My correspondent at Plucarden Abbey was kind enough to send me an article, Surprised by Hull by Jonathan Tulloch from a recent issue of The Tablet, the weekly magazine on Catholic pre-occupations. Surprised to find Larkin a subject for their attention, I was uneasy at the selective quotations Jonathan used to bring about an optimistic view of Larkin. By all means, he is not quite the complete curmudgeon of popular assessment but wheeling out the last line of An Arundel Tomb to suit his purposes is going too far although plenty of people see fit to do so.
I've been involved in debates about it before and had to re-read it several times to make sure it wasn't me that had been wrong all along. However much Eng. Lit. these days seems to want to see the writing as appendages to an author's biography or 'theory', the text must remain the real focus of our attention and so no amount of appeal to Larkin's sensitive side should divert us from the poem's argument as a whole, elusive though it might seem.
Thus, I wrote a letter to the Editor in the hope of adding The Tablet to my palmares of The Gloucester Citizen, The Sunday Express, The Listener, Retail Jeweller and The TLS. It was acknowledged but hasn't, to my knowledge, appeared yet and so it probably won't. There is also a poem in progress, although slow progress, called Letters to the Editor, to balance such activity with the idea that the authors of such things should have better things to do.
Anyway, just for the record.
Dear
Sir,
I
am indebted to a Catholic friend who brought my attention to Jonathan Tulloch’s
fine piece, Surprised by Hull (5 August) and it is to be applauded
that The Tablet could feature such an item on an as avowedly atheist
writer as Larkin.
But
maybe not quite so fast. An Arundel Tomb is mainly remembered for its
last line, ‘What will survive of us is love’ and Jonathan does include in his
quotation the preceding line that it is ‘our almost-instinct almost true’ which
qualifies it considerably. But those enamoured of the last line tend not to
notice how Larkin has taken great care to eschew the optimistic sentiment of
his ending more profoundly than that.
The
last stanza begins,
Time
has transfigured them into / Untruth.
And
continues,
The stone fidelity
They
hardly meant
And
so, although it does say it has come ‘to prove’,
What
will survive of us is love.,
that
is at most an almost instinct that is only almost true, so the
poem is saying no such thing.
There
is certainly more optimism in Larkin’s poetry than he is sometimes given credit
for but let us not get carried away.
Yours
Faithfully, as it were,
David
Green
