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Tag Archives: Philip Larkin

That Time Margaret Thatcher Spanked Christopher Hitchens

29 Tuesday Sep 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, Politics

≈ Comments Off on That Time Margaret Thatcher Spanked Christopher Hitchens

Tags

Biography, British Parliament, British politics, Carly Fiorina, Charisma, Christopher Hitchens, Donald Trump, François Mitterrand, Government, Hitch-22, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, memoir, New Statesman, Philip Larkin, politics, sex, The New York Times, The War Against Cliché

Margaret Thatcher

“I had written a longish article for The New York Times Magazine, saying in effect that, if Labour could not revolutionize British society, then the task might well fall to the right. I had also written a shorter piece for the New Statesman, reporting from the Conservative Party conference and saying in passing that I thought Mrs. Thatcher was surprisingly sexy. (To this day, I have never had so much anger mail, saying, in effect, ‘How could you?’)

I felt immune to Mrs. Thatcher in most other ways, since for all her glib ‘free market’ advocacy on one front she seemed to be an emotional ally of the authoritarian and protectionist white-settler regime in Rhodesia. And it was this very thing that afforded me the opportunity to grapple with her so early in her career…

Almost as soon as we shook hands on immediate introduction, I felt that she knew my name and had perhaps connected it to the socialist weekly that had recently called her rather sexy. While she struggled adorably with this moment of pretty confusion, I felt obliged to seek controversy and picked a fight with her on a detail of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe policy. She took me up on it. I was (as it happened) right on the small point of fact, and she was wrong. But she maintained her wrongness with such adamantine strength that I eventually conceded the point and even bowed slightly to emphasize my acknowledgment. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Bow lower!’ Smiling agreeably, I bent forward a bit farther. ‘No, no,’ she trilled. ‘Much lower!’ By this time, a little group of interested bystanders was gathering. I again bent forward, this time much more self-consciously. Stepping around behind me, she unmasked her batteries and smote me on the rear with the parliamentary order paper that she had been rolling into a cylinder behind her back. I regained the vertical with some awkwardness. As she walked away, she looked over her shoulder and gave an almost imperceptibly slight roll of the hip while mouthing the words ‘Naughty boy!’

I had and have eyewitnesses to this. At the time, though, I hardly believed it myself. It is only from a later perspective, looking back on the manner in which she slaughtered and cowed all the former male leadership of her party and replaced them with pliant tools, that I appreciate the premonitory glimpse—of what someone in another context once called ‘the smack of firm government’—that I had been afforded. Even at the time, as I left that party, I knew I had met someone rather impressive. And the worst of ‘Thatcherism,’ as I was beginning by degrees to discover, was the rodent slowly stirring in my viscera: the uneasy but unbanishable feeling that on some essential matters she might be right.”

Margaret Thatcher 2

__________

A segment from Christopher Hitchens’s memoir Hitch-22.

I thought of this encounter during the recent GOP debate in which Carly Fiorina dispensed one by one with her male counterparts, spurring even The Donald to bow in submission (a first for him, no doubt). That their particular clash came on the heels of Trump’s terrible comment about “that face” only doubled the association to Thatcher, whose looks, despite what Austin Powers may’ve thought, had more than a few fans on the left and right. (I’ve heard similar compliments about Carly, confirmed just a few days ago by a female journalist friend who interviewed her last week.)

It was Thatcher who once mused, in a poached version of a famous labor union saying, that, “being powerful is like being ladylike — if you have to say you are, you probably aren’t.” The same goes for other adjectives, like smart, classy, rich, and many of Trump’s other favorite words which he likes to apply to himself. Yet it’s precisely this do-don’t-tell orientation which makes a female politician like Thatcher so potent. What you think you see ain’t necessarily what you’ll get. As Mitterand said, “she had the eyes of Caligula and mouth of Marilyn Monroe.”

If you’re at all familiar with Hitch’s work, you’ll know this type of fixation on and flirtation with women were central to his persona. His best pal, Martin Amis, along with Amis’s father Kingsley and several other Englishmen of those generations, had a lot to say about Mrs. Thatcher — most of which didn’t have to do with her stance on Rhodesia. Martin uses the above interaction as a basis to analyze Thatcher’s appeal to the English male psyche. In an excerpt pulled from his essay collection The War Against Cliché, he writes:

I once discussed Mrs Thatcher’s feminine qualities with Christopher Hitchens who had recently spent some time in her company. This was his verdict: ‘Oh, she stinks of sex.’ And this is my father, Kingsley Amis, in his Memoirs: her beauty, he writes, is ‘so extreme that… it can trap me for a split second into thinking I am looking at a science-fiction illustration of some time ago showing the beautiful girl who has become President of the Solar Federation in the year 2200. The fact that that is not a sensual or sexy beauty does not make it a less sexual beauty, and that sexuality is still, I think, an underrated factor in her appeal (or repellence).’ Helplessley I reach for the commonplace about the glamour of power. I could further infuriate my father’s shade by adducing another cliché: English nostalgia for chastisement. Philip Larkin shared his friend’s enthusiasm for the Prime Minister (‘I adore Mrs Thatcher’). Larkin was a great poet… he once asked Mrs Thatcher, who had professed herself a fan, to quote a line of his. She blinked and said, ‘All the unhurried day/ Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.’

I like that she could quote Larkin. Counts for a lot in my book. What would my Larkin nomination be? I’m glad you asked. “The trees are coming into leaf/ Like something almost being said.”

By the way, is his repetition of  “saying, in effect…” in the first paragraph a rare Hitchens misstep? Watch him relay the encounter below.

You can also move on:

  • More English diffidence: Charles Darwin makes a spreadsheet to help him decide whether to marry
  • Kingley’s moving final tribute to Philip
  • A reflection on philosophical contradictions, which makes up my favorite extended section from Hitch-22

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“Days” by Philip Larkin

20 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ Comments Off on “Days” by Philip Larkin

Tags

Days, Philip Larkin, Poem, Poet, poetry

Leaves

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

__________

“Days” by Philip Larkin, which you’ll find in his Complete Poems.

“Solving that question” is just a euphemistic way of saying… well, what activity involves a priest and doctor? There couldn’t be a more Larkinesque way of capping off a poem about finding contentment in life’s diurnality. The lone image in the poem, those long coats coming from over the fields, seems to me to suggest something like foreignness and opportunism.

I took the picture in northern Virginia.

More Larkin:

  • “Aubade”
  • “The Mower”
  • “Going”

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Martin Amis: The Problem with Political Correctness

21 Saturday Feb 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Humor, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Martin Amis, masculinity, Masculinity and Modern Literature, Philip Larkin, Political Correctness, Robert Bly, Saul Bellow

Martin Amis

“Laughter always forgives… What we eventually run up against are the forces of humourlessness, and let me assure you that the humourless as a bunch don’t just not know what’s funny, they don’t know what’s serious. They have no common sense, either, and shouldn’t be trusted with anything.

Viewed at its grandest, political correctness is an attempt to accelerate evolution. To speak truthfully, while that’s still okay, everybody is a racist or has racial prejudices. This is because human beings tend to like the similar, the familiar, the familial. Again, I say, I am a racist. I am not as racist as my parents. My children will not be as racist as I am. Freedom from racial prejudice is what we hope for down the line. Impatient with this hope, this process, P.C. seeks to get things done right now. In a generation or at the snap of a finger, you can simply announce yourself to be purged of these atavisms.”

__________

From Martin Amis’s lecture “Masculinity and Modern Writing,” given at Harvard in 1997.

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A Eulogy for Philip

04 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Speeches

≈ Comments Off on A Eulogy for Philip

Tags

eulogy, funeral, Kingsley Amis, Larkin, Philip Larkin, poetry, requiem, Richard Bradford, speech, The Odd Couple: The Curious Friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin

by Godfrey Argent, bromide print, 8 October 1969

“We are here to mourn the death of our friend Philip Larkin. He was the most private of men, one who found the universe a bleak and hostile place and recognized very clearly the disagreeable realities of human life, above all the dreadful effects of time on all we have and are. The world of his fellow creatures was hardly less forbidding: privacy was to be jealously guarded. In the sense of complete physical solitude, he found it a daily necessity. He saw people as hopelessly cut off from each other, and revealingly misquoted Donne in declaring, ‘Every man is an island.’

And yet it was impossible to meet him without being aware in the first few seconds of his impeccable attentive courtesy: grave, but at the same time sunlit, always ready to respond to a gleam of humor or warmth. He was surprised if anyone found him a gloomy person: ‘I like to think of myself as quite funny,’ he told an interviewer, and he was more than funny about those in the literary and academic world whom he considered fraudulent, and he found no shortage of those; and to hear him sounding off about a politician or any other public figure who was not to his taste did the heart good.

But there was no malice in it, no venom. If he regarded the world severely or astringently, it was a jovial astringency. He could be at his funniest when uttering those same painful truths about life as those he made so devastating in his poetry. And it was all from the heart: he never showed off, never laid claim to feeling what he didn’t feel, and it was that honesty, more total in his case than in any other I’ve known, that gave his poetry such power. He meant every word of it; and so, though he may not have written many poems, he wrote none that were false or unnecessary.

His honesty extended to himself; again, nobody was ever more totally or acutely aware of his limitations. He took life seriously, he took poetry seriously, but not himself — nobody who said he looked like a bald salmon could do that. No solemnity about himself as a poet either; when he’d written a poem he felt pleased, as if he’d laid an egg. But we take seriously what he has left us. We are lucky enough to have known him; thousands who didn’t, and more thousands in the future, will be able to share those poems with us. They offer comfort, and not cold comfort either. They are not dismal or pessimistic, but invigorating; they know that for all its shortcomings life must be got on with.

And now we must get on with ours, a little better equipped to do so with the help of those fragments of poignancy and humor in everyday things, those moments of illumination and beauty we should never have seen or known but for Philip.”

by Godfrey Argent, bromide print, 19 June 1968

__________

As far as I know, this is the only place on the internet with a version of this tribute. It’s Kingsley Amis’s eulogy for his closest friend Philip Larkin, delivered 29 years ago this week. You can read more about their hilarious and eccentric relationship in Richard Bradford’s The Odd Couple: The Curious Friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin.

Top: Amis; below: Larkin.

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John Updike on Falling Airplanes and His Faith in a Fallen World

21 Friday Mar 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Archimedes, Autobiography, Biography, Christianity, Church Going, Donna Tartt, Ernest Hemingway, Experience, Faith, G.K. Chesterton, Hitch-22, John Updike, Joseph Conrad, Julian Barnes, Karl Barth, Life, memoir, Miguel de Unamuno, Mortality, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Philip Larkin, Proof of God, religion, Rudyard Kipling, Søren Kierkegaard, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, Speak Memory, T.S. Eliot, The Secret History

John Updike

“Early in my adolescence, trapped within the airtight case for atheism, I made this logical formulation:

1. If God does not exist, the world is a horror-show.
2. The world is not a horror-show.
3. Therefore, God exists.

The second premise, of course, is the weaker; newspapers and biology lessons daily suggest that it is a horror show, of landslides and plagues and massacres and falling airplanes and incessant carnivorousness… Yet this and all bad news merits reporting because our general expectation is for good: an instinctive vision of health and peace underlies our horror stories. Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we only have to be still to experience. Habit and accustomedness have painted over pure gold with a dull paint that can, however, be scratched away, to reveal the shining under-base. The world is good, our intuition is, confirming its Creator’s appraisal as reported in the first chapter of Genesis.

During that same adolescence, I reluctantly perceived of the Christian religion I had been born into that almost no one believed it, believed it really — not its ministers, nor its pillars like my father and his father before him. Though signs of belief (churches, public prayers, mottos on coins) existed everywhere, when you moved toward Christianity it disappeared, as fog solidly opaque in the distance thins to transparency when you walk into it. I decided I nevertheless would believe. I found a few authors, a very few — Chesterton, Eliot, Unamuno, Kierkegaard, Karl Barth — who helped me believe. Under the shelter that I improvised from their pages I have lived my life. I rarely read them now; my life is mostly lived. God is the God of the living, though His priests and executors, to keep order and to force the world into a convenient mould, will always want to make Him the God of the dead, the God who chastises life and forbids and says No. What I felt, in that basement Sunday school of Grace Lutheran Church in Shillington, was a clumsy attempt to extend a Yes, a blessing, and I accepted that blessing, offering in return only a nickel a week and my art, my poor little art…

My writing here about my religion feels forced — done at the behest of others, of hypothetical ‘autobiography’ readers. Done, I believe, in an attempt to comfort some younger reader as once I was comforted by Chesterton and Unamuno… But there seems, my having gone this unfortunately far, still this to say: One believes not merely to dismiss from one’s life a degrading and immobilizing fear of death but to possess that Archimedean point outside the world from which to move the world. The world cannot provide its own measure and standards; these must come, strangely, from outside, or a sorry hedonism and brute opportunism result — a greedy panicked heart and substance abuse. The world punishes us for taking it too seriously as well as for not taking it seriously enough.”

__________

From John Updike’s magisterial Self-Consciousness: Memoirs.

Well, it’s beautifully written. That’ll be your initial reaction to Self-Consciousness. No, let me rephrase: Wow, it’s beautifully written. Updike is a writer who pulls the sublime from effortless, conversational sentences, affirming his reflection that “to give the mundane its beautiful due” was the purpose of his writing style. And man, do you feel the power of that impulse in these memoirs.

Typically, a writer’s memoir is not really about his or her lived-life. Writers are not boring people, but they often do, when viewed from the outside, lead boring lives. Sure Conrad manned a steamer in the Congo and Kipling was deployed with a battalion in India and Hemingway drank his way through every bullring in Cuba. But that was a century ago. Nowadays, as writing has become largely professionalized, the pulse of a writer’s life has slowed significantly. A writer’s craft is a solitary and silent one, done with a pen and a pad, at the desk, day after day. So his memoir must concern matters beyond the workaday. Just to stick to some covered on this blog: Martin Amis’s memoir is about family; Christopher Hitchens’s is about friendship; Nabokov’s is about education. John Updike’s is about faith (and sex, as he could never avoid the subject).

At the conclusion of one of the finest contemporary novels I’ve read, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, the young protagonist Richard Papen wonders if he possesses a singular fatal flaw. “I have always mistaken beautiful or intelligent people for good” is his paragraph-long confession paraphrased, an admission which, upon reading, spurred within me a pang of recognition (“I’m busted”). And so too it is with writers. Beautiful prose can hide myriad sins of logic. So it’s essential when reading excerpts like the one above (found on pages 230-235) that you do not fall lazily into the ease of the prose, surrendering the critical faculties that such dense epistemology demands.

There is more to say here, but I will leave it for another day. Perhaps for when I post another section from Self-Consciousness. Still, there are two relevant sources concerning Updike’s final point about seriousness which may add some flavor to the discussion:

From Nothing to Be Frightened, Julian Barnes’s memoir about mortality (see: there’s always one unifying theme).

But if life is viewed as… something dependent on a greater reality elsewhere, then it becomes at the same time less valuable and more serious. Those parts of the world where religion has drained away and there is a general acknowledgement that this short stretch of time is all we have, are not, on the whole, more serious places than those where heads are still jerked by the cathedral’s bell… On the whole, they yield to a frenetic materialism. [emphasis mine]

There is also Philip Larkin’s exquisite poem “Church Going,” where the writer wanders into a church and in the final stanza muses on its perennial significance:

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious

Not to put too fine a point on the issue, but I think the contemporary American Church, with its Hollywood aesthetic and prosperity gospel, has lost much of that crucial, validating seriousness.

Updike, who died in 2009, would have been 82 this week.

Read on:

  • G.K. Chesterton’s defends his faith from cynics
  • Updike and a host of other thinkers reflect on whether we can simply assume God’s existence
  • Philosopher Alvin Plantinga dissects how evolutionary psychology intersects with Christian docrine

John Updike and Family

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“Epitaph” by Ian Hamilton

06 Tuesday Aug 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Auden, Epitaph, Ian Hamilton, John Etheridge, Larkin, Philip Larkin, Poem, poetry, The Book of Pain, W.H. Auden, Writing

Ian Hamilton

The scent of old roses and tobacco
Takes me back.
It’s almost twenty years
Since I last saw you
And our half-hearted love affair goes on.

You left me this:
A hand, half-open, motionless
On a green counterpane.
Enough to build
A few melancholy poems on.

If I had touched you then
One of us might have survived.

__________

“Epitaph” by Ian Hamilton, which you’ll find in his excellent Ian Hamilton Collected Poems.

For a fine elucidation of this poem, I refer you to my friend John Etheridge’s blog The Book of Pain. His site is a useful resource for compelling, voiced poetry. It’s title — The Book of Pain — suggests the sort of revealing, forbidding tone that’s also made vivid in Clive James’s great collection The Book of My Enemy.

John calls Hamilton the “finest poet of the second half of the 20th century”; and while I disagree, I don’t dismiss the gauge of such a careful register of language. For the record I think Eliot is the best post-war poet, with Larkin and Auden tied for second.

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“The Mower” by Philip Larkin

06 Saturday Jul 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Philip Larkin, Poem, poetry, The Mower

Philip Larkin

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

__________

“The Mower” by Philip Larkin, which you’ll find in The Less Deceived: Poems.

More from the best vernacular poet of the 20th century:

Philip Larkin

Aubade

Grass with DewGoing

Ireland Birds

Coming

Ireland Wave

Wants

Philip Larkin

Money

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“Going” by Philip Larkin

22 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Coming, Going, Philip Larkin, Poem, poetry

Grass with DewThere is an evening coming in
Across the fields, one never seen before,
That lights no lamps.

Silken it seems at a distance, yet
When it is drawn up over the knees and breast
It brings no comfort.

Where has the tree gone, that locked
Earth to sky? What is under my hands,
That I cannot feel?

What loads my hand down?

__________

“Going” by Philip Larkin, which you can find in The Complete Poems.

“Going” can be read as a complement (or perhaps counterpart) to another of Larkin’s works recently posted here, “Coming”. Both poems begin at an evening. In “Coming” it’s a sundown of warm and tender recognition; in “Going” it’s all gray clouds gathering — portents of some enormous, merciless darkness.

I like both poems a lot, for different reasons, though I think “Coming” is the more polished work. Part of this may be attributable to age. Larkin wrote “Going” when he was twenty-three (optimistic, wasn’t he?). Yet in addition to its craftsmanship, “Coming” is also a better poem, I think, because of the richer set of emotions it projects.

Read “Coming” here:

Ireland Birds

The photograph: taken on the southern coast Ireland several years ago.

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“Coming” by Philip Larkin

20 Wednesday Mar 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Childhood, Coming, Philip Larkin, Poem, poetry

Ireland Birds

On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork.

It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon –
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.

__________

“Coming” by Philip Larkin. Find it in his Collected Poems.

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“Wants” by Philip Larkin

31 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

A Streetcar Named Desire, Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms, oblivion, Philip Larkin, Poem, poetry, Sigmund Freud, Tennessee Williams, Wants

Ireland Wave

Beyond all this, the wish to be alone:
However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flag-staff –
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.

Beneath it all, the desire for oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
The costly aversion of the eyes away from death –
Beneath it all, the desire for oblivion runs.

__________

“Wants” by Philip Larkin, which you’ll find along with other classics in Collected Poems.

A reader is on solid ground if he approaches this poem — like many of Larkin’s — from a Freudian perspective. In “Wants,” Larkin is essentially nodding, or more like hanging his head, at the warring impulses of thanatos and eros — what Freud described as, “the opposition between the ego or death instincts and the sexual or life instincts.” In Larkin’s case, thanatos always won this internal war: the tragic thread of mortality (and the perverse desire for oblivion) lingered beyond and remained beneath everything in the life of the great English poet. As Adam Phillips writes, “Something inevitably happens to us when we are born, Freud says, which shapes out lives: we desire. From this point of view the stort of our lives is the story of — to borrow one of Freud’s titles — our instincts and their vicissitudes. And yet, Freud asserts in 1920, above all, or rather beneath it all, we desire to die; or rather, to fashion a death… In Freud’s view it is indeed as though life is resistant to itself; oblivion is the subject and the object of desire. For Feud the original life story was a death story, a how-to-die story.”

Although I understand the theory, I don’t happen to agree with Freud’s conception of the human psyche; I don’t think, even subconsciously, I have an impulse for oblivion, and I don’t think Larkin seriously had it either. All accounts suggest that Larkin, although a private man, never actually felt that in the end death would be some great consolation or welcomed comfort. From my understanding, he almost always wished to be alone, but never truly desired oblivion. Personally, I find myself falling more in line with the view espoused by Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, who observes, “The opposite of death is desire.” But perhaps that’s just an illusion too.

The picture was taken in County Kildare, Ireland.

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“Money” by Philip Larkin

13 Sunday Jan 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Lawrence Durrell, Money, Philip Larkin, Poem, Poet, poetry

Philip Larkin

Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:
‘Why do you let me lie here wastefully?
I am all you never had of goods and sex.
You could get them still by writing a few cheques.’

So I look at others, what they do with theirs:
They certainly don’t keep it upstairs.
By now they’ve a second house and car and wife:
Clearly money has something to do with life

– In fact, they’ve a lot in common, if you enquire:
You can’t put off being young until you retire,
And however you bank your screw, the money you save
Won’t in the end buy you more than a shave.

I listen to money singing. 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.

__________

“Money” by Philip Larkin, which you’ll find along with other classics in Larkin’s Collected Poems.

In my view, the brilliance of Larkin is bound up in his effortless ability to turn rhymes that read as almost conversational. This subtle skill has — at least in my reading — two effects, the first of which is that Larkin’s poetry has an inviting quality; not only do you want to repeatedly return to some of his best work, you also find yourself quoting it, or silently reflecting on it, in moments that are otherwise utterly mundane. Larkin wrote about money, relationships, society, and family in ways as accessible as those topics are themselves familiar to all of us. Towards the end of his life, Larkin said that he liked to think that people in pubs would talk about his poems, and I’ll say that although I don’t currently have any friends who are interested in both poetry and pubs, if I did, Larkin would probably be the first name dropped in our hypothetical discussions.

The second quality of Larkin’s that I always find myself admiring is — and this may surprise devotees of his — the fearlessness with which he writes. It’s not easy to identify, much less write about, the shortcomings of one’s character, the wounds in one’s psyche. Yet Larkin never seems to flinch in revealing these elements of his personality. As Lawrence Durrell quipped, “It’s unthinkable not to love – you’d have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you’d have to be Philip Larkin.” And Larkin was certainly a distinctly neurotic and isolated person. But his cold eye on the world is always counterbalanced by the warming, heartening quality of his voice, as if he’s enjoining us to share in his view while also softly nudging us to reflect that we are comparatively well-adjusted and connected. There’s a reason why Larkin called his most-beloved collection of poetry High Windows: he stands remote, secluded and single, separated from the human universe by a pane of glass. There’s a reason why he’s looking down at the mad world of “Money”.

To note: “bank your screw” refers to the money earned at a day job that one then saves. The “shave” referenced is the third stanza is the final shave that an undertaker gives a corpse in the casket.

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