Terry Whalen

Conflicts with Capitalism: Philip @rkin's Politics

Tell me what you think of Philip Larkin and I will tell you what is on your mind. Responses to Larkin over the past four or five years have in some cases been so excessive that his work now appears to have arrived at that particular site of acceptance where many other complex texts have ended up - a place where critics write primarily about their own ideas and passions and use the works as reference point only for the messages they wish to convey to the world. We are all guilty of this to some extent, of course, and there is no such thing as durable objectivity, but I think it is time again that Larkin was given more credit for having a complicated mind of his own, and, if it can be allowed, credit for being far less of a moral flop than many commentator's have allowed. Larkin was certainly not as nice as the rest of us, but literary criticism should aspire to being more than the mere hunting for weeds.

Since the publication of Anthony Thwaite's Selected L etters of Philip Larkin, 1940-1985 (1992) and Andrew Motion's Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life (I 993), critical discussion of Larkin's poetry only occasionally moves past condemnation of his political prejudices.' For some critics Lisa Jardine and John Newsinger, for example - the issue is quite uncomplicated: now thatwe have some conservative, distempered, reactionary material visible in Larkin's life and letters, the poetry is diminished by, toxified by, this tell-tale adjacent material.' Such an equation helps support anumber of flat allegorical readings of Larkin which I entirely disagree with, readings made possible only by way of viewing Larkin in a stem and moralistic manner.3

There is an anti-capitalist critique which Larkin absorbed from D.H. Lawrence's works, and it goes a long way in supporting a claim I will make here that Larkin's poetry expresses more a "politics of scepticism" than a "politics of faith .114 There is no getting around the fact that Larkin's letters show him at times to have been a self-indulgent and narrow person when he was speaking from a lesser self, but recent indignation about his personal life fails to take into account the more mature thoughtfulness of the poetry itself. In that poetry, he is far from a true believer in the status quo - he is often in conflict with the values of capitalism.

The letters show that Larkin did become more reactionary as he aged, as many have claimed, but we can also see in them that he resisted such a label and at times cast himself as a social misfit, a lonely outsider notjust the establishment figure his professional identity as a Head Librarian in a university would seem to suggest. In a letter to Norman Iles (4 July 1972), for example, he says: "For the last 16 years I've lived in the same small flat, washing in the sink, & not having central heating or double glazing or fitted carpets or the other things everyone has, & of course I haven't any biblical things such as wife, children, house, land, cattle, sheep etc. To me I seem very much an outsider, yet I suppose 99% of people would say I'm very establishment & conventional. Funny, isn't it? Of course I can't say I'm satisfied with it. Terrible waste of time."' It is clear that Larkin wished to think of himself as a misfit, even if it has been convenient for his detractors to caricature him as a fastidious establishment figure.

And if in his more unguarded comments in the letters do on occasion read like the words of a "thwarted fasciSt"16 as Christopher Hitchens would have it, we know also that they are written out of a sometimes drunken motivation, and we know that he often overstated his conservatism to please some of his red-necked friends. We should see also that he tried to play down the effects of these comments when, in a letter (29 June 198 1) to Robert Conquest, he says: "My political opinions are really no more than gouts of bile (SL, 650)," and makes similar limiting comment in a letter to Thwaite (13 May 1973) when he says: "...you know me, 'in religion and politics, be aisy and pleasant with both sides: shure, we'll all be dead drunk on Judgement Day,'(SL, 480)." In Larkin's letters, that is, there is a connection between the discomfort he feels around political issues and identities, and the maladroitness of his responses.

Humour often helped him with his discomfort, and it varies in the letters in its quality. So there is a marked difference, for example, between the surface wit of a letter to Robert Conquest (I I April 1977) in which he reacts to a government budget discussion by saying that, "The Budget put a bob on petrol, which caused a frightful squeal, so now the Liberals are going to get it put on drink. As a drinking motorist this doesn't make much difference to me, but the price of drink is really fierce (SL, 560)," and one to Judy Egerton (17 February 1974) in which he asks: "Are you still a Liberal? They seem to be doing well in the polls. But I don't think it matters which party wins - Lord Hunger will be at No. 10, Lord Want at No. I 1, Duke of Starvation at the Min. of Food, Rt Hon Utter Idleness at Min. of Labour, and so on. Hull University will be shut down. I shall earn a few pence sweeping crossings .... Gloomy old sod, aren't I (SL, 502-503)." The letters, that is to say, are full of witty escapism, but they also in places suggest a more thoughtful Larkin who shows scepticism about all political activities, no matter the party in power. Relatedly, at least two people who knew Larkin have spoken of a theatricality in his personal political postures. John Osbome, for example, claims that Larkin was in his later years given to adopting a "bluff, boorish, provincial personae, "7 and in Philip Larkin, The Marvel Press and Me, Jean Hartley relates that even in his earlier years Larkin maintained an embarrassed distance between his person and his politics:

His political niavety always astounded me but I suppose he was simply no@ interested in politics and so it was easy to adopt the bluff conservatism that must have been handed down to him by his parents and shared by his friends at school and Oxford. I say this because I always found him fair-minded, scrupulous and warmhearted in his personal dealings. To me, the ge@eral blimpishness and insensitivity to the plight of others less fortunate than- himself was a mask he wore to ward off issues that he did not want to think about. When I asked him round for a meal he would sometimes say: "You won't invite any left-wingers who'll bully me, will you?

In the early years of our friendship the subject had never arisen until Philip arrived one day, after a general election, rejoicing over a Conservative victory. I told him we always voted Labour and that I could not imagine how any person who had to work for a living could vote otherwise. An emotional scene ensued during which we each voiced our gut reaction to the other's views. "I have to be a socialist out of sheer self-preservation. A hundred years ago my counterpart would have been sent up the chimneys or had to scrub someone else's floors from dawn to dusk as my mother did." He shrugged disbelievingly andeased hisjacketoutof the iron-pronged chair which always managed to trap him. Socialism, for Philip, was on par with modem jazz - a descent into chaos. Eventually we had a tacit agreement not to discuss politics:8

These words were published three years before the publication of the letters, and the letters bear out the prefatory rightness of Hartley's recognition of Larkin's maladroitness in discussing political issues. It is only in his art that we will find a more complex political response.

In his life Larkin frequently skirted around political discourse altogether, and this makes a kind of biographical sense when we consider the pain his father's reputed pro-German sympathies caused him during and after World War 11.1 As well, it makes additional contextual sense when we consider that as a Movement poet he emerged from within a literary group which Blake Morrison and others characterize as cautious, low-key in political matters, and which Robert Hewison reminds us had to make its way in the midst of an inhibiting Cold War context.10

Larkin is usually disinterested in detailed party politics, and as an undergraduate he only joined the Labour Club at Oxford so that he could place himself near an attractive woman. " He constantly claimed that politics were irrelevant inspiration for his poetry, saying that poetry "has always been an intensely private thing, and I have avoided all its public manifestations (SL, 716)." He declined the poet laureateship, saying to Blake Morrison that he did not feel he could write about "bloody [royal] babies (SIL, 728)," and he disliked the idea of poetry as programmatic message from a public pulpit. Nevertheless, while it is true that Larkin has said, "I know bugger all about politics (SL, 34)" and "I don't know anything at all about anything [political] and its no use pretending to",12 and Motion might give Larkin low political marks by saying that as Larkin aged he "had grown into a man with no developed political opinions but strong reactionary prejudices,"" there is agood deal morepolitical awareness andcriticism in his poetry thanthese comments would suggest.

Critical responses to Larkin's poetry also include A. Alvarez's rendition of him as a provincial poet, a poet of "Little Englandism," 14 and this is a view Blake Morrison furthered somewhat when he created the term "post-imperial tristesse"" to refer to the typicality of Larkin's "At Grass," a poem which Tom Paulin has also analyzed as expressive of a wounded imperialist nostalgia at the centre of Larkin's provincial political vision. 16 In these and similar terms Larkin is often pictured as a bigoted, narrow patriot at worst and as a sort of failed John Betjeman at best, someone who, in Janice Rossen's words, writes "elegies for England which range from regret and tenderness to anger and fatalism about its changing state."" In the summary phrasing of Hitchens, Larkin is often billed as a "quasi-official national bard (SP, 163)" who has a sort of "totemic standing (SP, 163)" within the fatigued conservative ideology of his nation.

Such terms are recurrently employed to characterize the reputedly unprogressive political shape of Larkin's poetry, and some of them might fit Larkin's most explicit, visibly political poem, "Homage to Government," a poem he published in 1969 concerning the closure of a British colonial baseinadenforeconomicreasons. LaurenceLemertames abitthe implicit imperialism in this poem by saying that there are "a few crude right-wing poems by Larkin, all short and most of them unpublished. These I believe can be pushed aside as trivia which are best forgotten; one comparatively crude poem which he did publish ('Homage to Government') stands out for the unsubtle quality of its irony, and has few admirers."18 That having been noted, the poem does exist in his High Windows (1974) volume, and its publication has further encouraged the view of Larkin as an unthinking conservative.

Put another way, when he writes as a politically occasional poet, Larkin writes at his least inspired, and he seems to have had a kind of selfknowledge about this. This limitation is to a much lesser degree true also of his posthumously published "The March Past," and of the conservative work, "Going, Going," a poem which begins in notes of faint conservative nostalgia only to topple interestingly toward the political left almost in spite of itself. It includes the lines:

The crowd

Is young in the MI cafe;
Their kids are screaming for more -
More houses, more parking allowed,
More caravan sites, more pay.
On the Business Page, a score

Of spectacled grins approve
Some takeover bid that entails
Five per cent profit (and ten
Per cent more in the estuaries): move
Your works to the unspoilt dales
(Grey area grants!) And when
You try to get near the sea

In summer...
It seems, just now,

To be happening so very fast;
Despite all the land left free
For the first time I feel somehow
That it isn't going to last,


That before I snuff it, the whole
Boiling will be bricked in
Except for the tourist parts--
First slum of Europe: a role
It won't be so hard to win,
With a cast of crooks and tarts.

And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There'll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.19

In a letter to Faber and Faber's Charles Monteith (I 3 January 1972), Larkin dismissed "Going, Going" as "thin ranting conventional gruel (SL, 452)," and in one to Robert Conquest (31 May 1972) he identifies it as a poem which "makes my flesh creep (SL, 459)."20 More than any other poem I can think of, "Going, Going" brings to mind Philip Hobsbaum's observation that there is "nothing in Larkin's verse so easy as a contrast between present detritus and past nostalgia,"21 yet it remains a valuable curiosity in the way it archives Larkin's reformist instincts as a poet. It is, at bottom, an interestingly anti-capitalist poem, a shrewd attack on commercial corruption.

For all of this, there remains an objective validity in Larkin's suggestion that "good social and political literature can exist only if it originates in the imagination, and it will do that only if the imagination finds the subject exciting, and not because the intellect thinks it important; and it will succeed only in so far as the imagination's original concept was realized."21 There is a fair bit of self-knowledge and honesty in that comment, and that is why Larkin's more searching political commentary, his politics of scepticism, is available to us primarily in his more inadvertent or spontaneous poems, not those he wrote for political occasions. The conventional terms of critical discourse on Larkin's conservatism in some instances are apposite for underlining his renditions of English imperial decline, but they miss the conflict between capitalism and humanity in many of his more spontaneous political poems.

Much of Larkin's writing seems to issue from a self more serious than his bluff conservative one, and he has even spoken of a divided self in his letters, a division he declares in a letter to Sutton (I I August 1948)as being between, "what I admire and what I am (SL, 152)." He also discusses this important division in a more developed form in some of the unpublished archival material, where it is clear that he views the admiring self as in constant battle with the self of his cranks and places of exile, so to speak. Hitchens has said that we "are fortunate in being able to say that Larkin's politics are buried well beneath, and somewhat apart from, his poems (SP, 171)," but the fact of the matter is that Larkin's anti-capitalist bent is clearly visible in the poems and it tends to place the gestural politics of his published letters in a modifying and more benevolent light.

Now because of the availability of Larkin's letters surplus to the ones Thwaite has selected, it is abundantly clear that Larkin read Lawrence constantly in his youth and that he acquired from him a contempt for capitalist moral fecklessness. During his maturing years he was obsessed with Lawrence's ideas, and this is especially visible in his thoughtful, learned and enthusiastic correspondence with James Sutton, a man with whom he constantly discussed Lawrence's persuasiveness as a critic of modem industrial culture." Larkin appreciated Lawrence's moral disdain for industrialism and his high regard for the mystery of life and the quickness of life as the positives of a social idealism that made sense. So Lawrence is in part source for Larkin's more progressive views on society in his poetry and he is also source for Larkin's severest criticism of capitalism, a capitalism akin in its mindlessness to the "turbo-charged capitalism"" Edward Luttwak speaks so loudly against in our own day. It is the capitalism of "greeds/And garbage (CP, 190)," and both writers indict it with a candid moral gaze.

Lawrence was Larkin's stimulus for the recognition that money and power and commercial culture spell the defeat of community feeling, organic connections in society. He is source for Larkin's celebration of community life, his recoil from commercial life and his contempt for money connections and commercial greed. Larkin's central poems of this order are "The Whitsun Weddings," "To The Sea," and "Show Saturday." They are poems which value the human being and they value community in the name of a nostalgic social idealism Larkin in part learned from his reading of Lawrence. A number of critics have found these largely celebratory poems deficient because they find their speakers either too detached, given to class snobbery or just nostalgic and too sentimental." The poems are much more complicated than this, and are actually commentaries on English society which are analytical at the same time as they are idealistic. They are generous in their regard for the small beauty of the human being, and critical in their alertness to the largely capitalist forces which beat that beauty down. Each of their celebrations is of human ritual activities. Yet in them, to employ words from "Show Saturday," all of this celebrated human value takes place within a capitalist irony that frames and controls the society at large. Larkin values the human festivity he witnesses at the show, but concludes with:

Let it stay hidden there like strength, below
Sales-bills and swindling; something people do,
Not noticing how time's rolling smithy-smoke
Shadows much greater gestures; something they share
That breaks ancestrally each year into
Regenerate union. Let it always be there.
(CP, 201)

That "rolling smithy-smoke" of time is the signification of an implacable industrial-commercial power which pushes human worth into the past, renders traditional views of human worth obsolete and quaint. Larkin clearly sees this cultural logic at work, and he writes with a similar sense of things in "The Whitsun Weddings," where,

All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept
For miles inland,
A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.
Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and
Canals with floatings of industrial froth;
A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
And rose: and now and then a smell of grass
Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth
Until the next town, new and nondescript,
Approached with acres of dismantled cars.
(CP, 1 14)

"The Whitsun Weddings" is also a poem of praise and celebration, but it, too, recognizes the way in which all that is humanly worthwhile is relatively impotent as value in the midst of a depleted, commercialized, present world. In his poetry, Larkin evokes the real power in society as an ironic frame which surrounds in a negative way everything he as an artist values the most - beauty, the imagination, the individual. To me, this renders Larkin's more gestural kinds of political commentary, his offhand conservatism, pale in comparison to what more essentially "originates in the imagination" of his artistic world.

Larkin's Lawrence-inspired argument with commerce shows up in many of his other poems as well. It is there in poems like "Afternoons," for example, and "Here...... The Large Cool Store," and "Essential Beauty," to name just a few sites in which he indicts commercial culture for its reduction of the human imagination to the level of getting and spending the satisfying of fantasies on commercial billboards. In "Here," for example, the speaker's trip on a train,

Gathers to the surprise of a large town:
Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster
Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water,
And residents from raw estates, brought down
The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,
Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires--
Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced jollies,
Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers--
(CP, 136)

The speaker in this and other Larkin poems ends up seeking a contrary world of nature in which he is "Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach (CP, 137)." It is perhaps on the basis of poems such as these that Osbome might rest his judgement of over a decade ago that, "Truly, no shaggy Beat orwrist-slittingExistentialistwas less deceivedthanlarkinby Capitalism's big bribe or by Establishment's baubles; compared to him the Liverpool Poets seem positively cosy and CoMpliCitoUS",16 and I have elsewhere detailed how in these poems Larkin dissects the exploitative power of commercial advertising and sees it for what it is - corrupt.17 Like another cultural studies commentator who was young in the 1950s, Marshall McLuhan, Larkin a long time ago attempted to unwrite the lies of the industrial-commercial state. Larkin writes within an even longer modem tradition of writerly, sarcasm about the money basis of society, and his views on money might have beckoned him in the direction of the political left had he not acquired such a strong suspicion of socialist ideas. For some, a parallel with Ezra Pound might come to mind.28

Larkin's poetry is perhaps most steadily anti-capitalist in its scom for the basis of contemporary commercial society in the religion of money. He has nothing but contempt for the heroes of this kind of a society, figures like the huckster in "Faith Healing" and the business types in "Going, Going." As we have seen, he views the latter as "a cast of crooks and tarts" who will turn England into a wasteland of "greeds/And garbage (CP, 190)." In Lady Chatterley's Lover (I928) Lawrence views these figures as a new ruling class of people. He sees them as the "moneyboys" and the "moneygirls;"29 they are narrow and immature, but powerful. They are the present and the future, and the past has nothing to do with them. In Lady Chatterly's Lover they are responsible for the blighting of England and they are behind "the endless, endless greed that drove it all. Only greed, greed stirring in its sleep (LCL, 149)." Lady Chatterly's Lover and "Going, Going" have a lot in common as melodramas about greed.

Larkin and Lawrence are very moral about this - Lawrence of course is a bit more preachy about it, as is his style - and they continually scom those who devalue the coin of the human and who are narrowed by the power of wealth. As social antagonists, they are seen as unimaginative, rapacious, destructive, and arrogant with what Mellors in Lady Chatterley's Lover calls "the impudence of money (LCL, 286)." In some ways they have always been around. For Aristotle, these would be the merely moneyed, those he describes in Rhetoric as, "insolent and arrogant; their possession of wealth affects their understanding; they feel as if they had every good thing that exists; wealth becomes a sort of standard of value for everything else, and therefore they imagine there is nothing it cannot buy ... In a word, the type of character produced by wealth is that of a prosperous fool."10 They are in Larkin's poetry responsible for the diminishment of human value, for the fact that "the past is past and the future neuter (CP, 41)."

Lawrence contrasts the narrow money world of society with the more capacious natural world (of the instincts and of the universe), and in Apocalypse (1931) he urged that, "What we want is to destroy our false, inorganic connections, especially those related to money, and re-establish the living organic connections, with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family."" And in poems like "Money-Madness," "@ll Money," and "Aristocracy of the Sun," Lawrence expresses an insubordinate disrespect for money, just as Larkin does in his poem, "Money." In that work, Larkin comico-sadly offers:

Clearly money has something to do with life

- In fact, they've a lot in common, if you enquire:
You can't put off being young until you retire,
And however you bank your screw, the money you save
Won't in the end buy you more than a shave.

I listen to money singing. It's like looking down
From long french windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches omate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.
(CP, 198)

Money is everything but nothing, a kind of ajoke in a way, and this is what makes its power so untenable, so repulsive to the active imagination. In Lady Chatterley's Lover, Mellors says, "I hate the impudence of money, and I hate the impudence of class (LCL, 287), and in "Aristocracy of the Sun," Lawrence envisioned a money-less, classless ideal, declaring:

I am what I am
from the sun,
and people are not my measure.

Perhaps, if we started right, all children could grow up
sunny
and sun-aristocrats.
We need have no dead people, money-slaves and social
worms. 32

Larkin knew of this idealistic picturing of Lawrence's and he employed it sometimes as an implicit, sometimes as an explicit contrast in his poems. He was ironic enough of temperament to know that it was sentimental as an ideal for contemporary society, and this is in part why so many of his poems are peopled with similarly accounted for "dead people, money slaves and social worms." In a way, humanity is a dead letter.

Larkin's less deceived social vision is coloured, that is, by his reading of Lawrence's views on these issues. Lawrence says that "the middle classes / are sunless" and they "have only two measures:/ mankind and money, / they have utterly no reference to the sun,"" and Larkin took this charge seriously. He was highly aware of Lawrence's dream of an aristocracy of the sun, and it informs the apostrophe of his poem, "Solar," where the sun suggests for Larkin a Lawrentian kind of counter-currency:

Coined there among
Lonely horizontals
You exist openly
Our needs hourly
Climb and return like angels.
Unclosing like a hand,
You give for ever.
(CP, 159)

Larkin's usage of the sun as valuable coinage is also there, for example, in "Livings I," where the bored and narrow mentality of a salesman on the eve of the Depression is contrasted with the imaginative wealth of a "big sky" that "Drains down the estuary like the bed/ Of a gold river(CP, 186)."Theidealizedvalueof the sun aspurercoinageis alsothere in, for example, the atoned vision of the dead miners at the end of "The Explosion." After the explosion which kills the miners, their widows eventually come to view them with a purity of heart and imagination. The miner@ are envisioned by the poet as Lawrentian aristocrats of the sun. They live on in a dreamed-of etemity from which they approach their wives this way:

Larger than life they managed -
Gold as on coin, or walking
Somehow from the sun towards them,

One showing the eggs unbroken.
(CP, 175)

Larkin had a very equivocal attitude to class in both his letters and in his poetry, yet it is clear that he occasionally shared in Lawrence's view that a society is healthiest when men and women are first and foremost "aristocrats of the sun," classless, affiliated with nature, one another, and with imaginative, rooted community. This is close to what we find glimpsed at, or certainly wished for, in "The Whitsun Weddings," "To the Sea," and "Show Saturday." In all of these poems the human being is valued for an innocent quality which is contrasted with a corrupt and destructive world of commerce. These are three places where Larkin's idealism and his political criticism exist in the same breath.

Many of Larkin's poems suggest a creative nostalgia and an anticapitalist, reformist edge. Clearly, his sense of the fragility of the human being in the midst of the destructiveness of modem capitalism lies at the very centre of his political view. In political terms, he is most engaging when stepping outside his unfortunate identity as a faithful poet of nation.

NOTES

1. This article is based on a paper presented on June 30, 1996 at the Poetry and History Conference at the University of Stirling, Scotland, titled "Political Discourse in the Poetry of Philip Larkin."
   
   I am grateful to University Archivist Brian Dyson and his staff at the Brynmor Jones Library Archives, University of Hull, England for their help and goodwill during visits in which I researched unpublished Larkin materials, some of which are related to this article, and to the articie, "'Strangeness made sense:' Philip Larkin in Ireland," an item which appeared in issue Number 107 (Autumn 1996) of TheAntigonishReview. lam alsograteful to the Social Sciences andhumanities ResearchCouncil of Canada for making this research possible.


2. SeeLisaJardine's "SaxonViolence," in The Guardian, 8 December, 1992, Section 2, p. 4., and John Newsinger's "Dead Poet: the Larkin Letters," in Race & Class, Vol. 34, No. 4 (April-June 1993), pp. 87-93. "Now, of course, the game is up and Larkin is revealed in his Selected Letters to have been a reactionary bigot; racist, sexist and gripped by class hatred (p.87)," is the way Newsinger puts it.


3. See especially Tom Paulin's "She DidNotChange: PhilipLarkin," inhis Minotaur.- Poetry and the Nation State (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 233-25 1. See also note # 1 6 below.


4. I have taken these term s from Michael Oakeshott's "The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism." Oakeshott uses them to differentiate a critical from asimply complacentattitudetogovemmentandnation. The piece was written in 1952 and isexcerptedin an itemtitled"The fortunes of scepticism," in The TimesLiterarySupplement, No. 4850 (March 15, 1996), pp. 14-15. Oakeshott is also the author of On Human Conduct (1975) and Rationalism in Politics (1962).


5. Philip Larkin, in ed. and introd. Anthony Thwaite, The Selected Letters of philip Larkin, 1940-1985 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), p. 460. Future references to these letters are signified as (SL).


6. Christopher Hitchens, "Something About the Poetry: Larkin and 'Sensitivity'," in New LeftReview, No. 200 (July-August 1993), p. 167. Future references to this article are signified as (SP).


7. John Osborne, "Philip Larkin (1922-1985)," in Lincolnshire and HumbersideArts Diary, March-April (I 986), p. 6.


8. Jean Hartley, in Philip Larkin, the MarvellPress andme (1989; rpt. with Afterword, London: The Sumach Press, 1993), p. 159.


9. The most embarrassing issue for Larkin was whether or not his father belonged to "The Link," a "British organization advocating AngloGerman friendship and cooperation" (SL, footnote #3, p. 645). Larkin claimed in this letter (30 March 1981) to Thwaite that he didn't. In another letter to Thwaite (31 May 1980) Larkin says of his father that, "In fact he was aloverof Germany, really batty aboutthe place. I hated it (SL, p. 622)." In this instance he is anxiously reacting to a reference made to his father in a piece titled "The Young Mr Larkin," by Noel Hughes, which would appear later in ed. Anthony Thwaite, Larkin atsixty (London: Faber and Faber), pp. 17-22.


10. SeeBlake Morrison's The Movement: English Poetry andfiction ofthe 1950's (I 980, rpt. London: Methuen, 1986), especially pp.55-98. For relevant commentary on Morrison and Robert Hewison's work, In Anger.- Culture in the Cold War 1945-60 (1981), see Stephen Regan's Philip Larkin (Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1992), pp. 20-25.


11. See Andrew Motion's Philip Larkin: A Writer'sLife (London: Faberand Faber, 1993),p.73,wherehesaysLarkin"joinedtheLabourClub-less for political reasons than for the chance to see more of an'amazing'Czech woman, Chitra Rudingerova, whom he described as 'the crankiest communist I have ever met'."


12. quoted By Andrew Motion in Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life, p. 388.


13. Andrew Motion, p. 377.


14. See his "The New Poetry, orbeyond the Gentility Principle," which is his introduction to The New Poetry (I 962, rpt. London: Penguin Books, 1968), pp. 21-32.


15. See Blake Morrison, pp. 82-83.


16. See the Tom Paulin article referred to in note #3 above. In The New Poetry Alvarez analyzed "At Grass" (see pp. 29-32) as allegory thirty years before Paulin did, and the view oflarkin's imperial politics was likely also encouraged in Paulin by Blake Morrison's related analysis of the poem (see Morrison, pp. 82-84) in 1982.


17. Janet Rossen, Philip Larkin: His Life's Work (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), p. 5 1.


18. Lawrence Lemer, Philip Larkin, Writers andTheirWork Series (Plymouth: Northcote House in association with The British Council, 1997), p. 26. For an attempt on Larkin's part to explain the poem, see p. 52 of the Observer interview reprinted in Larkin's, Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces, 1955-1982 (London: Faber and Faber, 1983).


19. Philip Larkin, "Going, Going," in ed. and introd., Anthony Thwaite, Philip Larkin: Collected Poems (London: The Marvell Press and Faber and Faber, 1988), pp. 189-90. Future references to this collection are signified as (CP).


20. "Going, Going" was commissioned by the Countess of Dartmouth's report on the human habitat. In this same letter Larkin tells Conquest that the fifth stanza (about the businessmen in "spectacled grins") was cut out by his commissioner. As he puts it: "She made me cut out a verse attacking big business - don't tell anyone. It was pretty crappy verse, anyway, not that she minded that (SL, p. 459)."


21. Philip Hobsbaum, "Larkin's England," in Poetry Review, Vol 76, Nos. I 2 (June 1986), p. 25.


22. Philip Larkin, "The Writer in his Age," London Magazine, Vol. 4, No. 5 (May 1957), p. 47.


23. Larkin's letters to James Ballard (Jim) Sutton in the Larkin Estate papers (MS DP/I 72/4, nos. 1-214) at the Brynmor Jones Library Archives, University of Hull, England, are the main source for my claims here, but a few of the Sutton letters are published in Thwaite's selection, and the selection also contains other letters of Larkin's which refer to Lawrence.


24. See Luttwak's "B uchanan Has it Right," in the London Review ofbooks, Vol. 18, No.9 (9 May 1996), pp. 6-8 and his "Turbo-Charged Capitalism and Its Consequences," in the London Review ofbooks, Vol. 17, No. 21 (2 November 1995), pp. 6-7. In these pieces he talks about the irrelevance of party politics to the new world order version of capitalism with its utterly money-focussed paradigm for society, one in which western society ends up in a competitive race downward with the rest of the world. In the I atter item he says that this spawns a new fascism, thus the London Review ofbooks' caption on the 2 November 1995 issue: "Capitalism Uber Alles." Luttwak is director of geo-economics at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. He is author of The Endangered American Dream: How to Stop the Third- Worldisation of America(1993).


25. See particularly chapter seven of Neil Corcoran's English Poetry Since 1940 (London: Longman, 1993), pp. 87-95.


26. John Osborne, p.7. We also know, by the way, that Larkin had a hiah regard for the Liverpool poet, Roger McGough. See Andrew Motion, p. 382.


27. See chapter three of Philip Larkin and English Poetry (I 986; rpt. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1990), pp. 32-55.


28. For an interesting article which sees affinities between Lawrence's and Pound's views on commerce, see Robert Gingher's "Pound/Lawrence: A Re-evaluation," in Paideuma, Vol. 24, Nos. 2 & 3 (Fall & Winter 1995), pp. 149-62. Larkin's letters, published and unpublished, nevertheless suggest that it is from Lawrence, not Pound, that he absorbs his contempt for the dominating value of money in modem society.


29. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover(1931; with intro. Richard Hoggart (Han-nondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 109. Lawrence says: "There was only one class nowadays: moneyboys. The moneyboy and the moneygirl, the only difference was how much you got, and how much you wanted (p. 109)." Future references to this novel are signified as (LCL). In an unpublished letter to Sutton (MS DP/172/4, #48) Larkin uses a similar but even stronger epithet when he describes the greedy, moneyhungry characters in one of his favourite movies, The Little Foxes, a movie based on a modified version of Lillian Hellman's anti-capitalist play of the same name.


30. Aristotle, Rhetoric 1390b 33, asquoted by David Applebaum in "Money and the City," in Parabola, Vol XVI, No. 1, (Spring 1991), p. 43.


31. D.H. Lawrence,Apocalypse (193 1), intro. RichardAldington (London: Heinemann, 1972), p. 104.


32. -D.H. Lawrence, "Aristocracy of the Sun," in ed. and introd. and notes by Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts, The Complete Poems ofD.H. Lawrence (I 964; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 526. A future reference to this work is in the main body of the text as (CPDHL).


33. Ibid., p. 527.

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