Six Poets
Six Poets
also by Alan Bennett
PLAYS ONE
(Forty Years On, Getting On, Habeas Corpus, Enjoy)
PLAYS TWO
(Kafka’s Dick, The Insurance Man, The Old Country, An Englishman Abroad, A Question of Attribution)
THE LADY IN THE VAN
OFFICE SUITE
THE MADNESS OF GEORGE III
THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS
THE HISTORY BOYS
THE HABIT OF ART
PEOPLE
HYMN and COCKTAIL STICKS
television plays
ME, I’M AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF
(A Day Out, Sunset Across the Bay, A Visit from Miss Prothero, Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Green Forms, The Old Crowd, Afternoon Off)
ROLLING HOME
(One Fine Day, All Day on the Sands, Our Winnie, Rolling Home, Marks, Say Something Happened, Intensive Care)
TALKING HEADS
screenplays
A PRIVATE FUNCTION
(The Old Crowd, A Private Function, Prick Up Your Ears, 102 Boulevard Haussmann, The Madness of King George)
THE HISTORY BOYS: THE FILM
autobiography
THE LADY IN THE VAN
WRITING HOME
UNTOLD STORIES
A LIFE LIKE OTHER PEOPLE’S
fiction
THREE STORIES
(The Laying on of Hands, The Clothes They Stood Up In, Father! Father! Burning Bright)
THE UNCOMMON READER
SMUT: TWO UNSEEMLY STORIES
Six Poets
Hardy to Larkin
An anthology by
ALAN BENNETT
First published in 1990 as Poetry in Motion by Channel 4 Television, 60 Charlotte Street, London, WIP 2AX. This edition first published in Great Britain in 2014 by Faber & Faber Ltd and Profile Books Ltd. First published in the United States in 2015 by Yale University Press.
Editorial material © Alan Bennett, 1990, 2014. Poems © the Estates of the individual authors. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
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Contents
Introduction
Thomas Hardy
A. E. Housman
John Betjeman
W. H. Auden
Louis MacNeice
Philip Larkin
Index of Titles and First Lines
Acknowledgements
Introduction
When I was young, I used to feel that literature was a club of which I would never be a proper member as a reader, let alone a writer. It wasn’t that I didn’t read books, or even the ‘right’ books, but I always felt that the ones I read couldn’t be literature if only because I had read them. It was the books I couldn’t get into (and these included most poetry) that constituted literature – or, rather, Literature.
After a lifetime, these feelings of impotence and exclusion are still fresh in my mind. I have only to hear someone extolling the charms of Byron, say, or Coleridge, neither of whom I’ve ever managed to read, to be reminded of how baffled one can feel in the face of books.
Mindful of this, when I put together Poetry in Motion, the Channel 4 series from which this book derives, I didn’t make any bones about admitting what I didn’t understand or sympathise with. I’m all at sea with much of Auden, for instance, but feel less of a fool saying so because that kind of plain speaking is a refreshing feature of Auden’s own literary criticism. Auden is an exception, though, because the poets and poems I chose are all in differing degrees accessible. This seemed to me essential. Obviously, any poem repays study, but if it is only to be heard once and without detailed exposition, then a poem should be understandable at first hearing.
‘Accessible’ is another way of saying ‘popular’, and at least three of these poets – Housman, Betjeman and Larkin – are popular poets, much read and often quoted. The more a poet is read, the less he is written about. Criticism prefers an enigma, so Auden’s opaque and highly allusive verse has received much more critical attention than that of Betjeman or Housman, though since the enigma of Housman lies more in his life than in his art, he has had more than his share of biography.
That clarity should be penalised by critical neglect is perhaps unfair, though it’s not every writer who welcomes critical attention. ‘I am more or less happy when being praised,’ wrote the politician Arthur Balfour, ‘not very comfortable when being abused, but I have moments of uneasiness when being explained.’ While Balfour was not a poet, few writers enjoy being grilled about their text, hoping that they’ve made themselves clear, and if they haven’t, that’s a way of saying something, too. Posthumous commentary they can’t do much about, but famished for subjects, some critics don’t wait for death before hacking a chunk off their chosen prey and retiring to the academic undergrowth to chew it over. Auden suffered this fate, though airily. Larkin escaped it, perhaps because he had made his distaste so plain. In his poem ‘Posterity’, for instance, he imagines Jake Balokowsky, his fictional biographer, musing over the character of his subject: ‘“What’s he like? … One of those old-type natural fouled-up guys.”’ But if, while he lived, Larkin kept the commentators at bay, his death in 1985 gave criticism the green light, and the hearse was followed by a volume of critical essays, many of them couched in terms that would have made the poet groan.
It was Larkin, though, who said that a crude difference between novels and poetry is that novels are about other people and poetry is about yourself. This isn’t beyond dispute – Hardy, for instance, discouraged the reading of his poems as personal documents – but there is enough truth in it to justify an approach to these six poets through their lives. Justify it in Britain, that is – the current taste for biography (and gossip) about literary figures being a peculiarity of the English-speaking. It mystifies the Germans and the French, and it irritates authors, too. Hardy put together an official version of his life, which he fathered on the second Mrs Hardy, hoping that it would put paid to further revelations. Auden insisted (while enjoying biography himself) that his own biography should not be written – a useless embargo as since his death there have been any number – and while Larkin did not expressly forbid a biography, the bonfires burned in his garden just as they had in Hardy’s.
A writer’s motives in wanting an authorised version (or no version at all) of his or her life vary. Everybody has something to hide (even if it’s only that they have nothing to hide), but writers in particular feel that, since they have erected a monument in the shape of their work, a second (or a third or a fourth) tombstone is neither necessary nor desirable. They could point to Kafka, who has practically got a cemetery to himself.
Readers for their part tend to imagine that the poem is just what the poet has seen fit to put in the shop window and that there’s something tastier under the counter, which it is the job of the biographer to sniff out. Whether this turns out to be the case or not, writers ought to realise that any attempt to
supervise their posthumous reputation is futile (though a surviving spouse tethered to the grave works wonders in scaring off trespassers). And some knowledge of a poet’s life must add to the pleasure and understanding of his or her poetry. What the poet is afraid of is that the life will somehow invalidate the art (cries of ‘He’s insincere!’, ‘She’s inconsistent!’). But you can enjoy literary biography while at the same time recognising that the literary works, once written, have an independent existence, regardless of the circumstances in which they were produced. Hardy’s poems lyrically recalling Emma, his first wife, are not diminished as poems because of the truth (or the other truth) that the poet had treated Emma pretty shabbily. Though one could excuse the estate agent who, having read Auden’s ‘In Praise of Limestone’, sends the poet a prospectus of desirable residences set amid the chuckling springs of rural Westmorland, only to be told that what the perfidious bastard really prefers is a shack on the parched island of Ischia.
Certain authors have fan clubs: Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, Lewis Carroll and, more recently, Anthony Powell. Their work gets fenced off by enthusiasts, and the casual reader may feel the need of credentials to read them. Poets don’t have fans in quite this way, though in the days of ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ Housman was a telltale volume to have on the bookshelf, along with Forrest Reid, say, or Denton Welch. And Betjeman began as a somewhat eccentric taste, his admirers a bit of a club, before the poetry made a space for itself and was taken up by the nation.
One link between these six poets is that all of them (with the possible exception of Hardy) admired Hardy. Auden explains why:
My first Master was Thomas Hardy, and I think I was very lucky in my choice. He was a good poet, perhaps a great one, but not too good. Much as I loved him, even I could see his diction was often clumsy and forced and that a lot of his poems were plain bad. This gave me hope where a flawless poet might have made me despair.
Auden in his turn was admired by Larkin and MacNeice, though they were just two among the many poets he influenced. Auden was a good poet and perhaps a great one, though far from flawless, but he is less help to someone starting out than Hardy. Auden’s tone of voice is distinctive and easy to imitate, and even when his poems are bad, they are couched in his peculiar imagery, and that is infectious, too. Half the job of learning to write is getting to know the sound of your own voice, and Auden is no help here at all, just spawning imitators.
Auden’s intellect was formidable and showy, and quite off-putting. As an undergraduate at Oxford in 1956, I happened to hear his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry. I say ‘happened to hear’ because I didn’t honestly have much interest in his poetry, knowing only that this was a fabled figure and wanting to take a look. Had I any ambitions to write at that time, the lecture would have been enough to put me off. Auden listed all the interests and accomplishments that poets and critics should properly have – a dream of Eden, an ideal landscape, favourite books, even, God help us, a passion for Icelandic sagas. If writing means passing this kind of kit inspection, I thought, one might as well forget it.
MacNeice would probably have been more encouraging. He’s the odd man out among these six poets. Never well known enough to be other than a private face, MacNeice did not have to deal with the consequences of reputation, did not have to imitate himself, for instance, or sidestep his fame as his better-known colleagues had to learn to do. It might have happened, but because he died relatively young, he was denied his proper place. I didn’t know his poetry and to discover it was one of the pleasures of putting together this anthology.
I would like to acknowledge the help of Channel 4, for which the original Poetry in Motion programmes were made. They were conceived and filmed by Tony Cash, whom I have known practically all my life, even briefly sharing a desk with him in the sixth form at Leeds Modern School in the 1950s. He has been a constant encouragement, as has my editor Dinah Wood.
Six Poets
Thomas Hardy
1840–1928
Despite humble origins – his mother was a cook, his father a fiddle-playing stonemason – Thomas Hardy achieved such fame that he was awarded the Order of Merit and his ashes now lie in Westminster Abbey. Most of his life was spent in Dorset, the county of his birth. Aged sixteen he trained then practised as an architect. Success came in 1880 with the novel The Trumpet-Major: A Tale, published in instalments, as were Tess of the D’Urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge and his last major work of fiction, Jude the Obscure, serialised in 1894–5. From 1898 until his death, he committed himself to poetry, finding inspiration in ancient and medieval history as well as the Napoleonic Wars: he even interviewed veterans of the Napoleonic campaigns and visited the battlefield of Waterloo. The last thirty years were largely spent at Max Gate, a house he himself designed near Dorchester. He lived there with his first wife, Emma Gifford, and, after she died in 1912, with his second wife, Florence Dugdale, a school-teacher and writer of children’s stories. The pall bearers at his funeral included A. E. Housman, Rudyard Kipling and George Bernard Shaw. Spared cremation, his heart was buried in Emma’s grave in the churchyard at Stinsford in Dorset, within walking distance of his birthplace.
Beeny Cliff
March 1870–March 1913
I
O the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea,
And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free –
The woman whom I loved so, and who loyally loved me.
II
The pale mews plained below us, and the waves seemed far away
In a nether sky, engrossed in saying their ceaseless babbling say,
As we laughed light-heartedly aloft on that clear-sunned March day.
III
A little cloud then cloaked us, and there flew an irised rain,
And the Atlantic dyed its levels with a dull misfeatured stain,
And then the sun burst out again, and purples prinked the main.
IV
– Still in all its chasmal beauty bulks old Beeny to the sky,
And shall she and I not go there once again now March is nigh,
And the sweet things said in that March say anew there by and by?
V
What if still in chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore,
The woman now is – elsewhere – whom the ambling pony bore,
And nor knows nor cares for Beeny, and will laugh there nevermore.
Hardy was seventy-two when he wrote that poem, and he was remembering a visit to Cornwall some forty years earlier, when he met Emma Gifford, whom he later married. She had died a few months before he wrote ‘Beeny Cliff’, which was part of a flood of verse released by her death. It wasn’t so much grief as remorse: Hardy and his wife hadn’t got on. She was vague, fey and, some people said, mad. It’s a thankless role, being an artist’s wife. Writers want a wife, but they also want a disciple, someone who can do the buttering-up as well as the washing-up. Emma Hardy wasn’t really suited to either because she had literary ambitions of her own, so Hardy had to look elsewhere for appreciation.
He found it in various grand ladies, enamoured of literature and untrammelled by Emma’s domestic duties. One of them was his secretary Florence Dugdale, who after a decent interval became the second Mrs Hardy. This wasn’t a great success either, because Hardy spent most of this marriage, as can be seen in the poem, recalling the supposed delights of his first. So the first Mrs Hardy had the last laugh. It’s the kind of story Hardy could have written – life, as so often, imitating art.
The second Mrs Hardy might have known what was coming from the manner of Hardy’s proposal. He had taken her to the churchyard to show her the grave of Wife No. l, and, pointing to another vacant plot, he said, ‘That’s for you.’ By this, she took it that he was proposing. Before they’re anything else, if they’re any good at all, most writers are absurd.
Graves, though, had a fascination for Hardy. This is a poem about a yew t
ree in a churchyard:
Transformations
Portion of this yew
Is a man my grandsire knew,
Bosomed here at its foot:
This branch may be his wife,
A ruddy human life
Now turned to a green shoot.
These grasses must be made
Of her who often prayed,
Last century, for repose;
And the fair girl long ago
Whom I often tried to know
May be entering this rose.
So, they are not underground,
But as nerves and veins abound
In the growths of upper air,
And they feel the sun and rain,
And the energy again
That made them what they were!
Hardy was at home in churches. He knew the morning and evening services by heart, and though he had lost his faith as a young man, he continued to go to church and indeed designed one at Turnworth near his home at Max Gate in Dorset. He sometimes used to cycle there to read the lesson at morning service. It was a ride of twenty-odd miles, and as Hardy stood at the lectern, the congregation would see his bald head steaming gently.
In Church
‘And now to God the Father,’ he ends,
And his voice thrills up to the topmost tiles:
Each listener chokes as he bows and bends,
And emotion pervades the crowded aisles.
Then the preacher glides to the vestry-door,
And shuts it, and thinks he is seen no more.
The door swings softly ajar meanwhile,
And a pupil of his in the Bible class,
Who adores him as one without gloss or guile,
Sees her idol stand with a satisfied smile