Philip Larkin

by James Booth

  Finally Marie persuades Philippa to join her in a symbolic pub crawl into her Unconscious: ‘If you got drunk it would be a kind of descent into Hell to rescue your soul. Orpheus-Eurydice legend, you see.’70 In one of the pubs the barmaids reveal themselves to be Eileen and Pat, former servants at Willow Gables. Pat explains that she is no longer at the school because ‘That story’s over now, Miss Marie [. . .] Willow Gables doesn’t exist any more.’ Marie is disconcerted to be told that she is only a fictional character, and asks where she can find real life. Pat points out the Smoke Room door, which opens on to a busy scene of dart-playing and jazz, in the midst of which Diana Gollancz and Bruce Montgomery are discussing the title of Bruce’s novel. Unimpressed by reality Marie decides she would rather stay within the fictional story, and closes the door. Like her creator, she fears the onset of hard reality. The manuscript breaks off as she sets out into the darkness of a blacked-out Oxford, in pursuit of Philippa’s distant torch, dimmed with green tissue-paper.71 Larkin’s notes indicate detailed plans for the work’s completion, and he had already begun to type up the final copy when, overtaken by events, he was forced to abandon it. At this point he glued the typed pages over the initial pages of the holograph and added it to his archive for the attention of posterity. He was already working on Jill, which was, after all, a better prospect for publication than any of his Brunette works.

  The charmed world he had inhabited over the last few months was fading about him. The period of freedom which began with his exemption from military service on New Year’s Day 1942 finally drew to an end. On his birthday, 9 August, Larkin had submitted himself, miserably, to be interviewed for a job in the Civil Service. His application was rejected. In September he was considered for a Foreign Office post doing secret work at Bletchley Park, and was again rejected. Ashamed of his failure, he fumed to Amis: ‘I detest being inspected and weighed up and classed as unfit for this imbecile job or fit for that imbecile job or suitable for such and such lunatic task. I boil and spit with fury.’72 He returned to his attic in Warwick, to Brunette and to the beginnings of his first novel. Finally, early in November his future was decided: ‘I was sitting at home quietly writing Jill when the Ministry of Labour wrote to me asking, very courteously, what I was doing exactly. This scared me and I picked up the Birmingham Post and saw that an urban district council in Shropshire wanted a librarian, so I applied and got it.’73 As he had anticipated, he was to follow the example of the bank clerk Vernon Watkins, making his living in an ordinary job and applying himself to ‘perfection of the work’. The comic impulse central to the Brunette works withered for the time being, not to return until he found his mature poetic voice in the early 1950s.

  4

  Nothing So Glad

  1943–5

  Larkin arrived in Wellington on 1 December 1943, an inexperienced, unworldly young man of twenty-one. It was, on the face of it, an unpromising place to start a literary career. ‘Too large to have the community spirit of a village and too small to engender the cultural activities of a larger town, it was an unremarkable little place with a built-in resistance to new ideas and even perhaps to newcomers.’1 On his arrival he simply stayed in lodgings for a while: ‘The idea of getting a flat for myself was, you know, beyond my imagination.’ Once he had found more permanent digs in a 1930s detached house, ‘Glentworth’, his social life settled into a bachelor pattern.2 He played snooker at the local YMCA; he visited Sidoli’s and Brittain’s cafés and the town’s three cinemas with local girls, including Jane Exall, the ‘bosomy English rose’ of ‘Wild Oats’. Writing to Sutton in mid-December, he made a show of disdain for the duties of his new position: ‘I am entirely unassisted in my labours, and spend most of my time handing out tripey novels to morons. I feel it is not at all a suitable occupation for a man of acute sensibility and genius.’3 By March 1944 he was seeing some advantages to his situation: ‘I intend to devote myself to writing and doing my boring job without enthusiasm or slackness. I only took it on account of being able to write in the intervals: it’s not so easy, I must say, but it’s possible.’4 Indeed, from a literary point of view, wartime Wellington did offer what he needed. He occupied a respected position in the local community, and was largely his own master.

  In his brief memoir ‘Single-handed and Untrained’, written in 1977, Larkin recalled his days in Wellington with affection.5 He began each morning by stoking the boiler, and later in the day it was his task to light the gas-mantles with long, dripping tapers. He set about modernizing the Library’s antiquated systems and procedures, arguing with the Urban District Council about the need for improvements, and renewing the interior decoration. He enrolled on a correspondence course leading to membership of the Library Association and secured the appointment of an assistant librarian. When he arrived the Library’s stock consisted of only 4,000 books, and his purchases of works by Lawrence, Forster, Joyce and Isherwood gained him a reputation for ‘filling the Library with dirty books’.6 In a letter to Sutton of March 1944 he expressed a somewhat baffled respect for the ‘quiet men in cloth caps who take out books of a rather serious kind with a serious expression on their faces, as if they are seriously trying to get a grip on things’. The reading choices of the female library-users disappointed him: ‘It’s the women that are the stupid sods. I hate women when it comes to choosing books.’7 But he expressed such views only to distant correspondents, and rose to the social demands of his position, involving himself in the needs and ambitions of the local library-users. With a dynamism inherited from his father he persuaded the Urban District Council to raise the municipal rate by a penny in the pound to support the purchase of new books.8 He took pride in the increase in inter-library loans, ‘chiefly to sixth-formers, and those readers with precise interests and courses of study’.9 To older readers ‘he was unfailingly courteous, and his diffidence and nervous stammer, together with his patient willingness to find them books they would enjoy, won them over completely’.10

  One library-user on whom he made a particularly deep impression was Ruth Bowman, in 1943–4 a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl:

  The arrival of Philip made life suddenly brighter. Here was someone, a mere handful of years older than myself, glamorized by an Oxford degree – not all that common in Wellington at that time – mature, learned and successful, who was yet willing to discuss with me books I had read, advising me on what I should read and actually interested in my reactions. I was dazzled. Annoyingly, some of my contemporaries developed a sudden and unlikely interest in English literature and hung around the library shelves in what I felt was a distinctly predatory manner, but Philip, whose maturity I had over-estimated, regarded these giggling sixth-formers with some complacency.11

  Philip and Ruth’s feelings for each other developed in a decorous, hesitant way. By early 1944 there was amused gossip in the town about the awkward couple they made. At school she was warned to ‘stop bothering the new librarian’. An acquaintance at the time often saw them together ‘reciting poetry to each other [. . .] She looked at him with such adoring eyes.’12 They would walk on Sundays on the wooded slopes of the Ercall, above Wellington (joined on one uneasy occasion by Kingsley Amis).13 In 1991 Ruth recalled that she had been shocked by ‘the robustness’ of Philip’s language and his outrageous sentiments, ‘but if I found any part of his conversation distasteful and said so he might grumble at my prudishness but he would carefully avoid such expressions again. Oddly enough he had a Puritan streak which made him outraged if I attempted to reply in kind.’14 He attempted to shake her religious beliefs, but gave up when she remained steadfast. And he joined her in her passion for cats. Their liaison was symbolically cemented when she stole a copy of Yeats’s poems from her school for him. Over the previous two years Larkin had run the gamut of attitudes towards sexuality and gender, from Théophile Gautier to D. H. Lawrence; from W. H. Auden to Dorothy Vicary. Now, still a virgin, he had to cope with a vulnerable, serious-minded schoolgirl, with no conception of his inner life
, eager for a relationship with him, and also hoping for the only end of such a relationship. Over the next six years his entanglement with Ruth became an increasingly insistent element in his poetry and fiction.

  During his time in Wellington writing still continued to pour from the bottle uncorked by W. B. Yeats and Dorita Fairlie Bruce. Bruce Montgomery was now teaching at Shrewsbury School, and regularly on Tuesday, his evening off at the Library, Larkin would visit him in his ‘sumptuous’ house, a sharp contrast to his own makeshift ‘digs’. In turn Montgomery would visit Larkin in Wellington where they would sit for hours in the Raven or the more upmarket Charlton Arms, drinking and discussing literature.15 When ‘Edmund Crispin’s’ The Case of the Gilded Fly was published in February 1944, Larkin redoubled work on his own novel, Jill, first mentioned in letters to Sutton in August of the previous year. Urged on by Montgomery he completed the manuscript on Sunday 14 March 1944. Montgomery suggested changes to the final chapter and then sent the typescript to Charles Williams, a founding member of the Inklings and a director of Oxford University Press, in the hope that he might pass it on to Faber and Faber. Larkin was filled with excitement and a sense of unreality. T. S. Eliot worked at Faber and might see his book.16 But Williams wrote saying that he was unable to help. Montgomery immediately sent the typescript to Gollancz. Months went by, and Larkin began to feel that he had been left behind by his more successful friend.

  In contrast, opportunities to publish his poems came readily, confirming his conviction that the novel was the more difficult, serious form. R. A. Caton, owner of the Fortune Press, wrote asking him to contribute to a volume, Poetry from Oxford in Wartime, edited by William Bell of Merton College. Larkin sent him ‘So through that unripe day’ and nine recently written poems in Yeatsian style. These were immediately accepted and the volume was published in November 1944. In the meantime Caton had written to a number of Oxford poets, including Larkin, asking if they had enough work for a volume. The Fortune Press’s fiction list included, as Larkin joked, many ‘masterpieces’ for ‘students of intersex’: Boys in their Ruin, A Brute of a Boy, Bachelor’s Hall. Caton had been prosecuted in 1934 for ‘obscene libel’.17 But the Press’s poetry list was, in contrast, impressive, including Dylan Thomas, Gavin Ewart, Roy Fuller, Tambimuttu, Drummond Allison and Vernon Scannell. Surprisingly Larkin did not respond immediately to Caton’s approach. He was by this time engaged on his second novel, then entitled The Kingdom of Winter, which probably seemed a more important priority. But he may also have felt that his poetic voice was not yet secure enough to justify a volume. Montgomery, his stalwart ally when it came to fiction, was derisive of his enthusiasm for Yeats: ‘I remember Bruce Montgomery snapping, as I droned for the third or fourth time that evening When such as I cast off remorse, So great a sweetness flows into the breast. . ., “It’s not his job to cast off remorse, but to earn forgiveness.”’18

  Nevertheless, when Caton repeated his inquiry in October Larkin cast doubt aside and assembled a collection of thirty-one pieces, The North Ship. The fact that he headed each poem with a roman numeral, only eight of the poems being given titles, imitates Part One of Auden’s Another Time, which also runs from I to XXXI, but it may also betray a certain haste. He included the ten poems from Poetry from Oxford in Wartime, but most of the volume was made up of Yeatsian works written in the early months of 1944. Caton was notorious for not paying royalties to his authors, and when Larkin wrote asking about terms, Caton assured him ‘that no agreement was necessary’.19 A publication date of February 1945 was mentioned, and when proofs did not arrive until March Larkin was consumed with impatience. Nevertheless, their final arrival prompted him to send Caton the typescript of Jill, despairing of finding a more respectable publisher. The novel was, after all, in its way, a work of ‘intersex’. Caton accepted it at once, though again no financial terms were mentioned.

  Larkin’s first published volume, The North Ship, finally appeared on 31 July 1945, six months later than had originally been promised. The evocative, symbolist manner of The North Ship is at an opposite extreme from the witty demotic of Brunette (‘I’m very cross: I think you’ve been a beast’):

  I put my mouth

  Close to running water:

  Flow north, flow south,

  It will not matter,

  It is not love you will find.

  Here, as in the later mature poem ‘Solar’, the elements of nature are dispassionate, immutable, clear of the human element. The running water and the wind are beyond love, beyond death:

  You have no limbs

  Crying for stillness, you have no mind

  Trembling with seraphims,

  You have no death to come. (XIII)

  The phrasing shows a refined ear for the music of vowels and conson­ants: ‘Trembling with seraphims’.20 Even more exquisite is the jewel-like miniature, ‘This is the first thing’ (XXVI):

  This is the first thing

  I have understood:

  Time is the echo of an axe

  Within a wood.

  This lyric, in plain indicative mood, elusive in literal meaning but immediately emotionally comprehensible, would be perfectly in place in one of Ezra Pound’s anthologies of imagist poetry.

  One major strand of the volume is an aestheticist celebration of beauty for its own sake in a tone of secular worship or awe. In ‘Like the train’s beat’ (XII), the poet glimpses transcendent beauty in the eyelashes and ‘sharp vivacity of bone’ of a Polish airgirl in a corner seat, lit through the window of the swaying train by the ‘swinging and narrowing sun’:

  all humanity of interest

  Before her angled beauty falls [. . .]

  Her beauty has an abstract precision, as loveless and deathless as the running water and wind in ‘I put my mouth’. Her fluttering foreign words are as ‘meaningless’ as the ‘whorling’ notes issuing from a bird’s throat. A similar pure lyric impulse informs ‘Is it for now or for always’ (XXVIII), a carpe diem poem, playing with words to conjure exalted euphoria from an assertion of transience:

  Shine out, my sudden angel,

  Break fear with breast and brow,

  I take you now and for always,

  For always is always now.

  The ecstatic rhetoric cannot conceal the irony familiar from ancient and Renaissance examples of the genre. The only permanence the poet can offer his beloved is the livelong minute: we are always here; always is always now. Life is never more than a moment long.

  To achieve a unifying tone of pure lyricism, Larkin entirely excluded the humour and irony of his Brunette persona from the volume. He also banished the postures of his earlier Audenesques in favour of a more direct address to the reader. Larkin dedicated the first poem in the volume ‘To Bruce Montgomery’, but though his friend was generous about it (‘I like the North Ship’), he still preferred the Brunette works: ‘I adore WGO [Willow Gables at Oxford]. There’s a sort of brisk heartlessness about it, and it is extraordinarily funny.’21 Partly perhaps because of Montgomery’s lack of enthusiasm, but also because of the long delay before publication, Larkin always felt disappointed with The North Ship. His dissatisfaction resurfaced when the collection was reprinted in 1966 in the wake of the success of The Whitsun Weddings. In the Introduction to the reissue he derided his youthful pretension: ‘Then, as now, I could never contemplate it without a twinge, faint or powerful, of shame compounded with disappointment. Some of this was caused by the contents but not all: I felt in some ways cheated. I can’t exactly say how. It was a pity they had ever mentioned February.’22

  In 1966 Larkin reflected that the volume contained ‘not one abandoned self but several’, and added self-deprecatingly that ‘The search for a style was merely one aspect of a general immaturity.’23 An alert reader will catch the widest range of verbal echoes: Keats, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Ernest Dowson, A. E. Housman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, the French symbolists, T. E. Hulme, W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas. But, though some of the poems in the volume are s
econd-hand and weakly characterized, it does not deserve his later scorn. It is remarkable how often a poem in The North Ship appears upon examination to be an early, less forceful version of a later mature poem. The symbolist ‘One man walking a deserted platform’ (XXII) was later recast in his later ‘Movement’ demotic style, as ‘Poetry of Departures’; ‘Morning has spread again’ (XXV) anticipates ‘No Road’. ‘Like the train’s beat’ (XII), with its image of the ‘meaningless’ beauty of the Polish airgirl, looks forward to the poet’s ‘useless’ encounter with beauty in ‘Latest Face’.

  In 1966 Larkin was apologetic about his ‘infatuation’ with the particularly potent music of Yeats, ‘pervasive as garlic’, pleading in excuse that it has ‘ruined many a better talent’.24 Later in life he became fixed in condemnation, referring to ‘that shit Yeats, farting out his histrionic rubbish’.25 There may be a personal, biographical explanation for this puzzlingly disproportionate antipathy. The most headily Yeatsian works in The North Ship are Larkin’s first real love poems. ‘Morning has spread again’ (XXV) could easily be read, for instance, as an immature attempt to dictate the script of his relationship with Ruth Bowman. The poet dreams that the love affair has run its course to the end; the lovers have ‘worn down love good-humouredly’, and are left:

  Talking in fits and starts

  As friends, as they will be

  Who have let passion die within their hearts.

  The couple in Yeats’s ‘Ephemera’ sighed similarly that ‘Passion has often worn our wandering hearts.’26 This is very satisfying and poetic. But, following this valediction, the speaker expresses puzzlement that ‘love can have already set / In dreams, when we’ve not met / More times than I can number on one hand.’ The cosy ventriloquism of Yeats is broken by the poet’s dismay that he is rehearsing the end of the relationship when he should by rights be rejoicing at its beginning.