LARKIN ABOUT today, writing this while reading that, that being Larkin’s letters and some of his glummer poems, while thinking about Christmas stuff(ing) and trying not to overhear Bing, Dean, Mariah, and Vince Guaraldi looping endlessly up the stairs while KNOWING how utterly inappropriate Goya is at this time of year, esp. after all the hits we’ve taken & & & while all the while trying to endeavour to make more sense of more senseless things, a dangerous pastime, especially with grim old Phil Larkin lurking among the “sullen fleshy inarticulate men, stockbrokers, sellers of goods... men whose first coronary is coming like Christmas; who drift, loaded helplessly with commitments and obligations and necessary observances, into the darkening avenues of age and incapacity, deserted by everything that once made life sweet.”

'You look as if you wished the place in Hell,'//My friend said, 'judging from your face.' 'Oh well,//I suppose it's not the place's fault,' I said.//'Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.'

A fuck-up for sure, old Phil, a drunken, abusive, racist bigot sexist wanker blah blah with, fortunately for him, the poor rotten-begotten-every-evening-competely-sotten bastard, his old mum and dad to sop up most of the blame.

They may not mean to, but they do.//They fill you with the faults they had//And add some extra, just for you.

Old Phil didn’t have kids, though, did he? They’ll do you a doozy.

"Until I grew up I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn't like. Once you started meeting grown-ups life was much pleasanter. Children are very horrible, aren't they? Selfish, noisy, cruel, vulgar little brutes." – Larkin’s interview in The Observer, 1979.

2.

“What an awful time of year this is! Just as one is feeling that if one can just hold on if it just won’t get any worse, then all this Christmas idiocy bursts upon one like a slavering Niagara of nonsense and completely wrecks one’s entire frame.” — Larkin’s letter to Judy Egerton, December 1958.

“The thought of Christmas depresses me… Every year I swear I’ll never endure it again, & make you promise to be sensible, & now here you are talking about duck again, just as if I had never shouted and got drunk & broken the furniture out of sheer rage at it all… To hell with Christmas. Let us have peace, & not all this blasted cooking and eating (and washing up!)” — Larkin’s letter to his mum, November 1971.

Okay, got those off the chest. Time for cheer. Who doesn’t love Christmas? We’ve so much to be thankful for, especially now that the godawful King’s Singers are no longer lofting bemoaningly out of the kitchen speaker. And just look at all the delicious Christmas mince and manna!

But just as I’m about to don me now here comes scroogy old Phil again:

Man hands on misery to man.//It deepens like a coastal shelf.//Get out as early as you can,//And don’t have any kids yourself.

Jesus.

Isolate rather this element / That spreads through other lives like a tree
And sways them on in a sort of sense
And say why it never worked for me.
Something to do with violence
A long way back, and wrong rewards,
And arrogant eternity.

And that damn duck again: “I’m afraid I was not a very nice creature when at home. I wish I could explain the very real rage & irritation I feel: probably only a psychiatrist could do so. It may be something to do with never having got away from home. Or it may be my concern for you & blame for not doing more for you cloaking itself in anger. I do appreciate your courageous struggle to keep going in the old way, and am aware of your kindnesses – I did enjoy the duck, and all the other things – but I am worried about how long you can carry on without help.” – Larkin’s letter to his mum, December 1970.

Fuck duck. We’re having turkey.

Dinde Noir de Gers, Marché Popincourt, 5 k, 22€/k.

3.

“From St. John’s, news of another garden party (at the last I was so boozed I made advances to someone’s wife, pissed in a bath, & read the opening paragraph of The Wings of the Dove) in June. From the grave - how many miles? Brrr.” – Larkin’s letter to his friend Patsy Murphy, January 1958.

She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. It was at this point, however, that she remained; changing her place, moving from the shabby sofa to the armchair upholstered in a glazed cloth that gave at once⁠—she had tried it⁠—the sense of the slippery and of the sticky. She had looked at the sallow prints on the walls and at the lonely magazine, a year old, that combined, with a small lamp in coloured glass and a knitted white centrepiece wanting in freshness, to enhance the effect of the purplish cloth on the principal table; she had above all, from time to time, taken a brief stand on the small balcony to which the pair of long windows gave access. The vulgar little street, in this view, offered scant relief from the vulgar little room; its main office was to suggest to her that the narrow black ho...

Folly

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