Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Philip Larkin?
This is another one I had with me on my tour of duty.
You must have had a very heavy rucksack carrying all these books around.
I was the commander of the unit so it was all possible. I especially like ‘High Windows’. I really like his non-religious spirituality; that’s what’s remarkable about his poems. You don’t have to agree with it, but you can look at things from another angle and that was important for me because I was in such a strange environment. So thinking as a poet in that environment helped me a lot. I would read in my bedroom at night, first in a tent and then later in rebuilt barracks.
How did Larkin’s poetry shed light on the reality of war?
It’s about empathy. Well, he writes about ordinary things but he shows that you can look at it in another way than normal people do.‘High Windows’ is my favourite. The last stanza is really beautiful.
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
And the first stanza of ‘This Be The Verse’:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
In my circumstances I became an army officer to be a hero but perhaps I was a writer from the beginning.
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As a Dutch army captain Arnold was commanding officer of the unit that secured Tuzla airbase in Bosnia for incoming UN aid in 1994, a year before the overthrow of the enclave Srebrenica in the former Yugoslavia. His acclaimed debut novel, De koning van Tuzla (King of Tuzla), and his collection of poetry, Yugoslav Requiem, are now available in English. His new novel, Angel, will be available in English later this year.
Beauty in literature is as a good a segue as any to Philip Larkin. Your next book is his Collected Poems. What do you love about Larkin, and how has he influenced your writing?
I have a careless theory that the poetry of Larkin has had a profound effect on the prose writing of my generation. There are many writers of my age who are steeped in Larkin and, like me, incorporate the cadences of his lines, often without being aware of it. His poems are part of my mental furniture. Yesterday I slipped outside to get a sandwich at lunchtime, the sun was out, I looked at some rowan trees across the street, and I thought – ah yes! – ‘The trees are coming into leaf / Like something almost being said’. That’s Larkin’s poem ‘The Trees’. It has some almost Shakespearian lines: ‘Yet still the unresting castles thresh / In fullgrown thickness every May’.
On that note, I want to ask about style. I would describe Larkin’s style as conversational, but also with extreme precision and clarity of reflection, and he engages very directly with everyday experience. Prose and poetry aside, do you model your style on his at all?
Well Larkin’s style is deceptively conversational; narratively, it’s extremely and artfully compressed. Perhaps that’s why prose writers admire him so much. T S Eliot said that aesthetic revolutions in poetry are about the return to the rhythms of everyday speech, and Larkin fulfils those terms with clarity and restrained dark humour.
How does this affect my prose? There’s something in those cadences. There are times when I look back over some piece of work and I think, ‘I know where that rhythm comes from – it’s something out of “The Whitsun Weddings”, or out of “Self’s the Man”.’ It can be something so small, like a sentence that seems to miss its final beat in order to deliver something a little flat. There’s one other element too – a kind of morose scepticism, Larkin’s reluctance to be moved. And when he is moved, as he famously is in ‘High Windows’, the effect is all the more powerful.
Martin Amis and I used to meet up before going out in the evenings in the 70s, and spend an hour downing a bottle of wine and reading aloud and celebrating Larkin. I’m sure Martin would also acknowledge the curious power of Larkin in his work.
In terms of theme, do you draw from Larkin also?
Not directly. But I think that ‘Aubade’ is the greatest poem about death, from an atheist perspective, that has ever been written. And every writer ends up writing about death. Unless you cling to some infantile hopes of an afterlife, how can you dodge stark lines like ‘Not to be here, / Not to be anywhere, / And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true’.
Every writer also has to write about sex at some point. Your novella On Chesil Beach seems to have an implicit epigraph in Larkin’s famous line, ‘Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three’.
Well I avoided actually using that. I thought it was a bit too obvious. Every reviewer quoted it for me. I don’t think I would go to Larkin for sex, as it were, largely because he had such a tortured relationship to it. He writes ‘no more…sweating in the dark’, but I think perhaps he did a lot of sweating in the dark: in love again, in bed wanking at half past three. We were a luckier generation than his – we allowed ourselves, or history allowed us, far more freedom and delight and mutuality than poor Larkin ever found in his lifetime.
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Ian McEwan is a widely acclaimed British novelist. His first collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, came out in 1976. Since then, he has written 11 novels, as well as screenplays and librettos. His novels have won multiple awards, including the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1998 for Amsterdam, and have been adapted for film several times – most recently Atonement in 2007. His latest book, Solar, is a satirical novel focusing on climate change.
