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Terry Whalen

'Strangeness made sense:'
Philip Larkin in Ireland

Philip Larkin was a prolific reader and a careful student of a large number of literary mentors,including centrally W.H.Auden,John Betjeman, Edward Thomas, Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence and William Butler Yeats.1 Now that his extensive correspondence is more available, it is also clear that he developed an enthusiasm for a number of Irish writers in addition to Yeats. We already know that Yeats had an overwhelming effect on Larkin during his youthful years, and he strenuously tried to shake off that influence as he gradually developed a competing admiration for the work of Thomas Hardy. He mused in 1966, in a self-critical introduction to his The North Ship (1945), that he had spent too much time in his youth "trying to write like Yeats," and later realized that Yeats wrote in a "particularly potent music, as pervasive as garlic," one that actually "ruined many a lessertalent," presumably almost including his own. To this revised edition of The North Ship he added "Waiting for breakfast," a supposedly more Hardyesque, more low-key, more grounded poem, and offered it to his readers as evidence which "shows the Celtic fever abated and the patient sleeping soundly.2 He claimed to have successfully outgrown Yeats's influence.

A different diagnosis of all this is suggested by some of Larkin's more seasoned readers, since they see that the patient was only slightly unwell in the first place and that the" Celtic fever" fortunately never entirely abated during most of Larkin's artistic career. From Yeats, Larkin learned an esteem for beauty's compensatory qualities in the midst of personal and cultural disintegration, and he also learned ahabitof writing in the ascending lyrical, the grand manner of Yeatsian poetic flight. Edna Longley has spoken concisely of this latter, and other uses Larkin found for Yeats's example, and there is currently no serious questioning of Larkin's quite extensive imaginative debt to Yeats.3

Other Irish affinities are now there for consideration as well, though they certainly do not exist with anything like the strong force of Larkin's connections with Yeats. We have always known Larkin's high regard for the wit of Oscar Wilde, for example, and the correspondence now also shows that he greatly admired the novels of Flann O'Brien.4 This is an interesting, but not a surprising affinity, given Larkin's occasional zest for creating O'Brien-like figures of satire, ones such as those we see rushing in with existential answers in "Days:"

 What are days for?
 Days are where we live.
 They come, they wake us
 Time and time over.
 They are to be happy in:
 Where can we live but days?

 Ah, solving that question
 Brings the priest and the doctor
 In their long coats
 Running over the fields.5

Given Larkin's penchant for this very bizarre kind of spoofing we think also of that "ruin-bibber, randy for antique (CP, 98)" in "Church Going" - it is understandable that he would place O'Brien high on his list of reading choices.

Further, there is at least a generic connection between some of Larkin's determinist poems and the novels of George Moore, and this connection might someday be worth a more extensive look. Larkin's pessimism was sustained in large measure by his reading of the works of Dr. Samuel Johnson and Hardy, but we,now know also that he was continually fascinated by Moore's Zolaesque, naturalist technique as a writer, particularly as he experienced it by reading Esther Waters (1894) at least twice. It is easy to see Moore's mostly determinist shading in many of Larkin's depressed poems about the indifferent machinations of time, chance and social circumstance, when we come to think about it. In the 1940's Larkin said that he thought Irish writers maintained a truly classic quality in their works which disappeared from English writing around 1700, and he thought Moore sustained that tradition brilliantly.6

So it is clear that Larkin felt a strong imaginative affinity with at least four Irish writers (there are others), and the central importance of at least Yeats to his work is now an unassailable fact. As well, and more to my special focus here, Larkin spent approximately five years in Ireland during a very sensitive, formative period in his writing career, years in which he matured as a writer at a relatively firm rate. Both Irish literature and Irish life greatly influenced, and significantly shaped his imaginative world during and after these formative years.

In October of 1950 Larkin left his position as assistant librarian at University College, Leicester for a position as a sub-librarian at Queen's University, Belfast, where he was to stay until taking up head librarian duties at the University of Hull in March of 1955.7 This was very much a fresh start for him on many counts, particularly since it put distance between himself and a number of personal entanglements (e.g. his broken off engagement to Ruth Bowman) and made possible his escape from the doldrums of his life in England. He was twenty-eight years of age when he went to Belfast, and he was not well known as a poet. Five years later when he moved to Hull his cornerstone poem, "Church Going," had been published in Spectator (28 July 1954) only eight months earlier, and The Marvell Press was on the verge of publishing The Less Deceived (1955), the poetry volume destined to assure his status as one of the best of the Movement poets and a major voice in post-war English poetry.

His Ireland years were highly productive ones during which he wrote a great deal and developed and refined his writing style, a style characterized by a mix of astute observations and a gift for lifting them suggestively into epiphanies of various (often contrary) kinds. He made a number of close friends in Belfast (Colin Strang and his wife Patsy, Arthur Terry, Judy Egerton, and Winifred Amott, to name a few) and he also connected with and often visited poet and critic, Donald Davie in Dublin, where Davie was teaching at Trinity College. In a recent interview, Winifred Arnott has said of Larkin's time at Queen's that "As a colleague he brightened all our lives with his wry comments on daily life, and his marvellous collection of faces. He used to put his head round the door of the cataloguing room and pull a face which would put us all in a good mood for some considerable time. He was also a very able, efficient and respected member of staff."8 On long holidays he travelled back and forth to England (primarily to visit his mother and Monica Jones), and he vacationed in Scotland, and visited Paris briefly in 1952 -but for the most part he was content to "home" in Belfast and pursue his life as librarian and emerging writer.

Larkin sometimes viewed Ireland negatively. In Andrew Motion's Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life (1993) and Anthony Thwaite's edition of Selected Letters of Philip Larkin - 1940-1985 (1992), it is easy to find a number of wearily annoyed remarks, since he quite often derided what he also admired.- and Ireland.and the Irish provided no exception to this curiouspsychologicalruleofhisbeing.Sowefindinhislettersstereotypical comments like "The Irish are rotten with drink in my opinion - drivelling slack jawed blackguards (SL, 169)," and sadly displeased ones like, "Belfast is an unattractive city. Oh dear, oh dear (WL, 192)," and a oneliner remark about Queen's (to Arthur Terry in 1954), in which he says that the "common room is infested with brash undistinguished young men who turn out to be new professors. This place went to the dogs long ago the dogs are now coming to it (SL, 229)." Larkin often sneered about his academic workplaces - he was sometimes merciless about Hull, for another example - and he would frequently put almost anything, or anybody down in the higher interests of punchlines, turns of phrase or other' literary effects.

Nevertheless, he appears to have made relatively kinder ultimate judgements about Ireland generally, and he liked Belfast very soon after he settled in. In a letter to his friend James Sutton on the 5th of November, 1950, he speaks of the pleasure of sitting "at my desk looking out at the continual movement of the mad Irish up & down the pavements. As a matter of fact, the mad Irish aren't so mad: they can be very nice indeed. Their voices are incomprehensible most of the time - a Glaswegian, after a short stay in,,the USA, whining for mercy, but as my business is mainly connected with the educated ones I am not always quite at a loss (SL, 167)." And much later, in 1955, not long after his move back to England he sociologically confides to Patsy Murphy that "I'm passing through an anti English phase at present-they are miles uglier and noisier and vulgarer than the Irish: the pubs here are nightmares of neo-Falstaffianism, coughing laughter well soused with phlegm (SL, 248)."

In retrospect, Larkin was to say of Belfast that it "was extraordinary how at home I felt [there] ... and how much I disliked leaving.-..Queen's is a perfect little paradise of a library (WL, 247)." In another recollection he was to say that in Belfast he found "the best writing conditions I ever had," and thatjust before leaving England his "personal life was rather harassing. Then in 1950 1 went to Belfast, and things reawoke somehow."9 For the most part his years in Ireland were good ones, and during them he wrote a large number of poems, including ones which would later become anthology favourites - poems such as "No Road Wires Next Please Lines on A Young Lady's Photograph Album," "Maiden Name," "Born Yesterday Days Poetry of Departures," and the most popular mature poem of all, "Church Going." His best poems written in Ireland were not necessarily about Ireland at all, even if his sensations of Ireland were background to the creation of some of them.

Larkin's political views on Ireland were conservative in shape, for the most part, and are visible in the broadly imperialist bias he expressed in some of his letters and in a few of his poems. He made no bones (but little flesh either) about his "Orange sympathies (SL, 431)," and he once criticized Margaret Thatcher (who he admired for many other reasons) for the fact that, in his view, she "sold Ulster down the river (WL, 497)." Otherwise, he was given to dealing with Irish politics in humorous, anecdotal asides aimed primarily atgetting him off political hooks and away from serious discussion of issues. In a holiday diary in the 1970's, for example, he relates a vacation he took with Monica Jones in Ireland which he sets up with the comment that, "A week or so before we set out ... riots of a particularly serious kind take place between Protestants etc. and Catholics etc. in Londonderry and Belfast, which scares me rather as I am (a) English (b) Protestant and (c) the owner of a large new-looking car just made to be stoned and tipped in the Liffy (WL, p. 392)." He uses this sort of joking quite often when skirting politics in his letters, preferring the relaxeddiscourseofjokes andone-liners overseriouspolitical talk. Political issues intimidated him, for a lot of reasons, and he commonly preferred the comfort of humour as an escape from the complexity of their difficult moral demands.

"Homage to Government" is the standard reference point for commentators on Larkin's more deliberately political poetry, and it is only indirectly related to his views on Ireland. As a poem published in 1969 which contains what Andrew Swarbrick rightly calls Larkin's "most explicit response in High Windows to the growing political, industrial and economic difficulties of Britain in the late 1960s,"10 it makes visible Larkin's sometimes imperialist mentality. In Swarbrick's words, it "laments the closure of a British colonial base in Aden (now the Republic of Yeman) for economic reasons and condemns the decision as an index of Britain's imperial decline and moral corruption."' I Its sarcastic line, "Next year we are to bring the soldiers home / For lack of money, and it is all right (CP,171)" is seen by many of his readers (Swarbrick included) as just inadequate in the sharp-edged simplicity of its imperialist economics.12 It has only a distant relationship with the more muted imperialism of Larkin's Ireland poem, "The March Past," written during his Belfast years, since "The March Past" is imaginatively more capacious than "Homage to Government" because it is more humanly inclusive and more experientially direct. Larkin's full response to Irish society is ultimately far deeper than a simple response of imperial condescension, and his imagination is more engaged by Ireland than reductionist formulations aboutimperialism might suggest.13

Larkin wrote a number of poems of witness about his experiences in Ireland, poems which engage with what he calls in his poem, "The Importance of Elsewhere," the experience of "difference (CP, 104)," a word which of course has interesting usages in post-colonialist criticism as a term highlighting issues of respect for the uniqueness and value in cultures other than one's own. Larkin's usage of the term is not clearly in that territory of meaning, but it does suggest an openness to experience he was often given to when not just relaxed within his contrary, strictly narrow and gloomier self. The poems written out of this experience are more thoughtful and generous than his ideologically bruised "Homage to Government," for example, and they even include the ideologically more complicated work, "March Past." They tend to focus on moments of ritual community event or strong epiphanies of nature in Ireland, and they in some ways end up as paradigms for a number of Larkin's later poems.

Relatedly, John Goodby suggests that Larkin's time in Ireland made it possible for him "to develop poetic strategies which made use of and thereby justified his sense of otherness and isolation." It was there that Larkin more fully developed his "characteristic isolated, onlooker personae." For Goodby, the experience of "isolation and otherness" connects transitionally with Larkin's later poems about "social ritual, custom and routine"14 in England. Further, Larkin's writing in Ireland, we should add, is also centrally strengthened, as was his writing career as a whole, by a number of remarkable experiences of circumstantial epiphany, and these are basic in his poems about his Irish experiences.

The day he left for Belfast, Larkin began a poem titled "Single To Belfast" while on the Ulster Duke on his way across the Irish Sea. In it he compares himself with those who "cross from known to unknown, whereas I travel/ To unknown from lost (WL, 196)." The poem remains unpublished in a volume, but forty lines of it appear in Motion's Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life. Its feeling of escape, spiritual travel and potential for meaning in a new context prefaces Larkin's time in Ireland. It resonates with a note of openness and expectation. In the published poem "Arrival," written soon after he arrives, he claims to love Belfast's "ignorance of me (CP, 5 1)," a fact which he sees as giving him "a kind of innocence (CP, 51)." He looks forward to the freshness of all this, to living in what for him is anticipated as the 'milk-aired Eden (CP, 5 1)" of Belfast.

It is not long after he settles in Belfast that the experience of "difference" quickens, provokes in him a freshness of sensation which lies at the very centre of his best poems in all phases of his work as a poet for whom "theeyeleadsthe spirit,"15 aphenomenological poetwho continually claimed he wrote poems "to preserve things I have seen/thought/felt."16 "The Importance of Elsewhere" is a highly self-conscious poem in Larkin's oeuvre in this very central regard. Published in 1955, it retrospectively appreciates his experience in Ireland, and is, therefore, a poem of cultural gratitude. It also asserts the rudimentary base of his poetry as ade fresh by suddenly focussed impressions:

Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home,
Strangeness made sense. The salt rebuff of speech,
Insisting so on difference, made me welcome:
Once that was recognised, we were in touch.

Their draughty streets, end-on to hills, the faint
Archaic smell of dockland, like a stable,
The herring-hawker's cry, dwindling, went
To prove me separate, not unworkable.

Living in England has no such excuse:
These are my customs and establishments
It would be much more serious to refuse.
Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.
                                      (CP, 104)

In a way, the phrase, "Strangeness made sense," refers to an important epistemological finding of Larkin's in that it tells us of aromantic lifting of the veil of familiarity from his eyes, an escape from the life of "customs and establishments" of his life in England. The breakthrough in awareness he is talking about here facilitates a heightened receptivity in his imagination, and it is almost unfailingly at the base of his many later poems of circumstantial contemplation. Ireland's effect on Larkin included provision of an "elsewhere" as a source of contact with the "strangeness" of new impressions. Many of his poems written in Ireland are ones written from within this kind of a crisp inductive framework, and they are fundamental to his emergence as a highly skilled poet of contemporary social and natural observation.

Quite a number of the Ireland-focussed poems of this period are imagistically framed. They include "Single to Belfast," and published ones such as "Absences," "Arrival," "Arrivals, Departures," "Dublinesque," "The Importance of Elsewhere...... The March Past," and "Spring." All poems in this particular Ireland cluster respond appreciatively to natural Ireland and/or Irish community life. In part because of them, Larkin was later encouraged to express a more focussed social vision in his own culture. Thus, the contemplations of community we see in "The March Past" and "Dublinesque," for example, have a transitional value forward to his later poetry about English community events and ritual, just as Goodby has claimed.

In spite of an imperial nostalgia in its Orange sympathies, "The MarchPast" is also apoem with amarkedly wider, humanistnote. Itplainly enacts the mix of witness and social thought which characterizes many of Larkin's later poems of social observation. The observer in this work registers the sudden blare of a band as it passes by:

The march interrupted the light afternoon.
Cars stopped dead, children began to run,
As out of the street-shadow into the sun

Discipline strode, music bullying aside
The credulous, prettily-coloured crowd,
Evoking an over-confident, over-loud

Holiday where the flags lisped and beckoned, 
And all was focused, larger than we reckoned,
Into a consequence of thirty seconds.

The stamp and dash of surface sound cut short
Memory, intention, thought;
The vague heart sharpened to a candid court

Where exercised a sudden flock of visions:
Honeycombs of heroic separations,
Pure marchings, pure apparitions,

Until the crowd closed in behind.
Then music drooped.  And what came back to mind
Was not its previous habit, but a blind

Astonishing remorse for things now ended
That of themselves were also rich and splendid
(But unsupported broke, and were not mended)-

Astonishing, for such things should be deep,
Rarely exhumable: not in a sleep
So light they can awake and occupy
An absent mind when any march goes by.
                                 (CP, 55)

"The March Past" records something "seen/thought/felt," a sharp impression, a "consequence of thirty seconds," which speaks to us an "astonishing" reality, an emerging image of the sub-heroic confusion of Orange values. We are beckoned to notice the pathos of the "credulous, prettily coloured crowd." And their essential, very human imaginative hungeris as importantly privileged in the poem as their identity aspartisans in the context of Northern Irish politics. The poem is about the absurdity of a "flock of visions" and the suddenly realized frailty of the Orange community. It relates as much to Larkin's other poems of human disappointment as it does to any of his cognate political poems such as "Homage to Government."

It is perhaps significant that Larkin did not publish the poem during his lifetime, and we could speculate that this might have been so because he feared it would be read - as it has been since its posthumous inclusion in the collected poems - as more an ideological than a humanist and existential poem of witness. In "March Past" Larkin is primarily recording the pathos of a community rather than celebrating its rituals or endorsing an ideology. He sees a strange and even startling power in this community ritual while seeing also its weakness at the same time. It is his openness to the "elsewhere" of his context, the availability of his sensibility, which makes possible the intricate, compassionate, andfarfrom simply ideological statement the poem conveys.

"Dublinesque" is a more accomplished example from the Ireland cluster and it is also interested in ritual community life, and seems a more comfortable (because still less political) version of ritual event than we find in "The March Past." It is another example of Larkin's strong impulse to write a poetry of vividly physical sensation. It is really one of the best of his Ireland poems, and it was published in High Windows (1974), years after he had left Ireland. It reads:

Down stucco sidestreets,
Where light is pewter
And afternoon mist
Brings lights on in shops
Above race-guides and rosaries,
A funeral passes.

The hearse is ahead,
But after there follows
A troop of streetwalkers
In wide flowered hats,
Leg-of-mutton sleeves,
And ankle-length dresses.

There is an air of great friendliness,
As if they were honouring
One they were fond of;
Some caper a few steps,
Skirts held skilfully
(Someone claps time),

And of great sadness also.
As they wend away
A voice is heard singing
Of Kitty, or Katy,
As if the name meant once
All love, all beauty.
                       (CP, 178)

There is a pictorial liveliness to the scene evoked in "Dublinesque," and a strong feeling of "strangeness" being pondered and assessed. As I have said elsewhere,17 the juxtaposition of the "race-guides and rosaries" in the first stanza has a natural, emerging symbolism about it which amounts to a sharp comment on the culture of Dublin. The entirety of "Dublinesque" is a moment of romantic epiphany in which ostensible contradictions in tone and images are blended into an exceptional moment of worth and praise. The illumination is based on aperception of a beautiful quality which pervades life in Dublin like the "afternoon mist" which so well suggests its romantic surface. While the funeral initially appears in odd contradiction to the spontaneous gaiety of the funeral party, as seen in the middle stanzas, the details of the witness accumulate into something more profound. The poem embodies a tribute to a culture it greatly admires. It amounts to a celebration of a "difference."

At the centre of "Dublinesque" is the recognition of a poignantly beautiful quality in the felt life observed. There is praise here for the energy of the people and it saves the speaker from a simply overcast conclusion. The sound of the voice "singing/ Of Kitty, or Katy," rises from the scene of the ritual as audibly in sync with the empirical details observed. Larkin's respect for what he details shows in an ascending tone of praise - we inevitably thinkof Yeats atthispoint-whichturnstheepiphanyinto song. Larkin does not posture as an authority on Irish culture here or really anywhere else in his poetry, and his relative knowledge of Irish cultural issues is quickly placed for us if we think of him in comparison with contemporary Irish poets (Seamus Heaney, say, or Paul Durcan) who write from a special positionality within their own culture. Heaney and Durcan are more passionate and intimate analysts of Irish culture than Larkin could ever be, but that is not really the point. It is Larkin's achieved art and the cultural appreciation here which capture our attention the most.

"Dublinesque" is a wonderfully successful poem within the skill of Larkin's hard-eamed mature style, and a related intensity of language and experience may be found in his other poems of Ireland written during his five years of living in Belfast. The freshness of sensation he records in such places as the first stanza of "Spring," and the entire poem, "Absences," the opening lines of "Affivals, Departures" and the middle stanzas of "Autumn," all grow from Larkin's emerging awareness in Ireland of the value of writing a poetry of exceptional observation. One of the surest grounds for praise of his achievement as a poet is related to this dimension of his work. It is a dimension which opens to the world almost in spite of his contrary inclination to remain circumscribed within the confines of a much narrower self. Ireland clearly drew Larkin out of his she]], and he acknowledged this most genuinely in his work.

Notes:

1. This article is based on a paper presented on August 12, 1995 at the Irish Cultural Symposium at Louisbourg, Nova Scotia, titled "'The Importance of Elsewhere:' Philip Larkin in Ireland."

2. Philip Larkin, introduction to The North Ship (1945; repr. London:Faber and Faber, 1966), pp.9-10.

3. See Edna Longley's Poetry in the Wars(1986; re r. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987), pp. 134ff.

4. See especially ed. Anthony Thwaite, The Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940-1985 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), p. 734. Future references to this text are in the main body of the article and are signified as (SL).

5. Philip Larkin, in ed. and introd. Anthony Thwaite, Philip Larkin: collected Poems (London: The Marvell Press and Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 67. Future references to this text are in the main body of the article and are signified as (CP).

6. Larkin's letters to James Ballard (Jim) Sutton in the Larkin Estate papers at the Brynmor Jones Library Archives, University of Hull (MS DP/172/4, nos. 1-214) are my main source for these claims. Sutton letters #197ff particularly contain general responses to Ireland, and #77 and #79 contain commentary on Moore. In letter #79 (Jan. 3, 1944) Larkin says that he found Esther Waters a monumental work, discusses it in some detail, and tells Sutton that his own writing is heavily indebted to Moore. In #77, which is undated (but appears to have been written in December of 1943), he suggests to Sutton that Irish writers have maintained a classic quality in their works. For more immediately available references to Moore, see Thwaite, P. 87, and see Andrew Motion's quoting of Larkin on Moore in his Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life (London: Faber. and Faber, 1993), p. 43. Future references to this latter text are in the main body of the article and are referred to as (WL).

7. For a number of domestic and professional details concerning these years,see Motion,pp.185-246 and Arthur Terry's,"Larkin in Belfast," in ed.George Hartley, Philip Larkin.1922-1985:A Tribute (London: The Marvel Press, 1988), pp. 91-99.

8. Winifred Arnott met Larkin in 1950 when she was a cataloguer in the Queen's University library, and they became friends. Larkin often wrote to her (see Thwaite's Letters) when she left Queen's to study in Librarianship at Birbeck College, University of London.She was the inspiration for Larkin's poems, "Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album" and "Maiden Name." The quote is from, "Maeve Brennan Interviews Winifred Dawson (nee Amott)," in About Larkin, No. I (April 1996), p. 12.

9. Philip Larkin, in "An Interview with Paris Review, in Required Writing (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), p. 68 and p. 58 respectively.

10. Andrew Swarbrick, Out of Reach: The Poetry of Philip Larkin (London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1995), p. 140.

11. ibid, p. 140.

12. As,for example,Stan Smith puts it:"ForLarkin,this[the withdrawal of troops for financial reasons] is some kind of betrayal, as if, presumably, the troops had not been stationed out there for what, in the long term, were financial reasons: to preserve the investments, raw materials, and cheap labour of an imperialist economy." See his Inviolable Voice: History and Twentieth-Century Poetry (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan Humanities Press, 1982), p. 179.

13. For an extensive view of Larkin as primarily an imperialist poet, see Tom Paulin's Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 233-251.

14. John Goodby "'The Importance of Being Elsewhere', or 'No Man is an Ireland': Self, Selves and Social Consensus in the Poetry of Philip Larkin," in Critical Survey, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1989), p. 132, p. 133, and p. 135 respectively.

15. Larkin, introduction to John Betjeman. Collected Poems (Boston: Houghlin Mifflin, 197 1),p.xxiii.

16. Philip Larkin,in ed.D.J.Enright,Poets of the l950's; An Anthology of New English Verse (Tokyo: Kenkyusha Press, 1955), p. 77.

17. On pp. 107-1 10 of Philip Larkin and English Poetry (London: Macmillan Press, 1986; rpt. 1990).