 As
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Philip Larkin and Happiness On "Born Yesterday" |
As
Reviewed By: |
Philip Larkin and Happiness On "Born Yesterday" |
For those
familiar with Philip Larkin’s work, the title of this short essay will
seem to offer a juxtaposition so improbable as to be laugh-out-loud
funny—rather like that old joke staple, the tiny book titled German
Humor, or the admittedly unlikely prospect of a panel at a New
Formalist conference on “The Achievement of the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E
Poets.” Indeed, if we do associate the word with Larkin, we’re most
likely to think of poems in which happiness is mentioned as an
absence—as in the narrator’s rueful longing in “High Windows” for
“everyone young going down the long slide / To happiness, endlessly.”
I don’t want to suggest that Larkin’s poetry gives us glimpses of joy
with anything resembling regularity. But I think that the topic of
happiness—what it is, how to attain and cultivate it—is crucial to his
work, and I’d like to try to show how. I’ll focus on one poem, “Born
Yesterday,” with a few quick forays into other poems. “Born
Yesterday,” written in 1954 and dedicated to Sally Amis, the third child
of Larkin’s lifelong friend Kingsley, appeared in his 1955 collection The
Less Deceived. In the first of the poem’s two stanzas, Larkin
reveals that he’s already made a wish for the infant Sally, but rather
than let us in on the wish right away—and thereby ruin our delicious
suspense—he offers a list of what it does not consist of: “the usual
stuff” of beauty, innocence, and love. These traits would of course be
nice, but they are the by-products of luck; young Sally has no power to
control their arrival. The
poem’s enumeration of clichéd notions of happiness also recalls
Larkin’s scorching tally of dusty platitudes about poetic childhoods in
the poem, “I Remember, I Remember,” written just several weeks
earlier. In this poem, as we
will doubtless remember, the narrator, visiting his Coventry birthplace
with a friend, wryly lists all the things that didn’t occur in his
decidedly un-Wordsworthian childhood: he “did not invent /
Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits”; there was no “farm
where I could be / ‘Really myself’”; at no point did he lie down
with a young lady as “‘all became a burning mist’”; and so on. All
that happened there, he tells his friend, is that “my childhood was
unspent.” But in “Born Yesterday,” Larkin’s corrective to trite
ideas about Childish Things works very differently, since, in the poem’s
second stanza, rather than substituting real negatives for false
positives, he replaces false positives with real (and surprising)
positives: his hopes that Sally may be “ordinary,” “Have . . . an
average of talents” and even “be dull.” These wishes certainly catch
us off guard—is this
happiness?—but by the time we arrive at the stanza’s end, we’re
convinced, remarkably enough, that it is, “If” (Larkin’s charmingly
modest disclaimer) “that is what a skilled, / Vigilant, flexible, / Unemphasised, enthralled /
Catching of happiness is called.” This
final list is wonderfully dense with insistence and implication. After
wishing Sally “nothing uncustomary/
To pull you off your balance, / That, unworkable
itself, / Stops all the rest from working,” Larkin adds a third word
prefixed by “un”: he wants Sally’s happiness to be “Unemphasized,”
strikingly suggesting that a lack can be a virtue. And the movement in the
line from “unemphasized” to “enthralled” powerfully enacts the
quickening, joy-bringing effects of this lack: a depleting “un-”
causes an invigorating “en-.” As for the list’s first three
adjectives—“skilled, / Vigilant, Flexible”—they are forcefully
linked by their shared vowels and consonants, and the fact that
“flexible” rhymes with “dull” invites us to consider the
connection between these words: is what others may deem unexciting
(dullness) really an openness to change and growth (flexibility)? Finally,
“Catching of happiness” is a delightfully surprising phrase which—in
another instance of the poem’s subversion of expectations—transforms
infection, the “catching” of a flu, into something potentially good;
you may need luck to “catch” happiness, but once you do it can take
you—like a bus or a firefly you have just “caught”—on a
magnificent adventure. Perhaps
a word or two should be said about the poem’s title. Read literally, it
can refer to the simple fact that Sally is herself a newborn baby. It may
also be an allusion to the 1950 George Cukor movie, which describes the
mayhem that ensues when the shady tycoon Broderick Crawford brings the
showgirl Judy Holliday to Washington—where he intends to bribe a
congressman—and hires a tutor to educate her, only to find that she’s
smarter than he thought and can more than hold her own amid the D.C.
shenanigans, both falling in love with her tutor and ratting on her former
paramour. The title’s possible evocation of an ostensible “dumb
blonde” who is actually the shrewdest person in the room may be intended
to make us reappraise the naiveté associated with the term “born
yesterday,” just as Larkin as made us reconsider the normally derogatory
“dull.” I think it’s also likely that the title supplements the
second stanza’s list of desired virtues with a hint about how Sally
might achieve them (and, by extension, how we all might achieve them): by
cherishing fresh starts as well as certain traits of character that enable
us to feel we were “born yesterday,” open to anything, even if we are
forty or sixty or eighty years old. (Tragically, it should be noted, Sally
Amis died in 2000, at the age of 46.) In
its emphasis on fresh starts, “Born Yesterday” recalls, or rather
prefigures, two later Larkin poems, “Water” and “The Trees,” and
I’ll hazard a guess that the earlier poem allowed Larkin to test out the
very ideas of unorthodox baptism, of being born into happiness every day,
which made them possible. “Water” imagines a religion involving the
eponymous substance in which “Going to church / Would entail a fording /
To dry, different clothes”; the three quatrains of “The Trees”
beautifully describe the way “recent buds relax and spread” (remember
that Sally was described as a “Tightly-folded bud”), telling
onlookers, “Last year is dead . . . Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.” “Born
Yesterday’s” peculiar but persuasive account of happiness also happens
to come at a point in The Less
Deceived when readers have already encountered two poems concerned
with that subject. In “Coming,” Larkin’s narrator “starts to be
happy” after hearing the singing of a thrush and remembering spring’s
imminent arrival; in “Reasons for Attendance,” he stands outside the
window of a theater where dancers are “Shifting intently . . . on the
beat of happiness,” but decides that they are “not for me, nor I for
them; and so / With happiness.” Coming in the wake of these two poems
about how happiness is or isn’t possible only makes “Born
Yesterday’s” treatment of it more moving and powerful. These are, however, just a few of Larkin’s poems in which happiness seems to me a crucial theme, be it overt or muted; there are others. In “Solar,” Larkin praises the sun for its ability to, “unclosing like a hand . . . give forever.” In “Show Saturday,” he follows a lengthy, loving description of a yearly small-town festival with praise for this spectacle “That breaks ancestrally each year into / Regenerate union,” ending with the rapt demand, “Let it always be there.” Although, unlike the poems described so far, these two poems are not explicitly about happiness, they nonetheless describe conditions and situations in which happiness happens. And in the little known, extraordinary early poem “On Being Twenty-six,” Larkin, lamenting the withdrawal of “Talent, felicity,” wishes for the black-and-white experiential universe of the newborn for whom, both despair and ecstasy are readily accessible: I kiss, I clutch Like a daft mother, putrid Infancy, That can and will forbid All grist to me Except devaluing dichotomies: Nothing,
and paradise. In these poems, happiness makes itself known in the form of a distant star; a yearly festival that, for all its charms, has little connection to the modern world; and one half of an infant’s primitive, polarized consciousness. Dazzling sunlight, recurring ritual, and “paradise” certainly sound desirable, but I will confess a hopeless preference for the happiness described in “Born Yesterday,” whose eloquent, hopeful zeal for fresh starts and luminous praise of the ordinary feel like Larkin’s attempt to formulate an even more rewarding and plausible version of happiness, and thereby to counter the problems—the passing of time, the difficulties of human relations—that so many of his poems bemoan. In “Born Yesterday,” Larkin finds a happy medium between “Nothing and paradise,” joy’s absence and its fragile or otherworldly abundance; and if we are skilled and vigilant and flexible enough readers to pay attention to this important, quietly profound poem, we will be enthralled.
Editor's Note: I asked Rachel for this piece last year, and I am terribly sorry that it was not published before she passed away at the end of 2009. She did, however, approve this final copy. We hope you enjoy it. |
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