never have been read by him,
Harold Bloom and M. H. Abrams are emblematic in that they have
demonstrated the power and attractiveness of the concept of the "catas-
trophe of consciousness" from which "strong poets" are deemed to suffer
(Bloom, 10), and it is a short step from this belief in poetic consciousness
to an acceptance of a necessary artistic distance from the world: "The
inescapable cost of creation is suffering, of which creativity is the priceless
reward, and the artist must die to involvement with the world in order
to be reborn to the detachment of the artist" (Abrams, 82). The strategies
of writing a poetry that is not about artists but attempts to portray "real"
people, a poetry that seeks as large an audience as possible, require poets

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who would be popular to oppose the myth of the isolated artist, but they
also demand that poets find modes and stances that do not implicitly
assume this very isolation. This second task proved most difficult for
Larkin. The detachment the speaking observers in his sympathetic ren-
derings of "ordinary" people's lives too often reinforced poetic isolation
from and, indeed, superiority over those very people.
Nevertheless, it is this superiority that Larkin was renouncing when
he rejected Yeats in favor of Hardy because Hardy was "not a tran-
scendental writer ... not a Yeats ... not an Eliot" but a poet whose
subjects were "men, the life of men, time and the passing of time, love
and the fading of love" (RW, 175).3 And, as the mention of Eliot suggests,
Larkin was also rejecting the modernists, who, he felt, had destroyed the
market for poetry, creating in its stead a small, insular, academic cadre
of readers. Just as Robert Frost struggled to find a large market for his
poetry at the beginning of the modernist era, Larkin sought to find or
create a niche for himself (and the evolutionary metaphor is intended)
at a time when the dominance of high modernism was fading.4 This task
was made all the more difficult because the poetic climate he saw was
not inviting; he wrote of the "consumer's power to say I don't like this
bring me something different," and maintained that in the wake of
modernism poetry "has lost its old audience," because "the cash
customers of poetry ... who used to put down their money in the sure
and certain hope of enjoyment as if at a theatre or concert-hall were quick
to go elsewhere" (81).5 Larkin spoke in terms which sounded very much
like the concept of opportunity cost-poetry was a pastime which could
not be engaged in if its intended audience was indulging in other pastimes.
Poetry for him "offered[ed] something nothing else [could], something
more than reading, watching television or going out with some girl"
("Poet on the 8:15"). He wanted to write a poetry that created a
"compulsive contact between writer and reader" (RW, 56)-the kind of
poetry the reader had to come back to. Hence statements such as: "Poetry
should keep the child from its television set and old man from his pub"
or "A poem is rather like a slot-machine into which the reader inserts the
penny of his attention" ("Four Young Poets").
Though it is possible to suspect the sincerity of Larkin's repeated
statements that he wanted an accessible poetry for a mass audience and
to posit that behind his philistine exterior was the wry acceptance that
the term "accessible poetry" was ironic if not oxymoronic, it would be
a mistake to suggest that Larkin was not commodifying his poetry in a
very different way than were the modernists with their little magazines
and their complete takeover of academia. The strategies by which he
marketed his poetic commodity involved a demystification, even a
vulgarization, of poetry and poets. Larkin battled the assumptions that
poetry had to be difficult and that poets, by nature, are outsiders, blessed
with some greater vision than the populace. Larkin's insistence on the
transparency of the language of poetry (experience should be "pickled,
as it were, in verse" ["Speaking of Writing"]) is part of this battle, as is
his call for a return to poetry which was written in readily understandable
language and which communicated an experience that was relevant to

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more than a select few. In the popular press he presented himself as one
who thought poetry "should be a sideline," someone who didn't want
"to act like a poet when I don't feel like it" ("Speaking of Writing"). He
fomented an image of himself as just another bloke on the train, someone
who wasn't "collecting theatre programmes or cooking Turkish dishes,"
and who wasn't afraid to say that some of Yeats's poetry was "crap about
masks and Crazy Jane" ("Poet on the 8:15"). In one interview with the
Times Educational Supplement, he snidely defined culture as "'things
you haven't read'" ("Sharp-edged View"). And he was largely successful
at creating an image of himself as an ordinary guy who happened to write
poetry. A. Alvarez once wrote of him that "he is just like the man next
door-in fact, he probably is the man next door" (20-21). A scan of any
bibliography of him reveals titles such as Lollete Kuby's An Uncommon
Poet for the Common Man, Charles Tomlinson's "The Middlebrow
Muse," and Herman Peschmann's "Philip Larkin: Laureate for the Com-
mon Man." The phenomenal sales of his books, moreover, seem to testify
that he indeed reached the large audience he felt poetry should have.6
The numbers, however, do not speak to the quality of the reader-
ship, and there is a sense that Larkin didn't believe the average audience
he claimed to want to reach could understand or appreciate the com-
plexities his art demanded, a sense that he always saw himself as an artist,
and as such could not cross the gap between himself and his audience
through the kind of direct communication his "transparent" poems were
supposed to offer. He once praised John Betjeman for being "tactful
enough always to include [in his writing] an element of comedy, almost
of farce, to divert his audience's attention and enable his subversion of
established values to proceed unchallenged" ("A Citation"). Poetry, then,
was not to be merely an entertainment like a slot-machine, but rather
a kind of manipulative device by which the poet could pursue his hidden
agenda. Larkin's attitude toward his audience is similar in some ways to
that of Frost, who once wrote that he would "like to be so subtle at this
game as to seem to the casual person altogether obvious" (xv).7 Frank
Lentricchia rightly suggests that Frost's "desire to reach a mass audience"
could be satisfied "by favoring the ordinary reader, by fashioning an
accessible and seductively inviting literary surface that would welcome
the casual reader of poetry ... while simultaneously burying very deep
the sort of subtleties that might please those accustomed to Pound's
aesthetic" (83). Such a conclusion might well be drawn of Larkin. Still,
whereas, according to Lentricchia, Frost "mainly failed" in his aim to be
treated seriously by serious readers of poetry (87), Larkin-for all his talk
of ordinary readers- ended up with a literary set. One of the stories most
often repeated about him is that of his attempt to send copies of his
privately printed XX Poems to reviewers for major poetry journals, an
attempt doomed by his failure to notice that postal rates had recently
gone up. And when he had demonstrated his abilities with The Less
Deceived (published by the Marvell Press), he graduated to Faber with
The Whitsun Weddings, occupying the same stable, so to speak, as the
man whose poetic influence he so suspected-T. S. Eliot. Larkin's Oxford
Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse, moreover, did not so much

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supersede Yeats's earlier anthology as complement it. Yeats's book re-
mained in print after Larkin's came out, and was, indeed, advertised on
the dust jacket of Larkin's volume.8 For all his aspirations to write a poetry
free of the elitism of Eliot and Yeats, a poetry that could reach a larger,
more ordinary, audience, Larkin was a part of the same old-boy coterie,
which, though it gladly benefitted from his sales, had no great interest
in changing the status quo.
It is possible that the philistine image Larkin marketed to read-
ers of British newspapers in the late 50s and early 60s is represented by
the speaker of "A Study of Reading Habits" (CP, 131). But the words
Larkin, the poet, allows the speaker complicate Larkin's attitude toward
this image:

When getting my nose in a book

Cured most things short of school,
It was worth ruining my eyes
To know I could still keep cool,
And deal out the old right hook
To dirty dogs half my size.

Later, with inch-thick specs,

Evil was just my lark:
Me and my cloak and fangs
Had ripping times in the dark.
The women I clubbed with sex!
I broke them up like meringues.

Don't read much now: the dude

Who lets the girl down before
The hero arrives, the chap
Who's yellow and keeps the store,
Seem far too familiar. Get stewed:
Books are a load of crap.

The speaker of this poem clearly resembles the man who claimed that
much of Yeats was "crap about masks and Crazy Jane." And if the speaker
is to be taken seriously, then the audience the poem is calculated to reach
was composed of wimpish, sexist, anti-intellectuals who needed the
romance of train-station detective novels to transcend the familiar let-
downs of their everyday lives, and who often equated sex with violence
toward women.9 But it would be easy, also, to take the opposite tack
and claim the poem is a dramatic monologue in which the speaker's anti-
intellectual thrill-seeking is satirized. Both readings have their element
of truth, for the poem reveals both its empathy and distaste for the
speaker to the degree that the speaker exhibits self-knowledge. And the
speaker does know himself-the "dude / Who lets the girl down" and
"the chap / Who's yellow"" "seem far too familiar"-even if he seeks to
avoid the knowledge. The final declaration of both the speaker and the
poem (assuming for the nonce that they are separate) that "Books are
a load of crap" is both/neither accepted/rejected. Herein lies the crux

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of the problem of Larkin's announced free-market approach to poetry.
The speaker is more than a schizoid version of Larkin himself, for he
is a model of the vast audience Larkin would draw away from the pub
and television set. The poem with its before and after set-up reveals what
Larkin thought he was up against. The reader exhibited by the poem used
to be satisfied but is no longer-"Don't read much now." Though it's
possible that the change being depicted occurs in the reader, it is equally
possible to say the poem is about a change in reading material. The
particular reader portrayed in the poem may no longer think that what's
offered to him is worth his time. Such a reading problematizes Larkin's
idea of a poem being just another slot-machine in a row of slot-machines.
His own poetic canon, his commodity, offers very little of the "appealing"
matter of the first two verses of the poem, and instead is the epitome
of the kind of matter which so troubles the speaker in the third verse.
The poem, then, captures Larkin's ambivalence toward the reader-
ship so much of his prose claimed he wanted to reach; he genuinely
wanted to communicate with it even as he was put off by what he saw
as its vulgarity.
If "A Study of Reading Habits" does portray a model of Larkin's
audience, it still does not provide specifics about that audience. The
speaker presumably is middle class, but the colloquial "dude," "yellow,"
"stewed," and "crap" do suggest a broadening and a "lowering" of
Larkin's poetic sights, thereby problematizing his conception of that
audience. "Dude," in particular, is an exercise in prosodic brinksmanship.
Though the rhyme with "stewed" works, the word, set off as it is by a
colon at the end of the first line of a verse, spatially-as well as lin-
guistically-calls attention to itself. Though it's perfectly plausible that
the speaker is referring to westerns, the word itself seems out of place
in any typically British locution. It is as though an authorial smirk lingers
behind it.
Despite his attempts to paint a portrait of himself as a "common"
man, Larkin's understanding of a poet's stance toward the subjects of his
poems required that he remain apart from them, aloof. His ability to
"divert" their attention, to write about "men, the life of men" depended
on his observation of them. What he saw is best summed up in his
introduction to All What Jazz in which he muses on the people who have
been reading his jazz columns in the Daily Telegraph. There is a tinge
of the nausea in Larkin's description of his readers, a distaste he can't
escape even while he sympathizes and seeks to communicate with them:

Sometimes I imagine them, sullen fleshy inarticulate men, stockbrokers,

sellers of goods, living in 30-year-old detached houses among golf
courses of Outer London, husbands of ageing and bitter wives they first
seduced to Artie Shaw's "Begin the Beguine" or The Squadronaires' "The
Nearness of You"; fathers of cold-eyed lascivious daughters on the pill,
to whom Ramsey Macdonald is coeval with Ramses II, and cannabis-
smoking jeans-and-bearded Stuart-haired sons whose oriental contempt
for "bread" is equalled only by their insatiable demand for it; men in
whom a pile of scratched coverless 78s in the attic can awaken memories

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 of vomiting blindly from small Tudor windows to Muggsy Spanier's
"Sister Kate," or winding up a gramophone in a punt to play Armstrong's
"Body and Soul"; men whose first coronary is coming like Christmas;
who drift, loaded helpless with commitments and obligations and
necessary observances, into the darkening avenues of age and in-
capacity, deserted by everything that once made life sweet. (RW, 298,
also in All What Jazz, 28)10

Though Larkin's portrait of these (male) readers is sympathetic to a

degree, it is not flattering. It is so pejorative, in fact, that it problematizes
Larkin's sense of the ordinary people whom he would have be his
audience. Even as he wants to communicate and sympathize with them
he is reduced to observing from afar and speculating about them in a
fashion that is, at the very least, aloof, and often borders on being mean-
spirited.
Jean Hartley, Larkin's friend and the co-founder with her husband
of the Marvell Press, describes him in terms of voyeurism, noting his habit
of using binoculars to watch the park across from his house to see "its
trees, birds, children, and lovers" (123). She sees a Larkin who "needed
... to be able to distance himself .., to become an outsider" (203). This
need becomes clear in the poems themselves; Larkin himself refers to
these three lines from "Spring" (CP, 39) in speaking to John Haffenden:

And those she has least use for see her best,
Their paths grown craven and circuitous,
Their visions mountain-clear, their needs immodest.

He tells Haffenden that he considers himself one of "those she has least
use for," that he is one of "these indigestible sterilities, [who] see rebirth
and resurrection most vividly and imaginatively, but it isn't for them; their
way through life isn't a gay confident striding" (123).
Larkin's observations, as Foucault says of most writing since the
eighteenth century, tend to the anti-heroic. His writing is not a "procedure
of heroization" but instead "functions as a procedure of objectification
and subjection" (Foucault, 192). Foucault speaks of the examination as
turning "the individual into a describable, analysable object... in order
to maintain him in his individual features" (190), but this "cellular, organic,
genetic and combinatory individuality" is a "fabrication" (192). And,
indeed, Larkin's observations begin to fuse individuals; the singular
human beings he sees and attempts to describe become types. The
"Napoleonic character," master of strategic details, which the post-
Romantic writer can be considered to be, "who looms over everything
with a single gaze which no detail, however minute, can escape," relies,
on details in writing of his anti-heroes, on the illusion of realism (217).
Larkin, "the metonymic muse,"" required the detached observer to be
the speaker of his poems, for his invisibility to the people he watches
enables his construction of their reality through observed details.
Metonomy, however, can never capture the whole it represents. Simi-
larly, the detached observer, because of his distance, cannot know the
individuals he watches. Larkin relied on the illusion such a speaker pro-

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vides; and, paradoxically, because he professed to be concerned with
reaching a larger public, he may have had greater need to use such a
speaker in order to mask the distance he maintained, or, at least, to divert
attention from that distance.
This is not to say that Larkin did not use the distanced speaker
sympathetically. In "Dublinesque" (CP, 178), for instance, Larkin's
speaker teeters on the edge of sentimentality as he describes a street-
walker's funeral. Perhaps because the speaker makes no mention of his
own presence in the poem, there are no ironies concerning the distance
from which he views the proceedings. Rather, the scene is described
almost imagistically:

The hearse is ahead,

But after there follows
A troop of streetwalkers
In wide flowered hats,
Leg-of-mutton sleeves,
And ankle-length dresses.

There is an acknowledgement, even lament, that he cannot know all there

is about the scene ("A voice is heard singing / Of Kitty or Katy"). His
speculations are positive--"as if they were honouring" and "as if the name
meant once / All love, all beauty."
When Larkin's speakers do announce themselves, they remain, and
prefer to remain, removed. In "Vers de Soci6te" (181), the speaker pon-
ders whether or not he should attend a party at the Warlock-Williams's,
who along with the other guests are presumably from his social stratum.
His decision to go does not mean that he'll actively take part. The poem,
in fact, suggests that he will continue distantly to observe his hosts and
fellow guests, just as he has done on previous occasions. The poem not
only raises issues of class, but it also questions the speaker's place within
the class to which he belongs. Its title announces its concern, and the use
of French, which is itself suggestive of pretension, foreshadows ironic
uneasiness. One of the poem's major themes has been discussed by many
Larkin critics-the problem of participation. Most critics see such poems
as ways of exploring and working out the problem of involvement not
only for poets in general but for Larkin, himself. In this poem the problem
of a poet/intellectual's involvement becomes specifically a middle-class
dilemma. The Warlock-Williams's and the "crowd of craps" are identified
as being social equals with the speaker, and, considering the "ass" with
"his fool research," it's safe to assume that some are even academics-
the kind of people with whom a university librarian such as Larkin might
easily come into contact. Beyond the obvious artificialities of Warlock-
Williams as exhibited by his attitude toward his guests, the thinking
speaker must face his own artificialities which are implied by his
hypocritical acceptance of the invitation. He, the intellectual, must also
face his relationship with the philistine class that engendered him.
Eventually, he decides that he must join them, though the reasons that
he gives for doing so suggest he's avoiding his real predicament. The

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speaker of "Vers de Societe"' may not be what Alan Sinfield calls a
"dissident middle-class intellectual" (41),12 but he is disaffected enough
to feel uneasy about his relationship with the people who would seem
to be his natural associates. His attitude toward what he feels to be their
lack of intellectual capacity and his displeasure at the "drivel" he expects
to hear at their gathering are only almost enough to keep him away. What
he says drives him to them is the fear of thoughts of "other things" (death,
age, loneliness?) solitude will bring him. But this suggestion of fear works
as a kind of reverse displacement, for intimating such "other things"
diverts attention away from the fact that despite his "remorse" about
going to the party the speaker is one of them. He becomes an example
of the intellectual caught in a class he despises.'3
Larkin may have resisted belief in the superiority of the artist's
vision, but he lived in a society in which such a myth held sway. In this
way, Larkin is much like his chosen poetic predecessor Thomas Hardy.
In Moments of Vision Paul Zietlow says of Hardy that what sets his
"mode" of satire apart from that of someone like Swift "is the absence
of any clear moral perspective enabling the artist, secure in his own belief,
to manifest a confident attitude toward what he exposes" (77). The result
is a poetry of "pathos and ridicule ... a jarring combination, which seems
to deny an adequate, comprehensive perspective on the situation" (78).
Similarly, Larkin's own peculiar ambivalences toward the people so
much of his prose champions led him to offer the same unsettling
combination. His acceptance of poetic vision too often conflicted with
his efforts to communicate with a mass audience, which, in much of his
poetry, was being satirized even as it was being courted.
The distance Larkin's speakers attain or suffer from enables an
exploration of their fascination with and curiosity about the people they
watch; it enables the kind of speculative power over them that actual
contact would undermine. And unlike "Dublinesque," most of the poems
counter any sympathy for the people in them with a measure of disdain
or distaste. In "Reasons for Attendance" (80), Larkin explicitly tackles
the problem of distance and sympathy. In the first verse, the speaker
places himself outside a jazz club, inside which dancers are "shifting
intently, face to flushed face." The scene makes him question his own
distance: "why be out here? / But then, why be in there?" He places this
questioning in the framework of sex, but the problem is much broader
and involves an opposition much more profound than the false one the
speaker presents in the second and third verses between sex and art. And
it is, perhaps, an inkling of this falsity which causes the speaker to reach
only a conditional end to his dilemma:

Therefore I stay outside,

Believing this; and they maul to and fro,
Believing that; and both are satisfied,
If no one has misjudged himself. Or lied.

The last line of the poem, with its suggestion of doubt, at first seems to
undermine the speaker's choice of art over involvement with the dancers

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he sees through the window. However, the line can't erase the assumption
the speaker has made in the poem that by choosing art (more precisely,
art calls the speaker) he is condemned to remain outside the arena of
their activity. He will continually be left to look in where others "maul
to and fro." The last line, then, by suggesting such doubt, masks the
speaker's more egotistic intentions. In making "sex" the interest which
separates him from the dancers, and in using the word "maul," the speaker
animalizes them, and in doing so makes the difference he perceives be-
tween them and himself not just a matter of "believing this" or "believing
that," but instead turns this issue of "choice" into a rationalization for his
superiority. To linger on the opposition the speaker posits between sex
and art and to conclude that the poem has "an air of spurious self-
alienation" as M. L. Rosenthal did in his famous review of The Less
Deceived, "Tuning in on Albion," is to miss the point (458). For Larkin's
speaker moves from the perception that he can't share the dancers
experience to the attempt to make his own mode of alienated experience
somehow more valid than theirs.'4
In "The Card-Players" (CP, 177), Larkin exhibits a similar blending
of celebration and distaste: Jan van Hogspeuw staggers and pisses and
later farts and gobs; Dirk Dogstoerd belches out smoke; Old Prijck snores.
But Larkin's speaker finally declares in the poem's last line: "Rain, wind
and fire! The secret, bestial peace!" The eponymic/homonymic names
are amusing but dismissive. The men are much like R. S. Thomas's lago
Prytherch, Walter Llywarch, and Job Davies; but Thomas makes no
secret in his poetry of his love for the peasants he depicts, his anger at
the way they've been treated, and his dismay at the way the peasants
themselves accept this treatment. Larkin's poem seems more like an
elaborate joke, and its final line, set off from the rest of the poem, does
not excuse that joke. As if their names weren't enough, the poem's seem-
ing celebration of Hogspeuw, Dogstoerd, and Prijck is further under-
mined by the word "bestial."
Larkin seems unable to escape this kind of portrayal. The goal
of honest, realistic depiction succumbs to parody and stereotype. The
men in "The Card-Players" piss, gob, and fart; the women in "Faith Heal-
ing" (126) twitch and blort. Generally, he manages to cover this tendency
to dehumanize with impressive universalizing jumps into poetic inclu-
siveness. In "Faith Healing," Larkin moves from the women at the service
who are "moustached in flowered frocks" to "In everyone there sleeps";
in "Church Going" (98), one man's musings become universal ("someone
will forever be surprising"); in "Places, Loved Ones" (99), the move is
a simple switch from first to second person; in "An Arundel Tomb" (111),
the description of the tomb in the first six verses gives way to the in-
clusiveness of the last two lines where the speaker says the stone seems
"to prove / Our almost-instinct almost true / What will survive of us is
love"; in "Dockery and Son" (152), the difference between Dockery and
the speaker ("For Dockery a son, for me nothing") is generalized, and
the words "we" and "us" crop up in the last three lines.
These sudden moves to the universal are not necessarily bad,
especially since loneliness, old age, and death are experiences all human

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beings share. But given the way Larkin's speakers view the rest of
humanity in the bulk of his poems, these jumps are not enough. Again,
they serve as a kind of reverse displacement in which "any otherness is
reduced to sameness" (Barthes, 151); using a cosmic fear rather than joy,
they still divert attention from the pervasive condescension and distaste
Larkin exhibits toward other people-the same people he wants to be
his readers, the same people with whom he sincerely wants to sym-
pathize. Because of his acceptance of the notion of the poet as inspired
and visionary and of the inevitable alienation and distance that follows
from that notion, Larkin's portrayals of people (both lower- and middle-
class) who do not have that vision necessarily become negative, or at least
typed, and the poetry suffers as a result: by "reduc[ing] their experience.
... the consequence-it is a serious and characteristic consequence of
stereotyping the other-is that the poet's own possibilities are reduced"
(Sinfield, 166). The jump to inclusiveness under these conditions may be
an act of love, but it is also an act of desperation, and serves only to mask
rather than address the problems it is meant to confront.
Perhaps the best modem example of a poem using a detached
observer as speaker is Larkin's "Whitsun Weddings" (CP, 114). In the
poem, the London-bound speaker slowly comes to notice that newly-
weds are boarding his train at every station. Once his attention is caught,
he watches and speculates, and finally attempts to make meaning out
of what he sees. The poem is a description of a poetic process, show-
ing what happens when an artist is arrested by events in the "real"
world and tries to make art out of them. But, almost immediately, the
distance between speaker and participants closes poetic possibilities.
Even though the speaker says he sees each wedding party in "different
terms," the use of plurals in the description that follows this claim suggests
a slide into type:

The fathers with broad belts under their suits

And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;
An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,
The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,
The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres....

Moreover, the speaker, who never leaves the train, seems to know what
everyone on the platform thinks, and again the plurals he uses tend to
type them rather than to describe them individually: "fathers had never
known"; "The women shared / The secret"; "girls . . . stared / At a
religious wounding." The alienation, the inability to know how individ-
uals react to the situation, is transcended by an assumption of inclusion
and stereotyping.
Janice Rossen sees the description of the wedding parties as
"strangely circumscribed, even reductive" (56), and Andrew Crozier
writes, "the people are generalized through grotesque detail which is
always on the verge of registering distaste" (219). Neither of these
readings suggests a poet whose poem is "just the transcription of a very

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happy afternoon," and who speaks of the event which spurred the writ-
ing of the poem in terms almost rhapsodic:

You couldn't be on that train without feeling the young lives all starting
off, and that just for a moment you were touching them. Doncaster,
Retford, Grantham, Newark, Peterbourough, and at every station more
wedding parties. It was wonderful, a marvellous afternoon. (Haffenden,
124-125)15

The problem for Larkin, though, is that he is a prisoner of his inherited

poetic stance which thwarts his "transcription" (again, the belief in the
transparency of language) from the beginning. His poetic distance ("feel-
ing ... that for a moment you were touching them") transforms his cele-
bratory and generous urges into condescending, stereotypical images.
Part of this problem can be seen in the class markers of the
speaker's description: "girls / In parodies of fashion," "the broad belts,"
"the perms," "the nylon gloves," "the jewellery substitutes"; the otherness
of the lower class is obliquely brought up only to be subsumed into the
inclusiveness of the poem's final "rich and fruitful," even redemptive,
images (RW, 74). In this sense "The Whitsun Weddings" provides a classic
example of "the bourgeoisie" which "has obliterated its name in passing
from reality to representation, from economic man to mental man"
(Barthes, 138).
There is no acknowledgement in "Whitsun Weddings" that
individual fathers may have entirely different feelings from one another;
neither is there a realization that individual brides and grooms may, in
their turns, be ecstatic, relieved, doubtful, sad, afraid, even angry. The
speaker's stereotyping of the people he observes enables him to make
other generalizations, such as "and none / Thought of the others they
would never meet / Or how their lives would all contain this hour." The
act of cosmic sense-making is reserved for the watching speaker, who,
in the world of the poem, is the only one truly "loaded with the sum of
all they saw." When he says "I thought of London spread out in the sun,
/ Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat," he is claiming for his
vision a validity which, according to the speaker's view, those who never
"thought of the others" cannot claim. Such assumptions of superiority
work against the figure of the train journey, which, as Lollette Kuby has
pointed out, "is a metaphor for life." Her conclusion that "the poem's
commanding metaphor says, 'we are all in this together,'" is true with
regard to what the speaker of the poem attempts, but the metaphor is
continually undermined (121).
Many readers of Larkin's poetry notice a sense of generosity. What
Terry Whalen says specifically of "To the Sea" is true, in varying degrees,
of all of his poems: the "smiling respect for the small beauty of the people
as made visible in their moments of off-guardedness and spontaneity."
Less certain, however, is Whalen's claim that "All sense of the common-
place beauty of the people is caught in generous images of their gestures,
not in abstractions about them" (89), for always present is the sense of

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distance between the speaker and those he observes, a distance he
defends himself against with an assumption of superiority.
The very stance of observer, then, is most problematic in Larkin.
John Wain, in defending Larkin's use of the observer, sees such a stance
as the only possible one for poets. "Larkin," he says, "stands back and
looks. But to look for an artist of his receptivity, is to feel." Wain continues,
"such contemplation-rapt, unwavering, emphatic-is a way of 'joining
in,' and the only way art knows" (174). This attitude forms the core of
the myth of the poet that has matured and solidified since Wordsworth.
That is to say that this is where the artist's acceptance of alienation from
the "common man"-even while the artist proclaims empathy, if not
solidarity with him-begins. And Wain himself reveals why this is so in
speaking of Larkin's "cut-price crowd" in "Here" (CP, 136): "Small
wonder that these people are suckers for advertising, and buy cheap
flashy goods, and probably drool over the adventures of James Bond.
But they have something that none of those three cornucopia ever give
us: humanity" (173). Wain's celebration of "humanity" is reminiscent of
Larkin's imagining of his readers in the preface to All What Jazz and
displays the same sense of superiority over, even loathing of, otherness.
Janice Rossen writes that some Larkin poems "celebrate the rituals
of English life ... [and] also mark the poet's considered distance from
those who take part in such annual rites, though it is an enriching rather
than an alienating kind of separation-one which allows him to see these
scenes more profoundly" (59). In saying this, Rossen seems to be agreeing
with Wain's celebration of Larkin's artistic distance. But in her fine chap-
ter on Larkin's problematic presentation of women, she says of "Decep-
tions" (CP, 32) that "this poem seems less Hardyesque and fateful and
immediate than it does detached almost to the point of sadism." She
concludes, "In sum, I do not think that one can have it both ways: Larkin
as detached poetic observer and Larkin as sympathetic to human suf-
fering" (89). This view is persuasive, but Rossen's ambivalence toward
Larkin's distancing techniques reveals the central contradiction inherent
in his poetry-indeed in much contemporary poetry-because it pits
the myth of celebratory poetic distance against the disturbing amount
of distaste, and misanthropy, that is the emotional consequence of
that distance.
Larkin may have been aware of this difficulty. Merl Brown, in
spite of himself, suggests this possibility in his reading of "Whitsun
Weddings." Brown is troubled by the fact that "Larkin keeps staring at
people who are unaware he is looking at them and who do not, as a result,
gaze back at him." But he goes further:

In the "Whitsun Weddings"... Larkin takes on the sovereign privileges

of such invisible, unnameable observing even though he also presents
himself as a visible existent identity. He should have recognized that such
a hybrid is inadmissable in poetry like his. By bringing the act of
attending into the scene, he has unknowingly committed an obscenity,
in the sense that he has brought on stage what by its nature must occur
offstage. (90)

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What troubles Brown most, then, is that Larkin makes his observations
obvious. Brown, like Wain, accepts the poet's lot as outside observer, but
would prefer, evidently, that such observations not be admitted, that they
be kept secret. That Larkin foregrounded the act of observation reveals
and admits his choice (or what he, and Brown, seem to have felt was
his choice) to remain an outsider. In this sense, the poem turns on itself,
and ends with the same kind of edge the phrase "Or lied" gives to
"Reasons for Attendance."
It is, perhaps, a sense of this edge that may have prompted Ian
Hamilton to note that "many of Larkin's best effects depend on him being
both superior and vulnerable, unloving and in need of love" (5). If this
is so, Larkin was repeatedly dramatizing the problems behind his need
to produce those very effects. Revealing the act of observation could
have been a way of doubting the validity or even the necessity of that
act. Larkin the "indigestible sterility" with "mountain-clear" vision would
seem, at times, to have regretted his choice of isolation over involvement.
In one of the last poems he wrote for High Windows, which, given
Larkin's preoccupation with the market for poetry, is appropriately
entitled "Money" (CP, 198), the act of looking becomes a simile denot-
ing sadness:

It's like looking down

From long french windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

And it is the act of looking-more precisely, looking down-that is sad,

not the sight itself. Larkin may have occasionally considered the possi-
bility that the choice between art and involvement was perhaps a false
one, but in the pursuit of his own art he accepted distance as a necessary
part of the poetic endeavor. This acceptance resulted in years of con-
tradictory struggle to find ways both of presenting that distance and of
poetically conquering it.

Indiana University

NOTES

2. Naremore, Bayley, and even Terry Whalen have, among others, noted
Romantic characteristics of Larkin's poetry.
3. I use the abbreviation RW to designate Required Writing, a collecti
Larkin's prose from 1955-1982. I also use CP to designate Anthony Th
edition of Larkin's Collected Poems.
4. For more on Frost's struggle see Lentricchia.
5. This quotation is from "The Pleasure Principle" which appeared in
I use Required Writing for my references, but the reprint in this col
is shorn of Larkin's review of three books of poetry. This review, I t
offers much in the way of enabling an understanding of Larkin's p
standards and suggests a peculiar ambivalence toward the "plain sty
poetry he is thought to have championed.

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 6. High Windows sold out its 6000-copy first printing in three weeks
(Monteith, 45). According to Constance Cruickshank, archivist of Faber
and Faber, as of March 1989, Whitsun Weddings had sold over 170,000
paperback copies and High Windows over 70,000 paperback copies. Over
39,000 clothbound copies of Larkin's Collected sold in the first few months
after its release in Britain.
7. Lentricchia quotes this line to describe Frost's "basic strategy as a poet in
search of mass-cultural impact" (83).
8. Larkin's anthology, The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse,
was published in 1973. Yeats's The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, first
published in 1936, was last published in 1979; in the U.S. it appeared in
the 1984-85 Books in Print, but not in the 1985-86 edition; in Britain, it was
listed in the 1984 British Books in Print, but not in the 1985 edition.
9. Janice Rossen more fully explores Larkin's sexist impulses in her chapter
"Difficulties with Girls."
10. For another reading of this passage, see Tierce. Tierce also provides a good
discussion of Larkin's sense that he failed to reach the "cut-price crowd."
11. See Lodge.
12. In The Long Revolution, Raymond Williams also uses the term "dissident
middle class" to refer to a "minority public" whose disaffection from the
majority of the middle class he attributes to a "university education" (242).
Larkin's ironies in "Vers de Societe" and "A Study of Reading Habits"
would seem to appeal to precisely this public, a coterie much like the one
he excoriated in his prose.
13. Larkin's relationship to those of "lower" station is even more interesting.
A particularly illustrative incident regarding his misunderstanding of class
relations involved his use of an "unadorned surname" in addressing a
colleague at the University of Hull. See the two letters entitled "Surname
Unadorned," in the Times and Wheatcroft (141).
14. For a similar reading see Sinfield, 165-167.
15. See also Motion's Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life (287-288) for a hitherto
unpublished description by Larkin of the initial impetus for the poem.

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