What Trigger and Philip Larkin had in common
When Trigger was awarded a medal for services to road
sweeping in Peckham, it came out that his broom of 20 years had had 17 new
heads and 14 new handles. “How the hell can it be the same bloody broom, then?”
croaked Sid from behind the caff counter. “Well ‘ere’s a picture of it – what
more proof do you need?” said Trigg.
Though he had just described it, Trigg probably didn’t know
about Plutarch’s Ship of Theseus
paradox. Well let’s say he definitely didn’t know.
Of course there’s no reason at all why John Sullivan
shouldn’t have read his Plutarch.
Theseus. Founder of Athens. Fought many sea battles. Ship preserved after
his death for centuries as a memorial.
Every part of the ship renewed or replaced as the wood rotted over the
years. Was it or wasn’t it the same ship at this point?
But I wonder whether
some echo of another source might have filtered through to Sullivan as well.
This one for example - recorded in a letter from Philip Larkin to an old love,
Winifred Bradshaw, in November, 1976:-
Anyway, it’s hard to
afford both drink and petrol. Yes I
have a car (though I don’t talk about it). I learned to drive in 1964 – long
after your few patient lessons on the outskirts of Lisburn! I’d forgotten the
Mrs Beeton: I’m writing with a pen they presented me with in 1955, except that
it’s had several new nibs and barrels and caps since then. But in spirit it’s
the same.
Later, maybe, Larkin made one of his rare London forays and sat
down for lunch and booze with his oldest friend, Kingsley Amis. Might Sullivan have been at the next table? Perhaps,
as you do when deep philosophical writing tool-related topics are gnawing at
you, Larkin brought up the pen nib/cap/barrel issue in conversation as he had
in his letter - a bit like this:-
PL
You see, Kingsley, we
have an old saying that’s been handed down by generations of university
librarians – “Look after your fountain pen!”
(Pause)
KA
(hopefully) And your fountain pen will look after you?
PL
(blankly) No,
Kingsley. It’s just “Look after your fountain pen!”
And maybe he sat on it, thought about it until the ‘80s and Only Fools and Horses - and ultimately
gave Trigger one of his best lines and finest moments.
So did Sullivan draw his inspiration from a 2,000 year-old
Plutarchian Paradox or a restaurant-based Larkinesque Coincidence?
I know which option I prefer…
And what Jimmy Savile and Philip Larkin didn’t
In 1993, Alan Bennett wrote for the London Review of Books a long and brilliant review of Andrew
Motion’s recently-published biography of Larkin. There was a great deal of
tough love in Alas! Deceived. Bennett’s analysis gave full
reign to his fondness for Larkin but sharply challenged and debunked many of
the then-prevailing Larkin mythologies. Talking about Larkin’s 1965 Monitor film in which he was interviewed
by John Betjeman, Bennett wrote:-
Striding down the
library in the Monitor film, Larkin thought he looked like a rapist. (The
producer) reassured him, but walking by the canal in the same film there is no
reassurance; he definitely does. Clad in his doleful raincoat with pebble
glasses, cycle-clips and oceanic feet, he bears more than a passing resemblance
to Reginald Halliday Christie. Haunting his cemeteries and churchyards he could
be on the verge of exposing himself and whether it’s to a grim, head-scarved
wife from Hessle or in a slim volume from Faber and Faber seems a bit of a
toss-up
.
This is hilarious in an uncomfortable way - more so when
Bennett links it with Larkin’s supposed binocular-snooping on the courting couples in
Pearson Park from the high
windows of his flat.
Late in the review, Bennett talks about Larkin’s obsession
with and terror of death. He separates himself from the general approval given
to the last despairing major poem, Aubade.
And here a major jolt of retrospect from our later vantage point occurs.
Shortly after Larkin died in 1985, Bennett had taken part in a commemorative
event at Riverside Studios, Hammersmith. Recalling it years later in the
review, he quotes his diary entry:-
We finish at half-past
ten and I go straight to Great Ormond Street, where Sam is in Intensive Care.
See sick children (and in particular one baby almost hidden under wires and
apparatus) and Larkin’s fear of death seems self-indulgent. Sitting there I
find myself wondering what would have happened had he worked in a hospital once
a week like (dare I say it?) Jimmy Savile.
What we know now about what Savile did in hospitals provokes
a shudder from that closing sentence. Bennett, like almost everyone aware of
Savile at the time, took his activities as based in a benign if eccentric will
to help others. Now that we know differently (and I don’t doubt that Bennett
would agree), it seems reassuringly bizarre, even with the spread of phobias,
misogyny and racism revealed in his letters and diaries, to suggest that Larkin should have looked to him as a role
model. Larkin may have looked like a
rapist but certainly wasn’t one. Savile looked like one (we all missed it) and
was.
As for death itself, I can’t see that pushing trolleys round
a hospital would have done much to salve Larkin’s horror at the prospect of
extinction. And think of the effect on patients of waking from anaesthetic
torpor to find Larkin’s lugubrious dial looming over them. Larkin knew
hospitals after all. He’d written about them often – for example in this vein:-
This place accepts.
All know they are going to die.
Not yet, perhaps not
here, but in the end,
and somewhere like
this. That is what it means,
this clean-sliced
cliff; a struggle to transcend
the thought of dying,
for unless its powers
outbuild cathedrals
nothing contravenes
the coming dark…
Somehow, the road to cheeriness by true good works did not
lie there.
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