Philip Larkin and English Poetry by Terry Whalen (review)

130 LEITERS IN CANADA 1986 identification of reader, critic, and poet with the declarative and affirmative moments in Eliot's later poetry undermines the legitimate and complex enterprise at the heart ofthis study. (J.M. REIBETANZ) Terry Whalen. Philip lArkin and English Poetry University of British Columbia Press. x, 164. $18.95 Terry Whalen sets out to reassess Philip Larkin's aesthetic and his place in the traditions of English poetry. Larkin, he argues, is 'a more complicated personality, a more explorative poet, and also a more positive poet' than has been generally recognized. The book begins well, dlscussing the different personae in the poems. Whalen points out that Larkin's often-employed 'cynical' persona is characteristically transformed when he discovers 'a hunger in himself to be more serious.' Although one would like to see Whalen grapple directly with Larkin's intelligent critics - Charles Tomlinson, for example, or Donald Davie - his contention that Larkin's poetry moves beyond the nihilistically dejected mentality of 'books are a load ofcrap' and 'they fuck you up, your mum and dad' is generally convincing. This cannot be said for subsequent chapters. Beginning with the observation that Larkin employs a number of poetic personalities between which there is a dialectical interplay, Whalen goes on to characterize those personalities by suggesting sources and influences. It is here that problems arise. He argues that 'as a less deceived poet' and 'a poet of social satire' Larkin shares 'central affinities' with Samuel Johnson. Against this Johnsonian Larkin is set what Whalen terms 'the "other" Larkin,' a 'poet of passing wonder' who cultivates an inheritance from D.H. Lawrence and the Imagists. The book concludes with an attempt to draw attention to 'a core of living British poets who share with Larkin a profound legacy from the example of D.H. Lawrence and the Imagists' namely , Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn, and R.S. Thomas. In placing Larkin among such unlikely company, the book is at times thought-provoking. But it manages to be so in spite of difficulties that are almost overwhelming. These range from mildly annoying typographical errors to oversights - one hopes they are oversights - that seriously undermine Whalen's authority. In the first place, the book is not well written. Someone, at some stage, should have improved sentences like the following: 'The voice is both given to a flight into wonder, and ambiguously gesturing by including an image of the void.' Pointing out stylistic deficiencies might seem carping. But there are more serious related problems. In the Introduction we are told that the book will be a 'practical criticism exploration,' the 'central strategy' of which will be 'a close reading of the poetry.' For a critic employing this 'strategy: misquotation can be peculiarly disqualifying. Whalen misquotes poems on twelve occasions. At the most trivial, this is only a matter of dropping a comma (from 'The Explosion') or adding one (to Lawrence's 'Tommies on the Train'). When Larkin, in 'Going, Going: speaks of 'all the land left free: and Whalen of 'all the land let free'; or when Larkin, in 'Essential Beauty: ironically evokes ideal 'quarter-profile cats I By slippers on warm mats: while Whalen, doubtless with greater social realism, has 'quarter-profile cats I By slippers on war mats: we are perhaps only distracted. But consider the final lines of Larkin's fine poem 'Cut Grass': 'And that high builded cloud I Moving at summer's pace: Whalen corrupts both the immediacy and the stateliness of the poem's final evocation of transience, as well as the melancholy measured response to it, by rendering these lines, 'And the high builded cloud I Moving at a summer's pace.' These might be a typesetter's sins that escaped the eye ofa proofreader. But the number of such errors, taken with his own awkward style, makes us begin to suspect that Whalen is not a critic sensitive to detail or to subtleties of tone and shades of meaning. As the book progresses, this suspicion grows. For example, the argument that Larkin is a Johnsonian poet proceeds on a level of such generality that one wonders whether almost any conservative proponent of traditional morality - Jane Austen, say - would...