poetry: in praise of the plain and pleasant

For Sally Amis

Tightly-folded bud,
I have wished you something
None of the others would:
Not the usual stuff
About being beautiful,
Or running off a spring
Of innocence and love—
They will all wish you that,
And should it prove possible,
Well, you’re a lucky girl.

But if it shouldn’t, then
May you be ordinary;
Have, like other women,
An average of talents:
Not ugly, not good-looking,
Nothing uncustomary
To pull you off your balance,
That, unworkable itself,
Stops all the rest from working.
In fact, may you be dull—
If that is what a skilled,
Vigilant, flexible,
Unemphasised, enthralled
Catching of happiness is called.

- Philip Larkin, Born Yesterday (20 January 1954)

Poetry: Cruel Ironies

Why did I dream of you last night?
Now morning is pushing back hair with grey light
Memories strike home, like slaps in the face:
Raised on elbow, I stare at the pale fog
beyond the window.

So many things I had thought forgotten
Return to my mind with stranger pain:
- Like letters that arrive addressed to someone
Who left the house so many years ago.

- Philip Larkin, ‘Why did I dream of you last night?’ (1939)

Poetry: The end of virginity

‘Of course I was drugged, and so heavily I did not regain my consciousness till the next morning. I was horrified to discover that I had been ruined, and for some days I was inconsolable, and cried like a child to be killed or sent back to my aunt.’ Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor
Even so distant, I can taste the grief,
Bitter and sharp with stalks, he made you gulp.
The sun’s occasional print, the brisk brief
Worry of wheels along the street outside
Where bridal London bows the other way,
And light, unanswerable and tall and wide,
Forbids the scar to heal, and drives
Shame out of hiding. All the unhurried day
Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.

Slums, years, have buried you. I would not dare
Console you if I could. What can be said,
Except that suffering is exact, but where
Desire takes charge, readings will grow erratic?
For you would hardly care
That you were less deceived, out on that bed,
Than he was, stumbling up the breathless stair
To burst into fulfillment’s desolate attic.

- Philip Larkin, Deceptions (20 February 1950)

Poetry: dull duties

Some must employ the scythe
Upon the grasses,
That the walks be smooth
For the feet of the angel.
Some keep in repair
The locks, that the visitor
Unhindered passes
To the innermost chamber.

Some have for endeavour
To sign away life
As lover to lover,
Or a bird using its wings
To fly to the fowler’s compass,
Not out of willingness,
But being aware of
Eternal requirings.

And if they have leave
To pray, it is for contentment
If the feet of the dove
Perch on the scythe’s handle,
Perch once, and then depart
Their knowledge. After, they wait
Only the cold advent,
The quenching of candles.
- Philip Larkin, The Dedicated (18 September 1946)

Poetry: fatuous fate

No, I have never found
The place where I could say
This is my proper ground,
Here I shall stay;
Nor met that special one
Who has an instant claim
On everything I own
Down to my name;

To find such seems to prove
You want no choice in where
To build, or whom to love;
You ask them to bear
You off irrevocably,
So that it’s not your fault
Should the town turn dreary,
The girl a dolt.

Yet, having missed them, you’re
Bound, none the less, to act
As if what you settled for
Mashed you, in fact;
And wiser to keep away
From thinking you still might trace
Uncalled-for to this day
Your person, your place.

- Philip Larkin, Places, Loved Ones (10 October 1954)

Poetry: against your better judgment

Since the majority of me
Rejects the majority of you,
Debating ends forthwith, and we
Divide. And sure of what to do

We disinfect new blocks of days
For our majorities to rent
With unshared friends and unwalked ways.
But silence too is eloquent:

A silence of majorities
That, unopposed at last, return
Each night with cancelled promises
They want renewed. They never learn.

- Philip Larkin, ‘Since the majority of me’ (6 December 1950)

Poetry: for the sullen

No one gives you a thought, as day by day
You drag your feet, clay-thick with misery.
None think how stalemate in you grinds away,
Holding your spinning wheels an inch too high
To bite on earth. The mind, it’s said, is free;
But not your minds. They, rusty stiff, admit
Only what will accuse or horrify,
Like slot-machines only bent pennies fit.

So year by year your tense unfinished faces
Sink further from the light. No one pretends
To want to help you now. For interest passes
Always towards the young and more insistent,
And skirts locked rooms where a hired darkness ends
Your long defense against the non-existent.
- Philip Larkin, Neurotics (March-April? 1949)

NONFIC: growing

Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick—the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed.
Before I go on with this short history let me make a general observation—the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Crack-Up," pp. 139.

NONFIC: the end of men

On the Riviera last summer there were English girls who still believed in men – you could tell by the deliberate outdoor swagger of their walk, by what they laughed at so heartily, as if they were still apologizing for having been born girls, and were being “good chaps” for critical elder brothers. But as for the others—you could only tell the Americans from the French because they were pretty – the negligence with which they obviously took their men was almost shocking. Outside of material matters man’s highest and most approved incarnation was as “a good old horse,” be he fiancé, husband, or lover. The merely masculine was considered by turns stuffy, dull, tyrannical or merely ludicrous. I remember a girl responding to a desirable middle-aged party’s inquiry as to whether he could smoke a cigar with: “Please do. There’s nothing I like so much as a good cigar.” – and I remember the suppressed roar of hilarity that circled the table. It was the voice of another age—it was burlesque. Naturally one wanted and needed men, but wanting to please them, positively coddling them in that fashion—that was another matter.
The Prince, the Hero, no longer exists, or rather fails to put in an appearance, for society with its confusion and its wide-open doors no longer offers the stability of thirty years ago. In New York it has been difficult for years to arrange a numerical superiority of men over women at debutante balls. All the young girl can be sure of when she comes out into “the world” is that she will meet plenty of males competent to stimulate her biological urges—for the heterogeneous stag-line can do that if nothing more.
Her current attitude toward moral questions is that of the country at large—in other words the identification of virtue with chastity no longer exists among girls over twenty, and to pretend it does is just one of those things you are welcome to do if it gives you comfort. There are those of an older and purer generation who would have liked the present observer to have devoted his entire article to this phenomenon—and at the end virtuously thrown the magazine out the window. For America is composed not of two sorts of people, but of two frames of mind—the first engaged in doing what it would like to do, the second pretending that such things do not exist.

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Girls Believe in Girls," pp 103-104.

NONFIC: postmodern narrative techniques

The assumption behind [postmodern nonrealist fiction writers'] work is that "reality"-- that set of assumptions about life that we negotiate communally on a day to day basis-- is so unsatisfactory, or so extraordinary, or so absurd that conventional mimesis is no longer adequate to convey the essence of that world. Many American writers since the late 105-s, feeling this pressure, have either turned to nonfiction forms-- autobiography and documentary...-- or... to nonrealistic forms, what Robert Scholes has called "fabulation." (302-303)

The plural notion of reality inherent in this philosophical position -- the legacy of Einsteinian relativity and quantum physics -- erods the importance of plot: life cannot be experienced or understood as a simple linear sequence of causes and effects. (307)

Describing a project that was never actually completed, [Anderson] says the book will be "the autobiography of a man's secondary self, of the queer, unnamed fancies that float through his brain, the things that appear to have no connection with actualities." (308)

... Barthelme's questionnaire for the reader in Snow White forces us to think about the author's purposes in retelling the fairy tale. As mentioned before, the assumption underlying these narratives is that life itself is a fiction, based on a series of temporary arrangements, so that paradoxically the only "realistic" narrative is the one that continually draws the reader's attention to the fact that everything is fictional. (314)

- Stouck, David. 1985. "Sherwood Anderson and the Postmodern Novel.' Contemporary Literature 26(3): 302-316.

NONFIC: misbegotten youth

The New York of undergraduate dissipation… had become a horror and though I returned to it, alas, through many an alcoholic mist, I felt each time a betrayal of a persistent idealism. My participation was prurient rather than licentious and scarcely one pleasant memory of it remains from those days; as Ernest Hemingway once remarked, the sole purpose of the cabaret is for unattached men to find complaisant women. All the rest is a wasting of time in bad air.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, "My Lost City," pp. 107.

NONFIC: Unquenchable passions

I spent my entire freshman year writing an operetta for the Triangle Club. To do this I failed in algebra, trigonometry, coordinate geometry and hygiene.

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Who's Who -- And Why"