Larkin's blues: jazz and modernism - Philip Larkin

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1996 by B.J. Leggett

. . . those white and coloured Americans, Bubber Miley, Frank Teschmacher, J. C. Higginbotham, spoke immediately to our understanding. Their rips, slurs and distortions were something we understood perfectly. This was something we had found for ourselves, that wasn't taught at school (what a prerequisite that is of nearly everything worthwhile!), and having found it, we made it bear all the enthusiasm usually directed at more established arts. (AWJ 16)

A. T. Tolley characterizes Larkin's love of jazz as a kind of "cultural iconoclasm," and he observes, correctly, that "the sense that one valued something, not because it was felt to be culturally important, but because it spoke to one with immediacy, was to remain for him a touchstone of the arts" (2). Amis agrees that the appeal of jazz lay somehow in its lack of cultural authority, the fact that its commentary had not yet been written. His generation was the first to encounter it, and there were no precedents. Jazz was a "world of romance," he writes, "with no guide, no senior person to point the way" ("Farewell to a Friend" 4).

For Larkin, conversant with this world, everything from painting to a sore throat had its jazz analogy or allusion. He writes to Jim Sutton, his fellow jazz enthusiast at King Henry VIII School, Coventry, now an art student: "There is great hope for your painting. Look at Armstrong's crude beginnings & his lyric height. Or even the third-stage crudeness of Pee Wee Russell . . ." (Letters 18). Another letter to Sutton mentions "a cough & generally Armstrongish throat" which is "fine for bawling blues with ('Ah'm sorry babe . . . sorry to mah heart . . .')" (Letters 7). An early spring day is "as wonderful as hearing Earl Hines after a YMCA piano-basher" (Letters 114), and Auden's integrated style in Paid on Both Sides is "like Teschmaker's clarinet or Pee Wee Russell" (Life 75). The blues form especially was adaptable to any sort of utterance, even the apology to Sutton in Italy that a previous letter would be late because it was too heavy to be sent airmail:

'Sent you a letter, but it had to go by boat I said I sent you a letter, but it had to go by boat, Er - pardon me a moment while I pour some whiskey down the inside of my throat . . .' (Letters 81)

Larkin's most extravagant jazz analogy appears in an essay written during his last year at Oxford in which he argues that jazz "is the closest description of the unconscious we have" (Life 57). The argument begins with the Eliot-like assumption of a decay of ritual that has resulted in the deprivation of the unconscious, "which finds its daily fulfilment in such ritual." The predicament of the unconscious is reflected in turn by a general upheaval in all the arts, and most particularly in the emergence of American jazz. Every quality of the new music is analogous to the situation of the unconscious. The stridency of jazz symbolizes the urgency of the problem. The subjection of the unconscious is symbolized by the music of a subject people. The imprisonment of the unconscious is captured by the unvarying monotony of jazz's 4/4 rhythm, and the unconscious's panic is captured by the texture of the jazz tone. "Jazz is the new art of the unconscious," Larkin concludes, "and it is therefore improvised, for it cannot call upon consciousness to express its own divorce from consciousness" (Life 57).