Tentative intro to Disappointing Sons

Consider two great twentieth century poets, Yeats and Larkin, on a theme that has long preoccupied their art: heredity. In the aftermath of an Oxford college gaudy – half-tedious, half-voyeuristic events, floating between one of poetry’s driving forces, nostalgia, and a mundane, institutionalised form of social embarrassment – Larkin contemplates a contemporary’s reduplication, and his own sudden sense of fin de race. His disbelief is all the sharper for being sleepily expressed:

…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.

Part of the poet’s uneasy surprise relates to his feeling of being outflanked by Dockery, a father at a drastically young age, according to a piece of mental arithmetic roughly applied, but, as the poem proceeds, increasingly accepted. Then there’s the way in which Larkin implies he has associated Dockery, younger than the poet as he may have been, with an older, decadent class. Without ever stooping to that hoary adjective ‘callow’, he leaves it as Dockery’s lasting impression; there is a touch of the elegiac Raymond Asquith myth about the sparse, deliberately uncertain single descriptive query:

                                                                …Was he that withdrawn

High-collared public-schoolboy, sharing rooms

With Cartwright who was killed?

It is a question mark more terse than true. The reader feels that Larkin remembers Dockery more specifically than he is entirely willing to admit. The sartorial detail lends an impressionistic touch of visual reality; further, it combines with the class indicator to let us imagine the relationship between Larkin and this ‘junior’ contemporary pretty fully. Clothes are revealing; Widmerpool in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time never escapes his ill-fitted lapels. But this high collar is an object not so much of ridicule as of suspicion, and something approaching envy. There is a reason why the Dean of the College has brought up Dockery, a vague association, to this middle-aged visitor he hardly, and discreditably, recalls. Larkin’s most notable encounters with the Dean have, it seems, been disciplinary:

…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’?   

Dockery, on the other hand, well-born, heeled, and behaved, was likely a favourite even back in the day, and now he is a respected Old Member, father of an undergraduate the Dean can call to mind and perhaps has called to tea, quite possibly a donor to the college.

Who, by contrast, is Larkin? As he himself now realises, in the Dean’s eyes and his own, a mere composite of negatives, ‘no son, no wife, / No house or land’. What he has is ‘nothing with all a harsh son’s patronage’: including the patronage of Dockery’s son, which perpetuates a previous generation’s de haut en bas victory over Larkin. Dockery’s son is boasted about to passing graduates; Larkin’s departure is unsung (‘I catch my train, ignored’). The poem sounds the note of resentment against undergraduate toffs fresh from ‘Lamprey College’ that we hear throughout Larkin’s first novel, Jill. But it is a wiser and a sadder work. It tells us about Larkin’s automatic attitude to the tragedy he sought, notoriously, to sidestep,

                        Get out as quickly as you can

                        And don’t have any kids yourself.

- that of parenthood. More honestly, it reveals the steps by which the poet comes to regret this barren strategy of damage limitation – and to envy the unanticipated success of his societal nemesis, Dockery. The first syllable after Larkin hears of Dockery the younger’s existence is a translucent slice of his thought – ‘death’. He is prepared by more than funeral costume to enter a sombre mood. Reflections pass in the imperfect tense – ‘we used to stand’ ‘where I used to live’. Thoughts of death and the British railway’s motion drive him to escape in sleep, but as he wakes for the change of trains, his bafflement has begun to shift to mourning.

Larkin makes a remarkable debating point now: what made Dockery so sure he was perpetuating himself, not robbing it? ‘To me it was dilution.’ His defensive fear of reproduction is unusually frankly put, sincerely felt. This is not without its relationship, as we shall see, to the views on the same subject of an unlikely, mid-to-late-life father, Yeats (the paternal influence, pleasingly, behind Larkin’s early poems). Reproduction, and implicitly sex, as a sap on literary power makes us think of atavistic superstition, clerical celibacy, succubi. Dockery, whose function is to carry on dynasties, pass on lands, endow colleges, but certainly not to write poems, can have no such scruples. Larkin begins to wonder if the high-collared public-schoolboy was right. Did he, Larkin, squeamishly adhere too closely to some undergraduate reaction – cast aside a life for a pose?

…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…

The defensiveness continues in that ‘we’; Dockery’s reproduction, the poet says, is quite as irrational, habitual and therefore accidental, as his own lack of it. But this equivalency fails to account for the difference between a positive and a negative. ‘Got’, unexpectedly repeated line to line, stanza to stanza, comes to suggest its archaic meaning,

                        And now you shall be as your mother was

                        When your sweet self was got.

                        (Shakespeare, All’s Well that Ends Well, IV.ii)

and so the poem arrives at its final dichotomy: ‘For Dockery a son, for me nothing.’ A son, not a child; childless Larkin may be, childless he remained, but the voice he uses here, the antithesis and also the unsuccessful shadow of Dockery, thinks in, and secretly yearns for, patriarchal and almost feudal forms of contented settlement and succession – house, land, wife, son.

            For Yeats, on the other hand, in the fourth section of Meditations in time of Civil War, dynastic duty has entailed – to use that word advisedly – producing genetic tribute of both genders –

Having inherited a vigorous mind
From my old fathers, I must nourish dreams
And leave a woman and a man behind
As vigorous of mind…

Perhaps the kindly, encouraging, and ineffectual talent of Jack Yeats has meant that his son at the outset perceives his own gift in more generous terms than Larkin’s fear of ‘dilution’. While Larkin toys with the idea that it is not so much the poet’s responsibility as his right not to reproduce, hoarding a power inexplicable in its origin and elusive in its retention, Yeats acknowledges a time-honoured debt. This must be paid not merely in ‘a son’ – that is, a singular copy, subjectively related, and a repeat of one’s own gender – but in ‘a woman and a man’, two generic human beings objectively if immodestly up to scratch (‘As vigorous of mind’), and, in some instinctual, incestuous and, probably, eugenic manner, of opposite genders, constituting a breeding population. But the debt is not, in fact, just to John Butler Yeats the artist. The plural of ‘fathers’ reaches to a recurring concern of Yeats’s, both individual and impersonal – dynasty and domain. This is the same patch of associations, perhaps, as Larkin’s son, wife, house, and land, but whereas Larkin imagines this field bemusedly and belatedly, Yeats takes it seriously and consistently. He would certainly have included in his ‘fathers’ – perhaps primarily – his mother’s family, the Pollexfens, richer than the Yeats, less Bohemian, more rural and Anglo-Irish, simply more landed. But it is not only his own blood that sirs him to think of descent and obligation. To Yeats any place is bound to families that hold it, or once did. Architecture stimulates him most when doused in blood. Here is the beginning of Blood and the Moon –

Blessed be this place,
More blessed still this tower;
A bloody, arrogant power
Rose out of the race
Uttering, mastering it,
Rose like these walls from these
Storm-beaten cottages…

Building and breeding seem to have become of necessity entwined for Yeats. Had he written An Arundel Tomb, it would have been a celebratory affair fading into genetic dark, not an ironic meditation with an artistic redemption at the end. His art was subordinated in his mind to the stuff that made him.

            So far, then, divorced from his fellow ‘Last Romantic’, Yeats goes on in the My Descendants section to betray a distinct but related terror to Larkin’s twin fears, of dilution and extinction. In fact, Yeats is troubled by an inverted variant on Larkin’s contempt for ‘high-collared, withdrawn’ Dockery – he worries his children might become Dockerys, unworthy of the collective legacy he has transmitted:

And what if my descendants lose the flower
Through natural declension of the soul,
Through too much business with the passing hour,
Through too much play, or marriage with a fool?

‘Marriage with a fool’ is a phrase with particular bite, which Yeats would recycle by 1936, expressing his equivocal feelings about another descendant of his generation – Iseult Gonne:

            A girl that knew all Dante once

Live to bear children to a dunce.

Yeats had proposed to Iseult in 1916, directly after a courteous and partly symbolic proposal to and rejection by her mother, Maud. His feelings about Iseult were in appearance and in fact distinctly mixed; the girl lived as Maud’s niece, was in truth her daughter, and may have represented to Yeats the daughter he and Maud could have had. This is after all a common fancy in the aftermath of writerly and unrequited passion; see Charles Lamb, Dream Children: A Reverie:

We are not of Alice, nor of thee, nor are we children at all. The children of Alice called Bartrum father. We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence, and a name.

Whatever wistfully filial emotions Yeats entertained for Iseult, he was quick to transmute them into enough romantic fervour to propose to her; and indeed to remain preoccupied by her days into a honeymoon with another woman. Such vicarious love for the daughter of a muse is as well known a syndrome as vicarious fatherhood. David Garnett succumbed to the sentiment at about the same time as Yeats, with his immediate reaction to the child of his lover Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell: ‘I think of marrying it. When she is 20, I shall be 46 – will it be scandalous?’ (He did and it was.) The lovers of Lorna Garman, Laurie Lee and Lucien Freud, less directly married her nieces. At any rate, to marry or seek to marry the descendant, even collateral, of a lost love expresses a faith in genetics that verges upon the religious. Yeats, in considering his son or daughter’s union to an unknown and unworthy future in-law, and Iseult’s to the lightweight journalist Francis Stuart in 1920, automatically equates ‘marriage’ with the act ‘to bear children.’ The concern is entirely scientific and not sacramental, but for all that, under Yeats’s handling, it appears no less superstitious. What is that unadorned ‘flower’ in danger of loss? Something, obviously, that can be squandered simply by ‘bearing children’ to the wrong stock; and yet, the previous stanza’s syntax would seem to equate it with Yeats’s own ‘vigorous mind’; all of his own poet’s power, that is, and all the (albeit somewhat notional) aristocratic power of his ancestors. Yeats’s whole self, and more than that self – the aboriginal past to which he maintains it owes its being – is staked, not even on his own, but on his children’s prospect of successful heredity.

            Yeats is superstitious, too, or rather, occult, in his curse in the event of that heredity’s failure:

May this laborious stair and this stark tower
Become a roofless ruin that the owl
May build in the cracked masonry and cry
Her desolation to the desolate sky.

Indeed, when we think of Larkin’s malaise induced by his childless state, it begins to seem that the later poet somehow fell under the very curse the earlier one pronounced. For both, the presence of children relates to the solidity of property and architecture. But Yeats gives a visible, even stagey incarnation to what becomes Larkin’s empty, broken litany, ‘To have no son, no wife, / No house or land’. The most important difference is that Larkin’s bleak void is the result of no descendants, while Yeats’s almost lush Gothic fantasy of disrepair, the owl borrowed from Christabel and the atmosphere from Macbeth, is a vision designed to punish descendants because they have existed and failed. But the sense of insult Yeats feels towards these hypothetical wastrel offshoots, personal and artistic, and at the same time familial and conventional, is not, perhaps, so far from the powerful negative motive, fear of ‘dilution’, that keeps Larkin out of the shooting-match altogether until what he feels is too late.

            If My Descendants was a genuinely freestanding poem, instead of a nuanced movement within the more complicated shape of all Meditations in a Time of Civil War, then the final stanza would, as a conclusion, ring false. Larkin, on the other hand, through Dockery & Son gropes closer towards frank admission of regret.