Gone, Gone

I last saw the novelist and critic John Banville two weeks ago at  the British Library. We had just heard some vigorous readings from the work of Philip Larkin; we each had a glass of wine in hand;  and the the setting of burgundy-among the-books seemed just about right for our great librarian-poet.

Not that the vast modernist barrack-like British Library building is quite the Larkin type. The poem that we had just heard which was then freshest in my mind was Going, Going, Larkin's prophetic lament for cultural and countryside traditions that were disappearing under brick and concrete.

To the credit of the then Conservative government of 1972, these lines of loathing for economic progress had been commissioned for an official Department of Environment Report. And, in Going Gone (see below) I tried afterwards to think of any later governments that had been so happy to have their thoughts introduced by an artist's unreliable words.

John Banville now tells me what I should have known - that neither Whitehall nor Larkin had been quite as brave at that time as I was thinking.

The Seventies bureaucrats had, it is true, been content to publish what are now the best known parts of the poem: "and that will be England gone, the shadows, the meadows, the lanes, the guildhalls, the carved choirs".

There had been no problem either with the Countess of Dartmouth's report on The Human Habitat containing the idea that change was all too fast: "that before I snuff it, the whole boiling will be bricked in except for the tourist parts".

That far I was right.

But specifically attacking those who profited from the process had not been acceptable.

There was no room for Larkin's "grey area grants!" stanza in which "on the business pages, a score of spectacled grins approve some takeover bid that entails five percent profit (and ten percent more in the estuaries)".

Larkin originally denied accepting the censorship and told his friend and confidant, Robert Conquest, to tell no one about it, even though "it makes my flesh creep".

The lines were fully  restored before the poem was published in the collection, High Windows (see Roundhouse light, below). The audience at the Josephine Hart Poetry Hour had heard the full version.

The full version is the only one read and studied today.

"But still",

as this year's Booker Prize winner laconically concludes.

Comments

[peter stothard]

. . .ok, ok, but how about "a health to all that shot and missed"?
. . from another poet. .not Larkin . . Shakespeare . . Taming of the Shrew. . .
. . if i weren't bookless at Dallas airport, where the TV news on the VP's victim's health does not sound so good, I'd give the reference. . .

[Dion Per Sona]

There isn't really a place, here, to post these gleeful limericks, but the web is buzzing:

Tell me a story, tickle me quick!
What sort of a shot is your Dead Eye Dick?
Safe as houses!
Straight as a die!
Stand here behind him, see if I lie.

Where were they shooting? quail or duck?
A bird of which feather? Who ran amok?
Flying or walking?
Quacking or talking?
Whose foot in which mouth is, like, totally fcuked?

....so many questions, so few answers....