LitLetter 143: Dockery and Son by Philip Larkin

From an unpromising start, an existential dilemma

Half full or half empty?

Philip Larkin was one of the greats in British poetry in the 20th century. His poetic style is characterized as the combination of ordinary language, clarity, colloquial style, reflective quality, quietness, irony, and directness. It deals with commonplace experiences. His style has been called a sharp mixture of lyricism and gloominess. These last two descriptions are on show in the two articles I have dedicated to his poetry in the LitLetter. The first was An Arundel Tomb (LitLetter 33) and the second Aubade (LitLetter 119). An Arundel Tomb is as lyrical as it gets – a love song from a knight to his lady that has survived in stone for more than 650 years. Aubade is real – and gloomy, describing Larkin’s philosophy of death’s equivalence to eternal sleep.

This poem has a (probably deliberately) unattractive title. The image of a small commercial company, perhaps a real estate agency or a small legal practice, projects itself, say, from the list of contents of an anthology. I have become accustomed to ignoring this warning signal entirely, and am very often rewarded with poems of outstanding merit. So it was with this poem, for it is magnificent. A reading of the poem is here.

Dockery and Son by Philip Larkin

‘Dockery was junior to you,

Wasn’t he?’ said the Dean. ‘His son’s here now.’   

Death-suited, visitant, I nod. ‘And do

You keep in touch with—’ Or remember how   

Black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight   

We used to stand before that desk, to give   

‘Our version’ of ‘these incidents last night’?   

I try the door of where I used to live:

Locked. The lawn spreads dazzlingly wide.

A known bell chimes. I catch my train, ignored.   

Canal and clouds and colleges subside

Slowly from view. But Dockery, good Lord,   

Anyone up today must have been born

In ’43, when I was twenty-one.

If he was younger, did he get this son

At nineteen, twenty? Was he that withdrawn

High-collared public-schoolboy, sharing rooms

With Cartwright who was killed? Well, it just shows   

How much ... How little ... Yawning, I suppose

I fell asleep, waking at the fumes

And furnace-glares of Sheffield, where I changed,   

And ate an awful pie, and walked along   

The platform to its end to see the ranged   

Joining and parting lines reflect a strong

Unhindered moon. To have no son, no wife,   

No house or land still seemed quite natural.   

Only a numbness registered the shock   

Of finding out how much had gone of life,   

How widely from the others. Dockery, now:   

Only nineteen, he must have taken stock

Of what he wanted, and been capable

Of ... No, that’s not the difference: rather, how

Convinced he was he should be added to!

Why did he think adding meant increase?

To me it was dilution. Where do these

Innate assumptions come from? Not from what   

We think truest, or most want to do:

Those warp tight-shut, like doors. They’re more a style   

Our lives bring with them: habit for a while,

Suddenly they harden into all we’ve got

And how we got it; looked back on, they rear   

Like sand-clouds, thick and close, embodying   

For Dockery a son, for me nothing,

Nothing with all a son’s harsh patronage.   

Life is first boredom, then fear.

Whether or not we use it, it goes,

And leaves what something hidden from us chose,   

And age, and then the only end of age.

The action here is brief. The narrator – Philip Larkin attended St John’s College, Oxford – is part of the teaching staff at an unspecified college. The Dean, his office and desk, the room where the narrator used to live, standing before the Dean’s desk years before ‘still half-tight, black-begowned, unbreakfasted, to explain our role in incidents last night’. There is a suggestion that he and Dockery were both members of this disconsolate group. The narrator (I shall refer to him as Larkin here forward) is on his way somewhere, a rail journey, and leaves the clouds, a canal, the colleges of the University town behind. He falls to musing about his and Dockery’s shared history before sleep overtakes. Arriving at Sheffield station, he watches the reflection of moonlight on the rail track switches, and completes his thought pattern from the earlier train when he nodded off. Pure Larkin this – ‘I ate an awful pie’ – and we simply cannot go there!

The gist of his reverie is prompted by the realisation that Dockery’s son, now attending the same college, must have been born when Dockery was scarcely in his twenties, scarcely had left the college. Larkin is ensnared into a paradigm of comparison between himself and Dockery, not an unnatural paradigm for any of us – ‘I wonder what happened to so-and-so? Where is he now? Children? A successful career? Where does he live?’ I have patterns of thought like these often, different people at stages in my past who were once part of my life, and then no longer.

However, here Larkin goes much further, making assumptions from the fact of the son’s existence that the father, his erstwhile comrade Dockery, must have become convinced that he should be added to by an offspring, and that Dockery should think that adding to meant increase. This Larkin cannot understand. For him, this adding to meant dilution. So he asks himself from where do the assumptions (innate, he terms them) originate? It’s important for him to answer this question because, as he said earlier in the poem: ‘To have no son, no wife,/No house or land still seemed quite natural’ (to me). If we did not realise before we are now fully into existential territory as Larkin seeks insights into parts of his existence that are different from others. And I suppose that dilution for Larkin left him lonely, hard to befriend.

Carl Jung reckoned we shared a ‘collective unconscious’ in which certain characteristics of humans were generic. Are these what Larkin terms ‘a style our lives bring with them’, habits for a while until they harden into all we’ve got, and how we got them. In other words, these habits, styles, become us, all we’ve got, our identity, our sense of purpose, everything that is important for us. This sentiment, says Larkin, reveals itself as the desire for a son in Dockery, in Larkin nothing. He is not really very generous to himself, is he? To say ‘nothing’ seems harsh. And he does not even mention the hypothesis that Dockery may have simply made a mistake with a girlfriend. Rather, he self-lacerates even more:

‘Life is first boredom, then fear.

Whether or not we use it, it goes,

And leaves what something hidden from us chose,   

And age, and then the only end of age.’

This is the Larkin of Aubade. ‘Life is first boredom, then fear’ – what to say to that kind of despair, except ‘how can I help you?’ But his point in the penultimate line, that something we are not really aware of makes choices for us as our lives ebb away seems to me to match my view of reality; we do not really know how important decisions are made by us, do we? And, perhaps Larkin would say, you cannot deny all that is left is age, and then the only the end of age.

Most of us will say: ‘But does the matter have to be so bleak?’ And we would be right, it does not. Yet for all that Philip Larkin is a poet who more than any other refuses to romanticise life, its ending, its choices, its assumptions and preconceptions. He pulls no punches, he does not symbolise, he only presents an unfathomable option. As I said at the start, ordinary language, reflective, colloquially delivered, quiet, ironic, and direct.