Sarah Waters and Larkin and Unreliable Narrators. Do We Really Know What Truth Is?

I am off to the North East on Wednesday (burglars please note) and am reviewing what to take with me to read. I am two thirds of the way through Sarah Waters latest The Little Stranger which is a post second world war quasi ghost story. It has been discussed in the Guardian over the past four weeks but I have tried not to read the comments and write ups in order to come at the book without preconceptions. One thing that strikes me forcefully is the choice of era; the time when post Second World War everything was changing, the NHS was being formed and council houses rising at a rate of knots. I suppose I was a child that arrived in 1951 in time to benefit from that first hurrah of Labour when the social fabric seemed to be changing, gaining just a tad more texture.My brother who is nine years older bore the full brunt of expectations. Better health, better education raised the bar and becoming successful was just a tad more achievable and thus the pressure to do the high jump over this bar grew. This was a time when many parents who had been born at the end of the depression aspired to get out of pits and factories, aspired better fro their children and the lower middle class opened its arms to them. Education as a means to escape the working class was just a little more available and a grammar school place augured well for something that would set you up in the middle classes for life. A steady job with a pension seemed more open to those who could pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Even my parents who, whilst economically, would be labelled as lower middle class, by the time I was born contemplated the education of a daughter with slightly more enthusiasm as a means of social mobility and white collar nirvana.

Sarah Water’s book explores the flux in social class that was happening around that time in the late 1940s. The class system was not so much under attack as being sniped at from the higher moral ground of the Bevanites. She mirrors this class system with the fortunes of an old country house and the family that inhabit it in Warwickshire. The house seems to be falling about the ‘toff’ family's ears and the war injured emotionally fargile eldest son and the jolly hockey sticks sexually confused (I had a taste of freedom in the Wrens) daughter are sucked into servicing the needs of the house whilst the mother retreats gradually into the old times when clothes, life, everything was so much better, easier and predictable.

Into this tale of social class is weaved happenings which you can choose to explain away using a mix of cod psychology and objective/scientific reasoning or can take as a sign of things emanating from some dark and sinister ghostly presence or a poltergeist. The narrator, the doctor, working class boy made good by the sacrifice of parents from the servant classes is interesting. He is continually describing things in other terms making leaps of interpretation or connection. He describes behaviour of the daughter or the son of the house in quite minute observational detail and then adds the rider of ‘it is as if…’ then goes on to some explanatory planet where everything always seems as if it is something else.

The unreliable narrator, as I think the doctor is in Sarah Water’s book, is I think an interesting phenomenon. Sometimes you have to woo your readers into trusting the narrator as being objective and then gradually throw in small seeds of doubt about their viewpoint being slightly, if not totally, skewed and altered by their own needs and beliefs. I was pondering this and thinking how it might apply to the ‘voice’ in poetry. So often poetry is seen as either truly autobiographical, especially in its more ‘confessional’ mode. However more and more we come to accept that an assumed voice might be taken on by the poet. I am racking my brains to think of poems where the deliberate unreliable narrator voice is used (suggestions welcome). Where is a poem written in a first person voice and then the reader becomes aware that the voice is totally or waveringly unreliable?

Of course there is the surrealist approach when what happens in the poem is obviously taking us via another kind of reality but are there poems where the I voice has time even in a short poem to draw us in as speaking some truth (not necessarily factual truth) and then is discovered by the end or on re-reading to be viewing that ‘truth’ from an unreliable angle. Maybe it is not useful to think of the point of view in poetry and reliable and unreliable narrators but it is something I am exploring at present. Of course in older works such as The Iliad or The Canterbury Tales the ‘story’ nature of the work allows the reader to explore point of view. However if I took for instance at a modern poem such as Mr Bleaney by Larkin the POV may become important. Because we know Larkin, we probably have things we feel about him as a person stored away in our head we tend to see this as almost autobiographical or Larkin imagining himself as the next tenant of Mr Bleaney’s room. Larkin as the poet brings with it a tremendous baggage that it is sometimes difficult not to haulinto the poem. However nowhere in this poem are we told whether the narrator is male or female for instance, we tend to arrive at the gender from knowing who the poet is and maybe assumptions that only a man would smoke or this landlady would only take in male lodgers. The narrator tells us things about Mr Bleaney that he gleans from the landlady and from the room but what he or she chooses to tell us are perhaps only those things that speak to the narrators own feelings of alienation and ennui with life. He may only be choosing to tell us those things about Mr Bleaney that confirm or lead us to the final question of the poem, do we measure ourselves by our surroundings (social and physical). Perhaps the narrator does not tell us anything about Mr Bleaney that would not speak to that question or prod us in that direction. Mr Bleaney may have been a very jolly, happy man who adored his sister in Stoke and was more than happy to go to Frinton each year and lived a small but content private life.

Is Larkin, as the poet, deliberately making the narrator of his poem unreliable so the reader has to question the whole premise of his approach to Mr Bleaney? Is he , on the other hand, expecting the reader to accept that whilst he narrates facts about Bleaney, the tone and the facts chosen are there to push us towards an assumption that Bleaney lead a small sad life that didn’t amount to much if he at no point questioned his existence. The ‘I don’t know’ at the end seems somehow less than genuine as the whole tone of the poem pushes you to make a value judgement.

Does the poet want us to believe everything he tells us about Bleaney? Are the details of Bleaney’s life important at all and only in so far as they tell us what it is the narrator finds noteworthy. Is the poet just telling us about himself? If for instance we were told that Mr Bleaney was written by Sylvia Plath would our understanding and enjoyment of the whole poem be altered? Can we disassociate Larkin’s personal autobiography and well known lugubrious nature from his narrator? Is the form of the poem saying something about the narrator,the poet, or both? Quatrains rhyming abab, neat strict predictable boxes to mirror the small predictable box room, to mirror the small predictable life. Don’t tell me Larkin didn’t want us to feel hemmed in, claustrophobic, feel a longing to break out of the strait jacket that he places the poem in. He tells us he doesn’t know whether Bleaney questioned his existence but if he didn’t question it he ‘warranted no better’. Is he condemned by his unquestioning state to box-room hell or is he merely held in the limbo of blandness that the narrator believes the undeserving people who exist by routines inhabit anyway? Is the poet or the narrator being rather sneeringly judgemental about Bleaney?

But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
And shivered, without shaking off the dread

That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don't know.

I have tried to use the concept of unreliable narrator to interrogate just this one well known poem, shake it up a little. It doesn't add much to the world of literary criticism and is less than scholarly but it made me think just a little harder about what the POV of a poem can covey to the reader and whether unreliability of the narrator is something we don’t question enough in poems or incorporate deliberately into our writing.

Birthdays, Age and Tightrope Walking with Larkin

I had a birthday this week-end, I have no problem with birthdays they roll by whether you want them to or not so I like to embrace them as an increasingly familiar old friend. Twenty was wonderful, thirty was wonderful, forty was fine, fifty was interesting, sixty my next one I shall encounter with a zero will bring a bus pass, heating allowances and best of all I anticipate the feeling of empowerment that I have earned the right to not bother about what people think about me. If truth were told ( and truth is not always best told but probably less damaging that untruths told in the long term) I feel that at fifty –eight ( pause whilst I have to recalculate from last year). It would be a lie to say I did not care how others perceive me, that way lies slight madness and those blouses you find in shops that cater for ladies of a certain age. You know the ones I mean, tiny paisley patterns, maybe with trailing things that can be tied in bows at the neck. I still squeeze myself into jeans that are a triumph of corsetry over breathing and have T-Shirts that have slogans on. I was once told by a very glamorous perfumed and couturier bedecked lady that no woman should ever wear T-Shirts saying anything past twenty-five, unless it is a small discreet designer logo and then only if the designer is expensive enough. This woman was obviously wrapped in silk pashmina as she exited the birth canal and her mother probably only broke into a slight glow throughout labour.

I have little dress sense, no glamour ( as defined by afore mentioned designer woman), I often manage to achieve an effect through sheer serendipity, sometimes in the tumble of the drawers and wardrobe an outfit comes together by some strange law of permutations of what is nearest to hand. It must be a bit like the probability of winning the lottery, now and again you may win a tenner ( a near decent outfit) which makes you feel that a jackpot win( bloody great) is not totally impossible. At 6’ 3”( I’ve lost an inch along the way somewhere) you tend to get noticed when you enter a room, if you then add to that clashing colours and items of clothing from various decades that would make the words ‘an interesting mix of styles’ seem overly generous….. then you have a statement but in my case more of a exclamation ( probably best described by an exclamation mark).

I watched a couple of programmes on TV this week designed to cater to the over sixties. Gok Wan managed to persuade a lady over seventy to wear only iced buns for a photograph by calling her angel and ‘my darling’ every other sentence. In the other programme some doctors revealed the joys of the older body falling apart. Age is a bit of a bugger; it gives with one hand and takes with the other. Of course life is always about balance; the balancing act just gets a little more difficult as you get older, the wire a little thinner, you have to put your glasses on to see where you are going and the drop is a tad more daunting and you wonder if that slight twinge as you walk across the abyss signals a future hip replacement.. Of course I wouldn’t say I was as pessimistic as Larkin though and birthdays, any birthdays should be fun.

PS, The photograph at the top of the page was taken by my friend Martin Figura, a professional photographer and poet. I asked him to take photographs of my mother's bungalow a week after she died and then a few months later after it has been cleared. This may seem macabre but the photographs I knew would be strangely beautiful and continue to remain very poignant for me. You can see more here at his web site with a shortextract from an explanatory text I wrote to accompany the work.

Lost tapes and Larkin over the garden fence

I have written about Larkin before in the context of my daughter’s experiences of working in Booze Busters in Hull, serving lurching men with lurchers on ropes and Cuprinol Amazon women who know that a sun bed is for life and not just for Christmas. However I do not apologise for returning to Larkin as they have recently discovered old tapes made by Larkin reading a compilation of his poems before the days of podcasting, mp3players and listen again. The Radio 4 programme hosted by the poet Paul Farley was full of anecdotes not only about Larkin’s personality and approach to life but about the whole business of the poet’s voice, literally.

These tapes are the words of Larkin straight from the horse’s mouth. He took the time and effort to seek out someone local he trusted to record him for an American project which then folded and then he did absolutely nothing with them. He had a few years on the planet left to him after he made them but still he did nothing with them. Larkin was an intelligent man, I can’t believe he forgot they existed but he did not leave them with his personal effects, he did not give them to anybody for safe keeping, he did not lodge them with a solicitor or place them in a bank vault with strict instructions that they only be played after his death; nor did he leave orders for them to be burnt like his diaries.

Pure chance brought them to light, are we to believe that Larkin, who often had a strange sense of the ridiculous, intended the fates to play Russian roulette with these tapes; now they are discovered, now they aren’t? Did he just presume they would have been destroyed? A phone call to the local sound recordist whom he saw now and then, asking, what are you doing with those tapes I made now the Americans don’t want them, would have been quite easy? I don’t know the answer, no-one does, I have a sense that given they exist he would be quite pleased about a fuss being made about them. He may have well enjoyed the prospect of them being auctioned off on E bay, as the son of the sound recordist jokingly suggested soon after they were found. He would have found it easy to write a poem about that I’m sure.

Larkin notoriously hated reading in public and found the sound of his own voice difficult to bear. He had trained himself out of a stammer by teaching himself to ‘swallow’ words he found difficult to annunciate. All that swallowing of the sounds he couldn’t make stuck in his throat. It is ironic that he died of oesophageal cancer, the very mechanism that created his voice being the cause of his death.

Someone on the programme about the discovery of these tapes pointed out how important it was these days to event organisers that poets could read well. She said that often she was congratulated on her capacity to deliver a poem well rather than on the contents of the poems. It was ever thus, once the public became used to being delivered to. The radio and then the TV have ratcheted up what the public expects in terms of delivery for many years now. The means by which we hear a poem is as important as the poem itself in many cases. Larkin knew he could never compete with the dark brooding powerful delivery of a Ted Hughes or the light eccentric old ‘Goodbye Mr Chips’ mannerisms of John Betjeman. He was wise enough to turn down being poet laureate probably knowing that the public face is as important as the private one. He probably didn’t even think his penchant for schoolgirl soft pornography mattered more than his ability to convey poetic charisma. The headline ‘Poet Laureate found with stash of schoolgirl magazines’ may have been composed with joy by The News of the World now but back then the headline ‘Poet Laureate walks into room and no one notices’ was something he feared more and was more embittered by.

It is a naïve reader that thinks that a person’s work and their life and personality can be totally divorced. I might find a poem by Adolf Hitler interesting to read as a piece of historical data but I know I would find it hard to read it as a poem on its own merits. Of course it is always easy to play the Adolf Hitler game, most writers and poets are far less palpable villains. They had ‘a complex personal life’ is the catch-all phrase for every racist, misogynist, two timing, emotionally controlling, selfish, passive-aggressive writer or poet that every put anything down on paper worthy of note.

Hearing someone read their own work adds not only a passing historic interest to a poem but also adds another presence in the room. When reading a poem there is the poem, the reader and the reader’s presumptions about or questions about the poet. When the poem is delivered by the poet personally those elements still exist but to them is added several other elements; in particular personal iconography of voice.

Mr Larkin sounds exactly like the man who lived next door to us when I was fourteen; he used to ask my dad over the garden fence about what height he was setting his blades at on the mower or if he thought it was too early to put the bedding plants out. He would often pop up over the back fence and ask me in his slow ponderous grey voice when I was going to stop growing, which was a question I never knew how to answer as it not only required foresight (not often found in teenagers) but also an ability to tease out whether he was trying to be pleasant, taking the piss (I was already exceptionally tall by thirteen) or simply socially challenged with teenage girls, in which case why bother to pop upover the garden fence at all?. I hear Larkin reading his poems and I try very very hard to listen to the poem and all I can hear is this old neighbour reading Larkin’s poems to me which then escalates into a bizarre and surreal experience. I have also discovered that Sylvia Plath is the voice of my first neighbour when I rented a flat in London and Seamus Heaney is a lovely man who ran a small hardware shop in Nottingham. Seeing the poet read helps break this habit of enforced association but given I never saw Larkin read, no-one much did, I am now stuck with the ghost of Mr H from next door reading Larkin’s poems to me over the garden fence. It doesn’t make them worse or better poems it just makes them what they are, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Mr Bleaney is still a good poem no matter who reads it, which may be the whole point of what makes a good poem. However I can concentrate more when I simply read the wonderful High Windows from Larkin’s last collection.

Ps In case anyone is counting I have been writing this blog for exactly a year now..how time flies when you are blogging about yourself !