In Philip Larkin - A Writer's Life, Andrew Motion writes (p500),
"..Morrison's main recommendation was that Larkin should include the essay about his childhood, Not the Places Fault which had originally appeared in the obscure Coventry-based magazine Umbrella in 1959. Larkin replied gratefully but insisted, "I have rather a mental block about Not the Places Fault . In construction it is written as a kind of commentary on the original poem (I Remember I Remember) but this does not come through and in consequence it seems rather rambling. In addition, I think it said just a little bit more about myself than I really want known. These are the reasons Why I should prefer it remain in obscurity."
Above are two of the covers of this 'obscure' Coventry magazine - Umbrella - however Larkin's article is in Vol 1 No3 Summer 1959. Below is the poem I Remember I Remember - about Coventry. The Larkin article Not the Place's Fault is also in the book below apparently. It is
I Remember, I Remember
by Philip Larkin
Coming up England by a different line
For once, early in the cold new year,
We stopped, and, watching men with number plates
Sprint down the platform to familiar gates,
"Why, Coventry!" I exclaimed. "I was born here."
I leant far out, and squinnied for a sign
That this was still the town that had been 'mine'
So long, but found I wasn't even clear
Which side was which. From where those cycle-crates
Were standing, had we annually departed
For all those family hols? . . . A whistle went:
Things moved. I sat back, staring at my boots.
'Was that,' my friend smiled, 'where you "have your roots"?'
No, only where my childhood was unspent,
I wanted to retort, just where I started:
By now I've got the whole place clearly charted.
Our garden, first: where I did not invent
Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits,
And wasn't spoken to by an old hat.
And here we have that splendid family
I never ran to when I got depressed,
The boys all biceps and the girls all chest,
Their comic Ford, their farm where I could be
'Really myself'. I'll show you, come to that,
The bracken where I never trembling sat,
Determined to go through with it; where she
Lay back, and 'all became a burning mist'.
And, in those offices, my doggerel
Was not set up in blunt ten-point, nor read
By a distinguished cousin of the mayor,
Who didn't call and tell my father There
Before us, had we the gift to see ahead -
'You look as though you wished the place in Hell,'
My friend said, 'judging from your face.' 'Oh well,
I suppose it's not the place's fault,' I said.
'Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.'
Umbrella was edited by Terence Watson (Vice Chair of Coventry Arts Umbrella, Poet and a school teacher at King Henry the 8th School in Coventry). The contents of the above two magazines may be put in a collection on here at some stage.)
Larkin's essay for the Umbrella magazine is some kind of apology or explanation of the above earlier poem to offset any offence caused but rambling in places with memories but there are some evocative passages.
The essay starts with an explanation -
"In January 1954 I wrote a poem called "I Remember, I Remember'...after stopping unexpectedly in a train at Coventry, the town where I was born and lived for the first eighteen years of my life. The poem listed, rather satirically, a lot of things that hadn't happened during the time, and ended;
'you look as if you wished the place in hell,'
My friend said 'Judging from your face.' ' Oh, well,
I suppose it's not the place's fault,' I said.
'Nothing, like something, happens anywhere."
This poem was not of course meant to disparage Coventry, or to suggest it was, or is, a dull place to live in, or that I now remember it with dislike or indifference, or even can't remember it at all."
A bit later in the essay he describes the area around Coventry station in early days -
"I should have recognised the outside of the station better, for I passed it and repassed it daily on my way to and from school. Coming up short, somehow rather unofficial road that joins Warwick Road by the Station Hotel took me past the line of station horses in their carts outside the Goods Office. When I went back at lunch time they were wearing their nosebags, and on my return at a quarter to two there was a scatter of chaff on the ground where they had stood. I like this corner best at summerteatime, when people in addition to the man selling the 'Midland Daily Telegraph' there was frequently a white Eldorado box-tricycle that sold lime-green or strawberry ices at a penny each. In those days newspaper placards bore properly-printed posters that today would look depressingly un-urgent. Beside the paper seller was a cigarette-machine, which gave ten cigarettes for sixpence and twenty for a shilling (but with the twenty you got a halfpenny back under the cellophane); One of my fantasises was to unlock it and rifle the packets for cigarette cards. I sometimes think the slight scholarly stoop in my bearing today was acquired by looking for cigarette cards in Coventry gutters."
On music he writes -
"it was Arthur, who with Kazoo and a battery of toffee tins, lids, pens and a hair brush first introduced me to 'dance-music', sitting buzzing and tapping his way through pre-selected programmes of current hits and standard hot numbers ....Once a friend left a tenor saxophone at Arthur's house, and together we reverently handled it's heavy silver-plated intricacy and depressed the numerous cork-padded keys..."
He describes a visit to a friends house in Earlsdon -
"Peter must have introduced me to Tom and Jim, who lived further off in the Earlsdon area. We all went to the same school, and continued to meet for several years at Jim's house in Beechwood Ave that had a tennis court and a sunk ornamental pond and two garages. Behind the tennis court was a line of poplars. I suppose it was not a really big house, but it was the first I had known where people could be completely out of earshot of each other indoors, and which had a spare room or two that could be given over to a Hornby Lay-out or a miniature battlefield that need not be cleared up at the end of the day. I always supposed Jim's family to be richer than mine - at one time it must have been - but this was less because of Jim's many boxes of soldiers and Dinky Toys from Haddon's basement, and his frequent visits to the Astoria, than because of the airy hospitality informing his parent's house. The careless benevolence that produced Chelsea buns and Corona at eleven, and ignored the broken window and excoriated furniture seemed to me eloquent of a higher, richer way of living. The family were natural hosts. They had not to school themselves into accepting that a certain amount of noise and damage was inevitable if their son and his friends were to enjoy themselves; they took it as a matter of course. Looking back I can see we were a great nuisance...."
"One of my strongest memories of the house is of its long attic, that ran the length of their house, and which contained amoung many other things the debris of a hat-shop the family had once owned. There was a forest of hat-stands, small plush hemispheres on long metal stalks, like depetalled flowers, and cardboard boxes full of receipted invoices, wads of them, bearing dates of 1928, 1929 and 1930."
Back on music he wrote
"On Saturday afternoons we sat, frowning intently, in the glass cubicles at Hanson's, trying to decide whether both sides of the latest Parlophone Rhythm-Style Series of Vocalion Swing Series were sufficiently good to justify expenditure of the record's stiffish price of three shillings. Our standards were very high in those days. The idea of paying nearly two pounds for an LP containing only three tracks of real interest would have appalled me."
On fellow writers in Coventry
"I never knew anyone in Coventry who was interested in writing. There may have been little groups who met and discussed each other's work, but I never came across them; nor was there at school any literary society where talent might try itself out. No pipe-lighting dominie (I am afraid I am falling into the style of my poem) casually slipped a well-worn volume into my hands as I was leaving his book-lined den ('By the way you might care to have a look at this')"
"our house contained not only the principle works of most main English writers in some form of other (admittedly there were exceptions like Dickens), but also nearly complete collections of authors my father's favourites - Hardy, Bennett, Wilde, Butler and Shaw and later on Lawrence, Huxley and Katherine Mansfield....Knowing what it's effect would be on me, my father concealed the existence of the Central Public Library as long as he could...in the end the secret broke and nearly every evening I set off down Friars Rd. with books to exchange. Many were returned unfinished, chosen because I liked the thought of myself reading them. But for quite long periods I suppose I must have read a book a day, even despite the tiresome interruptions of morning and afternoon school.
Reading is not writing, though, and by then my ambition had pretty well deserted jazz drumming to settle upon a literary career. Apart from the School magazine I had still not got into print. I wrote ceaselessly, however; now verse which I sewed up into little books, now prose, a thousand words a night after homework, resting my foolscap on Beethoven's Op.132, the only classical album I possessed.
Leaving Coventry for Oxford at the outbreak of war in 1940 Larkin writes "Within a fortnight Coventry had been ruined by the German Air force and I never went back there to live again."
This poem was not in Umbrella but mentions Stoke in Coventry.
Mr Bleaney - Phillip Larkin
'This was Mr Bleaney's room. He stayed
The whole time he was at the Bodies, till
They moved him.' Flowered curtains, thin and frayed,
Fall to within five inches of the sill,
Whose window shows a strip of building land,
Tussocky, littered. 'Mr Bleaney took
My bit of garden properly in hand.'
Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook
Behind the door, no room for books or bags -
'I'll take it.' So it happens that I lie
Where Mr Bleaney lay, and stub my fags
On the same saucer-souvenir, and try
Stuffing my ears with cotton-wool, to drown
The jabbering set he egged her on to buy.
I know his habits - what time he came down,
His preference for sauce to gravy, why
He kept on plugging at the four aways -
Likewise their yearly frame: the Frinton folk
Who put him up for summer holidays,
And Christmas at his sister's house in Stoke.
But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
And shivered, without shaking off the dread
That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don't know.
Had an e mail from Abel in Spain requesting info on a certain Umbrella Magazine with info on the poet Buk -ie Bukowski - if anybody can help (I only have two copies of the mag and they are the wring ones. Seehis email below -
I'm a Spanish student writing the PhD dissertation on Buk's poetry (basically
focusing on his deceptively simple style and how this has been rejected by the
academia, in spite of its value) and I'm also compiling a bibliography on Buk's
periodical appearances. Thing is, an old bibliography says he appeared in
Umbrella magazine v.2 n.7. I've been unable to find that mag -I live in Spain
and you don't find that sort of material in local libraries- and I was wondering
if you could take a quick look at the old Umbrella issues and double-check
whether Buk appears in the Table of Contents of any of the late 50's / early
60's issues. I would appreciate it, Trevor.
Posted by: HOBO - Coventry Music Magazine | 04/26/2007 at 10:32 PM
As well as the Ref Library it might be worth enquiring of some of the schools. A couple of my English teachers were involved in the Umbrella poetry of that time period.
Dave.
Posted by: BroadgateGnome | 04/28/2007 at 10:37 AM