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[Published in Anthropology and Medicine vol. 7, no. 1, 2000, pp. 39-62]

WRITING ON THE BODY:THE POETIC LIFE-STORY OF PHILIP LARKIN

Nigel Rapport

PART I. LIFE AS TEXT

Writing and Cognition

Raymond Williams once commented on the way the phenomenon of writing has

become social-scientifically 'naturalised' in the academy: we ask 'what is the

writing about?', 'what knowledge, facts and experience does it contain?', but we

treat the process itself as non-problematic, as transparent and commonsensical,

once the requisite skills have been acquired (1983:1).1

Anthropologists, perhaps, have been less prone than others to this lapse,

since they more often treat those who do not and may not seek to acquire the

writing technique to which Williams refers. Hence, treating writing as a marker

of literacy, anthropology has emphasised the historico-cultural specificity of such

writing, and the effects which its arrival precipitates. Anthropology has

postulated, inter alia, that the technique of writing represents an objectification

of speech and a proliferation of words and meanings which causes more layering

and less indexicality in sociocultural milieux, so that individual members become

palimpsests who participate less fully and more sceptically, less securely and

more selectively, in their traditions (Goody & Watt, 1968:57-8). Here is a

technique for the fixing of discourse, preserving it as a possible archive of later

analysis and translation, and the creating of a quasi-separate world of texts

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which comes to eclipse the circumstantial world of orality (Ricoeur, 1981:145-

9); here is a means of keeping present moments at bay and at the same time

preserving them, recontextualising them, as ongoing, univocal, unifocal, and

reconsultable (Clifford, 1990:57-64). Writing is said to give rise to a certain

sociocultural alienation and distance out of which a sense of greater unities

comes, an evolution in consciousness, science and technology in terms of

encyclopaedic composition and sequentiality (Ong, 1977:47). In short, writing

comes to be anthropologically conceived of not so much as a neutral medium of

knowledge, facts and experience, a window onto an independent reality, than as

a way of knowing in itself, even a way of being.

Nevertheless, there is a sense in which I would still describe writing as

having become 'naturalised' in this anthropological appreciation. For writing has

been treated wholly as a particular technique or technology: writing as the

inscription of words or forms on a page or material surface. However, writing

could profitably be regarded as something far broader: the orderly inscription of

words or forms per se, whatever the precise technique and technology of that

inscription. Hence: words in phrases and sentences, but also musical notes in

chords and phrases, daubs of paint in shapes and relations, religious icons in

mouldings and arrays, physical behaviours in habits and routines, prescribed

roles in institutions and hierarchies. Inscription, moreover, might take place on

any number of surfaces: fields, houses, footballs, spaces, bodies and memories,

as well as pages. Here is writing conceived of less as a technique of

communication than as 'a mode of cognition which makes experience

meaningful'; writing as the orderly use of symbolic forms --forms which carry

meaning for their user-- for the making of orderly worlds.

On this view, writing, as Stock puts it (1983:531), entails the separating of

experience from its ratiocination; it is a considered ordering of experience in

symbolic form, and the conscious production of meaning from it. Understood in

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its fullest form, writing is the experiencing of experience, a meta-experience, the

practice of making sense of experience through symbolic reflection. A definition

of writing in this conceptualisation might then be: 'the composition, in symbolic

form, of a sequence of thoughts and ideas and senses such that a set of meanings

is created and retained from passing experience for further possible retrieval,

amendment and elaboration'. Furthermore, since symbols are simply 'vehicles for

a conception' (Geertz, 1973), the outward manifestations of such writing may, as

we have seen, be highly diverse. Diaries and treatises, of course, monographs

and novels, poems, songs and plays; but also the shapes of field-systems and the

patterns of their ploughing; also ways of shaping, carrying, tattooing and

clothing bodies; also forms of dancing and politicking, orating and marketing

and warring. All these may serve as mnemonics by which messages about life's

order and meaning may be inscribed, retained and recalled; the practice of

written reflection remains a constant even as the forms of its expression vary.

Indeed, understood in this way, writing can be appreciated as a universal:

a ubiquitous and constant part of human being. It is the special preserve neither

of certain cultures and times (literate versus non-literate), nor of certain social

classes and occupations (professionals versus workers); it is practicable and

practised by all. As Bruner and Weisser sum up (1991:136):

The process of life-textualisation is (...) a never-ending

interpretation and reinterpretation. Its textual status is not in the

strict sense determined exclusively by acts of speaking and writing,

but depends instead upon acts of conceptualisation.

Certainly, both in sociocultural milieux which practice largely oral techniques of

communication and those which prefer scriptural ones, there will flourish the

practice of scrutinising and abstracting from experience so as to produce orderly

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accounts. For, orality and literacy do not necessarily entail different habits of

thought. As Shweder comments (1991:14), if we use the word "civilised" to

describe those people who can explain their practices far better and with more

imagination than the anthropologist, then the "primitive" who leads an

unexamined life does not exist.

Auto/Biography

Another way of saying this is that every sociocultural milieu is a textual milieu,

where "text" (from the Latin root) implies a 'weaving' of language into patterned

compositions, whether spoken or scripted or both (Stock, 1990). Every milieu

has its meaningful inscriptions. It is in this sense, too, that one can understand

Bruner and Weisser's assertion that: "'lives' are texts: texts that are subject to

revision, exegesis, reinterpretation, and so on" (1991:133). For, one comes to

know one's life through 'never-ending textualisation', through the formulation

and reformulation of a written account, and narrative, of what that life is about.

The individual constitutes himself as a self (for himself and for others) in an

ongoing story; carried in memory, such textualisation represents the primary

process of 'self-accounting'. This textual account of self might be verbalised

(voiced or unvoiced), it might be embodied, or it might be otherwise imagined; it

might be enunciated as shorter or longer versions of itself; it might be to some

extent unified. It is, however, always evolving and always referred to, whether

implicitly or explicitly. We all 'live out narratives in our lives', as Alasdair

MacIntyre (1984) has put it, and we 'understand our own lives in terms of the

narrative that we live out'. Cognitive writing is, in short, a constant process.

It is, moreover, a process to which anthropology, since 'the literary turn' of

the 1980s, has become increasingly sensitive. Exploring the ongoing formulation

by individuals and groups of textual accounts of what life is about is seen as a

means to access and do justice both to the flow of subjective experience and to

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its meaningful interpretation, and so to give a nuanced, 'experience-rich',

anthropological account. Translating experience into static and essential

abstractions ('culture', 'social structure', 'habitus' etc.), as social science has been

wont, merely succeeds in depriving experience of its unique phenomenological

qualia. As Watson and Watson-Franke comment (1985:96-7):

We know the richness and complexity of our own inner life, and

when we compare this to the many tedious, dehumanizing accounts

of life in other cultures (...) we may feel an acute sense of

disinterest and even outright alienation (...). All too often the real

things seem to get lost in the obfuscation of the investigator playing

God with his constructs.

One particular manifestation of this new anthropological enterprise has

been an increased interest in individual creativity and artistry, in the 'artistic

temperament'. Anthropologists have made case-studies of particular artists

(sometimes celebrated, sometimes not) who might be expected to show in a

heightened form the general proclivities of individuals to 'write themselves': their

identities, bodies, societies and worlds (cf. Clifford, 1982; Handler & Segal,

1990; Rosaldo et al., 1993; Rapport, 1994). It is in this line, indeed, that the

present paper stands: an account of the life-story of the English poet Philip

Larkin (1922-1985) as I suggest he wrote and lived it. Effected primarily

through Larkin's own words and through borrowing those of his biographer,

Andrew Motion, the account will exemplify the complexities and subtleties by

which one individual in particular writes on his body a life-story of self

consciousness and control.

Philip Larkin's life-story, it shall be seen, was one of counterpoise: of

countervailing tendencies and contradictory tensions. For, Larkin wrote himself,

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composed an individual life and world for himself, through images of dithering,

passivity, disparagement, depression and hypochondria. Larkin sought to live his

life by turning his back on Life, and he sought to overcome Death by making

decision-making almost impossible for himself:

[Larkin] dictated the terms of his existence with great authority but

was always loath to commit himself absolutely to any one or other

course of action (Motion, 1993:xvi).

By these means he would negate any kind of movement in his surroundings:

The result is a sensation of standing still, marking time, not getting

anywhere (Larkin 8/4/1961, cited in Motion, 1993:315).

For movement, I shall say, always led down the road to death for Larkin

(Cemetery Road) as surely as 'evening coming in'.

By imbuing his life with all manner of tensions, however, with

counterpoised pathways, such that he always had the excuse of remaining at a

crossroads --a passenger, at worst, on someone else's energetic career-- he

determined to conserve his own vital energies and live out his life by way of a

series of disconnected moments of pure excitement: poems. Poems, at their best,

were atomistic universes of intense emotion, Larkin explained: concentrated

spear-points of exhilaration, beauty and thrill. In these orgasmic and organic,

freshly-made, individual, personal, non-ramifying, a-logical, timeless worlds,

progress towards death --that 'black-sailed ship which seeks you out', that

'running wave which tracks you down' bringing 'extinction through

fragmentation'-- could be momentarily dispensed with and overcome. (It was

more than a merely light-hearted image, I would say, when Larkin described the

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pleasure of having written a poem as equivalent to having "laid an egg"

(1983:52): crystalline, new, entire, at once fragile and strong). Time may

inevitably be our earthly 'element', as Larkin put it (Reference Back), but "[w]e

are not suited to the long perspectives" which it foists upon us thereby to "link us

to our losses".2 Poetry, ideally, did away with the need for any such links and so

screened against and salved "the continuous coarse / Sand-laden wind, time"

(Skin).

An elaboration of these notions provides the substance of this paper: a

case-study of one individual project of life-writing, whose main themes are

Physical Ailment and Death, Poetry, Work, Tradition and Routine, Family and

Marriage, Sex, Humour, Jazz and Excitement, Crossroads, and Inertia. Before

this is begun, however, Part I of the paper is concluded by a brief rehearsal of

terms which, alongside 'writing', will be significant for my analytical project:

'narrative', 'illness', 'action', 'body' and 'time'.

Narrative, Illness, Action, Body and Time

The notion of 'narrating' a life is significant both methodologically and

ethnomethodologically. Narrative may be described as a technique for

apprehending the passage of a life-course --in spatial, temporal and cognitive

senses; narrating a life compasses a charting of its movement (Rapport,

forthcoming (a)). Also, narrative is a means by which existentially to apprehend

the unity of a life; here is an act of writing by which present moments of being

are made sense of in the context of past and future ones. Narrative, in short, I

would describe as combining an appreciation of fluidity or movement with order

or significance; narrating a life is a creative act by which an individual combines

(fluid) experience with (ordering) reflection on that experience so as to produce a

meaningful plot (Rapport, 1997a:43-79).

Notwithstanding, what is likely to characterize the story an individual tells

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himself, the narratives he makes of his own life or that of others he observes, is

multiplicity and diversity. For, story-telling need in no way be seen as

monothetic, imbued with one logic, or non-contradictory; both among the

different narratives which individuals may write of their lives and keep alive in

their consciousness at any one time or over time (Rapport, 1993), and within any

single one of these narratives (Rapport, 1997b), individuals are little averse to

contradicting themselves. We live, as Virginia Woolf (1976) famously phrased

it, in 'moments of being', and the emotional and intellectual intensity of the

(Humean) impressions garnered at these moments, our allegiance to the visions,

the significances, engendered by them (Thomas Hardy: 'moments of vision'),

means that among and between such moments we are quite able and often

content to entertain contradictory versions of self, other and world.

What pertains particularly to this paper is the inclusion of notions of

ailment, illness and death as key ingredients in the individual life-narrative.

Illness narratives and their metaphoric individuality have been rigorously

addressed in sociological commentary (Sontag, 1990; Kleinman, 1996). I have

been impressed by John Berger's (1981) depiction (drawing on the work of

Michael Balint (1964)) of the experience and signifying of illness as a form of

active, individuating expression. Illness might be conceived, Berger has

suggested, less as a surrender to natural hazards than a form of expression of

uncommon personal meanings. By way of the illness, the individual objectifies

part of his body, or his body as such, and sets up a dialogue with it or through it.

Illness makes the individual other to himself, makes himself the object of

reflection, of action, of deliberation by himself, possibly with a third party.

Objectification of this kind, doubling or splitting the self between the body

and the body's illness may be said to amount to a complicating, a complexifying

of experience and identity. What might be the purpose and the outcome of this?

In reviewing a recent book on the published form of illness narratives as a

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growing, Western literary genre (Recovering Bodies by G.T. Couser), A.M.

Daniels (1998) has remarked on the apparent paradox that interest in consuming

details of disease never seems to have been greater, and thus exists in inverse

proportion to the actual (statistical) chances of suffering from it. Might this be an

attempt in a non-religious milieu, he wonders, to become apprised of the

exemplary in the ordinary, the exceptional in the everyday? In writing and

reading illness narratives, furthermore, one rediscovers life through text: one

creates an 'afterlife' at a distance from the diseased one.

In the context of a discussion on the place of stereotypes in public opinion,

Walter Lippman has made another point of possible importance here.

Stereotypes, Lippman (1947) described as fundamentally simplifying devices

which canalize perception and evaluation so that only those 'facts' which support

the regularities, uniformities and generalities of a particular and traditional view

of the world are admitted. Thereby, stereotypes lead the attention away from

ambiguity, contradiction and the oxymoronic. The advantage of this, in turn, for

Lippman, is that it affords the perceiver the ability to act in a certain practical,

reactionary and habitual fashion with equanimity; whereas, if individuals waited

to see the world whole, detailed, intimate, innocent, from every point of view

and in its true multifarity before they acted, then they might not act at all. The

blindspots of stereotypes thus give on to "vital movement" (1947:114), to

vitality-as-action, overcoming the inertia of self-doubt, hesitation and infirmity

of purpose which otherwise may threaten. Whatever one might wish to say to

complexify the picture Lippman paints regarding the nature of stereotypes (cf.

Rapport, 1995), or the relationship between vital acts and an absence of

contradictions in the perceived world,3 his existential focus on complexity of

world-view is a fecund one. In what ways might an individual concern himself

with such complexity --cause it or disclaim it-- as part of a strategy of action and

inaction? Split from himself by his illness, does the individual play with his

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ability to focus or concentrate himself in action? More particularly, is the

individual who fixates on the complexity of his own body and on his relationship

with it --who eschews the simplicity and the spurring nature of the

stereotypical-- able to bring fixity and stasis to his relationship with the world: to

the world per se as he experiences it? For the ill individual, sensitive to the

astereotypical nuances of bodily experiences, is action slowed to a halt?

The apprehension of the body in anthropology has tended to be a dualistic

affair. On the one hand, the body is explored as a relative instrument of cultural

conditioning. The natural body, we are told (Mauss, 1950), is transformed by

socialization into a cultural emanation, its 'techniques of use' --from walking, to

sexual intercourse, to defecation-- being influenced, if not moulded and

controlled, through traditional precept and example. On the other hand, the

natural characteristics of the body are said to structure the world of culture,

conditioning the way in which other collective phenomena --from society to the

cosmos-- are perceived. From the fact of human physical bilaterality, for

instance, the complementarity and opposition of left and right, front and back,

head and foot, derive the universality of binaristically based symbolic systems

(Needham 1973). On occasion, both of these perspectives, the sociocultural

determination of the physiological and the physiological channelling of the

sociocultural, appear together. Hence, Douglas (1970) informs us that the

organization of society as a body of functioning relations constrains how the

human body is related to and behaves, at the same time as the functioning of the

body constrains how society is metaphorized and perceived.

While refinements of both of these anthropological apprehensions

continue unabated --the body as a site of corporealization of key social

discourses (on gender, say (Martin 1987), or governmentality' (Foucault 1977);

society as the consequence of 'blood relations' between the sexes, an issue of

menstrual taboos (Knight 1991) -- a more helpful departure, perhaps, is that

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which exhorts anthropology to regard the body, first and last, as a site of

experience. In this Existential perspective, deriving ultimately from Nietzsche,4

the sentient body and the sociocultural world of 'forces, smells, textures, sights,

sounds and tastes' must be anthropologically accounted for as one and the same

phenomenon (Stoller 1995:7-8). For, as Fernandez puts it (1977:478), "[o]ur

experience is anchored in our body", and the elemental vectors of human

existence involve the way individuals' initially psycho-somatic projections

ramify out into world (via cultural codes) into social strategies of boundary and

identity. An Existentialist emphasis retains the individuality and subjectivity of

perspectives on life. One recognizes how sociocultural processes reduce to the

intentions of their individual members, as these intentions are effected by the

bodies of particular actors, and the abutting of individual bodies against one

another in particular times and places. The body becomes a vital site where

individual cognitions, cultural codes and social practices meet in time.

The human experiencing of time and control over its passing represents a

longstanding anthropological interest, and a venerable one. According to Levi-

Strauss (1975:14-30) for instance, myths are best understood as machines for

time's suppression. Leach (1976) would also extend this notion to include music

and ritual. For what characterizes myth, music and ritual alike, he explains, is a

particular narrative sequence whereby "the end is implicit in the start: the start

presupposes the end" (1976:44). The syntagmatic chains and paradigmatic

associations into which the structure of myth, music and ritual can be distilled

gives each of these communicative forms a unity despite the time taken to

transmit them. In myth, music and ritual, Leach and Levi-Strauss argue,

members of a collectivity thus transmit messages to themselves concerning the

eternal structural verities of their societies and world-views: verities which not

only claim an unchanging world but whose telling and retelling effect a stasis or

lack of change. For the duration of the myth, musical sequence or ritual, time

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stands still.

Elements of this theorizing retain their viability, moreover, I would

suggest, even when the notions of agential collectivities with which

structuralisme dealt have become obsolete. If myth, music and ritual are now

better appreciated as cultural forms which synthesize and disguise any number of

acts of individual communication and truth-making, that is, then the way their

deployment may affect the (individual) experiencing of time remains a valid

question. In the reiterating of the structural elements of narrative across time, and

in the composing of narratives whose structure bespeaks circularity rather than

linearity, the individual can be seen to be imposing a sequencing on time such

that its passage delivers nothing other than an eternal return. The poet, indeed,

may be particularly able in this direction, for his chosen narrative form offers

most freedom, in both its writing and its reading, for the prosaic, linear semantic

motion of (verbal) forms to be challenged, reversed or artfully and creatively

reconfigured.5 The poem is something of a crystalline distillation (an abbreviated

form, a formula) in whose repeating rhythms, scansions and structural grid is to

be found a world of meaning (and its experiencing) which is secure against

change; in the poem's possibly perfect balance and atomic purity are lodged

elements of eternal truth, a truth which 'outstrips' the moves of mere earthly

compulsions (Skultans, 1998:177).6

For Philip Larkin, a poet who accused others of being "[a]lways too eager

for the future" (Next, Please) and for whom "life" meant "slow dying" (Nothing

To Be Said), poetry, I shall argue, was a form of eternal life in which he could

(almost) make himself believe. Fluidity and movement he found as life-

threatening and deathly, and therefore the emphasis in his accounting of his life

is always on stasis: on prevarication, laziness, being too 'weak-kneed' to shift.

Writing about the illnesses of the life-course, the bodily sickness that was life, as

one of a number of stock themes whose expression and emotionality he sought to

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perfect through reiteration, Larkin (almost) succeeded in offsetting the illness

that is the constant slide to the grave by an illness-narrative of crossroads and

contradictions which leads nowhere fast. His poems, in particular, would, in

their purity of structure, content and rhythm, transform life's dithering,

indecision, decay and progress to death into discrete, beautiful, vital moments of

being which might be expected eternally to return.

PART II. PHILIP LARKIN: A NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE-COURSE

Writing and Life

'A Writer's Life' was how Andrew Motion chose to subtitle his biography of

Larkin, and 'Writer' was how Monica Jones, Larkin's partner for 35 years, chose

to have his gravestone inscribed. Besides his poetry, Larkin wrote novels, letters,

diaries, committee minutes, reviews, plays and short stories, in endless drafts. He

had a special eye for detail, and while he ordered his diaries to be destroyed at

his death, we know (from his published letters too) the kind of autobiographical

testament to which his writings amounted: records of events, reactions,

(masturbatory) fantasies, and intense rages against the world. Hoarding and

sorting the writings into boxes in the cupboards of his home, Motion suggests

(1993:xvii), Larkin "kept his whole life in perfect order".

The matter of his life was something that Larkin often addressed directly.

In 1958, at the age of 35, he sees himself as: "a corpse eaten out with envy,

impotence, failure, envy, boredom, sloth, snobbery, envy, incompetence,

inefficiency, laziness, lechery, envy, fear, baldness, bad circulation, bitterness,

bittiness, envy, sycophancy, deceit, nostalgia, etc." (cited in Motion, 1993:259).

In an account written to himself when he was 23, Larkin claims to feel

irrevocably cut off from other human beings, indifferent and not caring what

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they do or say. He describes himself as: self-absorbed, stingy, selfish,

hypochondriacal, luxuriating in misery, inhospitable, mother-fixated, uneasy,

jovial, susceptible to young women, and a plum-voiced, bachelor pansy. He has

a job as a librarian, has written two novels (one published) and one book of

poems. He hopes to write more, get another job, but also expects to have nothing

to do with women and to grow sourer. Above all, he bemoans "not [having]

made the slightest step in the direction of achieving a reputation. This I probably

shall not do. It will have to come of itself if it comes at all" (cited in Motion,

1993:134).

Motion warns the reader of his biography of Larkin about the ambiguities

contained in these kinds of self-descriptions. While seemingly candid they are

also evasive, and while often private records they are also written for posterity

(even in his adolescence Larkin had the notion that he was "a genius" who would

be written about); Larkin himself writes about his writing being "a fishy

business", part truth, part wish-fulfilment (cited in Motion, 1993:181). The key

to this ambiguousness or fishiness, Motion suggests, is the particular relationship

Larkin set up between his writing (his art) and his life. English life, Larkin

claimed, taught that one cannot ride two horses at the same time; what mattered

to him most, he decided was writing. He would therefore 'put his money' on a

life of creative imagination, and not care a jot about 'this or that lunatic, imbecile

job'. Even friends and lovers, habits and homes were to be set against the

backdrop of maintaining a 'writer's life'; he had to see himself as a free spirit full

of chances and choices for whom ongoing relationships were of little interest.

Only at the end of his life, when he had achieved such fame through his writing

that he had to go about almost 'pretending to be himself' and his inspiration left

him, did his work (as Head Librarian at the University of Hull) become his

mainstay and he allowed his (main) lover, Monica Jones, to set up house with

him. Moving house he once described as like being flayed of a skin and having

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to wait in a coarse shirt until a new one grows. If life proceeded as it should then

it ought offer no distractions from the process of him drafting poetry: the 30

pages of drafts it took, for instance, over 18 months between 1958 and 1960, to

distil the 80 lines of The Whitsun Weddings.

When he could not write, however, or life was distracting him, Larkin's

moods could be very black. What he feared above all was "a slackening and

dulling of the peculiar artistic fibres that makes it impossible to achieve that

mental 'clenching' that crystallizes a pattern and keeps it still while you draw it"

(cited in Motion, 1993:145). 'Giving in' to another person to the extent of living

with them, even marrying them, for example, could be expected to be death to

perception, and the ability and desire to express. Herein also lies the reason why

Larkin never wrote a formal autobiography; for, its structure would have

required him to isolate and inflate 'the life', privileging its details over 'the work'.

Having laboured with the assumption, however that he "should perfect the work

and life could fuck itself", all an autobiography would seem to point up would be

"a fucked-up life" (cited in Motion, 1993:460).

Family Life and its Consequences

Larkin's differentiation between his poetic work and the rest of his life, and his

deciding to work on perfecting the former in contradistinction to the latter,

originates in his home life with his parents. His parents' marriage left him "with

two convictions", Larkin reported: "that human beings should not live together,

and that children should be taken from their parents at an early age" (cited in

Motion, 1993:15). This sentiment is reprised in some of Larkin's most famous

poetic lines; towards the end of his life, indeed, as he reflected on the popularity

which "four-letter Larkin" was acquiring, he joked that he fully expected to hear

This Be The Verse, with its opening line, "They fuck you up, your mum and

dad", recited respectfully by 'a thousand Girl Guides'. But for Larkin, the humour

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was inextricable from the tragedy:

God, what hell. [Parents] bugger you up, then, then hang round

your neck and stop you ever curing yourself. To escape from home

is a life's work, like writing the Decline and Fall of the Roman

Empire (cited in Motion, 1993:383).

The only marital state Larkin knew intimately, his parents', convinced him that

family life was a waste: a life of frustration, suppressed fury and boring

responsibilities. His father, a high-ranking provincial civil-servant, an admirer of

Hitler and the new Germany, self-made, ambitious, autocratic and literary, lived

a petty, stifling and stunting marital life with Larkin's mother: a model of

timidity, apprehension and hypochondria, down-trodden, anxious, interfering

and helpless, who yet insisted that the Larkins were superior and their world-

view adequate. He hoped above hope, Larkin admitted at one time, that his

mother won out in him (just as his father appeared to be superior in his sister),

but he also knew that he 'contained' both his parents, and that a 30-year (marital)

struggle continued in him. His father remained his life's dominant model --a

figure of intellectual rigour; an example too of an independent mind in a

domestic trap. His father's death, Larkin claimed, left him forever anchored in

his shadow. Larkin's mother, meanwhile, shaped his inner life more decisively

than anyone else. She was someone he at once resented and needed and used;

'anyone who thinks they have loved more than one person', Larkin wrote after

her death, 'has never really loved at all'. His mother was his muse as well as a

misery, to be both resisted and accepted; she loaded him with fears and

constraints which he at once dreaded and embraced; she taught him mundane

routines which were both imprisoning and extraordinarily beautiful.

Overwhelmed at her death in 1977 (only eight years before his own) he claimed

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to be facing extinction as a poet.

At his mother's death (when he was 55) Larkin also wrote that he would

now not have time to begin his own life. While claiming that 'all he ever wanted

was peace and quiet and freedom from commitment: everything else could be

done without', he had, however, been content all along to use the time (faithfully)

spent with his widowed mother as an excuse to avoid other women and,

intellectually, to be by himself. More generally, as a result of his feelings towards

his parents and their marriage, and his sense of certain disparities, contestations

and contradictions within himself, Larkin developed a powerful inertia. Through

'ancestral traits', he felt he did not have the exercise of will, the opportunity or

the ability to choose and direct his own life. He lacked desire --had no wish to go

get anything (money, position, women)-- and so loafed about introspectively,

doing without, feeling he had little hold on life and few stakes in it. There may

have been "nothing but misery" deriving from his experiences in his parental

home and yet he was too weak to make any other way or real departure in his life

(cited in Motion, 1993:79). The 'shoots of his character', as he put it, 'neutralise

one another'.

By all accounts, moreover, Larkin displayed great contradictoriness in his

engagements with the world: a lover of solitude who associated independence

with self-control who yet depended on close friends; an introspective and self-

perfecting person who was fascinated by watching others; someone in whom

times of total self-absorption and withdrawal were balanced by great kindness,

patience, gentleness, sensitivity, sympathy and consideration; someone whose

sympathy was matched by an iron selfishness, delicacy by coarseness, and for

whom a powerful self-esteem was matched by a virulent self-disparagement; a

compassionate man who made acerbic commentaries upon those close to him; a

modest man who did not suffer fools but who revealed his own foibles, beliefs,

habits, opinions, to his readers; an intellectual who championed the

18

commonplace as means to address the grand issues; a poet who publicly

eschewed all manner of dogmatic interpretive schema and paraphernalia

surrounding poetry and yet who ambitiously promoted his own poetic tastes; a

shy and aloof provincial who clamoured for metropolitan gossip and news; an

urbane, witty, public speaker who dreaded the public setting and never finally

overcame a stammer; a man who felt that the excitements of women inevitably

ended in the dullness of marriage and home; a man with a powerful sex drive

who also felt that sex was too good to share with someone else, and was,

besides, disappointing and repulsive and best undertaken via pornography;

someone who insisted on privileging the thrill of life in human experience and

yet was personally obsessed with death and decay.7 Listed and labelled like this,

there can appear nothing particularly remarkable or distinctive about Larkin; we

are all, it might be argued, self-contradictory in these sorts of ways and we play

with our contradictions to creative effect (cf. Rapport, 1997b). What makes

Larkin interesting here is his deployment of contradiction and inertia (his

celebration of 'the majorities and minorities of me') as precise strategies in the

face of death and decay.

Physical Death

"Everything in life", Larkin once wrote in typical style to Monica Jones, "is

either irritating, embarrassing or frightening"; "[n]othing matters", he announced

to his mother, "but physical pain and death" (cited in Motion, 1993:403,247).

Both the 'everything' and the 'nothing' came together, in large degree, for Larkin

in the physicality of the self. He was embarrassed by what he variously saw as

his: short legs, long back, stammer, increasing baldness, short-sightedness and

deafness, and propensity to perspire. He was irritated by his piles, his insomnia,

his enlarged liver from too much drink, his weight, his phobia of cancer --and

also his hypochondria. His fears for his health led him to 'shrink into his shell in

19

terror', he explained, for if at death one 'breaks up', then to reach out of one's

solitude at any time was to threaten one's integrity and health.

At death, you break up: the bits that were you

Start speeding away from each other for ever

With no one to see. It's only oblivion, true:

We had it before, but then it was going to end,

And was all the time merging with a unique

endeavour

To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower

Of being here. Next time you can't pretend

There'll be anything else.8

Death had always been Larkin's special terror. In his twenties, thirties and

forties, while feeling for death's endless, 'merciful oblivion', he had still feared

that 'choppy' moment when the 'currents of life fray against those of death' as it

'washes at identity'. By his fifties, a dread darkened everything: "once the

certainty of permanent extinction is realised, only a more immediate calamity

can dislodge it from the mind, and then only temporarily"; death "remains (...)

something one is always afraid of" (cited in Motion, 1993:520). Moreover, it

was vain to think one could escape a consciousness of death, or even achieve

something lasting in the face of it. Whatsoever life brought it was merely a

marker on the trajectory towards death, and the best one could hope for were

moments of happy forgetfulness: of health, emotional intensity and material

wellbeing. A favourite image Larkin employed was of life as an ascent up a

steepening hill whose peak, "Extinction", "stays in view wherever we go" (The

20

Old Fools). Alternatively, our movement through life was like water beetles

scuttling over a thin surface: beneath lies a "solving emptiness", "permanent,

blank and true" (Ambulances).

For a number of years Larkin had prophesied that he would die at the

same age as his father: 63. As he approached that age, the idea began to obsess

him. In the event, he duly succeeded; in 1985 he died at the age of 63 from

cancer of the throat, extremely frightened in hospital and whispering to his

nurse: "I am going to the inevitable" (cited in Motion, 1993:521). The word

'going' seems to me significant, while Larkin's 'control' over the time of his going

--having his age and his father's coincide-- introduces a notion of agency which I

should like to begin exploring in relation to bodily decay and death.

Ignoring death Larkin once described as "[m]an's most remarkable talent"

(cited in Motion, 1993:520):

I don't think about death all the time, though I don't see why one

shouldn't, just as you might expect a man in a condemned cell to

think about the drop all the time. Why aren't I screaming?

The only way to offset thoughts of death was to 'wind oneself thoroughly into

life', but in this regard Larkin considered himself 'a failure, a farce and a freak'.

But the self-disparagement seems to me rhetorical here, or only a half-truth; for

Larkin did succeed, in his own special way, to lead a life of thrills for some sixty

years. And he did this by embracing his contradictions and the inertia they

produced, by refusing the actions and movements that led down the road to

death, by keeping before him a wealth of alternatives and finally choosing none:

by living, in short, in contrariety.

The Satisfactions of Dissatisfaction

21

Larkin described disappointment as the common human lot; it acted as a bridge

between different individual experiences and, together with suffering, sadness

and misery, it linked humanity to the world. Certainly it was his own

dissatisfactions which gave Larkin his sense of himself and the familiar

constraints in his life were comforting. In a way, indeed, these were also his

satisfactions, evidencing a superior sensitivity and spirituality which Larkin was

happy to see reflected in the likes of favourite fellow-poets Thomas Hardy and

A.E. Houseman. It was through his "tensions", as Motion (1993:469) puts it, that

Larkin made his life "tingle"; locked in passionate argument with himself, unable

to settle, finding no reconciliation, he was happy to ensure he always had reasons

for melancholy. Could he be kind by remaining uncommitted? Could he

experience the world by secluding himself on its margins? Was virtue selfish or

social? Could he maintain his integrity by refusing choice? Inner struggles

around issues such as these animated and formed his personality.

The form these struggles took was often humour, of a typically sardonic

kind.

Some times you hear, fifth-hand,

As epitaph:

He chucked up everything

And just cleared off,

(...)

He walked out on the whole crowd

Leaves me flushed and stirred,

Like Then she undid her dress

22

Or Take that you bastard;

Surely I can, if he did?

And that helps me stay

Sober and industrious.9

In cutting expressions of poetry and prose, Larkin played with contradictory

voices and possibilities without finally having to elect to complete or enact any

particular one. Through humour Larkin continually undercut himself.

Moreover, if his intense and dramatic life was lived primarily on an inner

stage, if, through being trapped between opposing impulses, Larkin's life

contained few 'events', then this was also a happy accomplishment. He wished,

Larkin pronounced near the end of his life, that his public honours and awards

and his bodily miseries could "cancel each other out" (cited in Motion,

1993:503). For, by trapping himself in a contemplative, uneventful life, Larkin

could effect a slowing down if not a temporary stop to the eventuation of death.

The tingle gained from tension and the relief of being trapped in

timelessness perhaps explain in part Larkin's love of English rites and his

reactionary political views. While following his father's dictum 'Never believe in

God' (and maintaining that the Bible was 'absolute balls in which it was

impossible to credit that anyone believed'), Larkin yet greatly appreciated the

ritual aspects of the Anglican service. Likewise, he hoped that secular English

traditionalism would abide, and defend itself against the encroachment of

'abroad'. "Let it always be there", he prayerfully opined (Show Saturday), while

declaring himself "always suspicious of change" (1983:50). The monarchy, the

army, English formality and familiarity, the virtues of the political Right ("thrift,

hard work, reverence, desire to preserve" (1983:52)) --these translated into

stability, as distinct from the unorthodoxies and unreliabilities of immigrants,

23

socialists, trades unionists, academics, students, women and children, and the

political Left.

Writing Poetry

More than this, however, tension and timelessness led Larkin to creativity:

created the emotional and mental climate in which he wrote his poetry.

'Deprivation', he admitted (1983:47), comparing himself to Wordsworth, was his

'daffodils'.

When I throw back my head and howl

People (women mostly) say

But you've always done what you want,

You always get your own way

--A perfectly vile and foul

Inversion of all that's been.

What the old ratbags mean

Is I've never done what I don't

(...)

Life is an immobile, locked,

Three-handed struggle between

Your wants, the world's for you, and (worse)

The unbeatable slow machine

That brings what you'll get. Blocked,

They strain round a hollow stasis

Of havings-to, fear, faces.

24

Days sift down it constantly. Years.10

Larkin accorded enormous importance to the writing of poetry. The 'brotherhood

of man' is 'balls', he once opined, but he cared enormously for (potential) artists

and the creation of art; a country's writers were one of its 'most precious assets'.

For "at the bottom of all art", Larkin explains, is "the impulse to preserve", "to

keep from oblivion" (1983:79). This preservation, in turn, was a source of

supreme comfort --a comfort like that which used to be universally supplied by

religion, and still also was by the customary, national structures of everyday life.

To write lyrically about the endless struggle of the human spirit to rejoice

through an engagement in mundane routines was to generate potential delight in

the state of living --despite its shortness and the inexorable approach of death.

Art restored a balance between what had happened (and what must inevitably

happen) and what one might like to think of as happening ('part truth, part wish-

fulfilment'); it assisted in both the endurance and the enjoyment of life.

It was the treatment not the subject-matter, moreover, which made good

poetry. Any art, in fact, could be damaged by preciousness, pretentiousness or

self-consciousness. The artist had simply to look around him meticulously and

eagerly, and be truthful, modest, formal and accessible in his representation.

What he should be describing, celebrating, after all, was life lived in the

everyday ('recreating the familiar') and not some abstraction. The reality of

quotidian life Larkin claimed to be exhilarating enough and the writers he

esteemed (Hardy and Houseman as mentioned, also Christina Rossetti, Bernard

Shaw, D.H. Lawrence, the early Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Edward

Thomas, John Betjeman, Stevie Smith and Barbara Pym), as opposed to those he

disparaged (Eliot, Pound, Joyce and similar Modernist 'shit'), found so too. Here

was writing by and about people who did nothing spectacular, who were not

25

especially beautiful or lucky, who behaved reasonably well in the limited field of

activity they commanded, who felt deep emotions but led ordinary lives, who

had moments of vision but were bypassed by any world-historical experiences.

The poetic art, in short, was to describe the ordinary in ordinary language,

presenting it with realistic firmness and humour (not pity or romance or despair)

in such a way that it evinced abiding truths. Art made the everyday numinous.

There was no one way to do this. In fact, each poet had the task of

creating a new language for himself. If Larkin became the supreme British poet

for immersing himself in everyday things and, through a modest watchfulness,

displaying a fastidious fidelity to familiar facts,11 then it was a journey through

Auden, Dylan Thomas, Yeats and finally Hardy that led him to who he was. The

reason for this individuality of language, Larkin felt, was that not only was the

everyday the route to the numinous but the individual was the route to the

universal: the autobiographical gave on to general truths. The poet had a "duty"

to his own "original experience", and a responsibility to preserve it from

oblivion, if possible "indefinitely" (Larkin, 1983:58,83); the "business" of the

poet was:

to bring [poems] into being by externalizing and eternalizing his

own perceptions in unique and original verbal form (Larkin,

1983:89).

This was for the sake of the experience as such (and Larkin would not elaborate

beyond this, but it would seem to have something to do with the very

ephemerality of experience, its bare existence in the face of death) and for its

beauty. A poem was a transmutation of the momentariness of experience and the

range, the multiplicity (the contradictoriness) of experience, into something

crystalline and lasting. Indeed, Larkin described a poem as the only possible

26

reaction to a kind of emotional existence: trying, through numerous drafts, to

approach more closely a vision, an image, a conception, a thought, a sight, a

feeling, so as to express, describe, render and preserve it and its significance.12

But, here too there was tension; indeed, poetry embodied a "fundamental

paradox", Larkin believed: a conflict "between what [the poet] non-verbally feels

and what can be got over in common word-usage", and also between 'natural'

verbiage and metre and rhyme (1983:253,82). What finally eventuates, then, is

non-eventuation:

For me, a poem is a crossroads of my thoughts, my feelings, my

imaginings, my wishes and my critical sense (cited in Motion,

1993:213).

What is significant about crossroads, it seems to me, is that they are a place of

halting, of non-progress. If he could reside at crossroads and refuse the choice of

any one particular direction, then Larkin could eschew the fact that all roads led

to death. "Every poem", Larkin also asserted, "must be its own sole freshly

created universe": in other words, a self-standing, interior landscape without

necessary connexion to anything else (1983:79). As new-born, atomistic and

discrete, it could give the lie to the inexorability of process, ramifications,

relations, change, decay, and death. Through poetry Larkin felt he could achieve

an "almost physical" release, solution and fulfilment: he could 'create,

externalize, explain, praise and justify' a repeatedly pristine world (1983:76).

To live in tension and the stasis of contradiction, of course, also meant

that Larkin had to be ironical even about what were his deepest felt beliefs in

poetry. His friendship with the boorish Kingsley Amis, Motion explicates, was

the occasion for Larkin to express the worst cynicism. But one also finds it in his

drafting of his own poems where an ironical phrase is appended on to what will

27

be the published conclusion of the piece in such a way as completely to undercut

its effect: "What will survive of us is love.", from An Arundel Tomb, is followed,

in the manuscript, by the remark: 'Love isn't stronger than death just because

statues hold hands for 600 years'. The last lines from The Trees, "Last year is

dead, they seem to say, / Begin afresh, afresh, afresh", are followed in

manuscript by: 'Bloody awful tripe'; while the concluding, "deep blue air, that

shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless", from High Windows, has the

manuscript coda: "and fucking piss". A crossroads had to characterise every

seeming narrative endpoint for Larkin, even one concerning poetry.13

PART III. MERELY A NARRATIVE?

Life is in essence a solitary affair diversified by company, Larkin asserted in

interview (1983:54). Out of our solitude we may seek to build bridges to one

another and the world, but there is no ontological necessity of this and no

necessary moral superiority in so doing. Certainly, it was the "unique private

excitement" of jazz, Larkin was pleased to admit, which gave him "more

pleasure in life" than almost anything else (1983:285).

Viciously, then, I lock my door.

The gas-fire breathes. The wind outside

Ushers in evening rain. Once more

Uncontradicting solitude

Supports me on its giant palm;

And like a sea-anenome

Or simple snail, there cautiously

28

Unfolds, emerges, what I am.14

In terms of the orthodoxies of anthropology, its fetichising of a self/other

ontology, this is iconoclastic, and likely to be dismissed as false consciousness. I

happen to believe Larkin is anthropologically correct, however: socio-cultural

milieux begin with self conscious individuals and take off from the partial

connexions that are brought to bear between them (cf. Rapport, 1997a).

It is in this way also that I would set out to defend the significance --to

Larkin and to the anthropological commentator-- of the narrative, the story, of

their life-course that individuals compose. It is not 'merely a narrative' beyond

which lies material reality (social structure, cultural practice, bodily habitus,

politico-economic institutionality) and the real instrumentalities of power, nor is

it a mere vehicle of the like. Rather, the writing of narrative is a vitally important

form of doing, and a means by which individuals give an individual form or

structure to the worlds around them. Inasmuch as individuals live their narratives

and understand their lives in terms of them (MacIntyre), the narratives are

responsible for contriving and controlling the lineaments of their worlds.

The essence of writing, it has been suggested, is the practice of giving

meaning to experience. By writing a text, one is able to hold together the

fragments of consciousness and hence make some notion of meaningful order in

one's life. For experience in and of itself is incoherent and meaningless; as

Existentialism has it, the truly empirical 'being-in-itself' is 'absurd'. Hence,

writing entails stepping back from the present, scrutinizing a given moment and

connecting it to others in an ongoing text; meaning is given to experience

through its being cognitively 'written up' as part of an ever reconstituted

comprehensible narrative.

In a sense, Augustine felt, such 'autobiography' is fictional since one is

29

attempting the impossible: to know oneself from amid one's life and story as if

from without; to see as whole and complete what is still becoming. Nevertheless,

the structured nature of our ongoing cognitive writing, and the supposition that

in our autobiographical narrations we are holding the truth of the self, is a fiction

which is 'life-preserving' (Nietzsche, 1979). As Nietzsche elaborates (1968),

what is significant is not that such a priori judgements are true but that believing

that they are we increase our feeling of power in the world; the fiction by which

fluid experience is compelled into the distinguishable and manageable shape of a

known and unified self enables an individual to go on acting and experiencing,

surviving and 'increasing his power'.

The point is a complex one, with wide-ranging implications concerning

selfhood and truth which cannot be elaborated upon here. What Nietzsche

identifies, however, is the vital matrix in human existence represented by the

conjuncture of will and happenstance, consciousness and fulfilment. In fine, the

world-views which individuals construct for themselves, the orderly contexts of

self, things, events and others, and which individuals express in the form of

meaningful, ongoing narratives, have the effect of structuring their experience; to

such an extent that individuals' world-views can appear as self-fulfilling

prophecies: the narration of their world-views enables individuals literally to

realise themselves (cf. Rapport, 1993:151-4). This is the full import of

Nietzsche's description of 'every specific body' as a 'centre of force' (1968).

In particular, narratives manifest the connexion between individuals' outer

worlds and their inner consciousnesses. The physical worlds individuals inhabit

are wed inextricably to what they consciously contrive; and in the narratives

individuals write in and of their lives one often sees the means by which that

consciousness pours itself out into the world, bringing a personal version of that

world into effect. This applies in complex ways also to individuals' own bodies;

these are at once the ground of consciousness and a site upon which

30

consciousness effects itself, pours itself out. Indeed, the body might be described

as a privileged site of conscious realization. The precise mechanisms behind the

writing on their bodies which individuals ordinarily undertake is only now

becoming known (cf. Edelman, 1989), but it seems clear not only that 'mind' and

'body' are in constant dialogue but that the body's habitual functioning owes a

significant part of its nature to the mind's construction of an environing world. In

other words, the mind is responsible, at least in part, for constructing the body in

its image(s). Not only is it in illness, then, that such a doubling or splitting of

consciousness occurs (although illness no doubt represents an objectification of

the body of a particular kind); as a matter of quotidian course, 'to comprehend

the behaviour of a human being it is necessary to comprehend its soul'.15

George Steiner seemed especially sensitive to an appreciation of the

extensional nature of consciousness, its constitutive power, and its manifestation

in a variety of symbolic forms (from books to bodies) when he undertook to

consider the relationship between what he called internal and external speech-

acts (1978; also cf. Woolf, 1980:192-3). It is important to recognize the way in

which human expression divides into two portions, audible and inaudible, voiced

and unvoiced, Steiner explains. Indeed:

internal speech-acts are as important as external, societal speech-

acts, and it is very likely that they represent the denser, statistically

more extensive portion of the total distribution of discourse

(1978:65).

The externally inaudible or unvoiced component, in turn, spans a wide arc: from

barely focused word or sentence-fragments to highly articulate and intentioned,

silent recitations of memorized texts. There is reason to believe, furthermore, that

individuals speak inwardly and to themselves more than outwardly to other

31

people. For this inward self-speech addresses a broad range of experiences and

conditions: storing, taking inventory of and replaying the acquisitions of

experience; figuring and stabilizing elusive or threatened senses of self; dealing

with fear, self-encouragement, self-castigation; avoiding dealing with or

speaking to others; answering an infinite variety of stimuli, external and somatic;

playing with and effecting narrative versions of experience. The practice of

internal narration may be said to be instrumental, in other words, for the

accomplishment of many primary and essential functions of identity, testing and

verifying the individual's 'being there'. Not only does this apply to the

conservation of the self but also to its origins. Steiner would go so far as to

conjecture, indeed, that inner-directed and intra-personal address possibly

precedes external vocalization, or is at least correlative with it. For, inasmuch as

individual autonomy is diacritical to social reciprocity and exchange, it is

internal narration which affords the necessary origination and safeguarding of

individuality and the private spaces of being. Speaking to himself before, during

or after encounters with others, the individual maintains the narrative of his life-

course and so becomes someone who can continue to be known by himself and

also by others.16

We have heard from his biographer how Larkin's writing (poetic, diarian,

prosaic, fantastic) was the means by which he not only ordered his life but in a

significant sense lived it. What a reading of Steiner urges is an awareness of the

way in which in this writing Larkin continued a constitutive conversation with,

of and about himself, which, both quantitatively and qualitatively, pertained

largely to a private sphere. As quantified by Monica Jones: "[Larkin] cared a

tenth as much about what happened around him as he did about what was

happening inside him" (cited in Motion, 1993:169). In the narrations which have

come down to us we glimpse the ways in which Larkin may have considered

himself, got to know himself, and their extents, but we are perhaps witness only

32

to those (rarish) moments when Larkin was talking aloud. Self's the Man Larkin

entitled one of his earlier poems, and we can only guess at the conversation that

Larkin conducted inside himself, the unvoiced narration, to be considered

alongside the extensive records of that which was narrated (spoken, written,

published) aloud.

It is possible to speculate, nevertheless, upon the way in which Larkin's

narrative of self not merely extended into his world, connecting the inner with

the outer, but directly affected that world, by considering, finally, the demise of

Larkin's physical body. We have heard how embarrassing Larkin often found his

bodily shape, also its impulses, processes and modalities. In his typically ailing

and self-disparaging style, he would describe it as other than himself and beyond

his ken.

Strange to know nothing, never to be sure,

Of what is true or right or real

(...)

Even to wear such knowledge -- for our flesh

Surrounds us with its own decisions --

And yet spend all our life on imprecisions,

That when we start to die

Have no idea why.17

But I am particularly struck by an ailment that Larkin carried with him all his

life: his stammer. Also by the illness that led to his death: polypoid tumours in

33

the oesophagus giving on to secondary cancers. Larkin's throat was a specially

significant part of his body, I would contend, one of which he was very

conscious. "[A]rtists, writers, poets", Larkin claimed in one memorable phrase,

are "those who swallow with silent excitement" (cited in Motion, 1993:147).

And yet, Larkin would have also felt great ambivalence about such swallowing,

according to my thesis; for, any such passage or flow between outside world and

life, any such movement or process of life per se, would have furthered the

march of death. While thrilling to the engagement with life, Larkin was at the

same time fearful of the procedures and their consequences. As one of the main

connecting channels surrounding this fateful phenomenon, his throat would have

been an important item of consciousness. The tension of both engaging and

blocking with his throat thus translates into a life-long stammer,18 an ailment

Larkin links (significantly) with a desire for self-effacement:

Anyone who has stammered will know what agony it is (...). It

means you never take the lead in anything or do anything but try

to efface yourself. I often wonder whether I was shy because I

stammered, or vice versa (1983:66, my emphasis).

Tension surrounding his throat also expresses itself in the form of Larkin's final

illness and of interim episodes besides. In 1956, for instance, at the age of 34,

Larkin had had a complaint with his digestion; it remained undiagnosed, despite

a barium meal and X-rays to the throat, chest and stomach, and the trouble had

seemed to cure itself. It left him, however, with the habit of drinking large

glasses of water before a meal so as to open up his throat sufficient to eat, as he

saw it; swallowing, we are to understand, was not something Larkin would

easily do. In 1985 he again complained of constriction in the throat and his

tongue feeling dry and brittle. "[S]uspect my throat is misbehaving, & am trying

34

to gain courage to have it looked at", he wrote to an old school friend in October;

"[s]pend most of my time drinking, to dull apprehension. Generally feel rotten.

Quacks don't care" (1993:755). It was throat cancer, and six weeks later he was

dead.

The form of Larkin's death, I want at least to suppose, manifested

important components of his life-narrative and its power: an anxiety about life

passing away as it flowed in and out of him in biochemical exchange, and a final

act of fixing and stasis; so that writing on the body up to the last, Larkin caused

himself to die at the same age as his father and in a manner preserving of the

integrity of his individual self.

35

NOTES

1. I am heavily indebted to the biography of Larkin by the poet Andrew Motion

(1993), to which Allison James was kind enough to direct me. I am also very

grateful to Douglas Dunn, Professor of English at St. Andrews and a former

poetic colleague of Larkin's at Hull, for taking the time to read a draft of this

essay and to comment (in particular on the role of comedy in Larkin's life).

Finally I would thank both Vieda Skultans and Andrew Sparkes for their

editorial suggestions.

2. "If you assume you're going to live to be seventy, seven decades, and think of

each decade as a day of the week, starting with Sunday, then I'm on Friday

afternoon now. Rather a shock, isn't it? If you ask why does it bother me, I can

only say I dread endless extinction" (Larkin, 1983:55).

3. Rather than a simple relationship between action and a straightforwardly

unambiguous world, an argument could be made that people have call for

contradictions so as to sustain a motivation for action (Rapport, forthcoming

(b)). People move in their action both towards a solving of problems --an

eradication of contradictions and ambiguities-- and towards a setting-up of

contradictions --their reinstatement, in evolved or transmogrified forms.

4. Nietzsche accused Western philosophy of ignoring the body, and

misunderstanding the role of desire in knowledge, the irony of this being that

"most of a philosopher's conscious thinking is secretly directed and compelled

into definite channels by his instincts. Behind all logic too and its apparent

autonomy there stands evaluations, in plainer terms physiological demands for

the preservation of a certain species of life" (1979:#3). Taking account of the

36

embodied nature of experience, however, one could begin to 'learn anew' and so

inaugurate a new embodied understanding: of demeanour, diet, physiology,

climate, nourishment and 'selfishness' (1980:66).

5. In this way, perhaps Nietzsche's complex notion of 'Eternal Return', which

seems to sit so uneasily alongside the progressive changes brought about by the

'will to power', can be better understood. The eternal return was to be found in

the literary style with which a philosopher-poet might effect a metaphysics of

will. In his poetry, that is, Nietzsche imaged an immortality which he otherwise

recognized as pertaining only to the necessary "movement" from one worldly act

to the next (1994:125-6).

6. If I claim to be able to approach Larkin's life in this essay largely through his

own words (often mediated by his biographer, admittedly) and through his

poetry in particular, and not to have significant recourse to the burgeoning

scholarly literature of Larkin interpretation (cf. Booth, 1992; Regan, 1992,

1997), than I am myself drawing on similar arguments to Larkin, Leach and

Levi-Strauss. A kind of (timeless) poetic appreciation is possible without the

contextualizing apparatus of historico-cultural commentary (without allusion to

"'tradition' or a common myth-kitty" (Larkin, 1983:79)). This does not mean

always taking Larkin's words at face value but recognizing the immediacy he

himself aimed for: "there's not much to say about my work. When you've read a

poem, that's it, it's all quite clear what it means" (1983:54); "one doesn't study

poets! You read them" (1983:67).

7. Anthony Thwaite (editor of Larkin's collected letters): here is the

"kaleidoscopic" record of a man at once "lonely, gregarious, exuberant, desolate,

close-fisted, generous, intolerant, compassionate, eloquent, foul-mouthed, harsh

37

and humorous" (1993:xv).

8. Philip Larkin, from The Old Fools.

9. Philip Larkin, from Poetry of Departures.

10. Philip Larkin, from The Life with a Hole in it.

11. In other words, what in other discursive contexts might pass for a definition

of an ethnographer.

12. This was not to say that the "ripe drama of self-sufficiency" (Motion,

1993:395) which a poem offered could not be appreciated in other art-forms too.

Thus, Larkin's poem The Card-Players ("someone behind drinks ale, / And

opens mussels, and croaks scraps of songs / Towards the ham-hung rafters about

love.") evokes the genre of seventeenth-century Dutch painting, in which

moments of social being are likewise captured with great fullness, sensitivity and

individuality.

13. Even the notion of finding stasis at a crossroads Larkin subjected to the

'crossroads critique', one might say:

I suppose everyone tries to ignore the passing of time: some people

by doing a lot, being in California one year and Japan the next; or

there's my way --making every day and every year exactly the same.

Probably neither works (Larkin, 1983:58).

38

14. Philip Larkin, from Best Society.

15. Apologies are due to Wittgenstein, here, for bastardizing his phrase ("to see

the behaviour of a living thing is to see its soul" (1958)) and reversing its force;

Wittgenstein (like Geertz after him (1983)) meant to say that there is no personal,

controlling consciousness only environmentally attuned behaviours.

16. According to Steiner, the unexamined axiom that the origins of expression

lie in interpersonal communication warrants deconstruction. Why should the

evolution of human locution be concomitant with, generated by or creative of

trans-individual societal behaviour when it is entirely possible to envisage a

scenario where what the dynamics of survival entail is the early development of

internally directed speech-acts as a form of self-awareness?

17. Philip Larkin, from Ignorance.

18. Until the age of 30 or so, Larkin explained, he was driven to the point of

handing over pieces of paper at railway stations with his destination written on

rather than "trying to get it out" (1983:49, my emphasis).

39

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Abstract

WRITING ON THE BODY:

THE POETIC LIFE-STORY OF PHILIP LARKIN

Nigel Rapport

The physical worlds which individuals inhabit are extensions of what they

consciously contrive, and in the narratives individuals write in and of their lives

one often sees the means by which that consciousness pours itself out into the

world, bringing a personal version of the world into effect. Narratives manifest

the connexion between individuals' outer worlds and their inner consciousnesses.

This applies in complex ways also to individuals' own bodies; these are at once

the ground of consciousness and a site upon which consciousness effects itself,

pours itself out. The body might be described as a privileged site of conscious

realization.

In this paper, these themes are explored in relation to the writing, the life

and the body of the English poet, Philip Larkin. Conceiving of writing not so

much as a technique of communication than as 'a mode of cognition which

makes experience meaningful', the paper explores the life-story Larkin wrote for

himself and proceeded bodily to inhabit. By way of Larkin's own words and

those of his biographer, Andrew Motion, through images of dithering, passivity,

disparagement, depression and hypochondria, the paper offers a nuanced

exemplification of an individual writing on his body a life-story of consciousness

and control.