Cultural Cohesion by Clive James Page B

loose “after about five rehearsals.” In “Essential Beauty” “the trite untransferable/ Truss-advertisement, truth” takes you back to the cobra-coaxing cacophonies of Calcutta, not to mention forward to Amis’s nitwit not fit to shift shit. Even High Windows , the bleakest of Larkin’s slim volumes, has things to make you laugh aloud. In “The Card-Players” Jan van Hogspeuw and Old Prijck perhaps verge on the coarse but Jake Balokowsky, the hero of “Posterity,” has already entered the gallery of timeless academic portraits, along with Professor Welch and the History Man. “Vers de Société” has the “bitch/ Who’s read nothing but Which .” In Larkin’s three major volumes of poetry the jokes on their own would be enough to tell you that wit is alive and working.
    But it is working far more pervasively than that. Larkin’s poetry is all witty—which is to say that there is none of his language which does not confidently rely on the intelligent reader’s capacity to apprehend its play of tone. On top of the scores of fragments that make us laugh, there are the hundreds which we constantly recall with a welcome sense of communion, as if our own best thoughts had been given their most concise possible expression. If Auden was right about the test of successful writing being how often the reader thinks of it, Larkin passed long ago. To quote even the best examples would be to fill half this book, but perhaps it will bear saying again, this time in the context of his poetry, that between Larkin’s humorous wit and his plain wit there is no discontinuity. Only the man who invented the golden tits could evoke the black-sailed unfamiliar. To be able to make fun of the randy ruin-bibber is the necessary qualification for writing the magnificent last stanza of “Church Going.” You need to have been playfully alliterative with the trite untransferable truss-advertisement before you can be lyrically alliterative with the supine stationary voyage of the dead lovers in “An Arundel Tomb.” There is a level of seriousness which only those capable of humour can reach.
    Similarly there is a level of maturity which only those capable of childishness can reach. The lucent comb of “The Building” can be seen by us only because it has been so intensely seen by Larkin, and it has been so intensely seen by him only because his eyes, behind those thick glasses, retain the naive curiosity which alone makes the adult gaze truly penetrating. Larkin’s poetry draws a bitterly sad picture of modern life but it is full of saving graces, and they are invariably as disarmingly recorded as in a child’s diary. The paddling at the seaside, the steamer in the afternoon, the ponies at Show Saturday—they are all done with crayons and coloured pencils. He did not put away childish things and it made him more of a man. It did the same for Montale: those who have ever read about the amulet in “Dora Markus” or the children with tin swords in Caffè a Rapallo are unlikely to forget them when they read Larkin. A third name could be added: Mandelstam. When Mandelstam forecast his own death he willed that his spirit should be resurrected in the form of children’s games. All three poets represent, for their respective countrymen, the distilled lyricism of common speech. With all three poets the formal element is highly developed—in the cases of Larkin and Mandelstam to the uppermost limit possible—and yet none of them fails to reassure his readers, even during the most intricately extended flight of verbal music, that the tongue they speak is the essential material of his rhythmic and melodic resource.
    In Philip Larkin’s non-poetic poetic language, the language of extremely well-written prose, despair is expressed through beauty and becomes beautiful too. His argument is with himself and he is bound to