Philip Larkin

by James Booth

  And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,

  Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.

  The scene has the uncanny quality of a painting by René Magritte. As in ‘Here’ there is no explicit centre of consciousness. With camp lugubriousness a disembodied, unlocated voice describes the hotel’s headed paper: ‘made for writing home / (If home existed)’. Kafka’s K. and Beckett’s Krapp would recognize this room. The poem ends with an unexplained shift into italics, ‘panning back’ from the isolated fort-like hotel in an abrupt epiphany: ‘Now / Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages.’ The euphoric sunny sea- and skyscape of ‘Here’ has turned to dusk and foreboding. This melancholic, ‘funny’ poem shows the richness of his Whitsun Weddings style hardening into the mannerism of High Windows.

  In his letters he continued to declare his love for Monica and for Maeve with undiminished intensity. On 4 June 1966 he concluded a letter to Monica by squeezing ‘Love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love’ into the right margin. Two months later, however, he wrote playfully to Maeve from Haydon Bridge where he was staying with Monica: ‘You know I’m never anything but happy to take you in my arms and enjoy that kind of kiss that seems to be your own speciality, or patent.’40 Back in Hull on Sunday 30 October, while catching up on work in the University, he became so eager to see Monica that he leapt into his car and travelled as far as Bawtry before he realized he had too little money with him for the necessary petrol.41 Shortly afterwards, in November, an unexpected note was struck when Patsy Strang paid a sudden visit to Hull in an attempt to revive their love affair and, in the course of much drinking (port and gin), accused him of ‘not being continental & so on’.42 After her departure things fell back into their familar pattern. He wrote drily to Monica on 20 November: ‘One thing about M., she’s never idle. Hurt her feelings and she’s soon making up to someone else, and letting you know about it.’43

  Commentators generally agree with Larkin’s own verdict on this love-triangle: ‘There isn’t any need to make my situation any better-sounding than it is: a self-centred person conducting an affair containing almost no responsibilities with one girl getting mixed up with another, heedless of the feelings of either. Well, not heedless, but not heedful enough to do anything about it, anyway.’44 However, it is difficult to see how he could have broken the stalemate. Despite what he said, Monica’s abject dependence imposed a crushing emotional responsibility upon him. Maeve was also, if to a lesser extent, dependent upon him, but gave his life a freshness and spontaneity lost in his relationship with Monica. He had to an extent created both women. As he had written earlier to his mother: ‘I have built her [Monica] in my own image and made her dependent on me, and now I can’t abandon her.’45 In 1966 he wrote in not dissimilar terms to Monica about Maeve: ‘You may wonder why I don’t end it, in my own interests as well as yours. Partly cowardice – I dread the scene. Partly kindness – if I’ve encouraged her to depend on me it seems cruel to turn her away. If she wanted to be free it wd be different.’46 Neither woman wanted to be free of him. Both knew they would find no other partner so attentive and life-enhancing as he. Kindness did indeed require him to continue both relationships. And kindness required also that he take all the blame upon himself: ‘it’s my own unwillingness to give myself to anyone else that’s at fault – like promising to stand on one leg for the rest of one’s life. And yet I never think I am doing anything but ruin your life & mine. I suppose one shouldn’t be writing letters like this at 44, one ought to have got it all sorted out twenty years ago.’47

  It is possible to conclude that Monica and Maeve were taking advantage of Philip, rather than he taking advantage of them. He was the victim of the breadth and generosity of his sensibility and the narrowness of theirs. The rut of Monica’s reductive pessimism on the one hand, and the limitations of Maeve’s complacent Catholicism on the other, meant that to reduce himself to a one-legged relationship with either of them would have brought pain to all three. It would also have put an end to his poetry. Consequently they all, for their different reasons, allowed the situation to continue from month to month, year to year, sapping his emotional energies with guilt. As he wrote to Judy Egerton on 5 March 1966: ‘in pretty low spirits [. . .] largely because of increasing dissatisfaction with me of Maeve & Monica’.48 On the same day he told Robert Conquest: ‘Yes, life is pretty grey up in Hull. Maeve wants to marry me, Monica wants to chuck me. I feel I want to become something other than a man – a rosebush, or some ivy, or something. Something noncontroversial.’49

  The ‘yearly frame’ of his life was, for the time being, settled. Regular short holidays with his mother in a spa hotel or seaside resort were followed, or preceded, by longer holidays with Monica, often in Scotland. He would spend Christmas in a state of frustration, with his mother in Loughborough. Maeve he would meet within the decorous context of the Library and social events in Hull, or in brief snatched moments elsewhere. Without subterfuge they could socialize at meetings of SCONUL, in Bangor, Reading, Liverpool or Manchester,50 and for several years in the 1960s they visited Scarborough together on Christmas shopping trips to Rowntree’s department store, taking lunch at the Pavilion Hotel.51 He pursued his own interests on trips to London, where he would visit Liberty’s department store and the art dealer Abbott and Holder with Judy Egerton,52 and share pornographic bookshop expeditions in Soho with Robert Conquest.

  He was working up to his limit, and living a full, and in his own terms, fulfilled life. In addition to day-to-day responsibility for the Library, he was serving on national committees, writing literary reviews, composing a monthly jazz review for the Daily Telegraph and producing a steady stream of correspondence, personal, professional and literary. In informal contexts he let off steam in ever more waspish aphorisms. In a letter to Amis he commented on Ted Hughes: ‘No, of course Ted’s no good at all. Not at all. Not a single solitary bit of good. I think his ex-wife, late wife, was extraordinary, though not necessarily likeable. Old Ted isn’t even extraordinary.’53 When Ray Brett of the Hull English Department remarked that the second volume of verse by an academic contemporary was ‘at least up to the standard of the first’, Larkin replied, ‘You can’t fall off the floor.’54

  It was not until almost ten months after ‘Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel’, on 12 February 1967, that Larkin returned to the March drafts of ‘High Windows’ and completed the poem on a single page. He was moving deeper into symbolism. Edna Longley observes: ‘Although Larkin scorned the idea that High Windows might be called Hautes Fenêtres the English title reeks of the nineties as influenced by French symbolism.’55 It is, however, a symbolism in tension with a less deceived demotic realism. The poem’s caricature of permissive youth is the product of an embarrassingly raw envy. As University Librarian he himself had little direct contact with students, but his correspondence with Monica echoes her complaints about their loutishness and growing radicalism: ‘The devils began their exams today (I think).’56 In the poem, however, there is no trace of moral censure: ‘When I see a couple of kids / And guess he’s fucking her and she’s / Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, / I know this is paradise // Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives –’.

  The speaker first seeks to reason with himself, putting his feelings into historical context by imagining the hypothetical resentment of an older generation for his own younger free-thinking self: ‘That’ll be the life; / No God any more [. . .]’ Then in a sudden, unanticipated shift of tone he leaps from this self-argumentative bluster to the purest poetic epiphany:

  He

  And his lot will all go down the long slide

  Like free bloody birds. And immediately

  Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:

  The sun-comprehending glass,57

  And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows

  Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

  The poem ends on a note of transcendence. But the poet himself remain
ed dissatisfied. The climactic ‘endless’, which sounds like a triumphant assertion of permanence, is after all merely a trick of syntax. The normal word order, ‘endless blue air’ or ‘endless nothing’, would dispel the sublime effect. Larkin knew that his loss of youth could not be countered by a rhetorical sleight. At the end of the March drafts he wrote as an alternative to the final words: ‘and fucking piss’.58 This has now become an inextricable part of the poem; indeed it makes it a more profound work.

  Increasingly Larkin was looking backwards, regretting his lost youth, and disliking the overworked, overweight, older man he was becoming. On 27 March 1967 he met Bruce Montgomery in All Souls, Oxford, and found himself picking up the relationship ‘as if there hadn’t been a ten year gap’.59 But the meeting could only impress upon him the distance he had travelled since his Oxford days. Another long perspective opened when he re-encountered his first muse, Penelope Scott Stokes, who since their brief encounter twenty-five years earlier had followed his career and in 1965 had sent him a volume of her own poems. Penelope’s vulnerable personality had made for a difficult life. In 1966–7 she spent some time in the Quaker psychiatric hospital, The Retreat, in York, and it was here that Larkin visited her on 8 May 1967, taking her out to Young’s Restaurant for dinner. She found him charming and amusing; as she wrote to her young daughter:

  We had some very interesting conversation about John Betjeman and particularly about a poet called Elizabeth Jennings, whose work I very much like – apparently, she is about 39 & is always in and out of the Warneford (mental hospital near Oxford). At the end of the evening Philip said he seemed to have made a series of tactless remarks, but that just wasn’t true [. . .] Actually he has a huge (quiet) sense of humour.60

  Not surprisingly, in the account he gave to Monica he adopted a disparaging tone, calling Penelope’s poems ‘no good’ and describing her as ‘alert, dowdy & a bit toothy’.61 However, he continued to correspond with her occasionally until his death.

  Larkin was no longer the lanky young man who had left school at ten stone seven pounds. Over their meal Penelope noticed his concern with his weight, which ‘has gradually crept up from 12 to 14 stone’. ‘So he made a pretty half-hearted attempt at certain points during the goluptious dinner to have a small helping of something really rather fattening.’62 He was aware of inexorable physical decline. However, his efforts at dieting were half-hearted. He wrote to Monica: ‘Oh dear, I’m fat again! 3½ lbs up. Needle well clear of 14st. Isn’t it grim! [. . .] I really must eat less, or something. My breakfast is juice, yoghurt, tea. Perhaps half an apple.’63 To add to his sense of decline, his hearing was tested in 1967 and declared to be ‘at the threshold of social adequacy’.64 Over the following years increasing deafness contributed to his isolation. His casual assumption that he would die at the same age as his father was hardening into a fixed prediction. On 27 March 1967 he wrote to Monica from Loughborough, lamenting that he was still tied to his mother: ‘I suppose I shall become free at sixty, three years before cancer starts. What a bloody sodding awful life.’65 His prediction was only partly accurate: his cancer was indeed diagnosed when he was sixty-three but his mother had died eight years earlier, when he was fifty-five.

  During 1967 Larkin encouraged Jean Hartley during her ‘O’ and ‘A’ level examinations, which she was taking as a mature student. She recalls that he ‘had taken a close paternal interest in my progress since I first began my studies, even to the extent of calling round to go through each literature paper after I’d sat it and discuss the answers I’d given’.66 On hearing that she had been awarded a B in ‘A’ level English he wrote to Monica: ‘Not bad for someone who was in hospital and anyway had never taken an exam in her youth.’67 When Jean began a degree course at Hull University the following year he opened a £25 account for her at Brown’s Bookshop68 (in 1968 Penguin paperbacks cost typically between four and six shillings).

  Like ‘High Windows’, ‘The Trees’, begun on 9 April and dated in the workbook ‘2 June 1967’,69 contrives a fragile epiphany out of mere rhetoric. The first two stanzas prepare the ground. A beautiful description of buds relaxing and spreading into full leaf leads to a faux naïf question, ‘Is it that they are born again’? No, the poet answers, ‘they die too’. The trees’ apparent immortality is a ‘trick’ betrayed by their rings of grain. But then he side-steps logic, creating an upbeat ending through emotional sound-writing: ‘Yet still the unresting castles thresh / In fullgrown thickness every May [. . .] Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.’ To a sentimental reader the final line will read as ecstatic affirmation. To a less deceived reader it will read as imperious command, reminding us that the time will come soon enough when we will be unable to respond. Larkin recognized that this would be one of his most popular poems, but he was unpersuaded by his own achievement. In a letter to Monica he called it ‘very corny’,70 and in the workbook he added after the date: ‘Birthday of T. Hardy 1840 / bloody awful tripe’.71

  The next page of the workbook features a startling contrast of tone and manner. ‘Annus Mirabilis’ was begun on 16 June and completed, apart from typescript adjustments, after only one more page of drafting on 12 July.72 It is a public poem, making out of the ‘annus mirabilis’ of 1963 a cultural myth to which readers of subsequent generations can easily relate:

  Sexual intercourse began

  In nineteen sixty-three [. . .]

  Between the end of the Chatterley ban

  And the Beatles’ first LP.

  Like ‘MCMXIV’ the poem has a Latin title, and refers to a specific date. Its theme is also an artificially reified social myth, though here in mock-heroic rather than tragic mode. Sex did not really begin in 1963 any more than innocence ended in 1914. Well-read readers will recognize the reference to Dryden’s patriotic poem concerning the year 1666­–7, describing the Fire of London, the plague and sea battles with the Dutch. The poet impudently asserts that 1963 is a date of similar national importance. There is no propaganda against the ‘permissive society’, as it was then called. The poet’s self-mocking presence, ‘(Which was rather late for me)’, merely adds piquancy, ‘me’ being a stereotype of old-fashioned inhibition. Indeed, the poem is delightfully politically incorrect (though the term did not come into use until the 1990s).

  Larkin’s forty-fifth-birthday poem, ‘Sympathy in White Major’, completed on 31 August 1967, shows his symbolist High Windows manner fully developed. Like his youthful ‘Brunette’ renderings of Villon and Baudelaire, the title makes an irreverent English reference to a French original: Théophile Gautier’s ‘Symphonie en Blanc Majeur’.73 When asked in an interview in 1964 whether he read much foreign poetry Larkin responded in the voice of his crudely philistine persona: ‘Foreign poetry. No!’74 However, the title of this poem is incomprehensible without knowledge of Gautier. Whether or not he read foreign poetry, it still haunted his imagination. He had commented that the last line of ‘Absences’ sounded ‘like a slightly unconvincing translation from a French symbolist’.75 The title of ‘Sympathy in White Major’ is, precisely, an unconvincing translation from a French symbolist.

  ‘Symphonie en Blanc Majeur’ is a central document in the doctrine of ‘L’art pour l’art’, a sumptuous white-on-white description of a swan-maiden descending to humankind from a chill empyrean of dispassionate aesthetics. It concludes: ‘Oh! Qui pourra mettre un ton rose / Dans cette implacable blancheur?’ ‘Who could infuse a rose tint into this implacable whiteness?’ Who would dare sully such purity with the colour of blood and emotion? This is the Platonic perfection which Larkin had celebrated from the beginning: the angled features of the Polish airgirl, beyond all ‘humanity of interest’, the essential beauty of pure foam, pure coldness. He opens with his own cynical version of Gautier’s white-on-white prescription:

  When I drop four cubes of ice

  Chimingly in a glass, and add

  Three goes of gin, a lemon slice,

  And let a ten-ounce tonic void

  In foaming gul
ps until it smothers

  Everything else up to the edge,

  I lift the lot in private pledge:

  He devoted his life to others.

  In this clear ice, liquid and foam he will drown his sorrows. In the second stanza he insists that unlike his contemporaries, who wore other people ‘like clothes’ in their lives, he had set himself to bring ‘the lost displays’ to the select few ‘Who thought I could’. A true aesthete, he has devoted himself to art for art’s sake. His verdict now is as dismissive as it had been five years earlier in ‘Send No Money’: ‘It didn’t work for them or me.’

  But the theme of the poem is peculiarly doubled: Anglo-Saxon as well as Gallic. In a typescript of the poem inserted at the end of Workbook 7, Larkin has written the title in capitals: ‘SYMPHONY IN WHITE MAJOR’.76 He has then crossed out the first word in pencil and replaced it with ‘SYMPATHY’ (the only appearance of this word in Larkin’s mature oeuvre).77 It was an inspired afterthought. By replacing Gautier’s ‘Symphonie’ with ‘Sympathy’ the speaker imparts the rose tint, perverting the poem’s focus from poetic vocation to moralized emotion.78 In the light of experience his pursuit of beauty no longer appears as the simple antithesis to playing the socially responsible ‘white man’ which it had seemed to be in ‘Reasons for Attendance’ and ‘Send No Money’.79 He has attempted to follow both vocations, bohemian and respectable, and they have led to the same bitter outcome: the sacrifice of his life to others. The two voices blend and merge. In roman type he speaks as a lonely dedicated aesthete; in italics he speaks as a loyal pillar of the community shouldering the white man’s burden: ‘A decent chap, a real good sort, / Straight as a die, one of the best [. . .]’. The bitter, histrionic irony builds up, phrase after phrase, into an excruciating self-epitaph: ‘Here’s to the whitest man I know – Though white is not my favourite colour.’ In a letter written shortly before the appearance of High Windows in 1974, Larkin revealed that the title he ‘really wanted’ for his final volume was Living for Others; ‘only I could never write the title-poem’.80 Had this poem been less elliptical and elusive it could have fulfilled that function.