Thomas Osborne . The Ordinariness of the Archive

THOMAS OSBORNE

Polarities of Englishness:Larkin, Hughes and national culture

Senilitys sour odour. It had condensedLike a grease on the cutlery. It confirmedYour idea of England: partNursing home, part morgueFor something partly dying, partly dead.

Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters1

Poetry and sovereignty are very primitive things. I like to think of their beingunited in this way, in England.

Philip Larkin, Required Writing.2

What is it that is so English about such very different writers as PhilipLarkin and Ted Hughes? Is it that they express Englishness or is it that theyallow a sort of commentary upon Englishness, perhaps because as will besuggested here each in fact wanted to escape it in his own way?

Not surprisingly, it took the quasi-external perception of an emigre tosee, in its most coherent form, this sense in which the extreme can registerthe generality. In the first chapter of his The Englishness of English ArtNikolaus Pevsner outlines his approach to what he calls the geography ofart, that discipline which takes as its purpose the discovery of features ofnational style in the arts and literature. Such a geography will be concernedabove all with extremes, with polarities. The history of styles, observesPevsner, can only be successful that is, approach truth if it is conductedin terms of polarities, that is in pairs of apparently contradictory qualities.3

So English art is Constable and Turner, it is the formal house and theinformal, picturesque garden surrounding it; polarities evident at one andthe same moment.

Polarities are not necessarily contradictions. Indeed the methodology ofsuch a geography of the arts, according to Pevsner, is to indicate that whatmight seem to be contradictions are not in fact such; so, for instanceConstables aim is truth to nature, Turners world is a fantasmagoria, butboth are concerned with an atmospheric view of the world, not withthe firm physical objects in it. Hence, for Pevsner, Constable and Turnerare both clearly extremes within English culture more generally, yet are

nonetheless exemplary or representative of tendencies within the generalityitself. So, in this example, the image of a Constable or a Turner will tell ussomething more generally about English culture: something, for instance, ofthe centrality through what unites them in their very polarity of thenotion of atmosphere to English aesthetic culture: the anti-corporealattitude of the English heritage.4

Diminishment and everyday life

Can we apply a similar logic to the case of Larkin and Hughes? A goodplace to begin such an argument might come from D. J. Taylors surmisethat what unites many English post-war writers, and what accounts for acertain characteristic kind of realism in their works, is the culturalexperience of disappointment; or, as Taylor aptly terms it, diminishment.5

At its most extreme form, such disappointment manifested itself as outrightsocio-political resentment, as in the words of a character from a novel byAngela Thirkell from the early 1950s: What I really mind is their trying tobust up the Empire . . . I mean like leaving Egypt and trying to give Gibraltarto the natives. If they try to do anything to Gibraltar, I shall put on a stripedpetticoat and a muslin fichu and murder them all in their baths, becauseTRAITORS ought to be murdered.6 There are plain echoes here of Larkinsmore laconic but no less resentful attitude in Homage to a Government,with its complaint that Our children will not know its a different country.7

Closely connected to this sense of diminishment we have a particularconcern with the status of everyday things. Against the argument ofAndrew Motion, Larkins biographer, that this emphasis was a function ofthe levelling effects of democracy, Tom Nairn has argued that it was intruth one of many substitutes for democratic levelling generated in thosepost-war circumstances.8 We can agree with Nairn whilst adding, inHumean vein, that such a tendency was also a function, so to speak, of thepolitical fate of Englishness itself.9 Post-war Britain was is a postcolonialcountry, a fact which is registered as much in the literature of themetropolis as it is in that derived from the experience of the periphery.

If, after the high watermarks of empire, what was once the ideologicallydominant experience of the metropolis can be understood as being in itsown way quite as much a part of the postcolonial experience of dissolutionand diaspora as that of the so-called peripheries, then we might even saythat the works of writers such as Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis or even TedHughes can be understood in postcolonial terms parallel to those frequentlyapplied to Salman Rushdie or Derek Walcott. Indeed, Walcott has himselfmade this point, arguing that for those who write from what was once a

44 Critical Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 1

confident imperial heartland, it may be as if the everyday world has itselfbecome dimmed, diminished, disenchanted.10 But adapting Pevsnersnotion of polarity we can say that this disenchantment is as much, inLarkins case at least, about a resolute turning towards the everyday worldas it is, in Hughess, of a turning away from it.

Larkin our principal focus in what follows is often represented as theincarnation of a certain Englishness, specifically of a quotidian ethos ofprovinciality. But perhaps we should see his writing not merely as a retreatinto everyday life or as an expression of such provinciality but rather as acarefully staged confrontation with the experience of ordinariness, a kind ofinterrogation of what disenchantment has left us with. What is at stake hereis, to put it too bluntly, the status of the world itself. In a very differentcontext, Stanley Cavell has observed the extent to which an embracing ofordinariness functions as an answer to scepticism; how grasping a day,accepting the everyday, the ordinary, is not a given but a task.11 Larkinsconcerns are perhaps of this order; to acknowledge the continued existenceof a world that has been shrunken out of proportion from ones expectationsof it.

Larkin is much more than the Englishman of the common-sensetradition, as is evidenced by the extent to which he makes almost a fetishof commonsensism and the ethos of the quotidian, pushing it towardshumour and irony, even at times absurdity. Of course there is a commoncultural tradition of Englishness that stresses precisely this status of theeveryday. In the tradition of English painting, we have in Pevsners ownphraseology the demand to paint the truth and its everyday parapherna-lia. Pevsner also quotes Dr Johnson: I had rather see the portrait of a dogI know than all the allegories you can show me, and comments, Thisirritating remark . . . is massively English.12 Truth, for the English, then, liesnot in the Grand Manner but in observed fact and personal experience.For Larkinesque versions of such descriptive care, one might invoke ShowSaturday or Here, with its notion of unfenced existence . . . untalkative,out of reach. But Larkin always does more than just capture this sense ofthe everyday. His is less the Flaubertian injunction to write the mediocrewell, in an aesthetic sense, than an attempt at an excavation of theeveryday, and as much an exposure of common-sensical attitudes, theirlittle dead-ends and complicities, as an embrace of them.

So it cannot be said that a poet such as Larkin simply represents variousmore or less innate tendencies in English culture. We could say, rather, thatLarkin did not merely inhabit an English reserve but that he actuallycultivated this ethos as a sort of technique; that is, as a method of escapefrom judgement, perhaps according to a kind of internalised ethics of

Polarities of Englishness: Larkin, Hughes and national culture 45

effacement. Describe the world as it is, in all its smallness, and effaceyourself. This is as much a question of a technique of the self as it is amatter of Larkins given personality. Effacement was as much a strategyas a predicament. Larkins normality, his sense of reserve, his veryconservatism all function not as expressions of his nature but astechniques for movement away from what he was and from what he sawin England. Which is why his bluntest statements may serve as evidence forthis very fact of effacement: Anyone who has stammered will know whatagony it is, especially at school. It means you never take the lead inanything or do anything but try to efface yourself.13

To escape ones judgement over oneself, the shame of stammering, onecultivates, just about literally in Larkins case, an ethos of perpetualdisappearance. What does Larkin do? Of all places, he moves to Hull Asfor Hull I like Hull because its so far away from everywhere else. On theway to nowhere, as somebody put it . . . Theres not so much crap aroundas there would be in London, at least as I imagine it . . .14 Crap is themetropolis, London, amongst the sophisticates; those who chatter, thosewho judge, those who pin you down. Larkin cannot stand London: in thatcontext at least, his might be seen as a genuine writing of becoming withits ultimate address the cultural, numerical majority that actuallyconstituted, to Larkins view of things, the discursive minority invokingthe provinces, the regions, small towns and little things.

The components of Larkins putative Englishness, then, are as much amatter of an inventive strategy as of the expression of the given.15 Hence,pitted between strategy and given-ness, the sense of Englishness in Larkinis actually ambivalent. He feels exiled even within England. In TheImportance of Being Elsewhere he voices the idea that he is estranged,always, in England and so in a sense it is better to be elsewhere, such as inIreland where one is more obviously and recognisably a stranger.

Living in England has no such excuse:These are my customs and establishmentsIt would be much more serious to refuse.Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.16

Moreover, at times Larkin can be quite overtly critical of Englishness,especially if this is mixed up with sensibilities derived from social class. Hewrote in 1955 to Patsy Murphy that: Im passing through an anti Englishphase at present they are miles uglier and noisier and vulgarer than theIrish: the pubs here are nightmares of neo-Falstaffianism, coughing laughterwell soused with phlegm. The village smells of chips. The town smells of


fish. And everywhere creep the new cars with L on the front, Auntie C.learning to drive i.e. clog up the road some more & further endangermy life . . ..17

Hughes and mythopoeisis

Whereas Larkin burrowed into inwardness, the poetry of Ted Hughesaspired to the status of a kind of externalised, dramatic, mythopoeticbecoming. Hughes, however, is as much subject, in his own way, to Taylorssense of diminishment as Larkin. Of course Hughess angle is reallyexistential, especially as experienced in the exposure to the brutalities ofnature. What has been diminished is less or less obviously the state ofnational dignity than any engaged appreciation of the state of nature itself,although it is not difficult to see how the two are ultimately linked inHughes. In Hughes the everyday world acts like a kind of false veneer onthe true essence of Nature. Hence his prosody of mythologising; hisattempts, in effect, to locate reality somewhere other than precisely thoseareas of life most exposed to Larkins own attentions the glib surfaces ofeveryday existence. Hughess Yorkshire roots versus Larkins moreprovincial upbringing in Coventry are also part of this polarity; or putting it somewhat crudely Larkin the buttoned-up petty-bourgeoislibrarian versus Hughes in the Bronte tradition of impassioned soulsstomping about the moor. Not that the poetry of Hughes, shepherd ofcomplete Being as Craig Robinson appositely describes him, was part ofthe pastoral tradition of the poetry of landscape.18 His poetry was as muchan attempt at escape from that kind of romanticism as was Larkins. In fact,as Keith Sagar has observed, neither the countryside nor the landscape(pastoral, impressive vistas) make much of an appearance in Hughesswork: or at least, what is at stake is rather Nature, or better Creation.19

For Hughes, the human ways of being in the world are at worst artificialveneers that conceal the brutal but exhilarating realities of Creation and atbest institutions of shepherding Creation. If, for him, there is an Englishway with the countryside it is in so far as the landscape is, so to speak, intrust to Englishness, folded into it. It is not, then, that Englishness providesus with the essence of the landscape but that there are certain ways of beingwith nature, of shepherding Creation, which have been cultivated in anEnglish way. It is there in The Day he Died:

From now on the landWill have to manage without him.But it hesitates, in this slow realization of light,


Childlike, too naked, in a frail sun,With roots cutAnd a great blank in its memory.20

However, Hughess preoccupation may seem to be more some of thelaureate poems aside with the world itself than with England as such: itsfalling away from myth, from synthesis; its submission to the narrow forcesof reason. However, this sense of mythopoetic disenchantment in the face ofthe forces of rationalisation is registered, for Hughes, at a level which doesconnect to questions of national identification that of the nationalliterature itself. Hence his impatience with the terrible suffocating,maternal octopus of ancient English poetic tradition.21

If there is disenchantment then so too is there obviously enough re-enchantment in Hughes. In their polarised ways, both Hughes and Larkinwish to move beyond the mere everydayness that they take to be at theheart of ordinary attitudes to life: Larkin by interrogating it to its limits,by going further into it, turning it from surface to essence; Hughes on thebasis of an effort at exposing, if anything, the hidden enchantedness ofexistence itself. Hughes seeks to find an enchantedness that is beyondordinary existence. Thus he attempts to forge a sort of alternativeUr-language against the superficialities of everyday language and tomake of Creation, in effect, a substitute for, as much as a sublimationof, the modern world. Creation expresses the cruelty and ruthlessness oflife, but in the form of Creation it is something to be celebrated hencethe justice of Derek Walcotts idea that Hughess is a poetry ofexultation.22

In actual, disenchanted life it might be a different matter of course.Certainly it is not always a case of exultation there. But then, for Hughes,everyday life is clearly all too burdened with mediocrity to be much of anissue for poetry. There is nevertheless a form of realism here: if it is anescape from the everyday world, it is still the realism of how things are innature at least; the overwhelmingly conservative realism of acceptance ofnature brutal, elemental. In short, Larkin moves ever into the ordinaryworld, Hughes ever away from it; but both concur in a sort of realism, albeitthe one deflationary, the other inflationary.

Realism and ordinariness

Larkins deflationism leads Derek Walcott to comment on his sense ofGeorgian decay that is aware of Englands smallness.23 Larkin has a muse,says Walcott, and its name is Mediocrity. Larkin is a sort of retractable


Kipling, meaning presumably and surely correctly that Larkin is toEnglish decline what Kipling was to English glory. Nowhere is this sense ofsmallness, this realism of mediocrity, more in evidence than in Larkinsfamous concern for everyday, commonplace things. Home is so Sad is theobvious case in point here.

You can see how it was:Look at the pictures and the cutlery.The music in the piano stool. That vase.

In his book on what he regards as the demise of Englishness, Roger Scrutonargues that this well-known poem is about the enchantment of things.Home has its customs, its rituals, its special times and places. Or if it doesnot, it is so much the less a home, so much the less a place to look back uponin adulthood, when anger and rejection have intervened.24 But what issurely more at stake in Home is so Sad is not the enchantment of theeveryday objects of home something that Scruton thinks is character-istically English but, on the contrary, their disenchantment. What is atstake in other words is disappointment, diminishment. Very often especially in some of the later, more personal poems Larkins turn towardsthe everyday is in fact evidence of a pronounced disgust with the futility ofit; the sense in which the everyday marks the falling away of life itself; as ifhe is turning to it only to see how much he can stand.

To see this further, let us note that Larkin had been an adherent of theworks of Lawrence. What Larkin embraced in his mature work was perhapsa kind of inverse (but not exactly an anti-) Lawrentianism: to find life whereit really is not in sexuality or in the escape from civilised life but ineveryday, commonplace life itself. Perhaps there is actually more ofLawrence in Larkin than in Hughes. In Larkins Letters, late in 1949 therecomes a Lawrentian declaration that there is no need to think Larkin wouldlater have repudiated. Literature, Larkin writes to his friend J. B. Sutton, isactually something of a farce. The point, it seems, is rather to work upononeself, to get down to reality perhaps literature is a technology for doingthat. I search myself for illusions like a monkey looking for fleas.25 This isLarkins brand of realism. There is no such thing as life but only a life-force; we are all varyingly charged with it and that represents our energyand nothing we do or say will alter our voltage or wattage. Perhaps this isactually more like Nietzsche than Lawrence. As Larkin writes, he himselfhas none of Lawrences sense of a purity of the life-force. For him, the life-force is immoral. Its motor appears to be admiration: Everything called


good is what we like, envy, admire, want, thrill to.26 This, be it noted, is arather anti-cultural understanding of culture: what counts is simplyadmiration. A great book, a great man, are things a great many peoplegreatly admire.

What happens to this ideal in Larkin? Perhaps surprisingly, it is nowherereally repudiated. Rather, Larkins attitude is that of someone who hasbecome exhausted with it (one can become sickened with such a life-force).Larkins work upon himself led to disillusion, but there is no particularreason to think that he ever gave up the project itself as a regulatory idealfrom which to measure his own and a more general diminishment. Afterall, from early on in his life, Larkin recognised that life itself and its choiceswere gambles. Again in Lawrentian vein to Sutton: Never accept what youdont want. Keep refusing, & in time you may get what you do want. On theother hand you may end up with FUCK ALL.27 That was perhaps how itwas with him; to have gambled and to have ended up with fuck all thento have made the fuck all his very subject matter his endlessdisappointment: that he had gambled and lost; not got the girl, and soon. Now, there is an oddly inverted Lawrentian realism here, coming closeto self-deprecation certainly. It is the realism of Letter to a Friend AboutGirls:28 Everything proves we play in different leagues the mentality ofyoure great and Im not and I know it.

This sense of decline and mediocrity after great hope is endemic toLarkins voice. In Reference Back, from The Witsun Weddings,29 on playingover old records:

Truly, though our element is time,We are not suited to the long perspectivesOpen at each instant of our lives.They link us to our losses: worse,They show us what we have as it once was,Blindingly undiminished, just as thoughBy acting differently we could have kept it so.

What is at issue here is not least a question of access. It is as if, in apostcolonial world, even the scholarship boy does not have quite theexpected access to the enchanted life of power, importance, influence,or better to what the sociologist Edward Shils, in a celebrated article,simply labelled centrality, the sense of being at the centre of things, at thestill pivot of a turning world.30 What, then, is there left beyond an ethicsof realism about loss, a commitment to the exploration of the tyrannyof the ordinary in a small, inevitably diminished country: as in the


miserably comic lines of unspent childhood in I Remember, I Remember;invoking

the garden . . . where I did not inventBlinding theologies of flowers and fruits

and where Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.31 Or equally theoppressive sense of repetition in the tyranny of the ordinary in MrBleaney:32

I know his habits what time he came down,His preference for sauce to gravy, why

He kept on plugging at the four aways Likewise their yearly frame: the Frinton folkWho put him up for summer holidays,And Christmas at his sisters house in Stoke.

Now, to what is this realism of the everyday opposed? It is opposed ofcourse not least to everything that Hughes himself was to come to representfor Larkin; anything that smacks of enthusiasm, of portentousness orpretentiousness: the Lecturers, lispers,/ Losels, loblolly-men, louts ofToads.33 We have here, then, a praise of and even commitment to dullnessand the ordinary: to Sally Amis (in Born Yesterday),

In fact, may you be dull If that is what a skilledVigilant, flexibleUnemphasised, enthralledCatching of happiness is called.34

The Larkin of Poetry of Departures would want to be reprehensiblyperfect; to go

swagger the nut-strewn roadsCrouch in the focsleStubbly with goodness, ifIt werent so artificial

It is precisely the sense of fakery, the artificiality of that option, that makes itnot an option at all. According to this logic, just about all foreigners areartificial; best to admit the miseries of our own existence, and attempt tolive up to them, even if we do all actually hate home/ And having to bethere.


Ethopoetics

What we have here is less the expression of a particular attitude in versethan what could be described as the poetic shaping of an ethic of truth; or,to express things pretentiously, an ethopoesis of truth perhaps.35 Thepostcolonial element in Larkins work does not lie in being straightfor-wardly expressive of how he feels as a diminished Englishman in the post-war cultural climate. It is rather that Larkin produces an image of such apredicament in the form of a poetically implicated sense of truth. Poetry inthis sense at least should be seen less as a form of expression than as atechnical means for working upon the self; a way of transforming a certainperception of the truth in this case of ordinariness and the mundane world into ethos. Poetry is indeed the set of techniques that can gain access tothis truth, since it is not quite reflective of experience as such but is also a setof techniques for transforming a particular experience of the truth into amore general ethical experience.

As we have seen, at the heart of such an ethopoesis in Larkin, there is avery strong focus on the ordinary and the commonplace. For Larkin it is amoral duty not so much to remain what one is but to become, so to speak,more so; to dig deeper, without blanching at the task, into the essence ofwhat one is, without pretending to be anything else. This amounts almost toa morality in Larkin. It has the character not so much of a worldview asof an ordeal, the object of an ethical labour rather than the expression of agiven identity. Hence, little wonder that the name for this what one is inLarkin is, above all, work (Toads).36

Six days of the week it soilsWith its sickening poison Just for paying a few bills!Thats out of proportion.

If one does not actually become one of the poseurs so obviously despised byLarkin then this is because of the Toad that is right there inside oneself; theanalogue to the exterior Toad of work; the moral commitment to work andboring duty. Anything else would be weakness.

This makes Larkin arguably more interesting than either the reactionarynudge-winker depicted by Terry Eagleton or the anti-bullshitter view ofhim favoured by Christopher Hitchens. Of course Larkin was a politicalreactionary. But he was not exactly a national reactionary (that is areactionary who was straightforwardly expressive of particular reaction-ary national cultural tendencies), not least because he was also somethinglike in the sense highlighted by Gilles Deleuze an English empiricist for


whom the very idea of a national culture would be too much of anabstraction. Hence his refusal to countenance forms of escapism that takeoneself away from the sense of a belief in this world; the empiricist sense oftruth as something of this world and of no other, be it the world ofmysticism, illusion, religion, intellectualism or whatever.37 One gets thesense, then, that with Larkin, once the possibility of Lawrentian glory hadevaporated, what was left was not the straightforward relinquishment ofsuch an idea but a studied acceptance of the dignity of a certain quotidiannihilism, albeit one which was less an attitude than the object of a work.Hence the ubiquity in Larkin of what might be called the failed linesof flight of ordinary people in everyday life; the Bleaneys and others,the ordinary people who are blocked in certain ways but who go on inany case.

Death and immanence

One sees this too in Larkins obsession with the question of death; hardly anovel concern for a poet of course, but it is given a kind of empiricist twistin Larkin that is not quite nihilism more a refusal to lay claim to or tojudge in the name of any higher, superior or transcendent life. Larkinsdistinction in this context was to observe how death occurred as, so tospeak, part of everyday life itself. Death is not a transcendent power, but aninevitable slow machine that governs the course of our lives from within.There is nothing creative or interesting about the inevitability of death onthis model. Why was happiness not a possibility? If only because you knowthat you are going to die, and the people you love are going to die.38 Whatwe have here, as well as an ethopoetics of the commonplace, is what couldbe called an ethopoetics of annihilation; and one which entails an atheismnot as negativity but as belief. This is not the fiery, enthusiastic atheism of aRimbaud; it is the unassuming atheism of the man who entering a churchtakes off his cycle-clips in awkward reverence. And it is an atheism thatrecognises the more or less positive if more or less obsolete moralfunction of religion at least in its relation with death. Church Going,for instance, shows Larkins lack of belief yet his respect for the seriousnessof belief, If only that so many dead lie around.39 The serious atheist,however, needs to confront death without the garb of religion, butrecognising death for its emptiness and inevitability, as in Heads in theWomens Ward.40

Smiles are for youth. For old age comeDeaths terror and delirium.


And an understanding of life in general as a long decline towardsextinction, as in the Marvellian:41

Being braveLets no one off the grave.

The same effect is there in The Old Fools or Dockery and Son. In theLetters, Larkin refers to the actual moment of our extinction as being afribbling as the currents of life fray against the currents of death.42 We live,we die, and thats it: we need to keep a straight gaze upon the presence ofdeath within life.

And Hughes? He was from the perspective of Larkins side of thepolarity anyway precisely one of the loblolly men, the bullshitters thatLarkin himself mentions so dismissively in Toads. Andrew Motion, in hisbiography of Larkin, reports in this context a visit to Hull that Hughes hadmade. I was in the chair, providing a sophisticated, insincere, effete, andgold-watch-chained alternative to his primitive, forthright, virile, leather-jacketed persona. When Larkin later discovered that the universityphotographer had snapped them together on the podium, looking asdifferent as he described, he ordered a copy of the picture, framed it andhung it in his lavatory.43

And here is the key really. Hughess way of death is so to speaksymmetrical with, if in opposition to, Larkins own. Both are moving, infact, away from the same thing not from death itself but from illusions,which is to say from belief in something transcendental. For Larkindeath is something immanent and of this world. For Hughes death is anaspect of life itself. In each there is no room for anything that istranscendent, not just God but anything that is beyond the actualcircumstances of life, however those circumstances are to be conceived. InHughess Crow:

Who owns these scrawny little feet? Death.Who owns this bristly scorched-looking face? Death.Who owns these still-working lungs? Death.

In both writers, what is at stake in such contrasting, indeed opposing,ways could be described as the disenchantment of the ordinary: Larkinembraces such a disenchantment in a sort of becoming that bores everfurther into it, whilst Hughes re-locates reality elsewhere, beyond theordinary itself, in the surge of life and death and violence. And of course,for him, even so-called everyday life can be folded into such a vision; as one


can readily see from Birthday Letters, in the inferno of 9 Willow Streetwhere:44

Your dayWas twenty-four rungs of a fire-escapeHanging in ghastly swirls, over nothing,Reaching up towards nothing.What an airy Hell!

or in describing, again in Birthday Letters, the creative if malignant energiesreleased from the effect of somebody being twenty minutes late to take overthe baby-sitting.

Against intellect

Now what resources does Hughes draw upon to re-enchant the world if notintellectual resources? However, although Hughes may wrestle with Jungor shamanism, what he is seeking is an Ur-intellect, not the ariditiesof scholarship. As such, his is in fact an anti-intellectualist form ofre-enchantment, even a retreat from intellect; or at best the maverickintellectualism of his writings on Coleridge or Shakespeare, but alsoof the poetry itself with its reliance on a mythological synthesis ofGravesian goddess myth-mongering, ancient Egyptianism, Amerindiantrickster motifs, Jungology, shamanic allusions, alchemy, and laterthe theoretico-monarchalism of the endnotes to Rain-Charm for theDuchy.

One might be forgiven for regarding the presence of myth here not somuch as Ur-synthesis of Creation and Being but rather as an off-the-shelfsort of intellectual consumerism, a rag-bag of mythologies, melded together.But, if we were to adopt a principle of charity, we might say that whatHughes was escaping was perhaps more important than what he wasembracing. It was the same thing, albeit in a wholly almost comicallydifferent direction, as that of Larkin: the puffing-up of intellect assophistication, that is as separation from everyday life, as somethingtranscendent and superior to the immanent forces of this world. Hugheswas affirming, to be sure, a different sort of immanence of intellect, onebased on Creation itself rather than the do-it-yourself ethic of Larkin. Andwhen Hughes actually evokes intellect poetically it is, precisely, in terms ofCreation: it is intellect become brute nature, intellectualism as an instinct.For instance, the image of the scholar that appears in the uncollected poemTutorial where academic intellect attains the status of one of Hughessanimal poems:45


He is fat, this burst bearskin, but his mind is an electric mantisPlucking the heads and legs off words, the homunculi.

Larkins own scepticism towards intellectualism is well documented. It hasoften been taken for a very typically English sort of anti-intellectualism or atleast a very typically English ignorance of intellectual matters. It is certainlyrelated to that well-known ethos, but is a variation upon it, more of anescape from it than an aspect of it. The work of Barbara Everett has donemuch to disabuse Larkins readers of an over-simplistic view here. Everettsuggests, in the course of a brilliant analysis of Larkins Sympathy in WhiteMajor, that what we have in Larkin, instead, is the figure of an imbecile-de-genie. In England, after all, it is bad taste not to hide onessophistication, assuming one is unlucky enough to be blessed with any.And in this context, Larkins letters, especially the earlier ones, areenlightening. For they are full of intelligent literary comment of a fairlymodernist hue. Especially striking is Larkins love of painting, above all inthe letters to J. B. Sutton which dominate the 1940s: see the comments onMonet, Cezanne, Brueghel and Picasso.46 It seems, of course, that Larkinnever had a very high opinion of Picasso, but it is clear that this dislike was at least initially not that of an uninformed philistine.47 For Larkin, it isjust that ones intellectual commitments should be immanent to this world,not placed on some pedestal beyond everyday life. Hence for instance hisworkaday comment to the Paris Review (an interview laced with lugubriouscomedy) when asked about the poets that he had studied: Oh, for Christssake, one doesnt study poets! You read them, and think, thats marvellous,how is it done, could I do it?48

In short, there are varieties of anti-intellectualism and Hughes andLarkin evince different sorts, each rather at variance with what amountsarguably to the rather more unconsidered anti-intellectualism of the Englishhabitus; their respective attitudes towards intellectualism being, then,rather like variants from a central, perhaps less reflexive norm.

Generational polarity?

Where does a series of contrasts and convergences, such as this betweenHughes and Larkin, take us? The differences between Larkin and Hugheswere in part generational of course, or were sensed as such at least byelements of Larkins generation itself. This sense of generational belongingwas in part simply a matter of a specific, defining experience. And hereperhaps we need to appropriate the resources of a certain sociology ofressentiment to further our ends.


One of the most striking things to note from Larkins Letters is the extentto which the decade of his post-Oxford maturity, the 1950s, was both adefining cultural period and simultaneously a period of equally definingdeprivation. Indeed, it could be said that out of the 1950s swells an entireexperience of Englishness, even it seems for later generations. The 1950srepresent, in that sense, a kind of central case, as philosophers of sciencemight say, of the experience of English diminishment. Central here, indeed,is the question of a certain exhaustion with everything. If one were toattempt to characterise the fifties by a catch-word, wrote Stephen Spender,I think it would be Anti. It was a time of negation and reaction in whichwhatever was in part positive was, to a larger extent, negative againstsomething or other.49 It was a question really of either less or more, but notjust more of the same. Later, Hughes himself was to voice a certaindistanced respect for this attitude, seeing in it a scepticism about the bigideas and ambitions that had lead ultimately to warfare and barbarism; butnoting at the same time that he himself, in the context of the experience ofhis generation, wanted on the contrary to plunder the whole variegatedpanoply of available traditions.50

Of course to talk of generations may seem rather inapposite here. Hugheswas born in 1930 and Larkin only eight years before, in 1922. Yet thedifference is not numerical but precisely one of generational experience; thedifference of a generation that had lived through the war and one whichcame to maturity after it. James Wood is right to claim, in this context, thatthe generation that came to maturity in the late 1940s and 1950s was freerthan its pre-war predecessor.51 Comparing Larkins generation to that ofEvelyn Waugh, Wood observes that the later generation had far greaterexpressive freedom. Larkin uses that freedom too strenuously at least inhis letters says Wood, because that freedom was still new. But in hispoetry this freedom turns into a novelistic concern with the everydaywhich leads him to capture the demotics of provincial daily life combinedwith a sense of social resentment. A later generation that of Alan Bennett would survive to make this demotics nothing if not winsome; for theauthentic, original sense of resentment is one that belongs particularly toLarkins own generation. Indeed, there is a kind of structured conflict of thegenerations going on here. There is a relative freedom from previousrepressions but, as D. J. Taylor has shown, there is still a very strong sense ofclass position.52 And then there is the sense of what was, if anything, tobecome Larkins theme: as he put it himself deprivation.

It is all but impossible, in spite of the efforts of Blake Morrison andothers, really to capture the extent to which the deprivations of the late1940s and 1950s characterised both Larkins own generation and those not


least by reaction which followed. One needs certainly to stress thecontinuity between the war years and the post-war years, a continuitywhich coloured the essence of that generation coming to maturity in the late1940s and early 1950s. Richard Hoggart observes of this generation, even inthe 1980s, that there was still behind every dealing with money and things,the fear and hatred of waste. That old phrase youll pay for this. . . isjoined by its a shame to be so wasteful, fancy good things being thrownaway. . . I had to work hard for every penny Ive got and am not going tosquander it .53 Meat rationing, for example, did not end fully until 1955. Ilive meagrely, wrote Larkin to Sutton in October 1947 7 cigarettes and 2beers weekly, almost by ritual. These things are like pinches of incensethrown on the altars of the Gods of smoking and drinking just to avoid theexcess of abstinence, & any possible spiritual results54 Or there is thisaccount, again to Sutton, from early 1951: This weekend I went down tostay near Dublin with a chap who had to marry a girl he put up the pole onVE night . . . All his clothes were pretty ragged and when he left a bit ofcream cheese he wrapped it up in the silver paper & replaced it in the box.Coal is d8 a ton there & the weather was something awful. The house hasonly been built four years & there are mice in it already.55 Can it besurprising that these sorts of circumstance lead to an enhanced attentive-ness to the visceral circumstances of everyday life? In pre-war Orwell, forexample, these are conditions associated with the poor; in the late 1940s and1950s deprivation goes democratic; it becomes more or less universal.

But by deprivation as in the famous quote Deprivation is for me whatdaffodils were for Wordsworth56 Larkin appears to mean not so muchsimply poverty as, more generally, unhappiness and above all disappoint-ment that people havent got out of life what they felt it had to offer.No doubt, again, this is a matter of access. For part of the postcolonialexperience, in this context, was not only restricted access to centrality butalso a dilution of centrality; in short, too much access, the democratisationof access for everyone. This is a sociological experience here translated intopersonal terms. But in Larkins case it is also about an inability to takeadvantage of such democratic conditions; to become, like Hughes, a sort ofenvoy of poetry, teaching in the United States, giving poetry readings andso on.

Presumably we should take Larkin seriously when he declares that hehad envisaged himself leading the writers life: Id had visions of myselfwriting 500 words a day for six months, shoving the result off to the printerand going to live on the Cote dAzur, uninterrupted except for thecorrection of proofs. It didnt happen like that very frustrating.57 Or,as he expressed it in his 1963 introduction to Jill, the conditions of wartime


made for truer perspectives: At an age when self-importance would havebeen normal, events cut us ruthlessly down to size.58 So this personal senseof diminishment is mapped on to a national one; the one is like a relay to theother. And if this was true of the realities of wartime then there is no reasonto think that it would not also be true of the atmosphere of postcolonialEngland after the war.

As for class, Larkin always repudiated that interpretation. He refused,quite understandably, to be identified with John Kemp, the working-classhero of Jill, insisting again quite understandably that class as such wasnot the issue. You see nobody had anything in those days, in the war.Everybody wore the same utility clothes. There was one kind of jacket, onekind of trousers; no cars; one bottle of wine a term. The distinctions betweendifferent classes of undergraduates were really pruned back.59 Larkin wasright to claim that Jill was not a novel about working-class experience. Butthat is not to say the experiences documented in Larkins work are notrelated to class issues at all. In a brilliant and neglected essay on themoment of the angry young men in particular Amis and Osborne C.Wright Mills situated the literature of the period in England in terms of thecomplacencies of provincialism. And provincialism here seemed, to Mills,to have as much to do with ones class location as it had to do withgeography. The complacent young men are symptoms of the collapse ofthe established pattern and of gentlemanly cultural aspiration and also ofsuch proletarian patterns and aspirations as have prevailed; in otherwords they are the expressions of white-collar aspirations and theirdisappointments. Unable to adopt the culture of the gentleman andindifferent to the questions of labour, these writers, says Mills, are theinternal emigrants of Great Britain.60

But there was more to this attitude too. For it did not take long for thedisappointment in ones own hopes to turn into resentment at the chancesof others. It is to Larkins credit that he turned this to genuine humour Sexual intercourse began in 1963 whereas contemporaries such as Amiscould be said to have turned it rather to cynicism, or to reaction disguised ashumour. The resentment towards the young is in fact less about class thanabout generations. Or rather one might say that generational conflict is itselfa form of class conflict. Even gender conflict would come under thisheading; for Larkins infamous misogyny was itself assuredly an aspectof generational conflict not perhaps in the literal sense of an entireyounger generation against an elder generation but in the sense of theresentment towards the social type that is perceived to be about to inheritthe future; since, for Larkin anyway, the future is effeminate if not definitelyfemale.


The future is also one of mass culture. Who are the targets of Larkinsmost forcefully, if more often than not humorously, expressed resentments?The young and their freedoms certainly: And the young folk, all indulgingin healthy mixed activities.61 But also the young and their opportunities.Writing to D. J. Enright in April 1970, Larkins complaint is against themassification of education: No doubt the Seventies will see the compre-hensivisation [sic] of the universities in the interests of mass education, and. . . I am sure this will put the emphasis on quantity rather than quality.62

But in fact it is worth noting that Larkin argues against the pessimism ofEnright here. His is really a fatalism about the much bigger process; notjust the quantitative increase in student numbers but the democratisation ofeducation itself. It is voice of the scholarship boy again, bemoaning the factof too much access; and it is the postcolonial situation of the weak inheritingthe earth. For Larkin, the problem is not particularly that universities willsuffer but that society will succumb to the laxities of a more libertarian,democratic ethos.

Larkins contempt for the culture of mass demand can certainly be linkedto his generational experience. The members of Larkins own generationwere certainly more than just a mere collective fact but actually,conditioned by their wartime experience, came close to being, inMannheims terms, a concrete social group; a generation, anyway, witha specific range of potential experience, predisposing them for a certaincharacteristic mode of thought and experience, and a characteristic type ofhistorically relevant action.63 What Larkin loathed was the undoing of thislimited world of historically relevant action which seems to have markedhis own peers. It was in fact a contempt which seems to have been as muchaesthetic as moral. To Kingsley Amis, in October 1979, Larkin wrote intypically Blimpish vein: God how I hate news cant watch it to see theseawful shits marching or picketing or saying the maer wi noo be referredback to thu Naional Exeuive is too much for me.64 This was certainlynostalgic, if in a grim sort of way. As he remarked in 1974, praising thehard-working virtues of the library and other staff at the Library ofUniversity College, Leicester, during the early 1950s: It certainly did notoccur to me that I had belonged to an academic community of a kind soonto be superseded but with virtues that in time would seem precious.65

A further area of evidence for this attitude comes by way of the politics ofthe language itself, an obsession certainly more evident, pedagogicallyspeaking, in Amis than in Larkin. Although, as Deborah Cameron hasshown in her book Verbal Hygiene, the discourse on the invariably parlous state of the language certainly predates the 1950s, that era was certainlyexemplary here in witnessing the massive expansion of standard English


outward, so to speak, to include more and more provincial forms.66 Hence,in Amis at least, the obsession with good usage if only by way of a reactionto the seemingly limitless expansion of the boundaries of socially acceptablespeech. Just as English became a world language so, for Amis, it becameabove all an American language, with its pernicious but pervasivepreference for the abstract over the concrete and the affectations of itsliterature that just make the Englishman want to say Come off it!67 Thissensibility was undoubtedly at the heart of Amiss own evident loathing ofHughes, as expressed in his own Letters to Larkin and others, and whichseems to have been far more vitriolic, and certainly less saturated incomedy, than that of Larkin himself.68

Yet such suspicion was not simply a question of generation againstgeneration. Rather the problem may have been with the fact that Hughesdid not even belong to a generation in the sense that Larkin and Amisbelonged to one. The massification of education had led to a kind of culturaldiaspora. Hughes himself had not been averse to teaching in America. Andhis own linguistic becoming was overtly different from that of Larkin orAmis. It led him, rather, into a sort of mysticism of language which, thoughunquestionably conservative, was unlike that of Larkin in its attempt to finda sort of primitive language of myth or being beyond the discourses ofeveryday life. Where Larkins generation went to the surface, Hughes wentto the depths. In any case, at the moment when English began to take offmore than ever, not just as a national and colonial language but as a worldlanguage, then so do we witness all the more sharply, and especiallyamongst Larkins immediate post-war generation, the perception ofsmallness and decline within English cultural experience itself. There is,in short, a postcolonial experience in the domain of language too.

Poetry and sovereignty

Poetry, as a linguistic form, may have been specifically tied to thisexperience. One way in which this is so lies, if our discussion at this pointmay take a somewhat more tentative turn, in the connection of poetry withsovereignty; that sense almost a mystical sense of an ultimate authoritythat gives, say, a nation its uniqueness, integrity and identity. It is a link thatboth Larkin and Hughes professed to feel.

Perhaps there is indeed a certain symmetry between these two ideals.Poetry, like sovereignty, is concentration, a condensation of singularity. Apoem might be described as a concentration of power in language; asovereign is a concentration of power itself within a network power. Apoem is a pure singularity; a sovereign is, as Carl Schmitt would have it, the


one who decrees the singular state of exception. Just as political sovereigntyis paradoxical in so far as it is what decides upon the state of exception tothe juridical order yet is also defined by that juridical order itself, so poetryis poetic language, condensed language, a form of language that isreflection upon language itself, both a form of language and a form thatdeliberately holds language itself in suspension, that is, beyond ordinarylanguage. Hence, again, the link between poetry and sovereignty, becausesovereignty alludes to a world that traverses another kind of sense to ourown; not a mystical otherness but the state of exception that gets to theheart of things, yet that is at the origin of the legitimacy and normality of theeveryday world.

Such reflections obviously have to be provisional if not downrightspeculative. Yet it is indeed striking the extent to which poets associatedwith a national culture, such as Larkin and Hughes themselves, have beendrawn to this question of sovereignty. If for each the Godhead was a matterof immanence, political authority was certainly of a transcendent order.Hence the flavour of reaction that is so easy to detect in each. For each,sovereignty resided or should reside specifically in royalty. Perhapsroyal sovereigns and poets are as one in having at least putative access tosome oracular realm of experience that is more fundamental, more mythicaleven than tradition. Larkin seems to be aiming for this idea when he saysthat poetry has a necessary relation to sovereignty;69 and Hughes attemptsto manufacture an entire mythological model of such a relation (perhapswith more of the mystique, though, of Tinguely than Levi-Strauss) in hisRain-Charm for the Duchy poems.

The link is not entirely fanciful. Marcel Detienne has explained how inancient Greece the poet possessed a kind of sovereign knowledge that wasclose to that of the gods: Like mantic knowledge, the knowledge of theseinspired poets was a form of divinatory omniscience . . . it was knowledgeof all things that were, things to come, and things past .70 Such oracularknowledge clearly made the poet useful to the earthly sovereign as well;having a theogonic role to laud the services of the king by demonstratingthe divinity or ineluctability of his emergence.

On the other hand the parallel between poetic discourse and sovereigntysoon became, after such grand beginnings, quite limited. In fact, such atheogonic function found its culmination in Hesiod. Here the poetsfunction was above all to secure sovereignty: by reciting the myth ofemergence, he collaborated directly in setting the world to order.71 But thefall of the poet from the position of direct functionary of sovereignty was allbut coterminous with this moment. For, as Detienne shows, Hesiod was notreally just the culmination but the swansong of the idea. Even by Pindars


time, the link between the poet and the actual sovereign had been dilutedsimply to that of singing the praises of the virtues of kings.

One can add to this sense of limitation the simple observation thatboth sovereignty and the orality that is often held to be at the essenceof poetry are rather defunct ideals in modern democratically legitimatedsocial formations with their excesses of technologically guided formsof communication. The names of Foucault or Bakhtin might be ofrelevance here. As Foucault observed, our societies long ago cut off thekings head in terms of their relations of power; and, as the followers ofMikhail Bakhtin might reasonably say, poetry at least in its lyric form isnot the primary of literary models in an era of heteroglossia and novelisticdiscourses that scarcely come from any particular, sovereign point of view.Perhaps. But the fact remains that poetry and sovereignty are stillconceivably connected, for these very reasons, at least as ideals oflegitimation.

In England this has been especially so. And this not only becauseEnglands national genre is surely its poetry and not its novels Englishness is, so to speak, housed very prominently in its poetry. It isalso because, in England, there are also quite tangible links between poetryand sovereignty, specifically in the designation of the position of poetlaureate. There is an interesting history that could be recounted here.Although court poets date from at least Anglo-Saxon times, and althoughthere was a laureate tradition from at least the time of Spenser, the firstmore or less official poet laureate was Dryden, named in 1668. According toBroadus, Drydens duties, like those of latter-day laureates, were not veryspecific, consisting, rather, of praising the king to the public in variousways.72

In short, the very idea of a laureate is a modern one owing as little toPindar as it does to Hesiod in so far as it is connected to sovereignty, ifconnected at all, only by way of the idea of the public. It is not just aboutsinging the praises of royalty to royalty or the royal circle. In that sense, thelink with sovereignty is delicate at best. Whereas in previous times the roleof the versificator Regis was confined to the Court, the modern laureateaddresses the sovereign in the context of a public. This was something thatLarkin felt as a loss and which Hughes, it seems, felt as something like anopportunity. Larkin, as we know, specifically equated sovereignty andpoetry and for this very fact his reasons for rejecting the laureateship arefascinating. For in their very homely way these reasons, which seem torelate only to himself, point to a crisis of sovereignty in Britain, indeed adecline in its certitude; the slow diminishment of sovereignty, we might say.But the publicity that anything to do with the Palace gets these days,


Larkin said, is so fierce, it must be really more of an ordeal than anhonour.73

For Larkin, then, sovereignty had been all but reduced to its location inthe public the masses so that unless he was to be a sort of Walt Whitmansinging the sovereignty of democracy, one could say that for himsovereignty as an ideal had become more or less bankrupt. Royalty hadbecome subordinated to publicity. In turning down the laureateship, Larkinis acknowledging the weakening of the link between poetry andsovereignty and thus, in effect, acknowledging the diminution of themystical ideal of sovereignty itself. Hughes, we know, took a differentcourse and accepted the challenge of attempting, as he saw it, to reconnectthem.

But in fact this sense of diminishment seems all the more strikingprecisely in so far as Hughes, himself to become poet laureate, attemptedto revitalise the role into a kind of mythological status that it had al-most certainly never possessed. On the one hand, then, the realism andresignation of Larkin; on the other, Hughess attempt at the re-enchant-ment of sovereignty; in between, the inertia-like persistence of a kind ofaddled sovereignty, existing only in the diminished, rather empty time ofthe actual postcolonial national predicament. In Larkin, a situation in whichsovereignty is nostalgia mixed with pragmatism; in Hughes, a situation inwhich sovereignty has become mythical (Pike in ponds as deep asEngland), yet and precisely as such arguably vacuous.

In fact, on becoming poet laureate it seemed less as if Hughes wasfulfilling a given role, or simply giving poetic expression to an existingsense of national sovereignty, than as if he was inventing a novel, perhapshybrid, kind of poetic sovereignty a becoming, as it were, in whichpoetry and sovereignty would meet as a kind of composite term. ThisHughesian form of poetic becoming was, then, as much an escape fromcertain kinds of in Hughess view disenchanted national existence as itwas an attempt to express some national essence that pre-existed it. Butelements of it were also bound to seem absurd and it is uncertain whetheranyone took Hughess poetic musings on royalty expressed most fully inthe elaborate apparatus of the Rain-Charm endnotes quite as seriously ashe did. What could be interpreted as Hughess heroic failure to restoresomething both poets regarded as the organic link that should operatebetween poetry and sovereignty only shows the wisdom of Larkinsrecognition that being now broken it was not worth the trouble ofattempting to redefine it.

Interestingly, the ideal of transcendence for how can the notion ofsovereignty entail anything else? appears in both precisely at the level of


power. In each, it is as if the field of power is granted the final determiningrole of folding in the immanence that makes up the rest of earthly existence,whether conceived as Creation or as the commonplaces of provinciality.Sovereignty puts the world in its place, and existence whether conceivedas turbulence or melancholy in order. Beyond this, Larkin and Hughes infact possessed in common only the coherence of what each rejected. Withinthe work of each there was a certain logic whereby they both rejectedanything transcendent, anything not of this world. And hence common toboth was the will to capture albeit in polarised ways the status of thisworld as immanence, without apology and even in Hughess case withoutillusion; for Larkin, without the illusion of comforts of belief, for Hughes,without the illusions generated by meliorist rationalist complacencies. Boththus embraced a certain kind of poetic empiricism, and a certain sense ofthe realism of things as they are. However, their sense of what constitutedthe real was very different, each of course perceiving things within thelimits of, on the one hand, those very particular conditions provided bytheir own personal and generational experience and, on the other, the stateof contemporary poetic discourse as each was to find it.74

Notes

1 Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters (London: Faber, 1998), 49.2 Philip Larkin, Required Writing (London: Faber, 1983), 75.3 Nikolaus Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art (1956; Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1993), 24.4 Ibid., 166.5 D. J. Taylor, After the War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 294.6 Quoted in Taylor, After the War, 13.7 Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, ed. A. Thwaite (London: Faber, 1988), 171.8 Tom Nairn, The Enchanted Glass (London: Verso, 1988), 276.9 Aside from the importance generally of moral factors, Hume emphasised the

role of styles of government in the formation of national character (OfNational Characters, in Essays: Moral, Political, Literary (Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1985), 197); see also the comments of Perry Anderson, FernandBraudel and National Identity, in A Zone of Engagement (London: Verso, 1992),261.

10 Derek Walcott, What the Twilight Said (London: Faber, 1998).11 Stanley Cavell, The Uncanniness of the Ordinary, in In Quest of the Ordinary:

Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988),171.

12 Pevsner, Englishness of English Art, 31.13 Larkin, Required Writing, 67.


14 Ibid., 545.15 Compare Christopher Hitchens on the links between Orwell and Larkin: It

would be impossible to prove this, but there is something about Englishness,especially as this quality is inscribed upon the landscape and in the ancienttowns, that both lends itself to melancholy and pessimism, and borrows fromthese (Orwells Victory (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 86).

16 Larkin, Collected Poems, 104.17 Philip Larkin, The Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, ed. A. Thwaite (London:

Faber, 1992), 248.18 Craig Robinson, Ted Hughes as Shepherd of Being (London: Macmillan, 1989).19 Keith Sagar, Hughes and Landscape, in Sagar (ed.), The Achievement of Ted

Hughes (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 1983.20 Ted Hughes, New Selected Poems (London: Faber, 1974), 190.21 Hughes, quoted in Neil Corchoran, English Poetry Since 1940 (London:

Longman, 1993), 114.22 Walcott, What the Twilight Said, 179.23 Ibid., 153.24 Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy (London: Chatto, 2002), 13.25 Larkin, Selected Letters, 154.26 Ibid., 154.27 Ibid., 157.28 Larkin, Collected Poems, 1223.29 Ibid., 106.30 Edward Shils, Charisma, Order and Status, American Sociological Review, 30:2

(1965), 199213.31 Larkin, Collected Poems, 812.32 Ibid., 102.33 Ibid., 89.34 Ibid., 84.35 Michel Foucault, Ethics: Essential Works, vol. 1, ed. P. Rabinow (Harmonds-

worth: Penguin, 2000), 209.36 Larkin, Collected Poems, 89.37 Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Essays: Critical and Clinical, trans. D. Smith and M. Greco

(London: Verso, 1997), 86. Andrew Swarbrick attempts to reconcile thesymbolist and empiricist moments in Larkin in his Out of Reach: The Poetry ofPhilip Larkin (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995).

38 Larkin, Required Writing, 66.39 Larkin, Collected Poems, 98.40 Ibid., 194.41 Ibid., 2089.42 Larkin, Selected Letters, 220.43 Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writers Life (London: Faber and Faber, 1993),

329; and compare Larkin, Selected Letters, 525.44 Hughes, Birthday Letters, 71.


45 Hughes, New Selected Poems, 49.46 Larkin, Selected Letters, 138.47 Later on Larkin rather characteristically declares that Louis Armstrong is of

greater cultural importance than Picasso (Selected Letters, 443).48 Larkin, Required Writing, 67.49 Stephen Spender, The Thirties and After (London: Fontana, 1978), 155.50 See the interview with Hughes in Sagar, Achievement of Ted Hughes.51 James Wood, review of The Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, Guardian, 27 October

1992.52 Taylor, After the War, 656.53 Quoted in Peter Hennessey, Never Again: Britain 194551 (London: Cape, 1993),

3089.54 Larkin, Selected Letters, 141.55 Ibid., 169.56 Larkin, Required Writing, 47.57 Ibid., 49.58 Philip Larkin, Jill (1946; London: Faber, 1975), 12.59 Larkin, Required Writing, 50.60 C. Wright Mills, The Complacent Young Men, in Power, Politics and People

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 391.61 Larkin, Selected Letters, 248.62 Ibid., 42930.63 Karl Mannheim, The Problem of Generations, in Essays on the Sociology of

Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1952), 29091.64 Larkin, Selected Letters, 609.65 Larkin, Required Writing, 39.66 Deborah Cameron, Verbal Hygiene (London: Routledge, 1995).67 Kingsley Amis, The Kings English (London: Collins, 1998), 1112.68 Kingsley Amis, The Letters of Kingsley Amis, ed. Z. Leader (London: Collins,

1997), 680, 732, 944, 949.69 Larkin, Required Writing, 75.70 Marcel Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Ancient Greece (1967; New York: Zone,

1996), 423.71 Ibid., 445.72 Edmund Broadus, The Laureateship (Oxford: Clarendon, 1921).73 Larkin, Required Writing, 75.74 My thanks to Graham Burchell, Joanna Jellinek, Greg McLennan and Judith

Osborne for help on versions of this article.


Documents

Thomas Osborne . The Ordinariness of the Archive