What will survive of us is…misreadings

Dear Hull,

Congratulations on being named the UK’s next “City of Culture” for 2017. I know you’re thrilled, and so you should be. It really takes something to bounce back after being voted the worst place to live in the UK. And you need fighting spirit to turn a city around after some of the mean things people have said about you, I’ll mention just one little thing Sam Jordison quoted in the Independent: “come Judgement Day the Humberside city would be “leased out indefinitely to Satan to provide housing for the Damned”.” Hull and Hell, so easily mistaken. But that dark decade is behind us.

Becoming City of Culture, we all hope, will put new life into you, both atmospherically, and economically. As BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz wrote:

The arts are not a panacea, but time and again they have proven to be remarkably effective in terms of urban regeneration. They bring tourists, investment, attention and confidence – all things from which Hull will benefit.

My guess is that the city will put on a great show.

The thing is, you already have a show planned, don’t you? You told the BBC that:

Hull’s annual Freedom Festival will incorporate a special aerial show taking its theme from the last line of [Philip] Larkin’s poem An Arundel Tomb: “What will survive of us is love.”

Oh Hull. I know Philip Larkin’s been your big draw, your “Hermit of Hull” as a citizen there for 30 years, with his daily cycle to his job at the library, and those life-affirming poems like “Home is so Sad”, “The Large Cool Store” (“How separate and unearthly love is”) and of course, Larkin’s own lament on the re-branding of cities, “Sunny Prestatyn”:

“Come To Sunny Prestatyn

Laughed the girl on the poster

…

She was slapped up one day in March.

A couple of weeks, and her face

Was snaggle-toothed and boss-eyed;

Huge tits and a fissured crotch”

Fair enough that you want to use and celebrate this poet as your cultural patron. I get that. But let’s be clear of the final sentiment in “An Arundel Tomb”, a poem in which we survey a stone effigy of an earl and countess holding hands. The poem’s last line is very lovely indeed. But you Hull, like many others before you, have chosen to ignore the important lines that come before. Here’s the entire final stanza:

“Time has transfigured them into

Untruth. The stone fidelity

They hardly meant has come to be

Their final blazon, and to prove

Our almost-instinct almost true:

What will survive of us is love.”

The penultimate line frames the final line, and underwrites its sentiment. We so want to believe that the stone couple represents and is an example of enduring love, but Larkin sees it as his job to point out the fallacy in this attitude. The idea is only “almost” true. Yet one can see how tempting it is to let the rest of the stanza fall away, when those final lines make such a nice epigraph. Larkin surely did this on purpose, knowing that his own poem about hopeful misreadings, would end up being misread itself.

Hull, what will you do? Can’t you change your Freedom Festival special aerial show theme to “What will survive of us is love, maybe”, or better still, “Almost true love”? You could ask guests to hold hands accidentally, and the planes could fly banners reading “ALMOST”. Will you seize this opportunity to provide an accurate reading of a poem, and one which is not sullied by the PR machine, but instead renders a cultural figure just as he intended to be read? As City of Culture, will you remain true to one of the art-forms that made you rather than transfiguring it into “Untruth”?

No, I didn’t think so.

But at least Larkin even has a poem for being lost in the crowd,“Broadcast”, which contains a couple of lines that actually do work perfectly for Hull 2017:

“Leaving me desperate to pick out

Your hands, tiny in all that air, applauding.”