The English poet Philip Larkin famously turned down an O.B.E. in 1961 and the position of Poet Laureate in 1984 following the Marxist theory (Groucho not Karl) to refuse any club that would have him as a member.
What is much less well known is, in 1955, he also turned down the role Principal Librarian at the British Museum (the post was renamed 'director' following the separation of the British Museum from the British Library in 1973) to join the University of Hull library.
He never explained why, although one of his most famous poems 'This Be The Verse', gives a hint. It is possible that the deeply jaundiced view he had of his parents may have been veiled criticisms of the destructive establishment ideology that museums present and represent.
This re-reading is highly illuminating. When he described his father as 'nihilistically disillusioned in middle age' we can easily see the quote as a metaphor for the British museum sector as a whole. He described his mother as a "...kind of defective mechanism...Her ideal is 'to collapse' and to be taken care of" - that could be the Museums Association definition of a 21st Century British museum.
Thus I have made it my duty to bring out the truth about museums in the famous poem. I take as inspiration the infamous credit of the 1966 film version of The Taming of the Shrew 'By William Shakespeare, with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor'
This Be The Verse*
by Philip Larkin with additional words by Frank Rason
They fuck museums up, your museum managers.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill exhibitions with the faults they learnt
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By curators in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Museums hand on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Visit them as little as you can,
And don't work in museums yourself.
* The original is available for you to read at http://www.artofeurope.com/larkin/lar2.htm
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