Philip Larkin

by James Booth

  His emotional life was now firmly set on an opposite course from that of the now married but still sexually predatory Amis. As Richard Bradford comments, Larkin must have found Amis’s callous assumption that his new wife was in ‘contented ignorance’ of his infidelities both ‘farcical and odious’.33 Hilly wrote to Philip on 3 March 1950, saying that she was ‘simply wild’ with jealousy about Philip’s involvement ‘with this school girl or who ever she is’. Kingsley, she writes, is chasing after other girls, ‘Barbara and Terry’, while their friend James Michie has a Jamaican girlfriend. She, in contrast, lacks romantic adventures. Kingsley has just departed for the weekend. ‘They are having a party on Sat. Night & I’m sure K will “do” all the pretty women there, & here am I stuck at Sketty, Swansea where all the men are dull, stupid & too short.’ She continues: ‘I’ve got a weekend off in April when I shall be going to London, I dream that I’m meeting you there, & that we’ll have loads to drink & then go to bed together, but alas, only a dream.’ She ends, ‘Lots of love sweet meat – remember no more women – unless it’s Hilly x x x x’.34 Whether or not she was serious, she knew well that Philip would never take the risk of becoming involved with a friend’s wife who, moreover, had recently become a mother.

  Larkin initiated his second workbook later that month, gluing a photograph of Thomas Hardy on the inside cover above the axiom ‘The ultimate aim of a poet should be to touch our hearts by showing his own.’35 Not surprisingly, given his situation at the time, the first two poems in the new book, revised later in XX Poems under the heading ‘Two Portraits of Sex’, express disillusion. Their contrasted styles wittily imitate the techniques of the visual artist. ‘Oils’, based on the template of George Herbert’s poem ‘Prayer’, has the wet, rich colour of oil painting; ‘Etching’ has the dry, acid-traced black on white lines of that very different technique. Nevertheless the theme is the same: sex as the awesome wellspring of existence driving its victims to expend themselves in desire and procreation. In ‘Oils’, Larkin employs the gaudy imagery of his ‘Apocalyptic’ manner and a bardic gravity of tone borrowed from Dylan Thomas. A Layardian shaman shakes his magic weed as he dances, while the second stanza takes us into the womb (‘Working-place to which the small seed is guided’). At this point the poet’s gravity falters. The indelicate line ‘Inlet unvisited by marine biologist’ is surely a joke. However, he recovers his aplomb, and there is real archetypal force in the strange slow-motion spondaic beat of ‘New voice saying new words at a new speed’. The third stanza obscurely laments the iron grip of sex on life, its control even extending to ‘the dead’ whom death grips and ‘begin[s] to use’. Presumably this is a strained way of saying that the organic matter of life is constantly re­cycled between the living and the dead.

  Though the manner of ‘Etching’ is reductive and ironic, paradoxic­ally it conveys a more intense mood of mythic seriousness than ‘Oils’. The crude punning title (‘Etching’ / ‘itching’) relieves the poet of the burden of high seriousness, which means that he can get away with extravagant rhetoric in his evocation of the diffused poignancy of orgasm (‘The wet spark comes, the bright blown walls collapse, // But what sad scapes we cannot turn from then’). The pretentiousness of ‘Oils’ is humanized and imbued with pathos. The final lines give an archetypal vision of an impossible imagined ‘padlocked cube of light’ where sex obtains no right of entry. Marvell’s masculinist vision of an Eden where man ‘walked without a mate’, before the cycle of procreation had begun, is reimagined in terms of modern psychology. Larkin later detached ‘Etching’ from its less rhetorically secure companion-piece and in The Less Deceived it appears under the sexually suggestive title ‘Dry-Point’ with a sly implied reference to the drinking toast: ‘here’s lead in your pencil’.

  In a pattern repeated several times in his later work, Larkin followed this complex exertion with a very different poem drafted to completion on a single page, ‘The Literary World’. This dry indictment of the selfish sexual politics of the male writer, his only free-verse poem, shows virtually no corrections and is dated decisively at the bottom of the page ‘20/3/50’. He left it unpublished. After this he spent seven pages drafting a poem with a purely descriptive theme, ‘Consider the race of birds’.36 Despite some fine lines it remained uncompleted: ‘A nesting thrush pecks up stray fibrous strands / And dashes off. A blackbird faces evening, / Shuddering with vehemence.’

  The more personal mood-piece, ‘Saturday’ or ‘Spring and bachelors’, retitled ‘Spring’ in The Less Deceived, was completed on 19 May, its drafts overlapping with the bird-meditation. This, the first of the four published mature sonnets, is a complex work, and took more than nine pages of drafting. The first line seems a description of an impressionist painting – ‘Green-shadowed people sit, or walk in rings’ – and if it were not for the deadpan tone, the visual details would evoke a joyful spring awakening: the calm cloud, the singing bird, the sun ‘flashing like a dangled looking-glass’, the ‘branch-arrested mist of leaf’. There is a contradictory youthful élan about the poet’s self-disgust at the end of the octave: ‘and me, / Threading my pursed-up way across the park, / An indigestible sterility’. The five accents of the pentameter line are compacted into just two polysyllabic Latinate words, to give an effect of verbal constipation. The reader is forced to stretch out the recitation and dwell on the mean rhyme (‘me / sterility’), making the tone snide and aggressive. This perverse effect is highly enjoyable, and it is easy to see that, despite its youthful moodiness, this is after all still a prima vera celebration, a traditional lyrical welcome to the most ‘gratuitous’ of seasons, with its ‘fold of untaught flower’ and ‘race of water’. Paradoxically the less deceived sourness of the poet’s tone serves only to intensify the sense of the sweetness of the season, evoked with Keatsian richness and gorgeous sound-writing reminiscent of Hopkins. This ironic contrast between the poet’s alienated despair and the freshness of spring is familiar from Shakespeare, Gray and T. S. Eliot. April, with its challenge to our deepest vitality, is indeed the cruellest month.

  ‘If, My Darling’, completed four days later on 23 May 1950, is, like ‘Deceptions’, a dramatic monologue addressed to an innocent woman by a self-critical man. But here the tone is comic rather than tragic. The poem shows the crucial role played by Larkin’s relationship with Monica Jones in the development of his new demotic register. The endearment ‘my darling’ is companionable and intimate. The darling wears a ‘floating skirt’ like Alice in Lewis Carroll. Photographs of Monica at the time show her in a bell skirt.37 In the title, the heavily stressed ‘If’ is followed by a deliberate comma, suggesting a provocative question, even a threat. Well, the poet seems to be saying, if you are prepared to take me on, you had better understand what you are letting yourself in for. This humorous combativeness is new to Larkin’s poetry. The darling’s cosy inner room of imagination has a prissy feel recalling the pathetic insecurity of Margaret Peel in Amis’s Lucky Jim. The real Monica, however, will have relished the witty caricature of Victorianism in the mahogany claw-footed sideboards, the ‘small-printed books for the Sabbath’, the bibulous butler and lazy housemaids which the poet preposterously suggests furnish the inner room of her mind. There may be Amisian hostility in the poem’s gauche surliness, but this is subverted by Larkinesque empathy.

  The poet’s own inner room is a mélange of mediated stereotypes. The higher call of art is imaged crudely as a Grecian statue ‘kicked in the privates’ and his ‘finer feelings’ are nothing more than swill fit for a pig. Mixed metaphor swamps the poem and the poet stumbles into incoherence in his eagerness to make as sordid an impact as possible. Judging by the vigorous crossings-out and scribblings in the workbook draft, Larkin spent much energy on perfecting the unhinged metaphorical register of geometry and disease found nowhere else in his poetry. Lit by monkey-brown light, a ‘string of infected circles’ loiter like bullies, and then ‘coagulate’.38 The geometrical abstractions of his mental processes are soiled a
nd dirtied by his despicable desires. He concludes that if she were aware of his guilty inner secrets she would be knocked ‘off her unpriceable pivot’.39 Deep in the subtext there is an intimate challenge, and in some sense, one must conclude, this is a seduction poem. Philip had, it seems, gauged Monica’s temperament well. She was, like him, a complex person, chary of the ingenuous commitments of conventional morality. In an interview at the very end of her life she commented:

  I was really surprised when I learned about it [Larkin’s engagement].

  Did you resent the fact that he didn’t tell you about Ruth?

  No. Not at all! I didn’t think he was straightforward.

  What if he had been? Could you have liked him?

  I don’t think so.40

  But for the moment Larkin’s first priority was not this new relationship. He was intent on securing an escape from his entanglements. An extravagant weariness haunts ‘Wants’ (2 June 1950). The poet is oppressed by the invitation-cards, ‘the printed directions of sex’, the family photograph, the life insurance: ‘Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.’ His application for a post in London was rejected, so he applied in late May 1950 for a sub-librarianship at Queen’s University Belfast. In early June he crossed by ferry for the interview and, somewhat to his surprise, was appointed. He was to take up his new position in September. He had no connection with the city or the Province, so would be making a bold new start. But though he had taken the decisive step, he still havered. On 17 June, imagining confusedly that ‘Ruth and I could start life afresh in a far countrie,’ he made ‘a garbled proposal of marriage’. But he knew that he could not take Ruth with him, writing the following day to Sutton: ‘Now today I cannot think what maggot was in my brain to produce such a monstrous egg.’41 Only three days after he made his proposal he withdrew it: ‘I grabbed back as many of my words as I could and ate them hurriedly, encountering a good deal of scorn and anger in the process, which was understandable enough.’42 Nevertheless on 3 July he was still contemplating a Lawrentian plunge into commitment: ‘Christ knows what I’m going to do. I feel D.H.L. wd sum it all up in a few words. “. . . meanwhile Philip gnawed his fingers, being a Willy Wetleg, and tried to decide whether A Woman was worth more to him than His Art. His most fundamental feeling was one of surprise that any woman should be prepared to marry him at all.”’43

  By the end of July, however, he had finally disentangled himself: ‘Despite my fine feelings, when it really comes down to terms of furniture & loans from the bank something unmeltable & immoveable rises up in me – something infantile, cowardly, regressive. But it won’t be conquered. I’m a romantic bastard. Remote things seem desirable. Bring them close, & I start shitting myself.’44 Only now, following the break with Ruth, did he begin a physical relationship with Monica Jones. He felt he could take the risk, since he would be in Belfast and Monica in Leicester, so their relationship would necessarily assume what was for him the ideal form: a written correspondence. He would be in control of the time and occasion of any communication, and the relationship could develop without the pressures of physical proximity.

  The task of disentangling himself from his mother was also stressful. His sister Kitty and he made arrangements for the furniture in 12 Dixon Drive to be put in store in anticipation of its sale. On 4 September Eva moved in with her daughter at 53 York Road, Loughborough, though, in her own mind at least, this was only until she could join her son in Belfast. Indeed it was not until more than a year after her move, that she abandoned this hope when a house was bought for her a few doors away from Kitty at 21 York Road. She moved in in December 1951, and was to stay there for the next two decades until she was admitted to Berrystead Nursing Home in 1972.

  Larkin was determinedly freeing himself of his responsibilities and their associated guilts. In June 1950 he wrote a self-consciously literary poem, ‘Under a splendid chestnut tree’, in which three vaguely stereotypical characters, a rector, a schoolboy and a spinster, each suffer from grotesque irrational guilts which spoil their lives. The sour ‘Who called love conquering’, completed a few weeks later, obscurely laments the vulnerability of love to selfishness. But Larkin was beginning to fight free. On 30 July 1950 he wrote to Sutton that, having listened on the radio to that ‘gloomy convincing piece of bullshit’, Kafka’s The Trial, he was determined that his life must change. He was even beginning to question his allegiance to D. H. Lawrence: ‘The other night, like a curate in the depths of misery blaspheming against the Almighty, I wrote a short hostile article about D.H.L.’s “freedom’’.’ Why is it, Larkin asked himself, that Lawrence ‘never, seriously or in jest, suggests that he may become a father’?45 Did he perhaps know that fatherhood was biologically impossible for him? That might explain his strangely uncomplicated attitude towards marriage. Larkin had earlier commented that, though Lawrence declared ‘Thank God I’m not free, any more than a rooted tree is free,’ it is ‘hard to see how he could have been less encumbered in the affairs of life’.46

  Larkin’s impending escape from his own encumbrances also led him to confront his failure to become a novelist. In his letters to Sutton and to Amis of 1948–9 his tone in referring to ‘my novel’ had become more and more despairing. On 7 March 1950, Amis consoled his friend for his failure to make progress:

  Yes, I am sorry about your lack of novel. Sam Wagstaff has finally gone for a Burton, has he? I’m sorry to hear it, because I thought you were on to rather a good thing there. I must say that in your shoes I shd. very likely be so overjoyed at the prospect of being published that I would (?shd.) be willing to write any old nonsense and send it in.47

  Now, as he prepared to leave for Belfast, Larkin made a complicated attempt to theorize his failure in the strange form of a dialectical playlet, or as he called it a ‘débat inédit’, ‘Round the Point’. Geraint and Miller, representing different aspects of his own personality, wrangle over Geraint’s failure to write his second novel. Coming upon his friend tearing up his latest draft, Miller tries to persuade him to abandon his literary ambitions in favour of a life of ordinary satisfactions: ‘a good easy lucrative job, three bouncing mistresses in quick succession and then a wife uniting all their good qualities along with a few of her own, and a house by the sea’.48 But the idealistic Geraint desires only to write, though to his dismay he is unable to do so. With Shavian incisiveness Miller tells him that this is because he lacks the necessary qualities: massive self-approval, a thick skin and the conviction of the importance of ‘some urgent conception of the universe and the state of man’, which, though inevitably ‘arrant tosh’, is necessary to give the writer the stubborn impetus to continue.49 Geraint counters with a vision of the artist as ‘feminine’ and ‘passive’, recording experience like the wax of a record or litmus-paper.50 Miller concludes, ‘your place is in the old ivory tower really’, as he kicks the wastepaper-basket into the auditorium and the curtain falls on the resulting snowstorm of novel scraps.51

  The protagonists of the unfinished novels, Sam Wagstaff and Augusta Bax, were both to have escaped to the new world of the USA. The actual new world in which Larkin embarked on his self-renewal was not so far off, nor so exotic. It was none the less a dramatic move for the young poet. A self-pitying poem of pessimistic anticipation, ‘Twenty-eight, I have walked the length of my mind’, petered out after nine pages of drafting. He was ready for a new start. On Saturday 30 September he embarked at Liverpool for his new life. In ‘Single to Belfast’, a poem whose fourteen pages of drafts never reached completion, he put the past behind him:

  the present is really stiffening to past

  Right under my eyes,

  And my life committing itself to the long bend

  That swings me, this Saturday night, away from my midland

  Emollient valley, away from the lack of questions,

  Away from endearments [. . .]52

  He could neither marry nor become a novelist. He pushed to the back of his life his mother’s demands, his Lawrentian g
uilts and his desire to ‘be that girl’. Whether he was yet prepared to admit it to himself or not, his novelistic ambitions were over. In the freer environment of Belfast he was, as a poet, to dash forward like Auden’s hussar. Ireland helped to renew his sense of himself, and the next few years were to be among the happiest in his life.

  9

  The Best Writing Conditions

  1950–2

  In a long chatty letter to Monica Jones of 1 October 1950 Larkin relished his ‘first day in Ireland’. He described his drab lodging in Queen’s Chambers, close by the University, grumbled amiably that the green of his candles would clash with the newly painted walls, noted that the roast beef at lunch ‘was as pedestrian as a centipede’ and lamented that no food was available after seven o’clock. But his complaints barely conceal his exhilaration at starting life afresh in this room of his own:

  No, heark ’ee, cully, this room is grossly underfurnished, the lampshade is made of brown paper, the bulbs are too weak, the noise from the trams tiresome, the sixpenny meter for heat will prove expensive, the students ubiquitous, the servants iniquitous (where’s the strap from my suitcase?). Michael Innes1 speaks somewhere of the combination of refined luxury and barbarous discomfort that is the Oxford don’s life: it is the Belfast don’s life, too, except for the refined luxury.2

  There is a sense in this first Belfast letter that he is setting the tone for a substantial future correspondence. Monica is to provide the sounding-board for his responses to his new environment. He ends on an intimate but respectful note: