Alan Bennett: joining the literature club

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/04/alan-bennett-how-i-discovered-popular-poets

Version 0 of 1.

When I was young, I used to feel that literature was a club of which I would never be a proper member – as a reader, let alone a writer. It wasn't that I didn't read books, or even the "right" books, but I always felt that the ones I read couldn't be literature, if only because I had read them. It was the books I couldn't get into (and these included most poetry) that constituted literature – or, rather, Literature.

After a lifetime, these feelings of impotence and exclusion are still fresh in my mind. I have only to hear someone extolling the charms of Byron, say, or Coleridge, neither of whom I've ever managed to read, to be reminded of how baffled one can feel in the face of books.

Mindful of this, when, decades ago, I put together a TV series about poetry – featuring Hardy, Housman, Betjeman, Auden, MacNeice and Larkin – I didn't make any bones about admitting what I didn't understand or sympathise with. I'm all at sea with much of Auden, for instance, but feel less of a fool saying so, because that kind of plain speaking is a refreshing feature of Auden's own literary criticism. Auden is an exception, though, because the poets and poems I chose are all in differing degrees accessible. This seemed to me essential. Obviously, any poem repays study, but if it is only to be heard once and without detailed exposition, then a poem should be understandable at first hearing.

"Accessible" is another way of saying "popular", and at least three of my selected poets – Housman, Betjeman and Larkin – are popular poets, much read and often quoted. The more a poet is read, the less he is written about. Criticism prefers an enigma, so Auden's opaque and highly allusive verse has received much more critical attention than that of Betjeman or Housman, though since the enigma of Housman lies more in his life than in his art, he has had more than his share of biography.

That clarity should be penalised by critical neglect is perhaps unfair, though it's not every writer who welcomes critical attention. "I am more or less happy when being praised," wrote the politician Arthur Balfour, "not very comfortable when being abused, but I have moments of uneasiness when being explained." While Balfour was not a poet, few writers enjoy being grilled about their text, hoping that they've already made themselves clear, and if they haven't, that's a way of saying something, too. Posthumous commentary they can't do much about, but famished for subjects, some critics don't wait for death before hacking a chunk off their chosen prey and retiring to the academic undergrowth to chew it over. Auden suffered this fate, though airily. Larkin escaped it, perhaps because he had made his distaste so plain. In his poem "Posterity", for instance, he imagines Jake Balokowsky, his fictional biographer, musing over the character of his subject: "'What's he like? … One of those old-type natural fouled-up guys.'" But if, while he lived, Larkin kept the commentators at bay, his death in 1985 gave criticism the green light, and the hearse was followed by volumes of critical essays, many of them couched in terms that would have made the poet groan.

It was Larkin, though, who said that a crude difference between novels and poetry is that novels are about other people and poetry is about yourself. This isn't beyond dispute – Hardy, for instance, discouraged the reading of his poems as personal documents – but there is enough truth in it to justify an approach to poets through their lives. Justify it in Britain, that is – the current taste, if it is still current, for biography (and gossip) about literary figures being a peculiarity of the English-speaking. It has always mystified the Germans and the French, and it irritates authors, too. Hardy put together an official version of his life, which he fathered on the second Mrs Hardy, hoping that it would put paid to further revelations. Auden insisted (while enjoying biography himself) that his own biography should not be written – a useless embargo as, since his death, there have been any number – and while Larkin did not expressly forbid a biography, the bonfires burned in his garden just as they had in Hardy's.

A writer's motives in wanting an authorised version (or no version at all) of his or her life vary. Everybody has something to hide (even if it's only that they have nothing to hide), but writers in particular feel that, since they have erected a monument in the shape of their work, a second (or a third or a fourth) tombstone is neither necessary nor desirable. They could point to Kafka, who has practically got a cemetery to himself.

Readers for their part tend to imagine that the poem is just what the poet has seen fit to put in the shop window and that there's something tastier under the counter, which it is the job of the biographer to sniff out. Whether this turns out to be the case or not, writers ought to realise that any attempt to supervise their posthumous reputation is futile (though a surviving spouse tethered to the grave can work wonders in scaring off trespassers). And some knowledge of a poet's life must add to the pleasure and understanding of his or her poetry. What the poet is afraid of is that the life will somehow invalidate the art (cries of "He's insincere!", "She's inconsistent!"). But you can enjoy literary biography while at the same time recognising that the literary works, once written, have an independent existence, regardless of the circumstances in which they were produced. Hardy's poems lyrically recalling Emma, his first wife, are not diminished as poems as a result of the truth (or the other truth) that the poet had treated Emma pretty shabbily. Though one could excuse the estate agent who, having read Auden's "In Praise of Limestone", sends the poet a prospectus of desirable residences set amid the chuckling springs of rural Westmorland, only to be told that what the perfidious bastard really prefers is a shack on the parched island of Ischia.

Certain authors have fan clubs: Austen, Trollope, Lewis Carroll and, more recently, Anthony Powell. Their work gets fenced off by enthusiasts, and the casual reader may feel the need of credentials to read them. Poets don't have fans in quite this way, though in the days of "the love that dare not speak its name" Housman was a telltale volume to have on the bookshelf, along with Forrest Reid, say, or Denton Welch. And Betjeman began as a somewhat eccentric taste, his admirers a bit of a club, before the poetry made a space for itself and was taken up by the nation.

One link between the six poets I have selected is that all of them (with the possible exception of Hardy) admired Hardy. Auden explains why: "My first Master was Thomas Hardy, and I think I was very lucky in my choice. He was a good poet, perhaps a great one, but not too good. Much as I loved him, even I could see his diction was often clumsy and forced and that a lot of his poems were plain bad. This gave me hope where a flawless poet might have made me despair."

Auden in his turn was admired by Larkin and MacNeice, though they were just two of the many poets he influenced. Auden was a good poet and perhaps a great one, though far from flawless, but he is less help to someone starting out than Hardy. Auden's tone of voice is distinctive and easy to imitate, and even when his poems are bad, they are couched in his peculiar imagery, and that is infectious, too. Half the job of learning to write is getting to know the sound of your own voice, and Auden is no help here at all, just spawning imitators.

Auden's intellect was formidable and showy, and quite off-putting. As an undergraduate at Oxford in 1956, I happened to hear his inaugural lecture as professor of poetry. I say "happened to hear" because I didn't honestly have much interest in his poetry, knowing only that this was a fabled figure and wanting to take a look. Had I any ambitions to write at that time, the lecture would have been enough to put me off. Auden listed all the interests and accomplishments that poets and critics should properly have: a dream of Eden; an ideal landscape; favourite books; even, God help us, a passion for Icelandic sagas. If writing means passing this kind of kit inspection, I thought, one might as well forget it.

MacNeice would probably have been more encouraging. He is the odd man out among these poets. Never well known enough to be other than a private face, he did not have to deal with the consequences of reputation, did not have to imitate himself, for instance, or sidestep his fame as his better-known colleagues had to learn to do. It might have happened, but because he died relatively young, he was denied his proper place. I didn't know his poetry and to discover it was a pleasure.

• Six Poets: Hardy to Larkin – An Anthology by Alan Bennett is published by Faber.