Terry Eagleton is a Lancaster University professor of English literature. He is also an outspoken socialist. Normally, this shouldn't make any difference. George Saintsbury was the kind of extreme Tory that doesn't exist today, or not openly. World events since the Victorian Age, and developments in the arts and literature, have made such a world view as Saintsbury possessed indefensible. Yet Saintsbury's literary criticism is still valuable because he never allowed his political prejudices to interfere with his aesthetic values.
Using the words "aesthetic values" will immediately have some people reaching for their pistols. But Terry Eagleton, unlike Saintsbury, refuses to check his politics at the library door. Eagleton seems to view all literature as divisible between progressive and reactionary tracts. Since the death of Harold Pinter, he sees contemporary literature as having acquiesced to the perceptible shift in British politics to the Right. But he has always been disinclined to accept the established view of literary legacies. In 1993, he appeared on the BBC Four programme Without Walls to present his J'accuse against the poet Philip Larkin:
"It was Philip Larkin who wrote,
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
A verse that was supposed to have opened up a Brave New Era in modern poetry. But rarely, in my view, have we been more thoroughly duped. The truth is that it's Larkin who 'fucked up' his readers by seducing them into his own dingy world of boredom, self-pity, and disgust."
And so on the programme goes - an extreme exception to the common reception of Larkin - for another 25 minutes. Eagleton called in a number of people, including some of Larkin's closest friends, to confirm what we already know: that Larkin was a miserable specimen of a man, smugly conservative, exactingly selfish in his affairs with women, a bigoted racist, an avid collector of bondage pornography, who entertained pedaephilic fantasies.
But he was also self-loathing in the extreme. He clearly saw his own shortcomings as a human being and in his poetry regretted them some of the time but also sometimes celebrated them. I can think of few poets who had a more thorough and devastating self-awareness. But he made his weaknesses and shortcomings into strengths by making them into a central theme. It isn't exactly his own voice speaking in "A Study of Reading Habits," but it might as well be:
When getting my nose in a book
Cured most things short of school,
It was worth ruining my eyes
To know I could still keep cool,
And deal out the old right hook
To dirty dogs twice my size.
Later, with inch-thick specs,
Evil was just my lark:
Me and my cloak and fangs
Had ripping times in the dark.
The women I clubbed with sex!
I broke them up like meringues.
Don't read much now: the dude
Who lets the girl down before
The hero arrives, the chap
Who's yellow and keeps the store,
Seem far too familiar. Get stewed:
Books are a load of crap.
(20 August 1960)
Exactly where did all that reading get him? And where did all the renown as a poet get him? Left alone with himself, as we all are at the end of the day, he wondered if any of it was worth it. What good was the fame (he was offered, but declined the Poet Laureate title), or the money, when it couldn't improve his looks, his goodness, his worthiness of love and happiness? Those things were for others, not for Larkin. What else could he write about, if not himself? Written in 1954 but not published until 1973, "Continuing to Live" stands alone, like a summation:
Continuing to live - that is, repeat
A habit formed to get necessaries
Is nearly always losing, or going without.
It varies.
This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise
Ah, if the game were poker, yes,
You might discard them, draw a full house!
But it's chess.
And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.
And what's the profit? Only that, in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
But to confess,
On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that one dying.
(24 April 1954/A Keepsake for the New Library, 1973)
For Eagleton, the truth that Larkin knew about himself must be rejected because it is not universal. Eagleton is a theoretic critic (as opposed to the non-ideological "belles lettrists"), and he is justifiably defensive about it: "To see The Waste Land as brooding upon the spiritual vacancy of Man without God is to read what is there on the page, whereas to view it as a symptom of an exhausted bourgeois civilisation in an era of imperialist warfare is to impose your own crankish theory on the poem." Of course, if all we have to go on is what is "on the page," academics and critics would have no function outside of simply explaining to us what we have just read. So we are presented with all the salacious stories about a writer's life, his or her sexuality, politics, tastes. Last month I asked, apropos of V. S. Naipaul, if a writer's personal life should have anything to do with our evaluation of his writing. The private Naipaul was a considerably nastier specimen than Larkin, yet his fiction is outstandingly good.
Nobody said you have to like Larkin or, for that matter, any important writer. Plenty of people never liked Shakespeare, and said so in no uncertain terms. One of the people who didn't like Shakespeare and was appalled by his continuing reputation as a great playwright and poet was Leo Tolstoy. When he finally had had enough, Tolstoy wrote a diatribe against him in 1903.(1) All his life, Tolstoy confesses, he had read Shakespeare, first in Russian and German translation and later in English, but he had never been able to agree with the common conclusion about his greatness. Finally, in old age, he could take it no more, so he wrote his pamphlet, which has not, as far as I can tell, changed anyone's mind. It is almost like the book, written in the 1960s by a Swede who would not otherwise be remembered, called Anne Frank's Diary: A Hoax, that tried to convince people that Anne Frank and the Holocaust that consumed her was a scurrilous invention and a slander on the German people.
Terry Eagleton has probably read but hasn't learned from George Orwell's essay, "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool." Orwell used the Tolstoy pamphlet twice, once in 1941 and again in 1947, as illustrations of "the frontiers of art and propaganda." Orwell was, like Terry Eagleton, a socialist. But he scrupulously rejected orthodoxy, especially when it interfered with judgement. Orwell was aware that every æsthetic preference "is either something inexplicable or it is so corrupted by non-æsthetic motives as to make one wonder whether the whole of literary criticism is not a huge network of humbug."(2)
All art is propaganda, Orwell claimed. But he also insisted that not all propaganda is art. "Æsthetic scrupulousness is not enough, but political rectitude is not enough either."(3) "Every piece of writing has its propaganda aspect, and yet in any book or play or poem or what-not that is to endure there has to be a residuum of something that simply is not affected by its moral or meaning - a residuum of something we can only call art."(4)
Orwell had in mind the Marxist critics who were his contemporaries, like Edward Upward. But he could have had Terry Eagleton in mind when he wrote:
"It is strange how invariably his æsthetic judgements coincide with his political ones. . . The basic trouble with all orthodox Marxists is that, posessing a system which appears to explain everything, they never bother to discover what is going on inside other people's heads."(5)
After parading a selection of witnesses for the prosecution, Eagleton concludes his video essay in the same tone with which he began:
"Defeatist, lugubrious, mean-spirited, implacably negative - in Philip Larkin, post-imperial Britain got the poetic talent it deserved. The Less Deceived, or, one might translate, No Flies on Philip, is the title of one of Larkin's early volumes, though few poets have been more deceptive. His poetry makes a virtue out of incapacity, and the ultimate value is just to live hopelessly, in solitude, without self-deception. Of course, you might claim the poet has a right to his or her misery. It's a way of seeing, after all. But Larkin made a career out of being a miserable old so-and-so who raised boredom, emptiness and futility to a fine art. He was a death-obsessed, emotionally retarded misanthropist who had the impudence to generalise his own fears and failings to The Way Things Are. And in the process he trapped his readers with him in a state of permanent casualty."
Eagleton has the ability to tell us everything he thinks is wrong about Larkin except why so many people continue to read - and enjoy - his poetry. By targeting his readers, Eagleton does manage to explain the origin of his distaste for Larkin. I think the reason Larkin is so widely read is because he writes poetry that avoids being deceptive, difficult, and diffuse. His language is the everyday, yet he often addresses subjects that are immense. Take this "death-obsessed" poem, "The Old Fools," as a prime example. Larkin doesn't avert his - or his readers' - eyes from the terror that awaits us all:
What do they think has happened, the old fools,
To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose
It's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,
And you keep on pissing yourself, and can't remember
Who called this morning? Or that, if they only chose,
They could alter things back to when they danced all night,
Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September?
Or do they fancy there's really been no change,
And they've always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,
Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming
Watching light move? If they don't (and they can't), it's strange:
Why aren't they screaming?
At death, you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. It's only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower
Of being here. Next time you can't pretend
There'll be anything else. And these are the first signs:
Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power
Of choosing gone. Their looks show that they're for it:
Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines
How can they ignore it?
Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them, acting.
People you know, yet can't quite name; each looms
Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning,
Setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair, extracting
A known book from the shelves; or sometimes only
The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning,
The blown bush at the window, or the sun's
Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely
Rain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live:
Not here and now, but where all happened once.
This is why they give
An air of baffled absence, trying to be there
Yet being here. For the rooms grow farther, leaving
Incompetent cold, the constant wear and tear
Of taking breath, and them crouching below
Extinction's alp, the old fools, never perceiving
How near it is. This must be what keeps them quiet:
The peak that stays in view wherever we go
For them is rising ground. Can they never tell
What is dragging them back, and how it will end? Not at night?
Not when the strangers come? Never, throughout
The whole hideous inverted childhood? Well,
We shall find out.
(12 January 1973)
The points that Eagleton makes against Larkin are actually the very qualities that make him great, however negative they may seem. As Orwell wrote in closing his answer to Tolstoy's attack on Shakespeare:
"There is no argument by which one can defend a poem. It defends itself by surviving, or it is indefensible. And if this test is valid, I think the verdict in Shakespeare's case must be 'not guilty'. Like every other writer, Shakespeare will be forgotten sooner or later, but it is unlikely that a heavier indictment will ever be brought against him. Tolstoy was perhaps the most admired literary man of his age, and he was certainly not its least able pamphleteer. He turned all his powers of denunciation against Shakespeare, like all the guns of a battleship roaring simultaneously. And with what result? Forty years later, Shakespeare is still there, completely unaffected, and of the attempt to demolish him nothing remains except the yellowing pages of a pamphlet which hardly anyone has read, and which would be forgotten altogether if Tolstoy had not also been the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina."(6)
(1) "Shakespeare and the Drama," published along with another pamphlet, "Shakespeare and the Working Classes" by Ernest Crosby.
(2) "Charles Dickens," 11 March 1940.
(3) "The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda," The Listener, 29 May 1941.
(4) "Tolstoy and Shakespeare," The Listener, 4 June 1941.
(5) Review of The Novel To-Day by Philip Henderson, New English Weekly, 31 December 1936.
(6) "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool," Polemic, 7 March 1947.
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