Art and Larkin

Abstract

Philip Larkin once dropped the pensive remark (concerning, I think, the reviews of The Whitsun Weddings, but it could just have been earlier, in the years after the publication of The Less Deceived, when I first got to know him): ‘I have no enemies. But my friends don’t like me.’ It was a joke. But the dislike of the friends of poetry can be interesting, if it is intelligent and honourable. Larkin attracted, all his working life, hostility from a kind of criticism which at its best — either American or more or less based on Cambridge English studies — articulated the opinion that his work was profoundly philistine. I want to praise his writing for precisely this reason: that it made itself permanently vulnerable to such charges. Larkin’s poetry helped to continue, I would suggest, a great English or British tradition that has for centuries refused to avail itself of the self-indulgent securities of ‘Art’, that made itself philistine for the good of the soul of literature.

What follows is the latter half of an essay on the friendship of Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis, and particularly on the literary principles shared by both.