Philip Larkin, Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces, 1955-1982.
(New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1982)
Review by Jim McCurry

Tearing out what’s left of one’s hair, and then starting in on one’s beard, one reads Philip Larkin on Emily Dickinson (“Big Victims”) and then curses so violently (in such a way as to recall Air Force days, the late Sixties) that one cannot go on reading the rest of the article, concerning Walter de la Mare. Pity.

Then one turns to the back of the book and reacquaints oneself with the dear old boy’s ad hominem fulminations against Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Picasso. Sad, really. Yes, because you see, one almost repents. One nearly recants one’s admiration for many of the dear fellow’s verses. And that would be a shame. One mustn’t—you know, that old chestnut about the baby and the bathwater, jolly what trot thingamajism.

Two brief observations: modest physic, salts, anodyne: (1) To regain that cozy fellow feeling so helpful on days of constant rain— subtle dukkha, mild constraint, the reins & lights--or near-constant rain (this summer of the wettest drought on record, surely), one may turn to Larkin’s delightful defense of Hardy’s poems, contained in two pieces near the middle of the book.

But do Hardy’s poems really need defense in the first place? Were I a vituperative, snarling sort of cur, I should digress right now to take up the cudgel against Paul Theroux and V. S. Naipaul (Sunrise with Sea Monsters). But no, maybe not. (2) Forgive me but second, thinking of a fragmentary reference in the former (and not quite the better) of Larkin’s two pieces in defense of Hardy, called “Wanted: Good Hardy Critic” ­ namely, “Shaw’s view is that we must live longer,” one may, concerning Larkin’s deaf ear to Trane and blind eye to Picasso, surmise the following:

Had a duffer, a cod, a 200 year lifetime, in reasonably good health and even fortunes, maybe a chelovek, even a square old bean, could wake up to new developments. Watch and listen to Rollins solo for a good half hour on the Chicago Opera House stage and think of Picasso’s wild work of brush or pen and shout Bravo!, knowing one was not necessarily possessed of “mental competence below zero,” as Larkin puts it (“All What Jazz?”). Ironic that Larkin should so indulge himself in cheap shots at others’ eyes, ears, and minds, considering his dunderheaded take on our own Emily. Oh, we Yanks may shout idiot! back and forth across the balcony seats of moth eaten red velvet, till the Bomb falls or the cows come home—whichever comes first—I suppose, but somehow one expects more of an Oxford man than that. (Or does one?)

Never speak ill of the dead. Oh yes, yes. To be sure. Philip, you would not make a bleeding scab on Emily Dickinson’s ass.

Copyright © 2003 Jim McCurry