Larkin's blues: jazz and modernism - Philip Larkin

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

I am not suggesting that Larkin's criticism is more ideological than that of any other critic; my point is simply that directing attention to the ideological stance of his writing on jazz helps us to understand the shape it takes. I use the term ideology in its Althusserian sense of a representation of an imaginary relationship to the set of conditions in which one lives. An ideological explanation in this sense is not simply false consciousness but a necessary and universal social condition, an effort to impose a unified meaning on disparate materials and to disguise or repress those elements that would expose the explanation as ideology. The repressed contradictions may appear in the text as gaps (illustrated most notably in Macherey's A Theory of Literary Production); and such openings enable the reader to unmask the ideology, the imaginary explanation, in the text. But one does not have to resort to a symptomatic reading of All What Jazz to be aware of the kind of disruptions Macherey's theory searches out. Larkin's own rereading uncovers obvious contradictions and he tells a story to account for them. Later readers have come upon these and other gaps and have attempted to resolve them in quite different ways. Clive James charts Larkin's reviews of John Coltrane and Miles Davis through the volume and explains the discrepancy between the fair-minded Larkin of the early reviews and the vitriolic Larkin of the later ones as an instance of a reviewer shifting his taste over time. In 1962, for example, he was still of "two minds" about Coltrane ("Coltrane's records are, paradoxically, nearly always both interesting and boring, and I certainly find myself listening to them in preference to many a less adventurous set" [AWJ 65]), but by May of the following year he was of one mind (99), and Coltrane thereafter became a name that conjured up all the dreariness and boredom of modern jazz. Similarly, after early favorable reviews, "he became progressively disillusioned with Miles Davis" (101). This quite reasonable explanation, it should be noted, goes against Larkin's own story, in which he was of one mind about Davis, Coltrane, and Parker from the very beginning; it was simply "journalistically impossible" to tell the truth.

Other readers' responses to the gaps in Larkin's jazz criticism open other fissures. Janice Rossen finds that the reviews give the impression of having been written for "two different and opposing kinds of audience." Portions of the reviews sound as if they were directed to open-minded readers receptive to modern jazz; other portions seem to have been written for an audience "whom he feels certain will agree with him about the 'nightmare' of the contemporary scene and the horror of the new generation of impudent youth . . ." (112-113). There is some irony in the suggestion here that Larkin, one of the twentieth-century writers most immune to fashionable opinion, should have compromised his critical position by trying to placate the moderns; and Cedric Watts sees a larger irony in the gap between the theory of the introduction and the practice of the reviews. It can be stated in several ways but it amounts to this: the "untruthful" Larkin of the reviews often seems more trustworthy than the sincere Larkin of the introduction (Watts 24).