Philip Larkin
Page 55
24. Letter from Mary Judd (née Wrench) to Maeve Brennan and Betty Mackereth, 15 April 1986.
25. Ibid. Mary married in 1960 and Philip and Betty Mackereth acted as godparents to her daughter. She left Hull in 1964.
26. 16 October 1957. LM, p. 229.
27. 29 January 1958. LM, p. 235.
28. To Eva Larkin, 6 May 1956.
29. LM, pp. 209–10.
30. Larkin dated the last complete draft in the workbook ‘1 Jan 57’; only minor adjustments followed. Complete Poems, pp. 397–8.
31. LM, p. 170.
32. Unpublished interview, South Bank Show, 16 April 1981. Motion, pp. 287–8.
33. ‘An Interview with John Haffenden’, FR, p. 53.
34. Ibid., p. 57.
35. To Thwaite, 17 March 1959. SL, p. 301.
36. The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. James Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976), p. 135.
37. Larkin perhaps recalls the biblical phrase ‘all flesh is grass’. He may also have had in mind Auden’s ‘The crowds upon the pavement / Were fields of harvest wheat’ in ‘As I walked out one evening’. W. H. Auden, Another Time (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), p. 43.
38. Hartley, p. 125.
39. David Lodge, ‘Philip Larkin: The Metonymic Muse’, in Stephen Regan (ed.), Philip Larkin: Contemporary Critical Essays (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 71–82, at p. 77.
40. Ibid., p. 78.
41. In Christopher Ricks, ‘The Pursuit of Metaphor’, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 248.
42. Lodge, ‘Philip Larkin: The Metonymic Muse’, p. 76.
43. Motion, p. 280. Judy Egerton always received Larkin’s letters with great pleasure. Interview, 17 December 2010.
44. 3 November 1958. LM, p. 245.
45. Motion, p. 284.
46. Anthony Thwaite, personal communication, 14 August 2011.
47. Jean Hartley, ‘Larkin, Love and Sex’, AL 30 (October 2010), p. 6.
48. Larkin, indeed, had played the same prank on his sister Catherine during the war, sending her a typewritten letter in an envelope with an official ‘On His Majesty’s Service’ cover, informing her that she had been ‘drafted to the Colliery at Pwllycracrach. Mon., for light duties at the shafthead’. Unlike Conquest, however, he revealed the joke in the PS: ‘Well, I hope [. . .] that this didn’t give you too much of a turn.’ 8 September 1943. DLN/3/2/11.
49. Motion, p. 267.
50. LM, p. 256.
51. Hartley, p. 100.
52. 17 December 1958. SL, p. 297.
53. To Judy Egerton, 19 January 1959. SL, p. 298.
54. Motion, p. 294.
55. Greenwich Mean Time. He is alluding to Mary’s poor time-keeping. Betty recalls Larkin standing at the issue desk, watch in hand in pantomimic censure, as Mary arrived late yet again.
56. Betty still has Mary’s letter.
57. Betty Mackereth, interview with the author, 20 June 2011.
58. Passage not in LM.
59. 14 April 1959. LM, p. 248.
60. LM, p. 254.
61. To Monica Jones, 9 October 1959. Not in LM.
62. LM, pp. 259–60.
63. LM, p. 261.
64. 25 August 1959. LM, p. 256.
65. Motion, pp. 296–7.
66. Betty Mackereth, interview with the author, 20 June 2011.
67. To Eva Larkin, 20 March 1960.
68. Jean Hartley, ‘Larkin, Love and Sex’, AL 30 (October 2010), p. 8.
69. Motion, p. 297.
14: Here (1960–1)
1. The drawing and poem are reproduced in facsimile as the back endpaper of SL. Motion records that he stayed with Bruce Montgomery before the interview. Motion, p. 302.
2. LM, p. 265.
3. 16 March 1960. LM, p. 266.
4. Archie Burnett, ‘Biography and Poetry: Philip Larkin’ AL 36 (October 2013), pp. 7–14, at p.13. Jean Hartley recalled seeing the film with Larkin. John Osborne, ‘Larkin and the Visual Arts’, AL 36 (October 2013), pp. 15–17, at p. 15.
5. Thomas Gray, Poems, Letters and Essays (London: Dent, 1963), p. 6.
6. He had begun drafting it in late 1956, and had returned to it several times. Complete Poems, p. 417.
7. 4 July 1959. LM, p. 252.
8. Larkin commented to Barbara Pym some time later: ‘it’s a “trick” poem, all one sentence & no main verb!’ SL, p. 367.
9. Hartley, p. 119.
10. Brennan, p. 36.
11. Ibid., p. 26. Betty Mackereth recalls that during the royal visit the Librarian’s office served as the Queen Mother’s ‘retiring room’, and was fitted with a set of net curtains. These were still incongruously in place when I arrived in Hull in 1968, and survived for many years afterwards.
12. 15 August 1960. LM, p. 270.
13. 4 August 1960. LM, p. 268.
14. He had been drafting it intermittently since the summer of 1959. Complete Poems, p. 419.
15. Brennan, p. 37.
16. Ibid., p. 28.
17. Ibid., pp. 33–4.
18. Ibid., p. 38.
19. Jean Hartley, ‘Larkin, Love and Sex’, AL 30 (October 2010), pp. 6–8, at p. 7.
20. Jean Hartley, personal communication, 4 March 2011.
21. Margaret Fowler, ‘Larkin’s Library Recollected’, AL 32 (October 2011), p. 11.
22. 9 August 1959. LM, p. 239.
23. SL, p. 319.
24. 10 November 1960, LM, p. 275.
25. Richard Bradford, The Odd Couple: The Curious Friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin (London: Robson Press, 2012), pp. 222–4.
26. LM, p. 273.
27. Ibid., p. 275.
28. To Eva Larkin, 6 November 1960.
29. Motion cites this comment from a letter to Eva Larkin of 1 January 1961 (Motion, p. 310 n. 12). However these words are not present in the letter of that date. The correspondence is not yet fully catalogued and it may be that the letter containing this sentence has been misplaced, perhaps before the correspondence came to Hull. Richard Bradford (The Odd Couple, p. 223) repeats the quotation (presumably from Motion), but mistakenly applies it to Maeve rather than Monica.
30. To Monica Jones, 1 January 1961. Not in LM.
31. LM, p. 276.
32. Complete Poems, p. 423.
33. Larkin cannot resist the bad pun ‘born / dead’.
34. She adds an arch parenthesis: ‘(why he didn’t call [a taxi] from the hotel, I cannot think)’.
35. Brennan, p. 38–9.
36. Ibid., pp. 8–10.
37. SL, p. 323.
38. 5 March 1961. SL, p. 325.
39. Hazel Holt, A Lot to Ask: A Life of Barbara Pym (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 89.
40. Philip Larkin Reads and Comments on The Whitsun Weddings, Listen Records, LPV 6 (Hull: Marvell Press, 1965).
41. 11 July 1961. SL, p. 330.
42. ‘A Conversation with Ian Hamilton’, FR, p. 25.
43. To Monica Jones, 13 November 1960. Not in LM.
44. FR, p. 25.
45. ‘W. H. Auden’, FR, p. 40; ‘The Life under the Laurels’, FR, p. 296.
46. ‘On the Circuit’, in W. H. Auden, About the House (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), p. 63.
47. Interview with Paris Review, RW, p. 73.
48. 11 February 1961. LM, p. 276.
49. 11 June 1961. LM, p. 283.
50. Motion, p. 311.
51. Motion (p. 311) and LM (p. 283n) give the date as 5 March, which was a Sunday. The letters to Eva show that it was Monday 6 March.
52. Colin Vize, ‘Larkin’s Refraction’, AL 35 (April 2013), p. 23. Vize concluded that ‘less than 1% of the population exhibit short-sightedness of the magnitude experienced by Larkin’.
53. Bradford, p. 224.
54. 11 March 1961. LM, p. 278.
55. LM, p. 279.
56. Ibid., p. 280.
57. Ibid., p. 281.
58. Brennan, p. 41.
59. To Monica Jones, 13 March 1961. No
t in LM.
60. Larkin was hurt when Amis failed to follow up this hospital visit. On 11 July, following his recovery, he remarked to Conquest that he had received no letter from Kingsley: ‘His joy at learning I was discharged without any discoverable defect must have rendered his right hand useless: give him my sympathy. It must be hell not being able to toss off’ (SL, p. 331).
61. Motion, p. 313.
62. Larkin Society. DNX, box 1.
63. SL, p. 327.
64. Brennan, p. 42.
65. To Betty Mackereth, 13 April 1961 (unpublished).
66. Brennan, p. 42.
67. Ibid., p. 29.
68. Ibid., p. 39.
69. Hartley, ‘Larkin, Love and Sex’, p. 7.
70. Motion, p. 305. Maeve was offended by Alan Bennett’s review of Motion’s biography which depicted her as a northern ‘lass’ deceived by a sophisticated seducer. All Larkin ‘really wants’, Bennett concluded, ‘is just to get his end away on a regular basis and without obligation’. Alan Bennett, ‘Alas! Deceived’, in Stephen Regan (ed.), Philip Larkin: Contemporary Critical Essays (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 243.
71. 10 April 1961. Brennan, p. 75.
72. Brennan, p. 43.
73. LM, p. 283.
74. Philip Larkin Reads and Comments on The Whitsun Weddings, Listen Records.
75. Brennan, pp. 56–7.
76. Mademoiselle de Maupin, trans. R. and E. Powys Mathers (London: Folio Society, 1948), p. 133.
77. 5 August 1961. SL, p. 331.
78. 9 August 1961. LM, p. 284 and n.
79. 17 August 1961. LM, p. 285.
80. It was published at once in the New Statesman, on 24 October 1961.
81. 21 September 1962. SL, p. 346.
82. Philip Larkin Reads and Comments on The Whitsun Weddings, Listen Records.
83. Shakespeare’s anti-Petrarchan sonnet, no. 130 (‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’), is an ironic example of the genre, and its conventions feature in Marvell’s ‘To his Coy Mistress’: ‘An hundred years should go to praise / Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze [. . .]’.
84. Brennan, pp. 57–8.
85. Ibid., p. 57.
86. Motion, p. 46.
87. Brennan, p. 57.
88. Among the books which Maeve left at her death was Linda O’Keeffe’s lavishly illustrated Shoes: A Celebration of Pumps, Sandals, Slippers and More (New York: Workman Publishing; special edition for Past Times, Oxford, 1996).
89. Brennan, p. 50.
90. Ibid., pp. 174, 184, 209.
91. Ibid., p. 73.
92. Ibid., p. 43.
93. Ibid.
94. LM, p. 289.
95. Judy Egerton, interview with the author, 17 December 2010.
96. SL, pp. 339–40.
15: Sitting It Out (1961–4)
1. Critical Quarterly 3.4 (Winter 1961), p. 309.
2. 9 December 1961. SL, p. 335.
3. Critical Quarterly misprinted ‘bribes’ in line 2 as ‘brides’, a mistake carried forward into the 1988 Collected Poems. The correct reading was restored in a reprint of Collected Poems later in 1988.
4. To Conquest, 9 December 1961. SL, p. 335.
5. SL, p. 336.
6. 23 January 1962. LM, p. 292.
7. 30 April 1962. SL, p. 342.
8. LM, p. 292.
9. SL, p. 335.
10. To Conquest. SL, p. 341.
11. SL, p. 342.
12. ‘The Living Poet’, FR, p. 81.
13. He finished the poem on 21 August and it was published in the Observer on 18 November 1962.
14. LM, p. 302.
15. DX/329, inventory p. 119.
16. Motion, p. 319. Iris Murdoch, The Flight from the Enchanter (London: Chatto & Windus, 1956). Copy in the University Collection, History Centre, Hull: MJ/B1/491, inscribed ‘M. M. B. Jones’ in Monica’s hand, with ‘& Dr Larkin’ beneath in his.
17. Hull copy of Murdoch, The Flight from the Enchanter, pp. 3, 78, 81.
18. Ibid., pp. 79, 308.
19. Ibid., pp. 5, 23, 79.
20. Anthony Thwaite, personal communication, 14 August 2011.
21. Anthony Thwaite (ed.), Larkin at Sixty (London: Faber & Faber, 1982), opposite p. 60.
22. LM, p. 304n.
23. Ibid., pp. 303–4.
24. Ibid., p. 306n.
25. 4 October 1962. LM, p. 305.
26. Ibid., p. 304.
27. Published in the Spectator, 23 November 1962.
28. Philip Larkin Reads and Comments on The Whitsun Weddings, Listen Records, LPV 6 (Hull: Marvell Press, 1965).
29. See for example paintings by Hans Baldung Grien (1484/5–1545) in the Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland.
30. LM, pp. 306–7.
31. Published in Critical Quarterly 8.2 (Summer 1966), p. 173.
32. To Eva Larkin, 16 December 1962.
33. To Monica Jones, 7 August 1966. Not in LM.
34. Brennan, p. 43.
35. Ibid., p. 23.
36. DPL/10/3.
37. To Monica Jones, 17 August 1963. Motion, p. 339.
38. LKA, pp. 204–5.
39. DX/329, inventory 68. These cameras took self-developing film, avoiding the involvement of a chemist or photographic laboratory.
40. Lord Byron: Selected Prose, ed. Peter Gunn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 357.
41. SL, p. 257.
42. See http://www.harrison-marks.com/hub.htm (accessed 27 April 2011).
43. Motion, p. 266.
44. Jean Hartley, ‘Larkin, Love and Sex’, AL 30 (October 2010), p. 6.
45. Richard Bradford, The Odd Couple: The Curious Friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin (London: Robson Press, 2012), pp. 209, 237.
46. DX/329, inventory 600 i–ix. There were also ‘Super 8’ cine-reels such as were used for Marks’s films: inventory 72a–d.
47. Sophia Dawn appeared in Kamera, issue 56 (1963). She was the principal model in Harrison Marks’s Byronically titled hardback She Walks in Beauty, and appeared in two 8mm home movies, The Bare Truth and Nature’s Intended. See http://www.harrison-marks.com/models_1.htm (accessed 27 April 2011).
48. DX/329, inventory 73 a–j. Ten ring-binders were found in the box room of 105 Newland Park. They were empty, but one showed the torn remnants of two black-and-white glamour photographs pasted to the inner front and back covers. Seven were Staff Handbooks. James Booth, ‘Glimpses’ (interview with Monica Jones), AL 12 (October 2001), pp. 25–6.
49. Presumably a jokey reference to the famous ‘You know how to whistle?’ scene from the film To Have and Have Not (1944), starring Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart.
50. Thwaite inadvertently omitted the final stanza in the workbook draft from the 1988 Collected Poems.
51. Burnett omits the stanza break after ‘understand’. Complete Poems, p. 309.
52. Burnett’s rigorous editorial principles led him to print Larkin’s shorter typescript version of the poem, adding subsequent lines from the 1967 fragment in Workbook 7 (see below). This fragment breaks off two lines earlier than the 1964 text, at ‘Of an explicit music; then’. Burnett confusingly relegates the uncancelled final two lines of the substantive 1964 workbook version to his notes, as ‘Additional lines’. Complete Poems, p. 637.
53. 25 April 1964. LM, p. 330.
54. LM, p. 331.
55. 29 April 1964. LM, p. 333.
56. To Monica Jones, 10 August 1964. Not in LM.
57. Brennan, p. 58.
58. DPL/1/7/16.
59. Brennan, p. 59; Motion, p. 423.
60. Brennan, p. 7.
61. 3 March 1964. LM, p. 326.
62. Motion, p. 343.
63. ‘An Interview with John Haffenden’, FR, p. 55.
64. In his selection of Larkin’s poems, Martin Amis preserves the order of poems within the volumes, despite the fact that his omissions dispel Larkin’s original sequence. Thus ‘Here’, completed in October 1961, and ‘Dockery and Son’,
completed in March 1963, both come before the much earlier ‘An Arundel Tomb’, completed in February 1956. This is puzzling since Amis argues that Larkin’s ‘volumes of verse [. . .] get stronger and stronger by a factor of ten’, a contentious point which would surely be better illustrated by arranging the individual poems in chronological order. Introduction to Philip Larkin: Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 2011), pp. xxii–xxiii.
16: Living for Others (1964–8)
1. Bibliography, G14.
2. 22 May 1964. LM, p. 335.
3. 8 June 1964. LM, p. 337.
4. 3 March 1964. LM, p. 326.
5. Motion, pp. 340, 345.
6. Ibid., p. 350.
7. Ibid., p. 362.
8. Brennan, p. 30.
9. A Law student working in the Library at the time rushed down to the entrance, fearing that someone had really committed suicide. Alan Marshall, interview with the author, 16 April 2013.
10. Card to Eva Larkin, 28 January 1965.
11. To Eva Larkin, 21 March 1965.
12. 15 August 1965. SL, pp. 375–6.
13. SL, p. 376.
14. Hazel Holt, A Lot to Ask: A Life of Barbara Pym (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 202.
15. Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury.
16. 3 October 1967. SL, p. 397.
17. ‘The World of Barbara Pym’, RW, pp. 240–1.
18. 26 November 1966. LM, p. 371.
19. Holt, A Lot to Ask, p. 49.
20. Motion, p. 362.
21. 20 January 1966. SL, p. 380.
22. To Eva Larkin, 24 October 1965.
23. 12 October 1961. Complete Poems, p. 301.
24. Motion, p. 302.
25. Brennan, pp. 170–1.
26. Ibid., p. 178.
27. LM, p. 339.
28. Ibid., p. 340 and n.
29. Ibid., p. 350.
30. Ibid., p. 352n.
31. SL, p. 369.
32. DPL/1/7/1.
33. Larkin made slight changes of wording before it was published in Queen, 25 May 1966.
34. ‘A Conversation with Ian Hamilton’, FR, p. 21.
35. 13 October 1964. LM, p. 342.
36. In the 1988 Collected Poems Thwaite adopted Larkin’s second title, added in pencil to the typescript (DPL/1/7/76). Breaking his editorial principles Burnett prefers the first title (Complete Poems, p. 634).
37. For the possible background to this poem, see Gary Kriewald, ‘Wasteful, weak, propitiatory poems: Larkin apologizes to the animals’, AL 28 (October 2009), pp. 29–33.
38. Margaret Hersom, unpublished recollection. Burnett prints a version of ‘Administration’ sent in a letter to Gavin Ewart in 1977 (Complete Poems, p. 655).