'High Windows' - Philip Larkin's Sleight-of-Hand

 

A lockdown walk across Walthamstow Wetlands at the weekend - the sky blue, the light pin-sharp - caught me thinking about the final stanza of Philip Larkin's 'High Windows'. The poem might well have been on my mind anyway, as carefree younger people, less at risk from Covid and less inclined to give you a wide, socially-distanced berth, conjured up the inter-generational differences that the poem's earlier lines pick out. Rather than thoughts of 'kids fucking' and pills and diaphragms, I gazed on curiously at faces that probably hadn't bothered to contemplate the possibility of being hooked up to a ventilator in an ICU.     

Woman at a Window, Caspar David Friedrich (1822)

Returning from my walk, I reached for my Larkin and read it afresh. What struck me first, as with many of Larkin's poem, was the tone. Even if you aren't reading a poem out loud, your inner voice - certainly more so than with prose - makes each line audible. And the voice that I hear uttering the poem's italicised lines, the thoughts of a phantom bystander present in Larkin's youth, has a strong Northern - possibly Yorkshire - accent.      

'.... That'll be the life;

No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide   

What you think of the priest. He

And his lot will all go down the long slide   

Like free bloody birds.' 

Perhaps it's the 'bloody' that does it. Or the classic Northern segregation at play in 'his lot'. It forces you towards abruptness, almost coaxing you into using a glottal stop. (My voice also drops the 'h' in 'hell', but then my voice always drops the 'h'). Some of this might have much to do with the expletive that we've already encountered in the second line: 'When I see a couple of kids / and guess he's fucking her'. Larkin's glossing of the poem might also be leading us north of Watford. He talks of that verb 'fucking' as being 'another Hoggart word ...  

'Indeed, the very Open Sesame of Hoggartism. Good job nobody reads anything. "Lackeen's usin' language!"' 

The appearance of that imaginary critic - more concerned with the 'effing and jeffing' than the import of the poem - clinches it. Try hearing anything other than a broad Northern accent now. Although, before I get carried away with my close-reading skills, I should confess that I initially thought Larkin's gloss on Hoggartism was referring to the more bawdy qualities of the 18th-century English painter. But no, that's of course, William Hogarth. Larkin is in fact referring to Richard Hoggart, the literary critic and the man called by the defence as an expert witness in the obscenity trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover. His testimony that words such as 'fucking' and 'cunt' were exactly the type of words that he heard on a building site on his way to court that morning, indicates what Larkin is getting at with 'Hoggartism'.  

Philip Larkin in 1953

'Hoggartism' and 'Hogarthian aside', what that italicised section of speech does, then, is set up the lofty uplift towards the final stanza, the one that was occupying my thoughts. The 'Larkinesque sleight-of-hand' let’s call it, a kind of reverse bathos, rising from the soiled commonplace towards the ecstatic and sublime. 'And immediately … 

'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.'

Words - sullied, inadequate, vulgar words - are jettisoned and instead we get that vast, unfathomable 'deep blue air' (an allusion to Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out apparently), and we're both soothed and terrified as we gaze out through those 'high windows'. Incidentally, the title, given to the collection that bears its name, is a reference to Larkin's various abodes. 'I hate living on the ground floor … all my poems were written on the top floor.' Indeed, a high window seems to have been essential for the poet's muse. I'm jealous; I've always hankered for a top floor room, but, aside from the two-floor houses of my childhood, I've usually been on the ground floor, or even in the basement.

'High Windows' isn't a great Larkin poem. What it is, though, is interesting, in that it is a perfect exemplar of the poet's method. It's also a work that throws up what I've increasingly come to see as the dilemma that faces all those who love his work. We love the lines much more than we dislike the man, a bigoted, porn-addled, misogynist. His greatest poem - one that is difficult to read, in that it is more terrifying than any horror film - is 'Aubade'. Reluctantly, more so as you age, you return to it over and over again, and sense its growing pertinence, and the unremarked upon consolation of words. It also stifles the thought that crossed my mind, of just why Larkin wanted that high window to gaze out from: to take comfort in the depths of that blue, atheist void, perhaps? 'Nothing' lies out there, and it is 'nowhere and endless', but surely it will also be painless and free from care? 'Aubade' doesn't give us the answer that we long for: 

'Specious stuff that says No rational being

Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing 

That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, 

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.'