"Elbowing vacancy": Philip Larkin's non-places.

Publication: Papers on Language & Literature

Publication Date: 22-MAR-07

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To consider the significance of place in Philip Larkin's oeuvre may seem a foredoomed endeavor. For one whose particularity in rendering the quotidian is almost a signature trait, it is revealing that of the 172 poems Larkin wrote between 1946 and 1983, as compiled in Anthony Thwaite's edition, only 16 include references to specific English sites, and most of those are merely nominal or passing allusions. (1) Indeterminate locations, blurred vistas, and generic topoi are the typical milieu of this writer for whom, as his antipathetic poem "I Remember, I Remember" strikingly concludes about his birthplace, "'Nothing, like something, happens anywhere'" (36). Allowing for the disparity between Larkin's actual experience of growing up in Coventry and his mythologized version thereof, the line still tells us much about the poet who could not discover what in "Places, Loved Ones" he terms his "proper ground" (3). Even of Hull, his "home" from 1955 until his death in 1985, he admitted, "I like it because it's so far away from everywhere else. On the way to nowhere, as somebody put it. It's in the middle of this lonely country, and beyond the lonely country there's only the sea" (RW 54). In the same interview he went on to say, "I very much feel the need to be on the periphery of things" (55). Given the fact that this widely heralded successor to Thomas Hardy and T. S. Eliot maintains that time rather than space is our defining element (CP 106), we perhaps should not be surprised by his marginal, attenuated landscapes. "Larkin," comments Laurence Lerner succinctly, "is a poet of absence" (31). Granted, but how we construe Larkin's engagement with vacuity will shape our estimation of his unique status as an equivocally postmodern author.

We can begin by recognizing that if what we inhabit is an "uncaring / Intricate rented world" (46-47), as Larkin declares in "Aubade," it is ironic but instructive that he commits himself so assiduously to "elbowing vacancy" (CP 27)--to exploring absence, nullity, and displacement, as though intent on plumbing these states fully. In this regard Calvin Bedient's rather pontifical judgment that Larkin is an inveterate nihilist with "a metaphysical zero in his bones" (70), one who has accepted "domestication of the void" and "simply taken nullity for granted" (71), proves suspect. Conveying the gray, often morose, mood of skepticism in post-World War II England, Larkin may indeed write a "poetry of lowered sights and patiently diminished expectations" (Davie 71), but he frequently qualifies such bleakness with fleeting images of a transcendent reality that lies just beyond the verge of recovery. Latent in Larkin's work is the implied construct of a mythic wholeness or immediacy whose unavailability in the present leaves merely the "kodak-distant" mapping of a desacralized sphere (CP 74). Especially noteworthy here is the fact that among the earliest scholarship published on Larkin were two articles by James Naremore and Barbara Everett that identified variants of an Edenic "lost world" in his corpus (CP 20). (2) For this poet, then, dispossession is our universal heritage, and he recurrently surveys what loss of that aboriginal "ground" of being continues to mean. Read from this perspective, his texts trace the outlines of a spectral "something" that now manifests itself only as the abysm of "nothing."

The 1954 poem already cited, "I Remember, I Remember," projects Larkin's characteristic stance well. Traveling north "in the cold new year" (2), the speaker finds that his train has stopped at Coventry to take on passengers. While they board, he leans out the window searching for "a sign / That this was still the town that had been 'mine' / So long" (6-8). Unable to detect any recognizable landmarks, the persona resumes his seat as the train lurches forward again, whereupon a friend making the journey with him asks, "'Was that [...] where you "have your roots"?'" (13). That last exhausted cliche, appropriately enclosed in quotation marks, triggers nineteen lines of sardonic reflection in which the narrator recalls what Coventry never was to him:

No, only where my childhood was unspent, I wanted to retort, just where I started: By now I've got the whole place clearly charted. Our garden, first: where I did not invent Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits, And wasn't spoken to by an old hat. And here we have that splendid family I never ran to when I got depressed [...]. (14-21)

In its unyielding hostility toward facile nostalgia, the meditation is pure Larkin. Unwilling to concede any notion of defining attachment, the speaker admits only that his birthplace is "just where I started," an accidental conjunction stripped of teleological meaning. But, if "now" he has "the whole place clearly charted," his reconstruction of the scene invokes through a series of negatives what are oblique albeit muted tropes of a prelapsarian state ("garden," for example, suggesting Eden, "Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits" a Wordsworthian "natural supernaturalism," and "spoken to by an old hat" God's discourse with Adam before the Fall). As in a play by Samuel Beckett, nothing gets "re-membered" in the poem, the title itself undercutting by its rhetorical redundancy the possibility of such integration. Instead, only a counter-memory surfaces, one wherein the train's brief stop at Coventry stimulates the narrator's resistance to laying claim to any self-invented past. When his traveling companion thus remarks, "'You look as if you wished the place in Hell'" (33), Larkin's persona casually retorts, "'Oh well, / I suppose it's not the place's fault'" (34-35). (3)

Drawing attention to this poet's often wry use of anecdotal reminiscence, Neil Corcoran has observed that "[t]he word 'persona' is a more than usually difficult one to use of a Larkin poem" because his virtuosity invites such identification (88-89). Given what this native son of Coventry says elsewhere about family and upbringing, the point is particularly apropos of "I Remember, I Remember." "We all hate home" (10), asserts his "Poetry of Departures" in 1954; four years thereafter he intones, "Home is so sad" (CP 119); and, as late as 1971, Larkin opens "This Be the Verse" with these distinctly unsentimental lines: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do" (1-2). His personal correspondence records comparable evidence of disenchantment. Writing to close friend James Ballard Sutton late in 1940, he twice expostulates, "What a bloody family!" (SL 8, 9); nine months later, ensconced at Warwick after the first Luftwaffe attack on Coventry, Larkin opines to Norman Iles that "the atmosphere of home clogs your bo-wels [sic]" (SL 22). In a letter to Kingsley Amis dated 19 September 1942, also originating from Warwick, he coins the term "nugacity" to capture his overwhelming sense of temperamental and circumstantial stagnation (SL 44). An element of self-staging undoubtedly lurks in these lugubrious statements, but two other factors shape the multiple disavowals of "I Remember, I Remember." The first is that owing to the Blitz, as Adrian Smith notes, "'Coventry' as a geographical and social construct, as a particular place at a particular time, had gone--in the case of Larkin's most familiar landmarks, quite literally" (49). More than ten years afterwards the poet thus declines to feign a nonexistent regard for his wartime-ravaged birthplace. The other factor is the aesthetic agenda of the short-lived "Movement," that group of Oxford writers in the 1950s, preeminently Larkin, who opposed the neo-Romanticism of such contemporaries as Dylan Thomas in "Fern Hill" and who advocated instead an intellectually tough, emotionally restrained, and thoroughly empiricist poetry. (4) If this erstwhile Coventrian is adamant about repudiating the whole idea of "'"roots,"'" however, his response is complicated all the more by his existential terror of time as "Extinction's alp" (see CP 197; cf. SL 156, 223).

The evanescence of temporality for Larkin is always complicit in our disconnection from place, sharpening the sense of alienation and Unheimlichkeit. As early as his 1946 poem "Traumerei," which recounts a nightmare vision of the first four letters of D-E-A-T-H emblazoned along "walls [that] have killed the sun" (8), Larkin is haunted by this ultimate mystery. Of special interest is his penchant for spatializing time, such that nothingness or annihilation is linked with what one critic calls "fatal horizontals" (Bidney 355), like the walls in "Traumerei," while topographical setting mirrors the mood of estrangement. A good example is "Triple Time." Beginning in the vein of Hardy's "Neutral Tones" with a description of "This empty street, this sky to blandness scoured, / This air, a little indistinct with autumn" (1-2), where the relative pronoun "this" masks any specificity, the poem conjugates how the perpetual slide toward an ever-vanishing future elides all sense of immediacy--of being here and now. The present shrinks to "A time unrecommended by event" (5), whereas the future looms from the vantage point of childhood as "An air lambent with adult enterprise" (10). The third stanza of "Triple Time" then deploys quite another metaphor for the past:

A valley cropped by fat neglected chances That we insensately forbore to fleece. On this we blame our last Threadbare perspectives, seasonal decrease. (12-15)

Keith Cushman correctly observes how the poem shifts from cityscape to "bitter pastoral" (22), but "valley" and "fat neglected chances" also hint at some primal forfeiture, the legacy of which is that we can know only the fugacity of a specious present. The point is not that Larkin is deliberately drawing on a Miltonic paradigm but rather that, in order to address the experience of dispossession, he is compelled to use what Everett terms "framing enclosures of the thing looked-back-on" ("Larkin's Eden" 46), the latter phrase designating "a dwindling Paradise glimpsed always from the outside and through a vision of limits" (45-46)....

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