For, though I’ve no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
. … . … . … . . .
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
PHILIP LARKIN
The british nation from the end of the Second World War to the mid-1960s is a “hybrid affair, assembled out of tales about the past as well as narratives of the future” (Conekin et al. 3). As theories of the nation have frequently pointed out, the Janus-faced nation simultaneously looks backward to “invented” tradition, invoking the collective “memory” of the imagined community, and forward into its own future.1 Philip Larkin’s poetry both emblematizes and brings into being, through an English manly inflection, the quotidian, poignantly Janus-faced, and cautiously hopeful state of postwar, post-imperial England, as it captures the contradictory impulses of a changing nation-state. The beginning of the slow and arduous shift from a hegemonic gentlemanliness to a domesticated, suburban Englishman that Orwell examined so well becomes the central feature of Larkin’s poetics.
The poem “Church Going,” from which the epigraph of this chapter is taken, captures the distinct doubleness of the Englishman in transition. The speaker’s considered yet casual agnostic dismissal of the church’s sanctified silence as being “Brewed God knows how long” is nevertheless shot through with and undercut by the seriousness and secular transcendence at the end of the poem.2 The final verse rises out of the skeptical, mild mockery of the immediate present to acknowledge the potential grasped-for spirituality that the hallowed ground of the church offers, even if it is by virtue of its architecture, “a serious house on a serious earth,” and the sedimented belief of others (59). The poem’s “bicycle-clipped” Englishman, though irreverent, cannot quite bring himself to dismiss belief and spirituality as completely as he would have liked. He is caught between a modern secular, ironic dismissal and the inheritance of a more earnest structure of belief. The past and present ways of being mesh to create the Englishman who is at “a loss” but nevertheless stops often at wayside churches.
Philip Larkin’s poetry assumed cultural and national resonance in postwar England because of its imbrication within, and adaptation of, an inherited stylization of hegemonic masculinity, or an imperially inflected gentlemanliness.3 Critics have identified Larkin with “an essential and enduring Englishness” because of the “colloquial tenor,” “ironic humor,” and “clear-sighted realism” of his verse, which was seen as “English in its self-restraint and ironic reserve”; yet they have failed to see that these national traits are also gendered ones (Regan 1). Larkin’s poetry is focalized through the post-imperial middle-class Englishman, who gives voice to the condition of England. His poetic personae exhibit a sense of ambivalence within the culturally pervasive contradictions of a post-imperial England. They lament the passing of a glorious past even as they offer a tempered celebration of the present—“one of those old-type natural fouled-up guys” that Larkin had foreseen in “Posterity” (Poems 139).4 Theirs is a complicated negotiation between what was and what is, even as the present struggles into being.
Larkin’s engagement with the postwar moment encompasses both a lament and a cautiously defiant hope for the present. Rather than the singular trope of imperial nostalgia and lament that critics usually read in his poems (as indicated earlier), I argue that Larkin’s poems describe, in nuanced and tortured detail, the trials and quotidian comforts of postwar, post-imperial English life. Indeed, his deliberate focus on English rather than British culture is itself a function of the duality of postwar British culture, a feature he shares with his peers who comprise the Angry Young Men. The celebration of Englishness marked as white and provincial is an effect of the resurgence of apparently indigenous traditions submerged by cosmopolitan imperialism in the decolonizing metropolitan center.5 Paradoxically, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the revival of hoary traditions is simultaneous with the establishment of the welfare state that caused revolutionary changes in the economic, political, and social spheres—the arrival of immigrants from former colonies and the gathering devolutionary momentum within the British Isles—changes that radically alter the idea of a stable and inherited national identity.
Larkin’s England is racially unmarked—representative of Englishness in its sheer taken-for-granted universality—and spotlights insular, solid middle-class English life in the decolonizing metropolitan center. However, as Tom Paulin has noted, the focus on the professional Englishman reveals that this transition is painful and confusing (240). By shifting the terms of reference from Paulin’s intuitive understanding of “personality” to an explicitly gendered understanding of national and imperial identity, I demonstrate that Larkin’s personae struggle within, adapt, and appropriate an inherited hegemonic masculine ideal—an institutionalized ideal that is historically and culturally knitted with the imperial Englishman that Paulin dismisses. Larkin’s personae are the post-gentlemen.
Larkin’s personae find themselves torn between an inherited, traditional identity of the middle-class gentleman and the pressures on that identity produced by the post-imperial welfare state, even as the latter strives to define and consolidate itself. Thus, Larkin speaks of Englishmen who are mere “scarecrows of chivalry” caught within “lost displays” in the absence of either the conviction or the logic that produced and enabled chivalry in an earlier generation; they are form without content. Like Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Larkin’s personae tentatively shift into the present even as they are shaped and structured by gender ideals of the past. And yet, Larkinesque self-conscious irony gives a new meaning to the inherited form, as it produces a poetics and a class, gender, and national identity that straddle the negotiation of the old and the new, the imperial and the post-imperial. More immediately, like Donald Davie’s contemporaneous poem “Remembering the ’Thirties”—which exemplified postwar literary neutrality and the ambivalently ironic dismissal of the activist sentiments of the Auden generation—Larkin’s “Poetry of Departures” also measures its masculine affect against the heroism of the thirties. Before I analyze the poem, a very brief examination of Davie’s representative poem will serve to thicken the literary-historical context of Larkin’s poetics of ironic manliness. “Remembering the ’Thirties” most famously and almost assuredly declaimed that “a neutral tone is preferred nowadays,” but turns this assurance inside out when it wonders whether it is not perhaps “better” to “praise a stance impressive and absurd/Than not to see the hero for the dust.” Heroism is both dismissed as “too dated, Audenesque” in an age where prewar events are “high brow thrillers,” and yet longed for as decisive, virile, and manly. Further layering this tense ambivalence is the casual mockery of the earnest heroic stance as effeminate and sexually dubious anyway, as evidenced in the Auden generation’s “craze/For showing that Hector was a mother’s boy” (Davie 34–35).
Similarly, in “Poetry of Departures,” which seemingly glorifies the manly and decisive repudiation of a tedious and narrow life, the poet sets up a dichotomy between two styles of masculinity: one that harks back to a more imperial, active manliness, and the other, which is more appropriate to a more circumscribed, suburban post-imperial life. The idea of “clear[ing] off” and “chuck[ing] up everything” is considered “purifying,” “elemental,” and “audacious.” The opening lines resonate with zest and energy; the “elemental” nature of such spontaneity is connected later in the poem with sexual conquest and a satisfactory revenge (Poems 64). The speaker’s envy of a robust masculinity is hard to miss with his exhortation of manly activities in which he would like to participate: swaggering, taking off dresses, and being a “stubbly” sailor. However, the last verse, characteristic of Larkinesque ambivalence, undercuts the preceding celebration of such primal audacity.
The persona’s boring, “sober” “industrious[ness],” it seems, is preferred over the world of manly adventure and excitement, of “[swaggering] the nut-strewn roads” and “[Crouching] in the foc’s’les.” The act of throwing up everything and leaving for adventures would have been fulfilling and worthwhile if “It weren’t so artificial/Such a deliberate step backwards” (64). Heroic exploits and voyages are artificial and inappropriate in a circumscribed contemporary world that seems made up of books, china, beds, and rooms. Indeed, grand gestures and quests for adventure in such circumstances are melodramatic and meaningless. As “Remembering the ’Thirties” so succinctly reveals, what for the “veterans” of the thirties were “agonies,” for the fifties poets were “worlds more removed than Ithaca or Rome”—post-imperial and postwar Britain is no theater of heroic manliness (Davie 34). The poet persona begins with envy for the robust spontaneity of adventurous manliness, but ends on a more tempered note that privileges his ironic self-consciousness for its maturity and sobriety.
“Poetry of Departures” is significantly sandwiched between “Toads,” where tedious white-collar labor is simultaneously condemned and soberly celebrated, and “Triple Time,” which considers the bland, autumnal days of the present as quintessentially representative of “adult enterprise” (Poems 65). Clearly, virile manliness with its association of exploration and conquest is outmoded in a new suburban England of “toads,” pensions, bills, and “[a] time unrecommended by event” that calls for sobriety and restraint (65). Martin Green, as we have seen, theorizes this self-consciousness as reflective of national readjustment in the ideals of masculinity: “There are many national types, and the dominant one, the Establishment type, the gentleman, has outlived its usefulness” (Green, “British Decency” 507). However, as I mentioned earlier, it is not a simple case of one style of masculine affect superseding another. Larkin’s poetry (like many postwar cultural texts) revealed that an emergent masculine affect, or what I have termed the post-gentleman, is paradoxically deeply implicated in the gender codes that it rejects. Indeed, The Less Deceived is a testament to the post-imperial melancholia, negotiation, and almost defiant ordinariness of English middle-class life in the 1950s.
Larkin’s critics have focused on his representations of gender in the domestic context of the welfare state, or on his seemingly ungendered relationship to the dissolution of empire.6 For instance, much has already been made of Larkin as the post-imperial poet of England, as the “poet of lowered insights and patiently diminished expectations” who, through his lyrical mutterings, represents the ex-centric position of the once powerful imperial center.7 As John Goodby points out, his time in the “elsewhere” of Belfast allowed him to “develop poetic strategies which made use of and thereby justified his sense of otherness and isolation” and to resituate his Englishness (132).8 Indeed, according to Larkin, it was in the Othered space of Belfast that “things reawoke somehow” (Required Writing 68). Nevertheless, even Goodby’s extremely rigorous examination of the “selves” in Larkin’s poetry inflected by the elsewhere of (Northern) Ireland ignores the question of gender. The following readings will bring the critical trends of culturally embedded examinations of gender in Larkin’s poetry into dialogue with postcolonial analyses of Englishness by arguing that Larkin constructs a belated manliness that is both English and post-imperial. Through an examination of Larkin’s ironic lyric voice, I reveal the unraveling and alteration of the imperially inflected moral and behavioral codes that produced the iconic, universalized figure of the Englishman, and the changes in his world.
One of Larkin’s most celebrated postcolonial poems, “The Importance of Elsewhere,” is his take on the Englishman as the persona negotiates his gender inheritance in the moment of imperial unraveling. It explores, in detail, the Englishman’s dilemma at the moment of post-imperial de-linking, or rather the self-aware disintegration of the Englishman’s identity in the absence of the structuring Other of the empire. As Nigel Alderman’s excellent reading reveals, the English self can only be achieved through a sense of separation from others; “the success of the ‘separate’ ‘me’ is measured by how workable it is, arguing that the failure of ‘home,’ of England, lies in the production of the ‘unworkable’ self.” He argues that it is the move away from the “universal rhetoric” of British imperialism able to absorb and incorporate other cultures to a “rhetoric of difference,” of post-imperial England, that signifies the decline of the nation (282). While I agree with this reading, I want to point out that it works only because the speaker in the poem is not just English, but gendered male: the English manly self is deliberately poised on the cusp of the imperial and the post-imperial. To clarify, the occasional female personae in Larkin’s oeuvre are immediately recognizable because of their unself-conscious emotional immediacy. It is only the male speakers who are wholly self-conscious, contemplative, and ironic about their relationship to national traditions and classed gender expectations. Rather than argue that Englishness, in the absence of its imperial underpinning, necessarily slides into a life with “a hole in it”9 (which it does, in one register), I want to establish how the speaker’s discomfort in his own national institutions more tellingly reveals the necessary transition of a gendered national identity. The poem moves from stabilizing difference in a colonial space to an uncomfortable distance from any sense of Burkean organic unity in England.10
The first section of the poem illustrates the enactment of the English identity in Ireland, where the speaker can still concretize this identity through the residual framework of imperialism. Ireland’s difference defines the speaker’s self: “Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home,/Strangeness made sense.” He argues that the “difference” makes him feel “welcome” (105). He is the colonizer among the formerly colonized at the moment of decolonization; hence, his Englishness is consolidated in opposition to the strange Other. They “prove [him] separate, not unworkable.” The phrase “not unworkable” is peculiarly Larkinesque, in that he deliberately uses a double negative to indicate a positive: part of Larkin’s contemporary appeal as a post-imperial poet lay in his ability to inscribe the positive or ordinary dimensions of post-imperial English life within a series of negations that managed to evoke the loss of empire and the simultaneous gain of a more manageable, authentic Englishness.
“Unworkable” as a term becomes even more loaded because he uses it so sparingly. In fact, he had used it only once before, in his poem for Sally Amis, “Born Yesterday” in The Less Deceived, where he hopes that she will have an ordinary and dull life, if that means an “enthralled catching of happiness.” He wishes “Nothing uncustomary/To pull you off your balance,/That unworkable itself,/Stops all the rest from working” (54). To be unworkable is to be knocked off balance, and it is not confined to the unworkable individual; it arrests the workability of those around her as well. To read these traces in “The Importance of Elsewhere” in The Whitsun Weddings is to understand that to be “not unworkable” necessarily indicates balance: the stable Other of Ireland structures his balance, thereby concretizing his identity. In fact, the alien, uncustomary nature of Ireland produces his balanced workability. Strangeness is a cognate for distance; hence, at a distance from home, self-distanciation made sense, but at home it does not.
The poem moves perspective from the imperial Englishman in the former colony to the post-imperial Englishman back in England where “elsewhere” no longer underpins home. The rhyme scheme of the poem illustrates this movement from difference to similitude. In the first two verses, the lines only half rhyme: “home” is paired with “welcome,” and “speech” with “touch,” “faint” with “went,” “stable” with “unworkable.” This partial rhyme replicates the disjunction that produces the workable English identity. However, in the final verse, the rhyme scheme tightens, replicating the sameness of England as opposed to the separateness of Ireland.
Living in England has no such excuse:
These are my customs and establishments
It would be much more serious to refuse.
Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence. (105)
While the separateness of Ireland makes his English self “not unworkable,” the similitude of home—home unstructured by the difference of empire—makes the defining national customs oppressive rather than comforting and familiar, a structure reflected in the strong rhymes of “excuse”/“refuse” and “establishments”/“existence.” And yet, even here, the rhyme is not quite perfect, exhibiting subtly the Englishman’s dissonant fit into his own national and gendered identity. The meter of the last verse also reinforces this sense of partial identification: the lines of the last verse are primarily trochaic with the last syllables dropped, ending with a stressed syllable. Hence “ex-cuse”/“refuse” are masculine rhymes that give the impression of full rhymes but are not.
Living in England, his identity of Englishman is called into question because he cannot comfortably plug himself into the network and traditions that would ensure a stable gender and national identity, and yet he cannot separate himself from his gendered cultural inheritance either. As a post-gentleman, he is unable, or refuses, to insert himself into his “customs and establishments,” implying a casting off of national and gendered moorings, for the Englishman is historically intertwined with his national institutions: he is a product of his “customs and establishments,” culturally formulated through the means of institutions in order to fit seamlessly back into them. To clarify, a slight recapitulation is necessary: the middle-class public school Englishman—synonymous with the English public school gentleman, at least from the middle of the nineteenth century—embodies the ideals of Englishness, what the Clarendon Commission called “the capacity to govern others and control themselves … their vigour and manliness of character.” Ideals of Englishness and English manliness consolidated in the public schools grew out of a long interaction between industrial/capitalist exigencies and the empire that sustained the power and cultural hegemony of the ruling class, connecting national and cultural identity with national/imperial institutions.
Larkin’s Englishman, though not a direct product of the public school system, is necessarily inflected by the ideology of these national institutions that constituted the ideals of normative English manliness and of Englishness in general.11 Connell’s delineation of hegemonic masculinity is once again useful in understanding how traits of public school manliness structurally constitute Larkin’s middle-class, postwar professional Englishman. In the postwar period, despite the celebration of class mobility and the mythic notion of classlessness, the most visibly powerful embodiments of corporate masculinity were still public school men, and the traits of this ethic of manliness underpinned and determined all English masculine affects. Hence, to reject the “establishments” woven into the very fabric of English manly identity is to arrive at a point of crisis and negotiation of national, gender identity. The Burkean associations of “customs and establishments” only serve to emphasize the unconscious weight of nation and history: to refuse to align with the customs and traditions of England and not integrate smoothly with the English nation is a “serious” case of national misanthropy.12
Larkin’s Englishman is revealed as being isolated and unsure, unable to get a toehold on a sense of “workable” self in the absence of functional framing devices, but also aware of his unworkable position. He is entirely self-aware of the seriousness of his disidentification: his interstitial position of being neither an imperial nor yet a post-imperial Englishman allows him the distance to examine the code of imperially structured English manliness within which he is inscribed. In the absence of an “elsewhere [that] underwrites his existence,” then, he cannot wholeheartedly insert himself into, nor separate himself from, his national customs and identity.
While “The Importance of Elsewhere” illustrates the Englishman’s inability to be comfortably absorbed into the nation in a post-imperial Britain, Larkin’s poems detailing the Englishman’s resistance to the family—the core of a heteronormatively structured nation—only serve to reinforce his discomfort with old established ideals, understood as “natural,” in a new, more uncertain English world where manly autonomy is no longer reconcilable with familial duty.
“Dockery and Son,” invoking Victorian patrimony through its associations with Dombey and Son, ironically enough depicts the trajectory of a solitary Englishman as he contemplates his own life in comparison to his peer, Dockery, on a visit to his old college. On discovering that Dockery’s son now studies at the same college, the persona is amazed at Dockery’s confidence that “he should be added to.” The emphasis on the exclusively masculine continues through the course of the poem, from the all-male Oxford college, to the poetically evoked worlds of the military, the industrial landscape, and, of course, sons and fathers. The poem, long by Larkin’s standards, is in the form of a rambling, contemplative, inner monologue. The first three verses, as he wanders around college—nostalgically recalling his days of undergraduate mayhem, and trying to recall what Dockery looked like and with whom he roomed—follow a regular rhyme scheme. The life experienced and the life observed follow a certain ordinary ease, and an expected, conventional pattern. And yet there are already indications that he is not really a part of it, a “death-suited visitant” whose youthful belonging is contrasted with his current status: “I tried the door where I used to live:/Locked. The lawn spreads dazzlingly wide” (108). The openness and integration of earlier times is indicated not only by his old college room but also by the invitation and open-endedness of the colon, which is deceptive, as it is abruptly arrested by the strong consonant at the end of the monosyllabic “Locked,” which is entrapped by a period. The visual impact of “locked,” trapped between two wide-open spaces—his happy past, and the wide, sunny lawns—reveals the speaker’s own problematic position in the world that he contemplates. Locked out and “ignored,” he leaves the known world of the past and heads off into the empty future from which all familiar views are gradually erased.
In the last three verses, when he begins to contemplate what it means to marry, and why men like Dockery would choose to do so, the hint of dissent/discomfort shades into a lack of discernable rhyme scheme, and by the final verse the rhythm is harsh and jagged, having completely lost any degree of calm or complacency. The rhythmic dissonance emphasizes the potential for social disruptiveness; the speaker’s questioning of heteronormative impulses—whether they are in fact impulses, and not some ingrained habit—destabilizes the calm, complacent conventionality of life that the first three verses seemed to affirm. There is a shift in tone that occurs at the end of the last line of the first verse, when he sees the reflection of the “unhindered moon” on the coupling and uncoupling railway tracks, signifying his uneasy fit into the conventions and expectations of English manliness: “Unhindered moon. To have no son, no wife,/No house or land still seemed quite natural” (108). His kinship with the solitary moon is an effect of his own solitude, not having a wife, family, home, or land. Through the invocation of the moon, he hijacks the “natural” from its association with family and reproduction and links it to a childless and solitary state. The choice of image is further significant because the moon and its poetic connotations of chaste femininity reverberate in a poem that is explicitly coded male. The poetic persona de-genders himself through his lunar identification, refusing to enter the procreative realm of adult manhood, and instead floats free in a seemingly asexual celibate integrity. The poetic persona makes visible what Robyn Wiegman calls the “seeming naturalness of adult masculinity—heterosexuality, fatherhood, family governance[,] … citizenry,” rendering it instead as a “set of prescriptive norms that contain potential contradictions within and between men” (43). The (un)conscious articulation of the different aspects of an adult life, and his decision not to pursue that life, echo the rejection of Burkean organic unity in “The Importance of Elsewhere”—which precedes “Dockery and Son” in The Whitsun Weddings. Hence, within the logic of this particular volume, Larkin emphasizes the disjunction between the Englishman as he is and the Englishman as he was and is supposed to be.
In this, Larkin represents and reflects the pervasive social and cultural concern regarding the increasing domestication of men, and, indeed, of English culture. This discourse of domestication began during the interwar years, as we have seen, and gained momentum to counteract the rise of Fascism and imperialist nationalism in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s: the British—hegemonically represented by the English—were increasingly constructed as a shy, modest, unassuming people, a nation consciously defined by ordinary, private pleasures and modest ambitions.13 This particular strand of national ideology—inwardness and domesticity—which seemed to coexist with imperialism even in the interwar years, became a national inevitability in the 1950s, with the gradual disintegration of empire that began in 1947 with the independence of India, the need for national rebuilding after the upheavals of World War II, and the initiation of the welfare state.
Lynn Segal argues that both men and women were more closely associated with the home in the postwar period, though for men, home involved appropriately masculine leisure pursuits such as watching television and do-it-yourself projects rather than any share of the housework. She points out, “Men, too, in popular consciousness, were being domesticated. They had returned from the battlefield to bungalow with new expectations of comforts and pleasures” (3). However, this new emphasis on the domestic was accompanied by rampant fears of emasculation, loss of masculine horizons and ambition, and a general obsession with constructions of masculinity produced by an explicitly domesticated England—shorn of any imperial and global weight.
These fears permeated the national fabric and constituted the subject of exploration in virtually every cultural outlet of the period, tying together the crisis of national self-presentation with the crisis of masculine renegotiation.14 Segal registers the paradox of domestication and its concomitant emphasis on manly autonomy when she points out the sudden cultural explosion of the “male adventure story linking masculinity and rugged individualism,” evidencing a deep-seated nostalgia for the exclusively masculine domains of the battlefield and empire (20). Hence, Englishmen were torn between two conflicting discourses: the nostalgia for an imperial and prewar world of solitary, yet homosocial, manly activity and integrity, and the economic and social pressures of interwar and postwar domesticity. In a homosocial imperial economy, manly solitude and domesticity balanced each other out; in an increasingly heterosocial postwar domestic economy, the two ideals conflict. Larkin’s Englishman in “Dockery and Son” ruminates precisely on this masculine problematic: of heterosexual desire and family on the one hand, and on the other, his need for manly solitude and separateness derived from a long, entrenched history of masculine activity in the national public sphere and the empire.
The speaker chooses his autonomy over what he considers the claustrophobia of domesticity. Whereas earlier, the primarily masculine terrain of activity—the public sphere and/or empire—was complemented by the comfort of domesticity, in the post-imperial world of the poem, domesticity appears to be the only terrain where a middle-class manhood can be consolidated (a fact Gordon Comstock reluctantly realized), and the speaker emphatically rejects it as unsuitable for his own masculine authenticity. This movement from a homosocial terrain to a purely heterosocial terrain is mirrored in the poetic content: though the poem speaks only of men, it moves from the exclusively masculine spaces to a predominant and overwhelming focus on questions of family and heteronormativity. And the speaker cannot, and does not want to, insert himself into the expected role of husband, father, homeowner, and landowner. This domestic failure follows upon the Englishman’s inability to satisfactorily identify himself as Englishman in “The Importance of Elsewhere.”
While reproduction, heternormative coupling, and filial responsibility are all the rightful duties of a middle-class Englishman—which would only serve to consolidate his middle-class masculine identity—for the speaker these expected duties only mean “dilution,” a gradual chipping away at his own sense of unadulterated self.15 What is significant is that the speaker’s outsider position—as postwar, middle-class Englishman structured by ideals of an inherited manliness—allows him a vantage point from which to question these naturalized assumptions: “Why did he think adding meant increase?/To me it was dilution” (109). However, the almost involuntary act of abstraction from, and questioning of, “innate assumptions” is not without uncertainty: the internal catalexis in the first line of the verse—between “think” and “adding”—produces a pause that repeats the persona’s hesitation and his attempt to grope toward an understanding of heteronormative and reproductive compulsions. This characteristic questioning hesitation scattered through many of Larkin’s poems, such as “Church Going” and “Reasons for Attendance,” for example, only emphasizes the painful transition of English middle-class manliness, and the concomitant negotiations within the middle-class English man.
The speaker is caught between the “naturalness” of inherited heteronormativity as the means to consolidate middle-class manhood, and the awareness that in postwar, post-imperial England, this very familial melding might destroy his carefully preserved manly integrity. Significantly, only the male speakers in Larkin’s poems have such a problematic relationship with marriage and domesticity. Female speakers in such poems as “Wedding Wind” and the earlier “Deep Analysis” wholly identify with their surrender to marriage and the domestic ideal.16 In fact, these poems are acknowledged as Larkin’s most Lawrentian poems because of their emotional intensity and immediacy.17 The female persona within Larkinesque poetics becomes the medium that enables an exploration of spontaneous emotion, unlike the male speaker who cautiously parses his emotions through the skein of rigid self-control.
In spite of his uncertainty, then, the persona realizes that the ideals of family, home, and land are neither embedded truths nor deepest desires; he sees them merely as style hardened into habit, and hence is all too aware of their historical development to consider them the essential pattern of gender behavior: “Where do these/Innate assumptions come from? Not from what/We think truest, or most want to do:/. . . They’re more a style” (109). He interprets naturalized heteronormative structures as “habit,” which points to a proto-queer critique of social conventions: the progression of “style” to “habit,” to “suddenly harden[ing] into all we’ve got.”18 Gender expectations, especially appropriate manly middle-class English behavior, began as style and have become the essential foundation of manliness. And Larkin’s Englishman struggles precisely against these hardened “style[s],” preferring to prioritize manly solitude and wholeness at the expense of marital and reproductive dilution. In such a situation, Larkin’s obsession with solitary and, indeed, solipsistic eroticism in such poems as “Best Society,” where the persona “viciously” shuts himself away from the intrusion and babble of society in order to “unfold” in “the giant palm,” is the only mode of erotic satisfaction and autonomous integrity.19 Two complementary styles of manly behavior—preservation of solitary integrity, and reproductive duty—once fused in the special ideological complexion and historical character of the Victorian gentleman and middle-class English manliness, have in Larkin’s poetic rendering of postwar England become irreconcilable with the national inward turn toward the domestic, and the consequential collapse of the private and public spheres. While “Dockery and Son” critiques heteronormative “impulses” and domesticity, “Sunny Prestatyn” moves further along the spectrum of heterosexuality and is a complex meditation on chivalry, desire, and differently coded masculinities.
Unlike the poems examined so far, which describe worlds devoid of women, “Sunny Prestatyn” focuses on a woman, but unsurprisingly it is more interested in the masculine responses evoked by the woman. Janice Rossen has pointed out that women in Larkin’s poetry are usually mediated through artistic representation: photographs, advertisements, and fiction (“Difficulties with Girls” 135–40). They are not, in fact, “empirically true” and very rarely are “real girl[s] in real place[s],” unlike the many troubled and hesitant men whose hesitance and doubt underscore their reality (Poems 43). This only serves to emphasize their inaccessibility and mystique within the world of the specific poem, a mystique that both bewilders the man in question and accentuates his longing. Larkin often uses the images of women to metaphorize a sense of loss and wistfulness. In fact, “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album,” which opens The Less Deceived, sets the volume’s tone of wistful longing for a past that is perfect in its distance and passivity.
Nevertheless, “Sunny Prestatyn”—as indeed other Larkin poems featuring women—needs to be read at the intersection of several different registers: the aesthetic representation of the woman in a consumerist framework, the classed, post-imperial masculine response to the portrayal, as well as the speaker’s ironic, self-conscious engagement with the witnessed tableau. The poem immediately succeeds “The Importance of Elsewhere” and precedes “First Sight”—a nature poem about new life—and “Dockery and Son,” which explores the vicissitudes of patrilineal duty. The four poems, or at least the three that focus on human subjects, reveal the multifaceted nature of classed, gender negotiation in post-imperial England. In the first poem, the Englishman tries to realign his national gender identity in the absence of established structures; in the second, he grapples with ideas of chivalry and his own middle-class manliness as juxtaposed with lower-class masculine violence vis-à-vis heterosexual desire in a post-imperial England; and in the third poem, the speaker rejects the naturalized heteronormative conventions that supposedly solidify his classed manhood.
Obviously, the volume does not depict anything as simplistic as a linear progression from masculine crisis to nihilism, although it is possible to trace such a narrative from The Less Deceived to High Windows. However, to do so would be to miss Larkin’s layered representations of “how something” pushed Englishmen to “the side of their own lives,” as well as his interspersed poems of hope and love amid such marginalization (Poems 115). In fact, The Whitsun Weddings continues the theme of the present past from The Less Deceived. It considers the diminished, more honest and self-aware present in terms of a grand, lost past: in its titular poem, and the scattered images of “immeasurable surprise,” it focuses on the potential for happiness in the present and ends on a characteristically guarded gesture of hope: “our almost-instinct almost true:/What will survive of us is love” (107, 117). More important, to consider the three poems together is also to clearly see the link between the Englishman as he comes to terms with a new/old England and the post-imperial nation as it transitions: the “Importance of Elsewhere” offers the master narrative within which the details of the other two need to be read. In other words, the uncertainty, the doubt, the paradox of violent chivalry, and the repudiation of heteronormativity can only be understood within the larger trope of a now diminished Englishman who is no longer underwritten by an “elsewhere.”
“Sunny Prestatyn” even begins with an invocation of beautiful tropical beaches, which once would have been part of the imperial periphery, but in postwar England refer to the domestic exotic of Wales—which, as an ancient colony, has been appropriated as a subsidiary fiefdom in the English body politic. The woman not only is a two-dimensional poster image but, furthermore, coalesces with a beach resort waiting to be plundered. The opening verse is a careful and deliberate tangle of woman and tropical resort, whose “breast-lifting arms” and “palms” coalesce through the explicit rhyme of palms and arms. Behind her, a “hunk of coast” spread from her thighs encourages inferences of sex, as “hunk” is slang for an attractive man, in addition to being an outcrop of land. The image privileges the fleshly, welcoming reality of the semi-naked woman open for conquest rather than the beach that the poster apparently advertises. Provocatively positioned for the male gaze, she laughs coyly, with her “tautened” satin, spread thighs and open arms. Advertising makes objects of desire of her and the beach, with which she merges. She is perceived as using her sexuality to produce desire in the male observer, a fact the speaker makes evident in his description of the poster as sexual fantasy. This provocation of advertising meets with swift and sudden retribution through the violence of graffiti: “She was slapped up one day in March/. . . and her face/Was snaggle-toothed and boss-eyed;/Huge tits and a fissured crotch/Were scored well in, and the space” (106).
The abrupt shift in rhythm mimics the viciousness of the violence perpetrated on the provocative, vulnerable woman. It is possible to argue that the graffiti violates the rich and luxurious life being advertised, but the pointed sexual nature of the violence—“she was slapped up”—indicates that the anger is primarily directed against the woman and not motivated by a critical and subversive Marxist agenda. The beauty and fertility of “March” deliberately counterpoints the violence done to her “fissured crotch” in the rhyme of “March”/“crotch,” while her face that denotes beauty and individuality is denigrated to empty space in the “face”/“space” juxtaposition.
The language of the poem that describes the act mimics the figurative violent rape that sets the woman “astride tuberous cock and balls” and makes her “snaggle-toothed” and “boss-eyed.” The sadistic attack asserts the masculine power of Titch Thomas (the graffiti “artist”) over her, while the violent language asserts the speaker’s revenge over unfulfilled and provoked sexual fantasy. The speaker, despite his detachment—“Titch” is a traditional derisive nickname for a very small man—is clearly complicit in this sexual violence. This complicity is made more evident when the vulgarity of language apparently imitates the speech of the lower-class hooligan, Titch Thomas: “tits,” “crotch,” “cock,” “balls,” and “snaggle-toothed” mingles with “tuberous” and “fissured,” which clearly lie outside his linguistic idiom. The unevenness of the idiom reveals that the speaker unwittingly shares Titch Thomas’s anger while he tries to maintain his detachment from, and condescension for, such crude and violent behavior of the lower-class man.20
At this juncture it is necessary to pause and consider the speaker’s location in this triangulated tableau. As mentioned earlier, the speaker is clearly affected by the image of the woman in the advertisement: he, like Titch Thomas, reads her pose as provocative; indeed, his description is almost pornographic in its attention to detail. For him the advertisement is not of the tropical resort but of the woman offering herself. His complicity, then, with Titch Thomas’s violence is evident in the second verse. There is righteousness to his complicity, as he not only shares in the desecration but also derives a salacious enjoyment from it, as it punishes the poster woman’s audacious teasing and apparent flaunting of sexual power over supposedly powerless men, without any potential for fulfillment.
Indeed, the idea of women as “unearthly” and “separate” from men of all classes is explored earlier in the volume in “The Large Cool Store,” where the speaker’s condescension for those who live in “low terraced houses” working in “factory, yard and site” suddenly collapses in a moment of inclusion: he too is part of a fraternity of men who are bewildered by women (101). However, what sets this speaker’s detached, educated, middle-class masculinity apart from Thomas’s brutality, within the logic of the poem, is the throwaway line amid tears and stabbings: “She was too good for this world” (106). The speaker’s chivalric elevation of the unearthly woman leads to this ironically pious pronouncement after his complicit violence in the previous verse. The speaker is a “scarecrow of chivalry” who mouths, and indeed believes, the ideals of a normative manhood, and is able to assert his superior classed manliness in the face of such a brutal example of lower-class masculinity. However, in a typically Larkinesque move, the statement is saturated with irony, because the flip side of mystification of women is the frustrated desire, resentment, and objectification that such etherealization produces. The poem reveals both aspects of the speaker’s chivalry, which is played out both in tandem with and against Thomas’s crude graffiti.
“Sunny Prestatyn” is an example of the Englishman’s engagement with women and the world of advertising. Women are too good, and hence subject to intense misogynistic violence, both physical and emotional. The trope of postwar domestication put intense pressure on the relations between men and women, and any hint of threat to manly autonomy and equilibrium led to an almost vicious response that was nearly always justified within the emotional logic of the text.21 Larkin’s inherited chivalry is more than evident in poems such as “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album,” “Maiden Name,” “The Large Cool Store,” “Sunny Prestatyn,” and “If My Darling,” where women are perfect, ethereal, and encapsulated in images and ideas. These poems also carry the implicit, and sometimes explicit, separation of women from a comprehensible and empirical reality that the speakers inhabit. Separation and distance accentuate desire and preclude desire’s fulfillment that sometimes results in violence. In the poems where women are very real presences, the male speakers can only perceive them through the lens of heterosexual conventions that frustrate masculine desire just as effectively as aesthetic representation. In “Self’s the Man,” Arnold “married a woman to stop her from getting away/now she’s there all day,” and she embodies the trap of heteronormative duty; she does not exist as an individual, merely as an abhorred embodiment of the trivialities and loss of freedom that married life entails (95).
In both representations of womanhood, the male speaker is usually a victim of femininity—either through the inevitability of desire and its nonfulfillment, or desire’s fulfillment through the entrapment of marriage and the dissolution of the masculine self. In Larkin’s postwar, post-imperial England, manly autonomy is always under threat from women. In “Sunny Prestatyn,” lower-class masculinity avenges itself through a brutal and sadistic attack, while the middle-class male speaker asserts himself through his vicarious enjoyment of the act, and simultaneously distances himself through his sympathetic idealization of the violated woman. The poem shows, with characteristic Larkinesque irony, the ambivalence of an inherited chivalry in a domesticated England where the stabilizing hierarchical structures that produced and sustained chivalry and the fulfillment of desire no longer exist. A similar metamorphosis is visible in the ideal of restraint—an ideal that governed both heterosocial affect and reserved solitude.
“Reasons for Attendance” explores the transmutation of the normative manly ideal of restraint and detachment. Self-restraint had occupied, and, indeed, continues to occupy, a privileged position in the self-characterization of the English. Since the hegemonic and tentacular reach of the public-school ideals of manliness weighted down the ideals of normative English masculinity and Englishness with its emphasis on self-control, setting it apart from femininity and non-English masculinities, self-control continues to determine appropriate English manly behavior. After all, Victorian and Edwardian codes of English gentlemanliness, which shaped the middle-class Englishman in the twentieth century, distinguished the gentleman, or the middle-class Englishman, from the primal working-class figure—and the primitive native—through an ascetic cultivation of restraint and appropriate distribution of affect. The professional man validated his masculinity through an ascetic physical and emotional regimen, the rigor of which differentiated it from feminine self-denial and spirituality. James Eli Adams argues with reference to Victorian manliness, “The gentleman was thereby rendered compatible with a masculinity understood as a strenuous psychic regimen, which could be affirmed outside the economic arena, but nonetheless could be embodied as charismatic self-mastery” (7). Martin Francis, in his examination of the politics of restraint in the construction of the postwar Labor Party, argues that the rhetoric of rationality and progress that dominated the postwar reconstruction of England along Socialist principles was necessarily accompanied by a related emphasis on self-control. He goes on to point out, “Self-discipline was prioritised because it was perceived as vital to the complex task of social and economic reconstruction. An emphasis on restraint matched contemporary codes of manliness, at a time when masculinity seemed to be under threat from a blurring of gender roles and the increased visibility of homosexuality. Uncontrolled emotion also transgressed a conception of the British (or at least English) national identity which was rooted in self-restraint” (153). Larkin, though not a Labour politician, clearly falls into this category of the restrained, middle-class Englishman. Though he is not a gentleman, Larkin’s ironic restraint is embedded within the inherited residual gender script of the Victorian gentleman, rendering him a post-gentleman. In “Reasons for Attendance,” he explores this particular defining trait of the Englishman, as well as the damning effects of restraint and rationality especially in the context of jazz and youthful desire.
The poem is set in the pleasure-filled and youthful, energetic world of either a dance hall or a jazz club, where the sound and mood of jazz permeates the scene. The speaker too, for all his apparent detachment, cannot entirely disassociate himself, as he is unwittingly drawn to the “loud and authoritative” call of the trumpet. He vicariously enjoys the animal pleasures of the dancing young people through the “lighted glass.” The immediacy of the witnessed bodily bliss is more than apparent in the “sense” of “smoke and sweat,” of the reality of life in which he does not participate. The sensual and fleshly “wonder/ful” “feel” of girls only serves to foreground the sensual life that the speaker misses by staying “out here” while he could be “in there” with full girls; the subtle lascivious innuendo of “in there” following upon the fullness of the girls is typical of a publicly restrained desire, which is a recurrent feature in Larkin’s poetry (Poems 48).22
The speaker tries to veer away from slipping into envy and longing through an abrupt question, “Sex, yes, but what/Is sex?” (48). Steve Clark points out that the question is answered by the arrangement of the rhyme “what”/“sweat” (Clark 95). The importance of sex, desire, and pleasure is reduced to a bodily emission. As a consequence, the speaker sets up his superior, detached rationality and restraint against the mindless, flushed dancing couples who “shift intently.” And while he seems to emphatically reject the equation of sex and happiness, the crucial break in the line undercuts the dismissal: “Of happiness in couples—sheer/Inaccuracy, as far as I am concerned” (48). In the gap between “sheer” and “inaccuracy” emerges the chasm of doubt; his desire emerges in its disavowal.
The tussle between restraint and spontaneity in any form, especially desire that defines the middle-class Englishman, plays out with understated power in the second verse and in the first line of the third, as quoted above. Here, at its most succinct, is the refusal to give in, the rational rejection of coupling as happiness, and yet the caesura indicates the knife-edge of that refusal—the undertone is that of the powerful pull of desire, an undertone whose “beat” plays through the poem from the authoritative call of the trumpet at the very beginning. The compelling undertow of desire is also evident in the double signification of the trumpet: “What calls me is that lifted, rough-tongued bell/(Art, if you like) whose individual sound/Insists I too am individual” (48).
In an effort to convince himself of his own uniqueness and not dissociate himself from the subcultural pull of jazz, the speaker deliberately and paradoxically signifies the trumpet as symbolic of art and individuality—or, perhaps, it is the trumpet’s single, lifted note separating it from the rest of the tune/beat that symbolizes individuality. Nevertheless, the “rough-tongued” bell, though semantically linked to the world of sensuality and sex, is translated into art and individuality. It is paradoxical because the bell—with its abrasive, sensual physicality of “rough” and “tongue”—points to the body and senses, but the speaker firmly rationalizes it as a symbol for art. In this one image, the speaker conflates sensuality and art/individuality, while privileging the latter. The same sound calls the couples to “maul to and fro” in animalistic fervor, and the speaker to witness their mating dance and rationally engage with the effects and deeper meaning of their mauling. His choice to consider the trumpet as a “bell” that beckons him toward artistic solitude indicates a precarious victory of restraint and rationality over desire. So the trumpet is desire: powerful and potential cause of happiness, and the loss of individuality and solitude. Hence, to succumb to desire is both wanted and unwanted. Poised on the cusp of restraint and desire, the speaker apparently has overcome desire through the sheer resoluteness of his restraint, and his wish to preserve his artistic and manly integrity.
The structure of the lines that refer to possible interpretations of the trumpet’s call replicates its double signification: “It speaks; I hear; others may hear as well/But not for me, nor I for them; and so/With happiness. Therefore I stay outside” (48). The semicolons between “it speaks,” “I hear,” and “others may as well” indicate the distinct separation and yet connection between what he and others hear, which is reinforced by the fact that each group goes their separate ways: “But not for me, nor I for them.” His apparent satisfaction with staying outside, which he was so keen to establish, is, however, undercut in typical Larkinesque fashion in the last two lines: “Believing that; and both are satisfied,/If no one has misjudged himself. Or lied” (48). He gains a distinctly rational overview and insight through his detachment, and yet this insight also allows him to be aware of his own possible equivocation, for the last line hints at the possibility of self-delusion, further accentuated by the rhyme of “satisfied”/“lied.”
While the speaker might have retained his individuality through restraint, then, the poetic undertone—signified by the powerful pull of desire—reveals that his restraint is not so much a matter of will as an inability to act. He refuses to, or perhaps cannot, surrender to desire. The speaker’s encoded middle-class English restraint allows him access to only restraint and not sex, or at least that is the dichotomy he has set up for himself. This paralysis of restraint becomes even more problematic because he does feel the pull of jazz. Jazz, according to Eric Hobsbawm (or Francis Newton, his jazz alias), was a protest against upper-class culture and respectability, “a rude word” (215). Simon Frith, using Larkin as his example, argues that the ascendant, suburban petty-bourgeois embedded in middle-class ideology identified jazz as the means to unlock an “authenticity” that enabled emotional and physical spontaneity—a sloughing off of the circumscribed gender script and suburban life (58). Both these ideas underwrite the speaker’s own reluctance to dismiss the power of jazz. In fact, the poem is not a rejection of jazz at all, but rather the speaker’s own ambivalent longing for, and concomitant repudiation of, the sexual and emotional freedom that jazz enables.
A brief detour is necessary here in order to comprehend the significance of jazz for Larkin and the persona’s relationship to it. Larkin’s obsession with, and attitude toward, jazz informs the speaker’s attitude toward what he witnesses. For Larkin, jazz, more than any other art form, symbolized a direct connection to the unconscious and desire. As he explains in an unpublished essay from 1943, “Jazz is the closest description of the unconscious we have. … Jazz is the new art of the unconscious, and is therefore improvised, for it cannot call upon consciousness to express its own divorce from consciousness” (qtd. in Motion 57). In the introduction to his collection of journalistic reviews of jazz albums and artists, All What Jazz, Larkin explains what drew him to jazz was its rawness, and the forbidden exuberance of its “hot numbers” (Required Writing 286). His derision of the arrival of modernism in jazz produced the oft-quoted Larkin statement: “The tension between artist and audience in jazz slackened when the Negro stopped wanting to entertain the white man” (294). Jazz was only worthwhile, in Larkin’s opinion, when it was aimed at entertaining the white man, where the music contained the raw emotionalism inherent in blackness that the white man could vicariously enjoy. Reading Larkin’s interpretation of jazz within the discourse of English manliness is particularly revelatory. English manly restraint was a signifier of superiority in relation to the more uncontrolled primal masculinities of the native and the working-class male and the passive emotionalism of women. Within this context, jazz, as produced by “the Negro,” allowed for the vicarious pleasure of “hotness” and the unconscious. It allowed for the white man to maintain his distance and detachment as “the Negro” played jazz, specifically for the pleasure and entertainment of the white man/audience. The white man did not have to engage directly with it; he enjoyed it at a remove, maintaining his control over his unconscious desires while being entertained by the black man’s surrender to his. And as Larkin saw it, when jazz became Modernist, racial qualities were betrayed as the unconscious now gave way to the intellect, and, accordingly, the power of jazz faded for Larkin.
To return to the poem, the persona tries to appropriate jazz’s subversive potential, in his own meager way, into his commitment to solitude. Unlike his peers, though, he cannot subsume himself within it; he is unable to entirely reject his inherited gender ideology even as he unwittingly longs to do so. To abandon himself to the animalistic pleasure would be to abandon the distinct characteristics of his own white, middle-class manliness, which he both longs to do and yet cannot. The associations of primitive, animalistic sexuality, even as a symbol of liberation recuperated through its Anglicization, derived its subversive power because it made desirable the unrestrained and spontaneous sexuality of an apparently primitive black masculinity against which English manliness was originally defined. John Baxendale, while describing criticisms of jazz in the interwar years, points out that jazz was denigrated specifically on the grounds of its savagery—an argument that structures its desirability for a postwar suburban youth who want to mildly protest bourgeois respectability: “It was read as coming from outside culture altogether—from ‘the jungle’; it was a force of nature, expressing sexuality and savagery, and invested by both critics and aficionados with the power to undermine culture” (148). Hence, the absent imperial periphery underwrites the suburban, manly fascination with jazz; indeed, it is no longer the periphery so much as the empire coming home to the center and the potential threat to Englishness with the arrival of HMS Windrush in 1948. The unconscious, and not so unconscious, invocations of imperially structured masculinities, both black and white, underpin the speaker’s unwitting restraint in the face of, and ambivalent wish for surrender to, the power of jazz. To surrender means a repudiation of suburban expectations and respectability, but that very surrender also signifies a relinquishment of both a desirable and an undesirable superior, rational, manly identity.
And yet, the speaker’s distance from his internalized gender code of restraint and rationality also produces a self-conscious awareness of his own. He is once again caught between opposing discourses: the desire to submerge in an unmediated, primitive sexual spontaneity on the one hand, and on the other, the inherited, imperially structured ideal of English manly restraint. Hence, it is the ability to identify with both jazz and youth, and his conscious awareness of his own inherited ideal of restraint, that produces the honesty and devastating irony of the last two lines of the poem. Rather than wallow in the smug complacency of his superior awareness and unwillingness to be drawn into the callow, youthful world of spontaneity, he locates himself among the deluded too. This particular irony marks the transition of the Englishman, his attempted arbitration of the old and new gender scripts.
The excruciating self-awareness exhibited by the poetic personae in the last two lines of the poem, and indeed all the poems analyzed thus far, is an effect of the historical distance between the personae as Englishmen in the postwar era who engage with the sociocultural alterations of post-imperial England, and established ideals of English manly behavior that shape and haunt their existence. This ever-present ironic distance, which Larkin’s work represents, is a self-aware mode of functioning within a gender ideology that he knows has outlasted its usefulness, but from which he is nevertheless unable to separate himself. To put it another way, detachment and irony are not voluntary traits—neither is the liminal position of the insider/outsider—but Larkin’s poetics makes this threshold, ironic position a way of being, as it were. The involuntary ironic and self-conscious position explains not only the thwarted eroticism, which is, more often than not, rationalized away in poems such as “Reasons for Attendance,” but also the proto-queer critique of heteronormative assumptions in a poem such as “Dockery and Son.” Liminality allows him the painful insight of seeing as well as living the ambivalence, of not being able to act but able to honestly gauge his own hesitant responses. An unambivalent “I” can “emerge” in “uncontradicting solitude”; social interaction only results in the quicksand of spiraling irony and self-consciousness. The poetic personae in “Reasons for Attendance,” “Dockery and Son,” “The Importance of Elsewhere,” “Best Society,” and any number of Larkin’s poems cannot be other than they are: detached, uncertain, ironically self-conscious, and solitary. They are historically fated to be so; they are the Englishmen in transition from the imperial to the post-imperial.
The historically inflected ironic style of the post-gentleman (or the postwar middle-class Englishman), the pervasive self-consciousness and sustained use of the ordinary and the prosaic—what one can call Larkinesque poetics—are effects of Philip Larkin’s engagement with the code of gentlemanliness. As I have argued, Englishness, the nation, and the changing styles of masculinity were linked, and the putative representativeness of Larkin’s work was part of a larger cultural obsession with representations of masculinity and values of Englishness in postwar England. The Angry Young Man and the Movement are literary testaments to the national focus on the intertwined relationship between masculinity and Englishness. Indeed, in Robert Conquest’s manifesto to the anthology introducing the Movement poets, he proclaims a return to a “robust” poetry, “empirical in its attitude” (xiv–xv) to counter the metaphorical and linguistic excesses of the poets of the forties and before, which were coded feminine.23
Anthony Easthope, in his study of Englishness, argues that Philip Larkin, “riding on the back of the Movement,” symbolized the return of the empirical observer in English poetry. Analyzing “The Whitsun Weddings,” he argues that “the speaker of the poem is presented as detached, critical, not self-deceived, confident of submitting the world to a controlling gaze; in other words, very much the poised, individualized, empiricist subject whose voice has been represented as speaking English poetry for over two centuries” (185). The traits that Easthope lists are the traits that I have thus far argued as being specific to the Englishman—remarkably similar, in fact, to the ideals of Englishness and English manliness as laid out by the Clarendon Commission. And while I agree with the idea that Larkin is clearly committed to empirical observation and heavily invested in material life, I disagree with Easthope when he argues that the speaker is “confident of submitting the world to his controlling gaze.” The male speaker in most Larkin poems begins with the encoded detached superiority of the middle-class Englishman who can see and interpret more clearly than others. However, that confidence increasingly falters, and by the end of the poem, the detached gaze has turned inward to include the speaker/observer himself within its own dispassionate gaze, producing an instability that is at odds with the original confidence.24
For instance, in the poem immediately following “The Whitsun Weddings,” “Self’s the Man,” the speaker begins with the confident assertion that Arnold is less selfish than he because of Arnold’s entry into married domesticity, but he progresses toward a realization that he is not more selfish than Arnold. He simply has different goals and knows better what he “could stand” “without them sending the van.” The last line undercuts the whole confident, detached superiority of the speaker with the qualification “Or I suppose I can” (96). The solitary Englishman has turned his dispassionately critical gaze upon himself and ironically observed that he “supposes” he knows better—the irony has rearranged the meaning of the entire poem. He is no better than Arnold, as the only thing that set them apart was his ability to see and know. However, the self-distancing irony has revealed that he is possibly as deluded as Arnold. Clearly, the persona reveals the pitfalls of detached empiricism when turned in on oneself; it is almost as if he is caught in a vortex of empiricism that cannibalizes and destabilizes itself.
One of Larkin’s most famous poems, “Mr. Bleaney,” represents this vortex of empiricism within which the persona is inextricably caught. A dramatized narrative lyric, in iambic pentameter with a regular rhyme scheme, it consists of two scenes: the first scene concerns a prospective tenant (the speaker) being shown a room in a lodging house, and the second focuses on the persona’s thoughts in the room he has taken. Beginning in media res, the first five stanzas of the poem reveal the speaker’s detachment from, and sense of superiority over, both the landlady and the former tenant, Mr. Bleaney. Observing the room with a clinical eye, and listening to the landlady’s prattle, he notices the “thin and frayed” flowered curtains that don’t quite reach the sill, “the tussocky and littered” strip of building land, and the bare and spartan room itself (81). The tone, though factual, catalogs images of neglect and despair. The landlady, with her insistent informational chatter about Mr. Bleaney, becomes a figure of ironic humor, as does Mr. Bleaney, who haunts the poem.
The speaker later ruminates on the narrowness of Mr. Bleaney’s monotonous life, with his regularized “plugging at the four aways,” the summer trip to the Frinton folk, and his diligent work on the landlady’s “bit of garden.” Mr. Bleaney’s pathetic, or alternately heroic, attempt to garden becomes a poignant metaphor, as it describes not only Mr. Bleaney’s life but post-imperial English life as well, represented here by the “jabbering radio,” the “fusty bed,” and the littered building land: a tortuous adaptation to a shrunken, cold life that was lived on a much grander scale (81). The location of this poem within The Whitsun Weddings only reinforces this vision of England: sandwiched between the opening poem “Here,” with its yearning for “an unfenced existence,” and “Nothing to Be Said,” where “life is slow dying,” English life is cold, empty, and filled with a melancholic yearning—simultaneously heroic and resigned (79–82).
The speaker most emphatically does not see any common ground between himself and Mr. Bleaney. The superiority and difference emerge and solidify in the cataloging of Mr. Bleaney’s habits. The speaker has books, unlike Mr. Bleaney, as the room has no shelves for books, nor hooks for bags. He has to stuff his ears with cotton to drown out the radio that Mr. Bleaney, obviously less sophisticated than the speaker himself, encouraged the landlady to buy. This comfortable superiority is rather abruptly undercut by the last two verses of the poem, signaled by the “But if” that marks the beginning of introspection and self-doubt: “But if he stood and watched the frigid wind/Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed/Telling himself that this was home, and grinned” (81). The speaker, initially cocooned by his intelligence, realizes through the act of occupying the same space as Mr. Bleaney that his solitariness is not unique.
Through the fact of the shared bedsit, the speaker’s detached superiority devolves into a contemplative self-consciousness. The duality collapses, and Mr. Bleaney, who was a comic, pathetic figure, almost coalesces into the speaker. The speaker, who held himself aloof with the use of the collective pronoun “we,” includes himself in his own detached observation. He too must “measure” his “nature” on the basis of how he lives, and in living in the same “hired box” that Mr. Bleaney did, his life is remarkably like Mr. Bleaney’s: “That how we live measures our own nature,/And at his age having no more to show/Than one hired box should make him pretty sure” (81). The internal catalexis in the line, between “our own” and “nature,” reveals a quintessentially Larkinesque hesitation as the speaker’s attempts to come to terms with the gradual revelation of his own frailty. On his realization of this shared trajectory of loneliness, his ability to judge and ironize the observed world melts into doubt and self-ironization. His inability to adjudicate on either his or Mr. Bleaney’s life with the final “I don’t know” reveals the ultimate abdication of detached judgment: from his initial position of ironic, indifferent observation, the speaker’s self-distancing irony leads to silence and ambiguity. As in “Self’s the Man,” the speaker’s inclusion of himself within his own ironic gaze reorganizes the poem: he is Mr. Bleaney.
Hence, while Larkin’s adherence to empiricism would imply a resurrection of the confident and sensible Englishman, what in fact happens is that the empiricism and common sense of the Englishman, in the absence of the functional hierarchical tropes—or rather in the absence of defined class and gender boundaries—and taken to its logical end, reveals the fragmentation of the inherited English manly code as it folds up against a new and altered Britain. The absence of “elsewhere” inevitably alters the nature of the controlled and controlling gaze, as the universalized rhetoric of imperial Englishness that incorporated and controlled other cultures is replaced by a national inward turn. The Englishman as a consequence of the domestic turn is shown as being caught within his own amplified and inverted empiricism—an effect of a specifically gendered inheritance.
Indeed, the Englishmen in Larkin’s poems are immersed in a pervasive awareness of the inherited Orwellian mask of English manliness even as they face the new structures and demands of the postwar world. The Englishman in “The Importance of Elsewhere” comes to terms with a new national and gender identity in the absence of the “elsewhere” that structured imperial English manliness; the speaker in “Dockery and Son” confronts the “warp tight-shut” doors of a threatening and all-consuming heteronormativity in a domesticated postwar England that offers no alternative space for masculine assertion; and the detached Englishman in “Reasons for Attendance” engages with his own paralyzing manly restraint even as he longs for the sexual liberation offered by the modernity of jazz. While Larkin’s Englishmen represent the tortuous shifting of inherited discursive expressions of manliness into newer stylizations suitable to a quotidian and insular Englishness, the post-gentlemen in the novels of Kingsley Amis, John Wain, and Ian Fleming endeavor to forge a more aggressive, virile, self-seeking professional masculinity in an era of feminism, domesticity, decolonization, and sexual liberation. Indeed, Charles Lumley, as he embarks on a quest to forge an English postwar masculinity, finds that he nevertheless exists in a tight dialectical relationship with the gentlemanliness that he attempts to reject.