Philip Larkin

by James Booth

I hope too your room doesn’t look sad & lonely now my lethargic cadging figure isn’t in it. Truly I shall always remember the fireplace & the cricket-bin & all the battery of things on the mantelpiece, Fifi & blue Neddy & the flowered lamp. Your life there has come into extremely sharp focus for me now: heating milk, singing in the kitchen, drying stockings, etc.

  A burst of nostalgia follows: ‘I loved every time I visited you, & do want to thank you again & again for being so kind, so gracious & so generous.’3 As letters like this arrived regularly over the following months and years it is not surprising that Monica allowed their unresolved long-distance relationship to become a permanent feature of her life.

  A serial letter of 28–30 November 19504 runs to fourteen sides, complete with a sketch of his room, and a cartoon of a shop-girl refusing to allow him to look through a newly arrived pile of Jazz Collector and Tempo records: ‘May I look through these’; ‘Oi’d rather you didn’t.’ He rages: ‘cow of Hell! I have never seen any before, & Belfast is the last place I expected to find them.’5 In the drawing he has accidentally given himself a round-shouldered stoop and huge nose, and writes in the margin: ‘This looks like an anti-semitic cartoon in Die Stürmer.’6 The letter ends with a spirited sketch of Monica, seen from behind and above, in her academic gown, flourishing a cigarette. His letters to Monica focus on descriptions of his latest or next anticipated meal, gossip about colleagues, sympathy over her work, fears that guilt will force him to allow his mother to join him in Belfast, and comments on cricket and boxing, Monica’s favourite sports. On 7 June 1951 he begins with a delightful sketch of Monica as a rabbit in an apron cooking over a brazier in her burrow, and follows with a vivid sketch of himself exploding across the page at all angles with a sneeze of hay-fever.7 Monica’s letters were often longer than his. In May 1951 he comments that her last letter is ‘one of the longest I’ve ever received, about 7000 words, the length of a couple of short stories or half a dozen Times leaders’.8

  Literature is the predominant theme. In an idiom laced with phrases in French and references to Verlaine, Mallarmé, Flaubert and Montherlant, he discusses the latest book he has read, moving smoothly from Llewellyn Powys to Mrs Gaskell to Oscar Wilde to George Bernard Shaw to D. H. Lawrence to Cyril Connolly to Frances Hodgson Burnett and Beatrix Potter. He exclaims that he longs to know what she thinks of Katherine Mansfield’s letters.9 This is not, however, a corres­pondence of literary or intellectual equals. Though she shared Philip’s love of the English poetic canon, Monica’s perspectives were narrower than his. When asked late in life about Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin, she recollected:

  I know that I borrowed it from Philip, early on, but I’m not sure I read it. Later I should have had more confidence in my own judgement and therefore wouldn’t have read it.

  How do you mean?

  Well. I wouldn’t be reading a foreign book.10

  He invited Monica’s comments on his poems. She particularly liked ‘Spring’ and ‘Wedding-Wind’: ‘it’s a lovely title, breathing Hardy and Housman’.11 However she rarely offered advice, and when she did, he did not take it. In June 1951 she warned him against an ‘easy lazy flatness you must watch’ and hesitantly detected a ‘tiny threat’ of this in the third stanza of ‘At Grass’. He responded vigorously, allowing that there will be a ‘prosaic quality’ in some of his poetry, ‘though I don’t find it in the spot you indicate in At grass –’.12

  Larkin rose to the professional challenges of his new post in what he called ‘the book barn’. He was put in charge of the Queen’s Library issue desk and ‘Readers’ Services’. A strong mutual respect developed between him and the Librarian, Jacob (‘Jack’) Graneek, the son of émigrés who had fled a pogrom in Russia. Outsiders from England and elsewhere formed, with Jewish intellectuals like Graneek, a cultural island in the College amid the surrounding sectarianism.13 Larkin’s social life in Queen’s was pleasant and stimulating. He learnt bridge from Ansell Egerton of the Economics Department and Alec Dalgarno of Mathematics. In the evenings he would join a group of male colleagues in the Senior Common Room bar, among them Alan Grahame from History, Evan John from Music and Arthur Terry from Spanish. He and Terry widened their horizons by borrowing books from the Library to read overnight and then exchange with each other next day. It was in the course of this reading spree, as Terry later told Motion, that Larkin declared Laforgue’s ‘Winter Coming On’ to be ‘the poem I’ve been trying to write all my life’.14 It was a stimulating environment for a young poet. Larkin later recalled: ‘The best writing conditions I ever had were in Belfast, when I was working at the University there. Another top-floor flat, by the way. I wrote between eight and ten in the evenings, then went to the University bar till eleven, then played cards or talked with friends till one or two.’15

  In the month following his arrival, determined to rescue his poetic career from the disaster of In the Grip of Light, he put together a new collection of poems. Fearing further rejection he determined on self-publication. Housman had, after all, published A Shropshire Lad at his own expense. He approached Carswells, a jobbing printer in Belfast, who undertook to produce a booklet for him. On 16 January 1951 he discussed the title in a letter to Monica:

  originally I’d thought of 20 poems for nothing, but Kingsley shuddered at it: said it was like Roy Campbell. Now I can’t think of another: do you think that is so bad? Apart from all the impossible kinds of title, I don’t like the drab kind (Poems), or the self-denigrating kind (Stammerings), or the implied-conceit kind (Moments of Vision), or the clever kind (Stasis) [. . .] I want something unaffected & unpretentious – for Lord knows there are few to pretend anything about.16

  He rejected Speaking from Experience as sounding like ‘broadcast talks by the Radio Padre’, and concluded briskly: ‘I don’t ask for advice because in such matters I should be extremely unlikely to take it.’17 Ultimately he chose the austere XX Poems, telling Monica that the title was ‘as free from offence as I can manage, & with a slight undercurrent of Guinness double X and Ezra Pound’s Cantos’.18 He dedicated it to Amis. On 27 April 1951, he took delivery of 100 copies, joking that it was printed ‘on what I privately called grocer’s wrapping paper’.19

  It is a sign of how rapidly Larkin’s poetic self-image was developing at this time that only three pieces were carried forward from In the Grip of Light: ‘There is an evening coming in’ (‘Going’), ‘The Dedicated’ and ‘Wedding-Wind’. The new works were: ‘Waiting for breakfast’, ‘Modesties’, ‘At Grass’, ‘Even so distant’ (‘Deceptions’), ‘Coming’, ‘Two Portraits of Sex’, ‘Spring’, ‘If, My Darling’, ‘Wants’, ‘Who called love conquering’ and six poems written since his move to Belfast: ‘Since we agreed’ (later titled ‘No Road’), ‘The widest prairies’ (‘Wires’), ‘Since the majority of me’, ‘Arrival’, ‘Always too eager for the future’ (‘Next Please’) and ‘Latest Face’. In retrospect XX Poems seems a trial run for The Less Deceived, thirteen of the poems ultimately being carried forward to the later volume.20 Larkin sent copies to a number of established literary figures who he hoped might review it, including Cyril Connolly and John Lehmann. Later he joked ruefully that the postal rate had just changed and he had put the wrong stamps on the envelopes.21 His worst apprehensions were realized. Charles Madge was the only recipient to make any response. He passed his copy on to D. J. Enright, who reviewed it in the Catholic journal the Month, the only notice it received.22 Seldom has great poetry been so ignored on its first appearance.

  Several of the more recently written poems, dating from the end of 1950 and the beginning of 1951, show what Larkin called his new ‘more vernacular’ style, basing themselves on proverbs or everyday verbal tags.23 The metaphor in ‘No Road’ is, for example, so natural and obvious as scarcely to seem a metaphor at all. The road is ‘so little overgrown, / Walking that way tonight would not seem strange, / And still would be allowed’. The tone is conversational, but the syntax becomes tangled as the poet’s
guilt and embarrassment intensify. In a strained infinitive construction he tells his former lover that it is his ‘liberty’ to watch ‘a world where no such road will run / From you to me’ as it rises ‘like a cold sun’. The final lopsided couplet stammers with Hardyesque awkwardness:

  Not to prevent it is my will’s fulfilment.

  Willing it, my ailment.

  With a listless wordplay (‘will’s / Willing’), pentameter runs into abrupt trimeter, and the poem ends on the wearily offhand misrhyme ‘fulfilment / ailment’. The ten high short ‘i’ or ‘e’ syllables, and seven ‘t’ sounds in these two lines force the poet’s self-distaste aggressively on the reader.

  ‘Wires’, based on the familiar saying ‘the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence’, was drafted to completion on a single page of the workbook, on 4 November 1950. Clearly pleased with the feat, he told Monica that it was written ‘straight off before breakfast, in pyjamas’.24 On the surface it shows little sign of rhetorical ambition. But it is in fact a verbal device of polished artifice. It has the wittily patterned form of a seventeenth-century ‘emblem’, like the poems by George Herbert in the shape of wings or an altar. Larkin’s pattern is more discreet. In the first quatrain the cattle approach the electrified wire apparently without the constraint of rhyme (abcd). They then rebound in the second quatrain, which recoils from the middle repeated word ‘wires’ (representing a two-strand fence?) as a hidden rhyme scheme makes itself heard (dcba), reversing the first quatrain. The young steers end where they started, except that their encounter with the wires has now made them into old cattle. The fences are now incorporated into their senses.

  Larkin commented on ‘Wires’ to Monica, ‘well, just a little verse: no wings’.25 ‘Absences’, in contrast, all but completed at the end of the same month, is one of his most sublime works. The first page of drafting beautifully evokes a deserted seascape in delicate phrases which were to undergo much rewriting before the final version:

  Rain patters on the sea, water to waters,

  A small sound in a giant afternoon,

  A sighing floor provoked to tiny craters

  And rough winds rub the gloss off water-dunes

  Running like walls, floundering into hollows [. . .]26

  But he hesitated to take poetic wing. Compelled to answer every mood and gesture with its extreme opposite he devoted the following page, headed at the top left Verlaine, to a translation of that author’s ‘À Mademoiselle ***’ (Parallèlement, 1889):

  Country beauty

  That one has in corners,

  You relish the harvests,

  Flesh and the summer [. . .]

  Your swaggering calves,

  Your tempting shoulders –

  And, high-spirited, cheeky,

  Your firm fat bum,

  They set in our blood

  A soft stupid fire

  That drives us crazy

  Arse, balls and belly [. . .]27

  The seven dimeter quatrains of Verlaine’s original are translated virtually word for word, reproducing faithfully the studied French ‘vernacular’ of the original.28 Larkin’s new demotic register, it seems, has French as well as English origins. The work occupies a single page (the final stanza being in a second column), suggesting that it may have been dashed off in one sitting. Though there is no attempt to reproduce Verlaine’s abba rhyme-scheme, the translation is all but complete; only one word in the penultimate stanza defeated him.29

  Having, as it were, given himself licence for sublimity by this straight talking, he resumed work on the poem which was to become ‘Absences’.30 It seems that it could have taken a very different direction from the final version. In the workbook the description of the sea, ‘tirelessly at play / Where there are no ships and no shallows’, is conceived as a consoling daydream of escape from a Kafkaesque courtroom of humiliation. This reassertion of anxious reality was still part of his conception when he briefly revisited the drafting in early 1951. What was to become the resounding final line features as the first line of a terza rima stanza:

  Such attics cleared of me! Such absences!

  Such courtroom consolations in a case

  Made up of stale inaudibilities

  With somewhere guilt. The thought of any place

  Uncheapened by this vague drawn out disgrace31

  Ultimately, however, Larkin’s symbolist instincts won the day and the courtroom context and the sonnet form were dropped. Three sumptuously pararhymed terza rima stanzas and a final isolated line make up a miniature, ten-line sublime ode in the tradition of Coleridge’s ‘Hymn before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamoni’ or Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’. The poet is rapt out of himself by the idea of a place beyond human observation. As Larkin commented, ‘I am always thrilled by the thought of what places look like when I am not there.’32 Graham Chesters has speculated that the final exclamation may have been suggested by Gautier’s ‘Sublime aveuglement! magnifique défaut!’ in his poem ‘Terza Rima’,33 a more elevated example of Gallic lyricism than Verlaine’s ‘À Mademoiselle ***’. Baudelaire’s celebrated ‘L’Homme et la Mer’ has a similar rhetorical climax: ‘Ô lutteurs éternels, ô frères implacables!’ Larkin later joked that his poem ‘sounds like a slightly unconvincing translation from a French symbolist’, adding, ‘I wish I could write like this more often.’34

  Though in other poems of the period he jealously guards his selfhood, here he contemplates a selfless nirvana. The accusing, ‘unanswerable’ light of ‘Deceptions’ loses its human, moral quality to become an impersonal ‘shoreless day’. And instead of bursting into a sordid attic of fulfilment we are left contemplating sublime attics of emptiness. The violated ‘attic’ of ‘Deceptions’ was squalid and humiliating; the uninhabited ‘attics’ of ‘Absences’ are exhilarating. The two appearances of the word mark the furthest extremes of emotion which the concept evoked in Larkin, and it was a sure instinct that told him not to use ‘attic’ again in any subsequent published poem.35 It seems that he felt doubtful at first about the poem’s unabashed transcendence. He omitted ‘Absences’ from XX Poems, though he did include the sulkily argumentative ‘Since the majority of me’, on which he worked immediately afterwards. ‘Absences’ certainly did not show the gloomy pessimism which had become a private joke in his letters to Monica: ‘we are all on a one way trip to the grave, etc. etc. etc. My usual style.’36 Monica was the touchstone of his deepest gloom: ‘I was struck again by the genuine quality of your pessimism: I play at pessimism but you really are a pessimist.’37

  In ‘Next, Please’, on which he worked in January and early February 1951, Larkin plays the pessimist with some gusto.38 Life, the poet tells us with mock-heroic didacticism, is like queuing:

  Always too eager for the future, we

  Pick up bad habits of expectancy.

  The singsong chiming of ‘we / expectancy’ has a facile self-mockery about it. Cinema clichés embody the ersatz inauthenticity of our dreams. We imagine that a ‘Sparkling armada of promises’ is headed our way. One day our ship will surely come in, its figurehead gleaming ‘with golden tits’, as in a Hollywood romance starring Errol Flynn. But in a witty contrast of mediated images, archetype trumps stereotype, and we are sought out by an altogether more sombre metaphorical ship: ‘a black- / Sailed unfamiliar’, towing behind it a ‘huge and birdless silence’. It is a most original and enjoyable exercise on a familiar theme.

  A similar proverbial tag underlies ‘To My Wife’, completed on 19 March 1951. The husband has preferred the fulfilment of a bird in the hand to contemplation of the numerous tease-birds flapping in the bushes. He has given up the Yeatsian ‘mask-and-magic-man’s regalia’ of poetry in return for the wife, who has become, in an excruciatingly sardonic rhyme, ‘my boredom and my failure’. The poet feels grim empathy with the woman who shares the disappointment of marriage with him: ‘No future now. I and you now, alone.’ Larkin did not include this poem in XX Poems, perhaps considering it a touch contri
ved.

  ‘Latest Face’, drafted in February 1951, adopts a more elevated tone. Shortly after his arrival in Belfast, Larkin’s eye was caught by Winifred Arnott, a twenty-one-year-old Library Assistant who had arrived a month before him. Their relationship was never to develop beyond a romantic friendship, but for this very reason this is one of the most poetically productive of all his liaisons. Winifred indeed became the second of Larkin’s muses. ‘Latest Face’ gives a classic exposition of aestheticist philosophy:

  Admirer and admired embrace

  On a useless level, where

  I contain your current grace,

  You my judgement [. . .]

  Like the ‘angled beauty’ of the Polish airgirl in ‘Like the train’s beat’ this depersonalized, ungendered face dispels ‘all humanity of interest’. It does not belong to a ‘wife’, nor to a ‘darling’. It is a Platonic Form, or more romantically a ‘precious vagrant’: ‘useless’. It imposes no demands or obligations. The poet has no desire to possess this bird in the bush. Indeed, he fears what might ensue should ‘The statue of your beauty walk’, not wishing to wade behind the woman into the ‘real untidy air’ of ‘Bargains, suffering, and love’. There is an ambiguity, however. Winifred’s name appears over and over again on the last page of the draft, and though the poet wishes to avoid bargains and suffering there is a hint of warm mutuality in the poem’s tone.

  In the ‘real’ world outside the muse-relationship of the poems, this was a friendship bordering on courtship. In retrospect, Winifred played down the suggestion of a romantic attachment: ‘He was a working colleague, seven years older than me, already balding. I was 21. I didn’t think of him like that.’39 They would meet over coffee, gossip about mutual friends, and at the weekends she would join him on long bicycle rides in the countryside. ‘I think he liked me because I was cheerful.’40 ‘I don’t remember him ever being sad,’ she commented, and added, ‘when he expressed melancholy I think everyone took it to be a pose’.41 The decisive factor for her was his negative attitude towards marriage: ‘I never did regard him as a candidate for my husband and the father of my children. I felt our relationship was of a different sort. We never went to bed together though I cheered him up, I think. I was very fond of him.’42 On the other hand she remembers several conversations in spring 1951 beginning ‘If you were married to me . . .’43 The development of their relationship was, however, suspended when Winifred left for London in August 1951 to take a year’s postgraduate diploma course in Librarianship at University College. Philip immediately initiated a correspondence with her, and they met twice during his visits to London.