The Letters of T S Eliot: Volume 8 by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden

The latest collection of T S Eliot’s letters is wonderfully insightful — but is it a little too exhaustive?

DAVID SEXTON
Thursday 17 January 2019 13:20

This immense edition of the correspondence of the greatest poet of his time is now entering its second decade. Covering just two years, this volume amounts to 1,100 pages, bringing the total so far published to a little over 7,600 pages, with 27 years of Eliot’s life still to go. Yet it is not even complete. The indefatigable, exemplary editor, John Haffenden, has posted the letters he chose not to include in each volume on a website, tseliot.com, and for these two years alone there are hundreds of them, perhaps even more than he has actually printed — eight, for example, from January 1, 1936 alone. 

Many of  the printed letters still seem at first of modest interest only: processing business for Faber & Faber, where he was an “ordinary director”; for the magazine he edited, The Criterion; and for his own career as a writer and, increasingly, a public man. 

He commissions books and articles, he assesses submissions. He responds to invitations and suggestions, always with courtesy, even when refusing. He supplies references and letters of introduction, he offers advice. He constantly apologises for delays in replying and he thanks people for their contributions, their comments, their hospitality, friendship and support.

All this can make repetitious reading now, essential though it may have been then to the literary culture he was seeking to nurture. Yet taken together these letters are little less than a lesson in conduct, a kind of tireless poise, a demonstration of grace under pressure. 

They are invariably, as Haffenden notes in his preface, “humane and engaging, constructive and inventive, and frequently jokey” — and sometimes they are more than that: revealing, touching and wise. They are also, like all good letters, wonderfully different in tone when writing to different friends and acquaintances. 

In these years, Eliot’s first stage play, Murder in the Cathedral, was being produced, and he was working on The Family Reunion. 

And it was during this time that his wife, Vivien Haigh-Wood Eliot, was finally committed to a psychiatric asylum, Northumberland House in Finsbury Park, close to Manor House Tube, after being found wandering in the streets in the early hours and taken to a police station. 

Haffenden includes enough of Vivien’s own letters, to her brother, to her bank, to Faber, and so forth, to make it clear quite how deranged she had become by this time, believing she was “OSTENTATIOUSLY FOLLOWED”, for example, and pretending to be other people acting on her behalf. 

"Taken together these letters are little less than a lesson in conduct, a demonstration of grace under pressure."

David Sexton

Eliot’s own letters dealing with her committal and support are faultlessly correct and responsible. Only once or twice in these years does he reveal his agony. In July 1936 he briefly mentions to Dorothy Pound: “I am rather shaky at the moment because I ran into my late wife in Wigmore Street an hour ago, and had to take to my heels: only people who have been ‘wanted’ know the sort of life I lead.” 

Only to his brother Henry does he speak directly of the “horrors” of his private life. There’s a revealing  letter, though, in response to Geoffrey Faber’s misgivings about the sex in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, which the company was publishing. Faber had naively confessed: “My own private struggle all my life has been to prevent sex meaning too much.” Eliot not only sees no sense in this, his view is quite the opposite, that trying to “keep sex in its place” is itself a symptom of instability.

“Between any two people (and the more intimate their relations the more important this becomes) there is always an unresolvable element of hostility,” he says. “It is I think, a coming to terms between the elements of attraction and repulsion that constitutes permanent affection…” 

To Bonamy Dobrée he writes eloquently about his understanding of St John of the Cross’s doctrine that in order to arrive at the love of God one must divest oneself of the love of created beings. “I don’t think that ordinary human affections are capable of leading us to the love of God, but rather that the love of God is capable of informing, intensifying and elevating our human affections, which otherwise may have little to distinguish them from the ‘natural’ affections of animals,” he explains. 

These are themes deep in his work — but there are also letters here about pyjamas, sherry and opening a cheese restaurant. There’s a salad recipe and a mock Abdication diary; a take-off of Henry James and spoof readers’ reports on his own verses; a denunciation of the English Verse Speaking Association and an inspiring letter of advice to the young poet George Barker, insisting “it is only necessary poems that matter” and “nothing is worth doing twice”. 

Just too many letters, though? Eliot, who did not want a biography or any letters printed “of any intimacy to anybody”, might have thought so. To one contributor he writes: “I quite agree that there are too many books, and that most books are too long. The tendency for books to say what they have to say at much greater length than necessary no doubt has something to do with the deterioration of the reading public into mere ruminants, who can only nourish themselves by a great deal of grass and reject more concentrated food.” Ha! Now, Faber, just where is that readers’ edition of Eliot’s uncollected prose?  

The Letters of T S Eliot: Volume 8: 1936-1938 edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (Faber, £50)

EVENING STANDARD

David Yezzi / Four poems by Giosuè Carducci

Giosuè Carducci

Four poems by Giosuè Carducci

by David Yezzi

April 2018

Giosuè Carducci (1835–1907) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1906. He was the first Italian to have done so. Since then, he has fallen into obscurity, despite his onetime eminence as something of a national poet, a trumpeter of Italian unification. Traces of him remain: there is a handsome plaque to him in the church of Santa Croce in Florence (where his family was from) alongside memorials to Dante, Galileo, Machiavelli, and Rossini. In Bologna, where he became a professor in 1860, his house has been turned into a museum for history buffs. But he has lost the youth market: now forced to study him in school, students develop a distaste for his poems bordering on contempt, while the professoriate has vastly preferred the poetry of Carducci’s contemporary Giovanni Pascoli, whose work provides a bridge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Carducci, with his dated syntax and arcane allusions, is firmly rooted in the late 1800s: he does not sound the way Italians talk today, and his passion for the classical past makes him seem even more remote. In his numerous poems on Garibaldi and the Risorgimento, he comes off more as an artifact than as a living voice.

But at one time he was the most famous poet in Italy. He embodied the hope of a generation and sang in classical meters of mythic visions that connected the Italian landscape to its roots in the ancient world. His poetry, criticism, and translations ran to a score of volumes. It was in his late volume, Odi Barbare (1877–1899), that he arrived at a transcendent, death-marked music. To my ear, a kind of Symbolist sonority emerges as the poems counter Romantic impulses with classical poise. In the four poems here, the past and the present overlap, occasionally in equal measure. In “Snowfall” (“Nevicata”), ghosts from the speaker’s past beckon to him, and he answers that he will be with them soon. “Kingfisher” (“Cèrilo”) incorporates part of the Greek poet Alcman’s Fragment 26, which describes the fearless flight of a seabird in a storm. The poem begins with an image of the writing desk, with its dreary scribbling, and soars up to the mountaintops and out to sea. Alcman’s fragment stands here at a double remove, translated first from the ancient Greek by Carducci nearly 140 years ago, and then from Carducci’s Italian.

“At the Station in an Autumn Morning” (“Alla stazione in un mattina d’autunno”) is a nightmarish look at modernity, juxtaposed with the delicate sweetness of the beloved, who appears ghostlike in a freezing late-autumn landscape. “Death During a Diphtheria Epidemic” (“Mors nell’epidemia difterica”) achieves an almost Dantean level of horror and pathos in its depiction of how, with their fathers looking on, children succumb to a deadly outbreak of disease. Death, the diva or goddess, descends as another ghostly presence in the landscape in this sequence of haunted poems. Carducci clearly felt a romantic’s longing for the spring, but he knew that winter was quickly, inexorably approaching.

Snowfall

A light snow falls through an ashy sky.
From the city no sounds rise up, no human cries,

not the grocer’s call or the ruckus of his cart,
no light-hearted song of being young and in love.

From the tower in the piazza, the quinsied hours
moan, sighing as if from a world far off.

Flocks of birds beat against the misted glass:
ghosts of friends returned, peering in, calling to me.

Soon, O my dears, soon—peace, indomitable heart—
I will sift down to silence, in shadow rest.

January 29, 1881

Kingfisher

Not under a steel nib that scratches in nasty furrows
its dull thoughts onto dry white paper;

but under the ripe sun, as breezes gust
through wide-open clearings beside a swift stream,

the heart’s sighs, dwindling into infinity, are born,
the sweet, wistful flower of melody is born.

Here redolent May shines in rose-scented air,
brilliant the hollow eyes, hearts asleep in their chests;

the heart sleeps, but ears are easily roused
by the chromatic cries of La Gioconda.

O Muses’ altar of green, white-capped
above the sea. Alcman leads the chaste choir:

“I want to fly with you, maidens, fly into a dance,
as the kingfisher flies drawn by halcyons:

he flies with halcyons over spindrift waves in a gale,
kingfisher, purple herald of spring.”

Verona, June 8–9, 1883

At the station

in an autumn morning

O the lamps—how they chase
each other lazily there behind the trees,
yawning their light through dripping
branches onto the mud.

Faint, fine, shrill, a nearby
steam engine hisses. A lead sky
and the autumn morning
enwrap us like a great chimera.

Where and to what are they going, these people,
cloaked and silent, hurrying to dark cars—
to what unforeseeable sorrows
or pangs of remote hope?

Even you, rapt Lydia, give
to the conductor your torn ticket,
and to pressing time your beautiful years,
your memories and moments of joy.

Along the black train come
the trainmen hooded in black
like shadows, with dim lanterns
and iron sledges, and the iron

brakes when plied make a long
enervated clang: from the soul’s depths,
an echo of languor makes its sad
reply, like a shudder.

And the doors slammed shut
seem like outrages: a quick jibe
sounds the final farewell:
thundering on heavy panes, the rain.

Already the monster, owning its metallic
soul, fumes, slouches, pants, opens
wide its fiery eyes; defies the heavens,
whistling through the gloom.

The unholy monster goes; with a horrible tug,
beating its wings, it carries away my love.
Ah, the alabaster face and fine veil,
hailing me, disappear in darkness.

O sweet face of pale rose,
o starlit placid eyes, o snow-white
forehead ringed with luxuriant curls
gently bending in a nod of love.

The warm air was throbbing with life;
the summer throbbed when she looked on me,
and the youthful June sun
liked to shower her cheek

with kisses of light, reflected through
auburn hair: like a halo
more brilliant than the sun, my dreams
encircle her soft shape . . .

Beneath the rain, I return through
the haze; and I would lose myself in it.
I stagger like a drunk. I touch myself
to see if I also have become a ghost.

O how the leaves are falling—cold,
incessant, mute, heavy—on my soul.
I know that everywhere in the world,
solitary and eternal, it is November.

Better he who’s lost the sense of life,
better this shadow, this haze:
I want O how I want to lie myself down
in doldrums that will last forever.

June 25, 1875

Death

during a diphtheria epidemic

When the precise diva drops down on our houses,
the far off roar of her flying is heard,

and the shadow of her icy wing, icily advancing,
spreads wide a melancholy silence.

When she comes, men bow their heads,
but the women fall to pining.

Thus the treetops, when July winds gather,
do not sway on the green hills:

the trees stand almost utterly still,
and only the hoarse moan of the creek is heard.

She enters, passes, touches, and without even turning levels
the saplings, delighted by their young branches;

she shears the golden wheat, and strips even hanging grapes,
scoops up the good wives and innocent girls

and tiny children: pink between black wings they reach their arms
to the sun, to their games, and smile.

O sad homes, where before their fathers’ faces,
silent, livid diva, you put out young lives.

Therein, rooms no longer sound with laughter and merrymaking
or with whispers, like birds’ nests in May:

therein, no more the sound of joyful rearing,
nor love’s woes, nor wedding dances:

they grow old therein, the shadowed survivors; to the roar
of your return their ears incline, O goddess.

June 27, 1875

David Yezzi is the Poetry Editor of The New Criterion.  His latest book is Black Sea (Carnegie Mellon).

THE NEW CRITERION

Poem of the week / Ralph Waldo Emerson / The Snow-Storm

Poem of the week: The Snow-Storm by Ralph Waldo Emerson

This time, an American Romantic who deserves to be much better-known

This week's poem, "The Snow-Storm" by the American Transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, aspires not only to rugged grandeur but to irony. Emerson knew the English Romantic poets, and I think quite possibly "The Snow-Storm" is a response to Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight". "Tumultuous privacy of storm" and "the frolic architecture of the snow" carry an almost parodic echo of Coleridge's "secret ministry of frost."

Emerson's poem, for all the sturdy authority of its blank verse, relishes the snow-storm's gothic abandon, its subversive, "savage" disregard for "number or proportion". Nineteenth-century American poets were determined to create a body of literature distinct from that of Europe, and there's a suggestion that the primitive snow-storm could invent shapes at least as interesting as the "slow structures" of deliberate artistry. Conversely, the human architect might, in terms of geological time, amount to no more than a snow-flurry.

The first stanza is stately, smooth-flowing and picturesque, the faintly Biblical touches reminding us that, before rebelling against organised religion, Emerson had been a minister. The snow has an apocalyptic quality in that it blurs the usual life-or-death distinctions. Movement is halted. Boundaries are blotted out – even the boundary between earth and heaven. The scene then shifts to a friendlier indoors, where that unexpected word "radiance" emphasises the vivid contrast with the lightless landscape. Again, a scriptural note is struck, and the old-fashioned fire, or glowing stove, seems to burn with an almost sacred incandescence.

And then, it's as if, in the white space between stanzas, the speaker had ventured outside. The shortened opening line of the second stanza increases the dramatic effect, the immediacy, of the summons, "Come see …" And the subsequent description convinces us there is something worth seeing.

The "fierce artificer", the snow-storm, has carried out an entire building-project, from the quarrying of the tiles to the decorative marble drapes of the "Parian wreaths". It's only when he comes to the end of this extended conceit that Emerson seems to struggle. "Retiring" must be the subject of "leaves" but it's hardly obvious. The qualification, "as he were not", is confusing, to say the least. Clearly, the poet is still talking about the snow-storm. Perhaps he wants to convey that winter is far from over, and the snow's retirement merely apparent, and temporary.

But I still like the poem, and have no objection to a little puzzlement. Emerson's philosophy of self-reliance is partially carried over into his poetic technique. His diction here is mainly down-to-earth, with a dash of medieval ("steed", "maugre"). The syntax, like his treatment of conventional forms and meters, dimly aspires to a more organic shape, although he stops short of real innovation. He recognised it when he saw it, though, and when Walt Whitman sent him a copy of Leaves of Grass in 1855, Emerson wrote back an exalted fan-letter: "I give you joy of your free and brave thought …"

Emerson and Thoreau, though important thinkers and writers, were not great poets, but it's a pity that their work is not better known in Britain. They have as much claim as the Romantics to be the ancestors of today's eco-poets and nature writers. The current obsession with rivers, rain and water among British poets, for instance, surely has a source in Emersonian metaphor.

And it's not only the poets who echo the Transcendentalists. For many people, the natural world has become the focus of morality. We sense our obligation to nature also in terms of an obligation to ourselves to become more "natural". Emerson was prophetic when he said, "Civilised man has invented the coach, but lost the use of his feet" and, less cheerily, "The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilisation."

The Snow-Storm

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,

Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,

Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air

Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven,

And veils the farmhouse at the garden's end.

The steed and traveler stopped, the courier's feet

Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit

Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed

In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

Come see the north wind's masonry

Out of an unseen quarry evermore

Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer

Curves his white bastions with projected roof

Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.

Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work

So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he

For number or proportion. Mockingly,

On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;

A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;

Fills up the farmer's lane from wall to wall,

Maugre the farmer's sighs; and, at the gate,

A tapering turret overtops the work.

And when his hours are numbered, and the world

Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,

Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art

To mimic in slow structure, stone by stone,

Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,

The frolic architecture of the snow.

THE GUARDIAN

Geoffrey Brock / Ovid old

Ovid old

by Geoffrey Brock

As  a pale gauze 

rose over Asia, he awoke 

             surrounded by, not Rome, 

                            but huts, hanging 

like tattered effigies of home 

             from threads of cedar smoke; 

                            Europe was dark. 

The woman by him also woke,

             gently helped him to stand, 

                            wrapped him in fur, 

and led him outside by the hand 

             to see the sun’s great yolk 

                            push up against 

the horizon’s rim. After it broke

             and bled into the bowl 

                            of the Black Sea, 

it rose again, transformed and whole. 

             For minutes, neither spoke. 

                            “Time,” he recited,

“tames the bullock to the yoke.” 

             He laughed, more blithe than bitter, 

                            the way he did 

these days when he could find no fitter 

             punchline to some old joke 

                            than himself. The woman 

knew the laugh if not the joke, 

             the moods if not the meanings 

                            of his strange words, 

uttered aloud, to no one—keenings 

             that once had made him choke 

                            with grief, but that 

evolved, as Daphne’s cries (a cloak 

             of bark abrading her body) 

                            gave way to birdsong 

in her branches. Some things no god 

             or Caesar can revoke.

Philip Larkin

Larkin Out Loud

By Giles Harvey

April 25, 2012

As with so much else—England, foreign countries, children, grownup people, a great deal of literature, and a great deal of life—Philip Larkin didn’t care for poetry readings. Listening to poetry read aloud, complained Larkin, one never knows how far away the ending is; all sense of stanzaic form disappears; and this is to say nothing of all the tiny misunderstandings that chip away at our ability to concentrate, the “theirs” being taken for “there’s.” I don’t much like poetry readings either, and I would add to Larkin’s list of grievances the fact that most people aren’t very good at reading poetry aloud.

The greatest offense is usually simply that of reading a poem as though it were a poem, in a boomingly uniform incantation that obscures nuance and texture. Fortunately, there were few such performances on display on Tuesday night at the Cooper Union’s Great Hall, where the Poetry Society of America had organized a tribute to Philip Larkin, England’s greatest post-Second World War poet, to coincide with the publication of “Complete Poems,” a clear improvement on the earlier editions, which includes each of Larkin’s collections in their original order, along with a section of uncollected and previously unpublished work, and a staggeringly thorough commentary. Like the clientele of a hyper-exclusive café, the evening’s readers—James Fenton, Saskia Hamilton, Mary Karr, Nick Laird, Katha Pollitt, Paul Simon, and Zadie Smith among them—sat in threes around small tables up on stage and took turns approaching the lectern to read a Larkin poem of choice.

Philip Larkin

Deborah Garrison got some laughs for her brilliantly plain and unobtrusive reading of “Poetry of Departures” (“So to hear it said / He walked out on the whole crowd / Leaves me flushed and stirred, / Like Then she undid her dress / Or Take that you bastard”), while Andrew Sullivan’s rendition of “The Whitsun Weddings” was bracingly alive to the poem’s atmosphere of gathering mystery and power.

To mix things up—and Larkin was all for variety (he said he always put a lot of thought into the order of poems in a collection: “I treat them like a music-hall bill: you know, contrast, difference in length, the comic, the Irish tenor, bring on the girls”)—the floor was intermittently ceded to the Queens College Louis Armstrong Ensemble, who played several of Larkin’s favorite Sidney Bechet numbers. (The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik did a fine job with Larkin’s poem to Bechet, where he exclaims, “On me your voice falls as they say love should, / Like an enormous Yes.”)

Many of Larkin’s best poems follow the same structure. First, the poet is arrested by something seemingly mundane—an invitation to a party, the sight of a young couple passing in the street—and begins to turn it over in his mind. As the poem gathers steam, these meditations take on a metaphysical cast and are expressed in an increasingly lavish diction. Then, almost bashfully, Larkin seems to overhear himself and to reject conventional poetic speech and sentiment in favor of a more grounded, clear-eyed vision of the world, one that his experience has verified.

Philip Larkin

“Sad Steps” is probably my favorite Larkin poem, and it is also one of his most characteristic. The poem’s modulations—grogginess (“Groping back to bed after a piss”), quickened thought (“There’s something laughable about this”), a somewhat confected awe (“Lozenge of love!”), self-correction (“No”), and final clarity—were expertly captured by J. D. McClatchy, who spoke the lines as though they were only at that moment occurring to him, and thereby restored to them a welcome freshness and spontaneity:

Groping back to bed after a piss
I part thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.

Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie
Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.
There’s something laughable about this,

The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow
Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart
(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)

High and preposterous and separate—
Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!
O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,

One shivers slightly, looking up there.
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can’t come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.

Zadie Smith’s voice, which is at once musical and strangely affectless, was well suited to “The Old Fools,” with its brutal catalogue of uncomprehending questions. Many of the people in the audience looked to be the wrong side of eighty, and there was an almost unbearable tension in the hall as Smith asked, matter-of-factly,

What do they think has happened, the old fools,
To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose
It’s more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,
And you keep on pissing yourself, and can’t remember
Who called this morning?

What saves the poem—and saved the reading—from seeming merely hectoring is the last line, when Larkin, having taken in the grotesque spectacle of old age, as it were, turns the camera on himself (and by extension, all of us who are not yet old). Smith spoke the last five words unimprovably, with just the right tone of grim anticipation:

Can they never tell
What is dragging them back, and how it will end? Not at night?
Not when the strangers come? Never, throughout
The whole hideous inverted childhood? Well,
We shall find out.

The audience chuckled and gasped simultaneously. There was no question about it: Larkin had come through.

THE NEW YORKER

Philip Larkin

The Importance of Elsewhere: Philip Larkin’s Photographs by Richard Bradford – review

Philip Larkin’s astute pictures make a tantalising companion to his verse

Sean O'Hagan
Sunday 15 November 2015

I

n October 1947, Philip Larkin wrote to his friend Jim Sutton about a recent “act of madness” – he had spent £7 on a camera. The British-made Purma Special had cost him more than a week’s wages, but it was state of the art compared with his previous model, a box camera that had been given to him by his father in 1937, when Larkin was 15.

“I am so far awaiting my first roll of results,” Larkin told Sutton in the same letter. “If they are bad, I shall feel I have been rather a fool.”

The results were in fact good, despite the fact that the Purma was, as Larkin put it, “a ‘fast’ camera, that is, best suited to swift scenes in bright sun” and: “I like poor light the best and I don’t think it will do any good in that line.” It seems somehow apt that Larkin, who once said “deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth”, should be drawn aesthetically to “poor light” – all the better to see some essence of England by, perhaps? Larkin later graduated to the altogether more classic Rolleiflex, on which he made many of his pensive self-portraits. Throughout, his visual style, like his poetic one, tended towards what the literary critic John Bayley called “a glum accuracy about places and emotions”… and people.

The photographs collected chronologically in The Importance of Elsewhere are culled from some 5,000 prints and negatives in the archives of the Hull History Centre. They are not, in the main, groundbreaking. They do, though, trace Larkin’s progress from an amateur enthusiast to a formally astute photographer with a keen eye for composition, whether making portraits of his friends, family, lovers and coterie of literary friends or casting his cold eye over the English countryside. There are moments of peculiar beauty here, mostly to do with his cool observation of English vernacular architecture: an austere Wesleyan chapel in East Yorkshire caught in stark monochrome; tall obelisks casting long shadows in a country graveyard in Oban.

Philip Larkin

The most Larkinesque series, apart from the many studied self-portraits, centres on the names of Yorkshire villages – Laxton, Faxfleet, Kiplin, Yokefleet. The poetry of place names, familiar from his verse, is here rendered in stark black and white, the silhouettes of buildings looming in the background behind these functional, yet lyrical, signs that nestle on well-tended grassy verges.

Of Larkin’s lovers, Ruth Bowman, Monica Jones, Patsy Strang and Maeve Brennan are each given a chapter, but it is Monica who emerges most strongly as a forceful presence in his portraits. Whether staring down the lens while curled up on an armchair, wearing horn-rims, jumper and vertically striped tights, or gazing in profile out of the window of her flat in Leicester in the early 1960s, she seems utterly at ease before Larkin’s camera. In contrast, there is a striking portrait of Maeve Brennan, looking up from a book, melancholy and almost Victorian in a high-necked, long-sleeved dress. It was taken shortly after they had agreed to end their relationship and seems to carry all the weight of that decision in its sombreness.

Philip Larkin

 

A young girl stares suspiciously at Larkin’s camera and you almost see him though her eyes, a nerdish outsider observing

Larkin also photographed the world around him wherever he went: his chum, Kingsley Amis, at Oxford and beyond, portraits of friends who had been conscripted during the second world war, Orange marches in Belfast in the early 50s, shipyard cranes and shopfronts in Hull a few years later. Here and there, the images and the poems seem to chime: a vibrant street scene in Dublin captures a crowd of children and adults watching a passing parade or funeral. Only one young girl stares suspiciously at Larkin’s camera and you can almost see him though her eyes, a nerdish outsider observing. One wonders if the image was echoed in his late poem, Dublinesque, in which he described how “Down stucco sidestreets,/ Where light is pewter/ And afternoon mist/ Brings lights on in shops/ Above race-guides and rosaries,/ A funeral passes”.

A fascinating and tantalising book, then, and one that sheds light on a great poet and tricky human being, who seems to have found, in photography, another altogether less fretful – and perhaps kinder – way of preserving what he experienced.

THE GUARDIAN