This time last year, Hullfire reported on how it had been twenty-four years since the death of Philip Larkin, and thanks to some sterling investigative journalism, deduced that “this means 2010 is the twenty fifth year”.
Well that date is nigh upon us, so, once more, Hullfire will look at the death of our nation’s favourite poet.
Larkin’s philosophies and myriad achievements throughout his life are far too extensive to be done justice, fully, within this page. However, there is one event fitting perfectly within December’s ‘theme’, regarding the poet’s death, that is worth dwelling upon:
In a recent article for The Sunday Times, Andrew Motion, a former poet laureate and close friend to Larkin, recalls not only Larkin’s immense dread of death but also, his plans once faced with the inevitable:
“When I see the Grim Reaper coming up the front path I’ll go to the bottom of the garden, like Thomas Hardy, and have a bonfire.”
Larkin seemed to approach ‘death’ with reverence and fear within his poesy, addressing humanities wanton refutation (but inevitable acceptation) of it: “The costly aversion of the eyes from death – Beneath it all desire of oblivion runs”, and yet, in many respects, addressed it himself with a startlingly straightforward manner. The bonfire suggests that with the death of the poet, must come the destruction of his own work. One cannot, or perhaps should not, live without the other.
Whilst Larkin’s dairies were indeed shredded and burnt, destroying a potential insight into Larkin’s innermost and inexorably sinister thoughts, the great body of his work were, as it were, rescued from the pyre. It turned out Larkin had destroyed none of the work he had threatened to. Perhaps he hoped he would recover from the cancer that was to eventually kill him. Perhaps he felt that by lighting the match he was accepting his fate, gently going into that good night: a placidity, it seems, that would not have sat comfortably with him.
The point, however, remains, and it is a beautiful one at that: even in the face of assured destruction, even in the light of death itself, life ensued. Larkin’s apparently straightforward instruction upon his death, to destroy all unpublished works, was, by a stroke of serendipity, complicated. The poet’s will was viewed, in legalese, as ‘repugnant’. This allowed the literary executors to interpret the will themselves and do what they saw fit with this body of unpublished work. They saw fit to preserve it.
December marks the end of a twenty-five week commemoration of Larkin’s work as a poet, jazz critic, librarian and novelist. The celebration will culminate with the unveiling of a bronze statue of Philip Larkin by the Lord Mayor of Hull at twelve-noon on the 2nd of the month, exactly twenty-five years since the poet’s death.
The commemoration, ‘Larkin 25’, has already hosted some incredible talent over these past weeks: be it the amateur recitals from Hull’s finest at the Hull Truck Theatre, the ‘Colloquy of Poets’, having recently taken place on campus, or indeed the plague of fibre-glass toads spread throughout the city – Hull has already witnessed so much. Though this final event, the unveiling, will be the most long lasting, permanent, homage to Philip Larkin. Through generous donations from the ‘Philip Larkin Society’, as well as the public at large, we have all been given a landmark moment: one that will unite people with a universal pride behind the man, the city, and the art.
Perhaps, therefore, Larkin, a man infamous for his misanthropy, a man of reticence and restraint, whilst writing on the fear of dying and its perpetual renewal, be it through politics, cinema, art or philosophy, has ironically demonstrated that there will always be a chance for life to persevere. Though “unresting death [is] a whole day nearer now”, we have an inner strength to deal with it, some resiliance, “something sufficiently toad-like squats within [us], too.”
By: Esther Lawrence
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