 As
Reviewed By: |
CPR Classic Readings: Philip Larkin "Broadcast" |
As
Reviewed By: |
CPR Classic Readings: Philip Larkin "Broadcast" |
While far
from being the most ambitious and successful poem in The
Whitsun Weddings, “Broadcast” seems to me in many ways among the
most essentially Larkinesque of Philip Larkin’s poems, and at the same
time the most uncharacteristically romantic. As vividly and as fully of
any of his poems, it demonstrates some of the ways in which Larkin
characteristically holds experience, and emotion, at arm’s length,
presenting himself as a distant but not quite entirely detached observer,
emotionally invested while professing his disinterest.
Indeed, Larkin’s poems, individually and in total, chronicle a
lifetime of not belonging and of not knowing how to belong, an attitude
that is at once skeptical and grudgingly admiring, if not envious, of
those who can or do belong. For Larkin, there is always an
“elsewhere”—a place where Larkin is not and cannot be present,
emotionally as well as physically, but a place of which, nonetheless, he
is always highly conscious, and which in a vitally crucial way grounds
him, stirs his creative imagination and, to steal a phrase from “The
Importance of Elsewhere,” underwrites his existence. The poet’s keen
awareness and acknowledgement of an “elsewhere” intensifies his
loneliness and longing, gives added texture to his isolation. No less than
the poem that bears that title, “Broadcast” gives voice to Larkin’s
insistence on the importance of elsewhere.
Of course this theme—or should I say obsession?—is limited to
neither “Broadcast” nor “The Importance of Elsewhere.” It
permeates “Church Going”; is evident throughout “I Remember, I
Remember,” with its evocation of the town “where my childhood was
unspent”; and most gloriously weaves through the fabric of “The
Whitsun Weddings,” with its poignant glimpses of strangers’ lives seen
from the confined and confining space of a compartment of a passing train.
(To which one might add the obvious—that the train itself is on its way
to an “elsewhere,” a London that, in Larkin’s imagination if not in
fact, is connected to Hull only by a thin ribbon of rail.)
The theme also surfaces in, or lies just beneath the surface of,
such apparently minor poems as “Success Story” (“To be ambitious is
to fall in love / With a particular life you haven’t got”) and
“Livings II” (“Radio rubs its legs, / Telling me of elsewhere”).
When Larkin declares, in “I Remember, I Remember,” that “Nothing,
like something, happens anywhere,” one almost feels that he has stumbled
onto another way of saying “Everything happens elsewhere.” And in the
poem “Here,” whose title so obviously is the exact opposite of
“elsewhere,” Larkin’s ultimate destination is a place where he can
only see “unfenced existence: / Facing the sun, untalkative, out of
reach.”
One of the felicities of “Broadcast,” at least for me, is that
it lends itself both to close textual (the old New Critical) and to
biographically informed readings. Indeed, the two approaches dovetail
nicely; they’re not mutually exclusive, but can even be simultaneous.
Larkin provides no overt “notes” to the poem, no specific
identifications of persons and places—there are no proper nouns except
for “ ‘The Queen’ “—and certainly no confessional crie
de coeur of the sort in which many of his American contemporaries
indulged. The “you” is both exact (a biographical reading identifies
the woman as Maeve Brennan) and yet generalized (it could be any “you”
loved by any poet). Yet the poem seems intensely personal and intimate,
animated by passionate emotions barely held in check. To what extent the
“I” of the poem stands for Larkin the man himself and to what extent
it represents an invented persona is a question we needn’t seek to
answer definitively: either and both are equally valid; the poem works,
regardless of how much or how little the reader knows about its author.
“Broadcast” finds Larkin (or shall we identify the
“speaker” as a Larkinesque persona?) at home alone “attending” a
concert at a distance, not seeing but visualizing the scene, the radio an
imperfect instrument for connecting him to an unnamed woman over the
distance that separates them, leaving him, ultimately, “desperate to
pick out” from the applause her tiny ungloved hands in the “vast . . .
spaces” of the concert hall. And it’s not a stretch of the
imagination—but then again, maybe it is
a stretch of the imagination, and that is exactly what Larkin wishes
it to be—that the “air” of “tiny in all that air” refers not
only to the aforementioned “vast . . . spaces” of the concert hall, in
which the beloved one can scarcely be “picked out,” but indeed, to the
geographic space that separates the radio listener in his compact room
from the larger expanses of the concert hall itself—all the air that
lies between Hull and London (if we may assume those to be the two
geographic locations in the poem), and the very airwaves
over which the concert is broadcast.
Here, in no particular order of importance, are some observations
about the particulars of the poem. Donald Davie, in an essay
(“Larkin’s Politics, and Tomlinson’s”) in Under
Briggflatts, identifies the occasion of the poem as “perhaps a
Remembrance Day ceremony in Westminster Abbey or St. Paul’s.” But
Davie, uncharacteristically, seems misled by “Vast Sunday-full and
organ-frowned-on spaces” and “‘The Queen’.” The reader needn’t
draw on biographical knowledge (about which more in a moment) to realize
that the space itself is “vast”—the Royal Albert Hall immediately
comes to my mind—and that the marvelous coined double adjective,
“Sunday-full and organ-frowned-on” is a metaphor. Larkin’s concert
hall resembles a full church
(though this metaphor would have been rather more appropriate to the
England of Larkin’s time rather than to ours). It’s clear to me that
the “sudden scuttle on the drum” is the drum roll that launches the
British national anthem, “God Save the Queen,” played at the beginning
of concerts and other public events (even in the cinema) during Larkin’s
time; “ ‘The Queen’” is an abbreviated form (the trope of
metonymy?) for “God Save the Queen” (itself a metonymy for the music
itself) rather than an announcement that the Queen is entering the hall or
church. The “huge resettling” is the audience in the mass act of
sitting down after having stood for the anthem.
Suffice to say that another of the many pleasures of this poem is
the mastery with which Larkin uses linguistic abbreviations to indicate
larger actions. At eighteen lines, the poem is remarkably compact, and yet
its reach stretches out from what the reader may imagine as the confines
of a small and dimly lit room in a bachelor’s flat in Hull in the north
of England, where the listener sits near the radio, across the
“glowering wavebands” and “rabid storms of chording” to the
distant concert hall itself. And one can read in the poem an awareness of
all the distances and elsewheres in between.
The word “devout” in the first line of the second stanza
continues the metaphor of the concert hall as church, and the concert
itself—and by extension, the act of listening to the broadcast
itself—as an act of devotion. The reference to the woman’s gloves
makes us think of hands, and from there it is not too far a stretch to
imagine her hands as folded together in an attitude that resembles that of
prayer, or at least some act of devotion. (Am I being too fanciful in
thinking of the separated couple in this poem as a vertical counterpart to
the stone-carved, horizontal conjoined couple in “An Arundel Tomb”?)
Larkin’s agnosticism might have precluded professions of faith, but it
does not prevent him from employing the imagery of devotion. The poem’s
almost reverential tone is such that one can believe that Larkin almost
wants to hear the concert as a secular alternate for a religious
ceremony—though ultimately the focus of this devotion isn’t the music,
but rather the image of the loved one whose reality he so desperately
strives to conjure.
One might also draw attention to the paradox that although the
poem’s ostensible subject is the radio broadcast of a concert, the music
of that concert (apart from the national anthem and the applause at the
concert’s end) is curiously neglected—the reader is left to determine
for himself what particular symphonic work might be characterized by
“rabid storms of chording”—and the language and imagery of the poem
itself is highly visual, and visually particular. Unable to see
the concert, let alone be personally present at it, the poet imagines
specific details that he has “picked out.” Dwelling at a distance and
unable to see what is happening,
he turns an imaginary spotlight onto the scene. But no sooner has the
poem’s “I” zoomed in, as it were, on “your face among all those
faces” than this vision “goes quickly dark” and he is left with only
“the outline of the still and withering / Leaves on half-emptied
trees”; presumably the trees are those outside his window, in the dusk
on an autumn evening.
Reading the poem aloud, one hears the predominance of S
and L sounds in concert, as it were: “Scuttle,” “resettling,”
“slithering,” and “shamelessly.” And note the negative
connotations, or at least the negative possibilities, of at least three of
those four words—and maybe even of “resettling.” Then too there are
the connotations of loss in “withering,” “half-emptied” and
“dark.”
What else in the poem should attract our special notice? Many
details. But ultimately I keep returning to those “gloves unnoticed on
the floor,” which seems to me to lie at the heart of the poem’s power
and meaning. A small matter, perhaps; but one should remember, as Larkin
does (if only unconsciously), that gloves traditionally were emblems of a
pledge of love and fidelity. All the more telling, then, that the gloves,
the most easily mislaid, forgotten, and losable of all our clothing,
should lie “unnoticed on the floor.” (Ah, but that “unnoticed” is
Larkin’s way of letting us know that he
notices!) Larkin tells us almost nothing about the woman or her
appearance; details of eyes, hair, breasts, skin, are all left to our
imagination. When he writes of “your face among all those faces, /
Beautiful and devout,” Larkin doubtless has a specific face in mind
(that of Maeve Brennan, if we are reading the poem biographically), but in
effect he gives the reader a blank slate; the face is like that of a
stylized saintly face on an Orthodox icon, personifying the traits of
beauty and devotion (or devoutness) as we imagine them to be. No: the
actual details that matter, as far as the poem is concerned, are found in
the woman’s gloves and those curiously “new, slightly-outmoded
shoes.” In effect the poem is about the import of noticing and not noticing, of faithfulness and faithlessness, of possession and loss. Indeed, “Broadcast” is not wholly a love poem, nor entirely a broadcast of love, but also a statement of recognition and acknowledgement that, at a distance, love grows tenuous, our hold on the beloved fragile and fraught with uncertainty. The woman he addresses so longingly, who is elsewhere, not with him, may love Larkin; but it’s as if Larkin can’t believe his own good fortune, or can’t bring himself to believe it, or doesn’t want to believe it. Yes, he’s in love; but is it all more than a mirage, a chimera that might vanish into thin air, into silence, when the distant orchestra falls silent when the concert and the broadcast end? Might not Larkin, or the Larkinesque character who listens to the broadcast, fear that it is he who somehow, carelessly dropped from memory or affection, is the counterpart of that “glove unnoticed on the floor,” and that he will remain unnoticed and left behind as the beloved leaves the hall? He is “desperate” indeed—desperate to see her face among that crowd, desperate to grasp, if only through his creative imagination, her tiny hands. As Yeats reminded us, and as Larkin well knew, “man is in love and loves what vanishes.”
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