‘Goodbye, Witherspoon’: a Jazz Friendship

Abstract

Sometime in January 1965, during my first week as an assistant lecturer in American Studies at the University of Hull, I wandered into the refectory bar and overheard two men discussing the composition of various jazz rhythm sections. I recognised one of the talkers as an eminent professor of history; the other — balding, bespectacled, ‘death-suited’ — I guessed might be Philip Larkin. Before arriving in Hull, I had read The Whitsun Weddings, and the poems ‘Reference Back’ and ‘For Sidney Bechet’ had struck responsive chords, particularly the lines about ‘scholars manqués … Wrapped up in personnels like old plaids’. When I heard the professor’s drinking companion ask: ‘And who was that farting about on the drums?’, I knew that my surmise had been correct. Too awed to introduce myself, I retreated to the bookstore and purchased a copy of The Less Deceived. The next day, I spotted Philip alone at the bar, assumed that he recognised me as an academic, and remarked (for want of anything less fatuous to say) that there had been remarkably few students present at my just-finished lecture. Eyeing me suspiciously, he replied: ‘Well, they don’t want old fogeys like me, and they don’t want smart alecks like you.’ The first words spoken to me by Philip Larkin, I decided, constituted a black eye, rather than a feather in my cap.