Brokeback Mountain etc.
In the latest NYRB, Daniel Mendelsohn has an excellent review (there are only two or three other critics I know who are so consistently incisive and lucid) of the film ‘Brokeback Mountain.’ In the same issue of the NYRB, J.M. Coetzee reviews Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores. Coetzee’s piece is noteworthy because, apart from examining the novel in relation to Marquez’s earlier work, he provides a very fine reading of its relationship to other writings, extending from Cervantes to Yasunari Kawabata. (NYRB often publishes its reviews later than other publications. None of the earlier reviews of this book managed to convey a fraction of the insight and erudition that Coetzee packs into his writing.) The NYRB also has a review-essay by John Banville entitled “Homage to Philip Larkin.” Banville manfully defends Larkin against the dunces: “There was much ugliness in Philip Larkin’s character, but what mattered most to him was beauty, and the making of beautiful objects. In this lay his greatness.” Maybe. It is more interesting to pay attention to the work itself and the ways in which it is familiar with corruption. Banville is better when he seems to relish Larkin’s wit and virulence. May I draw your attention, dear reader, to footnote 3, where this brief, previously unpublished poem of Larkin’s is quoted in full:
ADMINISTRATION
Day by day your estimation clocks up
Who deserves a smile and who a frown,
And girls you have to tell to pull their socks up
Are those whose pants you’d most like to pull down.
Great to see your blog. Hope you have time to update it now and then. Cheers!
Comment by Zafar Anjum — February 6, 2006 @ 3:22 am
Dear Amitava
Hi. You say:
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“It is more interesting to pay attention to the work itself and the ways in which it is familiar with corruption.”
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What does this mean?
What is the corruption that you sense Larkin is familiar with?
I wonder whether you mean corruption in the sense of the corrupting influence of time that we get a sense of when we read his work, the lament, the anxiety of life passing him by (Dockery and Son) the corruption of the flesh by aging - his elegaic poems like Aubade and An Arundel Tomb. (The debate about his politics or prejudice is just trivia.)
After being lead to the John Banville piece by your link, I have been reading Cut Grass closely several times, a poem I had read over carelessly in the past, and even there you can see this sensibility:
Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death
It dies in the white hours
Even in such a small space we get this corruption, decomposition - and the line:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale
It is just so beautiful, and beautifuly sad - the dying breath of helpless fragile stalks of grass. See, Larkin could see the pity and
sadness in small things. There is another poem, I forget the name, in which he describes the scene in a provincial English seaside town — dying, desolate, vandalised posters, neglected, corrupted by time - he notes these things with a gaze that can seem blank, that can seem disengaged, with what some people may say is part of his English reserve - but it is in fact a deep melancholy and tenderness.
Selena
Comment by Selena — February 6, 2006 @ 10:25 am