|
|
 |
| |
Philip Larkin: addicted to Jaffa cakes and soft porn |
Listening to Larkin and his habits of expectancy
PHILIP Larkin’s head looks like a scooped out Irish potato in Christopher Barkers’s book of photographs of touch-deprived poets (Carcanet Press 1986 – look out for it in secondhand bookshops). It is a photograph of genius.
I met Larkin once in 1965 when I went to his native Hull and interviewed him on a cricket field.
I listened to a new CD of Larkin reading 26 of his own poems, The Sunday Sessions (Faber £10.99), with the poet Murray Shelmerdine.
We agreed that the one poem of genius among the 26 was “Next Please!” I quote the first and penultimate stanzas:
Always too eager for the future, we
Pick up bad habits of expectancy.
Something is always approaching; every day
Till then we say,
The penultimate stanza makes the greatest impression:
We think each one will heave to and unload
All good into our lives, all we are owed
For waiting so devoutly and so long.
But we are wrong:
The emotional impact of “But we are wrong” is at the heart of every poem Larkin ever wrote.
Murray and I were in agreement that the other great poems on the CD were “Toads”, which sagged at the end, “Church Going”, “The Whitsun Weddings”, which unravelled like a film, “Days”, “Home Is So Sad” – Murray’s favourite – and “An Arundel Tomb”, with my favourite last stanza.
Larkin was addicted to “not so soft porn” and Jaffa cakes, as literary executors Andrew Motion and Anthony Thwaite revealed with great solemnity after his death.
His primary addiction can be found in the first line of his other unrecorded poem of genius, “Wants”: “Beyond all this, the wish to be alone”.
This provides the explanation why Ted Hughes became the next Poet Laureate after Philip had turned it down flat.
If you are as fed up with the recession as I am, you might like to get hold of the CDs of Martin Jarvis reading Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (Naxos AudioBooks).
While Jarvis is a joy to listen to on a car ride, or while tucked up in bed, there is only so much of Larkin’s depressed voice one can take.
|
|
|
|
|
|
