Book contents
4 - The Whitsun Weddings
Summary
Since Philip Larkin never married, and never owned a house until he was over 50, he spent most of his adult life in rented accommodation. This began in Wellington, where his first lodgings were small, chilly, and lacking in privacy; as he grew more prosperous his lodgings naturally became more spacious, culminating in the comfortable flat in Pearson Park where he lived for eighteen years; but he never lost the feeling of rootlessness, and out of it came one of his bleakest and most powerful poems, ‘Mr Bleaney’:
‘This was Mr Bleaney's room. He stayed
The whole time he was at the Bodies, till
They moved him.’ Flowered curtains, thin and frayed,
Fall to within five inches of the sill,
Whose window shows a strip of building land,
Tussocky, littered… .
The clinical, appraising glance that registers the expected drawbacks (‘Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook | Behind the door, no room for books or bags’) shows us that the speaker is all too familiar with life in hired rooms, and the moment of decision (‘I'll take it ’) is not heroic but a tired acceptance of the inevitable. ‘So it happens that I lie |Where Mr Bleaney lay’; and the rest of the poem sets forth the poet's feelings of frustration by means of a speculation about the predecessor he never met. ‘I know his habits’, he tells us, learnt obviously from the talkative landlady; then he lists these habits in all their emptiness, and concludes:
But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
And shivered without shaking off the dread
That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don't know.
This is a masterly use of syntax. Do these frightening thoughts belong to Mr Bleaney, or to the poet? The externals of a person's life are available to observation, the feelings are known only to himself; so we would naturally assume this chilling account of futility to be an account of how the poet himself feels – except that he is careful not to say so.
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- Philip Larkin , pp. 21 - 24Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2004