Philip Larkin (57 page)

In view of Larkin’s enthusiasm for this ‘Negroising’ of Western culture, it seems strange that in his correspondence with Faber’s Donald Mitchell concerning
All What Jazz
he should have commented: ‘It’s about time jazz had its Enoch Powell.’
⁷⁰
Larkin’s temperament constantly runs to contradictory extremes, but this surreal remark seems at first quite baffling. Powell’s notorious ‘rivers of blood’ speech had been made a few months earlier on 20 April 1968, and following his subsequent dismissal from the government Powell had become the focus of widespread opposition to West Indian immigration into Britain. In terms of the politics of the day Larkin’s comment should mean that he intends to take up Powellite cudgels against the ‘Negroising’ of British culture. Powell’s own ideas were complex, but the ideological constituency to which he appealed was in the main crudely racist. Clearly Larkin does not intend his jazz criticism to be Powellite in this sense. It seems that, ignoring the immediate political implications, he is using Powell’s name to signify simply a refreshing, bloody-minded candour on delicate issues. Larkin in jazz, like Powell in politics, will give voice to the inconvenient but deeply held feelings which others are too mealy-mouthed, or too intimidated by political correctness, to express.

But inevitably his mention of Powell will remind the reader of the handful of references to ‘niggers’ and ‘pakis’ in Larkin’s correspondence of the later 1960s and 1970s. It is these which have led to the careless assumption by some critics that he is, in Lisa Jardine’s words, ‘a casual, habitual racist’.
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Larkin does on occasions entertain some of his correspondents with expressions of pungent bigotry. However, these are performative riffs, always requiring inverted commas. They never come directly in his own voice or without subversion. He wrote to Monica on 19 November 1968, after he had completed his Introduction to
All What Jazz
:

Dearest, For once I feel pretty cheerful – 11.20 pm on a Saturday night, on wch I
think
I have finished the preface, & eaten haggis, neeps & claret, reading the
Noctes
:
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then a glass of Glenfiddich, & by God wasn’t the toast ‘Mr Enoch Powell’! Then jazz records
to my taste
, especially Armstrong, ‘How Long Has This Been Going On’, ‘Let’s Do It’, & ‘others about as good’, as he himself once said.
⁷³

The smooth transition of approval from Powell to Armstrong makes a comic show of his own self-contradiction. Similarly in June 1970 he gave Robert Conquest his ultra-nationalist prescription for success at the ballot-box: ‘Remember my song, How To Win The Next Election? “Prison for Strikers, Bring back the cat, Kick out the niggers, How about that?” How about it indeed. Yeah man.’
⁷⁴
The slogans are held up provocatively for examination; they are not proposed as his sincere political creed. And the closing exclamation, ‘Yeah man’, evokes a ‘Negro’ jam session. He later inserted the quatrain in a letter to his old schoolfriend, Colin Gunner, adding ‘Ooh, Larkin, I’m sorry to find you holding these views –’.
⁷⁵
Gunner could read as much or as little irony into this comment as he liked. A less ironic manifestation of his nationalism came in his obituary of Louis Armstrong, when he expressed satisfaction that the trumpeter had in his final years been better appreciated in Britain than the USA: ‘let us take pride in “The Melody Maker Tribute to Louis Armstrong”’ (a set of LPs from the seventieth-birthday concert held in the Queen Elizabeth Hall). ‘I defy anyone to listen to the final “Sleepytime” track without being glad that this country made its feelings about Armstrong clear once more before his death.’
⁷⁶
Nationalism was alien to Larkin’s sensibility, and this is perhaps the most passionate assertion of nationalism in his writing.

Worried about his health, Larkin might sound off comically about ‘fat Caribbean germs’ chasing him in the Underground, or lament ‘all manner of germs brought into the country by immigrants (Powell for Premier)’.
⁷⁷
Or later, in a letter to Colin Gunner, he might deplore the behaviour of black spectators at Test matches: ‘I don’t mind England not beating the West Indies, but I wish they’d look as if they were
trying
to beat them [. . .] And as for those black scum kicking up a din on the boundary – a squad of South African police would have sorted them out to my satisfaction.’
⁷⁸
But characteristically he begins with a reminder of the inferior skill of the English players. The verbal comprehensiveness at which Larkin aims in his writing meant that he would inevitably find a place for every conceivable kind of word. He could thus speak of ‘the paki next door’ in a letter to a friend without the slightest implication that he lacked respect for his neighbour, or would treat him differently from people of his own ethnic group. For all his verbal transgressiveness, it is impossible to imagine Larkin ever acting with racist motives.

Philip and Monica frequently dined with R. K. Biswas, an Indian colleague in the English Department at Leicester, and his wife.
⁷⁹
In August 1971 Larkin travelled to All Souls for a farewell dinner given for Biswas, who had been a fellow there. Larkin approached publishers on behalf of the young poet and novelist Vikram Seth.
⁸⁰
And in a letter to Anthony Thwaite he gave a glimpse of his contribution to a meeting of the Arts Council Literary Panel: ‘You should have heard me pleading for ethnic culture.’
⁸¹
When the President of Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor, visited Hull, Larkin was disappointed not to meet the poet of
négritude
and the translator of T. S. Eliot into French. He wrote to Conquest: ‘Didn’t get introduced to His Nibs [. . .] I suppose I represented Litherachoor. Apparently His Nibs is stuck on it.’ But his casualness is affected. He had taken the trouble to read Senghor’s poetry, and gave an incisive verdict on its combination of Gallic suavity and swooning
négritude
in terms of a cocktail recipe: ‘I read his poems (in translation) and thought them Whitman-and-blackcurrant-juice-and-catpiss.’
⁸²
This judgement may be felt to be too wickedly accurate, but it shows no racism.

In 1972 a student sit-in occurred in Hull when it was revealed in the press that Reckitt and Colman, a local company in which the University held a large investment, was paying black workers in its subsidiary factory in South Africa wages below the official UN poverty minimum. Larkin’s comments on the merits of the issue were neutral. He told Barbara Pym on 22 March: ‘I felt it was all rather halfhearted, and it failed to achieve its end anyway. The Admin Building stank for a week after the sitters-in (“activists”) had departed.’
⁸³
This issue was the source of ongoing tension in the University. I myself became involved as a young lecturer, securing the signatures of half the University staff on a petition to the University’s Council requesting that the University sell their shares in Reckitts. Over lunch in the staff bar Larkin was asked about this petition, and replied: ‘He’s performing a valuable function. It will be handy to have a complete list of all the pricks in the University.’ John Howarth, a Mathematics lecturer who was in the bar at the time, felt impelled to interject: ‘There’s one thing to be said about a prick. It usually has a pair of balls associated with it.’ Larkin made an appreciative gesture of concession, as if to say
touché
.

It is unfair that Larkin has suffered so disproportionately for the flashes of performative racism in correspondence with his more prejudiced correspondents. D. H. Lawrence immersed himself in racist theories and fascism for a time in the early 1920s, and T. S. Eliot showed the nasty anti-Semitism of his class and generation in ‘Gerontion’ and essays of the 1930s. In contrast Larkin had no cultural investment in ideas of racial ‘inferiority’ or ‘superiority’. It could never have crossed his mind, for instance, that Sidney Bechet must be an inferior musician to Pee Wee Russell because he was of an ‘inferior’ race.
⁸⁴
He was not a racist, either ‘casual’ and ‘habitual’ or, for that matter, consistent and systematic. The speaker of ‘Sympathy in White Major’ declares, ‘white is not my favourite colour’, and throughout his work Larkin subjects the customs and establishments of his own culture to scathing ridicule. When
All What Jazz
was reissued in 1984 he reflected: ‘It now reads very anti-black, insofar as most of the people I bollock are black [. . .] Coltrane, Coleman, Shepp. But then most of the people I praise are black too.’ He added with a twinkle: ‘Better play safe.’
⁸⁵

But the issue of Larkin’s supposed racism only came to the fore after his death, with the publication of his letters. In the 1970s the controversy focused instead on his loud attack on ‘modernism’ in the Introduction. In his initial approach to Mitchell, Larkin had written diffidently: ‘I thought it might amuse you to read the introduction, which is a
jeu d’esprit
not perhaps to be taken very seriously.’
⁸⁶
There is something puzzling in his fatalistic anticipation of the trouble he was making for himself. He was determined to have his say, while at the same time he hoped not to be taken seriously. He repeats later to Charles Monteith that the Introduction was ‘really only a
jeu d’esprit
in the manner of Mencken or someone like that’, and anticipates that ‘to pass it off seriously will earn me the biggest critical clobbering I have ever experienced’.
⁸⁷
As publication approached he attempted to disarm criticism by suggesting that the book be promoted as a ‘freak publication’. He wrote to Faber’s Sales Director: ‘I don’t think it will earn me anything but execration [. . .] Treat it like a book by T. S. Eliot on all-in wrestling.’
⁸⁸
To Anthony Thwaite he wrote: ‘Try to imagine a book by Humphrey Lyttelton saying that modern poetry is no good, while at the same time charmingly admitting he’s never read any since 1940, and you will get some idea of how mine will be handled.’
⁸⁹

But however hesitant he may have been it is clear that by prefixing the Introduction to the volume Larkin intended to cause controversy in literary circles and to secure a readership beyond the jazz world:

If it has any interest at all, I think it is the thesis of the introduction, namely, that post-Parker jazz is the jazz equivalent of modernist developments in other arts, such as are typified by Picasso and Pound in painting and poetry. I don’t think this has actually been said before, and, while it may not be wholly defensible, I think it sufficiently amusing to say once.
⁹⁰

In the Introduction Larkin turns the story of his personal taste into an engaging comic tale of hubris and punishment. Having, he explains, lost touch with jazz in the later 1940s when he lived ‘in a series of provincial lodgings where jazz was not welcome’, he had remained largely unaware of the transition from ‘trad’ to ‘mod’. When he was reunited with his record collection in 1948, he was content for a time ‘to renew acquaintance with it and to add only what amplified or extended it along existing lines’. Consequently when he began to review records for the
Telegraph
in 1961 he was ‘patently unfitted to do so and should have declined’.
⁹¹
Retribution for his hubris followed as the records arrived month by month at his door:

Had jazz been essentially a popular art, full of tunes you could whistle? Something fundamentally awful had taken place to ensure that there should be no more tunes. Had the wonderful thing about it been its happy, cake-walky syncopation that set feet tapping and shoulders jerking? Any such feelings were now regularly dispelled by random explosions from the drummer (‘dropping bombs’), and the use of non-jazz tempos, 3/4, 5/8, 11/4.

The accessible, happy Negro jazz of his youth had, he discovered, been spoiled by experimental free forms and (warming to his theme in a riot of alliteration) ‘all the tawdry trappings of South America, the racket of Middle East bazaars, the cobra-coaxing cacophonies of Calcutta’.
⁹²

Eventually, after months of puzzlement and dismay, it at last it dawned on him that what had happened to jazz was only a version of what had already alienated him in the other arts: ‘this was
modern
jazz, and Parker was a modern jazz player just as Picasso was a modern painter and Pound a modern poet. I hadn’t realized that jazz had gone from Lascaux to Jackson Pollock in fifty years, but now I realized it relief came flooding in upon me after nearly two years’ despondency.’ What had seemed merely a private disappointment revealed itself as an aspect of a larger cultural crisis with which he was already familiar. Parker, Davis and Coltrane were ‘modernists’, and ‘the term “modern”, when applied to art, has more than chronological meaning: it denotes a quality of irresponsibility peculiar to this century, known sometimes as modernism, and once I had classified modern jazz under this heading I knew where I was’.
⁹³