ABSTRACT
One scarcely thinks of sex in relation to the work of Philip Larkin; or, to qualify a little, only in terms of jaundiced disparagement, a fertile source of negation. The erotic Larkin would appear to be pretty meagre fare, in his own phrase from ‘Spring’, an ‘indigestible sterility’ (8:39). Such an emphasis would seem unlikely to displace the more familiar image of Larkin as wry commentator on the ‘lowered sights and patiently diminished expectations’ of contemporary Britain (Davie 1972:62). But the fact that the major English poet of the post-war period (and even the recent spate of iconoclastic polemic implicitly concedes this centrality) appears to be an uncompromising advocate of male celibacy should at the very least give pause for thought. The greater availability of biographical material (Thwaite 1992; Motion 1993) has revealed personal entanglements of some complexity. Nevertheless this does not alter the cumulative impact of his literary self-presentation. His verse immediately conjures up an image of sour and wizened bachelorhood —‘One of those old-type natural fouled-up guys’, as Jake Balokowsky puts it (18:170)—and its anti-paternity motif has often been noted. Far from being a minor aberration, this stance is integral to the characteristic persona of his poetry: the excluded onlooker, slightly wistful, yet nevertheless resolute in his self-conserving detachment. This point of vantage is well exemplified in ‘Reasons for Attendance’, where the narrator is momentarily drawn ‘to the lighted glass/To watch the dancers’:
sensing the smoke and sweat, The wonderful feel of girls. Why be out here? But then, why be in there? Sex, yes, but what Is sex? (2-3, 5-8:80)
The question seems to be implicitly answered by the rhyme, ‘what/Is sex’/‘sweat’, but this cannot quite stifle the appreciative ‘wonderful feel of girls’. (The phrase is typical of the unobtrusive yet explicit quality of Larkin’s sexual vocabulary, with the lascivious suggestiveness of a ‘full feel’ followed by the further specificity of ‘in there’.) The balance is tilted, however, by the ‘individual sound’ of the trumpet that ‘insists I too am individual’ (13-14):
Therefore I stay outside, Believing this; and they maul to and fro, Believing that; and both are satisfied, If no one has misjudged himself. Or lied. (16-20)
The emphasis on the insight gained through ‘staying outside’ recurs throughout Larkin’s verse (as, indeed, does the uncomfortably equivocal relation between ‘satisfied’ and ‘lied’). This can be linked to what I would venture to call the epistemological Larkin, whose unsparing meditation on ageing, death, ‘endless extinction’ (1983:55) aspires to a kind of agnostic sainthood, to ‘importantly live/Part invalid, part baby, and part saint’ (‘Waiting for breakfast, while she brushed her hair’ (23-4:20)). One cannot fear a thing one cannot know, and his poetry of mortality seeks to produce tangible cognitive equivalents to fill this gap. It stages a continual drama in which awareness of continual erosion (‘Life is slow dying’ (6:138)) is countered by strategies of self-withholding-a refusal to expend, a kind of sustenance through habit, routine, and confinement. ‘I don’t want to take a girl out and spend circa 5 pounds when I can toss off in five minutes, free, and have the rest of the evening to myself (quoted in Motion 1993:62).
