“One is constantly conscious of trying to measure the effects of what you have written on someone starting from cold who may not have the experience you have had. This may not sound very significant, but it does cut out an extraordinary number of things which are quite common in other poetry. It cuts out obscurity, it cuts out references to literature and mythology which you cannot be sure they know. It means you are writing fairly simply in the language of ordinary people, using the accepted sense of words and using the accepted grammatical constructions and so on. That is my own practice.”
- Philip Larkin
Larkin's critique of modernism in the arts
"Wwhether perpetrated by Parker, Pound, or Picasso:... it helps us neither to enjoy nor endure. It will divert us as long as we are prepared to he mystified or outraged, but maintains its hold only by being more mystifying and more outrageous: it has no lasting power … in a way it’s a relief: if jazz records are to be one long screech, if painting is to be a blank canvas, if a play is to be two hours of sexual intercourse performed coram populo, then let’s get it over, the sooner the better, in the hope that human values will then be free to reassert themselves.”
Pretty vicious subtweet of TS Eliot in that first quote.
ReplyDeleteI wonder where Larkin's mistrust of the mystifying and outrageous got him. Did he like the Beatles? Abba?
I think his taste stopped with jazz. Not sure, though.
DeleteI feel like he might have disliked the Beatles through association with the whole "sexual intercourse was invented in 1963" idea - his resentment about having been born too early to have the free and easy relation to shagging that the 1960s generation did. Not that he seemed to lack for girlfriends - he had two on the go at once, didn't he?
That whole thing that rock'n'roll is where explicit sexuality enters pop culture seems like a load of bollocks to me. There was that huge boom for Latin American rhythms, very suggestive and lower-half-of-body activating. Belly to belly dancing. "Si Si, No No". Plus Hollywood films are drenched with the stuff, aren't they?
Yes! That Larkin line definitely reveals more about him than it does about society in general. And, to be fair to him, I think he understands that.
ReplyDeleteAs you say, popular culture has been powered by more-or-less explicit sexuality for as long as it has existed. Jazz is a cognate for "jizz" and "jism". The waltz comes from the High German "walzen", meaning "turning", or more suggestively to modern ears, "rolling" or "grinding". And Morris dancing is positively filthy...
A fascinating discovery from the Wikipedia entry for Morris dancing: the name most likely comes from "Moorish" dancing. It was an English interpretation of African and Arab dances, probably passed on through Spanish and Italian performers. Cross-cultural fertilisation even in the Middle Ages!
Oh yes, the waltz was a dance that began with the lower orders, didn't it? It only became a refined, genteel thing later on.
DeleteI did not know that about Morris dancing - amazing! Yes people were moving about across Europe - migrating, trading... bringing spices and fashions, artistic and culinary practices.
I am reading a book about the early traditions of British Isles music (the thesis argument is that the UK was totally ripe for rock'n'roll and for having the major role it did in rock's evolution, simply through indigenous traditions of song and so forth going back centuries. So it wasn't a case of total alien invasion from America that ignited the whole thing out of nothing). Haven't got very far into the book but there's a bit about how just one particular troubadour of European background in the entourage of Mary Queen of Scots brought a bunch of things to do with harmony and melodic ornaments that then got assimilated into Scottish balladry, merging with the existing traits. That resulting hybrid then travelled across to Appalachia within a century or two.
Sounds interesting! That thesis certainly makes sense: when you hear Appalachian folk and bluegrass, the similarities to British and Irish folk music are often very clear. All those fiddles and mandolins!
DeleteGreat stuff here on the waltz from The Times in 1816:
Delete"We remark with pain that the indecent foreign dance called the Waltz was introduced (we believe, for the first time) at the English Court on Friday last. This is a circumstance which ought not to be passed over in silence. National morals depend on national habits: and it is quite sufficient to cast one’s eyes on the voluptuous intertwining of the limbs, and close compressure of the bodies, in this dance, to see that it is far indeed removed from the modest reserve which has hitherto been considered distinctive of English females." Sounds very familiar!
Source: https://branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=cheryl-a-wilson-the-arrival-of-the-waltz-in-england-1812