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1998 – Larkin’s French
Larkin’s French – by Raphaël Ingelbien,.
Raphaël Ingelbien, former holder of the Philip Larkin Scholarship in the University of Hull, reports on the talk given to the Larkin Society by Graham Chesters in Hull on 29 September 1998.
[From About Larkin 6, Winter 1998/99]
On 29 September 1998, the Society members assembled in the Staff House at the University of Hull were treated to a splendidly detailed exploration of Larkin’s relation to French poetry, and more especially Charles Baudelaire. The speaker was supremely qualified for the task: Professor Chesters is not only an expert on French symbolism, but has a particular interest in English translations and renderings of Baudelaire. In addition, he has always followed Larkin very closely – the man as well as the poet, since he spent some years at Queen’s University, Belfast, before coming to the University of Hull. Anecdotal coincidences do not stop here; indeed, when Professor Chesters reminisced about some strains between the famous librarian and the University’s French Department, Larkin’s hostile comments about foreign languages were immediately brought to mind.
It has been clear for some years that Larkin’s strictures on foreign literature were in fact disingenuous, and any remaining doubts were quickly dispelled by the speaker’s skilful analysis of Larkin’s early poem ‘Femmes Damnées’, written in 1943 under the pseudonym ‘Brunette Coleman’. Larkin’s use of Baudelaire in that poem has always been obvious, flaunted as it is by its French title, its lesbian theme and decadent images, which are all taken from Les Fleurs du Mal. However, Professor Chesters cast this debt in a series of new lights. He explored the context in which Larkin read Baudelaire at Oxford, where Enid Starkie’s championing of the French decadent was causing quite a stir. He also discussed Larkin’s use of a French model as part of his wider exploration of different identities: the poem is signed by a female persona, and deals with sexual difference. Larkin’s declared wish to be ‘different from himself’ was not limited to his juvenilia; as Professor Chesters insisted, it runs through his poetic career, and is often bound up with his interest in French poetry. Larkin famously described the last line of 'Absences' as sounding like ‘a slightly unconvincing translation from a French Symbolist’.
Critics often conflate the French symbolist influence on Larkin with his longing for poetic transcendence and rarefied atmospheres, but Professor Chesters pointed out that Larkin was also sensitive to other registers in French decadent poetry. Indeed, manuscripts reveal that Verlaine’s occasional bawdiness had its appeal; most importantly, Baudelaire’s eye for urban detail may also have helped Larkin to develop his own poetics. Thus, while the speaker originally suggested that ‘Femmes Damnées’ could be read as a typically English version of French decadence, he also showed how Larkin’s description of an English setting in the first stanzas points back to the urban poetry of Baudelaire’s ‘Tableaux Parisiens’. And while Larkin’s poem shrinks back from Baudelaire’s celebration of sexual decadence, the ominous realism of its closing lines is still indebted to certain parts of Les Fleurs du Mal.
All this led Professor Chesters to make out a strong case for the importance of French poetry and of Brunette Coleman in Larkin’s development. Instead of regarding them as early experiments from which the mature, ‘English’ Larkin later emerged, he invited readers to consider them as part of Larkin’s continued attempt to test his identity and become other than himself. His plea was made all the more convincing by the remarkable ease with which a Baudelaire specialist discussed Larkin’s poetry, which never ceases to reveal surprising aspects.
A version of Professor Chesters’ talk, ‘Larkin and Baudelaire’s Damned Women’, is published in Making Connections: Essays in French Culture and Society in Honour of Philip Thody, ed. James Dolamore, 1998, pp. 81-92.
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