45 Years On

Thanks to Emma Thompson, Anrhony Hopkins and Helena Bonham-Carter et al, I think Howard's End finally clicked. Quite good isn't it. Sadly, it's 45 years too late to help with the 'A' level I did so badly in, like a well-backed favourite that ran unplaced.

The 'only connect' theme, I thought, related to the arty Schlegels and the monied Wilcoxes but I always thought it was about Leonard Bast and still do, his death being caused by a bookcase full of books landing on him surely symbolic of him being crushed by 'culture'. However, it was disconcerting to see Emma Thompsin and Anthony Hopkins married some decades before they so painfully weren't in The Remains of the Day. 

Perhaps now I should go back to The Knight's Tale and Paradise Lost, re-take that exam, get the grade I was supposed to get and then get a place at a better university than the one I went to.

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In the second year at that university, an essay was required to be 3000 words. That went up to 5000 in the third year. While that seemed substantial at the time, it doesn't amount to all that much these days. 3000 words is what The Importance of Almost amounts to, a comparison of Gunn and Hughes with Larkin that takes up four and a half pages of the new issue of About Larkin. I'm not overly concerned to see myself in print these days but it looks well in the august journal and shows me still in business and glad to have Rainyday Woman in print as one of my better efforts of recent years.

25 footnotes in a 3000 word essay shows the way things have gone in the last 40 years when 4 footnotes and a general bibliography sufficed for a 15000 word dissertation on Marvell in 1981.

But About Larkin is no Teddy Bear's Picnic for those who prefer to pore benignly over the finer detail of the life and work of poets of bygone days. Good Lord, Stewart Lee is brought to account in forthright terms for a contribution of his. Poetry can still be a battleground like it was in the 1960's and 70's once somebody decides to take exception. It is presumably a healthy thing that differences can be aired but it is to be hoped that some decorum and etiquette can be maintained.

Otherwise in About Larkin 53, John Boaler's Awkward Reverence does good work in defining why Larkin feels a bit like George Orwell, there's a summary of a collection of Monica Jones's school prizes, an account of young Larkin's teenage family holidays in Nazi Germany and a very un-Larkinesque poem by Cliff Forshaw that explores available typefaces as much as the language but, as ever, 'poetry is a wide church'. Although John Whitbourn provides plenty of evidence that Roseanne Cash took up lines from Larkin poems it not obvious to me that the relationship is symbiotic and that Larkin can be assumed to have had a taste for Country. 

But December this year sees the next Larkin Society conference in Hull and the call for papers momentarily makes me think about the next little essay I've made a start on. Surely not, standing up in front of the accumulated Larkin cognoscenti to outline lots of things they know already. No, I couldn't. It's a long way to Hull and I can't see what I'd gain by it.