Like father, like son

IN 1977, EARLY IN MARTIN AMIS’S “erotic picaresque” adventure with the tantalising Phoebe Phelps, as related in his latest novel Inside Story, they consider Larkin’s “The Whitsun Weddings”. Phoebe, Amis tells us, “philosophically saw eye to eye with this poem”. He quotes the final lines:

We slowed again,

And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled

A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower

Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

Amis’s explanation of the metaphors is characteristically negative: “The arrows of desire, as the poet sees it, are doomed to deliquesce in impotence and tedium — becoming as dull as rain.” This anti-marriage reduction of the poem misreads its tone. If they express “impotence and tedium” it is strange that these lines are inscribed on a plaque in King’s Cross station. And Clive James must have blundered in titling his admiring essays on Larkin Somewhere Becoming Rain.

No. This is an elevated epiphany. Whitsun marks the Christian sacrament of Pentecost, a visitation of the holy spirit, and there is a hint of transcendence:

and it was nearly done, this frail

Travelling coincidence; and what it held

Stood ready to be loosed with all the power

That being changed can give.

Many of these marriages will no doubt fail, and all will be vulnerable to illness, age and death. But Larkin finds the hopes of these newly-weds deeply moving.

comprises two strands. “The book is about a life, my own, so it won’t read like a novel.” In an interview Amis said, “In the end it’s about death”, and its most moving sections concern Saul Bellow’s descent into dementia and Christopher Hitchens’s death from cancer. But alongside this autobiographical “life writing” Amis constructs round the fictional Phoebe a novel proper,