[...] Nabokov has elsewhere made the point that all writers who are any good are funny. Not funny all the time – but funny. All the lasting British novelists are funny; the same is true of the Russians (Gogol, Dostoevsky, and, yes, Tolstoy are funny); and this became true of the Americans. Franz Kafka, whatever your professor might have told you, is funny. Writers are funny because life is funny. [...]

Slot pounced. ‘The story is less comprehensive than the novel. In a short story you’re more aware of limitations of space. So the story provides fewer…’

I paid the extras on the bill and went upstairs for the bag, into which Elena was forcing stray pairs of shoes. I said,

‘It’s a good job Jed brought his thesaurus with him from Buffalo. He might get through the whole six weeks without saying shorter or longer.’

‘He can’t…’ Her eyes were downcast, directed at her shoes or the silky traces of April frost on the blades of grass. My stepmother lowered her head when she spoke. It was her dyed and parted hair I had to interpret (from The Bellarosa Connection). Except Rosamund’s parted hair was undyed and grew with tangly force. She was forty-four, I was fifty-three, Saul was eighty-seven. ‘He can’t read any more.’

‘What?’ And I took a step away from her, to keep my balance.

She glanced over her shoulder. ‘Each time he gets to the end of a sentence,’ she said, or mouthed, ‘he’s forgotten how the sentence began…’

A line from Herzog: Life couldn’t be as indecent as that. Could it?

And I thought incoherently of the times I’d found myself on the London tube without a book, or, worse, with a book but without glasses, or, worse still, with book and glasses but no light (power out) – but the book and the glasses will be found and the light will come back on, and I won’t be sitting in the dark with a book on my lap for the rest of my life.

‘Has anyone noticed? On planes, they’ve started calling passengers customers.’

Blue, at least, had certainly noticed it, and thought it comical; and for a while we found some diversion in a word-replacement game of the kind we often played…

‘ “The passenger is always right.” “Michelangelo Antonioni’s sensitive study of alienation, The Customer”. “He’s an ugly passenger.” “Only fools and customers drink at sea.” “When you are –” ’

‘This won’t work,’ said Christopher. ‘It’s not subversive enough.’

I said, ‘Mm. Insufficiently subversive. But why’re they doing it? Who benefits?’

He said, ‘Americans – that’s who. You take it as an insult, Mart, but for an American it’s a compliment. It’s an upgrade.’

‘How d’you work that one out? Jesus, I don’t understand this goddamned country.’

‘Well, here in the US, passengers might be freeloaders, you know, lying hippies and scrounging sleazebags. Whereas customers, with that discretionary income of theirs, are the lifeblood of the nation.’

‘…All right. But doesn’t it go against the grain of American euphemism? And uh, false gentility? Even in supermarkets they call us guests. Well here’s one thing nobody’ll ever say. The plane crashed into Mount Fuji, with the loss of sixteen crew and just over three hundred customers.’

‘The customers died instantly. No. That would be subversive. If it kills you, I’d say – I’d say that once you’re dead, you go back to being a passenger.’

Norman’s answer was that his heterosexuality was so intense and impregnable that he was ideally placed to interpret its obverse. The story doesn’t end there, of course, and Norman would strike back, saying in an interview that literary England was controlled by a gay cabal headed by Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, and Ian Hamilton. ‘I think that’s very unfair’, said Christopher, ‘to Ian Hamilton.’

In general, Christopher chose not to avail himself of the new carnal freedoms of his era. The promiscuity that most of us were going in for he found…somehow not serious enough. There was I think a further scruple, less paradoxical than it at first seems, because he was someone in whom many cultural and historical strands combined. And one of those strands had to do with religion – or its residue.

To repeat: as a young man Larkin was intrigued, or better say fatally mesmerised, by the Yeatsian line about choosing between ‘perfection of the life’ and perfection ‘of the work’. But that was a line in a poem (‘The Choice’), not in a manifesto; no one was supposed to act on it (and Yeats certainly didn’t). Larkin seized on the either/or notion, I think, as a highminded clearance for simply not bothering with the life, and settling instead for an unalloyed devotion to solitude and self. As he put it in ‘Love’ (1966): ‘My life is for me. / As well ignore gravity.’ Most crucially, the quest for artistic perfection coincided with his transcendent worldly goal – that of staying single.

Bellow Sr, Abraham Bellow, who died in 1955, always described Saul as a desperate sluggard, the only son ‘not working only writing’. Not working? From Augie March:

All the while you thought you were going around idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It’s internally done…[I]n yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again yourself! Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast.

‘It’s the same idea, isn’t it,’ I said to Rosamund. ‘The hidden work of uneventful days.’

The end of a sentence is a weighty occasion. The end of a paragraph is even weightier (as a general guide, aim to put its best sentence last). The end of a chapter is seismic but also more pliant (either put its best paragraph last, or follow your inclination to adjourn with a light touch of the gavel). The end of a novel, you’ll be relieved to learn, is usually straightforward, because by then everything has been decided, and with any luck your closing words will feel preordained.

Don’t let your sentences peter out with an apologetic mumble, a trickle of dross like ‘in the circumstances’ or ‘at least for the time being’ or ‘in its own way’. Most sentences have a burden, something to impart or get across: put that bit last. The end of a sentence is weighty, and that means that it should tend to round itself off with a stress. So don’t end a sentence with an –ly adverb. The –ly adverb, like the apologetic mumble, can be tucked in earlier on. ‘This she could effortlessly achieve’ is smoother and more self-contained than ‘This she could achieve effortlessly’.

Together with its almost sinister memorability, and its unique combination of the lapidary and the colloquial, the key distinction of Larkin’s corpus is its humour: he is by many magnitudes the funniest poet in English (and I include all exponents of light verse). Nor, needless to say, is his comedy just a pleasant additive; it is foundational…Was he helped in this – was he somehow ‘swayed on’ – by living a hollow life, ‘a farce’, ‘absurd’, and ‘stuffed full of nothing’? Well, not nothing; his life was stuffed full of the kind of repetitive indignities that make us say, If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry. Yes, and if you didn’t cry, you’d laugh. This is the axis on which the poems rotate. His indignities were his daffodils.

As we take our leave let us recall a very late poem (1979) that captures some of his personal pathos, his muted benignity, and his exquisitely tentative tenderness. One day he was mowing the lawn and ran over a hedgehog in the taller grass. ‘When it happened,’ said Monica, ‘he came in from the garden howling. He was very upset. He’d been feeding the hedgehog, you see – he looked out for it…He started writing about it soon afterwards.’ The result was ‘The Mower’ (closely related, here, to the Reaper), which ends:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.