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2006 – Phil Bowen
'Well, we shall find out' – by James Booth.
James Booth reports on ‘Well, we shall find out’, a talk by Phil Bowen, The Tranby Room, University of Hull, 20 October 2006.
[From About Larkin 22, October 2006]
Phil Bowen's collections of poetry include The Professor's Boots, which features poems about Max Wall, Tony Hancock and Ken Dodd, and Variety's Hammer (Stride), selected for The Forward Book of Poetry 1998. His latest collection, Starfly, was published by Stride in the autumn of 2004. His New and Selected Poems will be available in 2007.
He has also edited two anthologies for Stride: Jewels and Binoculars: fifty poets celebrate Bob Dylan, and Things We Said Today – poetry about The Beatles, and one biography, A Gallery to Play To – the story of the Mersey Poets, published in 1999.
Phil has devised several pieces for theatre, including A Handful of Rain, which imagines a meeting between Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas, and The Same Boat, a one woman multi-media piece about Caitlin Thomas. His latest theatre piece, A Case of the Poet, concerns Larkin's long-term companion Monica Jones, and was staged with The Same Boat as part of the Dylan Thomas Festival, at Swansea's Dylan Thomas Centre on 7 November 2006.
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In his genial and entertaining talk Phil Bowen (pictured right) claimed modestly to focus only on his own personal encounters with Larkin's poetry. But in doing so he clearly struck a chord with many in the audience, and subtly caught one of the essential elements of Larkin's enduring appeal: his 'reachability'. As a schoolboy in Liverpool in the early 1960s, Phil had found Auden, Eliot and Yeats impressive, but also beyond him. Somehow Philip Larkin and Dylan Thomas were within reach. Larkin was, after all, the poet who made the young Roger McGough understand that it was possible to be a poet and not be already dead.
Phil gave a vivid picture of his first encounters with poetry in the Liverpool of the early 1960s, through the school anthology, Here Today (1963), with its introduction by Ted Hughes, three poems by Charles Causley, and only one poem by a woman (Stevie Smith's 'Harold's Leap'). The single Larkin poem, 'I Remember, I Remember', did not at the time make a great impression. This was, after all the Liverpool of the Beatles and The Mersey Poets. It was when The Whitsun Weddings appeared in 1964 that Phil came to realise how good a poet Larkin was. Apart from Eliot's 'Prufrock' (still his favourite poem), Phil felt that he had never read anything so good before in his life. He shared the experience of countless readers at this period who 'discovered' Larkin for themselves with a feeling of personal intimacy: 'I worked it out for myself; no-one told me’. Phil was gratified when he later discovered that his judgement was confirmed, and Larkin was recognised as a major poet. Here was a writer who could use a commonplace phrase like 'ate an awful pie' and make it poetic. 'Until I read the Mersey poets and Larkin, and listened to Bob Dylan, I hadn't realised you could say such things in poetry and it still be poetry. I hadn't thought anyone could have communicated with someone like me so easily'. It is this quality, Phil argued, that ensured that, despite the enormous pains he took not to become a 'national treasure', this is now exactly what he is. On a different level Phil was also left with one of those haunting puzzles familiar to many readers of Larkin: the detached, unattributable phrase, like a tune you can't get out of your head, and yet can't identify. He would have sworn for years that the phrase 'ate an awful pie' was in the first Larkin poem he had read, 'I Remember, I Remember'. 'I would have bet £30 or 40 on it.' But it wasn't there. Where was it?
Phil recalled how at Drama College in the late 60s he had impressed women by reading them T. S. Eliot and Auden's 'In the Musée des Beaux Arts'. However, when he was called upon to read a poem out loud to the class, he opted instead for 'The Whitsun Weddings': 'I thought “they won't know about Larkin so it will seem that I've written it myself”.’ For those in his Tranby Room audience familiar with Larkin's own reading voice, it was fascinating to hear Phil reciting 'I Remember, I Remember', 'The Whitsun Weddings', 'Water' and 'The Trees' in a voice which, as he said himself, could scarcely be more different from that of the poet. The poetry, however, unlike that of some poets, remains to a remarkable degree, the same, whatever the voice.
In the 1980s Phil's career took a different course, and he only returned to literature and the arts in the early 1990s. ('By this time I probably thought "an awful pie" was in 'The Explosion!') He found a transformed situation. He expected there still to be only one woman poet, but there were many. He was pleased to find the tutors he met on Arvon poetry courses, Roger McGough and later Sean O'Brien, were admirers of Larkin. But more generally at this time, no-one seemed to like the poet. Indeed he was much hated. The line was (as it still is in some quarters): 'Larkin is a great poet, but it's a pity ...' Such readers, Phil felt, are profoundly mistaken. 'If you want to know anything about comedy and theatre', he declared, 'watch Ken Dodd. If you want to know anything about life, listen to Bob Dylan or read Philip Larkin. His poems are just better written than those of others.' Who else, Phil asked, could have thought up those extraordinarily unexpected openings: the disturbing violence of the 'Old Fools' for instance ('Why aren't they screaming?'), or the funny preposterousness of 'Water': 'If I were called in / To construct a religion…'
There is always another world, in Larkin, Phil concluded. He takes us beyond the ordinary.. Betjeman could have written much of 'I Remember, I Remember', but not the last line: 'Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.' Betjeman wouldn't have 'taken off' at the end, as Larkin does. Phil illustrated this 'going beyond' in a highly lateral way, by means of a haunting surrealist moment from his own life. In a pub in a small Welsh town he had been accosted by a man who buttonholed him with the assertion: 'They're trying to change the language, you know.' Phil nodded uncomfortably. 'It's being taken off us,' continued the bore with paranoid intensity. 'What would you think, now – what would you think– if there was no language?' Not knowing what answer to give to this mind-boggling question, Phil responded ingenuously 'Well. It'd be a lot quieter.' It was only afterwards that he'd realised that the point at issue had been the Welsh language. Somehow the conversation had taken him into a more profound and poetic realm than our usual world of politics and nationalism.
Phil Bowen and Belinda Hakes Phil Bowen Photographs © James Booth 2006
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