When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives —
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God anymore, or sweating in the dark
About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
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Too often summer days appear
Emblems of perfect happiness I can’t confront: I must await
A time less bold, less rich, less clear:
An autumn more appropriate.
— Philip Larkin, "Mother, Summer" in "High Windows" (Faber and Faber, 1974) (via @Kurt J. Harden)
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it's sirius' birthday today, so - naturally - i have decided to depress myself by writing a little story about the the great tragedy of his happy life being snatched away from him at the ripe old age of almost twenty-two.
the title for this pieces comes not from the philip larkin poem of the same name - although it's not not sirius-coded - but from the song live fast, die old by frank turner, which is the most james-and-sirius thing i've ever heard.
September 1979
‘It is a miracle you’re not dead.’
‘I thought I was about to be. You should have seen the way he was brandishing those fire tongs.’
‘I think you might actually be the luckiest bastard alive, Pads. I’m in awe.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t have wanted to die without you being there to witness it. If I’m going to get my head caved in by Mad-Eye Moody for breaking a mug without giving him prior warning and making him think there’s a Death Eater lurking in his kitchen cupboards, then I expect you to enjoy watching it happen.’
‘As, indeed, I would. Pass me that bottle?’
Sirius hands him a bottle in which the last dregs of a very good firewhisky - the mellow, amber colour of late summer - undulates. James swigs from it.
‘You look like a twat doing that.’
‘No I don’t! I look cool!’
‘You look like a fifteen-year-old having his first drink.’
James snorts. ‘Listen, you know I don’t, because you were there when I had my first drink. So you know that -’
‘- the fact you’re not hurling your guts up crying about how you’ll never win the world cup means that this is nothing like that.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Fair enough.’
James passes the bottle back and flops once more on the grass. The golden haze of sunrise slouches over the garden - catching the lime-green leaves of the beech and the dew-drops on the spider’s webs hanging from the door of the shed James never uses - and the whole garden seems to be encased in glass; a terrarium - shimmering and shining - which has been made into their perfect habitat, like the weird moss-filled thing Bertram bloody Aubrey used to have for his toad.
He imagines some benevolent owner lovingly arranging the detritus of their impromptu party - he’d only come round to update James and Lils on his latest meeting with Mad-Eye, Dumbledore’s orders, and that was fifteen hours ago - on the lawn around them and starts laughing.
‘What are you giggling about?’ grins James, his eyes glittering like caramel as it’s poured from a pan. A surefire sign that his mind was turned towards mischief.
‘I don’t even fucking know. Fucking everything, Prongs.’
James starts laughing too. He has a perfect laugh - uproarious and rich, the sort of laugh you wish could be preserved in amber - and it’s perfect for that morning, with its golden dawn and the crisp-apple bite to the air which says that autumn, and its promise of driving Lily to distraction by carving rude things into pumpkins, is on its way. It’s perfect for that perfect morning, when they’re both that brilliant sort of drunk which makes the soft blue of the sky seem all the clearer.
He lies back, the grass tickling his cheek, and looks up at the heavens, which stretch endlessly before him, revealed bit-by-bit by the new day’s light.
That horrible house - the prison of his childhood - seems so far away that he’s not sure he didn’t dream the whole thing.
It seems like something out of a fairytale - the sort of topsy-turvy formlessness of fantasy - to think that he had once been so miserable that he’d longed to self-destruct, to shatter like a dry bone and be scattered. It seemed absurd to look back at his sixteen-year-old self, rattling around on the Knight Bus as it sped him to James, and to freedom, and realise that he had once been unable to comprehend the idea of being truly happy.
But he is. Life stretches before him unfettered, beckoning to him and James and winking knowingly. You won’t grow old gracefully, it says, with a mischievous glint in its eye. Neither will he
It’s got that right. He and James made a promise within seconds of meeting to still be friends when they were ninety, living next door to each other and scandalising all the village witches and impressing all the village children with the rumours about their dissolute youths. And dissolute middle ages.
‘You’re my best friend,’ says James, because the whisky’s hit him. ‘We’re going to be best friends forever. Even when we’re fucking ancient.’
‘Yep. I know we are.’
‘This was a great party, wasn’t it, Pads?’
‘Party of the year, I’ve heard.’
‘I think I’d like every party I ever have to be like this.’ He’s staring at the sky, squinting behind his glasses, suddenly introspective. The sunlight makes his skin look like honey.
Sirius does the same. ‘I promise that all your parties will start because I have a run-in with Alastor Moody, Lils wants an excuse to open a bottle of cherry brandy, and you want the chance to act like a soft cunt at five in the morning,’ he says, watching a beam of sunlight shimmers behind a cloud, turning its solid white fluffiness into something sheer - gauzy - like a veil.
‘Cheers, mate. Appreciate it.’
The undulating blue-and-gold of morning is so beautiful, clouds rising up like castles from the sea. If Sirius wasn’t so happy it would be painful to see it. As it is…
‘I think sometimes that me and Lils will move by the sea,’ says James. ‘When we’re older. When we have a couple of kids. Yeah, we’ll move by the sea. And have parties in a house all filled with light.’
In the three essential volumes, the balanced triad of Philip Larkin’s achievement, all the poems are poised vibrantly in the forcefield of tension between his profound personal hopelessness and the assured command of their carrying out. Perfectly designed, tightly integrated, making the feeling of falling apart fit together, they release, from their compressed but always strictly parsable syntax, sudden phrases of ravishing beauty, as the river in Dante's Paradise suggests by giving off sparks that light is what it is made of.
— Clive James on poet Philip Larkin
from his review of the 1988. publication of Collected Works (from Faber. ed. by Anthony Thwaite)
[note. the three essential volumes being The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings, and High Windows.]
