Some (older, obviously) authors get just one day in the Author Almanac. Some get two.(Sorry, Shakespeare – but you DO get at least one entry a week here’d on Sundays!)
There are plenty of writers who could, technically, appear twice: once to celebrate a birth, and again to commemorate a death. But that isn’t quite how I want the Almanac to work. For me, a second appearance has to be earned.
Larkin earns a second entry, so we’ll be back in early December: partly because of MY response to his work. And then because of my experience teaching his work – and importantly, the response of the A-Level students.
When I taught him at A-Level, I had a skull on my desk which we called Grumpy Uncle Philip (he had a Post-It name tag for the youngsters, inviting questions and conversation). At the time, my classes were comparing him with Carol Ann Duffy, so there was a second skull at the front of the room: Carol.
We never – and I’m talking about more than one cohort – seemed quite as close to Carol. And don’t get me wrong: ‘we’ loved her work.
Had I known Larkin, I suspect I would have enjoyed teasing him into increasingly cynical or curmudgeonly pronouncements. Like I do with my dad. I also suspect he would have known exactly which buttons to press in return. Like my dad.
Because that is the thing about Larkin.
He could be difficult. His biography (Andrew Motion’s work is brilliant) gives us plenty to wrestle with, particularly in his relationships with women.1 He was deeply conscious of his mortality, and frightened by it. He could be miserly, sour, funny, cruel, tender and extraordinarily observant. Dare I say, he was human …
And then, occasionally, he gives you something like this:
The unfailing sense of being young
Spread out like a spring-woken tree.2
I remember the first time I really noticed “spring-woken tree”.
Honestly, I just thought: wow.
I stopped reading
… and that is the biggest compliment I can pay any author. For my students, it’s the equivalent of ‘I enjoyed reading this.’ I’m still stopping to admire it today, writing this post.
Larkin isn’t, as far as I’m concerned, a nature poet. I love his fascination with ordinary lives, ordinary people – at the same time that I’m occasionally suspicious, to the extent of sometimes accusing him of snobbery. Depends on the day, of course!
So. The tree isn’t really the subject here. It’s a way of making something psychological visible: the sudden reawakening of a feeling which has never entirely disappeared.
Stepping back and thinking for a while, that is what interests me about “the unfailing sense of being young.”
Not remembering being young.
Not pretending that age hasn’t happened.
The sense of being young itself remains.
You’re only as old as you feel.
I’m almost embarrassed- but clearly not enough to omit it – to bang on, yet again, about Tennyson, and my favourite poem, ‘Ulysses’.
though much is taken, much remains3
Obviously, I recognise rather more keenly ever year that I don’t feel young all the time. My back helpfully ensures that particular delusion doesn’t last long — but the feeling is still there. It simply arrives less automatically, and I find myself more actively seeking the things which wake it.
For me, reading does it.
Music does it.
Art does it.
A Shakespeare play can do it.
Perhaps that’s one reason this line has stayed with me.
The record in today’s image is old. The growth, the youth, the joy? That persists.
And perhaps that’s what Larkin means by “unfailing”: not that youth remains permanently present, but that the capacity to feel it never quite goes away.
How poignant is that? The idea that youth, possibility, the ability and willingness to appreciate life and beauty, they never go away.
Almost 15 years after graduation, I think Victor Shklovsky was one of the most influential thinkers I encountered at university. 4 I think he would have understood.
Art has a habit of making the familiar strange again.
Sometimes, it makes us strange to ourselves again, too. That feels … bloody wonderful!
A final note: I’m curating this series according – naturally – to my tastes, experiences, and ideas.
But like everything else on this site – it’s a conversation.
If you’re sitting there, looking at your bookshelves, and wondering why I haven’t celebrated an author’s birth (or commemorating their life) what are you waiting for?
- Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (London: Faber & Faber, 1994). ↩︎
- Philip Larkin, “Love Songs in Age,” in The Whitsun Weddings (London: Faber and Faber, 1964 ↩︎
- Alfred Tennyson, “Ulysses,” in Poems, 2 vols (London: Edward Moxon, 1842). Read online at Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses ↩︎
- Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” in Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (eds), Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004) ↩︎
Leave a Reply