Larkin's blues: jazz and modernism - Philip Larkin

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

The tendency to use jazz - that is, early jazz - as a reference point or, more frequently, as a touchstone by which authenticity may be determined (including the lack of authenticity of later jazz) persists into post-Oxford life. Decades later Larkin counters Yeats's statement that a poem is a piece of luck with a quotation from Pee Wee Russell: "'The more you try, the luckier you are,'" and in 1981 the 27 years since the publication of Amis's Lucky Jim is made real for Larkin once he converts it to the chronology of jazz: "That shakes me. Longer than between Oliver's first record and Basie's" (Letters 81, 638). The most elaborate entanglement of jazz and the other arts is the introduction to the 1970 All What Jazz, where jazz and modernism are paired in ways (Larkin believes) that expose qualities of both. Jazz reveals the excesses of modernism very clearly, Larkin explains in a later interview, "because it's such a telescoped art, only as old as the century . . ." (RW72). In a review included in the second edition of All What Jazz, he goes so far as to suggest that the short history of jazz recapitulates in a condensed form (and therefore unmasks what is more difficult to see in the longer histories of the other arts) the stages into which any art may be segmented. In jazz we see "a capsule history of all arts - the generation from tribal function, the efflorescence into public and conscious entertainment, and the degeneration into private and subsidized absurdity" (AWJ259).

All What Jazz is a collection (along with a polemical introduction) of the jazz reviews Larkin began writing for the Daily Telegraph in 1961,(4) and it invites a somewhat closer and more skeptical reading than Larkin's casual comments on jazz. A rereading of the collection with its introduction reveals, among other things, that Larkin had also been rereading the pieces and in the process had discerned a "story" lying hidden in the progression of seemingly innocuous record reviews. Larkin's account of his rereading is almost certainly feigned to a degree; he presents himself as an innocent reader coming upon a group of music reviews that reveal collectively a latent text more interesting ("entertaining" is his word) than the manifest content, but of course he knew the story long before he reread the pieces. It is, however, a crucial narrative of Larkin's jazz career and it merits retelling, although we may well be suspicious of his own version. The story is in part an explanation for his inability to appreciate postwar or modern jazz, but, since jazz is Larkin's touchstone for all the arts, it becomes as well his explanation of a distaste for the whole of modernism, exemplified by the alliterative triad of Parker [Charlie], Pound, and Picasso, names that become his shorthand for the pioneers of modernism and "every practitioner who might be said to have succeeded them" (AWJ 27).

Larkin's story revolves around a gap in his jazz career that is both the problem to be explained - something missing from his appreciation of jazz - and the explanation - a chronological gap during which he is divorced from jazz: "on leaving Oxford I suffered a gap in my jazz life . . ." (AWJ 17). The explanation is disappointingly simple; in beginning his career as a librarian in 1943, Larkin lived in a series of lodgings where he was forbidden to play his gramophone. Since jazz, unlike poetry, cannot be enjoyed in silence and moreover depends notoriously on the individual performance - "it is not 'Weary Blues' we want but Armstrong's 1927 'Weary Blues'" (AWJ 60) - Larkin, separated from his records and without access to new performances, lost touch with jazz for almost five years. In 1945, for example, he reports to Amis that he has received for his birthday a copy of "Jazz Me Blues" by the Lewis-Parnell Jazzmen: "This is I believe (though only having heard it once I can't be sure) one of the best records ever made in England. I suppose the best was 'Waltzing the Blues'. . . . But as I have no gramophone here all this is rather academic" (Letters 107). When he was reunited with his collection in 1948, he "was content to renew acquaintance with it and to add only what amplified or extended it along existing lines . . ." (AWJ 17-18). He was further isolated from contemporary jazz by his resistance to the long-playing record, introduced in the mid-1950s: "it seemed a package deal, forcing you to buy bad tracks along with good at an unwontedly-high price" (AWJ 18). He was vaguely aware of something now called modern jazz: "What I heard on the wireless seemed singularly unpromising, but I doubt if I thought it would ever secure enough popular acceptance to warrant my bothering about it" (AWJ 18).