By James Booth (auth.)
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Extra resources for Philip Larkin: The Poet’s Plight
Example text
Larkin had set out with the same aim: I was brought up to think you had to have a job, and write in your spare time, like Trollope. Then, when you started earning enough money by writing, you phase the job out. But in fact I was over fifty before I could have ‘lived by my writing’ – and then only because I had edited a big anthology. (RW 62) Writing fiction both provides one with a full-time occupation and, unlike poetry, is quite likely to yield enough money to live on. The task for the poet, as Larkin sees it, is to find something which will both occupy his or her time, and also provide a living, while allowing him or her to wait for ‘the experience.
Moralists and sentimentalists may reduce money solely to its nasty literal component. But money, crudely literal, yet also the locked promise of so much potential living, is a metaphor, with both real and imagined dimensions. Indeed, as a medium of exchange with no use value, money is the most natural of all metaphors. Its embodiment of happiness in the abstract is the very stuff of the poetic dream. ’46 And Larkin’s poem ‘Money’ is on the side of Stevens’s lyric insight rather than Graves’s moralism.
46 As it is, history repeated itself with a second rejection by Faber, this time of a larger number of better poems than in 1948. Until the appearance, in the fullness of time, of The Complete Poems, edited by Archibald Burnett, it is only in the Collected Poems of 1988/1990 that the reader can follow Larkin’s mature creative development in all its developing complexity: its shifts and significant silences. The plight of the writer is a life-sentence, to be served as well as written. The oeuvre to which Larkin devoted his life does indeed possess the cogency of a single, spontaneous sentence.