[b]Philip Larkin
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.[/b]
And here we all are.
I sit in my room like Miss Havisham, about whom I have been reading this week. Better the Dickens you know than the Dickens you don’t know - on the whole I enjoyed it. But I should like to say something about this ‘irrepressible vitality’, this ‘throwing a fresh handful of characters on the fire when it burns low’, in fact the whole Dickens method - it strikes me as being less ebullient, creative, vital, than hectic, nervy, panic-stricken. If he were a person I should say ‘You don’t have to entertain me, you know. I’m quite happy just sitting here.’ This jerking of your attention, with queer names, queer characters, aggressive rhythms, piling on adjectives - seems to me to betray basic insecurity in his relation with the reader. How serenely Trollope, for instance, compares. I say in all seriousness that, say what you like about Dickens as an entertainer, he cannot be considered as a real writer at all; not a real novelist. His is the garish gaslit melodramatic barn (writing that phrase makes me wonder if I’m right!) where the yokels gape: outside is the calm measureless world, where the characters of Eliot, Trollope, Austen, Hardy (most of them) and Lawrence (some of them) have their being.
So, what do you think, one man’s opinion?
Life is slow dying.
Then shift gears. Or put the pedal to the metal.
In life, as in art, talking vitiates doing.
So, aside from a context what else is missing here?
One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the same day as we do ourselves.
Not counting the murder suicides of course.
I work all day, and get half drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
This, one imagines, is why poetry was invented.