larking again

Nobody heard him, the dead man,

But still he lay moaning:

I was much further out than you thought

And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he so loved larking

And now he’s dead

it must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,

they said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always

(Still the dead one lay moaning)

I was much too far out all my life

And not waving, but drowning.                                    (Stevie Smith)

Somewhere I read that Philip Larkin enjoyed this famous poem because he could imagine the first line of the second verse was “Poor man; he so loved Larkin.”

I love Larkin for his poetry and his wit, but mainly for his honesty when writing jazz reviews, such a contrast to today’s obsequious and fawning pundits. In 1969, for example, he wrote:

“If I were to frame Larkin’s Law of Reissues it would say that anything you haven’t got already probably isn’t worth bothering about. In other words, if someone tries to persuade you to buy a limited-edition of the 1924-5 sessions by Paraffin Joe and his Nitelites, keep your pockets buttoned up; if they were any good, you’d probably have heard them at school, as you did King Oliver, and have laid out your earliest pocket money on them.

                Everything worthwhile gets reissued about every five years.”

We have to bear in mind that Larkin was at school in the middle-to-late 1930s, one of the true golden ages of jazz, so he’d have been buying contemporary stuff released before the shock of the be-bop era and the inception of baffling forms of jazz such as free, acid, funk and smooth (smooth! makes sign of a crucifix). He wrote his Law of Reissues over thirty years later, by the lamp glow of the residual radiance of jazz’s silver age, light-years away from where we are now. Jazz was yet to arrive at the Darwinian multiple-bifurcation which would eventually lead to universal chaos.

What would he make of today’s scene? He was certainly a waver, but I have the feeling that he’d now be more of a drowner. And I suspect he’d have trouble finding anything to buy other than reissues. An emerging previously never-released King Oliver, originally rejected because it wasn’t good enough, would seem a jazz detectorist’s dream.

“Nobody heard him, the dead man; but still he lay moaning” just about sums it up for me.

Happy Christmas