Philip Larkin

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Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Disc's Archive. For rights' reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen seventy six, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

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On our Desert Island this week is the poet Philip Larkin. mister Larkin, are you a gregarious man? I never think of myself as a gregarious man, but

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Having thought about your island for a few weeks, I've come to the conclusion I probably am. I should be.

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Very happy there for about twenty four hours, and fairly happy for another another forty eight hours, but after that I suspect I should miss people and society in general. What would you be happiest to have got away from? The instant answer that comes to mind is work, but over the years I've come to think I rather like work.

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What was your plan in choosing your egg record?

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Well, either records that I've known and liked for a long time, um, simply because they seem to me marvellous musical experiences, or else music that reminds me of

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probably rather imaginary things.

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That I like thinking about. But they're not, as you would say, nostalgic. What's the first word?

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The first one is a Louis Armstrong record. I suppose any jazz lover has to decide which Louis Armstrong record he's taking because there are so many and Louis is such a

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combined Chaucer and Shakespeare jazz,

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I've chosen Dallas Blues from nineteen twenty nine because I've been playing it for about forty years and never got tired of it. It is a blues and Armstrong plays it in a beautifully warm and relaxed way that he doesn't always achieve on his later more

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Um showmanship size.

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Louis Armstrong, Dallas Blues.

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You're a jazz lover, you've been playing that record for forty years.

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Do you play an instrument yourself?

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I don't know. I wish I'd been taught forcibly, if necessary, when I was young. The only musical instrument, if you can call it musical, I tri tried to play was the drums. Uh but I never got very far with them. You wrote about jazz for a number of years, didn't you?

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I had the job of reviewing jazz records in the Daily Telegraph for for ten years, which I enjoyed very much, but there came a point when I felt not only that I'd said all I had to say, but I was losing sympathy with the kind of jazz that was coming out and

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I thought it proper to uh close down.

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Yeah.

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Let's have your second record. What's that to be?

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This is a Newcastle street song, I think dating from the seventeen nineties, sung by Louis Killen. It's called Dolli Yar.

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It's about one regiment, the black cuffs, leaving the garrison and another regiment, the green cuffs, replacing them and the effect it has on the local female population.

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I like it not only because it has a curiously haunting tune,

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But I always have a faint private uh feeling it it's half about the the departure of winter and the coming of spring.

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The black cuff says gun away, Dolly, Dolly That'll be a cryin' dear, Dolly

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Dolly the Dill and Doll, Dolly, Dolly Dolly the Dylan Doll, Dolly Yah

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A Newcastle street song by Louis Killen.

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You were born in Coventry, weren't you?

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That's right, yes. Were you brought up in a house with a lot of books to explore?

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I suppose I was. Uh my father was not a literary man, but he was a great collector of books, and when I went up to Oxford I found that I had in fact

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Been brought up with many more books than my contemporaries. You know, we had all Lawrence, we had all Hardy, we had all Huxley, we had Somerset Moore, Catherine Mansfield, Forster.

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And I had somehow absorbed these things, um whereas my friends often were were still

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Uh grappling with them.

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They were novels, they weren't poetry. I think perhaps I should make that point. Yes. Now you read English.

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Yeah.

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This was the war, nineteen forty. I didn't think one really had a view to anything in those days. One thought one would would be called up um after about four terms, and after that it's all on the lap of gods. Had to have started writing.

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Oh, yes. I suppose I began writing

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At the age when everyone does.

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not very well, but prolifically, both poems and prose.

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I always thought I should I should be a novelist, and that was what I wanted to be, but

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Um after a couple of novels uh the third one never got finished and I had to fall back on

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On poems

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What was your first job?

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My first job was the librarian of

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the library of an urban district council in Shropshire

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uh a very small one and

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One which I think is now much more flourishing as part of the county system. It was an ordinary public library when one lent books to old-age pensioners and children and

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performed the various simple tasks like putting up newspapers in the newsroom. I I was the librarian and the only librarian. Um I stoked the boiler and and um and opened the doors in the morning and and closed them at night. I can really claim to have started at the bottom. The previous librarian used to scrub the floors as well, but I I said I didn't want to do that.

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And you also published your first book of poems at that time.

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Yes, that was in nineteen forty five and then the first novel, Jill, was nineteen forty six, and the second novel

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A girl in winter was nineteen forty seven, and then a profound silence descended.

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Now you've been a librarian ever since you started in in in Shropshire. You moved on to work Leicester, Nick? To University College, Leicester as it was in those days, now the university. And that was in 1946 and then in 1950 I went to Queen's University, Belfast.

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where I stayed till 1955, and then I w was appointed librarian of the University of Hull.

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Well where have I been ever since?

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Let's have your third record now. What's that to be?

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Well, I should want something for Sundays, which suggests church music.

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There's an enormous amount to choose from and I think, oddly enough, church music is a kind of music I like very much in the same way as jazz.

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I don't know why this should be so, unless

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Agnostics are naturally romantic about religion.

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Yeah.

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I could pick any one of of ten or or twenty records, but I I think I would be very happy with Thomas Talis's

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Forty part motet, spemenalion.

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which is sung here by the the choir of King's College, Cambridge.

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The closing passage of Thomas Tallis's Forty part Motet, Spermin Aulium, by the choir of King's College, Cambridge.

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Now, you're one of this country's best-known poets, but your output has been

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Remarkably small. Um a slim volume, really, every ten years. I suppose it depends whom you're comparing me with. I don't think it's too small compared with with Hausmann, for instance.

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This has not been intentional. I write as much as I can and publish as much as I can.

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I think in the last ten years or so I have published almost everything I've written.

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there have been fewer false starts. Occasionally one publishes a poem and then decides it isn't worth collecting. There are perhaps half a dozen of those poems lying around, but I certainly haven't got a great mass of unpublished poems.

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Do you write for yourself?

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or to communicate a feeling to others.

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I certainly write to be read. There would be very little point in writing something that no that nobody was going to read, but it's not quite communicating in the sense of

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Writing a letter to The Times, for instance,

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You try to

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create something in words that will reproduce in

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somebody else who's never met you and perhaps isn't even living in the same

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cultural societies yourself.

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That somebody else will

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Read and so get the experience that you haven't and that

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forced you to write the poem.

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It's a kind of

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Preservation by recreation, if I can put it that way.

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You are not in any way um

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quote here, difficult or abstruse poet. Y your poems are very simple, and I this strikes me as being due to a great deal of effort to make them so.

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I think that a poem should be understood at first reading.

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Line by line. But I don't think it should be exhausted at at first reading. I hope

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that what I write gives the reader something.

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when they read it first, enough, in fact, to make them read it again, and so on at infinite item.

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If just one of your poems was to survive, which one would you like it to be?

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That really is a most difficult question because one doesn't really think of one's poems as

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favourites or better or anything like that. I suppose I should choose The Wits and Weddings as being a f fairly full ex expression of one particular theme that I wanted to deal with. That was the title poem of the volume you published in nineteen sixty four, was it? Nineteen sixty four. Yes.

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I feel I should be calling you, of course, Dr. Larkin. You have a splendid number of honorary doctorates from, what is it, six or seven universities.

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I don't think it's quite as many as that but I have been very gratified by the offer of them. And an impressive list of awards and prizes, the Queen's Gold Medal, Arts Council Awards and so on.

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Yes. Um well th they have to go to somebody, you know. Record number four.

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Well, record number four is in fact the last record that Bessie Smith, the blues singer, ever made, and this was in nineteen thirty three. She didn't know it was her last record.

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But in fact it proved to be so. She was killed in nineteen thirty seven. It's called I'm Down in the Dumps, but a more misleading title I can't imagine. She sounds full of

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Life, and, as she says, vitality

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And for the first time she's playing with an accompanying group of

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Thirties musicians, Jack Teegon, Frankie Newton.

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Even Betty Goodman is reputed to have been in the studio.

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And she obviously regarded it as the beginning of a new career, and I think it could have been, if only the the the the record companies had taken her up.

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I suspect it's the first time sh she ever recorded with a string bass, for instance. But it it does show Bessie having successfully got into the thirties and left the twenties behind.

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Praise of an enemy God

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Ain't no you

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Oh me down in life.

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All them down in the dump.

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Only five years old.

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I've got plenty of fearman vitality. I'm sure that I can make the great. I'm always like a tiger.

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I'm ready to jump.

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I need a whole lot of love and a lot of things.

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Bessie Smith, I'm down in the dumps.

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Now, a few years ago you were offered a very daunting literary assignment.

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You mean the job of selecting th the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse? Yes.

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Well, I didn't think of it as daunting when I accepted it. I thought it was a very great honour, which it was. I thought it would be very lucrative, which it has been. How long did it take you? I undertook it in nineteen sixty six and I

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Handed in the completed copy in 1971, so that would be about uh five years, wouldn't it? Yeah. A massive job of reading. How did you do set about planning it all?

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It was quite easy uh for me as a librarian to get and read the collected works of virtually every poet who flourished in this century. How many, roughly?

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Heavens, I don't know, four or five hundred, I know.

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But there came a point when I wanted to read the poets I'd never heard of, and I thought the only way to do that was to.

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go to a copyright library um for for a few months and prevail on them to let me go down into their stacks and literally handle every book they possessed. And I I managed to do that through the kind offices of the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

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And that gave me a great many, um

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little fines that I was pleased to add and that I thought might

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diversify the pulse of the reader along uh what was

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Unavoidably, a quite well-known highway. I mean, you're not going to surprise anybody with Eliot or Yates or Orden, but.

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I was able to, I think, rehabilitate Wilfrid Gibson, for instance, a much underestimated poet.

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And occasionally one's just stuck in a l a little poem one had found for the hell of it that nobody would ever have heard of.

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Let's have record number 5.

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Well, I would like a record for Christmas. Um that argues I shall play it only once a year, but I shall probably play it more often than that.

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And it's the St. George's Cansona's beautiful rendering of the Coventry Carol.

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This suggests to me Christmas, not the Christmas of Dingly Dell, more the Christmas of the illuminated manuscripts and the the books of ours with the red and blue robes and the gold crowns and the gold halos and the snow and so forth.

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Happy joy.

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By Lord Holy

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The Life has only tried.

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I will be honest.

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The sixteenth century Coventry Carol by the St. George's Countzoner.

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What's your next record?

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I'm sure there would be times when I would be homesick for England. I should just want to lie back and think of England.

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And I can't imagine a better record to do it to than Elgar's Symphony No. 1, and in particular the The Third Movement.

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This is a purely suggestive choice.

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I think of the Midlands, the South West Midlands.

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The meadows, the rivers.

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the occasional church and cathedral.

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The opening of the third movement of Elgar's first symphony, Sir Adrian Bolt conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

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You're on this desert island. You have to look after yourself. Have you done any fishing or anything useful like that?

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I haven't no. Um the only time I saw a fish caught I was so horrified that I I I could never try to do it myself.

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Would you try to escape?

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I should certainly consider the situation. It would depend how far off the mainland was, and how many sharks there were in between.

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Record number seven.

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Record number seven is Billy Holliday's These Foolish Things. I always thought the words were a little pseudo poetic, but Billy here sings them with such

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passionate conviction that I think they really become poetry.

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It also demonstrates a theory of mine that you can't have a great jazz vocal without a great jazz accompaniment.

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And here you have Duke Ellington's marvellous altoist Johnny Hodges and the pianist Teddy Wilson making up a wonderful trio.

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Tingling piano in the next compartment.

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Those stumbling words that told you what my heart meant.

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Bare from the pain of the wings. Swish foolish things remind me of you.

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You

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You saw you conquered me when you did that to me.

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I knew somehow that

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Win the march and make my dancer.

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A telephone that rings, but who's to answer? Oh, how those of you clings? These foolish things remind me of these

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Billy Holiday's These Foolish Things recorded in nineteen thirty six.

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Now we come to your last record. What's that to be? Well, if I have a favourite composer, it would be Handel. And indeed, I could have made up my entire choice from Handel.

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But I couldn't not have one of his great

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Roaring finales

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You know, the musical equivalent of sunshine, I think of them as.

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Handel's roaring finale, Praise the Lord, from Solomon.

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The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

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The Beecham Coral Society, conducted by Sir Thomas Beacham. If you could take just one disc of the eight, which would it be?

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It would have to be one of the jazz records. Um I can't live without jazz. The Bessie Smith, I think it is so full of life.

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and so invigorating.

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And one luxury to take with you to the island?

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Well, something to write on, something to write with. Could I have a a typewriter and an unlimited supply of paper? Yes, indeed. What are you going to write?

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Well, I might try to write another novel, but if I failed to do that I could always write my life story.

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in the hope that the white ants would get it before I was rescued.

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And one book, apart from the Bible and Shakespeare, and we've put big encyclopedias on the bard list.

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I think I'd like the complete plays of Bernard Shaw. Shaw is such a

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a sane and light hearted writer, and above all so free from self pity.

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I think he'd be the ideal companion for a desert island.

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The complete plays of Bernard Shaw, and we'll give you the prefaces as well. And thank you, Philip Larkin, for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. I look forward to being rescued. Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 124:12

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.