When interviewed by Melvyn Bragg on television recently, Alan Bennett described the poetry of WH Auden as “too difficult” to be bothered with.
Philip Larkin, on the other hand, was easy to understand and therefore a pleasure to read. I am reluctant to contest the literary opinion of the 26th greatest living Yorkshireman. But sweeping judgements rarely make critical sense. Auden and Larkin both wrote poems that the reader has to think about and are, in consequence, called hard. And each of them wrote poems which are, superficially at least, easy. Anyway, “hard” and “easy” are ideas that exist only in the mind of the reader. Do not take my word for it, or even Alan Bennett’s. Believe TS Eliot.
There is, Eliot wrote, “such a thing as stage fright. But what some readers have is pit or gallery fright” — a syndrome “caused by having been told, or having suggested to themselves, that a poem is going to prove difficult”. Stop All the Clocks — a poem written by the “difficult” Auden — illustrates the point. No one complains that it is difficult to understand.
Nor should they, for it is both simple and sentimental. But the real reason for its acceptance by people who are usually frightened of poetry is its inclusion in a simple and sentimental film, Four Weddings and a Funeral.
Larkin — writing more or less on the same topic — did not always observe the rule of simplicity that Bennett so admires. I am a Larkin fan. Indeed I wrote and narrated a television programme in his praise. Alan Bennett read The Whitsun Weddings beautifully and I stumbled through Dockery and Son.
Larkin wrote to me to say how much he had enjoyed the broadcast and to Kingsley Amis, on the same day, describing it as a disgrace to the BBC and comparing me to a Soviet commissar. But the character of a poet should not influence our literary judgement. An Arundel Tomb — like Stop All the Clocks, about love — is a beautiful poem and all the more so for making the reader think as well as feel.
The count and countess who “lie in stone” are holding hands. Larkin’s conclusion about their relationship, apparently contained in the last line, is often quoted as a message of hope: “Time has transfigured them into Untruth / The stone fidelity / They hardly meant has come to be / Their final blazon and to prove / Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.”
No matter what the count and countess thought of each other, it seems — on superficial reading — that Larkin had no doubt about what eternal truth their effigies represented. “What will survive of us is love.” But read the verse again. “Time has transfigured them into untruth.” What will survive of us will not be love.
Eliot is right to say that we should enjoy poetry at several different levels. A poem can wash over us without requiring much thought and then keep us awake at night wondering what it really means. And we only understand the full meaning when we can recognise the references and untangle the allusions. I always knew that Dockery and Son was a sad and beautiful poem about a childless man who had begun to worry about mortality. But when I learned that Larkin had been reminded of “the high-collared public schoolboy” after he gate-crashed a college reception looking for the drink which he had been denied at someone else’s “death-suited” memorial service, I felt an extra twinge of pleasure. It is no more philistinical to rejoice at that discovery than it is to celebrate recognition of references to JG Frazer’s The Golden Bough in The Waste Land.
Poetry is a pleasure which comes in a variety of shapes and sizes. One important rule is not to be prejudiced by the poet’s character. My last meeting with Philip Larkin was in the (now defunct) French Club in St James’s. Although we were eating at different tables, he took me by the hand and led me into the kitchen. It was filthy. “Now,” he said, “you will never enjoy a meal here again.”
Bennett suggests that Larkin wrote straightforward poetry. I doubt if that was in the power of such an unstraightforward man. — Â