Larkin's blues: jazz and modernism - Philip Larkin

We too may wonder what part of Larkin's poetic assumptions and practices came from his musical addictions. The question of the significance of jazz in the Larkin canon - does jazz haunt Larkin's poems in the way that nature haunts Wordsworth's? - encompasses too many other issues to be tackled in the space of an essay, but one of these issues, the confluence of jazz, poetry, and modernism in what Larkin called his "jazz life" (AWJ 17), invites a more circumscribed reading, and I want to examine it as a preface to the larger question. I want to look particularly at Larkin's attitude toward jazz as a measure of all the arts - the sense we have in reading his letters and criticism that Larkin's music is often the perspective from which all else is seen - and I want to examine in some detail the odd pairing of jazz and literary modernism in his collection of jazz reviews.

"The art-form I associate with Philip at Oxford was not any sort of literature but jazz," Kingsley Amis writes ("Oxford and After" 24), and others who remember Larkin at Oxford make the same association. Nick Russel recalls that in their first meeting Larkin immediately abandoned his mission (drumming up support for the university English Club) when he spotted on Russel's table a copy of Hugues Panassie's Hot Jazz. Russel also recalls that Larkin had the most remarkable ear of the dozen or so undergraduates who belonged to the unofficial jazz club: "he could distinguish accurately between Johnny Dodds and Albert Nichols, say, or King Oliver and Armstrong" (83). Larkin appeared to Russel to make little distinction in value between discussions of the work of Sidney Bechet and Pee Wee Russell and discussions of Lawrence, Joyce, and Yeats (83).

Among those who belonged to the unofficial club at Oxford, jazz soon became the language into which literature and the other arts were translated. The Romantics became "Bill Wordsworth and his Hot Six - Wordsworth (tmb) with 'Lord' Byron (tpt), Percy Shelley (sop), Johnny Keats (alto and clt), Sam 'Tea' Coleridge (pno), Jimmy Hogg (bs), Bob Southy (ds)" ("Oxford and After" 26). Larkin and his circle applied to jazz the kind of scrutiny that at another time would have been given to poetry:

I suppose we devoted to some hundred records that early anatomizing passion normally reserved for the more established arts. "It's the abject entreaty of that second phrase. . . ." "What she's actually singing is ick-sart-mean. . . ." "Russell goes right on up to the first bar of Waller. You can hear it on Nick's pick-up." "Isn't it marvellous the way Bechet . . ." "Isn't it marvellous the way the trumpet . . ." "Isn't it marvellous the way Russell . . ." (Introduction to Jill 15)

That a music so exotic - a "form of Afro-American popular music that flourished between 1925 and 1945," as Larkin defined it (AWJ 246) - should have spoken directly to an Oxford undergraduate perhaps requires explanation, especially in light of Larkin's later statement that he was "not fond of exotics (botanical term meaning introduced from abroad) . . ." (AWJ 197). Both Larkin and Amis (who shared Larkin's passion for jazz at Oxford) have offered explanations that arrive at similar conclusions. The appeal of jazz, in Larkin's view, was precisely that it was not foreign; it was something his generation took as their own because they had discovered it for themselves. One's parents knew nothing about it, "[n]o one you knew liked it" (AWJ 15), and it provided a private language that those outside the unofficial club had difficulty understanding. "For us, jazz became a part of the private joke of existence, rather than a public expertise," Larkin says of his group at Oxford; "expressions such as 'combined pimp and lover' and 'eating the cheaper cuts of pork' (both from a glossary on 'Yellow Dog Blues') flecked our conversations cryptically . . ." (AWJ 17). More than that, it was an unpretentious art built on a simple and direct emotional appeal that did not depend on an extensive musical education. Jazz was a "form ideally suited to those with enough - but no more - music in them to respond intensely to a few strong simple effects," Amis says ("Farewell to a Friend" 4). Larkin's explanation contains an implicit recognition of what should have been the distance between American musician and English audience: