Was there not a case, in Larkin’s case, for two Collected volumes: the first a one-volume reprint of the three grown-up, finished books plus the handful of poems he completed after publishing High Windows (these, of course, would include the marvellous ‘Aubade’) the second, a mop-up of juvenilia, fragments, occasional light verse, even limericks and squibs? Thwaite’s edition does divide itself in two, with mature Larkin at the front of the book and learner Larkin at the rear, but it makes no other formal separation between the poems Larkin passed for press and those which, for one reason or another, he hadn’t wished to see in print. But then, ought we to have any ‘fragments’ at all in an edition of this sort? And if we do have them, ought they not to be herded off into a section of their own? This was Eliot’s method, and it might have been Larkin’s if he’d had the choice and if – a big if – he had thought as highly of his own ‘The Dance’ fragment as Eliot did of Sweeney Agonistes. I am not sure that these items don’t sound to be more interesting than some of the bits and pieces Thwaite has chosen to include. which takes up 15 pages of drafts between April and June 1969 and what was apparently his final struggle with a substantial poem, “Letters to my Mind”, drafted in October and November 1979’. Anthony Thwaite has decided not to include various squibs and limericks (these will appear later on in Larkin’s Letters), and has also ruled against certain of Larkin’s unfinished pieces he mentions an ‘attempt at a long poem called “The Duration”. It’s as if this most bachelor of poets had suddenly acquired a slightly messy family life.Īpparently, it could have been messier. On the contrary, a poet whom we value for his sparingness, for not out-putting work that he wasn’t ‘pretty sure’ amounted to the best that he could do, is now to be seen as somewhat cluttered with botch-ups, immaturities and fragments. Ought we to think, though, as he generally did not, that adding means increase? Kilograms aside, the plumpened Larkin oeuvre does not carry a great deal of extra weight. (I say ‘almost’ because The North Ship, reprinted ‘with considerable hesitation’ in 1966 and offered more as a curiosity than to be admired, adds another 30 titles to the list.) What it all boils down to, or up to, is that Larkin the thrifty now has a Collected Poems of substantial bulk. I’m thinking here of the poems collected in The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows. This is a hefty addition, since the poems we already know him by and most admire total a mere 85. We can assume, therefore, that he must have envisaged a Collected Poems rather like the one we’ve now been given: a volume that adds something like eighty poems to his lifetime’s known tally. Nor did he leave any advice about what ought to happen to the various unfinished pieces he would leave behind. He seems not to have minded the idea of having his most early work exhumed. There are no explicit instructions in Larkin’s will concerning the publication or re-publication of his poems. Having something to hide is generally reckoned to be better than having nothing to show, he might have thought. Throw these away and you are doomed to imagine that my life was not really as boring as I always used to say it was. But then again, who knows? After all, those now-incinerated notebooks might have been full of household accounts or noughts and crosses: the instruction to destroy them a librarian’s last, bleakest joke. So what? Well, put it like this, the loss can be made to sound not at all what Larkin, as we know him from the poems, would have wholly wished. There is a wanting-to-be-known that can desolate or undermine our self-sufficiency.Īnd now, it seems, there are things about Philip Larkin that we’ll never know. But then some of his most moving poems contrive a subtle, unsettlable dispute between revelation and concealment. Did Larkin expect to be so obeyed? Or did he imagine that perhaps someone, somehow, might take a peek at the material before it reached the flames? And if such a thought did cross his mind, why didn’t he destroy the stuff himself? He must have known that, by not doing so, he was bequeathing at least the possibility of a dilemma. ![]() ![]() His executors obeyed: the word is that several of the poet’s notebooks, or journals, are now ashes. Philip Larkin, we are told, left instructions in his will that certain of his writings had to be destroyed, unread.
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