A Joyous Shot at How Things Ought to Be

Clive James, Somewhere Becoming Rain: Collected Writings on Philip Larkin

Picador, 160pp, £12.99, ISBN 9781529028829

reviewed by William Poulos

The late Clive James had much in common with Philip Larkin. In verse and prose, both men wrote long, complex sentences — sometimes covering a whole stanza — without losing the rhythms of common speech; in verse and prose, both blazed with wit and wrote scores of memorable lines. (James is one of the few critics to recognize this quality in Larkin’s prose. He rightly praises Larkin’s jazz criticism, but Larkin’s literary criticism was just as insightful and well-phrased: “Whether true or not, much Marvell criticism has a curiously inhibiting effect on one’s ability to read the poems, just as a description of a chair in terms of whizzing molecules would make one afraid to sit down on it.”) In verse and prose, both men expressed their admiration and gratitude for jazz — not the jazz of Coltrane and Konitz but the jazz of Bechet and Beiderbecke, whose clarity and lyricism they said were models for good writing. This is the first stanza to James’s poem ‘A Heritage of Trumpets’:

The clear, clean line was always the ideal.
Though there was subtlety in how Miles muttered,

One always ached to hear a song line uttered

With definition, lyrical and real:

A well-timed silence puncturing the swing

Only to add propulsion. Play that thing!

James isn’t saying that only the trumpeters have the ideal ‘clear, clean line’; he’s also invoking Larkin because he had it too. Over 50 years earlier Larkin had written the poem ‘For Sidney Bechet’, in which he urged the clarinettist to ‘play that thing!’
I can’t count how many times James has quoted this Larkin poem in all the essays and broadcasts he’s done – in any case, he quotes from it at least three times in Somewhere Becoming Rain. Even if I had never read Larkin, I’d be able to recite the following lines just from hearing and reading James’s work:

On me your voice falls as they say love should,
Like an enormous yes.

Perhaps the most important similarity between the two men is that, although their work was laced with sadness, few writers since have written with such beauty and gratitude about the world. The critics — and, I’m sorry to say, the students — who think that Larkin was the Eeyore of English poetry have missed a large part of his work, revealing more about themselves than him. About three hundred years ago, Alexander Pope recognized their sort and diagnosed their problem:

All seems infected that th’infected spy,
As all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye.

The only difference between Larkin and James is that James was more sanguine about his approaching death. Diagnosed with terminal illnesses, past his three score and ten, he still registered his appreciation for life with every word. Close to death, he didn't record the terror of ‘extinction’s alp’ or ‘the sure extinction that we travel to’ as Larkin did. Instead, he rejoiced that life on earth will go on without him: his granddaughter, the famous Japanese Maple, the floral clocks in a recent poem – all symbolised regeneration and the renewal of life. James doesn’t make the connection, but this was, in fact, one of the major themes in Larkin’s poetry. No one else wrote so beautifully about the splendour of spring:

It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon –
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy…

Spring, of all seasons most gratuitous,
Is fold of untaught flower, is race of water,
Is earth’s most multiple, excited daughter…

In a 1954 poem never published in his lifetime, Larkin wrote:

Long roots moor summer to our side of earth.
I wake: already taller than the green
River-fresh castles of unresting leaf
Where loud birds dash,
It unfolds upward a long breadth, a shine

Wherein all seeds and clouds and winged things
Employ the many-levelled acreage.

More than ten years later, he wrote ‘The Trees’, the rarely-quoted complement to ‘This Be the Verse’. The unforgettable last stanza of ‘The Trees’ runs:

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Not only does the vocabulary of the earlier poem live again, the rhyme in ‘The Trees’ links the last line of each stanza to the first, imitating the regeneration it describes. Rhyming poetry is a Christian invention, exemplifying the repetition and fulfilment of the past in the present. Larkin, who wrote beautifully about churches, had little time for religion. Denying any salvation or supernatural intervention, he wrote:

We have our loneliness
And our regret with which to build an eschatology.

Actually, he didn’t. Peter Porter wrote that. Larkin, on the other hand, wrote that if he were asked to invent a religion, it wouldn’t be based on disappointment and loneliness; it would be based on endless iridescence. As part of his liturgy he would

…raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.

I’m not denying that deprivation, loneliness, and regret were also a large part of Larkin’s poetry, but they were illuminated by the light of his verse. If his soul were absolutely benighted, he wouldn’t have written a thing. Instead, he drew attention to quotidian pain and gave it a voice: better than any social scientist, he described the mouldering communities, the sad retirement homes, the ill-treated animals, the ‘joyous shot at how things ought to be, / Long fallen wide.’ James recognises this, and scolds Professor Donald Davie for not doing so: Davie ‘cannot or will not see that Larkin’s grimness of spirit is not by itself the issue. The issue concerns the gratitude we feel for such grimness of spirit producing such a beauty of utterance.’ Describing Larkin’s powers as a novelist, James writes: ‘Chopin is not too far-fetched a parallel. Larkin’s two novels are like Chopin’s two concertos: good enough to promise not merely more of the same but a hitherto unheard-of distillation of their own lyrical essence.’ I’m surprised that James didn’t continue the comparison: Larkin, like Chopin, made misery beautiful.

Somewhere Becoming Rain is a tease: a follower of Larkin or James would have already read everything in it. It’s nice to have all of James’s writing on Larkin in one volume, but the promised ‘extra material’ amounts to little more than an introduction and a coda: about four pages total. I know it’s churlish to expect more, considering James’s illnesses, but since scholars have recognised Larkin’s debt to French poets such as Baudelaire and Laforgue, it’s surprising James never covered the subject, given his knowledge of French literature, his lifelong experience as a poet, and his disapproval of the English literary world’s strident monolingualism.

An even greater omission, perhaps, is that of the stanza divisions in James’s two poetic tributes to Larkin, ‘The North Window’ and ‘A Valediction for Philip Larkin’. The poems are instead printed as two long slabs, making them tiring to read and hiding James’s poetic rubato, as his initial light and occasionally facetious scene-setting slows and morphs into gravid reflections about Larkin’s life and poetry. The following, from ‘A Valediction for Philip Larkin’ could summarize Somewhere Becoming Rain: James rightly argues that Larkin’s squinnied gaze gave him access to boundless vistas:

You were the one who gave us the green light
To go out there and seek experience,
Since who could equal you at sitting tight
Until the house around you grew immense?
Your bleak bifocal gaze was so intense,



Hull stood for England, England for the world –
The whole caboodle crammed into one room.
Above your desk all of creation swirled…

Cramming the stanzas together would be a bad mistake when printing anyone’s poetry, but when printing James’s it’s egregious. James is fastidious about his punctuation and the structure of his stanzas. So too was Philip Larkin, his model. In Somewhere Becoming Rain, James argues that stanzaic structure is essential to the ‘rhetorical majesty' of Yeats’s later poems, which Larkin recognised and imitated in his poems. The last two stanzas of ‘Mr Bleaney’ cannot be rewritten without losing their force:

But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
And shivered, without shaking off the dread

That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don’t know.

Larkin accumulates everyday words and rhythms to make one long periodic sentence, forcing clauses across lines and stanzas, rocking the reader from one part to the next, creating a sense of confusion and claustrophobia, leading you to the ringing, indecisive resolution: ‘I don’t know.' This sort of ending is typical of Larkin. His longer poems usually start with casual, almost banal, descriptions:

       Hatless, I take off
My cycle clips in awkward reverence…

or:

That Whitsun, I was late getting away:
    Not till about
One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday
Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out…

Imperceptibly, Larkin’s wit, cadence, and magnanimity seep into his tight, rhymed stanzas. Together they form an image combining desire and disappointment, majesty and mourning, pleasure and plangency:

    … and it was nearly done, this frail
Travelling coincidence; and what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give. We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled,
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.
William Poulos is Review 31's poetry editor.