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Literary Theory: a short introduction

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brief guide to critical approaches to literary studies

This introductory guide to literary theory comes from a new series by Oxford University Press. They are written by specialists, aimed at the common reader, and offer an introduction to the main cultural and philosophical ideas which have shaped the western world. Jonathan Culler avoids the common approach of explaining the various schools of literary criticism by choosing instead a set of topics and showing what various literary theories have to say about them.

Literary Theory: a short introduction There’s a certain amount of sleight of hand. In explaining ‘theory’ in its modern sense he doesn’t acknowledge the profound difference between this loose use of the term and a scientific theory, which can be proven or disproven. Nor does he acknowledge the sort of special pleading and self justification which is passed off as ‘philosophy’ in the work of someone such as Michel Foucault. But he does have a persuasive way of explaining some of these difficult ideas in terms which the common reader can understand.

The topics he chooses turn out to be very fundamental questions such as ‘What is literature?’ – that is, are there any essential differences between a literary and a non-literary text. These are questions to which common sense supplies rapid answers, but when Theory is applied, unforeseen complexities arise.

In fact when he looks more closely at the nature, purpose, and the conventions of literature, he claims that one of the purposes of Theory is to expose the shortcomings of common sense.

There’s an interesting chapter on language and linguistic approaches to literary theory where he discusses Saussure and Chomsky, the differences between poetics and hermeneutics, and reader-response criticism. Any one of these approaches is now the basis for a whole school of literary theory.

When he gets to genre criticism there’s a useful explanation of lyric, epic, and drama – though it’s not quite clear why he separates narrative (stories and novels) into a chapter of its own.

However, when it does come, his explanation of narrative theory is excellent. His account of plot, point of view, focalisation, and narrative reliability will help anyone who wants to get to grips with the analysis of fiction.

He ends with brief notes explaining the various school of literary theory which have emerged in the recent past – from New Criticism, through Structuralism, Marxism, and Deconstruction, to the latest fashions of Post-Colonialism and Queer Theory.

In one sense the book’s title is slightly misleading. It should be Modern Literary Theory. But this is a very interesting and attractive format – a small, pocket-sized book, stylishly designed, with illustrations, endnotes, suggestions for further reading, and an index.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp.149, ISBN: 019285383X

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Literary Theory: the basics

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schools of literary criticism 1900-2000 explained

Despite its title, this is a survey of modern literary criticism. Hans Bertens starts from a critique of Matthew Arnold’s liberal humanist and essentially romantic appeal that literature exists on a higher spiritual plane that we are invited to visit. He then goes on to show the links with T.S.Eliot, Ivor Richards, F.R.Leavis, and the New Criticism of the United States in the early decades of the last century. Then its on to the Russian formalists and Prague structuralism – Shklovsky, Propp, and Jakobson .

Literary Theory: the basicsThese progress by a slightly dog-legged chronology to the French structuralists of the 1960s and 1970s. Roland Barthes picks up Saussure and runs with the ball of structuralism. Genette develops the same lines in his theories of narratology. When it came to Marxism I had a minor quibble with his account of ideology and I think he lets Georgy Lukacs off rather lightly – but on the whole it’s an even-handed treatment.

I enjoyed his explanations of feminism, race, and gender theory, and I couldn’t help feeling that his own interests were transmitted more infectiously as his story approached the present. What a rich choice of approaches any young student of literature has today.

When he arrives at the ‘poststructuralist revolution’ you have to be prepared for an excursion into the realms of philosophy. Literature seems a long way off, but you’ll get an account of Derrida which makes him seem almost accessible. The same is true of his chapter on Lacan

We know now that the deconstructionists took literary theory to a point where it appeared that nothing certain could be said about a text. So what happened afterwards? Well – it’s interesting that the fashions in literary theory which followed tend to focus upon on a single topic – race, class, sexuality, colonialism, or gender, and erect a series of abstact generalisations upon it.

Bertens gives very generous considerations to these late twentieth-century developments. The strength of this approach is that the theories are explained very well. The weakness is that we don’t get to see them applied. Literary texts themselves seem a long way off, and only get the occasional mention. It’s really difficult to see what ‘queer theory’ can tell us about Bleak House or The Odyssey. Go on – prove me wrong.

Nevertheless, I think this is a book worth recommending to people embarking on literary studies at undergraduate level, if for no other reason than it gives a reasonable account of what these theories claim without shirking from their weaknesses. And as he points out, although the latest of them tend to claim the intellectual high ground, their predecessors are still in general circulation.

Each separate chapter is followed by an annotated bibliography of further reading. I mention the annotation because this makes it far more useful to the reader than the long bare listings you usually find in books of this kind.

© Roy Johnson 2007

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Hans Bertens, Literary Theory: The Basics, Abingdon: Routledge, 2nd edition 2007, pp.264, ISBN: 0415396719

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Literature and the Internet

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resources, techniques, and issues for literary studies

In the field of literary studies, people have been creating digitized texts and making concordances for quite some time now. But until the advent of the Web it was difficult to get an overview of criticism and scholarship which was easily available. In fact it’s still not easy. As the authors of this excellent guide Literature and the Internet point out, it remains common for the latest work to be made available only in the form of conventionally printed books and the dinosaur publishing methods of scholarly journals.

Literature and the Internet But at last the Internet is now making ever more material easily available to us, and it is the purpose of this guide to advise students, teachers, and scholars how to make the most of the opportunity to retrieve it. They start with a general survey of the pros and cons of the Internet for literary studies, quite rightly pointing out that despite all its obvious advantages, there are still many shortcomings:

It has large and obvious gaps, it cannot cover the literary ground as even a moderately well-stocked library can, and it cannot equal the contemporary appeal of a good bookstore.

In fact the differences between books in libraries and texts on the Net are intelligently explored, before we get down to some practical advice on usability. This centres logically enough on using search engines, and they offer an explanation of the different techniques which can be deployed, as well as alerting users to the differences in kind amongst the sources which might be located.

The centre of the book is an extensive list of resources. These are arranged as web site address – in categories ranging from libraries, journals, literary periods, literary criticism, discussion groups and email distribution lists, to individual authors – from Achebe to Zola – and their home pages.

Mercifully, these lists are annotated with useful evaluative comments, making clear distinctions between sites which are commercial, fan pages, and the results of scholarly research. It’s interesting to note how many of the award-winning sites are the work of dedicated individuals (such as Jack Lynch at Pennsylvania and Mitsuharu Matsuoka in Japan) and departments in little-known colleges in the back of nowhere. Major institutions are noticeably thin on the ground.

I felt reassured that the authors had done their homework, had visited the sites they discuss – and were not frightened of levelling criticism at some quite well known names in the literary establishment. They point out the need for more qualitative evaluation of online resources and web site reviews.

This is followed by advice on the evaluation of sites, including a series of basic questions we can ask on arrival. Is the information accurate? Is it complete? And is there any acknowledgement of the sources being used?

There is also a section for teachers, discussing how computers and the Internet can be used in literary studies, with suggestions (for instance) for hypertext assignments and web essays – though I hope their term Webliographies doesn’t catch on.

They consider the nature of electronic texts – from plain ASCII, through the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and HyperText Markup Language (HTML), and even as far as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and Extensible Markup Language (XML).

These are only touched on lightly, with their differences briefly explained, but this is a valuable topic to raise in the consciousness of students and teachers, especially in the light of controversies surrounding the form in which commercial electronic books are being issued.

The guide ends with considerations of the theoretical and political connections between literary studies in an era of digitized text – exploring some of the notions raised in recent years by Jay Bolter, George Landow, and J. Hillis Miller.

They even have some interesting comments to make on the likely impact of Information Technology on academic careers – including the vexed issue of academic publishing, which must surely be due for major convulsions in the next few years.

Many people have argued that it’s now rather pointless issuing printed resource guides which will be quickly outdated. But there is a reason for such publications. The fact is that it’s often quicker to locate information in a book, rather than searching through files or favourites using a browser.

Certainly, I’m very pleased that this book is on my desk, and I look forward to exploring its suggestions and passing on any gems to my own students – who are currently learning how to write, link, zip, and upload their first web essays.

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© Roy Johnson 2000

Stephanie Browner, Stephen Pulsford, and Richard Sears, Literature and the Internet: A Guide for Students, Teachers, and Scholars, London/New York: Garland, 2000, pp.191, ISBN: 0815334532

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Metaphor

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its meaning in literature and general culture

Routledge have a series of books (New Critical Idiom) which offer monographs examining the key concepts and critical terms used in literary, cultural, and media studies. They seek to bring modern theory to bear upon traditional concepts, so as to illustrate the development of modern usages and shifts in contemporary interpretation. David Punter’s examination of metaphor starts by looking at its history. This begins with Aristotle’s observation in his Poetics (350 BC) that the genius of metaphor lies in the ability to see similarities in two different things.

Metaphor That is at the base of metaphor in all its forms – similes, metaphors, metonymy, synecdoche, symbols, and allegories – and I think he was wise in not getting hung up about the differences between them. He looks at examples in poetry and prose, showing them working at various levels of complexity – from simple similes to extended metaphors which seem to be operating at a ‘beyond the text’ level. After establishing the basics, he moves on to look at metaphor in a non-European context (specifically, Chinese poetry) then at public or political metaphors (‘Fathers4Justice’, the Crown, and Labour’s red rose symbol – cue William Blake).

In most cases his approach is to show what lies beneath the ‘intended’ meaning(s) so as to show others, that might be unintended, lurking below. To give an example that never ceases to amaze me, when local government officers speak of their ‘front line’ services, I wonder if sub-consciously they think of the public (their clients, whose interests they are supposed to be serving) as their enemy, with whom they are at war?

Then he tries something more difficult – interpreting modern texts that seem to have metaphorical meanings to which (it would seem) we do not have access – The Life of Pi being his most prominent example. This didn’t seem so convincing.

There’s also a discussion of psycho-analysis and metaphor which I thought might say something about what the two things being likened to each other might reveal about the person making the comparison – but he drifts off into a consideration of Edward Lear’s nonsense poetry. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that Lear’s famously bathetic last lines (‘That elastic old person of Pinner’) which merely echo the first, might just be an example of feeble whimsy.

At its weakest, his commentaries are not much more than chasing word associations (‘Howling at the moon’-> Howling Wolf -> Wolf -> Sheep -> Wolf -> Rome) and so on, but at their best he offers genuine insights into the limits and possibilities of his subject.

And despite any differences one might have with his interpretations, any students of literature (and in particular, poetry) will find his extended analyses of modern poets (Hardy, Hughes, W.S. Graham, Walcott) very illuminating.

© Roy Johnson 2007

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David Punter, Metaphor, London: Routledge, 2007, pp.158, ISBN: 0415281660

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Modern English Writing

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General survey of literature in English 1960-2003

Modern English Writing is an introduction to contemporary literature, and a survey of ‘British and Irish’ writing from 1963 to the early 2000s. John McRae and Ronald Carter introduce the social and political background to the period – which will be useful for those people who haven’t lived through it. They give a brief account of the writer’s major works, discuss the themes that emerge, and highlight links and differences with their contemporaries. These expositions are punctuated by mini-essays outlining special themes which emerged during the period, and commenting on developments in language, culture.

Modern English WritingIn the theatre they single out as major figures Stoppard, Orton, Beckett, and Pinter. Then coming more up to date, they make a strongly argued case for the importance of Sarah Kane, who committed suicide in 2000. However, it’s the novel which gets the lion’s share of their attention. The names go racing past with few surprises: Durrell, Golding, Murdoch, Amis (pere et fils). What’s interesting here is their mention of names who seemed important at the time but who are now largely unread or on their way to becoming forgotten: Anthony Powell, D.M.Thomas, Muriel Spark, Angus Wilson.

There is a group whose value is in the balance, but whose stock (I predict) seems likely to sink. Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge, Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, and her sister A.S.Byatt

Of course it is difficult to see who if anyone from the recent crop will last. Formerly ‘big’ names from the 1960-1980s are already beginning to disappear, and if you look back further than that into the review pages of literary newspapers and magazines at who was being touted as important or the next big thing, your reaction is likely to be “Who he?”

The main novelty to emerge from the last half century or so has been the emergence of writers from other cultures (often former colonies) who have chosen to write in English. The most recent are all represented here: Timothy Mo, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Anita Desai, and Vikram Seth, whose novel in sonnet form, The Golden Gate, is undoubtedly a masterpiece.

As we move closer to the present, it’s more difficult to say who is worth listing and who not. The younger but now middle-aged generation of writers such as Ian McEwan are given as much space and attention as Nobel prizewinner V.S.Naipaul. But the authors pack in as many names from the world of contemporary fiction as possible, giving fair space to Irish and Scottish writers, as well as English. They also include mention of sub-genres such as detective fiction and children’s literature.

They finish off with a survey of poetry. Few surprises here: Larkin, Hughes, Heaney, and Harrison. But they manage to come smack up to date with a very appreciative piece on Simon Armitage.

Anyone could quibble about who is included or excluded, or argue about the amount of space devoted to a particular writer; but anybody looking for guidance or suggestions on literature in UK English in the last fifty years will find this useful.

There are also some useful appendices – lists of literary prizewinners, a late 20th century literary timeline, and a bibliography of further reading. It’s an excellent source if you need suggestions for further reading, or you are studying modern British literature.

© Roy Johnson 2004

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John McRae and Ronald Carter, The Routledge Guide to Modern English Writing, London: Routledge, 2nd edn, 2004, pp.216, ISBN: 0415286379

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Modernism – a very short introduction

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radical developments in the arts 1900-1930

As a critical term ‘modernism’ needs careful use and understanding. For it refers not to things that are modern, but to the general movement of experiment in the arts that took place in the period 1900-1930. Modernism is the loose term we use for discussing Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Christopher Butler offers as background reasons for these radical artistic developments the loss of religious belief, the growth of science and technology, the spread of mass culture, and radical changes in gender roles and relationships.

ModernismHe starts his survey of the period very wisely by presenting and analysing three iconic modernist works – James Joyce’s Ulysses, Fernand Leger’s La Ville, and Berthold Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, explaining how they ‘work’ in terms of their use of new techniques including fragmentation, collage, strange juxtapositions, abstraction, parody, allusions, and referentiality.

Then he looks at the theories that were advanced as attempts to underpin these developments. This is a tricky area, because what artists say or claim about their own work is not necessarily to be taken at face value. There are other problems too. Picasso and Braque for instance invented cubism without writing a single word explaining the process.. Many other artists on the other hand wrote manifestos full of complex notions and theories that turn out to be entirely unconnected with the works of art they produced.

Schoenberg thought his twelve tone system would assure the dominance of world music by Germany for the next one hundred years [sounds familiar?] but within a short time most listeners had tired of atonality. Writers such as Joyce, Woolf, and Eliot fared better in explaining their methods because literature is a medium which must faux de mieux be articulated via language.

The range of Butler’s references and examples discussed is enormous – though I was not persuaded by his attempts to recruit Wallace Stephens and William Faulkner into the Pantheon of Significance. It’s surprising how quickly some artistic reputations fade or in some cases are revealed as completely bogus – Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Herman Broch, Andre Gide, and Gertrude Stein spring to mind as candidates.

He devotes an entire chapter to the creation of a subjective point of view and its counterpart in modern fiction, the Epiphany. Literature naturally dominates here, but he compensates for this by including a section on surrealism, in which painting is the main art form. Interestingly enough, even though it was a short-lived phenomenon, it still lives on in occasional appearances in the visual arts, whereas in literary forms it is as dead as the dodo.

He brings all his arguments together with a quite refreshing examination of modernism and politics. This starts with the surrealists who half-heartedly tried to ally themselves to the Communist Party, then passes on to show how the communist orthodoxy of Socialist Realism chimed exactly with the Nazi policy on the arts. He also includes a lively critique of Berthold Brecht, who often escapes censure for his Stalinist propaganda, disguised as it often is beneath historical allegory.

He concludes with arguments that are quite contemporary in their scepticism. No matter which critical approach we take for instance, it is simply not possible to say which parts of Women in Love, The Firebird, or Guernica are ‘progressive’ or contribute to social development or enrichment. But what is more interesting is that these great modernist works still speak to us as vibrant examples of artistic achievement long after the historical and political events that provide their context have passed.

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© Roy Johnson 2010

Christopher Butler, Modernism: a very short introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp.117, ISBN: 0192804413

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Oxford Book of Essays

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classics of the essay genre written in English 1700-2000

The Oxford Book of Essays is a compilation of short literary prose studies edited by John Gross of pieces written in English stretching from Francis Bacon in 1625 to Clive James in 1980. He admits in his introduction that it’s almost impossible to define the literary essay (as distinct from the academic essay). The essay has no set rules or even recognisable shape: it can take the form of a moral homily, a character sketch, a piece of travel writing, or even a book review. The only requirement (to paraphrase Henry James) is that it should be interesting.

The grand-father of the Renaissance essay is Michel de Montaigne – who is actually mentioned in Fancis Bacon’s earliest entry in this collection – a figure who almost ‘invented’ the modern discursive essay, which generally combines personal reflection, entertaining anecdote, and historical background reference.

Oxford Book of EssaysSome of the best of the earliest essayists in this plump volume have a genius for casting their thoughts almost in the form of aphorisms. Thomas Browne for instance, in his essay On Dreams reflects ‘[Sleep] the brother of Death extracteth a third part of our lives’, going on to observe that ‘If some have swooned, they may also have died in dreams, since death is but a confirmed swooning’ (1650). And Swift is equally succinct in On Good Manners: ‘Pedantry is properly the overrating any kind of knowledge we pretend to’ (1714).

As a literary genre the essay came to its first maturity when an educated readership coincided with the establishment of a vigorous periodical press. This was during the heyday of the The Spectator and the Tatler edited by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele.

These journals also introduced the idea of a persona who made comments on coffee house gossip and social characters of the time . In the ‘Sir Roger de Coverley Papers’ Addison pushed the boundaries of the essay form towards narrative fiction. And he writes entertaining reflections on mortality and death couched in essays on the buildings at his disposal – Westminster Abbey and The Royal Exchange.

In general the pieces written around this golden era tend to be witty, satirical, and deeply engaged with contemporary events. They represent the forming of modern post-Renaissance consciousness – the Age of Enlightenment. Even James Boswell’s slightly self-regarding style cannot dampen the impact of his passionate tirade against militarism in On War, a piece occasioned by a visit to the Arsenal in Venice.

The form of the assay is certainly loose, but there always seems to be a danger of falling into triviality – as in William Hazlitt’s piece considering the affectations of Beau Brummell or Anthony Trollope’s Pooteresque railings against plumbers. But on the other hand there is no rule that says the essay must always be serious. Nevertheless, it is those essays and reviews that embrace a rigorous critical attitude which remain the most impressive.

G.K. Chesterton’s defense of ‘penny dreadfuls’ which predates George Orwell’s essay on ‘Boy’s Weeklies’ by forty years is one of these. Philip Larkin’s review of the work of the Opies on children’s street rhymes is impressive as it calls the whole concept of childhood into question. V.S. Naipaul takes a similar attitude, smashing the reputation of Christopher Columbus (real name Christobal Colon) into pieces. And the finest work in the collection is an impassioned study of the White Man and the Black Man in America written by James Baldwin when he was staying in a remote Swiss village.

In terms of selection and editing, John Gross does seem to be cheating somewhat by including ‘essays’ which have been created by shortening longer pieces of work (by writers such as Lord Macaulay, John Stuart Mill, and Matthew Arnold). This approach devalues the very notion of the essay as a genre and reduces its definition to any short example of prose. But Gross compensates by including some excellent pieces from later twentieth century writers we might not normally think of as essayists – proving that the genre is still alive and in very good health.

© Roy Johnson 2014

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John Gross (editor), The Oxford Book of Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp.704, ISBN: 0199556555

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Philip Larkin biography

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his life, and a critical re-assesment of his major poetry

Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love is the latest biographical study of arguably Britain’s most popular twentieth century poet. In his Introduction, respected and prolific Larkin scholar James Booth clearly sets out his position and concerns. Philip Larkin he believes is ‘by common consent, the best-loved British poet of the last hundred years’. But three decades after his death, he ‘remains a controversial figure, both as a poet and a man’. Ironically, his posthumous reputation was inadvertently tarnished by his two literary executors. Anthony Thwaite’s Selected Letters of Philip Larkin (1992) (properly) included his ribald and Chaucerian correspondence with like-minded friends, notably Kingsley Amis. The self-appointed literary guardians of public morality were quick to pounce, accusing him of racism, sexism, Thatcherism, misogyny and homophobia.

Philip Larkin biographyAndrew Motion’s official biography, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (1993), despite its impressive research, was also disapproving of his alleged character traits and proclivities. More recent ‘Larkin Studies’ have been (to borrow a Larkinian phrase) more precious than valuable, subjecting him to arcane post-modern analysis and exegesis. But the publication of Archie Burnett’s Philip Larkin: The Complete Poems (2012), with its meticulous ‘Commentary’ on the provenance of his verse, has done a lot to restore a Larkin-centred appreciation of his poetic oeuvre.

James Booth now convincingly and gracefully rehabilitates Larkin (whatever his real or imagined personal ‘failings’) as a poet of the people: ‘Phrases and lines from his poems are more frequently quoted than those of any other poet of his time’. ‘Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three’; ‘What are days for?’; ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’; ‘What will survive of us is love.’ Booth argues that ‘For the moment he seems to have had the last poetic word on love, on death, on the Great War, on parents, on ageing, on hedgehogs.’

Booth also suggests that Larkin’s poems feature the most uncompromising reflections on death outside the soliloquies of Shakespeare. With a veiled reference to Larkin’s sanctimonious detractors, he cautions that ‘there is no requirement that a poet should be likeable or virtuous’, but adds that all of his former friends and colleagues remember Larkin as a compassionate, courteous and extremely funny person, certainly not the morose ‘Hermit of Hull’. He was, Booth contends persuasively, ‘an ebullient provocateur with an instinct to entertain’, and ‘the various ideological Larkins who raise the passions of some critics, are provisional personae’. Like other human (and humane) beings, Larkin presented different faces to different people. His epistolary and hilarious ‘obscenities’ to Kingsley Amis, for example, were not retailed to Barbara Pym.

Booth deftly traces Larkin’s early years in Coventry and his relations with his parents, Sidney and Eva. As is well known, Sidney, City Treasurer of Coventry, was a declared admirer of Hitler and the Third Reich. Booth asserts that his father’s political views served only to turn his son away from embracing any coherent political ideology. In fact, his vague political sympathies veered more to the left than to the right, and many of his later poems first appeared in journals like the New Statesman.

On the other hand, Larkin père encouraged his son’s early passion for jazz, and also provided the family home with a decidedly ‘modern’ library: Hardy, Shaw, D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley. But his parents’ obviously unhappy union did instil in the young Philip a life-long fear of marriage – or ‘misogamy’. The lacklustre Eva, although castigated in some of Larkin’s published letters, was to be the recipient of thousands of tender (and as yet unpublished) notes and letters from him for the remainder of her long life.

His years at Oxford introduced Larkin to Kingsley Amis and a circle of friends who made jazz their secular religion. Following his war-time job as a librarian in Wellington, where he met his first love, Ruth Bowman, Larkin went to the University College of Leicester and encountered the formidable and voluble Monica Jones. She was to remain his increasingly embittered partner until his death in 1985.

After a happy spell at Queen’s University, Belfast, where he had a brief sexual liaison with Patsy Strang, daughter of a South-African diamond-mining magnate, Larkin moved to the University of Hull, and embarked on affairs with the shy (and devoutly Roman Catholic) Maeve Brennan, and in the 1970s a much happier one with his common-sense and attractively mature secretary, Betty Mackereth. Larkin’s love life receives sensitive but also critical treatment from Booth. None of these women were his intellectual equals, but each, successively, became his poetic muse. No one (apart from Larkin himself) has written more insightfully about these complicated relationships.

However, perhaps the greatest strength of the book is Booth’s analyses of Larkin’s major (and minor) poems. A few examples must suffice. A Study of Reading Habits is a didactic warning against subliterary escapism. But there is an oblique subtext of self-mockery. Now, his status safely established, he ensures that one of his most quotable lines will be: ‘Books are a load of crap’.

In Church Going ‘The Church represents a moribund authority to which the poet sulkily refuses to defer. [But] his tone allows his pious readers to imagine that the poet himself shares their superstitious self-deception.’ He argues that The Whitsun Weddings, as the train journey unfolds, ‘becomes an Ode to Incipience.’ And on the notorious This Be The Verse Booth comments: ‘This must bid fair to be the funniest serious English poem of the twentieth century’ [and] must also already rival Gray’s “Elegy” in the number of parodies and pastiches it has generated.’

Larkin once said ‘I like to think of myself as a funny man’. A minor criticism of Booth’s book is that more space could have been given to Larkin the wit – and less, perhaps, to his early experiments with decidedly soft porn, as revealed in Trouble at Willow Gables, written under the pseudonym Brunette Coleman. Booth sees them as ‘high camp comedy’. Not all readers would agree.

He is on firmer ground with such Larkinesque bons mots as: sexual intercourse is ‘like asking someone else to blow your nose for you’, and [to Barbara Pym] ‘On Tuesday I have to address the freshers on “books” (“How to Kill, Skin & Stuff Them’). Or [to Kingsley Amis] after Larkin had declined the Poet Laureateship which was then accepted by Ted Hughes: ‘The thought of being the cause of Ted’s being buried in Westminster Abbey is hard to live with.’ The Selected Letters, and his poems offer many other revealing and ludic examples of Larkin the ‘funny man’.

Elsewhere, Booth offers nuanced interpretations of Larkin’s infamous assault on ‘modernism’ in the arts in general and jazz in particular, evaluates his two completed and published novels [Jill and A Girl in Winter], and points out that much of his poetry reflects ‘the twelve-bar blues formula’ so that a reader ‘plays’ a Larkin poem just as one might ‘play’ a recording of Bessie Smith or of Louis Armstrong (his great hero).

Booth also relates Larkin’s awareness of and empathy with the plight of African-Americans, and his increasing deafness – as well as his love of animals and, not least, his professional achievements as Librarian at the University of Hull. We are reminded that Larkin is probably unique among twentieth-century poets in writing in Toads in a `natural, first-hand way about work in the sense of paid employment. No other significant poet, except Wallace Stevens, held down a nine-to-five job with no expectation of becoming a `full-time’ professional writer.’

Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love is the best biography we have or are likely to have for a long time – until possibly the eventual release of hundreds, if not thousands, of his currently embargoed letters. Even these are unlikely to contradict Booth’s apt conclusion: ‘What will survive of him is poetry. But the thought of his literary afterlife was never any consolation to him.’

© John White 2014

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James Booth, Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love. London: Bloomsbury, 2014, pp.544, ISBN: 1408851660

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Philip Larkin letters

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witty, erudite, and scurrilous correspondence

Philip Larkin was very much a glass half empty sort of person. Even when things were going reasonably well in his life, he would find a reason to look on the glum side. He satirically called himself ‘the Hermit of Hull’ and generally moaned about everything – the weather, his neighbours, the state of his health, and even the plebeian food he chose to consume. Yet in his heyday he had three lovers at the same time; public honours and popular success were showered on him as a poet, and he even had more money than he knew how to spend. Yet despite the persistent gloominess, these letters also reveal that he could be entertainingly irreverent and very funny indeed.

The editor Anthony Thwaite is at pains to point out that this is only a selection from Larkin’s complete correspondence – and it is so selective that there’s a potential danger of creating a lopsided picture of the man himself.

Philip Larkin lettersFor instance the figure of Monica Jones hovers in the background of many letters, but there are very few addressed to the woman herself – she who played such a significant role in Larkin’s erotic and intellectual life. (There is a separate collection – Letters to Monica.) However, the few which are reproduced make very uncomfortable reading. In one Larkin gives an ‘honest’ but excruciatingly self-centred account of a weekend visit from a former lover (Patsy Strang) which verges on the sadistic – written to a woman who devoted her emotional life to him.

Of course the letters also reveal what were considered inappropriate character traits when they were first published – his penchant for soft pornography, his tendency to smut and behind-the-bike-sheds swearing – particularly in his correspondence with Kingsley Amis. But it’s worth bearing in mind both the stifling mediocrity of much British culture in these post-war years, against which these attitudes were a healthy antidote, and the fact that a fellow son of the midlands (Joe Orton) was revving up by writing in exactly the same manner a few miles down the road.

What underlies a great deal of the correspondence from a sociological point of view is that once having established himself at Oxford there is ever afterwards a network of relationships, employment, and social connections which has the British university system at its core. It emphasises Oxbridge as a system which provides a three year membership that lasts a lifetime.

Yet despite his persistent gloom and claims of being neglected, he was well connected with Faber & Faber, the BBC, and prestigious journals such as The Spectator, The Listener, and New Statesman. But to do him credit, a great deal of his early work was published by small independent presses by whom he sometimes wasn’t even paid.

The year 1955 appears to have been something of an annus mirabilis for him – first a series of publications edited by admirers such as Robert Conquest and D.J.Enright which were followed by good reviews. Then there was the move to Hull. His first impressions were not very favourable: ‘It’s a frightful dump … The village smells of chips. The town smells of fish … Life here varies from dreary to scarcely-bearable’. Yet in the end it turned out to suit him well enough (‘It’s very nice & flat for cycling’) though his regard for the University might have shocked his colleagues had they known at the time:

But in the main this institution totters along, a cloister of mediocrities isolated by the bleak reaches of the East Riding, doomed to remain a small cottage-university of arts-and-science while the rest of the world zooms into the Age of Technology. The corn waves, the sun shines on faded dusty streets, the level-crossings clank, bills are made out for 1957 under billheads designed in 1926, and the adjacent water shifts and glitters, hinting at Scandinavia … That’s a nice piece of evocation for you.

He also had no time for the business of ‘lit crit’ and the pampered existence in university academic departments. Commenting in a letter to Barbara Pym he observes: ‘If you were in university life you would be familiar with the phrase ‘crushing teaching load’ — i.e. six hours a week six months a year’.

In terms of literary development it’s interesting to note that he started in the realm of fiction, and even produced two novels – Jill and A Girl in Winter – before disenchantment set in following an unfinished sand abandoned third and fourth novel. He then settled to poetry alone, which seemed better suited to his temperament.

Yet before he had even reached the age of forty he was writing: ‘I really have no sense of the future now, except as the approach of death’ and on reaching fifty he thought it was a miracle he was still alive. As if to confirm his own sense of the sands running out, he produced less and less poetry as he got older, and yet perversely devoted huge amounts of time and effort into compiling the badly-received Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (which he referred to satirically as ‘really the Oxford Book of Nineteen & Half Century’s Right-Wing Animal-Lovers Verse.

Even though he was writing in a number of different linguistic registers to people who reflect quite distinct relationships in his life – friends, lovers, publishers, public figures – he had an amazing gift for throwing off witty epigrammatic statements:

I don’t think I write well — just better than anyone else

Personally I should need only 2 words to describe English poetry since 1960 — ‘horse-shit’

I should like to change my address in Who’s Who from ‘c/o The University of Hull’ to ‘c/o Faber & Faber , 3 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AU’, and I hope this will be acceptable to you. My reason is to make it even more difficult for people to get at me.

This attitude even extends into the darker areas of his life. After travelling regularly at weekends for years to the nursing home in Leicester where his mother was confined, he mentions to a friend:

My mother, not content with being motionless, deaf and speechless, is now going blind. That’s what you get for not dying, you see.

He was fiercely loyal to old friends such as Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, and Anthony Thwaite; he helped other writers notably Barbara Pym and his old school friend Colin Gunner locate publishers; and he was amazingly diligent, well-informed, and persistent over the rights of published writers to their royalty entitlements and re-publication fees. He even registered himself for VAT when it was introduced.

In many respects he was a figure of contradictions – which these entertaining letters bring out very well. He was the recluse who (within the UK) traveled widely and socialised regularly; the confirmed bachelor who maintained sexual relationships with a number of women – often at the same time; the radical anti-establishment figure who accepted public honours by the bucketload; the prolific writer who produced only a handful of well-known poems; and the anti-materialist who was much-depicted with an old-fashioned bicycle but who actually drove a four litre Rolls Royce Vanden Plas.

© Roy Johnson 2014

Gerald Brenan Buy the book at Amazon UK
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Anthony Thwaite (ed), Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940-1985, London: Faber & Faber, 1993, pp.791, ISBN: 057117048X

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Radical Larkin

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‘A Study of Reading [and Writing] Habits’

Radical Larkin, John Osborne’s second book on Philip Larkin is (like the first) polemical: ‘Larkin died in 1985. No-one now under 40 (and few enough aged 50) can really be said to have known the man. The future of his reputation is passing irrevocably out of the hands of those who knew him and into those who did not’. It also strikes postures: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, in place of the obdurately English poet of the critical consensus, I offer you Philip Larkin, master of deterritorialization’.

Radical LarkinThe pugilistic Osborne (a light heavy-weight) throws some below the belt punches at such distinguished Larkin commentators as Andrew Motion, who believes that the poems are autobiographical (‘as Larkin’s biographer he would say that, wouldn’t he?’), Trevor Tolley (‘A master of thinking inside the box’), Anthony Thwaite (who ‘twice recycled Larkin’s Betjeman review without referencing the source’), and James Booth (‘not because he is the worst exponent’ of ‘the conventional view of Philip Larkin as a lyric poet….but its best’.) David Timms and Richard Palmer stand jointly accused of having ‘converted [Larkin] from what he is, the greatest poet of doubt and ambiguity since Hardy, into a poet of certitude, often to the point of bigotry’. Even Archie Burnett, editor of Philip Larkin: The Complete Poems (2012), to which Osborne declares himself greatly indebted, is taken to task for including ‘mere scraps of verse’ (Burnett’s own phrase) in his magisterial compilation.

Osborne’s reiterated contention is that Larkin’s poems are not autobiographical but rather the creations of ‘a professional intertextualist’ which require ‘a post-authocentric’ reading and analysis. He focuses on such seminal poems as An Arundel Tomb, The Whitsun Weddings, This Be the Verse and Aubade – as well as his second novel A Girl in Winter.

Warming to these themes, Osborne liberally sprinkles his text with such unattractive words and phrases as ‘Phonocentrism’, ‘Anti-Textualism’, ‘Radical Ekphrasis’, ‘Radical Deterritorialization’ and ‘Radical De-essentialism’. At one point his taste for neologisms leads him astray. He heads one section ‘A monstrance against the sexing of texts.’ The word monstrance either means ‘demonstration or proof’ in Middle English or ‘an open or transparent vessel in which the host is exposed’ in contemporary English. Osborne actually wants to launch ‘an assault’ upon ‘biographicalism’ and his choice of words is baffling.

Unlike Larkin’s, much of Osborne’s language is convoluted, and presumably directed at a ‘post-modernist’ readership. Summarising his contentions in Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence, Osborne reminds his readers that Larkin’s techniques ‘include ellipsis, a four-act structure with closing reversal, asymmetrical stanza lengths and rhyme schemes, plus a battery of disaggregative linguistic devices such as split similes, negative qualifiers, oxymora and rampant paronomasia’. In this new book, such doubtful coinages as ‘the sexing and racing of narrators or addressees’ do little to aid comprehension.

In his chapter on The Whitsun Weddings, Osborne triumphantly ‘proves’ – largely thanks to Burnett’s researches – that Larkin’s famous train journey (from Hull to King’s Cross) never took place, and cautions that most of his poems ‘tell one nothing about the gender, race, class or nationality of either their narrators or their addressees’. Yet Larkin’s champions and detractors ‘fill in the missing information by jumping to the conclusion that the protagonist is always and only a white, male, middle-class Englishman named Philip Larkin’. Osborne presses his ‘intertextual’ reinterpretation of The Whitsun Weddings to a ludicrous conclusion when he suggests that the line ‘Free at last!’ reflects not only the poet’s well-known passion for jazz and its roots in African-American spirituals and blues, but also echoes Martin Luther King’s famous peroration in his 1963 ‘I Have a Dream’ speech in Washington, DC so ‘the reader has been licensed to speculate whether the narrator might be an American visitor to these shores, and not necessarily a white one’. These putative Americans (whatever their ‘racing’ or ‘sexing’) might well expostulate: ‘Pur-leeze!’

But Radical Larkin does contain original insights into some of the poet’s ‘greatest hits’. Four examples substantiate the point. As a poem, Vers de Société relates ‘the foibles of polite society. In Larkin this becomes something else: a meditation on the merits of social life, the life lived in company, versus those of the meditative life, the life of solitude’. Then, This Be The Verse, with its much-quoted opening lines

They fuck you up, your mum and dad,
They may not mean to, but they do.

is described as ‘a tweet-sized poem of atomic destructiveness detonated by laughter’. Larkin’s last great poem, Aubade, is ‘a masterpiece which affords a barometric reading of late millennial Western culture as encapsulated in its ideologies of death’. And finally, commenting on At Grass, Osborne shows that he is perfectly capable of writing clearly while offering a perceptive analysis:

…it surely offers as complex a statement as may be found in our literature of the mixed emotions with which we approach the constraints and the liberations of the later stages of life. This subsuming of the elegiac into a more nuanced address to the neglected subject of retirement is a good example of Larkin’s genius for involving poetic genres only to elude them…

Unfortunately, such astute judgements are few and far between in the densely-packed pages of Radical Larkin. Too much space is taken up by Osborne’s (generally informed) comments on Western art, sculpture and literature. And, unless one applauds his statements that ‘it would do no harm to Larkin studies if for the foreseeable future we desisted from visiting the (imaginary) certitudes of the life upon the work but rather visited the (real) polyvalency of the work upon the life’, or ‘not only do [Larkin’s] poems sabotage conventional pieties regarding church, state, nationality, marriage, gender, race and capital, but in the process they play a central role in the cultural transition to postmodern indeterminacy’, I can only recommend this book to those willing to struggle with the postmodern terminology.

© John White 2014

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John Osborne, Radical Larkin: Seven Types of Technical Mastery, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 292, ISBN: 0230348246

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