[In the following essay, Leggett explores British poet Philip Larkin's fascination with traditional jazz music.]

The wonderful music that swept the world during the first half of this century … was of limited appeal, but that appeal was new and definite: a certain area of musical and rhythmic sensibility was being played on for the first time.

—Larkin, “Wells or Gibbon?” in All What Jazz

Russell, Charles Ellsworth “Pee Wee” (b. 1906); clarinet and saxophone player extraordinary, was, mutatis mutandis, our Swinburne and our Byron.

—Larkin, Introduction to Jill

Offering an explanation for the source of his poetry (“unhappiness”) and the source of his popularity (“writing about unhappiness”), Larkin told an interviewer late in his career that deprivation was for him what daffodils were for Wordsworth (RW 47).¹ Although unhappiness is a state we readily associate with Larkin's poetry, deprivation as a description of the circumstance of his life doesn't quite ring true, perhaps because it is dictated by the alliterative echo of daffodils (and wit seems an inappropriate mode for expressing deprivation). Or perhaps it is because the post-biography-and-letters Larkin appears now to have indulged himself to a degree even exceeding the norm in that traditional triad of worldly pleasures wine, women, and song, what he termed in an unfinished poem “Drink, sex and jazz—all sweet things” (CP 154). Whatever the case, a more persuasive argument might be made that it was not the fact of deprivation but the musical and rhythmic sensibility of deprivation, the blues, which were for Larkin what daffodils were for Wordsworth. For Larkin, the “hallmark” of the blues was exactly their capacity to express the “solitary anguish” (AWJ 86) of the African-American's life of deprivation. His praise for the blues and for jazz in general—that is, the music for which the blues serve as foundation—is based, ironically, on an admiration for the sort of emotional honesty missing in the comparison with Wordsworth.² He characterizes the blues as “a kind of jazz that calls forth a particular sincerity from the player (‘Yeah, he's all right, but can he play the blues?’),” and he argues that the “Negro did not have the blues because he was naturally melancholy. He had them because he was cheated and bullied and starved” (AWJ 87, 224). The deprivation—daffodil parallel more aptly applies to the makers of the music to which Larkin was addicted and through which he experienced his privation secondhand.

It is perhaps decisive for Larkin's own version of jazz and the blues that his jazz sensibility was formed in adolescence. “I became a jazz addict at the age of 12 or 13,” he remembers (Letters 416), so he might also have said, preserving the alliteration, that jazz was for him what juvenescence was for Wordsworth. At a time when Wordsworth was, by his testimony, bounding like a roe o'er the mountains, Larkin was entering his subscription to Down Beat and learning to play the drums. And while Wordsworth remembers the “very Heaven” of being young at the time of the French Revolution, Larkin's later reflection on his youth was that it was his particular bliss to have been young at the only time he could have experienced the pleasure of jazz. Had he died on 9 August 1922 instead of being born then, or had he been born a decade or so later, he would have missed it all (AWJ 28), since, he notes, jazz was the “emotional excitement” peculiar to one generation, his own, that “came to adolescence” between the two World Wars. “In another age,” he suggests, “it might have been drink or drugs, religion or poetry” (Letters 416, AWJ 15). Or daffodils or revolution. Larkin's claim to have substituted jazz for the inspirations and excitements of other ages is something more than his characteristic philistine pose, even if it is also that. Jazz was, along with poetry, the great passion of his life (“In many ways I prefer it to poetry”)³ and his reader may well wonder about the extent to which the two passions intersect.

Larkin has given readers cause to think that the popular music of his time was a part of the climate in which his conception of poetry took shape. In a 1972 review of a book on Cole Porter he reminds us of the sophistication of the typical Cole Porter song, “that feat of rhyme and reference,” and he adds that “those who were exposed daily to such products grew up thinking that songs (and perhaps even poems) were skilfully made things, requiring thought as well as feeling” (RW 227). In a 1979 interview he makes clear that he is referring to his own exposure to such products and to his own assumptions about how songs and poems are made:

I must have learned dozens of dance lyrics simply by listening to dance music. I suppose they were a kind of folk poetry. Some of them were pretty awful, but I often wonder whether my assumption that a poem is something that rhymes and scans didn't come from listening to them—and some of them were quite sophisticated. “The Venus de Milo was noted for her charms / But strictly between us, you're cuter than Venus / And what's more you've got arms”—I can't imagine Mike Jagger singing that; you know, it was witty and technically clever. (RW 50)

We too may wonder what part of Larkin's poetic assumptions and practices came from his musical addictions. The question of the significance of jazz in the Larkin canon—does jazz haunt Larkin's poems in the way that nature haunts Wordsworth's?—encompasses too many other issues to be tackled in the space of an essay, but one of these issues, the confluence of jazz, poetry, and modernism in what Larkin called his “jazz life” (AWJ 17), invites a more circumscribed reading, and I want to examine it as a preface to the larger question. I want to look particularly at Larkin's attitude toward jazz as a measure of all the arts—the sense we have in reading his letters and criticism that Larkin's music is often the perspective from which all else is seen—and I want to examine in some detail the odd pairing of jazz and literary modernism in his collection of jazz reviews.

“The art-form I associate with Philip at Oxford was not any sort of literature but jazz,” Kingsley Amis writes (“Oxford and After” 24), and others who remember Larkin at Oxford make the same association. Nick Russel recalls that in their first meeting Larkin immediately abandoned his mission (drumming up support for the university English Club) when he spotted on Russel's table a copy of Hugues Panassié's Hot Jazz. Russel also recalls that Larkin had the most remarkable ear of the dozen or so undergraduates who belonged to the unofficial jazz club: “he could distinguish accurately between Johnny Dodds and Albert Nichols, say, or King Oliver and Armstrong” (83). Larkin appeared to Russel to make little distinction in value between discussions of the work of Sidney Bechet and Pee Wee Russell and discussions of Lawrence, Joyce, and Yeats (83).

Among those who belonged to the unofficial club at Oxford, jazz soon became the language into which literature and the other arts were translated. The Romantics became “Bill Wordsworth and his Hot Six—Wordsworth (tmb) with ‘Lord’ Byron (tpt), Percy Shelley (sop), Johnny Keats (alto and clt), Sam ‘Tea’ Coleridge (pno), Jimmy Hogg (bs), Bob Southy (ds)” (“Oxford and After” 26). Larkin and his circle applied to jazz the kind of scrutiny that at another time would have been given to poetry:

I suppose we devoted to some hundred records that early anatomizing passion normally reserved for the more established arts. “It's the abject entreaty of that second phrase. …” “What she's actually singing isick-sart-mean. …” “Russell goes right on up to the first bar of Waller. You can hear it on Nick's pick-up.” “Isn't it marvellous the way Bechet …” “Isn't it marvellous the way the trumpet …” “Isn't it marvellous the way Russell …” (Introduction to Jill 15)

That a music so exotic—a “form of Afro-American popular music that flourished between 1925 and 1945,” as Larkin defined it (AWJ 246)—should have spoken directly to an Oxford undergraduate perhaps requires explanation, especially in light of Larkin's later statement that he was “not found of exotics (botanical term meaning introduced from abroad) … ” (AWJ 197). Both Larkin and Amis (who shared Larkin's passion for jazz at Oxford) have offered explanations that arrive at similar conclusions. The appeal of jazz, in Larkin's view, was precisely that it was not foreign; it was something his generation took as their own because they had discovered it for themselves. One's parents knew nothing about it, “[n]o one you knew liked it” (AWJ 15), and it provided a private language that those outside the unofficial club had difficulty understanding. “For us, jazz became a part of the private joke of existence, rather than a public expertise,” Larkin says of his group at Oxford; “expressions such as ‘combined pimp and lover’ and ‘eating the cheaper cuts of pork’ (both from a glossary on ‘Yellow Dog Blues’) flecked our conversations cryptically … ” (AWJ 17). More than that, it was an unpretentious art built on a simple and direct emotional appeal that did not depend on an extensive musical education. Jazz was a “form ideally suited to those with enough—but no more—music in them to respond intensely to a few strong simple effects,” Amis says (“Farewell to a Friend” 4). Larkin's explanation contains an implicit recognition of what should have been the distance between American musician and English audience:

… those white and coloured Americans, Bubber Miley, Frank Teschmacher, J. C. Higginbotham, spoke immediately to our understanding. Their rips, slurs and distortions were something we understood perfectly. This was something we had found for ourselves, that wasn't taught at school (what a prerequisite that is of nearly everything worthwhile!), and having found it, we made it bear all the enthusiasm usually directed at more established arts. (AWJ 16)

A. T. Tolley characterizes Larkin's love of jazz as a kind of “cultural iconoclasm,” and he observes, correctly, that “the sense that one valued something, not because it was felt to be culturally important, but because it spoke to one with immediacy, was to remain for him a touchstone of the arts” (2). Amis agrees that the appeal of jazz lay somehow in its lack of cultural authority, the fact that its commentary had not yet been written. His generation was the first to encounter it, and there were no precedents. Jazz was a “world of romance,” he writes, “with no guide, no senior person to point the way” (“Farewell to a Friend” 4).

For Larkin, conversant with this world, everything from painting to a sore throat had its jazz analogy or allusion. He writes to Jim Sutton, his fellow jazz enthusiast at King Henry VIII School, Coventry, now an art student: “There is great hope for your painting. Look at Armstrong's crude beginnings & his lyric height. Or even the third-stage crudeness of Pee Wee Russell … ” (Letters 18). Another letter to Sutton mentions “a cough & generally Armstrongish throat” which is “fine for bawling blues with (‘Ah'm sorry babe … sorry to mah heart … ’)” (Letters 7). An early spring day is “as wonderful as hearing Earl Hines after a YMCA piano-basher” (Letters 114), and Auden's integrated style in Paid on Both Sides is “like Teschmaker's clarinet or Pee Wee Russell” (Life 75). The blues form especially was adaptable to any sort of utterance, even the apology to Sutton in Italy that a previous letter would be late because it was too heavy to be sent airmail:

‘Sent you a letter, but it had to go by boat
I said I sent you a letter, but it had to go by boat,
Er—pardon me a moment while I pour some
whiskey down the inside of my throat …’ (Letters 81)

Larkin's most extravagant jazz analogy appears in an essay written during his last year at Oxford in which he argues that jazz “is the closest description of the unconscious we have” (Life 57). The argument begins with the Eliot-like assumption of a decay of ritual that has resulted in the deprivation of the unconscious, “which finds its daily fulfilment in such ritual.” The predicament of the unconscious is reflected in turn by a general upheaval in all the arts, and most particularly in the emergence of American jazz. Every quality of the new music is analogous to the situation of the unconscious. The stridency of jazz symbolizes the urgency of the problem. The subjection of the unconscious is symbolized by the music of a subject people. The imprisonment of the unconscious is captured by the unvarying monotony of jazz's 4/4 rhythm, and the unconscious's panic is captured by the texture of the jazz tone. “Jazz is the new art of the unconscious,” Larkin concludes, “and it is therefore improvised, for it cannot call upon consciousness to express its own divorce from consciousness” (Life 57).

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. … ” (RW 72). 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” (AWJ 259).

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 chronologial 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).

Uncannily, Larkin's gap after Oxford in 1943 was being duplicated at almost exactly the same time by a gap in jazz created by the American Federation of Musicians' ban on recorded music imposed in July of 1942. “It is a significant date,” Larkin says in a review of a jazz discography. The disruption “closed the era of swing music. When the ban was lifted two years later, jazz had split into what seemed two irreconcilable camps, be-bop and trad revival, and things were never quite the same again” (AWJ 161). Larkin's implication is that the coincidence of the two gaps caused him to miss the advent of modern jazz, so that when he began reviewing jazz records for the Daily Telegraph in 1961, he was “patently unfitted to do so” and took on the job only because of the depth of his ignorance of the new jazz: “I didn't believe jazz itself could alter out of all recognition any more than the march or the waltz could. It was simply a question of hearing enough of the new stuff. … ” (AWJ 18-19). But when the records arrive, the extent of the gap in Larkin's jazz is revealed:

… the eagerness with which I played them turned rapidly to astonishment, to disbelief, to alarm. I felt I was in some night-mare, in which I had confidently gone into an examination hall only to find that I couldn't make head or tail of the questions. It wasn't like listening to a kind of jazz I didn't care for—Art Tatum, shall I say, or Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers. It wasn't like listening to jazz at all. (AWJ 19)

In this multiplicity of gaps there is one further gap that the first two are meant to account for—the real motive for the story Larkin supposedly discovers—and that is the gap between the conception of jazz in Larkin's introduction to All What Jazz and that in the reviews it introduces. A number of readers of the collection have noted the contradiction—a bitter denunciation of modern jazz and its practitioners in the introduction and a fair-minded and appreciative view of the same music and musicians in the essays that immediately follow. To take the most obvious example, in the introduction Charlie Parker (as a member of the Parker/Pound/Picasso trinity) comes to represent everything that is wrong with modern jazz. Larkin holds him personally responsible for the advent of the new music, which is characterized as “Parker and his followers” (AWJ 20); and he comes to epitomize the worst of modern jazz's mannerisms, the “impression of mental hallucination,” a “kind of manic virtuosity,” and the “substitution of bloodless note-patterns for some cheerful or sentimental popular song as a basis for improvisation.” Parker's playing was “fast and showy,” he “couldn't play four bars without resorting to a peculiarly irritating five-note cliché” from “The Woody Woodpecker Song,” and his tone was “thin and sometimes shrill.” He repeats, finally, one jazz critic's testimony that “if he played Charlie Parker records to his baby it cried” (AWJ 20-21, 26).

This is not, however, the Charlie Parker of a 10 June 1961 joint review of Parker and Sidney Bechet. Here the two musicians represent two different but equally legitimate branches of jazz:

Parker … had when he died, aged 34, seen jazz re-fashion itself pretty well in his image and heard his own solos coming back at him from a thousand horns. His technique and invention were prodigious, whereas no one would pretend Bechet had any more of either than he needed. Yet both alike on these records display unquestioned individual authority, unclouded and absolute. This is jazz and this is Bechet (or Parker) playing it. (AWJ 40)

Parker is praised as a musician who “not only could translate his ideas into notes at superhuman speed, but who was simultaneously aware of half a dozen ways of resolving any given musical situation. …” Interestingly, Larkin's own traditional jazz is now referred to as “the ossified platitudes of 1940 big-band jazz” against which Parker's modern jazz was in part a reaction. The review ends with one of those unexpected and affecting figures that the Larkin reader sometimes stumbles across in the last lines of a poem: “But on the evidence of these solos alone it would be absurd to call Parker's music a reaction. As well call leaping salmon a reaction” (AWJ 42-43). The elation of the leaping salmon and the generosity of coupling Parker with Bechet, Larkin's representative of all the best qualities of jazz, will at first seem odd to a reader who, a few pages earlier in the introduction, has seen Parker coupled with another traditional jazz musician: “I used to think that anyone hearing a Parker record would guess he was a drug addict, but no one hearing Beiderbecke would think he was an alcoholic, and that this summed up the distinction between the kinds of music” (AWJ 20).

It is the gap between the two Parkers that Larkin seeks to fill with the story he claims to have discerned in rereading the reviews. Contemporary criticism thrives on gaps and contradictions of various kinds—the reader response critic's blanks, the poststructuralist's aporias, Macherey's Marxist lapses and hollows. These critics discover disruptions even where the surface looks perfectly smooth; it is difficult to come up with another instance of a writer opening a chasm as wide as that Larkin opens in All What Jazz. And in attempting to bridge one gap, the two Parkers (I will follow Larkin's lead in using Parker as an icon for the whole of modern jazz), he introduces another that is equally troubling. Larkin's explanation for the contradiction between the two Parkers involves a confession that would seem more damning for a reviewer than the charge of inconsistency. He confesses that for the first two years or so of his career as a record reviewer he faked his responses to the music under review.

What prevented him from publishing his honest response? Larkin's explanation is that he found himself in the awkward position of coming upon the traditional-modern controversy 20 years too late. It was in the late 1940s (during the gap in his jazz life) that the battle had been fought; to adopt the traditional viewpoint once again in 1961 would have been “journalistically impossible,” since the issue had long since been decided. By the time Larkin could enter the fray “Parker was dead and a historical figure, in young eyes probably indistinguishable from King Oliver and other founding fathers. There was nothing for it but to carry on with my original plan of undiscriminating praise. … ” (AWJ 21). In short, he became the jazz equivalent of the literary “whores who had grown old in the reviewing game by praising everything …” (AWJ 19). Larkin's “slow approximation” through the reviews to the position taken in the introduction is the amusing narrative he finds in the collection—“watching truthfulness break in, despite my initial resolve” (AWJ 25).

Larkin's figure for himself as the jazz whore seems particularly damning here in light of his attitude toward modern jazz. In taking up his column for the Daily Telegraph, he would be to reviewing what prostitution is to sexual desire, and it turns out that his formulation—the counterfeit that is the antithesis of the thing it feigns—approximates the relationship of modern jazz to real jazz. “When Parker and the rest started bopping,” he says in a review included in the second edition of All What Jazz (by which time truthfulness had broken in), “their aim was to sell something as unlike jazz as possible to jazz audiences.” What they produced was “the conscious opposite of jazz” (AWJ 260). Borrowing an argument from A. E. Housman, Larkin declares that the music of Parker and the rest was not bad jazz; it was simply not jazz at all, and to appropriate the name for something different amounts to a kind of dishonesty. “What Parker, Monk, Miles and the Jazz Misanthropes are playing can be Afro-American music for all I care, but it isn't jazz” (AWJ 261).

Now I am a simple soul. If someone offers me salt instead of sugar, or a waltz instead of a march, or bop instead of jazz, then I can't help pointing out that there's been some mistake. (AWJ 160)⁵

Using the same argument, one would have to say that if Larkin's introduction is truthful, then a good part of All What Jazz offers us reviews that are not reviews at all.

One of these reviews sets out to define the essence of jazz reviewing. What is the one quality that the jazz critic must possess? It turns out to be exactly that quality betrayed by the first two years of Larkin's reviews. The jazz critic is “only as good as his ear”:

His ear will tell him instantly whether a piece of music is vital, musical, exciting, or cerebral, mock-academic, dead, long before he can read Don De Micheal on the subject, or learn that it is written in inverted nineteenths, or in the Stygian mode, or recorded at the NAACP Festival at Little Rock. He must hold on to the principle that the only reason for praising a work is that it pleases, and the way to develop his critical sense is to be more acutely aware of whether he is being pleased or not. (AWJ 156)

By this test as well, Larkin's foray into jazz criticism was an act of dishonesty—unless, of course, Parker's solos did afford him some small pleasures and his metaphor of leaping salmon was not altogether contrived. This is to say that there is the possibility of another equally amusing interpretation of the two Parkers and of Larkin's story justifying them: the antimodernist theory of the introduction is simply not sophisticated enough to incorporate Larkin's own practice as a critic in the reviews. In order to say one thing about modernism in the introduction (to alter a Marxist formulation on ideology) there are other things that cannot be said. Unfortunately for Larkin, he had already said them in the reviews of the first two years.

To put the issue another way, why would a reviewer publish two years of faked reviews and call his readers' attention to it in the introduction? Clearly because the values his story reveals and conceals are more important to him than the impropriety of confessing to fakery (and of course the emphasis of his version of the story is that he eventually told the truth). Here is Nietzsche's manner of questioning this sort of revelation: “When we are confronted with any manifestation which some one has permitted us to see, we may ask: what is it meant to conceal? What is it meant to draw our attention from? What prejudice does it seek to raise?” (The Dawn of Day 358). Pierre Macherey extends Nietzsche's argument to ask of texts what it is they cannot say (A Theory of Literary Production 85). In Macherey's theory the kind of gaps that we confront here can be traced to the text's relation to ideology. A text produced under a particular ideology—a conception of literary modernism, for example—cannot say something that would contradict that ideology. Yet in attempting to avoid one contradiction the text is driven to other disruptions that are the inevitable result of the limits and gaps inherent in all ideologies.⁶

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 amount to this: the “untruthful” Larkin of the reviews often seems more trustworthy than the sincere Larkin of the introduction (Watts 24).

Many readers, especially those who know the records under review, must have experienced this reaction. Tolley finds it puzzling that “someone who hated Parker's music so much” could write “so perceptively about his concert recordings” (144). He quotes from a 1963 Larkin review of two recordings by Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and concludes that people “familiar with the music might say that one had to be writing with engagement and perception to offer so discerning a critique. These are certainly not the comments of a baffled, dismayed reviewer” (142). In the introduction, where “Larkin writes frankly and apparently sincerely, the result is a sweeping denunciation of modernism including all modern jazz,” Watts notes. “Yet, in the actual reviews, Larkin writes predominantly in a much more considerate and scrupulous way. … ” And if one applies to the two approaches the test of “stylistic acuteness,” then “the ‘conscientious’ Larkin seems to be a better and more intelligent critic than the ‘sincere’ Larkin” (22-23). Watts offers two explanations for this paradox. The first is that “sincerity is no criterion of merit,” and the second is that “the discipline of striving to write fairly may actually have liberated more of his intelligence than did the freedom he enjoyed in that Introduction” (22-23). It is easy to agree with Watts's premise that the reviews are more interesting, more intelligent, more acute than the introduction, and still question the adequacy of his explanation, since it depends on our accepting Larkin's story that the introduction represents the truth and the reviews the pretense.⁷

When we look closely at the conception of modernism that Larkin brings to his discussion of jazz in the introduction, we recognize that it is the kind of ideological statement that could never sanction thoughtful criticism of modernism or modern jazz. Any sophisticated discussion of Parker or Davis (or Eliot) would contradict it, since the introduction relegates all the productions of modernism, including jazz, to the realm of non-art, unworthy of serious consideration. Modernist works “are irresponsible exploitations of technique in contradiction of human life as we know it. This is my essential criticism of modernism, whether perpetuated by Parker, Pound or Picasso.” The modern work “will divert us as long as we are prepared to be mystified or outraged, but maintains its hold only by being more mystifying and more outrageous: it has no lasting power” (AWJ 27). The genesis of modernism is related to an imbalance between the two tensions that produce art, the tensions between the artist and the material (that is, a concern with technique) and between the artist and the audience (a concern with being read or heard or seen): “in the last seventy-five years or so the second of these has slackened or even perished” (AWJ 23). In consequence, the artist has become over-concerned with technical experimentation and has no interest in giving pleasure to an audience (or perhaps even delights in producing outrage in the audience). “The tension between artist and audience in jazz slackened when the Negro stopped wanting to entertain the white man,” Larkin writes. “From using music to entertain the white man, the Negro had moved to hating him with it” (AWJ 24).

The final logic of Larkin's theory is the Housman argument that he incorporates in a later review: if we apply the word poetry or jazz to something which does not resemble in content or form the thing which has heretofore been called by that name, we are corrupting the language. “By this time I was quite certain that jazz had ceased to be produced,” Larkin writes in the introduction. “The society that had engendered it had gone, and would not return” (AWJ 25). In a later review that reflects the introduction, Larkin has found a name for the new music—“the jazz that isn't jazz” (AWJ 87). In a 1967 review entitled “Credo” he returns to Housman's theory in The Name and Nature of Poetry:

… I like jazz to be jazz. A. E. Housman said he could recognize poetry because it made his throat tighten and his eyes water: I can recognize jazz because it makes me tap my foot, grunt affirmative exhortations, or even get up and caper round the room. If it doesn't do this, then however musically interesting or spiritually adventurous or racially praiseworthy it is, it isn't jazz. If that's being a purist, I'm a purist. (AWJ 174)

What Parker and his fellow musicians are playing “isn't jazz. Jazz is dying with its practitioners, Red Allen, Pee Wee Russell, Johnny Hodges” (AWJ 261). To develop a concept of poetry or painting or jazz which holds that the work under examination simply does not merit the name by which the art is customarily evoked is a legitimate enterprise; it is not however a promising basis for a collection of reviews of such works, especially since the loving attention and carefully drawn distinctions of the reviews will seem to be in contradiction to the theory.

If we assume that the more one conforms to an ideology of art the more one comes up against things that cannot be said or sensibilities and pleasures that must be repressed, then the introduction of All What Jazz may be read not as the sincere Larkin who confesses to insincerity in the reviews, but as the ideological Larkin whose ideology of modernism tempts him to discredit his more honest attempts to understand modern jazz. From the time of Oxford, Larkin had viewed literature and the other arts through the lens of jazz. In two discussions of jazz and modernism (quoted earlier) that follow the first edition of All What Jazz he also gives the impression that it was jazz that allowed him to understand modernism (RW 72, AWJ 259), but in fact, if we can accept his account of his moment of revelation, he reverses the relationship and allows his version of modernism to explain jazz. By this time, however, jazz and modernism have become so entangled that it is impossible to say which is the perspective through which the other is seen, and at different points in the introduction each serves as paradigm. The critical jargon of modern literary criticism, Larkin says, helped him to understand what was happening in modern jazz, but at the same time, his definition of modernism, which involves the artist's over-concern with material and technique and lack of concern with audience, almost certainly derives from his sense of exclusion from contemporary jazz after the gap in his jazz life. That is, the mystery of how a jazz lover, indeed a connoisseur of the art, could be so thoroughly alienated from the latest phase of jazz is solved once he sees that the musician of modern jazz has no interest in him, feels no responsibility for entertaining or even being understood by an audience. Thus his conclusion that the defining quality of the term modern applied to art is “irresponsibility” (AWJ 23).

To return to Larkin's narrative of his awakening to the true history of jazz, he fixes its moment of inception to the confluence of the language of jazz criticism and the language of modernist criticism of poetry and painting. Faced with the task of writing a column on music no longer familiar to him, he begins reading jazz critics and historians:

… there was something about the books I was now reading that seemed oddly familiar. This development, this progress, this new language that was more difficult, more complex, that required you to work hard at appreciating it, that you couldn't expect to understand first go, that needed technical and professional knowledge to evaluate it at all levels, this revolutionary explosion that spoke for our time while at the same time being traditional in the fullest, the deepest … Of course! This was the language of criticism of modern painting, modern poetry, modern music. Of course! How glibly I had talked of modern jazz, without realizing the force of the adjective: this was modern jazz, and Parker was a modern jazz player just as Picasso was a modern painter and Pound a modern poet. (AWJ 22)

Perhaps the most revealing moment in Larkin's account of his revelation is the relief that comes flooding in once he can feel that the problem is not a gap in his understanding or sensibility but a gap in the history of the arts.

All I am saying is that the term “modern”, when applied to art, has a more than chronological meaning: it denotes a quality of irresponsibility peculiar to this century, known sometimes as modernism, and once I had classified modern jazz under this heading I knew where I was.” (AWJ 23)

All-encompassing ideologies such as Larkin's formulation of modernism have both positive and negative functions, as Althusserian critics point out. Positively, they allow us to feel better about our condition by offering what look to be natural and seamless explanations for everything; negatively, they allow us to take imaginary explanations for real ones. Once Larkin has classified modern jazz under the general heading of modernism, it is true that he knows where he is; he now has a way of explaining every feature of the music of Parker, Coltrane, and Davis. Unfortunately, this also means that jazz must now conform to his paradigm of modernism, and this produces a somewhat eccentric history of jazz.

An obvious example is Larkin's attack on the university in the introduction to All What Jazz. The chief villain of literary modernism for Larkin is, strangely, not the artist but the academic critic. In “The Pleasure Principle” (1957) he charges that poetry has lost its true (that is, pleasure-seeking) audience through a kind of conspiracy between the poet, the literary critic, and the academic critic, three classes so indistinguishable that “the poet has gained the happy position wherein he can praise his own poetry in the press and explain it in the classroom” (RW 81). The audience that reads poetry for pleasure has been replaced by an audience of students who learn from their (mystifying) professors that “reading a poem is hard work” (RW 81). The university professor is the subject of some of Larkin's most biting prose and verse. He is the narrator of “Naturally the Foundation will Bear Your Expenses,” he is Jake Balokowsky of “Posterity,” and he is the speaker of the following passage, designed to demonstrate how the academy has aided the conspiracy to deceive the contemporary audience:

… don't trust your eyes, or ears, or understanding. They'll tell you this is ridiculous, or ugly, or meaningless. Don't believe them. You've got to work at this: after all, you don't expect to understand anything as important as art straight off, do you? I mean, this is pretty complex stuff: if you want to know how complex, I'm giving a course of ninety-six lectures at the local college, starting next week. … After all, think what asses people have made of themselves in the past by not understanding art—you don't want to be like that, do you? (AWJ 23-24)

As an argument about modern poetry, which flourishes to such an extent in the college classroom, this has some cogency, and Larkin was not alone in holding the position. (Blake Morrison reports that Larkin's friend and fellow conservative Robert Conquest suggested in a 1966 interview that a conspiracy existed between universities and poets to promote ambiguity and difficulty, thus keeping university professors employed [The Movement 128-29].) But in applying the argument to jazz—which he also tries to move into the academy via “concert halls” and “university recital rooms” (AWJ 24)—Larkin produces only a caricature of art history. Jazz as an art form and jazz musicians as artists are notoriously unacademic. “It lacks the embedded institutions of the other arts,” Ted Gioia has noted, and he adds that the “group norms, exercised perhaps through academia or other mechanisms of standardization, would probably have stifled some of jazz's greatest talents” (83). How is it possible for Larkin to argue that the sounds of Charlie Parker or Miles Davis are the result of a conspiracy of university professors? In large part because of the confluence of jazz and poetry, later to be mixed with conceptions of modernism, that began when Larkin became a jazz addict at the age of 12 or 13.

And such a confluence may have implications for all the streams that converge. Larkin's jazz criticism is informed by a conception of literary modernism. It may be that a reader of the poetry who brings to the reading a sense of Larkin's jazz life will find in the verse various manifestations of that life, some of them difficult to separate from a style or quality we now think of as Larkinesque, although such a reading will require a more rigorous and extensive examination of both the poems and musical texts and conventions. It may also be that, apart from poems that openly embrace jazz—“Reasons for Attendance,” “For Sidney Bechet,” “Reference Back,” for example—the traces left by jazz and blues in Larkin's verse are so elusive, so deeply submerged as to be nearly inaccessible, or to be retrievable only through more speculative readings. Still, it is intriguing to conceive of a jazz or blues intertext inhabiting the Larkin canon that may be glimpsed now and then, as in the opening of Larkin's last great poem “Aubade” (CP 208), “I work all day, and get half drunk at night,” a line that, read in another context, could as easily be attributed to Sleepy John Estes or Blind Lemon Jefferson.

Notes

1. I have used the following abbreviations for frequently cited works by Larkin, for Anthony Thwaite's edition of the letters, and for Andrew Motion's biography: All What Jazz (AWJ), Collected Poems (CP), Required Writing (RW), Selected Letters of Philip Larkin (Letters), and Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life (Life).

2. In Stomping the Blues Albert Murray quotes (disapprovingly) the definition of the blues offered by the Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend—the “tender, ironic, bitter, humorous, or typical expression of a deprived people” (Murray 74). On the issues of the blues as the music of deprivation and the blues as fundamental to both jazz and rock and roll, see, for example, AWJ 36, 86, 87, 234-35, 266, and Life 46-47, 57. In general, Larkin thinks of the blues both as a kind of jazz and as the basis of all jazz. Very early in his jazz career he came to the conclusion that “there is only one kind of jazz, and that's Blues, or music based on the Blues” (Life 46). In All What Jazz he writes that “blues lie at the heart of rock,” which is “only certain elements in the blues isolated, coarsened and amplified” (266).

3. This is quoted from a 1968 Guardian interview in Rossen (100). The whole passage is of interest because of Larkin's explicit comparison of jazz and poetry:

   In many ways I prefer it to poetry. I listen to it while dressing in the morning, turning to it in a way I should turn to poetry if I were living my life according to Vernon Watkins's standards. What did Baudelaire say, man can live a week without bread but not a day without poetry. You might say I can live a week without poetry but not a day without jazz.

4. The reviews continued until December 1971. The first edition of All What Jazz (1970) contains the reviews between 1961 and 1968. The second edition (1985) adds the reviews of the last three years.

5. In The Name and Nature of Poetry Housman argues against extending the word poetry to verse that does not merit the term. Rather than calling it bad poetry we should not call it poetry at all:

   We should beware of treating the word poetry as chemists have treated the word salt. Salt is a crystalline substance recognised by its taste; its name is as old as the English language and is the possession of the English people, who know what it means: it is not the private property of a science less than three hundred years old. … The right model for imitation is that chemist who, when he encountered, or thought he had encountered, a hitherto nameless form of matter, did not purloin for it the name of something else, but invented out of his own head a name which should be proper to it, and enriched the vocabulary of modern man with the useful word gas. If we apply the word poetry to an object which does not resemble, either in form or content, anything which has heretofore been so called, not only are we maltreating and corrupting language, but we may be guilty of disrespect and blasphemy. (174)

   The passage that occasioned this distinction is from Crashaw's “The Weeper”: “Two walking baths, two weeping motions, / Portable and compendious oceans.”

6. I have used Nietzsche and Macherey in a similar manner in Early Stevens: The Nietzschean Intertext. See chapter 2, “Stevens Reading Nietzsche,” for a more extended discussion of Macherey's symptomatic reading.

7. The possibility that Larkin himself may have doubted the sincerity of the introduction is suggested by his remarks to Donald Mitchell, to whom All What Jazz is dedicated, and to Peter Crawley, sales director at Faber & Faber. He told Mitchell that the introduction was “not perhaps to be taken very seriously” (Letters 408). To Crawley he said of the thesis of the introduction—that “post-Parker jazz is the equivalent of modernist developments in other arts”: “I don't think this has actually been said before, and, while it may not be wholly defensible, I think it is sufficiently amusing to say once” (Letters 417).

Works Cited

Amis, Kingsley. “Farewell to a Friend.” Philip Larkin: The Man and his Work. Ed. Dale Salwak. London: Macmillan, 1989. 3-6.

———. “Oxford and After.” Larkin at Sixty. Ed. Anthony Thwaite. London: Faber, 1982. 23-30.

Gioia, Ted. The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.

Housman, A. E. “The Name and Nature of Poetry.” A. E. Housman: Selected Prose. Ed. John Carter. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1961. 168-95.

James, Clive. “On His Wit.” Larkin at Sixty. Ed. Anthony Thwaite. London: Faber, 1982. 98-108.

Larkin, Philip. All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961-1971. New York: Farrar, 1985.

———. Collected Poems. Ed. Anthony Thwaite. New York: Farrar, 1989.

———. Jill. Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1976.

———. Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982. New York: Farrar, 1984.

———. Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940-1985. Ed. Anthony Thwaite. New York: Farrar, 1993.

Leggett, B. J. Early Stevens: The Nietzschean Intertext. Durham: Duke UP, 1992.

Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. Trans. Geoffrey Wall. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978.

Morrison, Blake. The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s. London: Methuen, 1986.

Motion, Andrew. Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life. New York: Farrar, 1993.

Murray, Albert. Stomping the Blues. New York: McGraw, 1976.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Dawn of Day. Trans. J. M. Kennedy. New York: Russell & Russell, 1964. Vol. 9 of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Ed. Oscar Levy.

Rossen, Janice. Philip Larkin: His Life's Work. Hemel Hempstead, England: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989.

Russel, Nick. “Larkin’ About at St John's.” Philip Larkin 1922-1985: A Tribute. Ed. George Hartley. London: Marvell, 1988. 82-87.

Tolley, A. T. My Proper Ground: A Study of the Work of Philip Larkin and its Development. Ottawa, Ontario: Carleton UP, 1991.

Watts, Cedric. “Larkin and Jazz.” Critical Essays on Philip Larkin: The Poems. Ed. Linda Cookson and Bryan Loughrey. London: Longman, 1989. 20-27.