Philip Larkin

by James Booth

  Winifred left Belfast on 27 September 1953. The day before this, by a strange accident, she met Monica for the first and only time, with Philip in the square at Lisburn. It was an awkward, tongue-tied encounter. Winifred immediately wrote to Philip, reproaching him for not properly introducing them, hoping that Monica had not registered the Numéro Douze scent, which Philip had given her, and reassuring him that Monica would certainly have noticed her engagement ring. She concluded: ‘It’s no use my saying how much I shall miss you, and the Library, and Ulster – I wish you could say them for me in a poem. Thank you for all you have been to me this year, when you have had so little in return.’ He replied at once, amused at the ‘comic encounter’, and apologizing for not making the introductions: ‘I felt a little like an early Xtian, who feels it hardly necessary to introduce a pair of lions that have met over his recumbent body.’ He slyly sympathized with Winifred’s nostalgia for their relationship: ‘I’m sorry I had so little in return, too (“he made his Havelock Ellis face”),43 but, well, as I said, you could have treated me much, much worse, and I have dozens of happy memories which, like pressed flowers, I can spend all winter arranging.’44

  His poetic version of his affair with Patsy, ‘Whatever Happened?’, makes a stark contrast with the poems addressed to Winifred. The title has an elusive abstraction about it. Though the question becomes an indicative in the poem’s first line, no clear answer emerges. Patsy’s cosmopolitanism is reflected in the poem’s exotic setting and knowing tone (‘Such coastal bedding always means mishap’), reminiscent of a story by Somerset Maugham or Graham Greene. It is implied that some sordid brawl has occurred during a shore visit from a cruise ship, leaving the travellers, a vague collective ‘we’, with ‘trousers ripped, light wallets, and lips bleeding’. Relieved to have escaped, they snap photographs of the port as it recedes ‘kodak-distant’ into the past, eventually becoming a mere ‘latitude’ on the map. The impact of Patsy’s emotional manipulativeness is reflected in the ripped trousers and bleeding lips. The phrase ‘What can’t be printed can be thrown away’ hints, brutally, at her miscarriage. Obscurity and indirection were essential since Larkin intended the poem for publication and needed to ensure that its real-life occasion was not recognized by Colin Strang, Winifred or Monica.45 The form, unique in his work, is a sonnet of four terza rima stanzas followed by a concluding couplet (aba, bcb, cdc, ded, ff), the original intended form for ‘Absences’. It is formally taut, as if the poet is straining to keep control. Nevertheless repressed emotion finally erupts in short interrogative phrases:

  Curses? The dark? Struggling? Where’s the source

  Of these yarns now (except in nightmares, of course)?

  Despite its very intimate biographical origin the poem is a brilliant universalized evocation of emotional violation.

  On 1 November 1953 Philip sent Patsy a draft of this poem under the title ‘The story of an occurrence and a disoccurrence’. In order to deflect her attention from its hostile implications he dates the letter gloomily ‘All Hallows’, and speculates on whether he has lung cancer. In deference to her own poetic aspirations he discusses its theme: ‘In case it isn’t clear, it treats of the way in which the mind gets to work on any violent involuntary experience & transforms it out of all knowledge [. . .] I have tried to keep the wording ambiguous, so that “whatever happened” could be sexual as well as violent.’46 He implies that Patsy herself, as much as he, is a robbed and victimized traveller. However, he discourages any idea of reviving the affair: ‘if a “wrong” thing becomes harder to do, it seems wronger in consequence and – well, we have our obligations. I wish I could write this without sounding priggish & unfriendly.’47 The following month, on 10 December, he sent Patsy another sonnet, with a more conventional rhyme scheme, ‘Autobiography at an Air-Station’:

  Delay, well, travellers must expect

  Delay. For how long? No one seems to know.

  With all the luggage weighed, the tickets checked,

  It can’t be long [. . .]

  The poet describes travellers wondering whether to make friends with each other as they await the call to departure. They decide against it in case it spoils their chances in the race for seats: ‘You’re best alone. Friendship is not worth while.’ He made no attempt to publish this poem.

  The relationship with Patsy had left him feeling violated. His response was the shameless assertion of bachelor privacy of ‘Best Society’, drafted in October 1953.48 This is another of those poems on the typescript of which he wrote ‘unfinished’, though any other poet would have been satisfied with its refined artistry:

  Our virtues are all social [. . .]

  Viciously, then, I lock my door.

  The gas-fire breathes. The wind outside

  Ushers in evening rain. Once more

  Uncontradicting solitude

  Supports me on its giant palm;

  And like a sea-anemone

  Or simple snail, there cautiously

  Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

  Never before had he written with such chromatic musicality. In an ababcddc stanza unique in his work, b and d are half-rhymes with subtly shifting vowels (‘wrong / thing; get / what; expressed / just; if / chafe; outside / solitude’). These slippages, like accidental sharps and flats in music, perfectly express a wilful, satisfying withdrawal into the self. The open vowel and soft consonant cluster of ‘palm’ gently but decisively descends to the harder ‘am’, asserting self-possession in one of the resonant ‘what’ noun phrases, which were to become a feature of his later poems: ‘what I am’. He was determined to resist the intimidation of his socially responsible superego, and to live life rather than allowing life to live him. Larkin never published this intensely personal poem. Perhaps he felt it was too easy to decode the ‘vice’ of auto-eroticism in the image of the emerging ‘simple snail’. Perhaps ‘unfinished’ was code for ‘not for publication’.

  After he had finished this poem, he turned, in a characteristic shift of form and mood, to the elegant ‘emblem’ ‘Tops’ (originally ‘You’re the tops’), which he completed in two pages of concentrated drafting (22 and 24 October). The spinning tops become a metonym of life, squirming at first round the floor, then drawing gravely up in a motion so smooth as to seem quite still, ‘Until, with a falter, / A flicker – soon gone – / Their pace starts to alter’, and they collapse in wobbling, clattering pathos. The metaphor is made explicit with a deft darkening of diction, held back until the last word. The appalling ‘first tiny shiver’ tells us that the tops are ‘starting to die’.

  Philip and Patsy continued to correspond occasionally and she depicted Larkin as Rollo Jute in her novel Playing the Harlot: or Mostly Coffee.49 In December 1954 she wrote to say that she was to marry another poet, Richard Murphy. Larkin replied on 7 December, drawing a final line under the affair: ‘I reckon, on balance, you treated me better than I treated you. The only thing I hold seriously against you is reading my diary – really. You must not tell people if you read their diaries! remember! –’50 After her marriage in 1955 he sometimes wrote to the Murphys as a couple.

  It was during his time in Belfast that Larkin finally abandoned any residual ambition to be a novelist. In his letters to Monica Jones he occasionally implied that he was working on a novel,51 and as late as April 1952 Amis wrote to him that he was ‘interested to hear about your new novel’.52 It may be that some of the surviving drafts of No For An Answer and A New World Symphony date from the Belfast years, though the situations they fictionalize belong in 1946–8. A key factor here is Amis’s progress on the novel inspired by his glimpse of Larkin in Leicester. Larkin suggested the title The Man of Feeling to replace the working title Dixon and Christine, but this would have been too literary.53 In the early stages, the protagonist was closely modelled on Larkin, but in the published novel Jim is an independent comic creation.54 While keeping his own Leicester novel secret from his friend, Larkin had been reading drafts of Amis’s novel since its inception
, and when Michael Joseph rejected the typescript of Dixon and Christine in June 1952, Larkin helped Amis with the redrafting. ‘We should be able to fudge up something good between us’, Amis wrote anxiously.55 ‘Would it be asking too much to ask you to skim quickly through the typescript, making marginal indications of anything that displeases you? (“Bad style”, “damp squib”, bad bit of dialogue & so on, to prevent me using them again).’56 Larkin wrote amusedly to Monica about his friend’s imperious demands, and his intense desire for publication: ‘He is prepared to go to endless trouble, & I think if he could get it accepted he’d die happy, but he has no idea how people talk.’ Larkin was nevertheless aware that Amis’s book was ‘full of “laughs”, and would amuse many people’.57

  The Harry Ransom Center in Texas holds an incomplete early typescript of Lucky Jim bearing Larkin’s marginal notes.58 Its protagonist, Julian Dixon, is more self-confident than the Jim of the final version, and the Bertrand character is quite sympathetically portrayed. It begins with Julian visiting Veronica, the character who was to become Margaret Peel, following her attempt at suicide. He is intent on discovering whether she will now, at long last, begin sleeping with him. Larkin’s annotations are not extensive but they show an authoritative involvement in the process: ‘Forget how we left this, but the device shouldn’t be used twice’; ‘do people talk like this? I never hear them’; ‘Absolutely weak kneed. Please cut.’ 59 Larkin is particularly concerned that Amis’s women characters are insufficiently modest and decorous to be plaus­ible: ‘Ladies don’t talk about sex’, ‘People don’t talk like this, esp. ladies’, ‘Ladies don’t use words like this’, ‘Ladies etc.’ He objects to Christine’s response to being kissed: ‘A bit forward! [. . .] This is going much too fast.’ Larkin is confident enough of his friend’s receptivity to be frank and trenchant: ‘This speech might come from a stage play too BAD to be produced.’ ‘This speech makes me twist about with boredom.’60 He writes against one passage, ‘Horrible smell of arse’, and later against another: ‘H S of A’. Similarly ‘GRUESOME AROMA OF BUM’ is repeated as ‘G A of B’.61 In their correspondence the word ‘bum’ had become a frequent debunking epithet and it remained part of their familiar private language for the rest of their lives.

  Though his own unfinished novels are not essentially comic, Larkin’s advice tends to transform Amis’s original serious realism into broad comedy. He comments that ‘Bill Atkinson is bloody funny’, and in the final version this character’s role is greatly expanded. He deflates Amis’s more pretentious dialogue. In the draft, Dixon says to Christine, ‘Apart from your obvious physical attractions, what I like best about you is your honesty.’ Larkin responds: ‘Fearfully pompous’. At one point Dixon indignantly rejects Veronica’s attempt to win him back from Christine by seduction: ‘I don’t want it [sex] on a plate, thanks, and I won’t have it used as a trap.’ Larkin is derisively unpersuaded: ‘oh yes you do my dear fellow that’s just what you do want on a plate’.62 One cause of tension between them was Larkin’s concern over the impact of the novel on Monica Jones. On his insistence Amis agreed to change the name ‘Veronica Beale’ to ‘Margaret Peel’,63 though since Monica’s full name was Margaret Monica Beale Jones this scarcely disguised the origin of the character. Amis seems largely to have taken Larkin’s advice. Richard Bradford argues that the success of the dialogue in Lucky Jim owes much to the texture of Larkin’s correspondence with Amis at this time.64

  When Monica first met Kingsley she was struck by the difference between the two friends. Larkin remained in control of his performances, making a ‘Havelock Ellis’ face, or acting out an elaborate mime of shoe-fetishism. Amis, she concluded, ‘wasn’t just making faces all the time, he was actually trying them on. He didn’t know who he was.’65 In Lucky Jim Amis turned this insecurity to fictional advantage. The face-pulling antics and insecure fantasies of the fictional Jim Dixon endeared the character to readers, and gave original spice to the novel’s humour.

  After so many disappointments both Amis and Larkin were caught by surprise when Lucky Jim was accepted by Gollancz in 1953, and it was soon apparent that it would be a great success. Larkin’s importunate friend had suddenly overtaken him. Richard Bradford concludes: ‘Larkin would remain embittered for the rest of his life by what he saw as Amis’s act of plagiarism.’66 But, despite an occasional snide comment, Larkin was not embittered. Nor did he consider Lucky Jim ‘plagiarized’, though he was well aware that Amis could not have written it without his help and support. He wrote to Monica on 14 September 1953 with characteristic generosity: ‘I don’t think anything can stop it being a howling success: it seems to me so entirely original that my own suggestions really pass unnoticed [. . .] even if he never writes anything else it will remain as a landmark.’67

  While the typescript of Lucky Jim was still being considered by Gollancz, Larkin reviewed his own novelistic efforts in a letter to Patsy Strang: ‘I’ve just dug out 2 unfinished novels of mine & am reading one to see what kind of a thing it was – 233 pages abandoned in Dec. 1949. To me it reads extremely cleverly but without the least flavour of merit.’68 Three months later he finally admitted what had been obvious for several years. He wrote to Patsy on 6 July 1953: ‘I can’t write this book: if it is to be written at all it should be largely an attack on Monica, & I can’t do that, not while we are still on friendly terms, and I’m not sure it even interests me sufficiently to go on. It was planned a long time ago, of course.’69 The last dated outline, ‘Sundry resurveyings’, is headed ‘November 1953’ and when Charles Monteith, who had taken over from Alan Pringle at Faber, asked to see drafts of the third novel, Larkin told him that it was ‘at a halt’.70

  In a letter to Patsy written on 25 January 1954, two days before the publication of Amis’s novel, Larkin balanced admiration against objective critical judgement: ‘Of course Lucky Jim sends me into prolonged fits of howling laughter [. . .] I do think that it is miraculously and intensely funny, with a kind of spontaneity that doesn’t tire the reader at all. Apart from being funny, I think it somewhat over-simple.’71 He was aware that his own novel would have been deeper and more ambitious than Amis’s. Augusta Bax is potentially a far more interesting character than Margaret Peel. But once Amis’s novel had been published, to the acclaim which Larkin so confidently forecast, he could not think of continuing with his own fiction. At least Lucky Jim was dedicated to him.

  11

  Various Poems

  1953–6

  At the very end of 1953, Larkin completed a poem of vocation, ‘Reasons for Attendance’, in which he translated the romantic fervour of ‘The Spirit Wooed’ and ‘Waiting for breakfast’ into his new ‘vernacular’ manner. Though the tone is different, the pattern remains the same. Drawn to the lighted glass by the sound of a trumpet, the poet watches the dancers, face to flushed face, eager for commitment and marriage. He attends instead to art: not now in the form of ‘pristine absolutes’ or ‘tender visitings’, but of a demanding ‘rough tongued bell / (Art, if you like)’. The casual aside ridicules artistic pretension. Nevertheless, he still obeys the call unquestioningly: ‘It speaks; I hear.’ He remains the poète maudit, and the reader is expected to register the French nuance of ‘attend’: attendre à – to listen to. There is, it seems, as much doubt over ‘Life, if you like’ as over ‘Art, if you like’. However the poet no longer feels on safe enough ground to condemn the ingenuous involvement of the dancers. He justifies his position not by grand Yeatsian gestures, but with a stubborn, sulky shrug. He can’t help it; this is just the way he is made. He concludes inconclusively that both the lonely artist outside and the dancers within ‘are satisfied’: ‘If no one has misjudged himself. Or lied.’ The poet is less deceived about life than the courting couples, but also less deceived about art than a Yeatsian romantic.

  During his years in Belfast Larkin had established an unobtrusive reputation by publication in literary magazines. In 1953–5 a number of his poems (including ‘Wires’, ‘Latest Fac
e’ and ‘Arrivals, Departures’) appeared in the Spectator. In 1953 John Wain, his friend from Oxford, became the producer of First Reading on the Third Programme, and Larkin’s poems began to be heard on the radio. One of the journals in which his work appeared was Listen, a small magazine founded in Hull by a twenty-one-year-old former art student, George Hartley, and his wife Jean. Larkin noticed the first number in 1953, and sent the Hartleys ‘Spring’, ‘Dry-Point’ and ‘Toads’, all of which they eagerly accepted for the second issue the following year. ‘Poetry of Departures’ appeared later in 1954 in Listen 3. The Hartleys immediately fell in love with his work. Jean Hartley recalls their excitement at the poems’ ‘accessibility, wide range of mood and rare combination of wit, lyricism and disenchantment’.1 In February 1954 Donald Davie invited Larkin to give a talk at Trinity College, Dublin, where he was teaching. Larkin agreed, telling Patsy Strang: ‘the sweat runs down my back’.2

  Through 1954 and into 1955 poems in his new robust manner alternate in the workbooks with poems of elevated emotion. Even in the most ‘vernacular’ poems a romantic counter-impulse is audible. ‘I Remember, I Remember’ (8 January 1954) blasphemes against his former Lawrentian faith, debunking the depiction of childhood in novels like Sons and Lovers. When the poet’s train stops at Coventry, where he was born, the poet is at a loss. The childhood the books tell him he should remember never occurred. He experienced no ‘Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits’, he did not escape to a neighbouring ‘splendid family’ and become ‘Really myself’, nor did his first erotic experience come among the bracken, when ‘all became a burning mist’. Coventry, he concludes, is not where he has ‘his roots’, only where his childhood was ‘unspent’. His passionate denials become comic and his companion protests, ‘You look as if you wished the place in Hell.’ But beneath the plain speaking there are complications. Though the poem is divided into stanzas of five lines, the rhyme-scheme implies a nine-line unit. Larkin claimed, preposterously, that this playful subversion was ‘quite accidental really’.3 The final hanging line required to complete the scheme resonates perplexingly in the mind: ‘Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.’ At first the words seem merely a glum verdict on the poet’s childhood. But they transcend their context, and haunt the reader like a Wittgensteinian puzzle. The impact of this apparently prosaic work is intensely poetic.