![]() While the self is in retreat, the poem is full of command. Philip Larkin has an unfinished poem from the early 1960s called “The Dance” in which the main character “in the darkening mirror sees/The shame of evening trousers, evening tie” and then, on arrival in the dancehall, finds himself edging “along the noise/Towards a trestled bar, lacking the poise/To look about me.” He soon wonders what he is doing in public at all when he could be “really drinking, or in bed,/Or listening to records.” When he sees the object of his desire, he wishes “desperately for qualities/Moments like this demand, and which I lack.” Later he feels “How right/I should have been to keep away.” The poem enacts a strange, awkward, and deeply felt melancholy, but the tone, the phrasing, the use of stanza form and rhyme are controlled, almost magisterial. It is as though the prose represents the ordered noise that society makes, or indeed the sound of the reader’s judgment, all the more to emphasize the inner and disordered fear of the male protagonist as he lives in a state of vast uneasiness. ![]() The sentences used to describe moments, or indeed hours and years, of inglorious discomfort remain, however, in the work of Julian Barnes, elegant, careful, and stylish. ![]() ![]() When their characters wear the wrong clothes, for example, or are members of the wrong class, this can appear as deep, almost spiritual, unsettlement. ![]() English writers have come to describe awkwardness with a great tender ease. ![]()
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