Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  Around this time both Larkin and Amis were paying court to a Czech student. Kingsley, Philip wrote, was attempting ‘to ensnare Chitra by a reformed-pervert appeal’. He goes on to describe her: ‘striking, with a comical head of black hair and scarlet lips. One couldn’t call her beautiful – anyway she would probably regard beauty as being slightly bourgeois – but she had a good figure and was decidedly attractive. She was, however, a full time party-line girl. She was known to interrupt kisses to say: Remember, the party comes first.’45 While Amis invented strategies to cajole Chitra into bed, Larkin explored his feelings for her: ‘In a drunken fit of bravado I asked her to tea, and she came. We ate toast and marmalade and she told me I was decadent. Nothing else happened. My ventures with women had up to this time been continually depressing, but I liked her and I still do – not that I ever did anything about it. She did not ask me back.’46 Without ‘doing anything about it’ he finds that he ‘likes’ her, and attributes her lack of response to his own inadequacies rather than to any failure on her part.

  Towards the end of the following term Larkin found himself further isolated in his exemption when Amis followed Sutton into the army, being commissioned into the Signals. Larkin’s mood during the summer vacation in 1942 is vividly evoked in parallel letters to Sutton and Amis written from his new Warwick family home shortly after his twentieth birthday. He begins his letter to Sutton on 17 August in a mood of pure jouissance: ‘I have gone for a walk in the Park. I have seen a man & six white puppies. The paddling-pool is full of children [. . .] There is a light, withy, breeze.’ His ebullience overflows into surreal inner music: ‘I am hearing an audible voice singing “Arseholes cheap today, cheaper than yesterday.” etc.’47 Since their letters have been crossing in the wartime post, he decides that ‘general meandering is the best way to write at present’. ‘I enjoyed your letter by the way – pissed myself over Ross & a few other bits.’48 He briefly mentions the ‘buggering silly’ war work in which he is engaged in the Warwick Fuel Office, sorting letters and forms, and then turns to his writing: ‘I am still undecided as to whether I am a poyte or a writah. At present I am writing a story about a mad woman in an air-raid, much influenced by Dylan Thomas, whom I very much admire [. . .] The novel has expired – bricks without straw. You remember Auden in “Letters from Iceland” said that novels were much harder than poetry. I agree!’49

  Later he resumes the letter with a different topic: ‘My favourite jazz record at present is Condon’s “Friar’s Point Shuffle” in the 1940 Chic. Album. It is sodding fine [. . .] Bessie is still huge and monumental.’ He then shifts time and scene again. He is back in the park:

  This evening is purely beautiful – a whitish sky near the sun, sweeping over to deep blue in the east. The stone wall is yellow. Shadows of poplars are very translucent at the tips. Dogs run through the stream. People wheel bicycles between the flowerbeds. The river runs between green, rounded banks and is lined with trees. A woman wheeling a pram, and a soldier, have come up to this seat. The soldier has his thumbs in his pockets and is quite at his ease. Planes crawl like lice over the sky. I’m afraid I’m not much good at description.

  The park is full of soldiers. The baby is crying uneasily, waving tiny paws over the wool coverlet.50

  As dusk descends Philip wishes Jim many happy returns on his twenty-first birthday and reflects seriously on their future: ‘At no point can one say “Now I am this, or that”. One discovers it slowly [. . .] The sun has sunk and shows a great, cloud-paced sky, etched and whorl[ed]. It is a bit colder. Yesterday I rode 30 miles and feel fine. If we had peace and a bit of money we could live damned well. Also read “The Rainbow” again.’51

  Next day he picks up his account as he listens to jazz. He compliments Jim on his letters (‘They express something firm and unshaken’), and tells him that the previous evening he wrote a poem: ‘My poytry is all to buggery at present. The pure wine of Auden has been shamefully adulterated by Spender’s still lemonade and Dylan’s Welsh whiskey.’ He suddenly dramatizes his immediate writing process: ‘I rather like this paper I am writing on. Large and opulent [. . .] Fuck this bastiobating pen.’52 He brings the letter to an end with a reflection that all his friends, with the exception of Philip Brown, are in the army or navy. He, in contrast, is on the edge of events, lonely but safe. He signs off with verve: ‘Well, I’ll cock off. Whenever you read this, in darkness or sea-dingle, I hope you’ll be well & happy. I will write again shortly. Yours ever, Philip.’ The enclosed poem shifts borrowed tones between the yearning Yeats (‘I stand at the kerb, and hear / The day of shops break over my feet’), the ‘modern’ Auden (‘the crowd / Wave in the cinema like weed’), and the ‘metaphysical’ Dylan Thomas (‘the navigating worm’). Nevertheless it conveys real emotion:

  I hear you are at sea, and at once

  In my head the anonymous ship

  Swings like a lamp;

  I think of equipment and meals, and the long

  Sane hours of a funnel

  Against the birdless, interleaving plain.53

  The letter to Amis, written two days later on 20 August 1942, is more edgy and argumentative. After complimenting his friend on his latest letter (‘I read it on the way to the office, cackling liberally’), he resumes an ongoing disagreement with a show of finger-wagging pomposity: ‘Might I remind you that the greatest artists and philosophers did not enjoy the benefits of heterosexuality. If I were not too lazy, I would get up a few references for you.’ Then, apprehending that his tone might antagonize his friend, he humours Kingsley’s homophobic prejudices: ‘(NB This is not serious – do you catch the note of hysteria.) I put my mental age as fifteen; and likely to remain so many moons, I should imagine.’54 Amis has sent him a blues lyric which he found ‘highly entertaining’, and he promises to enclose his own ‘Fuel Form Blues composed & illuminated at the office’. He has just been listening on the radio to ‘the History of Jazz, Ch 16’: ‘Very good – after each programme I make frenzied notes of records to buy when I go back to Oxf., if I do [. . .] I have a great admiration for Armstrong – “he hath outsoared the shadow of our night” etc.’55

  With calculated abruptness he shifts to more personal matters: ‘2.3 was the reading on my flogging chart. I’m not quite sure what it signifies: it’s either times per day, or days per time. The former, I rather fancy. Present reading is 2.2.’ After this masturbatory calculation he abruptly turns to a set-piece description of his fellow workers at the Fuel Office, displaying his skill in characterization for his aspiring novelist friend. Mr Turner, ‘an enormous comic ex-policeman’, ‘thrusts a pile of papers on my desk & says “You might just check that, Mistah – er –” I remain Mister Er, although he knows my name perfectly well [. . .] His favourite phrase is “I think we’ve done enough, for today” said in monumental simplicity & sincerity.’56 Larkin has, it seems, developed a more interesting relationship with his closest office colleague:

  After cautious fencing, Mrs Glencross & I have begun to swear. I say sod, bugger, bloody, and balls. She says bugger, bloody, and bum. The latter amuses me intensely. I have an awful moral compulsion to say fuck & shit as well, but haven’t dared to yet. It might horrify you that such things become important. They do. This morning, after she had been scoffing57 abt Prince George,58 I made a flippant remark like ‘One less to shoot when the Revolution comes’ which, before I knew where I was, had developed into the kind of conversation ‘Well, I always say to people who run England down, if you know a better, go to it!’ However, we compromised by agreeing that Hitler could have made Germany ‘the finest country in the world’.59

  To preserve masculine solidarity with Amis, Larkin presents this verbal brinkmanship as a skirmish in the battle of the sexes, omitting the facts which he records in a separate biographical fragment, that Mrs Glencross’s husband was a prisoner of war and she had recently given birth.60 By referring to her always as ‘Mrs Glencross’ he also obscures the fact that she was only twenty-seven. There is more f
riendship and fellow feeling in this relationship than he reveals to Amis.

  Richard Bradford attributes the difference between the levels of Larkin’s and Amis’s sexual activity at this period to Larkin’s lack of attractiveness: ‘he did not have Amis’s enviable combination of charm, wit and looks’.61 However, Amis was certainly no more charming and witty than Larkin, and Larkin’s empathy with and respect for women made him less aggressive than Amis in the pursuit of sexual conquest.62 Philip Brown remembered that Larkin was popular with the women in the Oxford English Club: ‘most of the officers of the Club were girls, and they used to lionize Philip a bit, asking him to tea and so on [. . .] he was charismatic, you see. Girls wanted to find out about him.’63 At this time Larkin still had the silky fair hair seen in early photographs; though not for much longer. Nuala O’Faolain was later to comment on Larkin’s subtle sexual magnetism. She found him ‘a most attractive man, sending out both a nonthreatening message and a message about being more threatening than his nonthreatening image made him appear’.64

  Larkin’s letter to Amis comes to an abrupt close on the pretext that ‘there’s no more of this paper left’. He ends with a suggestive compliment on his correspondent’s sexual adventures:

  . . . God I want to piss. How’s Lizzie?

  Busy? (don’t misinterpret.)

  Wishes –

  Here, in embryo, is the caricature relationship between the two men seen later in ‘Letter to a Friend about Girls’: Larkin the timid, unadventurous wimp, Amis the rampant sexual adventurer. The promised lyric, ‘Fuel Form Blues’, is enclosed as a separate typescript.

  Oh see that Fuel Form comin’ through the post

  Oh see that Fuel Form comin’ through the post

  It’s five weeks late and worse filled up than most.

  [. . .]

  I’d rather be a commando, or drive a railway train,

  I’d rather be a commando, Lord! drive a railway train,

  Than sort dem Fuel Forms into streets again.

  [. . .]

  Fuckin’ Fuel Forms, gonna carry me to my grave, carry me to my grave.

  He adds a vigorous pen sketch of a seven-piece band: piano, double bass, saxophone, guitar, drummer, trumpeter and clarinettist, all jamming away in angular enthusiasm. Motion’s description of Larkin’s mood at this period seems unduly negative: ‘Reading the letters he wrote at the time, it is impossible not to be impressed by the ferocity of his misery. It is also hard not to suspect [. . .] a degree of complacency.’65

  These letters to Sutton and Amis show Larkin’s already highly developed literary sense. Texture and tone are calculated to suit the correspondent. To have written to Amis with the earnest sincerity of his letters to Sutton would have incurred sceptical derision; while Sutton would not have appreciated the crude sexual references and sharp caricatures of the letters to Amis. Significantly Larkin scarcely mentions Sutton in his letters to Amis, or Amis in his letters to Sutton; they feed quite different, contradictory aspects of his sensibility. What both letters have in common, however, is their omnivorous, magnanimous appetite for experience of all kinds. It is easy to see why Larkin’s friends so looked forward to receiving his letters, with their vivid interest in the correspondent, evocative epiphanies, quirky self-ironic euphoria and manifest enjoyment of the process of writing itself.

  At the end of the first section of the ‘Biographical Details’ typescript, completed on 9 September 1942, Larkin added a brief list of omissions in pen. Then, in different handwriting and at a slant he inserted the name ‘Penelope’. The second section, describing his final year, begins with his fire-watching duties and reading of Dryden and Pope. He then continues: ‘I soon found out that Penelope Scott-Stokes, a girl resembling an Eton boy and whom I had been gently attracted to the term previously had left Somerville and been married. So a sonnet, So through that unripe day . . ., was proved correct.’66 These enigmatic references hint at a private subtext. Penelope, already lost when he first mentions her, was his first muse, and her ambiguous image haunts his work for the next two years. In the winter term of 1941 Larkin had attended a performance of Twelfth Night in Somerville College, where he was struck by the first-year student playing Viola. Penelope Scott Stokes’s father ‘had wanted her to be a boy and thus had her hair cut short and dressed her in boy’s clothes’.67 Decades later she herself recalled their failed encounter: ‘He invited me to tea, but I evaded that, making some paltry excuse. We’re talking about 1941 when probably tea was just that. No bed glimpsed through carefully half-opened door. Just a bright fire, toast and cakes fetched from Oliver & Gurden [. . .] One way and another, perhaps at 18 I was wise! The girl-boy in me (Viola well chosen) he found provocative.’68 Penelope appealed to the young poet’s intense literary eroticism. He found himself ‘gently’ attracted by her slight figure, ‘gently’ meaning ‘overwhelmingly’.

  It seems a plausible speculation that there was also some more substantial incident which they both later suppressed. In a letter to Amis written on his birthday three years later, in 1945, Larkin recalls: ‘the only advance I ever made to a woman was productive of such scorching embarrassment that the wound is still rawly open. (In response to your unspoken question it wasn’t anyone you knew.) That was over two years ago and if I forget it in ten I shall be agreeably surprised.’69 Robin’s abrupt embrace of Katherine on the punt in his 1947 novel A Girl in Winter may perhaps be a version of this incident.70 It is not impossible that he is referring to a different woman, but it seems likely that he made a clumsy physical advance to Penelope, eliciting a vulnerable response which filled him with shame.

  ‘Sonnet: Penelope, August, 1942’,71 to which he refers, became Poem XXX in The North Ship. It begins with an Audenesque evocation of an ungendered victim enduring the bitterness of ‘that unripe day’, cruelly tested before his/her time by some undefined ordeal. It then shifts abruptly to the poet’s perspective:

  Instead,

  It was your severed image that grew sweeter,

  That floated, wing-stiff, focused in the sun

  Along uncertainty and gales of shame

  Blown out before I slept.

  Despite his obscure uncertainty and ‘shame’, the poet cherishes his beautiful recollection, which floats in his imagination like a stiff-winged butterfly. She is now ‘Long since embedded in the static past’:

  Summer broke and drained. Now we are safe.

  The days lose confidence, and can be faced

  Indoors. This is your last, meticulous hour,

  Cut, gummed; pastime of a provincial winter.

  The delicate promise of summer has sunk into the safe Eliotic sterility of winter. As he had predicted in the poem, Penelope was unable to take the strain, and left Oxford to be married. In accordance with tradition the muse is distant, unattainable. Significantly, however, in the poem the speaker also sympathizes with the real suffering girl. Watching Penelope’s performance as Viola, he had intuited her nervous, vulnerable temperament, and felt protective towards her.

  The very different ‘Poem for Penelope abt. the Mechanical Turd’, written in anticipation of his return to Oxford in autumn 1942, seems to dramatize an intimate birthday stocktaking.72 It survives only in holograph on a single sheet torn from a manuscript book, and shows a number of draft changes. Archie Burnett considers it merely three separate fragments. However, the text arises from a single mood and a continuous, finished text can be inferred. Larkin has drawn a large cross over the second and third sections, but he did not destroy the page. This is a more private poem than ‘So through that unripe day’, with a mix of elements unprecedented in Larkin’s previous poetry. The title parodies a poem by Sidney Keyes, addressed to his girlfriend, ‘Poem for Milein about the Mechanical Bird’, which had been published in Keyes’s first collection The Iron Laurel, in 1942.73 The opening line, however, echoes Keyes’s ‘Elegy’ on his grandfather, which includes the lines: ‘It is a year again since they poured / The dumb ground into your mouth.’ These
eloquent lines, it seems, roused Larkin’s competitive envy. His pastiche insults Keyes (presumably the ‘mechanical turd’), with gratuitous obscenity: ‘August again, and it is a year again / Since I poured the hot toss into your arse’ (‘arse’ replaces the earlier drafted ‘mouth’). The image of buggery or oral sex may perhaps express self-disgust at his clumsy advance to Penelope a year earlier.

  After an asterisk the poem continues its retrospective on the past year, but in a different register, focusing, with a further echo of Keyes, on the poet’s current claustrophobia at home with his parents:

  Choking, I pull open a door. It is evening out there.

  But the house is building still behind my back

  Room over room, cells of a great mad brain,

  And all are threaded on my parents’ voices

  Crossing like scissors in the stale air.

  The bright road crawls with placid faces.

  And I leave tomorrow eager to have done

  With the sandwiches they are cutting for me to take

  – For they love me – but I turn again in despair.