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Larkin's blues: jazz and modernism - Philip Larkin
Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1996 by B.J. Leggett
Larkin's story revolves around a gap in his jazz career that is both the problem to be explained - something missing from his appreciation of jazz - and the explanation - a chronological gap during which he is divorced from jazz: "on leaving Oxford I suffered a gap in my jazz life . . ." (AWJ 17). The explanation is disappointingly simple; in beginning his career as a librarian in 1943, Larkin lived in a series of lodgings where he was forbidden to play his gramophone. Since jazz, unlike poetry, cannot be enjoyed in silence and moreover depends notoriously on the individual performance - "it is not 'Weary Blues' we want but Armstrong's 1927 'Weary Blues'" (AWJ 60) - Larkin, separated from his records and without access to new performances, lost touch with jazz for almost five years. In 1945, for example, he reports to Amis that he has received for his birthday a copy of "Jazz Me Blues" by the Lewis-Parnell Jazzmen: "This is I believe (though only having heard it once I can't be sure) one of the best records ever made in England. I suppose the best was 'Waltzing the Blues'. . . . But as I have no gramophone here all this is rather academic" (Letters 107). When he was reunited with his collection in 1948, he "was content to renew acquaintance with it and to add only what amplified or extended it along existing lines . . ." (AWJ 17-18). He was further isolated from contemporary jazz by his resistance to the long-playing record, introduced in the mid-1950s: "it seemed a package deal, forcing you to buy bad tracks along with good at an unwontedly-high price" (AWJ 18). He was vaguely aware of something now called modern jazz: "What I heard on the wireless seemed singularly unpromising, but I doubt if I thought it would ever secure enough popular acceptance to warrant my bothering about it" (AWJ 18).
Uncannily, Larkin's gap after Oxford in 1943 was being duplicated at almost exactly the same time by a gap in jazz created by the American Federation of Musicians' ban on recorded music imposed in July of 1942. "It is a significant date," Larkin says in a review of a jazz discography. The disruption "closed the era of swing music. When the ban was lifted two years later, jazz had split into what seemed two irreconcilable camps, be-bop and trad revival, and things were never quite the same again" (AWJ 161). Larkin's implication is that the coincidence of the two gaps caused him to miss the advent of modern jazz, so that when he began reviewing jazz records for the Daily Telegraph in 1961, he was "patently unfitted to do so" and took on the job only because of the depth of his ignorance of the new jazz: "I didn't believe jazz itself could alter out of all recognition any more than the march or the waltz could. It was simply a question of hearing enough of the new stuff . . ." (AWJ 18-19). But when the records arrive, the extent of the gap in Larkin's jazz is revealed:
. . . the eagerness with which I played them turned rapidly to astonishment, to disbelief, to alarm. I felt I was in some nightmare, in which I had confidently gone into an examination hall only to find that I couldn't make head or tail of the questions. It wasn't like listening to a kind of jazz I didn't care for - Art Tatum, shall I say, or Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers. It wasn't like listening to jazz at all. (AWJ 19)
