We begin with Larkin at the height of his fame. In 1970 Philip Larkin is established as the most widely-read English poet of his generation. He publishes “All What Jazz”, a selection of record reviews from the preceding decade (many of them from The Daily Telegraph). The introduction voices immense love and respect for jazz, with telling passages about Larkin’s first experiences of this (mostly) American music while growing up in provincial England. More controversially, Larkin here sets out a near-polemic against the modernist movement in jazz and jazz criticism. (His argument is similar to his attempt, in the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse, to demonstrate that there had been a large body of undervalued English verse pushed to one side by the cultural and critical hegemony of an overvalued modernism.) The analogy with the politician Enoch Powell was Larkin’s own (in a letter), and an exemplary moment of paradox or even contradiction: in an essay which praises and advocates the music of African Americans, not least for the direct treatment of themes of suffering and oppression, Larkin sees himself aligned with a figure widely considered a colonial authoritarian and even a dangerous racist, but praised by supporters (including Larkin, it seems) for speaking “unfashionable truths” on matters of immigration and race in British society. Since the 1970s, Larkin’s own politics have become prominent in debates over the value of his writing and legacy, and negative perceptions have been very influential. Indeed, the excellent recent biography by James Booth, for example, devotes its opening section almost entirely to countering the perception of Larkin as a bigoted misanthropist: it is as though the biographer feels that the story of Larkin’s life can begin to be told only when a direct challenge has been made to a revisionist portrait of Larkin that has become so common as almost be to an orthodoxy. In this context, a wider understanding of Larkin’s work on jazz offers valuable insight into the subtlety and warmth of his thought, and into the paradoxical coexistence of generous humanism with an undoubted taste (in later life at least) for striking poses and making remarks that closely resemble casual bigotry. In the history of literary critical debates, Larkin’s attempt to shift the ground away from Modernist orthodoxy was mostly a failure. By his own account, the research for the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse was unable to uncover a substantial body of more traditional verse written in the twentieth century but pushed to one side by what he called “the modernist claque”. But in the jazz “culture wars” it is worth noting that Larkin’s position has been much more widely vindicated over the past 50 years – and this by the same liberal and post-colonial cultural academic sensibility that is so conscious of the politics of race, gender, and post-colonial history. Since 1970 scholarship and musical practice have moved away from the critical orthodoxies challenged by Larkin. There is now an increased awareness of the greatness and influence of the music in Larkin’s canon, and a decline in the authority of the “grand narrative of emancipation” that once elevated Bebop and its descendants above all else, either in intellectual depth or cultural influence. The power and eloquence of Larkin’s own writing, his rhetorical advocacy of the greatness of Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Lester Young and others, and its moving account of the emotional impact for him and his generation, has only endured and even increased.

Larkin grows up in Coventry, and aspires to cultural significance while feeling marginalised and disenfranchised. Poetry and jazz offer him an inter-related sense of the expressive and even emancipatory potential of the arts. Literature becomes his academic subject. This offers more than a possible career in either writing or teaching. At that time, academic English was the only forum in British intellectual life where connections were made between contemporary society and an eclectic set of intellectual ideas ranging from cultural history through anthropology, psychoanalysis, and beyond. Nevertheless, and ironically for a great poet, it was music that was the emotional and spiritual Jacob’s Ladder. Jazz was the art that “sent” him somewhere above and beyond his oppressive surroundings.

Larkin reads English at Oxford University and continues to write seriously. In a University of gender-segregated colleges, his key personal and literary friendships are almost exclusively male, and formed in and around the process of listening to jazz, discussing its meaning and construction, and the force of its statements. Both Larkin and his close university friend Kingsley Amis testify (in autobiographical writing) to how their discussion of jazz often had an intensity of engagement and attention greater than the energy they brought to bear on academic work or literary criticism in general. The time spent in intimate and passionate discussion of jazz, and also the heavy consumption of alcohol, set enduring templates for Larkin’s artistic and personal life. Though Larkin never mentions it in his own writing, Amis reveals that Larkin had made himself, by this time, a more than capable jazz pianist. His response to the question “How did you do that?” was a perfect snippet of his ability to turn aeasthetic attainment into melancholic self-deprecation: “years of trying”. More difficult to trace, but equally essential to Larkin’s biography, are the sexual currents and experiences woven into this social and musical circle. Andrew Motion’s biography discreetly but clearly sets out that Larkin had a physical love affair with at least one of the university circle, Philip Brown, and that conflicted feelings of desire and self-disgust are delineated in Larkin’s writing of the time, both published and unpublished. In the cultural imagination that Larkin shared, Jazz was inextricably linked to “perverse” sexuality. This link was not only because of the brothels of Chicago and New Orleans, or the double and single entendres of the blues tradition, but because of the close connection between jazz and interracial sexuality: for example, the Cotton Club, and other “black and tan” clubs in Harlem, were formative spaces for jazz which consciously exploited a white audience whose enjoyment of African American physicality began with voyeuristic titillation and frequently extended into other forms of “sexual tourism”. For Larkin, did the sexual freedoms and directness of jazz offer a means of access to feelings and physical impulses in himself; feelings and impulses that he would otherwise have buried as unacceptably perverse? (And to what extent would a psychoanalytic reading of his letters and prose conclude that his moments of racial spite involve an element of denouncing his own perverse inner self? Do some of the contradictions of a man whose personal pantheon sets Louis Armstrong beside Enoch Powell reflect a man in conflict with his own feelings?) In all other ways, Larkin’s writing declares that the “enormous yes” that jazz inspires is a positive thing. His phrase unmistakeably hints at a cultural fulfilment that is positively orgasmic (perhaps Larkin had read or heard that Sidney Bechet’s sexuality was apparently not only voracious but as undiscriminating in its objects).

Around the time of Larkin’s university years he developed the alter ego “Brunette Coleman”, under which name he wrote two novellas, an autobiography and a parodic literary manifesto. The writing and the persona clearly indicate a playful treatment of “identity issues”. And the generic form of the novellas, mixing the pastiche of schoolgirl fiction and soft porn, also speaks of Larkin’s literary impulses to write both with cerebral knowingness and visceral appeal. The Brunette Coleman stories also link sexuality and jazz: in one of the novellas the girls discover a stash of illicit jazz records, and when listening to the records they find themselves roused to sexual frenzy. This chapter will acknowledge that the Brunette Coleman material is a fanciful and recreational body of Larkin’s work. But it will also trace ways in which his writing weaves jazz with self-parody, confession, fantasy, social satire and creative joy.

An account of Larkin’s jazz writing in his adult years. The chapter examines Larkin’s jazz criticism in context: what brought it about? How did it differ from the selective version given by Larkin in All What Jazz? An interesting parallel is between Larkin’s jazz reviews and those of Eric Hobsbawm; a point of comparison that extends into the British culture wars of the postwar years. Larkin’s own subtitle for All What Jazz was “a record diary”. In the biographical study of any writer, it often becomes clear that critical writing is inseparable from autobiographical reflection and self-scrutiny, both personal and creative.

What were the social groups, the musical occasions, the musical culture in which his listening took place? In Motion’s biography the metropolitan visits and occasions in Larkin’s life find far more attention than the years of friendship and society in Hull. For the metropolitan imagination, Larkin’s melancholic loner persona chimed easily with a sense that a great writer would be almost entirely alone and isolated in the British provinces. However, Larkin’s resilience and productivity – not to mention the testimony of his friends – suggest otherwise.

The poem “For Sidney Bechet” merits a chapter of its own. Its account of the possible meanings and resonances of jazz is more than a commentary on Bechet; it is declaration of what the voice of love should be, and of what the best of art can achieve. The poem is not only a corrective to those who see Larkin only as a negative poet; the supposed laureate of romantic disappointment and “books are a load of crap”. It is also an affirmation of Larkin’s belief in jazz and of a wider belief in what culture should do. The scope of the poem’s ambition is indicated by the fact that it is written in Terza Rima. No poet writing in the 20thC would submit to the complex Dantescan verse form without a conscious aspiration to literary and even theological seriousness.

This chapter takes four settings of Larkin’s poems composed by Ian Smith for BBC 3, and uses them to discuss ways in which the music attempted to develop and exploit the use of jazz form in Larkin’s writing – a structural and formal debt that has had no critical examination hitherto.