No more “Whitsun Weddings”
Publish a “New Whitsun Weddings” and you would be met by a chorus of right-minded types saying, “Who are you to judge? How could you be so judgemental? Who could write such things?”
A recent train journey caused me to reflect on Philip Larkin’s poem “The Whitsun Weddings”. The poem, first published in 1964, gave its title to his book of collected verse of that year. It describes a train journey the narrator takes from Hull to London. The weather is sunny – “through the tall heat that slept for miles inland” – making the “three-quarters-empty” carriages hot. The narrator describes the industrial scenes besides the tracks giving way to more pastoral views. Gradually, the poet becomes aware that at each station (not the ugly neologism of “station-stops” in those days) newlywed couples join the train: “All down the line / fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round”.
The poem records with a critical but affectionate eye the gaudy outfits of the working-class wedding parties. “Parodies of fashion […] the perms, / the nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes.” The colours of the dresses are new and unflattering, the relatives coarse or shrewish, the young children bored. The train heads to London, taking new couples to their honeymoons and fruitful futures, blending a sense of joy with light mockery. It shows how special days (forever recorded in family histories and cherished in personal memory) can become just part of the fabric of daily life, so unremarkable that, even on a single train, newlyweds are nothing special. The poem describes the pulse of life discerned among universal rituals and common events of the ordinary English. We know these people through our own experiences and observations and feel familiar with them without knowing them personally.
My own journey was from Cardiff to Wrexham – a stopping service calling at all the small-town stations in south, mid- and north Wales, terminating at Holyhead, Anglesey, where ferries cross to Ireland. It was a Friday and that must have increased passenger numbers, because the train was standing room only by Newport, the second station. Transport for Wales had clearly underestimated the demand by providing a two-carriage train for a busy Friday.
At every station there seemed not a wedding party – dressed in parodies of fashion in “lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres” – but hen parties. Gaggles of shrieking drunk women in crop-tops, sequined scraps and sashes emblazoned with the group’s name clacked across platforms, wheeling suitcases behind them. At Shrewsbury, there was a gay group in fetish gear, aghast at the evident lack of seating in the train. Scowling outdoor types carried folding bicycles and rucksacks. Larkin’s gaudy couples would have been appalled at the lack of decorum. Then again, it is their grandchildren standing on railway platforms of 2022, wearing T-shirts with swear words. Society decides what is acceptable, so if the Whitsun wedders had been born twenty-five years ago, they would have been acting just as these passengers were.
Sitting next to an Indian and facing a Thai, I had time to reflect on how one could not now write “The Whitsun Weddings”. That poem relied on familiarity with rites of passage, common aspirations and shared values. Even mild criticism of loudness and unwise clothing choices required a refined set of taste markers within a broadly homogenous population. In 1964, a reader could smile at the subjects’ vulgarity because he knew what was considered déclassé. Today, we cannot write anything comparable because we have no society; we have competing factions of different origins. The markers of taste and status we once shared, newcomers know nothing of and care less about. We cannot nowadays expect a person with a British passport to know anything of British life, to speak English (or indeed Welsh, Gaelic, Gallic or Manx) or to have access to common touchstones of an integrated society. Beyond that, we have an atomised population, full of supposed individuals, selfish, separated and unanchored. This is the upshot of the credo “you do you”. However well meant, such a value leads to social breakdown.
Another barrier is the neutering of public spaces. It has been observed that when a society becomes riven by divisions between competing groups, public spaces become not more various and vigorous but more cautious. It is precisely because we have no shared values – and no, I (and many others) will not sign up to values of egalitarianism, equality, democracy and multiculturalism – that public discourse must become more policed. So huge are divisions between the values of a religious person, social conservative, secular liberal, ethno-nationalist, environmentalist and an African immigrant, that we cannot permit open expression of such discordantly incompatible worldviews. Those who claim to celebrate diversity of opinion are terrified of such expressions. Ask a liberalist supporter of free speech about public speech for an ethno-nationalist or a traditional Muslim and you will get strangled logic about suppressing “hate speech” for the purpose of community cohesion. If you have values that are contrary to the state’s then no diversity of opinion permitted.
In short, publish a “New Whitsun Weddings” and you would be met by a chorus of right-minded types saying, “Who are you to judge? How could you be so judgemental? Who could write such things?” Should one be seen as critical, sceptical or even unsupportive of public display of people in fetish items or women drinking to excess, one would be seen (regardless of quality of verse or accuracy of insights) as a spiteful bigot. When it was published, “The Whitsun Weddings” was acclaimed and widely read; now academia and the media condemn Larkin as retrograde. It is obligatory in new documentaries on the poet to mention his (private) use of racial slurs. Nonetheless, Larkin is beloved by many and remains the most popular British poet of the twentieth century, despite the best efforts of the BBC and The Guardian to make him untouchable.
As a poet, I did briefly toy with the idea of writing an updated “Whitsun Weddings” but I decided against it, for the reasons above. Consequently, you lost a not very good poem and gained this article, for what it’s worth.
