Philip Larkin

by James Booth

  A month later, on 17 February, Larkin wrote to Judy Egerton on his familiar 32 Pearson Park notepaper, making as much lugubrious fun as he could of his situation:

  my days in Pearson Park are coming to an end. I have blindly, deafly, & dumbly said I will buy an utterly undistinguished little modern house in Newland Park (plus ça change, plus c’est la même parc) [. . .] I can’t say it’s the kind of dwelling that is eloquent of the nobility of the human spirit. It has a huge garden – not a lovely wilderness (though it soon will be) – a long strip between wire fences – oh god oh god [. . .] So Larkin’s Pearson Park Period ends, & his Newland Park Period commences.47

  He attempted to raise his spirits by mentioning his recent election to membership of the MCC and hoping that his and Monica’s annual ‘Lords dinner’ get-together with the Egertons, which had survived the couple’s separation, would continue. He complimented her on the success of the Liberal Party in the polls, and looked forward to the collapse of the economy following the recent Middle Eastern oil crisis: ‘Hull University will be shut down. I shall earn a few pence sweeping crossings [. . .] You can sell your pictures – at rock bottom prices. Gloomy old sod, aren’t I?’48

  A few weeks later, in the cruellest month, April, he began ‘Aubade’, the initial intensive drafts taking up nine workbook pages, dated between 11 April and 7 June. Unusually, he left the verso of the final page blank as if anticipating the poem’s early completion.49 He reached a near-final version up to the opening of the third stanza, though he was to change some phrases in the final version: ‘I have the leisure to remark / That more than half of life has elapsed by now / (Two-thirds; three quarters’); ‘Ancient interrogation’; ‘The endless absent dark we travel to’. This, the tenth and last of his major contemplative elegies, is also the only one of his aubades to announce its genre in the title. Here there is no traditional parting of lovers. Dawn in ‘Aubade’ prompts the poet’s farewell to life itself. The grip of light has become ominous and threatening.

  The theme is the ‘dread / Of dying and being dead’. The celebration of ‘being here’, always the raison d’être of Larkin’s poetry, falters as the poet imagines the extinction of his imagination. Figurative language fails him, and a dispirited prosiness prevails: ‘I work all day, and hit the jug at night’ (in the final version: ‘and get half-drunk at night’). In bitterly ironic self-quotation he falls back on familiar, richly romantic vocabulary recycled from his earlier work. In ‘The Trees’ (1967) the ‘unresting castles’ of leaf, renewing themselves each year, told the poet to ‘Begin afresh’.50 Now with the end of such renewals in sight, the adverb ‘afresh’ is attached not to rebirth but to the thought of death, which ‘Flashes afresh to hold and horrify’. In the final draft three years later he cruelly transferred ‘unresting’ from the living foliage to death itself. It is an indication of the precision with which he imposes his linguistic authority that he confidently expects his readers to hear the verbal echoes of the earlier, already ‘canonical’ poem.

  The stanzas preserve the richly interwoven form of the intricately rhymed Horatian or Keatsian ode, and there are poignant flickers of poeticism: ‘that vast brocade, / Moth-eaten and musical’ (in the final version ‘That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade’). But this ornamental complexity is contradicted by bald indicative prose: ‘nothing more terrible, nothing more true’. However, the poem’s failure of élan is itself paradoxically eloquent, and the anti-rhetorical rhetoric is immediately accessible to the reader. The phrase ‘the open emptiness for ever’ (in the final version ‘total emptiness’) is instantaneously memorable, while ‘Not to be here, / Not to be anywhere’ has a naturalness which will make it sound to many readers like a quotation from themselves. This is the poetry of ‘What oft was thought, but ne’er so well exprest’.51 Few poets have succeeded in conveying so directly our familiar dismay at death. Mortality annihilates ‘What I am’; it dissolves ‘all we are’. Larkin’s lyric naivety generates a candid dismay which other poets would repress in embarrassment. Any reader who has felt outraged at the sight of a loved one reduced to an inanimate mannikin in an empty room will respond to this.

  Copies of High Windows arrived from Faber in May 1974, in the middle of his drafting of ‘Aubade’. The grey cloth cover reminded Larkin of Auden’s Look, Stranger which he felt to be ‘a specially good omen’. It was, indeed, in terms of poetry publishing, a best-seller. The initial impression of 6,000 copies was sold by September; 7,500 more were printed, followed by another 6,000 in January 1975.52 His poetic future, however, was bleak. He was aware of having all but completed his oeuvre, and his inspiration was guttering. It is thus perhaps not as surprising as it might at first seem that, having drafted half of one of his greatest poems, he abandoned it for the time being. No doubt the upheaval of his removal interrupted the flow. Perhaps, also, the manifest status of ‘Aubade’ as his ‘last’ poem inhibited him from putting the final touches on the tenth, blank page. He was not yet prepared to throw in the poetic towel. Larkin was to live for another twelve years following the end of his ‘Pearson Park Period’, and a brief poetic Indian summer lay ahead, in the poems he wrote to Betty Mackereth in the following year. But, with the final completion of ‘Aubade’ three years later in 1977, his literary life would be effectively over.

  21

  The End of the Party

  1974–6

  All his life Larkin had avoided ‘furniture and loans from the bank’.1 When he moved house on 27 June 1974 he no longer needed loans. But he did at last have to furnish his life in the expected manner. He described the upheaval to Anthony Thwaite with gloomy wit: ‘I’ve been v. upset [. . .] in most senses: feel like a tortoise that has been taken out of one shell and put in another.’ He had had to cope with a jammed door, lost key and ill-fitting carpet, and needed to ‘buy heap furniture fast’. Moreover, ‘The garden is growing. Feel like Hölderlin going bonk.’ He concluded in the plaintive tones of an exile: ‘Drop me a line occasionally.’2 Judy Egerton helped him choose a stylish lampshade in London.3 He bought a new washing machine and no longer had the pleasure of wringing out his socks and underwear by hand, as he had done all his life. He mourned the loss of his simple attic existence. He could not find a satisfactory place to work, so he recreated his flat, sitting in an armchair by the fire downstairs, his back to the garden, bookshelves within reach. He wrote to Barbara Pym, ‘Perhaps I shall produce a version of About the House (Auden’s sequence about his Austrian “pad”),’ adding a grim self-quotation: ‘“Well, we shall find out.”’4

  Andrew Motion’s interpretation of Larkin’s state of mind at this point seems ungenerous. He sees the move to Newland Park as a devious strategy, a ‘form of creative suicide, one which left his achievements untarnished, his put-upon identity intact, and his need for sympathy undiminished [. . .] he could both relish his success and seem not to enjoy it. He could freeze his talent to avoid the responsibility of having to live up to his reputation.’5 The letters and poems of this period do not bear out this picture of manipulativeness and ‘put-upon’ self-pity. Larkin was not perversely freezing his talent. He was struggling to keep up his spirits and maintain his dying inspiration.

  To all outward appearances his life had reached its zenith of success. High Windows was universally praised. He was awarded honorary degrees by St Andrews and Sussex Universities.6 The eminent photographer Fay Godwin visited to take photographs which established a potent iconic image in the public imagination. He wrote to Godwin on 12 July 1974, saying that he liked some of her images ‘very much indeed. I wish I always looked like that.’ But he was apprehensive of the effect of others in reinforcing a negative stereotype. ‘The photographs I “didn’t like” [. . .] were simply the ones where I am peering out from among dark shelves with a somewhat furtive/whimsical appearance.’7 Later, in 1982, he refused permission for one of these photographs to be used in Thwaite’s Larkin at Sixty tribute volume. Later still, on 11 November 1983, he wrote to Godwin: ‘I think it mus
t have been to Fabers that I gave vehement instructions that the ones of me among the shelves on sheet 1892 should never be used. However, I take heart from your assurances that insofar as it lies within your control the Boston Strangler will not reappear.’8 It is regrettable that Faber chose one of these images for the front dustwrapper of Martin Amis’s selection of Larkin’s poems in 2011, repeating it on the back, cropped to show a single sinister, bespectacled eye.9

  His poetry was, for the time being, at a stand. After abandoning ‘Aubade’, he completed nothing until the day before his fifty-second birthday, eight months later. ‘The Life with a Hole in It’ (8 August 1974) was, he wrote, using Bruce Montgomery’s nom de plume, ‘what my old friend Edmund Crispin calls “demotic”, I believe’.10 Its jokey reference to the advertisement for Polos (‘the mint with the hole’) announces a richly self-parodic poem in ‘Movement’ vein. It is one of those works composed on a single page of the workbook, with only minor corrections. Never has an attack of the sulks been dramatized with such jouissance:

  When I throw back my head and howl

  People (women mostly) say

  But you’ve always done what you want,

  You always get your own way [. . .]

  The women may be sympathetic and genuinely puzzled, but in his extravagantly self-pitying mood he hears only, as the italics suggest, a caricature feminine nagging. Then, determined to give offence (if he hasn’t already), he turns the minimal civility of ‘(women mostly)’ into the crude insult of ‘the old ratbags’. All he can be justly accused of, he protests, is never having ‘done what I don’t’. He may have managed not to do what he doesn’t want (marry and settle down). But this does not mean that he has done what he wanted. In this ‘demotic’ context what he wanted is imaged in terms not of symbolist transcendence, but of a novel-writing career in Ian Fleming mode. However, this turns out to be another dead end, since the life of ‘the shit in the shuttered chateau’ with its ‘bathing and booze and birds’, clearly repels him. Well, at least he has avoided the destiny the old ratbags would have preferred for him. He is not a ‘spectacled schoolteaching sod’ with six children, a pregnant wife and her parents coming to stay. The poem’s real subject now emerges. This staged and artificial bellyaching is a displacement activity intended to distract him from ‘larger gestures’. Choices of life are becoming irrelevant as age advances. In a grand didactic finale of emphatic noun phrases he declares that life is an ‘immobile, locked’ stasis, a struggle between ‘Your wants’, which remain unmet, ‘the world’s [wants] for you’, which you strain to fulfil, and the ultimate winner, the ‘unbeatable slow machine’ which will bring ‘what you’ll get’. ‘Days sift down it constantly. Years.’

  At the time of his move from Pearson Park, Philip’s relationship with Maeve was in abeyance. Her impatience with his indecision had resulted in frequent brief estrangements. ‘I repeatedly dispatched him to sort himself out.’11 The longest break in their affair had begun in 1973 and lasted sixteen months. Now it was briefly broken when he presented her with a copy of his new volume, inscribed ‘For Maeve, with affectionate gratitude for so much – Philip’. She thanked him, a little puzzled, and, as she recalls, he responded: ‘Oh Maeve! You have taught me so much about the breadth and depth of human emotions, and more about my own than anyone has ever done.’12 Though they remained on distant terms for several more months, his words impressed her.

  His routines repeated themselves. In September 1974 he and Monica spent the customary holiday in Scotland, and the same month he attended the SCONUL conference, which was held once again in East Anglia. In November he broke his usual rule and agreed to give a reading of his own poetry at his old college, St John’s. In the haunts of his youth he relaxed, drank too much and ended the evening berating ‘that shit Yeats, farting out his histrionic rubbish’.13 Back in Hull his evening routine had now settled into a pattern: gin and tonic first, food accompanied by wine, then a nap followed by a menthol cigarette and another drink before bed.14 His health steadily deteriorated. Occasionally he would host record-playing sessions with his jazz friends including the Professor of History, John Kenyon, Mike Bowen of the University’s Audio-Visual Centre and John White from the American Studies Department. At the end of the year he edited the Christmas Supplement of the Poetry Book Society, and included ‘The Life with a Hole in It’. The turn of the year brought his usual attack of despair. He wrote to Judy Egerton on 2 January 1975, ‘What an absurd, empty life! And the grave yawns.’15

  The following year however saw an unexpected emotional and poetic flowering. Early in the year his estrangement from Maeve ended. Because the quarrel had lasted longer than usual, the reconciliation was particularly warm and, momentously, their relationship at last became fully physical. As she told Motion in 1992, she ‘yielded to temptation, but only on very rare and isolated occasions, and at a cost of grave violation to my conscience, since I never, in principle, abandoned my stand on pre-marital sex’.16 It is difficult, and perhaps unnecessary, to be sure exactly what occurred between them. Feeling that she had been too confiding to Motion in the early 1990s, she was very reticent when writing her memoir in 2000–2. However, more than one informed source attests that, overweight and undermined by drink, Larkin was by this time descending into impotence. Perhaps his own perception of inadequacy, unsuspected by her, gave Maeve’s late access of passion a disorientating intensity for him. The statue of her beauty was walking, and he found himself wading in her wake. From Maeve’s innocent viewpoint ‘we embarked on the most serene phase of our relationship’.17 Following this reconciliation, she wrote, ‘our friendship continued on this heady course until 1978’.18 Her language is characteristically decorous. Friendship is not usually described as running a ‘heady course’. The tone of their relationship is illustrated by their innocent, chatty correspondence. Following his first encounter with Barbara Pym, whom he had finally arranged to meet on St George’s Day 1975, in the Randolph Hotel, Oxford, he wrote to her:

  The day has turned into a really pleasant one as far as the sun is concerned – very warm & friendly. B. Pym was a bit like Joyce Grenfell, but very pleasant and accommodating.

  She is still under care after her mastectomy (is it?) and of course she did have a sort of stroke recently, but she seemed quite normal.

  How are you, dear? I hope the disagreeable impact of returning to work has worn off, and Brenda C. has come back. I dread the start of term [. . .]19

  There is a disingenuousness in his naive phrases: ‘mastectomy (is it?)’, ‘a sort of stroke’.

  He now occupied a secure place in the canon; Alan Brownjohn published a pamphlet on his work in the British Council ‘Writers and their Work’ series. On 16 June Harold Pinter, Charles Osborne and Ian Hamilton participated in a celebratory Evening without Philip Larkin at the Mermaid Theatre in London. His public image was on display at the end of May 1975 during a visit to Hull by Ted Hughes. Larkin wrote to Charles Monteith: ‘He filled our hall and got a great reception. I was in the chair, providing a sophisticated, insincere, effete, and gold-watch-chained alternative to his primitive forthright virile leather-jacketed persona.’20 A fortnight later he let rip more maliciously in a letter to Conquest: ‘At Ilkley literature festival a woman shrieked and vomited during a Ted Hughes reading. I must say I’ve never felt like shrieking. We had the old crow over at Hull recently, looking like a Christmas present from Easter Island. He’s all right when not reading!’21 Larkin positioned a framed photograph taken on this occasion above the cistern of his downstairs toilet. It shows Hughes standing mid-stage, a sexually magnetic shaman, while Larkin, the poet-librarian, sits uncomfortably at a table to one side. Opposite this picture, high on the wall he hung an antique ceramic plate bearing the legend ‘Prepare to Meet thy God’ in ornate letters, a reminder perhaps that one should not be surprised to meet one’s maker with one’s trousers about one’s ankles. He was making his domestic environment into a self-parody.

  He now turned to his s
econd commissioned poem, in celebration of the Humber Bridge. After initial drafts in the eighth workbook between January and 3 April 1975, Larkin bought a small dark-red ‘Collins Ideal 468’ hard-backed manuscript book, in which he continued drafting between the end of May and the end of July.22 Was this perhaps because the poem was ‘required’ rather than ‘inspired’ writing? His heart was not in this celebration of community. Anthony Hedges recalls Larkin telling him that he ‘felt more like writing a threnody for the things he loved about the region which the bridge would put an end to’.23 Hedges estimated that 250 lines would be needed for a piece lasting forty minutes. In the event Larkin wrote forty lines, and when Hedges said he needed more, the poet regretted that there was nothing he could do. The composer recalls, ‘I produced a long slow introduction and lots of repetition.’ Larkin’s ambiguous feelings about the project inhibited him from giving the work a title. Hedges headed the manuscript ‘A Humberside Cantata’. But Sidney Hainsworth from Fenner, the company that had commissioned the work, insisted on the title ‘Bridge for the Living’. Hedges recalled: ‘Philip told me he thought it made it sound like a card game Instruction Manual for adults.’24