Philip Larkin

by James Booth

  The Observer interview is his most exhilarating exercise in high camp wit, though there is also something of the self-epitaph about it. He simplifies his life into a delightful self-parody, claiming to have ‘completely forgotten’ his childhood, and wanly characterizing his parents as ‘not very good at being happy’. ‘Oxford terrified me,’ he remembers, and wistfully envies more recent students who have seen the influx of women into formerly all-male colleges: ‘it would have been nice to have been part of the experiment’. He imagines the new regime as probably ‘cheerful and non-academic, like an American college musical’. Sincerity and irony are blended in an inscrutable mix, and his diffidence is so articulate as to be indistinguishable from confidence. Librarianship was a good choice of profession for him, he claims, since ‘it has just the right blend of academic interest and administration that seems to match my particular talents, such as they are’. For a moment he masquerades as a Tory ideologue, spoiling for a fight: ‘I identify the Right with certain virtues and the Left with certain vices [. . .] thrift, hard work, reverence, desire to preserve – those are the virtues in case you wondered: and on the other hand idleness, greed and treason.’ But then he dissolves into the softest man of feeling as he recollects nearly crashing his car while listening to the radio on the motorway: ‘someone suddenly started reading the Immortality ode, and I couldn’t see for tears’. He likes living in Hull because it is ‘On the way to nowhere, as somebody put it. It’s in the middle of this lonely country, and beyond the lonely country there’s only the sea. I like that.’ His final comment has persuasive gravity: ‘I want readers to feel yes, I’ve never thought of it that way, but that’s how it is.’54

  23

  Extinction

  1980–5

  The new decade opened with the death of Barbara Pym. On 11 January 1980 she succumbed to a return of the cancer first diagnosed ten years before. Shortly afterwards a long perspective was opened up when Ruth Bowman (now Siverns) wrote to Larkin, prompted by the appearance of the Observer interview. He told Amis tersely: ‘now living in Romsey, nice and far away. Widow, son at Varsity’.1 As in their youth he withheld the full story from his friend. Ruth had experienced a difficult life. She had married, only to be widowed before her son was born. Converting to Catholicism she never remarried and spent many years as a teacher and single parent in Wolverhampton. Resilient and creative, she was at this time about to publish a charming children’s story, Barlow Dale’s Casebook, focused on a Blue Persian cat detective.2 Philip and Ruth continued to correspond until his death but they never met again in person.3

  Early in 1980, Larkin agreed to read a retrospective selection of his work for the Watershed Foundation in the United States, and the University’s engineer made the recording on 24 February 1980.4 The edited tape included twenty-six poems from all phases of his development, ordered without regard to chronology.5 Some poems were omitted at the last minute because of the limited time available, and too much should not be read into the selection. As he later explained: ‘The tape was made with America in mind (that is, no four-letter words or peculiarly English subjects).’6 But it is intriguing that he chose three poems from The North Ship, including the symbolist ‘I put my mouth’, and also ‘So through that unripe day’. No sooner were the recordings made than complications arose. The Foundation had not budgeted for the required permissions fees, and crucially George Hartley refused permission for the use of poems from The Less Deceived, ‘in any way’.7 After protracted negotiations Larkin gave up hope of wider dissemination, and retrieved what he could from the debacle by selling a copy of the tape to Harvard University’s Poetry Room for £50 plus postage. His own copy of the tape was deposited in the archive at Hull, available to any listener who discovered its existence.8 The tape preserves readings of a small number of poems unrecorded elsewhere, but Larkin’s manner of recitation is remarkably consistent, and there are no significant differences from earlier readings.

  On 7 May Larkin travelled to Nottingham University to open an exhibition of books and manuscripts by D. H. Lawrence, and in a gesture of sartorial independence bought a T-shirt depicting the novelist, which he wore thereafter when mowing the lawn.9 Andrew Motion, feeling ill-fitted for academic life, had secured an Arts Council Fellowship and moved to Oxford to write. Larkin had advised him against giving up his lecturing post, and asked Anthony Thwaite in a letter of 6 July 1980 to try to cheer Andrew up: ‘He’s a nice lad, I think, but I think not really tough enough – in his writing, that is. Probably tough enough otherwise.’10 He had detected the determined ambition that was to take Motion to the Laureateship.

  Larkin was finding his duties in the Library increasingly uncongenial. In the summer the new GEAC computer system, which the Deputy Librarian, Brenda Moon, had chosen during a trip to Canada, arrived. Unfortunately for Larkin, at this point Brenda left Hull to become Librarian at Edinburgh University. Burnt out by years of overwork, isolated by his deafness and alienated by the new technology, Larkin requested early retirement. However, the Vice-Chancellor, Sir Roy Marshall, refused, since his presence on the staff was deemed ‘of ma­terial advantage to the university’. He wrote to Barry Bloomfield on 16 July: ‘I am worked to death [. . .] Computerisation proceeds apace, resembling a kind of lunatic professional hari-kiri: I’ve never knowingly destroyed a library before. It’s a curious sensation: half-exhilarating, half-frightening.’11 In a sad contrast, just as his literary and professional lives were crumbling about him, he was gaining ever greater public acknowledgement. On 6 September Melvyn Bragg visited Hull to discuss a South Bank Show television feature. In the same month Larkin was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Library Association.12

  He spent Christmas 1980 in Haydon Bridge with Monica. The year had passed without any attempt to write a poem. He was, however, having to read a large number of poems by others, as judge for the Arvon Foundation prize. He told Judy Egerton on 10 December: ‘I deeply wish I’d never got mixed up with it. About half the entrants are Yanks, all worrying about Vietnam and being Jewish. UK entries are all about dying and dolmens on cold moors.’13 Early in the New Year he wrote to Brian Cox: ‘When I said, Where are all the poems about love? and nature? they said, Oh we chucked all those out on the first round. I bet I should have liked some of them.’14 On 11 April 1981 ‘A Bridge for the Living’ was finally performed at Hull’s City Hall, celebrating the long-delayed opening of the Humber Bridge. Five days later came the South Bank Show interview. Larkin found the experience intrusive and uncomfortable. Melvyn Bragg recalled that he ‘decided he didn’t want to be seen, which I thought was a bit mean of him. We looked over his shoulder and shot him from a distance and all that rubbish. Either it was a tease or he didn’t like the way he looked.’15 Working to his limit, he was nevertheless still capable of dynamic initiatives. In May he was elected Chairman of the Poetry Book Society, and immediately suggested that its membership could be increased by transforming it into a club providing books at reduced prices. The scheme was put in place over his two-year tenure, and membership increased over the next five years from 871 to 2,000.16

  At this time Larkin showed a brief interest in theology, partly stimulated by his relationship with the young writer A. N. Wilson, whom he had met in All Souls and who became the Literary Editor of the Spectator in 1981. In July Larkin bought an OUP Bible for £120 which he set up on a lectern in his bedroom, ‘to remind me of matters spiritual’. The result was predictable. He told Andrew Motion: ‘It’s absolutely bloody amazing to think that anyone ever believed any of that. Really, it’s absolute balls. Beautiful, of course. But balls.’17 In the summer Monica had taken early retirement from Leicester at the age of fifty-nine, and Larkin once again raised the possibility of early retirement for himself, in vain. (The University did, however, confer an honorary professorship on him the following year.) Like 1980, 1981 passed without poetry, apart from a light-verse sixty-fifth-birthday greeting to Gavin Ewart, ‘Good for you, Gavin’. Larkin praises Ewart for the ‘riotous
road-show’ of his poetry ‘like Glenlivet nightly, / A warming to us all.’ It is a nicely judged compliment, but it has only a flicker of Larkin’s former subtle felicity. The two undated pages of drafts of this poem comprise the last entries in his final, eighth workbook.

  Now in his sixtieth year, he wrote to Amis on 3 January: ‘So now we face 1982, sixteen stone six, gargantuanly paunched, helplessly addicted to alcohol, tired of livin’ and scared of dyin’, world-famous unable-to-write poet, well you know the rest.’18 Early in the year he resigned from the Arts Council Literature Advisory Panel, sounding off to Amis in terms his friend would applaud: ‘No subsidies for Gay Sweatshirt or the Runcorn Socialist Workers Peoples Poetry Workshop. Or wogs like Salmagundi or whatever his name is.’19 He agreed to an interview with the Paris Review conducted by Robert Phillips, stipulating that he be sent the questions by post. The result was another witty piece like the Observer interview of two years earlier. The aphorisms are as incisive as ever: ‘of course most people do get married, and divorced too’.20 There are also thoughtful reflections on his life and art. He asserts, ‘I didn’t choose poetry: poetry chose me,’ and to the question of what he is aiming to ‘preserve’ in his poetry he replies with simple eloquence: ‘the experience. The beauty.’21 In contrast there is philistine coarseness in his response to a question about poets who have also been librarians: ‘Who’s Jorge Luis Borges?’, though he follows this up with an acute account of Archibald MacLeish’s creative impact as Librarian of Congress in the USA.22 His response to a question about foreign poetry is utterly misleading: ‘deep down I think foreign languages irrelevant [. . .] Hautes Fenêtres, my God!’ Here and there a tone of weary defeat is detectable: ‘Anything I say about writing poems is bound to be retrospective.’23

  In his later years Larkin was approached by an increasing number of admirers, students, secretaries of societies and young poets in search of advice. Betty Mackereth still has her book of draft ‘Refusal Letters’, dated 1982, by which he evaded these requests. It is divided under the headings: ‘Autographs’, ‘Being photographed’, ‘Biographical information’, ‘Criticism of poetry’, ‘Interviews’, ‘Judging poetry competitions’. Each category has a number of standard responses graded by level of politeness. In the case of ‘Autographs’, for instance, they range from the courteous – (a) ‘grateful though he is for your interest in his work, he prefers not to autograph copies of his books for people not personally known to him’ – to the blunt: (d) ‘indiscriminate signing seems to devalue copies inscribed to friends, and [. . .] it has not been unknown for such copies to turn up in book-sellers’ catalogues in a remarkably short space of time.’

  His practice was inconsistent, however, particularly in the case of personal approaches. In 1981 a young PhD student in the English Department sent him a copy of High Windows explaining that her newly bereaved mother, reading her own copy on a recent visit, had been much moved by it. Could he perhaps sign this copy to be given to her as a present? A few days later the student was surprised when Larkin visited her in her postgraduate study in the University to explain that he did not sign books for people he did not know. He noticed that her thesis was on Thomas Hardy and they were soon involved in a lively discussion over a cup of Nescafé and powdered milk. Roy Morrell’s 1966 study of Hardy, he told her, had missed Hardy’s ‘sensual cruelty’. An hour after his departure a University porter delivered a package containing the copy of High Windows signed for her mother, and also, for herself, a copy of A Girl in Winter, also signed: ‘with all good wishes’.24

  On 12 May 1982 Larkin attended a reception in Downing Street and met the Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher. She misquoted a line from ‘Deceptions’ – ‘Her mind was full of knives’ – which persuaded him that she really had read his work: ‘I took that as a great compliment – I thought if it weren’t spontaneous, she’d have got it right. But I am a child in these things.’25 The poetry scene in Hull was highly active at this time, and Douglas Dunn, who after graduating from Hull in 1969 had been for two years an Assistant Librarian under Larkin, assembled an anthology for publication by Bloodaxe Books under the title A Rumoured City: New Poets from Hull. Larkin agreed to write a short foreword, and in mellow, retrospective mood produced a glowing prose poem celebrating the city in which he had now spent the best part of three decades. He evoked the ‘sudden elegancies’ of Hull’s city centre, and ended with a recasting of the conclusion of ‘Here’:

  People are slow to leave it, quick to return. And there are others who come, as they think, for a year or two, and stay a lifetime, sensing that they have found a city that is in the world, yet sufficiently on the edge of it to have a different resonance. Behind Hull is the plain of Holderness, lonelier and lonelier, and after that the birds and lights of Spurn Head, and then the sea. One can go ten years without seeing these things, yet they are always there, giving Hull the air of having its face half-turned towards distance and silence, and what lies beyond them.26

  His private comments on the poets in the volume were not, however, favourable. Only the local poet Frank Redpath, whose well-crafted works are heavily influenced by his own, gained his approval.27 He was reading little of the poetry of others by this time, and was even reluctant, initially, to write a review for the Observer of Andrew Motion and Blake Morrison’s Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry.28

  As his birthday approached, Anthony Thwaite sent him the pieces to be included in the Festschrift Larkin at Sixty which he was editing for Faber and Faber. Larkin was offended by the essay by his schoolfriend Noel Hughes which referred to the Larkin house in Manor Road as ‘joyless’ and claimed that Sydney Larkin had been a member of the Link group of Nazi sympathizers. Larkin accused Hughes of writing a piece that ‘read like a posthumous article, to be published when I was no longer around to mind’.29 Hughes made changes but Larkin retained his sense of injury: ‘I and my sister continue to regard [him] as a reptile spitting venom hoarded for forty years.’30 Early in June the South Bank Show feature was broadcast. The chemistry between Bragg and the poet had not been good, and his verdict, in a letter to Judy Egerton, was that the programme was ‘inoffensive’, but ‘lacked subtlety and intelligence’; ‘there was rather too much of four-letter Larkin for my liking’.31

  In January 1982 Larkin had read an article on his work by the Canadian academic Terry Whalen, ‘Philip Larkin’s Imagist bias’.32 On 24 July he completed his first true poem for three years, a concentrated imagist lyric in two- or three-stress couplet lines, evoking a hot summer day. It is a welcome breath of celebratory lyricism:

  Long lion days

  Start with white haze.

  By midday you meet

  A hammer of heat –

  Whatever was sown

  Now fully grown;

  Whatever conceived

  Now fully leaved,

  Abounding, ablaze –

  O long lion days!

  The poet was not quite dead. As if to highlight its isolated, belated position in his output he titled it ‘1982’. Of less poetic interest are the thirty-seven lines of tetrameter couplets he contributed to Poems for Charles Causley:

  Dear CHARLES, My Muse, asleep or dead,

  Offers this doggerel instead

  To carry from the frozen North

  Warm greetings for the twenty-fourth

  Of lucky August [. . .]

  It seems significant that of the poems he wrote in his final years, two were celebrations of sixty-fifth birthdays (Ewart’s and Causley’s). Was he, on some level, attempting to persuade himself that he might himself reach this improbable goal?

  A month after his sixtieth birthday, on 10 September 1982, he responded to a letter from his Oxford contemporary Michael Hamburger:

  Many thanks for your kind wishes [. . .] Yes, it is a pity that the ability to write poems dies away as one goes down the vale, but I don’t think there is much one can do about it. Silence is preferable to publishing rubbish, and better for one’s reputation. However,
it would indeed be lovely if we both had sudden Indian summers, and there is no harm in hoping; is there?33

  Wordsworth and Auden also exhausted their inspiration well before their deaths. They fell into empty prolixity; Larkin fell into silence.

  On 26 October Larkin was invited by Hugh Thomas, head of the Centre for Policy Studies, to a dinner at his home in Ladbroke Grove, arranged to allow Mrs Thatcher to meet Tory-sympathising artists and academics. His fellow guests were Stephen Spender, Anthony Quinton, Al Alvarez, Anthony Powell, Isaiah Berlin, J. H. Plumb, Dan Jacobson, V. S. Pritchett, V. S. Naipaul, Tom Stoppard, Nicholas Mosley and Mario Vargas Llosa. In a letter to the Thomases following the dinner, Mrs Thatcher wrote that she was ‘a little worried that Philip Larkin was so silent’. Not hearing much because of his deafness, he had felt out of his depth among all the talk about foreign policy. Characteristically, his only significant contribution seems to have been a condemnation of the ‘hypocrisy’ of those who (like Mrs Thatcher) complained about the Berlin Wall while at the same time not wanting to see a united Germany.34

  The remaining three years of Larkin’s life were darkened by accident and illness. In October 1982 Monica fell and cut her head in Haydon Bridge. He wrote to her in hospital: ‘Dear bun, I know how utterly alien hospitals are, but I hope this one is kind and friendly [. . .] Think if you would like to come here to convalesce when you “come out”. I could fetch you away.’ The following day, 14 October, he wrote again, distressed that his deafness had prevented him from hearing what the nurse had said over the phone: ‘Feel worried and cross with myself. I shd say I am deaf. How wonderful it will be to talk to you again!’35 Five months later, in March 1983, Monica developed shingles, and Philip drove her down from Haydon Bridge to Hull Royal Infirmary.36 When she left hospital to convalesce in Newland Park he found himself for the first time since 1950 living day to day with another person. She was suffering from lethargy and double vision, but on 9 July was sufficiently recovered to allow him to make a quick visit to Coleraine to receive an Honorary DLitt from the New University of Ulster.37 Then in August a spell of sneezing dispelled her double vision. The lease on Monica’s Leicester flat had expired in July and the plan was that as soon as she was well enough she would move permanently to Haydon Bridge. Betty recollects calling at the Newland Park house at this time with a bottle of champagne for Philip’s birthday. Monica asserted her precedence by raising the toast (in Betty’s champagne) ‘To Oxford Firsts!’38