Book Essay - Winter 2009

Lunching on Olympus

My meals with W. H. Auden, E. M. Forster, Philip Larkin, and William Empson

By Steven L. Isenberg

We walked out to his car, which was some sort of mini–station wagon. Larkin had large thick glasses, and I was apprehensive about his driving skills, but he wouldn’t hear of me driving. “That would make me an awful host, and anyway I would have to keep giving you directions, and as a publisher, you are a direction giver.”

His tone and manner were anything but that of the Larkin of despair and loneliness; he was fast, funny, and friendly. I laughed often  and was struck by the precise and fresh turns of phrase in his conversation.

At the pub, we had beer. I am a slight drinker; Larkin went at a seasoned Englishman’s lunchtime pace. I told him about the evening of the Ricks lecture and he was pleased.

He was, by his own admission, wary of Americans; they wanted either to ask academic questions about his poems or to try to get him to visit America. He said he was the sort of Englishman who did not want to go anywhere else. He told me of going to Germany to get an award. When he went to the hotel’s front desk in the morning to ask for a newspaper, he discovered that “although they tell you the people in those places speak English, they don’t.”

At some point, I asked him about contemporary poets. He was jokey and dismissive, refusing to be caught up in “Ted Hughes worship” as he put it, “or anything like that.”

He told me he had a friend who visited New York and was mugged outside the New York Public Library on 42nd Street. I told him that when he came, I would get my younger brother, who was a strong guy, a criminologist, and knew a lot of policemen, to see that he was protected. “You see,” he laughed, “you are working on trying to get me there.”

He seemed in no rush to begin lunch, and I started to fear the rule about an hour or two. I didn’t want to drink too much without eating, but I had another beer with him.

When we did sit down, I remember two things I said. I misquoted a word in a snatch of a John Betjeman poem, and he corrected me, gently. (At the end of our visit, he gave me an edition of Betjeman’s poems and signed it: “For Stephen (or even Steven), commemorating a delightful day, Kindest regards, Philip.” Second, I said that the way he wrote about death and growing old, staring them in the face, summoning unshopworn, unexhausted everyday words, all newly woven and unflinching, ironically, gave me a certain comfort against my own fears. He listened quietly.

He then raised the matter of going to see well-known people and asked had I done it before. I told him of going to see Forster.

He told me that when he was young he had gone to see Forster, too. Forster had entertained a circle—literally—of young men. Every 10 minutes or so, he made them change chairs so someone new sat on his right. Larkin said he had taken the manuscript of his first novel, Jill, and tried to press it on Forster to read, but he wouldn’t take it. Larkin laughed at himself. It was an embarrassing and amusing memory—not painful, though I got the clear impression he would have been happier if Forster had taken and read his manuscript. I think he told me this story to put me at greater ease—we both knew it takes nerve to arrange one of these meetings, and there is a certain nervousness once you are there.

He had another tale of meeting the famous. When he was librarian of Belfast University, the Queen visited, and he was introduced to her. He told her an Irish joke, which he said was sort of a triple faux pas—telling the Queen a joke, an Irish one, and doing it in Northern Ireland.

At some point, the chemistry felt right, and so I did take up the question of a visit to America. What stops you? I asked. He said, “I don’t like to be in hotels, and I really don’t know anyone.” I said, “Here’s a proposition. You know Ricks—he always stays at my home. Get him to vouch for us. Why don’t you stay with us at our apartment? It overlooks Central Park. There’s my wife and our son, who’s nine. You don’t have to talk to us. You can come and go as you please, invite anyone over you like.”

He said, “The idea sounds appealing,” and I thought that if I could get him on a plane that day, he would do it. Then he said, “I never like to be more than five miles from home.”

Well, here’s another idea, I said. Why don’t you fly to New York? We’ll get a helicopter to take you to Manhattan, take you to see whatever you want, and then take you back to the airport, and you can fly home.

“Oh,” he said, “I like that very much. But you can’t do that.”

“Oh yes I can,” I said. I told him of a friend who was the head of the Port Authority. “They run the airports, and my newspaper will find a way to get it done.”

He roared. “That’s the best offer I have ever had.” Years later I read that Larkin said he would like to go to China—if he could come back the same day.

It is faces we remember, and his was big, enlarged by his baldness and the glasses and the animated intensity of his speech. For all his poems, which often showed a glum, lonely, and struggling self, the man I met was strong, confident, terrifically alive, welcoming, relaxed, engaged, engaging. He had another beer, finished his lunch, and insisted we have something sweet. I tried to pay; he wouldn’t allow it.

As he drove back, I was thinking how much he had drunk and how narrow the country roads were. I must have given off some whiff of apprehension, because he turned to me and said, “I hope we don’t have an accident or the headline in your paper will be ‘Our Beloved Assistant Publisher Dies with Unknown English Poet.’”

William Empson:
“My boy, it is just like a symphony.”

A year later, Ricks asked me if I would like to join him on a visit to William Empson in London. I was staying with a friend in Hampstead Heath, quite near Empson’s home, so Ricks and I met late on a Saturday morning, planning to take Empson out to lunch, somewhere close by and informal.

The eccentricity of Empson’s genius was almost as well known as his important critical works: Seven Types of Ambiguity, Some Versions of Pastoral, and Milton’s God. Robert Lowell, then the American poet of highest standing, had once written to Empson that he was “the most intelligent poet writing in our language and perhaps the best. I put you with Hardy and Graves and Auden and Philip Larkin.” A prized possession of mine is a recording of Empson reading his poems in a tone of voice that I believe no other human being can match, even if that person also combined Wykehamist, Cantabrigian, and Chinese accents.

Ricks is said by Empson’s biographer, John Haffenden, to be Empson’s “greatest fan and friend,” and Empson himself once said gruffly to Ricks’s mother, “Your son saved me.” This invitation was a great privilege for me.

Steven L. Isenberg is a visiting professor of humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. He was the publisher of New York Newsday.