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BOOKS
143
It
would be unfair to say that the social context of this struggle is
ignored . On the contrary, we are given many suggestive historical apen:;us.
But they do not quite meld into some kind of overall picture or diagnosis.
Indeed, there is a hint of a conspiracy theory instead : the misguided
tradition is upheld by a class of centralizers whom he likes to call the
political clerisy. It starts with Plato, includes Hobbes and Bentham, and
most of the recent U .S. presidents and their entourages . And yet, at this
moment of our great darkness, there is hope. The very gravity of our
situation will teach us the lesson we need :
.. .as the Reformation taught the West the expendability of one kind
of clerisy, so, it seems evident, will this twilight of authority we are
living in teach us the expendability of the political clerisy; in simple,
blunt truth, the political intellectual is as obsolete as his religious
prototype had become by the sixteenth century.
ERNEST GELLNER
POET OF BRITISHNESS
High Windows.
By Philip Larkin. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $6.95.
Once a decade a slim volume of Larkin's poems appear. In
England it is an event . For Philip Larkin is the finest contemporary British
poet and, among the major poets writing in English, he is the one to whom
I turn most enthusiastically . The latest collection,
High Windows,
offers.
two major poems, the title poem itself and "The Old Fools," a scathing
anthem to age; there is also a varied array of English character, Larkin's
renderings of a changed British landscape and the "miniature gaiety" of a
fatigued culture, his probings into the complex question of inheritance,
and the quietly difficult heroism of behaving humanly. In this volume
Larkin is again the poet of inheritance and succession, who speaks of prize
vegetables and baked goods at a country fair as "pure excellences that
enclose/A recession of skills." I and others have been ten years ' randy for
