Cultural Cohesion by Clive James Page A

writes about jazz, with unfaltering intelligibility, a complete trust in his own ear, and a deep suspicion of any work which draws inspiration from its own technique. In Italy his collected music criticism is an eagerly awaited book, but then in Italy nobody is surprised that a great poet should have written a critical column for so many years of his life. Every educated Italian knows that Montale’s music notices are all of a piece with the marvellous body of literary criticism collected in Auto da Fé and Sulla Poesia , and that his whole critical corpus is the natural complement to his poetry. In Britain the same connection is harder to make, even though Larkin has deservedly attained a comparable position as a national poet. In Britain the simultaneous pursuit of poetry and regular critical journalism is regarded as versatility at best. The essential unity of Larkin’s various activities is not much remarked.
    But if we do not remark it we miss half of his secret. While maintaining an exalted idea of the art he practises, Larkin never thinks of it as an inherently separate activity from the affairs of everyday. He has no special poetic voice. What he brings out is the poetry that is already in the world. He has cherished the purity of his own first responses. Like all great artists he has never lost touch with the child in his own nature. The language of even the most intricately wrought Larkin poem is already present in recognizable embryo when he describes the first jazz musicians ever to capture his devotion. “It was the drummer I concentrated on, sitting as he did on a raised platform behind a battery of cowbells, temple blocks, cymbals, tomtoms and (usually) a Chinese gong, his drums picked out in flashing crimson or ultramarine brilliants.” There are good grounds for calling Larkin a pessimist, but it should never be forgotten that the most depressing details in the poetry are seen with the same eye that loved those drums. The proof is in the unstinting vitality of language.
    As in the criticism, so in the poetry, wit can be divided usefully into two kinds, humorous and plain. There is not much need to rehearse the first kind. Most of us have scores of Larkin’s lines, hemistiches and phrases in our heads, to make us smile whenever we think of them, which is as often as the day changes. I can remember the day in 1962 when I first opened The Less Deceived and was snared by a line in the first poem, “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album.” “Not quite your class, I’d say, dear, on the whole.” What a perfectly timed pentameter! How subtly and yet how unmistakably it defined the jealousy of the speaker! Who on earth was Philip Larkin? Dozens of subsequent lines in the same volume made it clearer: he was a supreme master of language levels, snapping into and out of a tone of voice as fast as it could be done without losing the reader. Bringing the reader in on it—the deep secret of popular seriousness, Larkin brought the reader in on it even at the level of prosodic technique.
    Flagged, and the figurehead with golden tits
    Arching our way, it never anchors; it’s . . .
    He got you smiling at a rhyme. “Church Going” had the ruin-­bibber, randy for antique, “Toads” had the pun on Shakespeare, “Stuff your pension!” being the stuff dreams are made on. You couldn’t get halfway through the book without questioning, and in many cases revising, your long-nursed notions about poetic language. Here was a disciplined yet unlimited variety of tone, a scrupulosity that could contain anything, an all-inclusive decorum.
    In The Whitsun Weddings , “Mr. Bleaney” has the Bodies and “Naturally the Foundation Will Bear Your Expenses” has the ineffable Mr. Lal. “Sunny Prestatyn” features Titch Thomas and in “Wild Oats” a girl painfully reminiscent of Margaret in Lucky Jim is finally shaken