Clive James on Larkin

Clive James, Somewhere Becoming Rain, Collected Writings on Philip Larkin (Picador)

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.      
  
 

Best Poem and Best Collection 2017

It must be nearly time to make up the shortlists for our annual review of the year. There might be more to come in the additional categories but I might have read all the new poetry books I'm going to see this year. So, let's have a look in the book.

Best Poem

Having been concerned that it was getting late in the year and there wasn't much on this list, recent weeks have filled it out to a respectable length. There might have been more than one candidate in some collections but I've kept it to one from each poet.

John Burnside, Mistaken for a Unicorn, from Still-Life with Feeding Snake
Douglas Dunn, The Nothing But, The Noise of a Fly
Kathryn Gray, Bournemouth, Flowers
Clive James, Anchorage International, TLS
Roddy Lumsden, Work Crush, So Glad I'm Me
Derek Mahon, Howe Strand, TLS
James Sheard, The Abandoned Settlements, The Abandoned Settlements

Best Collection

The Best Collection list is nowhere near as long because everything listed needs to be a potential winner and if I knew already there would be no point in a shortlist. Thus, although Simon Armitage, Douglas Dunn and others put in worthy performances, and I haven't even seen David Harsent's book even though I am a great admirer - a long book made of short poems, some only one line long isn't selling itself to me- it does come down to two titles.

John Burnside, Still Life with Feeding Snake
Roddy Lumsden, So Glad I'm Me  

Novel

Arundhati Roy and Alan Hollinghurst put in good performances that suffered under high expectations and so, unfairly perhaps, were slightly disappointing. I don't think I'll be reading another new novel this year and so provisionally we can give it to,

Adam Thorpe, Missing Fay

even if the missing girl theme has become a cliche and because Murakami's Men Without Women was short stories, on which grounds I wouldn't have left it out, but has stayed in the memory less vividly. 

CD

It is tempting to shortlist the Bacewicz String Quartets by the Silesian Quartet because it is clearly an immense record but even though there are more discs on the way this year, including Carolyn Sampson's duets with Iestyn Davies, it is highly unlikely that

Carolyn Sampson, Bach Cantatas for Soprano

can be bettered by very much which, after last year's wide-open heat, comes as a bit of a surprise to be calling the winner quite so far from the finish but I think we can.
I would feel like an even bigger fraud than usual if I pretended I enjoyed the Bacewicz, or anything else, more than that.

Event

It was announced at the time that nothing was going to be a better event than the Welsh Championship 12 Hour, in which my nephew inherited my long lapsed role of family marathon bike rider.
Everything went to plan, which it ought to considering the expertise in all areas of planning, riding and catering for such a ride that the family brought to the occasion and the lad delivered exactly the great debut that I astutely predicted for him. Although we still don't know yet if my first runner in a time trial as a trainer won the novice prize for best first attempt at the discipline. But it was tremendous to see it all come together quite so convincingly. Top marks to Chris and all of his entourage.
But if the award were limited to arts events (which it quite clearly isn't), we are back with Carolyn Sampson and her lunchtime concert at the Wigmore Hall in March. There is at least one more concert to come but it won't be Carolyn, whose year it has been this year - and that could continue indefinitely - and it won't be the Wigmore Hall in which one instinctively feels everything is right.

So, it is largely foregone conclusions apart from the poetry. Tune in mid-December to see what further reading of the poems brings about because we know about the Eliot Prize, those people at Forward and all the other jamborees that go on but this is the one that nobody's heard of or cares about and so is the one that, if I were them, I'd be most pleased to accidentally find out I'd got.     

  

Oh Babe, What Would You Say

Although shelf space is becoming a critical issue, it doesn't mean the acquisitions of books and records is likely to be subject to any spending restrictions. Although there are now three casual purchases that are increasingly unlikely to get read up there, the awesome glory of the Complete Buxtehude, the Schumann concertos, the Dvorak symphonies, the Nataslie Clein disc and all such things turn out to be such great successes that it only encourages me to buy more as belated compensation, now that anything is affordable, for the austerity of those teenage years when such purchases had to be carefully considered.
At least it meant they were played regularly enough to be imporinted on the memory for good.
But the consequences could be disastrous. Prompted to find myself Dylan's Street Legal on CD ahead of the original plan to collect Joni Mitchell, I am deeply enamoured of it, probably because it triggers all the residual memories of it except that it turns out to be even better, if possible, than I remember it. The potential disaster looms up when I find myself thinking that the next project, having dutifully produced 50 thousand words that rtepresent some kind of novel, could be to write an album. Not songs for someone else or with anybody else but the album of songs I might do myself. And so I scroll through guitars on the internet, delighted to see that they are all eminently affordable, as if it's only a matter of time before I have a set to compare with The Changing of the Guards, Baby Stop Crying, Is Your Love in Vain, etc.
I had thought that Bob Dylan couldn't sing but got away with it and so might I but on Street Legal he is majestic and however easy he makes it look to knock out a masterpiece album, that doesn't transfer to anybody who just happens to find themselves profoundly liking it.
Having been impressed by Julian Barnes but then having to console oneself that a lousy story that only ever aimed to fulfil the barest qualifications for novel status, it would be a dreadful folly to invest the next six months in making an album of twelve songs that will inevitably be laughable from one who genuinely can't sing and is no musician only in order to say I've done it. I hope common sense will prevail and I can return to The Perfect Book of poems rather than think that every genre is just another waiting for my inexpert contribution. It would be inexcusable to carry on saying there was too much of everything being produced while being guilty of producing the very worst of it myself.
It ought to be possible to happily admire wonderful things and not have to imitate them all myself. Luckily, seeing Steven Isserlis for the third, ever marvellous, time has not yet made me want to buy a cello.

But the TLS featured a great poem by Clive James recently, Anchorage International. I had always admired his commentary on poetry ahead of his poems. His ongoing farewell has been a powerful and moving process, heroically sane and measured in contemplation of the impossible. Circumstances invite the best to find the better still within themselves. If something's worth doing, it's worth doing well and not just for the sake of it. 

The Echo Chamber

As Radio 4's The Echo Chamber finishes another of its short runs of four programmes in the 4.30pm Sunday slot, it is an opportune time to congratulate both it and Paul Farley on an excellent series and wonder, not for the first time, if half an hour a week isn't too much to allocate to a proper contemporary poetry magazine on the BBC.
I doubt if such a tiny side issue would be part of the business plan of any newly reformed BBC under the new government's review of this insidiously leftist, arty, subversive, state sponsored bunch of militants. How outrageous it is that they waste so much time and money on the Proms, Radio 3, I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, The Danny Baker Show, Only Connect and some fine things on BBC4 whenever they can find enough to pay an academic to write a series on the Renaissance in Britain or Vicky Coren to do Bohemians. Why not have more shows on cookery, interior decor or buying antiques in order to flog them again. I must admit that the episode of 60 Minute Makeover that I contributed to some years ago was screened on Pick TV the other day but, luckily, only two people I know saw it. It wasn't my fault and there was nothing I could do about it, and, yes, it gets more awful every time I think about it. But that is more reason why we need more Echo Chamber, so that very minor poets are not diverted into, literally, wallpaper programmes.
The latest Echo Chambers included an interview with Clive James, the admirable Helen Mort, someone called Andrew McMillan and ended with no less than Tony Harrison reading a new poem.
Helen Mort is fine and managed to not quite lapse into the quagmire of Creative Writing-speak and even if she flirted with it, the poems she writes compensate for it.
Clive James continues to sign off quite gloriously and we must all hope he can continue to do so for some time yet.
I had to have some doubts about McMillan who claims a great affinity with Thom Gunn who had died before he discovered his work. McMillan, born 1988, can't be expected to have known much about Gunn before 2004, when Gunn died. But just how much he can claim to be a natural inheritor is another matter. From what I heard, and what little I've read, it's possible that McMillan's appreciation of Gunn was as a free verse, homo-erotic poet and not much more. I don't know enough about McMillan yet to say, perhaps he includes the strict metrical verse, the existentialism, the breaking down of the protagonist/antagonist divide and much more about Gunn. Anybody taking Thom Gunn as an exemplar needs to have developed through the discipline of metrical verse, much acknowledged in his debt to Yvor Winters and J.V. Cunningham, rather than assume one can go straight to free verse without any such grounding.  The reason why Gunn's apparently looser free verse poems are any good is because he could have also done it the other way. It's not good enough to see him only alongside Gary Snyder and the like and it's a trap for the unwary to think one can be as free as one likes without knowing what it's like to be formal. It means not much otherwise and tends to look like less than a pale imitation.
Whereas Tony Harrison returns with a monumental poem, Polygons, which is not in the heroic couplets we have come to expect of him. I find it was first published in the LRB and you can find yourself a copy on their website.
As far as I'm aware, Harrison's last published poems were in Under the Clock (2005), which looked to me then as if they were too close for comfort to the doggerel that Harrison's poems generally rise so far above. But then I went to a conference in Oxford and heard the book given thoroughly respectful, serious academic treatment and so was glad to assume it was my mistake.
Polygons is something of a career retrospective, going back over his attachment to Ancient Greece, his NT versions of Aeschylus and Sophocles as well as time spent with contemporary makars, Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes. If you remember a George Harrison song called All Those Years Ago, it's a highbrow version of that. I was concerned that such a significant statement from such a grand, old man of poetry would give me a decision to make about what has been the best poem of 2015 because that decision has been done and dusted for quite some time.
Luckily, it doesn't. It's prolix and can be heavy-going in places while undoubtedly containing many memorable moments. At the age of 78, Tony is giving himself perhaps 10 years or more before asking that his ashes be scattered at Delphi, is it, which is good to hear. Whether or not we can look forward to anything more as good as Cypress and Cedar or A Kumquat for John Keats remains to be seen but he surely doesn't owe us any more.
So, top marks to Paul Farley and The Echo Chamber and a note to the BBC and anybody whose intentions are to make it into the new Channel 5- half an hour, once a week, something like this, that would do.

View from the Boundary

Unioniste put in a convincing performance in the last at Sandown today to make it a good day down here. It prompted me to look up his subsequent price for the Grand National and I took a modest share of the 25/1. It is by no means a tip with Triolo d'Alene also very encouraging and Rocky Creek, who I'm sure will eventually win a big race, in opposition at this early stage.
But there is nothing like having landed the nap to make everything safe and then a double and a treble come to fruition with a well-backed favourite and the great Noel Fehily on board.
--
I don't know what time the postman came today, it's a Saturday, isn't it, but when I just had to slip out to the shop, there were two promising packages in the porch. The Staple Singers and The Sixteen's recent set of settings of the Stabat Mater.
One can hardly have enough music but it's hard to get around to playing all of them. Today, before the racing started, I gave a rare outing to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's Wintereisse, to see if I was interested enough in it to order Ian Bostridge's book on the subject.
No, I'm not. It is a fine thing but perhaps not quite the template for the archetypal poet that ought to be encouraged by now.
--
Whereas Clive James' recently arrived Poetry Notebook 2006-2014 is admirably stringent and forthright in providing an example of what a 'critic' could be like if we weren't all so nice and polite so much of the time.
There might have been a time, in the 1960's and 70's, when a prototype of political correctness made it unthinkable to question modernism, the avant-garde, Beat poets and anything else that aspired to revolutionary intent. I can see why, then, in artistic terms if not all of them in politics, Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, Pierre Boulez, concrete poetry and jazz might have been regarded as left-wing whereas Georgian poetry, Hardy, Larkin and any work that respected a tradition was seen as staid, right-wing and thus to be disrepected, Daddy-O.
It took a while for such assumptions to be revealed for the fashionable aberrations that they were but they were arguably right-wing aberrations and what had always been there was more genuinely leftist. Just because something is paraded as new doesn't make it 'progressive'. Clive re-assesses his reassessment of Pound only to find that the 19 year old Clive was in thrall to an empty appearance of grandeur and, yes, his loss of faith in him was perfectly in order.
He is also a resilient defender of Frost, whose perceived folksy wisdom was attacked by those who,
had a vested interest in the oblique and wanted poetry to be taught rather than remembered.

If I remain to be convinced about Clive James as a poet himself, there is no doubting his stout credentials as a commentator but mainly as someone who cares enough to find poetry 'electrifying' and the most important thing there is, which is gratifying to read when I so often doubt it myself.
But, of Pound's 'juxtapositions', he can say,
a fancy way of claiming weight for the practice of bringing incongruous objects together and waiting for a compound meaning to emerge: the hope and faith of every crackpot who creates elaborate wall charts with fragments of evidence joined together by string.
While he is in fine form throughout with such disdainful put downs (and let us remember what an admirer of Pound Thom Gunn was), Clive is best at letting others provide the comment when he feels he can't do any better, which is something he credits Michael Donaghy with.
Thus, it is no less pertinent for being fourth-hand when something I've quoted before only at third-hand, if I quote James quoting Donaghy quoting Auden saying that 'the only thing that doesn't change is the avant-garde'.
I'm not leaving much to say in a review of this book once I've read it, so I might as well go for broke.
The Cantos is,
or are- or perhaps was or were- a nut-job blog before the fact.
And, quoting Donaghy quoting Dana Gioia,
ideas in the poetry of Ashbery are 'like the melodies in some jazz improvisation where the musicians have left out the original tune to avoid paying royalties'.
And so it seems to go on, page after invigorating page, which I'm sure some beatniks, old-timers from the 1970's and playful post-modernists would be piously offended by because here, surely, is a cantankerous old bull having one last thrust at the tricksy matadors that have tormented him.
The finale is entitled Trumpets at Sunset, which I haven't read yet but anticipate being a grandstand farewell and celebration of all that Clive loved in poetry. I dare say there will be more to say after reading that.