Philip Larkin

by James Booth

  20

  Winter Coming

  1972–4

  On 24 January 1972, the day before Larkin completed ‘Going, Going’, his mother fell and cracked a bone in her leg. It was no longer possible for her to stay in her own home. On 30 January Larkin and his sister Kitty looked over Berrystead Nursing Home on the London Road between Leicester and Loughborough, and on 2 February Eva made her final move.1 A week later, on 9 February, Larkin completed ‘The Building’. It had been almost nine years since he had been confident enough to address a wider audience in one of the long Keatsian odes or reflective elegies which had formed the backbone of his early work (‘At Grass’, ‘Church Going’, ‘An Arundel Tomb’, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, ‘Here’, ‘Dockery and Son’). Now he resumed the sequence, and over the next six years would complete four more, all focused directly or indirectly on the theme of death: ‘The Building’, ‘The Old Fools’, ‘Show Saturday’ and finally ‘Aubade’.

  Since his forty-fifth-birthday poem, ‘Sympathy in White Major’, Larkin’s poems had been distilled intertextually from earlier literature or art, or had evoked a reified historical past or an exotic location. Now he returned to the contemporary social scene of his middle-period work. But the modulations are more abrupt and the tone harder. In ‘The Building’ the poet struggles to assert an elevated poetic register against the drag of despondent prose; or his idiom fuses the flatly literal and romantically poetic together. This strange effect is seen in the footnote, isolated at the bottom of the second page of drafting: ‘We must never die. No one must ever die.’2 The businesslike imperative is contradicted by embarrassingly ingenuous emotion and naive repetition. The opening simile of the poem has a similarly mixed tone. It sounds rhetorically confident: ‘Higher than the handsomest hotel’. But the aspirated ‘h’ alliteration gasps exhaustedly.3 The phrase ‘lucent [honey]comb’ strikes a rich Keatsian note, but is also an exact photographic description of the yellow-lit Hull Royal Infirmary on the Anlaby Road.4 A strained elevation is maintained in the description of the ‘close-ribbed’ streets: ‘Like a great sigh out of the last century’. But towards the end of the stanza the poet’s figurative nerve collapses: into flat description (‘The porters are scruffy’), superstitious circumlocution (‘not taxis’) and the gallows humour of zeugma (‘in the hall / As well as creepers hangs a frightening smell’).

  Prosy description follows: ‘There are paperbacks, and tea at so much a cup.’ Then the tone becomes more detached and impersonal with the stumble of a loosely appositional noun phrase: ‘Humans, caught / On ground curiously neutral’. The chillingly abstract noun ‘Humans’, used here for the only time in a serious mature poem, strips the people of their families and fashions.5 Faced with biological extinction, only the fundamentals remain. Two crushing noun phrases rub in the point with the same repeated grammar and rhythm: ‘The end of choice, the last of hope’, an effect so Larkinesque as to border on self-parody. Poetic metaphor flickers back into life with a variation on Larkin’s familiar room imagery. The ‘rooms’ of ‘The Building’ are at the same time more literal than the attics, dens or towers of his recent symbolist poems, but also more awesome: ‘rooms, and rooms past those, / And more rooms yet, each one further off // And harder to return from’. These oubliettes offer the same escape from the self which the poet longed for in the ‘padlocked cube of light’ in ‘Dry-Point’ and the attics of ‘shoreless day’ in ‘Absences’. But in this context of reductive biology the surrender to extinction brings no euphoria.

  In stanzas six and seven metaphor stands on its head as the ‘real’, dull ordinary world takes on the glowing inaccessibility of a Grecian urn or mythical Byzantium: ‘Red brick, lagged pipes, and someone walking [. . .] / Out to the car park, free’. Outside lies the gorgeous normality of traffic, terraced streets and, in an elegiac metonym of life as glamorous as anything in Keats or Yeats, ‘girls with hair-dos’ fetching their separates from the cleaners. This achingly poignant evocation of the loveliness of everyday things prompts an impassioned apostrophe which no other twentieth-century poet could have risked:

  O world,

  Your loves, your chances, are beyond the stretch

  Of any hand from here!6

  In the building the solid, accessible world of humdrum normality has become ‘unreal’, ‘A touching dream’ of togetherness, from which we all ‘wake [. . .] separately’. Reality awaits us after we are ‘borne across’ into the metaphorical world of extinction. Towards the end of the poem the language descends again to prose: ‘Each gets up and goes / At last. Some will be out by lunch [. . .]’ In a wan parody of the elect ascending to heaven the others go to join the ‘unseen congregations whose white rows / Lie set apart above’.

  In the past we tried to keep our ‘thought of dying’ at bay through faith. Now, though secular medicine may outbuild cathedrals:

  nothing contravenes

  The coming dark, though crowds each evening try

  With wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers.

  Superstitious propitiation is useless, as are gestures of love and sympathy. The language combines the formal Latinate eloquence of ‘contravenes’ and ‘propitiatory’ with the homely Anglo-Saxon plainness of ‘dark’, ‘weak’ and ‘wasteful’. The ‘w’ alliteration has a hint of exasperation and, after the emotional stammer of the cluttered polysyllable ‘propitiatory’ the voice falls, in a Mozartean diminuendo, to the open vowel of ‘flowers’.

  ‘The Building’ adopts a roomy stanza of regular interwoven rhyme characteristic of Larkin’s earlier reflective odes. But there is a hidden complication. The eight-line rhyme-scheme (abcbdcad) naturally suggests regular eight-line stanzas. Wilfully, however, the stanzas are only seven lines long. Thus the rhyme-scheme completes itself at line 1 of stanza two, at line two of stanza three, at line three of stanza four, and so on. It is not until the eighth stanza that the completion of the rhyme scheme coincides, for the first time, with the end of the stanza. But, instead of concluding here, Larkin adds a further, ninth stanza, necessitating a final single isolated line to complete the scheme. It is difficult to imagine any reader actually hearing this. Larkin is playing a private game, like the numerological patterns or acrostics of medieval poetry and music. But it is a game on which he has expended a great deal of imaginative energy. I have argued elsewhere that this device could be seen as leading the reader through a suite of similar rooms, each different from the last and with confusingly rearranged furniture.7 Alternatively, the slippage between stanza and rhyme could be felt to throw the poem off balance, resulting in a game of catch-up as the initial ‘a’ rhyme of each abcbdcad rhyme-unit moves down the order in each succeeding stanza, hidden (like an undiagnosed cancer?) to take its final form as ‘die’ at the beginning of the ninth. It seems relevant here that the nine seven-line stanzas bring the poem to its sixty-third line. In his fiftieth year, Larkin was already certain that he would die at sixty-three, the same age as his father. The hopeful mathematics of this poem force the poem beyond that limit into a sixty-fourth line. However, like the wasteful and weak flowers themselves, this superstitious magic is pathetically ineffective.

  Larkin followed this poem, just under a month later, with a more direct response to his mother’s plight, ‘Heads in the Women’s Ward’, drafted on a single page dated 6 March 1972. The poet describes the senile heads in crisp couplets: the staring eyes, the taut tendons, the bearded mouths talking silently. A sixty-year perspective returns them to their youth, when they smiled ‘At lover, husband, first-born child’. But time and place are now different:

  Smiles are for youth. For old age come

  Death’s terror and delirium.

  The rhythm suggests a nursery rhyme suitable for recitation by those in their ‘second childhood’. He published the poem immediately, placing it in the Rationalist Association’s journal New Humanist (May 1972), which has been campaigning on behalf of scepticism since 1885.

  Larkin was deeply affected by his mother’s loss of in
dependence. He wrote to Barbara Pym in March, reluctantly conceding that Eva would never now return to her own home: ‘it’s clear she can’t go back to living, as she did, more or less on her own. Indeed I wonder if she will ever emerge from the Nursing Home [. . .] since Christmas I have been going back there on Saturday & returning Sunday, which leaves considerably less time than usual for letters.’8 In May, to add to his gloom, Cecil Day-Lewis died. Larkin had visited him days before the end, and had shown him the Sonus Press publication of Joan Barton’s The Mistress. Despite his condition Day-Lewis had gone to the trouble of reading the poems and dictating a complimentary letter to the author. Larkin was chastened at this generosity of spirit: ‘Catch me doing that. I really think he was a nice man.’9 In the same letter to Conquest he briefly reflected on Roy Fuller as a possible successor to Day-Lewis as Laureate. Had he himself been offered the post at this point, he would have accepted.10 In the event Betjeman was appointed. In June 1972 Larkin allowed Anthony Thwaite to persuade him to make a rare ‘personal appearance’ during his visit to the University of East Anglia for a SCONUL conference. He commented apprehensively, ‘The awful thing is that people may be expecting too much – a combination of Rupert Brooke, Walt Whitman and T. S. Eliot, instead of which they get bald deaf bicycle-clipped Larkin, the Laforgue of Pearson Park.’11 He is echoing Dylan Thomas’s description of himself as ‘the Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive’.

  Unusually, ‘The View’, his fiftieth-birthday poem, was drafted almost entirely outside the workbook. Larkin dramatizes his feelings with the zestful gusto of a stand-up comedian. In a wildly inappropriate image he depicts himself as an ‘overweight and shifty’ mountain climber, ascending the peak of age. His weight was by this time fifteen stone. Experienced climbers assure him that the view is ‘fine from fifty’. He should expect: ‘fields and snowcaps / And flowered lanes that twist’. But having reached this vantage point he is disappointed to find that, beyond his toecaps, the track ‘drops away in mist’. A fifth line tacked on to each quatrain turns the knife with a third malicious recurrence of the rhyme. ‘The view does not exist’ gives the unmistakable cue for a pantomimic shrug.12 Short-syllable throwaway rhymes (‘twist / mist / exist’) alternate with grotesque double rhymes (‘fifty / shifty; snowcaps / toe-caps; lifetime / unwifed, I’m’). The flow runs clear only in the pensive open vowels of the final rhyme (‘drear / clear / near’):

  Where has it gone, the lifetime?

  Search me. What’s left is drear.

  Unchilded and unwifed, I’m

  Able to view that clear:

  So final. And so near.

  With an elliptical virtuosity characteristic of Larkin’s late style the poem modulates at the last minute into pensive self-elegy. Puzzlingly he did not publish it. Eight years later in 1980 he sent it to his friend Anthony Thwaite on his fiftieth birthday with the compliment ‘But it would have been far worse without you.’13 Perhaps he would not have objected had Thwaite offered to publish it in one of the journals with which he was associated. In the event it did not appear until the publication of Collected Poems in 1988.

  In August 1972 the BBC Third Programme broadcast a radio feature, Larkin at Fifty, prompting his Belfast muse, Winifred Arnott, now Bradshaw, long ago married, divorced and remarried, to write to him. They resumed an intermittent correspondence which lasted until the poet’s death. This year Philip holidayed with Monica in Wester Ross. He wrote in their joint diary with disconcerting candour:

  My specs are splashed with lobster.

  My lobster’s splashed with snot,

  No woman makes my knob stir –

  A bloody cold I’ve got.14

  On top of his other reasons for depression his unhealthy lifestyle and heavy drinking were causing a loss of sexual vigour. In November Patsy Strang wrote to him from a nursing home for alcoholics. He replied regretting that they had lost touch with each other and sorry that she was in ‘“Clinholme” – word of fear’. Concerned as ever about his mother he told Patsy: ‘I now go & see her every other weekend, which is a little wearing, but of course one does what one can, which isn’t much.’15 As another augury that he was becoming ‘historical’, he was approached by Barry Bloomfield, who had recently completed a bibliography of Auden, with a proposal to make him his next subject. He wrote that this would be ‘wonderful’, and speculated on whether he would be ethically justified in hiding from Bloomfield any ‘terrible poem’ tucked away in a magazine.16

  At the beginning of December 1972 Larkin heard that Ansell and Judy Egerton were to separate. He had been writing to the Egertons, first as a couple, then regularly to Judy, since their first meeting in Belfast in 1954. He visited with the Egertons once or twice a year, and for many years he and Monica would take them out annually to dinner during the Lord’s Test match. In 1974, together with Harold Pinter, Ansell Egerton sponsored Larkin for membership of the MCC. Judy Egerton was at this time developing her career as an art historian, and in 1974 was to become Assistant Keeper of the British Collection at the Tate Gallery. The news of the separation came as ‘a great shock’. In a tactful letter of 5 December 1972, Philip expressed his sympathy (‘I can guess the loneliness isn’t easy [. . .] no, it’s sad. I do feel that’). He went on to thank her for her advice on muesli for breakfast and congratulate her on the recent purchase of a watercolour, in a bidding competition against ‘these grabbing Yanks’. He boasted that the Ferens Gallery in Hull had bought its Atkinson Grimshaw ‘in 1950 for £10 ARRGHGH. It’s lovely: so delicate’, and went on to discuss the progress of the Egertons’ younger daughter Fabia, then studying English at Cambridge.17

  In January 1973 he wrote to Judy that he had ‘finished a long dreary poem that had been dragging on since September’.18 His great Ode to Senility, ‘The Old Fools’, completed on 12 January, again breaks new expressive ground. The meditative authority of his extended reflective elegies is here, uniquely, inflected into a series of blunt questions: ‘What do they think has happened [. . .]?’; ‘Do they somehow suppose [. . .]?’; ‘do they fancy [. . .]?’ One might see this as an example of Larkin’s characteristic faux naïf technique. The poet already knows the answers to his rhetorical questions. But the effect is actually less strategic than this. The questions sound genuine, and bitterly reproachful: ‘Do they somehow suppose / It’s more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools, / And you keep on pissing yourself [. . .]?’ He shockingly refuses to displace this familiar anger into our usual patronizing sentimentalism towards ‘the old dears’. He goes on to answer his questions by evoking their absent minds. They sit ‘through days of thin continuous dreaming / Watching light move’. The last phrase cruelly parodies a typical Larkin epiphany: the wind tousling the clouds in ‘Mr Bleaney’, the luminously peopled air in ‘Here’. In the curt two-stress line with which the stanza ends, the poet asks: ‘Why aren’t they screaming?’ He seems genuinely puzzled. As he wrote to Brian Cox the following month: ‘I felt I had to write it. It’s rather an angry poem, but the anger is ambivalent – we are angry at the humiliation of age, but we are also angry at old people for reminding us of death, and I suppose for making us feel bad about doing nothing for them.’19

  The second stanza shifts to composed philosophical meditation. In an atheist trope familiar from Hardy and Housman the poet contemplates our (or rather ‘your’) physical atoms ‘speeding away’ from each other in dissolution. He rationalizes that you are merely returning to the oblivion from which you emerged at birth. But there is no emotional consolation in this. After all, ‘then it was going to end’. When our mothers gave us birth we became part of a ‘unique endeavour / To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower / Of being here’. When oblivion resumes ‘you can’t pretend / There’ll be anything else’. This thought unsettles the poet’s philosophical composure and he reverts to awed jeering, mimicking the old fools’ witlessness: ‘Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power / Of choosing gone’ (‘Oh, ow, eeh, oo, ow, oo’). The final short line in this stanza return
s with a mocking rhyme to the raucous disrespect of the opening: ‘they’re for it; / [. . .] How can they ignore it?’ Georges Bataille wrote: ‘Obscenity is our name for the uneasiness which upsets the physical state associated with self-possession, with the possession of a recognized and stable individuality.’20 There is something radically obscene about ‘The Old Fools’; and about old fools.

  In the third stanza the familiar gibe ‘the lights are on, but nobody’s at home’, generates one of the most poignantly beautiful effects in Larkin’s work. The rooms they inhabit are no longer the literal rooms of homes or hospitals. They have retreated in their senile confusion into archetypal living rooms inside their heads:

  chairs and a fire burning,

  The blown bush at the window, or the sun’s

  Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely

  Rain-ceased midsummer evening.

  They achieve transcendence by living ‘Not here and now, but where all happened once’. The effect is unbearably moving. As a materialist Larkin sees the fading rooms as ‘Inside your head’ rather than inside your mind, and so at the mercy of physical decline. They ‘grow farther, leaving / Incompetent cold, the constant wear and tear / Of taken breath’. Riskily, Larkin changes metaphor at this point, shifting to the mountain climbing of ‘The View’. The old fools are perhaps so near to the icy peak of ‘Extinction’s alp’ that they can perceive only the ‘rising ground’ of day-by-day existence. Since the 1940s Larkin had been writing about the approach of death, but his internal verbal censor had stopped him from using the key word ‘extinction’ until the context arrived when it would exert its full 1,000-watt force. He uses the word only here in ‘The Old Fools’ and once again in ‘Aubade’ (‘the sure extinction that we travel to’), in unforgettable phrases differentiated from each other in grammar and idiom. As the poem draws to a close the rhetorical questions return (‘Can they never tell / What is dragging them back [. . .] Not at night?’) to be ‘answered’ in the chilling final short line: