the year I found philip larkin

an ordinary looking man. a great poet

This week I read a poem by Philip Larkin for The American Scholar  Read Me a Poem. And while I walked my dogs this morning, I found myself reflecting on the year I first encountered him - not in person, of course, but in his poetry.  I was on a semester abroad at Wroxton College in Oxfordshire.  And that does sound odd - since England has never been abroad for me. Rather, it was returning home.

I had finished high school in the United States and went to Emerson College in Boston through their early admissions program.  Two years later, attending Wroxton as a study abroad student was my chance to go back home, while still working on my American BA degree.  Wroxton Abbey was a Jacobean mansion with sweeping lawns and sprawling wooded acres, in a tiny village near Banbury.

When I first arrived, and seeing that I was British, one of the professors asked, "Are you one of us or are you one of them?" I explained that my family returned to England every year, but I'd been a resident of Massachusetts for seven years.  "Oh," he said, "then you're not one of us.  You're tainted."

 My bedroom at Wroxton was enormous. If you happen to see a photograph of the abbey, my room is the one on the second floor, the tall windowed one, on the right.  I shared it with one person.  We had a view across the lawns. Our desks looked over the drive and the pine trees. Every morning I woke to the sound of wood pigeons.

All our professors were Oxbridge types and the courses were run in the British tradition with seminars, tutorials and frequent guest lecturers, including Shakespearean scholar Stanley Wells.  We were able to take in many productions at Stratford too. I saw the Henry plays - parts I and II and Henry V, as well as The Merry Wives of Windsor.

I was nineteen years old. Back in America I had just ended a disastrous love affair with a much older man. So I was wiser but also sadder.  This was my chance, not just to spread my wings, but to reconnect with my heritage, with grandparents and British friends.  I occasionally went to London to see my best friend Lucy and her circle in Earls Court. I shopped for clothes on Oxford Street and Portobello Road. I bought a pair of platform shoes in blue and green leather.  I went to the Hayward Gallery to see an exhibit of Sir Edward Burne Jones with a sculptor who used to live across the street from us in Surbiton.  We had lunch in her club.  This was the year the band Queen released their single Bohemian Rhapsody.  I bought the 45 and played it repeatedly in my grandparent's living room in Iver. 

During this era my blessing and my curse was to be pretty, intelligent and intellectually curious. And because I was nineteen and a sexual person, I longed for a man to take me on. The trouble was that the one who had recently taken me on spelled trouble. And this was why I had left the man in America - an Iranian who'd lived in England for many years.  His range of experience as well as his connection to England had all been part of the attraction.

My mother used to tell me about her girlhood cat Tinky- who gave birth to forty kittens. Mummy said she always mated with the roughest tomcats in the alley.  Well, that had been me.  Looking for experience - looking to be seduced and educated, looking for somebody to take me on.  I went for an older man since he  had experience, the intellectual and artistic chops to draw me.

But never mind all that, because I started out intending to write about Philip Larkin.  It's just that here I was - in a college where most of the students were female.  There were no boys I wanted to kiss.  No boys to flirt with.  For  recreation, I played the piano. There was a room in the abbey called the Gold Room with a beautiful grand piano.  Strangely, nobody went in there but me.  It was a massive concert sized room with tall ceilings and gilded chairs which matched the gilded rococo paneled walls.  I'd sit at the piano for hours and fumble my way through Beethoven's Pathetique.  It was quite extraordinary.  The room was so grand and I felt grand to be inside it, left to my own devices.  Once, my Shakespeare professor joined me there, and played a few improvisations of his own.  A romance was kindled - but not a very interesting one. 

So I took long walks by myself in the shrubbery. It was full of rhododendron bushes. One afternoon, I finished my shrubbery walk by peering through the library windows.  There I  saw my classmates with open books, cramming for exams. They looked up, perplexed.  Why was I outside when exams were next week?  Only, I was even more perplexed. What were they doing studying - on a beautiful day like this?  I couldn't understand it. 

I too spent time in the library - not cramming for exams, but reading poetry.  I should also add here that the abbey contained a private collection: The full library of C S Lewis.  I was in there only once. Why I didn't take the opportunity and visit that room again and again is beyond me. But I was young and foolish.  I should have been there for hours. But sadly, I wasn't. 

Nevertheless,  it was in the Wroxton library that I found a shelf of contemporary poetry - and discovered Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn and Philip Larkin.   I pored over their work - over Crow by Ted Hughes  in particular, but also over Philip Larkin's irreverent and beautifully structured poems.  It was the off hand tone of his work that drew me.  Wow.  You could write like this?  But how did he incorporate his command of language and form so effortlessly,  while maintaining such irreverence in his tone - such humor and ordinariness - questioning the standards and benchmarks of greatness.  As it turned out, he worked in a library in Hull.  He was an outsider who shunned the spotlight, but he was every bit as good as those in the spotlight.  In fact, he was one of the greats.  When I read Larkin, I entered a whole new world.

After my time at Wroxton, I returned to Emerson College feeling empowered, not just to study literature, but to try my hand at writing some stories of my own.   I published in The Emerson Review and later on in Ploughshares.  A few years after teaching creative writing at Emerson, I moved to New York City and worked for The New Yorker.

But I'll never forget that corner of the Wroxton College library - down near the front windows, overlooking the beautiful gardens in the back.  Church Going - the poem by Philip Larkin which I read for The American Scholar, will always be one of my favorites.