derek spooner, reflections on the place of larkin

7/28/2019 Derek Spooner, Reflections on the Place of Larkin

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Reflections on the Place of LarkinAuthor(s): Derek SpoonerReviewed work(s):Source: Area, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Jun., 2000), pp. 209-216Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of

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Area (2000) 32.2, 209-216

Reflections on the place of LarkinDerek Spooner

Department of Geography, University of Hull, Hull, HU6 [email protected]

Revised manuscript received 5 July 1999.

Summary The close association of the poet Larkin with the city of Hull has inducedreferences to Larkinland, though commercial exploitation of this concept is very limited.This paper examines Larkin's sense of place and explores his relationship with Hull and itsenvirons. In drawing on his own personal landscapes, Larkin intermittently involves thereader in the pleasure of recognition. For the inhabitant of Hull, some poems have addedvalue. 'Here' paints an evocative picture of Hull in the 1950s, but also links to theinterpretation of Larkin as the poet of provincial England. However, Larkinland, either as

Hull or as provincial mid-century England, has a slender basis.

Introduction:xploiting literary eritageIn recent years there has been a growth of interest inliterary heritage, the places writers came from, thelandscapes and journeys immortalized in theirwork.

According to Margaret Drabble (1979): 'everywriter's work is a record both of himself (sic) and ofthe age inwhich he lives, as well as of the particularplaces he describes'. Seeing landscape through theeyes of a particular writer is a source of pleasure, andour perception of a particular landscape may beshaped by the writer's. The pleasure is often linked toa nostalgia for the greener, unspoilt landscape of thepast connected with the English countryside andsome Golden Age of innocent childhood (Williams1973; Squire 1993). The Atlas of Literature, edited by

Malcolm Bradbury (1996), exemplifies the trend,describing itself as a 'companion to hundreds ofliterary landscapes, sites and shrines'.

Inevitably, local or regional literary heritage isincreasingly marketed as a tourist attraction and as avehicle for local economic development. This rangesfrom the offering of literary tours (there is forexample a Tolkien Trail in Kings Heath andLadywood in Birmingham to see the locations thatmay have inspired a young JRR to write of Gondor,Mordor and the Lord of the Rings) to the conversionof writers' homes to museums and shrines (think ofthe Bronte parsonage at Haworth, or of BeatrixPotter's Hill Top Farm in the Lake District), to the

promotion of particular localities under such labelsas Catherine Cookson Country or Bronte Country(Pocock 1987, 1992) by local tourist offices anddevelopment departments. Sometimes such adoptions can be quite subtle-the use of Tennyson'spoetry to promote the now defunct borough ofGlanford showed particular imagination, with linesfrom the Lady of Shallot (sic) set against a picture ofa Lincolnshire wold (though it is not at all clear thatTennyson was thinking of North Lincolnshire whenhe wrote the Lady of Shalott; and it is a pity that theydidn't check the spelling). The trend to commercialexploitation has also extended beyond canonicalliterature to television and film drama (sometimesbased on popular novels), broadening the conceptof an imagined landscape. North Yorkshire forexample is now 'Herriot country', with HambletonCouncil bidding for money from the MillenniumCommission, which awards National Lottery funds toprojects to mark the Millennium, to establish 'the

World of James Herriot' inThirsk.The promotion and exploitation of literary heritage

is most commonly associated with novels andnovelists, but poets are not immune. Grasmere isoverrun with visitors toWordsworth's Dove Cottage.In Northern Ireland, South County Derry is now

marketed as Heaney country and has its HeaneyTrail. Across the border in the Republic, Sligo isemphatically Yeats country, with boat trips to viewthe Lake Isle of Innisfree, and signposted tours to

ISSN 0004-0894 (? Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2000


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210 Spoonerplaces associated with the Yeats canon (Ben Bulben,Dooney, Lissadell ...). The identification of Shropshire as 'Housman's country' is obvious (eventhough AE Housman came from Worcestershireand wrote The Shropshire Lad in London), whileShakespeare-poet and playwright-has spawned ahuge heritage industry at Stratford upon Avon.

Looking for LarkinlandPhilip Larkin (1922-85) remains one of England's

most eminent and best-loved poets, though hispersonal reputation was seriously tarnished by revelations in his biography (Motion 1993) and editedletters (Thwaite 1992) of his intemperate views onrace and other matters and his fondness forpornography. Like several other great writers (Hardy,Dickens), his literary reputation seems likely tosurvive our knowledge of his personal flaws. Larkinlived and worked inKingston upon Hull (hereafter

Hull) as University Librarian for the last 30 years ofhis life and it iswith thismedium-sized, freestanding,port city on England's eastern seaboard that he ismost commonly associated (even as 'the hermit ofHull' (Bennett 1994)). However, although the word'Larkinland'"has appeared in the press, it is difficultto discern any significant exploitation of this conceptinHull, though the publication of a Larkin trail inJeanHartley's Philip Larkin's Hull and East Yorkshire(1995) was a gentle nudge in that direction. Yetthere is rarely a media reference to the image of

Hull-a problem that has seriously vexed the cityauthorities in recent years, leading to the launch ofan image enhancement campaign-without someallusion to Larkin or his poetry, with the poet's levelvoice and reclusive nature portrayed as matching theflatness and isolation of the city. Thus the Rough

Guide entry for Hull begins with a reference to Larkinas the 'city's most famous adopted son' and aquotation from Larkin about the flatness of Hull,'a town which reaches few heights, physical or

otherwise' and which is suited to the 'poet's curmudgeonly temperament' (Rough Guide, 1998).2Larkinwas, of course, initiallyan outsider to Hull, and

was born inCoventry ('not the place's fault') poetically recalled in IRemember, IRemember (1954),3the opening verse of which has recently beeninscribed on a plaque on Coventry railway station, inamodest first step by that locality to promote him asa Coventrian (followed by the launch of a LarkinCityCentre Trail).He also studied inOxford and workedin Shropshire, Leicester and Belfast (interestingly all

provincial places), but it is with Hull that he hasbecome identified. Indeed his luminous presencemay have had something to do with the significantdevelopment of the cluster of Hull poets, includingthe likes of Douglas Dunn, Sean O'Brien andAndrew Motion (who became Poet Laureate in1999).4 Dunn and Motion were both colleagues of

Larkin at Hull University.In this paper I xplore the extent towhich Hull can

be identified as Larkinland, focusing upon the senseof place conveyed in his poetry. To what extent wasLarkin responding to Hull as a locale? How doesLarkin talk to the reader about place? Iargue that ahandful of Larkin's poems speak to the reader verydirectly about Hull and its immediate environs,enhancing our awareness of this city. However, thepredominant sense of place conveyed is not specificto any locality. Itmay contribute to our picture ofthe larger place 'provincial England' in a particularphase in its post-war development. Seamus Heaney(1982, p.135) has said that Larkin's poems shouldbe re-titled 'Englanders', while Davie (1973, p.64)concluded that 'there has been the widest agreement ... that Philip Larkin is for good or ill theeffective unofficial laureate of post-1945 England'.

More recently Bradbury (1996) has discussedLarkin's contribution to scenes from provincial life,and argued that Larkin became famous as 'the poetof provincial Englishness'. This claim however maynot bear too close a scrutiny.

As Kong and Tay (1998) have recently noted,geographers have adopted a number of differentapproaches to the relationship between geographyand literature-humanistic, regional, and structural.The humanistic approach, as exemplified by thework of Relph (1976) and Seamon (1981), isparticularly relevant to the poetic portrayal of place, with itsemphasis on the exploration of atmosphere, meaning and symbols and on our personal response toplace. The regional approach has been developed bythose geographers who have turned to the regionalnovel to discover the character, personality andidentity of regions (Kong and Tay 1998); poetrycan also provide opportunities of this nature. Thestructural approach sees the author as the productof a particular society, reflecting and revealing itsideology and values, and emphasizes the importanceof situating any analysis 'within an understanding ofparticular historical and geographical contexts' (Kongand Tay 1998).

This paper is informed by, and attempts to blend,all three approaches. The first part of the analysis


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Reflections on the place of Larkin 21 1draws upon humanistic ideas to explore Larkin'spersonal response to place, and in particular toHull. Later sections of the paper return to theregional approach which characterized an earlierpaper on this topic (Spooner 1992), while the finaldiscussion of Larkin as poet of provincial England issituated within a broader historical and geographicalcontext.

Larkin's personal landscapesFor all of us, personal landscapes are important; thelocal, familiar and ordinary places that make up oureveryday landscape. These provide us with a senseof rootedness and meaning, and some sort ofallegiance to a home territory or common ground,although depending on who we are and where wecome from, they also may give a sense of alienation.Relph (1976), investigating the nature of place as anexperience, concluded that its essential experientialcore is 'insideness'-the degree to which a personbelongs to and associates himself with place. Relphterms the most profound sense of place existentialinsideness, where 'a place is experienced withoutdeliberate and self-conscious reflection, yet is fullwith significances'; the opposite is existentialoutsideness, where the individual feels separate fromplace and alienated from a meaningless environment. Newcomers to a place are existential outsiderswho may become insiders as they develop a constellation of experiential ties, but they can never becomecomplete insiders because their past permeates andcolours the present place (Seamon 1981). However,an individual becomes rooted in a place as he/shedevelops relationships with it-and this 'rootedness'relates not only to a geographical landscape but alsoto a social landscape (in a community), an emotionallandscape (intimacy with individuals) and an intellectual landscape (acquired knowledge and ideas)(Middleton 1981).

Poetry (and other writing) explores the meaningsthat places have and through the gift of imaginationand thewriter's filtered perception add to the enjoyment and awareness of our surroundings. It can thusserve as a means to penetrate the complexities thatunderlie people's relationships with their environment. Literature provides a source of new insightsand assists us to explore the experiential foundationof our world (Pocock 1981).

Philip Larkin saw himself as engaged in his poetryin recreating the familiar, and indeed his dislike fortravel and lack of curiosity about other places has

become mythical (and probably exaggerated).5 In aninterview with ParisReview in 1982 he stated that he

wrote 'to describe recognizable experiences asmemorably as possible' (Larkin1983, 75). This develops an idea he expressed many years earlier: 'Iwriteto preserve things I have seen/thought/felt'.6 Butthings seen or experienced may bear some relationto particular places, whose description becomes partof the product.

Most of his poems are in his words, about'enhancing the everyday' (Brett 1988)-the ordinaryepisodes of life and death, the difficulties of personalrelationships, growing old. 'Nothing, like something,happens anywhere' is an oft-quoted Larkin line(from I Remember, I Remember). In a letter toPatsy Murphy in 1958, he wrote: 'the first thing Iaskof any environment is that it should be ignorable'(Thwaite 1992). Such sentiments appear to supportthe argument of Porteous(1 997) that a sense ofplace is marginal to Larkin's oeuvre and that hischief achievement is a sense of no-place, ofanywhereness.

It is true that the personal landscape of Larkin'spoetry is one that only intermittently betrays itsplacespecificity. The city of Hull in fact never appears byname, nor does the riverHumber (Larkin leaves thisto Douglas Dunn (see below) and to Stevie Smith'No wonder/the river Humber/lies in a silkenslumber').7 There are clear references to the localityinonly a small number of the 80 or so poems Larkin

wrote after moving to Hull in 1955, especially Here(1961), The Whitsun Weddings (1958) and Bridgefor the Living (1975), the last a commissionedcantata celebrating the building of the Humber RoadBridge (and arguably one of his less successfulpoems). Bridge for the Living is the only one of thesethree poems where locations are clearly fixed: 'Tallchurch towers parley airily audible,/Howden andBeverley, Hedon and Patrington', though the reference to 'Where sky and Lincolnshire and water

meet' in The Whitsun Weddings identifies the beginning of the poem's journey unmistakably by the riverHumber, while the title of another poem, FridayNight at theRoyal Station Hotel (1966) also fixes it inspace and time; the hotel of this name burned downin 1990 and has re-opened as the Quality Royal

Hotel. Indeed one might argue that Larkinappears tobe deliberately reticent about place names andshows a preference for withholding specific placereferences, perhaps consciously seeking to universalize the poems. Yet some remain identifiably rootedin local experiences.


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212 SpoonerThe personal landscapes of Larkin's poetry can

therefore be viewed in two ways. The problem is thereader, who may or may not have seen the landscapes on which Larkin has drawn. The reading ofthe poems may or may not therefore involve thereader in the pleasure of recognition (Watson,1989). Literary text-the poems-lies somewherebetween the writer, the individual reader and thelandscape or place itself.Given the relative obscurityof Hull (a recent study by Spooner et al (1995) foundthat the city suffered from being littleknown and thelack of a clear external image), it is clear that mostreaders will not have the benefit of familiarity orrecognition, but these readers can still enjoy abeautifully crafted description as well as morecomplex interpretations.

Those of us who live inHull (insiders) are thus ina sense privileged because of the bonus of recognition. Larkin's imagination and skill with wordsheighten our awareness of our specific surroundings. Thus The Building (1972) is both a poemabout a hospital which can be enjoyed by anyone,and a brilliant evocation of 'the lucent comb' ofHull Royal Infirmary:every time Ipass the infirmarythe lines of The Building are conjured inmy mindand indeed the lines of How (1970), where hedescribes hospitals as 'Lighted cliffs, againstdawns/of days people will die on'. This poem thenadds, 'I can see one from here'-Hull Royal Infirmary was visible from the poet's attic flat in 32Pearson Park, Hull.

To the initiated the picture of Hull and the Humberpresented in a poem likeHere is unmistakable, andthere are elements in the poem distinct to the city forexample 'the slave museum', 'barge-crowded water'.

Wilberforce House in Hull is the slave museum,named after William Wilberforce, one of the city'smost famous sons; it stands alongside the workingriver still used by barges, the river Hull, close to itsconfluence with the Humber, and now the focus ofurban regeneration efforts. The poem thus has addedvalue; our enjoyment of our home territory isenhanced. But the poem isalso a picture of any largetown (at least in provincial, estuarine England) in aparticular period (the 1950s) which can be enjoyedby anyone. Thus Porteous (1997) has argued that'here' to Larkin is also anywhere (and everywhere).

We might compare Drabble's remark (1979) aboutHousman's 'blue-remembered hills'-'at onceunmistakably Shropshire and unmistakably every

where: an inner landscape of universal loss'. Ienjoyed The Shropshire Lad before I aw Shropshire.

Larkin (1971) himself expressed some views onthe significance of 'topographical and period background to a work of literature' in an essay onBetjeman. Betjeman's poetry, of course, is muchmore explicit than Larkin's in its identification ofplaces. The poems are littered with place names. Butas Larkin points out:

'Iknow Brent,Wembley, Northolt and so on are inMiddlesex, because Betjeman tellsme so, but I'veneverbeen thereandwhat I eel about them depends entirelyon what he tellsme about them.... The crucialpoint iswhether the readergets enough out of thework initiallyto make itworth his while solving the references todeepen the enjoyment'.

My argument here is that solving the references totopography is aided by experience of the placedescribed, enhancing the enjoyment, even while thepoetry retains its universal appeal.

Larkin and HullWhy did Ibring you to thisHull,This rancid and unbeautiful surprise of damp andEnglishness?(DouglasDunn, Envoi,1986)

It isperhaps debatable whether Larkin liked Hull. Hispoems about itmight be described as detached. InHere and The Whitsun Weddings the device of thetrain journey increases the sense of detachment;Larkin is a spectator, separated from the landscapeby glass. Larkin claimed that poetry was about 'seeing things as they are', and when he describes placesthe style is sometimes almost documentary; heexpresses a sense of realism rather than emotionalattachment. And as a relative newcomer to the city,an element of 'outsideness' (if not alienation) isretained.Indeed a year before he moved to Hull Larkinprofessed a lack of identity with any particular placein the poem Places, Loved Ones (1954):

No Ihave never foundThe place where Icould sayThis ismy proper groundHere Ishall stay

Ironically he was to spend most of the rest of his lifeHere, in Hull. In his early days in Hull his letters(Thwaite 1992) tended to be derogatory about thecity:


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Reflections on the place of Larkin 213'Iwish Icould thinkof just one nice thing to tellyouabout Hull-oh yes, well, it's very nice and flat forcycling: that'sabout the best I an say' (1 55, to Anselland JudyEgerton):'Hullsmelt revoltingof fish thismorning: my secretarysaid that meant itwas going to rain. And it did.' (1955,to Richard and PatsyMurphy):'Ihave come to the conclusion that the peculiar horror

about Hull is that the smuts-and there are plenty ofthem, drifting around, are fishy...... I've not comeacross this feature anywhere else and Idon't like it.'(1 56, to JudyEgerton):'Hull is like a backdrop for a ballet about industrialismcrushing the naturalgoodness of men, a good swingeing, left-wingballet.' (1957, toRobertConquest):'headline in the Daily Telegraph recently 'Hull insuredfor?30,000'-just about the rightprice, Ithought,buttheywere talking bout a ship' (1958, toPatsyMurphy):

and more neutrally,'Hull'sa difficultplace to drop inon' (1965, to Pamela

Kitson).

This last feature seems to have become in time areason for liking the place, a protection from intruders (Booth 1992). Perhaps the former newcomer toHull was making the transition from existential outsider to insider (Relph 1976) and was becoming'rooted'. Certainly by the 1 70s he was embeddedin the University community, and had mapped outthrough friendships and liaisons a local emotionallandscape. But he also seems to have becomeattuned to the geographical landscape. In 1979 hesaid in an interview with The Observer (Larkin 1983,54) that he liked Hull 'because it's so far away fromeverywhere else. On the way to nowhere, as somebody put it. It's in the middle of this lonely countryand beyond the lonely country there's only the sea. Ilike that'. 'And Hull is an unpretentious place. There'snot so much crap around as there would be inLondon'. On the other hand Poem about Oxford,written for long-time lover Monica Jones in about

1970, carries a hidden implication that Hull (andLeicester) have even less 'tone' than the city hestudied in-'for while the old place hadn't muchtone/Two others we know have got less'. A letter toRobert Conquest in 1968 contains a gripe about 'abloody rainy chilly afternoon in this arsehole of East

Riding'. It appears that familiarity had bred bothaffection and contempt.

Larkin's last prose comments on Hull are contained in the preface he wrote to A Rumoured City:

New Poets from Hull (Dunn 1982). The city is 'asgood a place to write in as any. Better in fact thansome'. The statement is brief but sympathetic intone-Hull is unpretentious, has an end-of-the linesense of freedom, has itsown sudden elegancies; it is'a city that is in the world, yet sufficiently on the edgeof it to have a different resonance'. Perhaps thetransition from outsider to insider had come close tocompletion.

Loved or not, 'here' or 'not here', an evocativepicture of Hull and the Humber estuary ispainted byLarkin in Here and The Whitsun Weddings. Thesepoems however are period pieces-they evoke theHull of 30 years ago ormore (Spooner 1992). 'Smeltthe fishdock'; the smell of the fish dock no longerpervades, as Hull's fishing fleet has declined and thefishmeal factory has been demolished. Both poemsdescribe a train journey, one arriving inand the otherdeparting from Hull, and both convey eloquently tothe reader that sense of remoteness that characterized Hull before modern motorway connections

were constructed and it began to re-image itself asthe 'northern gateway to Europe'.

Here is descriptive of Kingston upon Hull in the1950s and the 1 60s-'a terminate and fishysmelling/Pastoral of ships up streets', populated by'residents from raw estates'. Hull was still in thethroes of reconstruction after horrendous wardamage. ItsOld Town and inner city docks were indecay; its economy stagnant. Motion (1993) suggests that Larkin had arrived ina large city 'at the endof one kind of life,waiting for another to begin'. Infact when Larkin wrote Here (1961), the sharpdecline of the fishing industry and of much of thecity's industry was still to come. IfLarkin returnedtoday he would certainly find it hard to recognize

Hull's revamped 'docklands', which have beentransformed since the mid-1980s.

As Ihave suggested in an earlier more detailedanalysis of the portrait of Hull presented in Here(Spooner, 1992), this poem speaks to at least fourrecognizable themes in the local geography, andsome of these are echoed inTheWhitsun Weddings,Bridge for the Living, and snatches of other poems:

(i) Isolation (the place 'where only salesmen andrelations come' (Here), 'isolate city', 'lonelynorthern daughter' (Bridge for the Living));


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214 Spooner(ii) the spacious estuary ('the widening river's slow

presence' (Here), 'the river's level driftingbreadth' (TheWhitsun Weddings)). The estuary,'where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet',

obviously impressed Larkin, and the emptinessand spaciousness of the landscape ('a big skydrains down the estuary', Livings (1971)) issomething that has struck other writers. Thereare clear affinities with Winifred Holtby'sdescription in South Riding (1936) of 'the wideDutch landscape, haunted by larks and seabirds,roofed by immense pavilions of windy cloud:the miles of brownish-purple shining mud ... thegreat ships gliding up to Kingsport ... the braveinfrequent flowers, the reluctant springs, theloneliness, the silence

...'(iii) the urban-rural contrasts ('gathers to the surpriseof a large town' (Here), 'and out beyond itsmortgaged half-built edges/Fast shadowedwheatfields, running high as hedges' (Here));

(iv) theworking class culture, the social geography ofthe city ('grim head-scarved wives', 'a cut-pricecrowd, urban yet simple' (Here)). Arguably thislast theme is less place specific, though 'residentsfrom, raw estates brought down/The deadstraight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys' is aneat reminder of a form of public transport, thetrolley bus, which ceased to run inHull in 1964,and of the construction of huge blocks of councilhousing on the edge of this, the flattest of allmajor English cities, in the 1950s and 1960s.

Poet of provincial England?In Here and other poems we link to the widerinterpretation of Larkin as a poet of provincial life. Ithas been argued that inmany respects the provincialEngland that isportrayed conveys an atmosphere ofdesolation. Terry Eagleton considered that Larkinbetrays a disaffection that belongs to his (provincial)place and time and an England in acceleratingdecline.9 As a declared anti-modernist, Larkin's disillusion with change is perhaps unsurprising. Thissentiment ismost clearly expressed inGoing, Going(1972), significantly commissioned by the Depart

ment of the Environment,10 where Larkin lamentsthe concreting of our green and pleasant land-'thebleak high rises' (very visible in North Hull fromhis University eyrie) ... 'the whole boiling will bebricked in'. He concludes gloomily 'that will beEngland gone'. This is at variance with his views thatnothing much happens in the provinces-rather they

are being ruined by development. However this isthe only place where England as a geographical orpolitical abstraction features in his poems, and Booth(1992) rightly points out that we should be cautiousto attribute to Larkin (as did Draper (1989)) a 'deeplypatriotic ... feeling for his native country' simply onthe basis of Going, Going or his musings on the

Great War inMCMXIV (1960). Larkin's England isreally not identified clearly as an ideological territory.

The sort of provincial England that Larkin seems tobe regretting inGoing, Going, is a nostalgic ruralone'the shadows, the meadows, the lanes, the guildhalls,the carved choirs...', reminiscent of the sleeksouthern landscape described by George Orwell onhis return from Catalonia in 1938 ... 'railway cuttings smothered inwild flowers, the deep meadows

where the great shining horses browse and meditate,the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, thegreen bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in thecottage gardens'. As Raymond Williams has demonstrated, nostalgia for pastoral golden ages isas old ascivilization itself (Williams, 1973); Orwell and Larkinmay simply be two recent examples in a long line ofEnglish prose and poetry writers who have expresseda concept of the country that is essentially a senti

mental idea stemming from childhood, whatWilliams describes as the endlessly recessive 'happyEnglands of my boyhood'. In the same way, thepopularity of the children's books by Beatrix Potter(and of visits to Hill Top Farm) is argued bySquire(1993) to be linked strongly to nostalgia foran English countryside separate from the city-'OldEngland, the rural and picturesque'. Heaney'scategorization of Larkin (with Ted Hughes andGeoffrey Hill) as one of the 'hoarders and shorers' ofwhat is taken to be the 'realEngland' is expressing asimilar argument; the craving to preserve communal

ways and rituals (show Saturdays, church-going andmarriages atWhitsun) and to confirm a threatenedidentity (Heaney, 1980). He sees Larkin's 'England ofthe mind' as continuous in many ways with theEngland of Rupert Brooke's Grantchester and EdwardThomas's Adlestrop-'an England of customs andinstitutions, industrial and domestic, but also anEngland whose pastoral hinterland is threatened bythe very success of those institutions' (Heaney,1980, 168). There isperhaps here more than nostalgia, an intensified valuing of native English experience, as England's external power and influencediminished.

Orwell also wrote at length and in detail of theindustrial north and its horrors, but Larkin makes


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Reflections on the place of Larkin 21 5relatively littleacknowledgement of this other provincial England.We are afforded only glimpses of thislegendary north inHere, The LargeCool Store (1961)('the weekday world of those/Who leave at dawnlow terraced houses/Timed for factory, yard andsite') and The Explosion, a poignant episode in thelife of a mining village ('on the day of the explosion/shadows pointed towards the pithead:/in the sun theslagheap slept').What we do have-until thewistfulness of Going, Going-is a neutral and observantdescription of an inhabited, even congested, urbanrural England, where farms, hedges and cattle are

mixed with roofs and gardens, chemical froth andabandoned cars (Davie, 1973), as exemplified bythese lines from TheWhitsun Weddings:

Wide farmswent by, short-shadowed cattle, andCanals with floatingsof industrial roth;A hothouse flashed uniquely; hedges dippedAnd rose; and now and then a smell of grassDisplaced the reek of buttoned carriage-clothUntil the next town, new and nondescriptApproached with acres of dismantled cars.

This is the more typical Larkin voice; itwould beunwise perhaps to overstress the different, but forLarkinmore unusual, tone of Going, Going. AlthoughLarkin strongly admired the poetry of Betjeman,which positively brims with nostalgia, most of hisown poetry studiously avoids measuring the presentagainst the past.

There is a temptation to see post-war England aspoetically divided between Betjeman's Metroland inthe suburbanizing south-east, and Larkinland in theperipheral regions, but this temptation should beresisted. Betjeman in any case wrote profusely about

many English places beyond Metroland (notablyCornwall and other parts of the South West),and Betjeman and Larkin are quite different intheir treatment of place and Englishness (Booth,1992). The basis for seeing outer-provincial Englandas Larkinland is tenuous. Larkin's poems arepredominantly personal rather than provincial.

ConclusionItwould appear that the concept of Larkinlandeither as Kingston upon Hull and itshinterland, or asprovincial mid-century England-is a dubious one.Despite the specificities of Here and a few otherpoems which provide added value for those whoknow Hull and EastYorkshire, it isan exaggeration to

describe Larkin as a poet of place. Similarly whileglimpses of provincial English life are provided insome of his poems (good examples are To the Sea(1969), with its evocation of the traditional Englishseaside holiday, Livings and Show Saturday (1973),

with their portrayal of the rural shires) they do notprovide a coherent picture of provincial England orits landscapes.

There appears therefore to be limited scope forthe exploitation of the Larkin heritage in the city of

Kingston upon Hull, and the use of Larkin's poetry incity promotion is likely to be constrained by hisambivalent attitude towards the city (reflecting hisexperience as a newcomer not able or perhapswishing to become the complete insider), the lack ofglamour in his portrayal of it, and the sparseness ofspecific identifiable references in the poetry. Yet thecity of Hull might certainly make more of its Larkinconnections as the place that the poet lived and

worked in (the shrine concept). There is at presentlittle acknowledgement of Larkin's presence, save on

Hull University's campus, and even there it ismuted.We await 'theWorld of Philip Larkin'.

AcknowledgementsAn earlierversion of thispaper was presented at the NewLarkins orOld Conference at Hull University in 1997. Iamgrateful to participants at the conference, and to DavidSibley and Catherine Spooner, for theircomments on thatversion.

Notes1 Independent on Sunday 15 November 1995

('Becalmed inLarkinland' y StephenMcClarence).2 Other recent examples include a description of Hull in

TheGuardian as 'feted glumly by PhilipLarkinand leftbehind by the famous' (16 October 1997), whileaccording to The Independent 'the city'smost famousresidentwas the master of gloom, Philip Larkin' (10November 1998).

3 References to individualpoems in this paper indicatethe completion date recorded in Larkin'sCollectedPoems.

4 See, forexample, the anthology,A RumouredCity:NewPoets from Hull, edited by Dunn and with a preface byLarkin.

5 Larkin'saverred antipathy to travel isoften associatedwith his remark that he wouldn't mind going to China ifhe could come back the same day, but Alan Bennetthaswittily pointed out that the self-proclaimed 'hermitof Hull' actually often travelled in England at least, withfrequent journeys to London, Oxford, and MonicaJones'Northumberlandcottage, and to collect a sackful


9/9

216 Spoonerof honours and seven honorary degrees-'he's aboutas big a recluse as the late Bubbles Rothermere'(Bennett 1994, 368).

6 From 'Statement',1955, collected inRequiredWriting.7 The line is from the poem The RiverHumber. StevieSmithwas born inHull, butmoved to PalmersGreen,

Londonwhen she was 3 years old (MacGibbon, 1978).8 Winifred Holtby was brought up in the East Riding of

Yorkshire and her last novel, South Riding, drawsstrongly on her experience of local landscapes.Kingsport, for example, is a thinlydisguised Kingstonupon Hull.

9 This view was expressed in a Channel 4 televisionprogramme, in1992, 'PhilipLarkin, ' accuse'-Larkin asthe poet of 'a society inaccelerating industrial ecline,bereft of its imperialglory,with no big brave causesleft'.

10 This poem isdated in itsreference to 'greyarea grants',a feature of British regional policy in the 1 70s,whereby industrywas encouraged to relocate to 'grey'or IntermediateAreas, which were struggling to compete with the more seriously depressed 'black'Development Areas where generous financial incentives

were already available. Hull was and still is an Intermediate Area but the term 'grey area' has faded fromuse.

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London)Brett R L (1988) 'Philip Larkin in Hull' in Hartley G (ed)

Philip Larkin 1922-85; a tribute (The Marvell Press,London), 100-14

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Dunn D (ed) (1982) A rumouredcity:new poets fromHull(Bloodaxe, Newcastle upon Tyne)

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