The young Philip Larkin, in his poem “Best Society”, thought that solitude was a simple matter:
Something everybody had,
Like nakedness, it lay at hand,
Not specially right or specially wrong,
A plentiful and obvious thing
Not at all hard to understand.
Two histories have appeared which might have educated Larkin in the complexities of solitude as an experience and idea: David Vincent’s magisterial History of Solitude and A Biography of Loneliness by Fay Bound Alberti, a sensitive and scrupulous investigation into a mental state that is now widely regarded as a public health menace and a defining symptom of neoliberalism. And, as I’ve been writing, a new relevance, unexpected and frightening, has settled in. As the curves of the coronavirus infection graphs have been bending skywards, millions of us have been enduring a period of prolonged, indeterminate solitude. What have we found there? And what have others made of it in the past?
Larkin would have made a good specimen case in either of these books. He was an inheritor of the Wordsworthian tradition of Romantic solitude in nature, despite what his famous disenchantedness might suggest, responding with a particular lyric pang to “lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace” or the sun’s “suspended lion face”. He wrote of the “uncontradicting solitude” that allowed his true self to appear: “like a sea anemone / Or simple snail, there cautiously / Unfolds, emerges what I am”. Meanwhile, he knew that this solitude was considered selfish and that virtue is understood as necessarily social. “Good neighbours need whole parishfuls / Of folk to do it on.” Both Vincent and Bound Alberti write about the constant movement between solitude and company that makes for a balanced life and about how loneliness occurs as a product of enforced or “failed” solitude. In a Paris Review interview in 1982, Larkin spoke about trying to maintain those ratios in his life. “The best writing conditions I ever had were in Belfast”, where he worked as a sub-librarian in the early 1950s:
I wrote between eight and ten in the evenings then went to the university bar till eleven, then played cards or talked with friends till one or two. The first part of the evening had the second part to look forward to and I could enjoy the second part with a clear conscience because I’d done my two hours. I can’t seem to organise that now.
Larkin’s poetry records with clarity and dismay the new configurations of postwar British society that created the seedbed conditions for the current mass loneliness: the continuous atomizing urbanization (“And dark towns heap up on the horizon. / None of this cares for us”); the large stores and wish-fulfilment imagery of the new consumerism; the ubiquitous television – “The jabbering set he egged her on to buy” – a significant factor in entertainment becoming an ever-more private experience; and the NHS hospitals that concealed sickness and death from society (“O world / Your loves, your chances, are beyond the stretch / Of any hand from here!”). Larkin was, like an increasing number of Britons, without faith in God. Death was the ultimate isolation, as figured in his great late poem “Aubade”: “this is what we fear – no sight, no sound, / No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, / Nothing to love or link with, / The anaesthetic from which none come round”.
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