Last night I watched the Philip Larkin film, something on TV which could for once properly be described as horrifying. So much of the excellence of the poetry survived: it was wonderfully read, in such a natural tone that the rhymes came unexpectedly and gained redoubled force. There were some things only TV could show: the slow inflation of Larkin’s face, from the curious, big-eyed, delicate youth, absurdly reminiscent of an Arthur Rackham fairy, to the moon-faced drunk with polyfilla jowls. Curiously, in memory, their real sequence is reversed, so that I see the young man in colour and the older one in grainy black and white.
They started, as they had to, I suppose, with “this be the verse”, in which the ‘fuck’ was beeped. It ended with the unexpectedly strong voices of Larkin and Monica Jones singing, unbeeped, and to the tune of Lillburlero, “niggers, niggers, ni-i-i-ggers”, which shocked me more than anythign I’ve watched on television for a long time.
All night, I kept waking to year their voices writhing in my head, and to think of Jeffrey John’s sacking. The two seemed to merge into one snake-like evil. The shame I felt on behalf of Rowan Williams is only marginally tempered by the knowledge that he must feel it too. Anglicans don’t, of course, believe in a Petrine ministry, but as the birds started up in Lambeth Palce on gardens on Sunday morning, there will have been a cockerel among them, crowing just for him.