(cross-posted from a poetry reading group I've started with a couple
of other bloggers)
A defunct form of misery, or so we might imagine. Larkin had a couple
of tries at imagining it so himself, notably in "High Windows" and
"Annus Mirabilis" ("Sexual intercourse began / in 1963"), which
pictures the sexual revolution of the 60s as the moment when
"everything became / a brilliant breaking of the bank, / a quite
unloseable game". Yet here he is, wanking at ten past three, his
misery the particular misery of the sexually defunct.
The language of the poem is shocking, not so much in its direct
obscenity as in its juxtapositions: "love" must live, somehow, in this
proximity to "wanking" and "breasts" and "cunt". "Breasts" and even
"cunt" can be said tenderly, but here I think are not: here they name
the parts on display in the Swedish porn mags sent to Larkin by his
pal Kingsley, the parts of a woman's body related to as prize or
property: either one's own or "someone else"'s. This is a poem about
coming second in a competition between men. Humiliation, "the usual
pain"; and consolations that do not console ("the drink gone dead",
flat in the glass).
Why "love", then; and why "drowned in that lash-wide stare" (rather
than, say, "up to his balls in quim")? The latter is of course quite
compatible with greedy objectification: women routinely figure as both
"breasts and cunt" and mysterious oceanic sex-beings in which male
identity is submerged and dissolved. The speaker's anguish here is
that of being uncomfortably left alone with his "male identity", his
deprived and grasping selfhood, rather than "drowned" or "swayed" by
the disindividuating force of erotic love.
There is a contradiction in how he imagines his successful rival, as
both masterfully in possession ("surely he's taken her home by now")
and ecstatically dispossessed ("drowned in that lash-wide stare").
This contradiction is reflected in his own compensating position,
which is trying to make up for two incompatible privations at once.
On the one hand, there is the typical Larkin move towards knowledge as
balm for disappointment, in which what is lacking in direct experience
is made up for in ironic reflection: the arid satisfaction of being
"less deceived" in proportion as one is less involved. Here I want to
supplement Larkin with Lacan's observation that "les non-dupes
errent": the fantasy of being "the less deceived", of imagined
aloofness and linguistic mastery, conceals the reality that the trap
of experience has already been sprung and one is already writhing in
its jaws.
On the other hand, the poem is an expression of profound ignorance, in
spite of what it says about being unable "to be ignorant, / Or find it
funny, or not to care". The ellipsis after "Even...": what was he
about to "put...into words"? Even, I think, to feel happy for this
person he says he loves (if that is what he is saying): the sequence
would then run from ignorance, through amusement and indifference, to
benevolence. But this step, a first step beyond selfishness, is beyond
Larkin - or so he insists, in poem after poem.
Instead, the poem turns to the question of "this element // That
spreads through other lives like a tree / And sways them on in a sort
of sense". "Unselfishness" might be a good name for it; but even as
the poem yearns for release from selfhood, it has no name for what
might open selfhood up from the inside, exposing it to the proximity
of other selves in which this release might be found. "Love again" is
something other than love the first time around, the primary erotic
motive force that "spreads through other lives": it is love
narcissistically recaptured, as self-love deprived of the object that
would have facilitated it.
Larkin's answer, here, to the question of "why it never worked for me"
seems to have something to do with attachment: the implicit narrative
I think is one of a "violence / A long way back" that detached him
from the sympathetic weave of "other lives", and a subsequent
attachment to "wrong rewards" - the satisfactions of poetic craft,
ironic knowledge, literary fame - that belong to "arrogant eternity"
rather than the temporal present through which Larkin's imagined tree
of life spreads its branches. Poetry here is not the sublimation of
erotic urges, or "emotion recollected in tranquility", but rather a
usurping power, rooted in privation: the poet as Larkin presents him
in this poem is not an especially sensitive individual, but rather an
especially desensitised one (although unwaveringly sensitive to his
own condition). It is a studiously unappealing portrait, and I am
rather inclined to take it as a warning; which may after all be how it
was meant.
--
Shall we be pure or impure? Today
we shall be very pure. It must always
be possible to contain
impurities in a pure way.
--Tarmo Uustalu and Varmo Vene
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