3. Writing about Time
3.3. Time as Space
The central motif of Larkin’s first mature collection of poems, The Less Deceived, is the relationship between experience, text and meaning in a variety of contexts. This is what Larkin starts with and returns to in this book, which was published in the same year as the
“Statement” (1955). The poems (and also the volume as a coherent text) provide ample evidence that although Larkin thought of his responsibility to experience as a guiding principle, he also doubted that it could serve as an organizing and constructive force in poetry.
Facing and representing this paradox played a central role in the unexpected success of The Less Deceived.
In this volume the most important experience to be transferred into the verbal form of poetry is the passing of time. In some of the central poems he transformed the experience of time into metaphors of space, a method he kept on using in his later poetry.1 This is sometimes analogous with the representation of time units, with the difference that when time is envisioned as space, it is frequently indivisible. Such poems are typically those in which Larkin, overtly or covertly, applies the technique of photography. In some other cases (most spectacularly in the poems about train journeys) visible continuity in space is constructed as a metaphor of time.
3.3.1. Photography and the Past
The opening poem of The Less Deceived is “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album”
(CP 71-72). It is easy to find this position symbolic: this is the first significant volume of the central figure of the Movement, which has itself been characterized as “creative photography”
(Kuby 154). On the other hand, Andrew Motion has pointed out Larkin’s ambivalent attitude:
although this poem can really be read as a prototype of Movement verse, it also alludes to its limits (Philip Larkin. Contemporary Writers ser. 82-84). This duality can particularly be seen in these lines:
1 This method strengthened the symbolism of some parts of the poems. In “The Rhetoric of Temporality” Paul de Man writes that in a symbol (in contrast with allegories) the connection between reality and its representation is spatial rather than temporal. Andrew Motion draws attention to the typically symbolic function of the image of
“sand-clouds” in “Dockery and Son”, an image that has “no precise connection with the poem’s dominant pattern of images”. Motion adds that “they fleetingly fulfil the function that Yeats expected of symbolism”
(Philip Larkin. Contemporary Writers ser. 14). As I mentioned previously, a further example of the same symbolism is the image in the last two lines of “The Whitsun Weddings”.
But O, photography! as no art is, Faithful and disappointing!
This is what Movement poetry can also become: “faithful” but “disappointing”, which latter suggests something discouraging and deceptive at the same time. It will be noticed that the reference to “disappointment” is both to the experience represented by photography and the photos themselves (also as metonymies of art).
The text is a symbolic love poem; however, its symbolism is concealed by the realism of descriptive details, the mimetic level of the text and its referential language. Larkin wrote it to Winifred Arnott, the woman he was in love with in Belfast, and if one reads it in the context of his letters to her, it is also the basic text of a long discourse of love.2 Its sexual symbols are overt: the woman offers her own self by letting him have the album (“At last you yielded up the album”); the male speaker first wants to satisfy his eyes (“My swivel eye hungers from pose to pose”); then, jealously, he separates her from his rivals (“Not quite your class, I’d say, dear, on the whole”). The photographs he is watching make him believe (either by convincing him or deceiving him) that the experience of possessing the woman is a real one:
That this is a real girl in a real place,
In every sense empirically true!
Larkin’s two major values meet. Beauty has become true, not unlike in Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and, more significantly, in “The Eve of St. Agnes” (a poem that Larkin found particularly interesting), where sexual intercourse signifies beauty transformed into truth.
But before the reader of this poem could be enchanted by the charm of symbolic love-making, s/he has to realize that this is only one half of what could be called the core of the text. Its literal meaning, on the other hand, is that the male desire represented here is satisfied only symbolically, only in the speaker’s imagination. The artistic value of the poem is based upon the tension between these two latent meanings. This is corroborated by another duality:
that between personality and impersonality, the intricate mask technique of the text. The mask
2 It would be out place here to enter the debate as to whether private letters should be treated as parts of a writer’s life work. My position is this: once they have been published we cannot ignore them.
is not only that of a jealous person: it is also that of the learned man of letters. Intertextuality shapes the meaning.
The poem recalls Cecil Day Lewis’s “The Album” both in its title and through its subject matter. Larkin’s pleasure and Schadenfreude (which he felt on learning that somebody thought his poem superior to Day Lewis’s) expressed in a letter to Winifred (SL 300) provides evidence that he knew his older fellow-poet’s work. As the situation in the two poems is basically the same, Larkin’s text can also be read as a provocative and witty response to the previous one. In Day Lewis the representation of the everyday situation is only a starting point to achieve the surrealism of the closing stanza, where the possession of the woman by the man is complete; his desire is fulfilled, since he is offered even her past, her whole personal history:
I close the book,
But the past slides out of its leaves to haunt me And it seems, wherever I look,
Phantoms of irreclaimable happiness taunt me.
Then I see her, petalled in new-blown hours, Beside me – ‘All you love most there
Has blossomed again,’ she murmurs, ‘all that you missed there Has grown to be yours.
(Poems of C. Day Lewis 125)
The present has grown out of the past organically. The “yielding” in the last line of Day Lewis’s poem becomes a symbolic beginning in Larkin: “At last you yielded up the album”.
But the closure of the poem, in poignant contrast with Day Lewis’s, suggests that no personal past can be possessed by another subject:
So I am left
………
… to condense,
In short, a past that no one now can share, No matter whose your future; calm and dry,
It holds you like a heaven, and you lie Unvariably lovely there,
Smaller and clearer as the years go by.
In poetry there is only one way for a man to completely contain a female subject: by constructing her as a figure and making her speak. (The phrasing “making her speak”, of course, is imprecise: in most cases it is arguably the implied poet who “speaks” through the mask of the persona.) It is no accident that the second poem of The Less Deceived is
“Wedding Wind”. The poem representing the passing of time in the artificial spaces created by photography is followed by a text constructing both the idyll of a static space and the feeling of terror. Arranging some of the poems in pairs in a book of poetry is a frequent editing principle, since in this way the two texts, read together, can form further contingencies of meaning. Yeats used this device frequently: some “pairs” of poems complementing each other (and also forming contrasts) are “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” and “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” in The Wild Swans at Coole, or “The Second Coming” and “A Prayer for my Daughter” in Michael Robartes and the Dancer. Larkin’s “Lines…” and
“Wedding Wind” are also complementary pieces. The speaker in the former is a man, while the latter constructs a female voice; from the point of view of the implied poet the first is based on desire, the second on symbolic possession. Beauty becoming truth proves to be illusion (self-deception) in “Lines…”; in “Wedding Wind”, the truth in the situation is discovered by a female voice.
Carol Ann Duffy’s “Before You Were Mine” represents this voice when she re-writes the two male poets’ (Day Lewis’s and Larkin’s) texts:
The decade ahead of my loud, possessive yell was the best one, eh?
I remember my hands in those high-heeled red shoes, relics, and now your ghost clatters towards me over George Square till I see you, clear as scent, under the tree,
with its lights, and whose small bites on your neck, sweetheart?
Cha cha cha! You’d teach me the steps on the way home from Mass,
stamping stars from the wrong pavement. Even then I wanted the bold girl winking in Portobello, somewhere in Scotland, before I was born. That glamorous love lasts where you sparkle and waltz and laugh before you were mine.
(Mean Time 13)
As I wrote in Chapter 2.2, in the closure of his poem Larkin uses an idiom that is normally used in reference to the dead, demonstrating that writing (a temporal event) is only possible through metaphors of death. Larkin’s young lady is “Smaller and clearer” as time is passing;
Duffy’s woman is “clear as scent”. Photography stops time and transforms the moment either into beauty or into truth. Duffy lets her protagonist in the picture (dead now) dance and laugh, but this dynamism is still closed into the moment. The only way to preserve an experience from the past is by re-constructing it as a photograph; this is how Duffy’s text reads Larkin’s.
Whereas in “Lines…” the speaker creates a vision of another person’s past, the speaker in “I Remember, I Remember” (CP 81-82) is in search of his own personal past, his childhood self. The experience represented in the poem comes all of a sudden:
Coming up England by a different line For once, early in the cold new year,
We stopped, and, watching men with number-plates Sprint down the platform to familiar gates,
‘Why, Coventry!’ I exclaimed. ‘I was born here.’
As can be seen in the first line, the character in the poem has chosen an unusual route, and, completely unexpectedly for him, the train calls at his birth-place, Coventry. Experience comes with an elemental power; this is signified in a threefold way by the instinctive gesture with which the speaker leans out of the window, the dialect word (“squinnied”), and the strenuous effort to possess the place as his own again, even though only for a minute:
I leant far out, and squinnied for a sign
That this was still the town that had been ‘mine’
So long, but found I wasn’t even clear Which side was which.
The train, however, leaves the station, and this separates the experience from its later contemplation:
. . . A whistle went:
Things moved. I sat back, staring at my boots.
These lines introduce the act of remembering, and at this point the poem becomes one of Larkin’s most ironic and parodistic pieces: it holds up a distorting mirror to nostalgic poems recalling the poet’s childhood.3 “Things moved”, in two senses: the train departs, and the target of remembering also moves away from the thinking and speaking subject. Hugh Underhill suggests that the poem is about disillusionment and the refusal to deceive oneself:
Nostalgia literally means, after all, a longing to return home, and it is abundantly clear from ‘I Remember, I Remember’, or the poem ‘Home is so Sad’, that Larkin experiences no such longing. All attempts to keep the past alive, every ‘Reference Back’, ‘link us to our losses’ in a way he finds unbearable, and foster the delusion that things might have been other than they are, that there might really have been a choice of departures. (187)
All clichés appear in a negative form, beginning with the bitter cynicism of the phrase “my childhood was unspent”:
Our garden first: where I did not invent Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits, And wasn’t spoken to by an old hat.
The reader might wonder why the implied poet is speaking about the lack of experience rather than experience itself. There is an increasing feeling that this is an “anti-poem”, until we reach the last line:
‘You look as if you wished the place in Hell,’
3 More concretely, it is a parody of Thomas Hood’s once popular poem with the same title.
My friend said, ‘judging from your face.’ ‘Oh well, I suppose it’s not the place’s fault,’ I said.
‘Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.’
Although the last line is a puzzling aphorism, and is therefore open to a number of readings, one possible interpretation is this: the absence of experience is also an experience, and a poem can also be born out of that.
“I Remember, I Remember” is a dramatic lyric in which the poet distances his confession and self-portrait by constructing a dramatic situation. The structure that I have pointed out in “Coming” (Chapter 2.4) and “Church Going” (Chapter 2.6), the distinction between an experience and its elaboration, can also be observed here. Since the persona refuses to deceive himself with the illusion of nostalgia, what he remembers is absence. This is transferred into the poem, where the railway line represents the merciless continuity of time. But the future is also nothingness, personal extinction. The place of birth is left behind, signifying the narrow limits of human choices, like the poster in “Sunny Prestatyn”. Matt Simpson refers to the similarity between the two poems: “Prestatyn is a direction untaken, an unfulfilled promise (like the promises in ‘I Remember, I Remember’’s unspent childhood); it is also a sunny image set in stark contrast to the functional dreariness of the railway station it is urging to get away from” (177). The poster in “Sunny Prestatyn” is as deceptive as the nostalgia evoked by catching sight of our birthplace. Images of childhood are metaphors of time, but also places of delusion.
The Whitsun Weddings shows in even sharper focus the problem of temporal and spatial relations; one of the central themes is distance, which the persona attempts to bridge.
Andrew Swarbrick comments: “After the self-absorption of The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings expresses a yearning for the self’s absorption in otherness” (121). The novelty of the new volume can clearly be seen in a comparison between the closing poem of The Less Deceived, “At Grass” (CP 29-30), and the opening text of The Whitsun Weddings, “Here” (CP 136-37).
3.3.2. There and Here
“At Grass” was based on a documentary film about retired racehorses. Although there is no clear indication in the text that the speaker is watching a film, it is easy to see Larkin’s camera technique in stanza 1, as he approaches the horses gradually, and then shows them one by one.
Apart from imitating the movement of a camera and following in the wake of 18th and 19th century landscape poetry, this stanza is also self-reflective: the way the poet is using experience to form a text is also a part of the poem. The implied poet is detached from the horses, but he makes efforts to bridge the gap by finding a meaning in the experience. A partial failure of these efforts is suggested by the last line of stanza 1, where a racehorse
“stands anonymous”.
The speaker wants to find the lost names of the creatures he is describing. To achieve this he constructs images of the past, and thus the text becomes nostalgic. The question for him is whether he can understand the experience of seeing the horses, or, to put it another way: is he able to communicate with these animals? He asks if they think of what he himself has in mind: “Do memories plague their ears like flies? / They shake their heads” (lines 19-20). This is a characteristically Larkinesque pun: the horses shake their heads not only because of the flies mentioned in the vehicle of the simile, but also as a reply to the speaker’s question. The meaning of the horses is a past experience, but now they live in a non-verbal world, without the names they used to have. The vision that it creates is not that of unhappiness, it is rather an image of non-human idyll. The implied poet cannot find the names, he can only guess the essence of the experience represented in the text (“seeming to look on”, “gallop for what must be joy”), and suggests that he can only write about the absence, rather than the presence of something. This missing “something” in this particular poem is the communication between humans and animals.
The speaker of “Here” reveals the same position as the persona of “At Grass”: that of the passive observer. Both follow the convention of classic landscape poetry: “At Grass”
starts with a distant view to end with close-ups representing the intimacy that the speaker discerns in the community of retired race horses; “Here” first goes in the opposite order, then arrives in a place of absence. (The description is that of Hull, as the phrase “slave museum”
suggests in line 20, with its reference to the museum erected to commemorate the political fight of William Wilberforce.) The differences between the two poems are telling. Whereas in
“At Grass” the implied poet tries to bridge the distance from the position of a person watching a film, the speaker of “Here” is a traveller who explores the city and notices minor details. He
never becomes a part of the crowd, but seems to know it as thoroughly as he knows the buildings. The middle part of the poem is based on juxtaposition; more accurately, on an inventory whose elements form a harmonious whole:
A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling Where only salesmen and relations come Within a terminate and fishy-smelling
Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum, Tattoo-shops, consulates, grim head-scarfed wives;
As the title suggests, this is a poem of Dasein, but the word “here” refers to something that the speaker encounters on leaving the city:
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.
The image of nothingness appears in the same situation as it does in other poems where the persona looks out of the window: “Wants”, “High Windows” and “Sad Steps”. There exists another world in Larkin’s “universe”, which (as Andrew Motion puts it) is “both ‘Here’ and nowhere, and attainable only in imagination, not in fact” (Philip Larkin. Contemporary Writers ser. 80). Depicting the landscape becomes meaningful as the speaker leaves the world with numerous details behind to arrive in another world where details do not exist. This transgression is essentially the same as the sudden shift between two spheres in “Days”. In that poem the long series of time units is contrasted with the indivisibility of time in death; in
The image of nothingness appears in the same situation as it does in other poems where the persona looks out of the window: “Wants”, “High Windows” and “Sad Steps”. There exists another world in Larkin’s “universe”, which (as Andrew Motion puts it) is “both ‘Here’ and nowhere, and attainable only in imagination, not in fact” (Philip Larkin. Contemporary Writers ser. 80). Depicting the landscape becomes meaningful as the speaker leaves the world with numerous details behind to arrive in another world where details do not exist. This transgression is essentially the same as the sudden shift between two spheres in “Days”. In that poem the long series of time units is contrasted with the indivisibility of time in death; in