Philip Larkin (1922–1985)

Reading through Larkin's Collected Works it seems clear that he struggled with poetry - that there was poetry inside him is undoubted - in its creation, in what he wanted it to be and what he was lauded for. There are two basic types of Larkin poetry: 1. the wry, internalised observations of the world; and 2. more formal poetry about nature and abstracted visions of women. The first are the poems that everyone knows, that play around with form or abandon it altogether, and show an almost unique voice. The second are all the rest, that are generally pretty boring, if worthy. Without the first he would only ever have been a minor poet. But it feels like the second type are the ones he wanted to do, as his Collected Works is full of them. Perhaps the first only came out in times of 'fuck this poetry lark' stress? I don;t know, but there are some amazing works here in amongst the lesser pieces.… (mer)

The poet Philip Larkin was the jazz critic of the Daily Telegraph from 1961 to 1971. He was, as he acknowledges in the entertaining and contentious introduction to this collected edition of his record reviews, in many ways exactly the wrong man for the job. Larkin fell in love with jazz as a schoolboy in the interwar years. His heroes were Sidney Bechet, Bix Beiderbecke and Louis Armstrong. But he took up his post in the era of Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. It wasn’t just that Larkin didn’t like what these musicians did, he didn’t even recognise it as jazz. In fact, it was the antithesis of jazz as he understood it. In the jazz of the twenties and thirties Larkin found a life-affirming music of melody and rhythm that lifted his spirits and set his feet tapping. From bebop onwards it increasingly entered his ears as ‘broken glass’ rather than ‘honey’ and when it was wasn’t repelling him with atonal dissonance, it was boring him to death with cerebral aridity. For Larkin’s generation jazz had the rebellious and slightly illicit appeal that rock did for my own: something teenagers discovered for themselves and which parents and teachers disapproved of. By the early sixties, however, it was transforming itself from popular entertainment to art music. Jazz was entering the academy and becoming respectable. The music Larkin loved had gone wrong, worse than that abandoned him, and he felt the loss with the intensity of a personal betrayal.

You don’t have to be a jazz buff to understand what he was going through. Fans of almost every genre of music eventually experience that disorientating moment when it is not so sweet as it was before. For classical fans it might have been when everything went atonal in the twentieth century. The writer Nik Cohn, in his classic book Awapbobaloobop Alopbamboom, spoke for many fans of fifties rock ‘n’ roll who believed that the increasing sophistication of sixties pop, led by the Beatles, was a betrayal of the essential primal spirit of the music. It’s a recurring story: the mode of the music changes and the traditionalist is left stranded in the museum of his or her record collection.

Larkin’s introductory essay is an attack not just on modern jazz but the entire modernist tradition in art, neatly summarised for him by the alliterative trio of Parker, Picasso and Pound. Modernism, for Larkin, relied on mystification and outrage and was the triumph of technique over feeling. It was deliberately difficult, often ugly, and overly intellectualised; art to be endured rather than enjoyed. Along with it came a dubious intermediate class of professorial high priests intent on explicating aesthetic mysteries to a supposedly benighted public (‘this music only sounds terrible, buy my book on contemporary music and all will be explained’). Larkin thought you should trust your own ears, eyes and judgment. If something sounded or looked like worthless garbage then it probably was and the obliging intervention of an expert surplus to requirements. For Larkin art was less to do with virtuosic display, or formal innovation, than meaningful communication between artist and audience about shared experience. Above all, he thought it should give pleasure: ‘the only reason for praising a work is that it pleases, and the way [for a critic] to develop his critical sense is to be more acutely aware of whether he is being pleased or not’.

He does have a tendency to get carried away though. He writes about modernist artists wading ‘deeper and deeper into violence and obscenity’. This is clearly hysterical and even, some might think, the authentic voice of the philistine alarmed at where all this artistic experimentation might lead. Conversely, I think of James Joyce spending seventeen years of his life writing an incomprehensible novel called Finnegans Wake, the ne plus ultra of modernism. Joyce said modestly: ‘the demand I make of my reader is that he should devote his entire life to reading my works’. Has anyone ever curled up of an evening with Finnegans Wake? Or described it as a good read? If it isn’t a good read, why is it worth reading? Larkin’s introduction is best understood as a manifesto or credo. As such things tend to be it’s overstated and full of simplifications, but he undeniably had a case nonetheless.

Reading the pieces in All What Jazz I sometimes felt I was eavesdropping on an arcane ecclesiastical argument rendered irrelevant by the passage of time. These reviews were written in the 1960s but carry the whiff of ancient history about them. Traditional? Modern? Who cares? We’re all post-modernists now, quite capable of listening to Bechet and Coltrane, enjoying both and recognising them as brilliant practitioners of a long and evolving tradition. Even the term ‘modern jazz’, which our man in Hull gets so worked up about and was the cause of such antagonism between trendy modernists and ‘mouldy figs’ like Larkin, now seems laughably anachronistic. Still, Larkin is touching on fundamental and fascinating questions about the nature and purpose of art.

I disagree with most of what Larkin says about ‘modern jazz’ but, unless you’re only happy when in an echo chamber lined with mirrors, you don’t have to agree with a critic to find what they say compelling. Larkin came to bury the modernists not to praise them, even so he carried out his doomed assassination attempt with considerable wit and style. His arguments are deeply felt and his prose has the same combination of complex thought and lucid expression found in his poetry. He is often very funny, particularly when in attack mode-: ‘I freely confess that there have been times recently when almost anything - the shape of a patch on the ceiling, a recipe for rhubarb jam read upside down in the paper - has seemed to me more interesting than the passionless creep of a Miles Davis trumpet solo’.

Luckily, there was still plenty of jazz around that was to Larkin’s taste (and there was no shortage of reissues, previously unreleased recordings and boxed sets even back then). When writing about the music he loved you can see Larkin wasn’t joking when he said he could live a week without poetry, but not a day without jazz. His deep appreciation, knowledge and understanding of the music comes through loud and clear. His taste was also more eclectic than is usually acknowledged (than he possibly acknowledged to himself). I wasn’t surprised to find him reduced to tears by an Armstrong track, but he also loved blues (on reflection this isn’t so surprising; Larkin’s poems are a sort of existential blues of the English suburbs), and praises Keith Jarrett, Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin and Bob Dylan (Highway 61 Revisited didn’t land in Larkin’s jazz bag by mistake; he placed it there out of genuine open-minded musical curiosity, and he liked what he heard). The reviews, while not short on splenetic exasperation, are far more nuanced than the gleeful dogmatism of the introduction leads one to expect. He even likes the odd Miles Davis album, though he still doesn’t think it’s jazz.

Larkin said that his one regret about this book is that it left some people thinking he hated jazz. They can’t have been reading very carefully is all I can say to that. Anyone who doubts how much jazz meant to Larkin, and the profoundly liberating effect it had on him, should read his love poem - that’s exactly what it is and no mistake - For Sidney Bechet. I’ll leave you with the magnificent closing lines-:

On me your voice falls as they say love should,
Like an enormous yes. My Crescent City
Is where your speech alone is understood,

And greeted as the natural noise of good,
Scattering long-haired grief and scored pity.… (mer)