Some of these pieces are on my shelves already and are likely to be on yours if an admirer of either Clive James as commentator or Larkin as poet but, as in any Collected, it's necessary to acquire duplicates if you want the other bits. James is a critic of some gusto and insight and worth having on your side, as he is throughout these reviews and essays. He is well-paired with Larkin who, since I heard him described as a 'great, minor' poet by Anthony Thwaite at the bar at Hull University in 1987, has risen to being the author of 'the most magnificent poetic achievements since Donne and Marvell' by James in 2018.Oh My Giddy Aunt. Larkin has few keener admirers than me (I thought) and I might want to agree with Clive's large claim but I wouldn't have dared put it in print. If James Booth's PL, Life, Art and Love put up more defence than Larkin really needed as his reputation is restored, James is batting more like Chris Gayle than Geoff Boycott for his case.
Reading James on Larkin straight through, which it is quite possible to do, makes him sound repetitive in his insistence that the Larkin we should attend to is in the poems not the outrageous letters to his ribald friends. These pieces, though, were written years apart and not intended to be read one after the other.
If James insists that those letters were private and never meant for public scrutiny, we did have Thwaite justifying the Letters to Monica a few years ago saying that he knew he was writing for posterity and had the likes of us 'reading over his shoulder'. It's not easy to have that both ways but if Larkin was a fastidious enough editor of his own work not to publish the likes of The Dance, a poem that never quite 'takes off', it seems to me that the letters wouldn't have been part of his intended legacy either.
The late Lisa Jardine belatedly declined her invitation to the first Larkin Society conference in 1997, presumably knowing she was on a hiding to nothing. While her case for the prosecution might have been shrill, it would be possible to accept that some of Larkin's private musings were beneath his proper dignity but that poets are best judged on their poems. Like Booth, James is more strident than he needs to be but that is what devoted admirers are like.
Nevertheless, for those of us dedicated to that descried as 'the mainstream' by enthusiastic avant-gardists and experimentalists, James is a proper darling and Larkin is his. He describes him as,
superficially a reactionary crusader against modernism, a sort of latter-day, one-man Council of Trent,
and, imbuing Larkin with some of his own swaggering machismo that the poet plainly didn't aspire to, argues for him to be played by Jack Nicholson in a film; compares him with the ultimate literary cool kid, Albert Camus, in his shifty role as lover to several women at once and, in taking on the equally testosterone-fuelled Al Alvarez, takes down his advocacy of Robert Lowell via that poet's 'berserk stare'. It is a crowd-pleasing performance throughout for those of us who won't, or don't like to, hear a word against Larkin and I might not recommend it far beyond us.
As long ago as 1974, James wrote of An Arundel Tomb that,
he almost believed in the survival of love. Almost believing is all right, once you've got believing out of it.
And in 2003, reviewing Tom Courtenay's Pretending To Be Me, he is right to stress survive rather than us in 'what will survive of us is love' but that's only after we've given proper attention to the line before, as James had done 29 years earlier but some still don't. I'd have thought we'd have got that sorted out by now.
James is also more Larkin than necessary in the two poems included but that's fine since pastiche is partly cartoon. In The North Window,
The moon-cold deeps
Are cod-thronged for the trawlers now benighted,
which is (Clive) Jamesian rather than Larkinesque because, as he says elsewhere,
Larkin, while being to no extent a dandy, is nevertheless an exquisite.
But James is astute and knows why Larkin is any good. It is not a rearguard action against the threat of modernism and those radicals who think they are cleverer than all that went before them. It had been a while since I had seen Larkin compared with his Italian equivalent, Eugenio Montale, and then I remembered it was in Clive James that I'd seen it before but, he says, they share 'a deep suspicion of any work which draws inspiration from its own technique', by which they mean certain jazzmen but not only them. Larkin wasn't quite as backward-looking as his detractors liked to make out, and James writes in his valediction poem,
They didn't sound like poetry one bit,
Except for being absolutely it.
Clive James is one of many, I think, who wouldn't have minded being Larkin except they wouldn't have liked it. What they want is to be themselves but to have written his poems, or poems very like them.
