by Alan Bennett
‘I do believe’, he wrote to Maeve Brennan, ‘that the happiestway to get through life is to want things and get them; now I don’t believe I’ve ever wanted anything in the sense of a … Jaguar Mark IX … I mean, although there’s always plenty of things I couldn’t do with, there’s never been anything I couldn’t do without and in consequence I “have” very little.’ But the truth is, surely, he wasn’t all that interested, and if he kept his flat like a dentist’s waiting-room it was because he preferred it that way. He wanted his jazz records, after all, and he ‘had’ those. In one’s own choosier circumstances it may be that reading of a life like this one feels by implication criticized and got at. And there is with Larkin an air of virtue about it, a sense that a sacrifice has been made. After all, Auden’s idea of the cosy was other people’s idea of the squalid but he never implied that living in a shit-heap was a precondition of his writing poetry; it just happened to be the way he liked it.
Still, Larkin never wanted to be one of those people with ‘specially-chosen junk,/The good books, the good bed,/And my life, in perfect order’ or indeed to live, as he said practically everyone he knew did, in something called The Old Mill or The Old Forge or The Old Rectory. All of them, I imagine, with prams in the hall. Cyril Connolly’s strictures on this point may have been one of the reasons Larkin claimed The Condemned Playground as his sacred book and which led him, meeting Connolly, uncharacteristically to blurt out, ‘You formed me.’ But if his definition of possessions seems a narrow one (hard to see how he could feel encumbered by a house, say, but not by half a dozen honorary degrees), his version of his life, which is to some extent Motion’s also, was that if he had lived a more cluttered life then Art, ‘that lifted rough tongued bell’, would cease to chime. When it did cease to chime, rather earlier than he’d thought, ten years or so before he died, he went on living as he’d always lived, saying it was all he knew.
Striding down the library in the Monitor film Larkin thought he looked like a rapist. Garland reassured him, but walking by the canal in the same film there is no reassurance; he definitely does. Clad in his doleful raincoat with pebble glasses, cycle-clips and oceanic feet, he bears more than a passing resemblance to Reginald Halliday Christie. Haunting his cemeteries and churchyards he could be on the verge of exposing himself, and whether it’s to a grim, head-scarved wife from Hessle or in a slim volume from Faber and Faber seems a bit of a toss-up. Had his diary survived, that ‘sexual log-book’, one might have learned whether this shy, tormented man ever came close to the dock, the poetry even a safety valve. As it was, lovers on the grass in Pearson Park would catch among the threshing chestnut trees the dull glint of binoculars, and on campus errant borrowers, interviewed by the Librarian, found themselves eyed up as well as dressed down.
Day by day your estimation clocks up
Who deserves a smile and who a frown,
And girls you have to tell to pull their socks up
Are those whose pants you’d most like to pull down
Motion’s hardest task undoubtedly has been to cover, to understand and somehow enlist sympathy for Larkin and his women. Chief among them were his mother, whose joyless marriage put him off the institution long before poetry provided him with the excuse; Monica Jones, lecturer in English at Leicester, whom he first met in 1946 and who was living with him when he died: Maeve Brennan, an assistant librarian at Hull with whom he had a seventeen-year fling which overlapped with another, begun in 1975, with his long-time secretary at the library, Betty Mackereth. All of them (mother excepted) he clubbed with sex, though Maeve was for a long time reluctant to join the clubbed and Betty escaped his notice until, after seventeen years as his secretary, there was presumably one of those When-you-take-off-your-glasses-you’re-actually-quite-pretty’ moments. Though the library was the setting for so much of this heavy breathing, propriety seems to have been maintained and there was no slipping down to the stack for a spot of beef jerky.
Of the three, Monica, one feels, could look after herself, and though Larkin gave her the runaround over many years she was never in any doubt about the score. ‘He cared’, she told Motion, ‘a tenth as much about what happened around him as what was happening inside him.’ Betty, too, had him taped and besides had several other strings to her bow, including some spot-welding which she’d picked up in Leeds. It’s only Maeve Brennan, among his later ladies anyway, for whom one feels sorry. Maeve knew nothing of the darker side of his nature − the porn, for instance, coming as a posthumous revelation, as did his affair with Betty. If only for her sake one should be thankful the diaries did not survive. A simpler woman than the other two, she was Larkin’s sweetheart, her love for him romantic and innocent, his for her companionable and protective. Dull you might even say,
If that is what a skilled,
Vigilant, flexible,
Unemphasised, enthralled
Catching of happiness is called.
A fervent Catholic (trust his luck), Maeve took a long time before she would sleep with him, keeping the poet-librarian at arm’s length. Her arms were actually quite hairy − this, Motion says, adding to her attraction. Quite what she will feel when reading this is hard to figure, and she’s perhaps even now belting down to Hull’s Tao Clinic While Maeve held him off the romance flourished, but as soon as she does start to sleep with him on a regular basis her days are numbered. Larkin, having made sure of his options with Betty, drops Maeve, who is desolate, and though he sees her every day in the library and they evolve ‘a distant but friendly relationship’ no proper explanation is ever offered.
There is, though, a lot of other explanation on the way − far too much for this reader − with Monica being pacified about Maeve, Maeve reassured about Monica, and Mother given edited versions of them both. And so much of it in letters. When the Selected Letters came out there was general gratitude that Larkin was old-fashioned enough still to write letters, but there’s not much to be thankful for in his correspondence with Maeve and Monica. ‘One could say’, wrote Kafka,’ that all the misfortunes in my life stem from letters … I have hardly ever been deceived by people, but letters have deceived me without fail … not other people’s letters, but my own.’ So it is with Larkin, who as a young man took the piss out of all the twaddle he now in middle age writes about ree-lay-shun-ships.
The pity is that these three women never got together to compare notes on their lover, preferably in one of those siderooms in the library Mrs T.’s cuts meant had to be hived off. But then women never do get together, except in French comedies. Besides, the conference would have had to include the now senile Eva Larkin, whose spectre Larkin detected in all the women he had anything to do with, or had sex to do with. Motion identifies Larkin’s mother as his muse, which I suppose one must take on trust if only out of gratitude to Motion for ploughing through all their correspondence.
What makes one impatient with a lot of the stuff Larkin writes to Monica and Maeve is that it’s plain that what he really wants is just to get his end away on a regular basis and without obligation. ‘Sex is so difficult,’ he complained to Jean Hartley. ‘You ought to be able to get it and pay for it monthly like a laundry bill.’ The impression the public had from the poems was that Larkin had missed out on sex, and this was corroborated by occasional interviews (‘Sexual recreation was a socially remote thing, like baccarat or clog-dancing’). But though Motion calls him ‘a sexually disappointed Eeyore’, in fact he seems to have had a pretty average time, comparing lives with Amis (‘staggering skirmishes/in train, tutorial and telephone booth’) the cause of much of his dissatisfaction. He needed someone to plug him into the fleshpots of Hull, the ‘sensitive and worldly-wise Conquest’ the likeliest candidate, except that Larkin didn’t want Conquest coming to Hull, partly because he was conscious of the homeliness of Maeve. On the other hand, there must have been plenty of ladies who would have been willing to oblige, even in Hull; ready to drop everything and pop up to Pearson Park, sucking off the great poet at lea
st a change from gutting herrings.
I imagine women will be less shocked by the Larkin story, find it less different from the norm than will men, who don’t care to see their stratagems mapped out as sedulously as Motion has done with Larkin’s. To will his own discomfort then complain about it, as Larkin persistently does, makes infuriating reading, but women see it every day. And if I have a criticism of this book it is that Motion attributes to Larkin the poet faults I would have said were to do with Larkin the man. It’s true Larkin wanted to keep women at a distance, fend off family life, because he felt that writing poetry depended on it. But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten. They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury’s, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play. Larkin complains to Judy Egerton about Christmas and having to
buy six simple inexpensive presents when there are rather more people about than usual … No doubt in yours it means seeing your house given over to hordes of mannerless middle-class brats and your good food and drink vanishing into the quacking tooth-equipped jaws of their alleged parents. Yours is the harder course, I can see. On the other hand, mine is happening to me.
‘And’ (though he doesn’t say this) ‘I’m the poet.’ Motion comments, ‘As in “Self’s the Man”, Larkin here angrily acknowledges his selfishness hoping that by admitting it he will be forgiven.’ ‘Not that old trick!’ wives will say, though sometimes they have to be grateful just for that, and few ordinary husbands would get away with it. But Larkin wasn’t a husband, and that he did get away with it was partly because of that and because he had this fall-back position as Great Poet. Monica, Maeve and even Betty took more from him, gave him more rope, because this was someone with a line to posterity.
In all this the writer he most resembles − though, ‘falling over backwards to be thought philistine’ (as was said at All Souls), he would hardly relish the comparison − is Kafka. Here is the same looming father and timid, unprotesting mother, a day job meticulously performed with the writing done at night, and the same dithering on the brink of marriage with art the likely casualty. Larkin’s letters analysing these difficulties with girls are as wearisome to read as Kafka’s and as inconclusive. Both played games with death − Larkin hiding, Kafka seeking − and when they were called in it got them both by the throat.
Like Kafka, it was only as a failure that Larkin could be a success. ‘Striving to succeed he had failed; accepting failure he had begun to triumph.’ Not that this dispersed the gloom then, or ever. Motion calls him a Parnassian Ron Glum, and A. L. Rowse (not usually a fount of common sense) remarks, ‘What the hell was the matter with him? He hadn’t much to complain about. He was tall!’The publication of the Selected Letters and now the biography is not, I fear, the end of it. This is early days for Larkin plc as there’s a hoard of material still unpublished, the correspondence already printed just a drop in the bucket, and with no widow standing guard packs of postgraduates must already be converging on the grave. May I toss them a bone?
In 1962 Monica Jones bought a holiday cottage at Haydon Bridge, near Hexham in Northumberland. Two up, two down, it’s in a bleakish spot with the Tyne at the back and the main Newcastle-Carlisle road at the front, and in Motion’s account of his visit there to rescue Larkin’s letters it sounds particularly desolate. However, Jones and Larkin spent many happy holidays at the cottage, and on their first visit in 1962 they
lazed, drank, read, pottered round the village and amused themselves with private games. Soon after the move, for instance, they began systematically defacing a copy of Iris Murdoch’s novel The Flight from the Enchanter, taking it in turns to interpolate salacious remarks and corrupt the text. Many apparently innocent sentences are merely underlined (‘Today it seemed likely to be especially hard’). Many more are altered (‘her lips were parted and he had never seen her eyes so wide open’ becomes ‘her legs were parted and he had never seen her cunt so wide open’). Many of the numbered chapter-headings are changed (‘Ten’ is assimilated into I Fuck my STENographer). Even the list of books by the same author is changed to include UNDER THE NET her Garments.
Something to look forward to after a breezy day on Hadrian’s Wall or striding across the sands at Lindisfarne, this ‘childishly naughty game’ was continued over many years.
As a librarian, Larkin must have derived a special pleasure from the defacement of the text, but he and Miss Jones were not the first. Two other lovers had been at the same game a year or so earlier, only, more daring than our two pranksters, they had borrowed the books they planned to deface from a public library and then, despite the scrutiny of the staff, had managed to smuggle them back on to the shelves. But in 1962 their luck ran out and Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell were prosecuted for defacing the property of Islington Borough Council. Was it this case, plentifully written up in the national press, that gave Philip and Monica their wicked idea? Or did he take his cue from the more detailed account of the case published the following year in the Library Association Record, that delightful periodical which was his constant study? It’s another one for Jake Balokowsky.
At forty-five Larkin had felt himself ‘periodically washed over by waves of sadness, remorse, fear and all the rest of it, like the automatic flushing of a urinal’. By sixty the slide towards extinction is unremitting, made helpless by the dead weight of his own self. His life becomes so dark that it takes on a quality of inevitability: when a hedgehog turns up in the garden you know, as you would know in a film, that the creature is doomed. Sure enough he runs over it with the lawnmower, and comes running into the house wailing. He had always predicted he would die at sixty-three, as his father did, and when he falls ill at sixty-two it is of the cancer he is most afraid of. He goes into the Nuffield to be operated on, the surgeon telling him he will be a new man ‘when I was quite fond of the old one’. One of the nurses is called Thatcher, another Scargill (‘They wear labels’). A privilege of private medicine is that patients have ready access to drink, and it was a bottle of whisky from an unknown friend that is thought to have led him to swallow his own vomit and go into a coma. In a crisis in a private hospital the patient is generally transferred to a National Health unit, in this case the Hull Royal Infirmary, for them to clear up the mess. ‘As usual’ I was piously preparing to write, but then I read how Louis MacNeice died. He caught a chill down a pothole in Yorkshire while producing a documentary for the BBC and was taken into University College Hospital. He was accustomed at this time to drinking a bottle of whisky a day but, being an NHS patient, was not allowed even a sip; whereupon the chill turned to pneumonia and he died, his case almost the exact converse of Larkin’s. Larkin came out of the coma, went home but not to work, and returned to hospital a few months later, dying on 2 December 1985.
Fear of death had been the subject of his last major poem, ‘Aubade’, finished in 1977, and when he died it was much quoted and by implication his views endorsed, particularly perhaps the lines
… Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
The poem was read by Harold Pinter at a memorial meeting at Riverside Studios in the following March, which I wrote up in my diary:
3 March 1986. A commemorative programme for Larkin at Riverside Studios, arranged by Blake Morrison. Arrive late as there is heavy rain and the traffic solid, nearly two hours to get from Camden Town to Hammersmith. I am to read with Pinter, who has the beginnings of a moustache he is growing in order to play Goldberg in a TV production of The Birthday Party. My lateness and the state of the traffic occasions some disjointed conversation between us very much in the manner of his plays. I am told this often happens.
Patrick Garland, who is due to compère the programme, is also late so we kick off without him, George Hartley talking about
Larkin and the Marvell Press and his early days in Hull. Ordering The Less Deceived no one ever got the title right, asking for ‘Alas! Deceived’, ‘The Lass Deceived’ or ‘The Less Received’ and calling the author Carkin, Lartin, Lackin, Laikin or Lock. I sit in the front row with Blake Morrison, Julian Barnes and Andrew Motion. There are more poems and reminiscences, but it’s all a bit thin and jerky.
Now Patrick G. arrives, bringing the video of the film he made of Larkin in 1965, but there is further delay because while the machine works there is no sound. Eventually we sit and watch it like a silent film, with Patrick giving a commentary and saying how Larkinesque this situation is (which it isn’t particularly) and how when he was stuck in the unending traffic jam he had felt that was Larkinesque too and how often the word Larkinesque is used and now it’s part of the language. Pinter, whose own adjective is much more often used, remains impassive. Patrick, as always, tells some good stories, including one I hadn’t heard of how Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!’
Then Andrew Motion, who is tall, elegant and fair, a kind of verse Heseltine, reads his poem on the death of Larkin, which ends with his last glimpse of the great man, staring out of the hospital window, his fingers splayed out on the glass, watching as Motion drives away.
