Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  Well,

  We shall find out.

  For many readers this commonplace phrase has become a quotation from Larkin.

  Three days after the completion of ‘The Old Fools’, and shortly before the publication of The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse, Charles Monteith wrote proposing that he and Auden nominate Larkin for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry. Larkin found the offer ‘immensely flattering’: ‘the biggest compliment I have been paid for many years’. However, he declined: ‘I have really very little interest in poetry in the abstract; I have never lectured about it, or even written about it to any extent, and I know that I could never produce anything worthy of such a distinguished office and audience.’21 His instinct was sound. He could not have written the kind of sustained reflection on the poetic craft which Auden produced in his Oxford lectures, The Dyer’s Hand. In the event he supported the candidacy of his friend John Wain. He wrote to Judy Egerton on 11 June 1973: ‘I went to Oxford for the poetry election, & got very drunk.’ Wain was elected.22 In February 1973 the business of poetry had penetrated to Hull in a different form when Robert Lowell gave a poetry reading at the invitation of the Professor of American Studies, Geoffrey Moore. Though Larkin was uncomfortable with Lowell’s ‘confessional’ mode, Lowell’s admiration for his work, and capacity for hard drinking, created a short-lived friendship. They corresponded, and later, in 1974, Larkin visited Lowell at his home in Kent.23

  The Oxford anthology appeared on 29 March 1973 in an edition of 29,300. A reprint of 13,550 copies followed in June. Whatever damage the volume might do to his reputation, it would certainly make him money. As he commented later, ‘I was over fifty before I could have “lived by my writing” – and then only because I had edited a big anthology.’24 He was by now already a man of substance, an uncomfortable thought for so purely lyric a poet. As Wordsworth wrote: ‘Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.’25 His response was the late masterpiece ‘Money’ completed on 19 February 1973, a month or so before the anthology was published. The poet reviews his quarterly accumulation of dividends and interest payments and finds himself at a loss. It is eloquent of the gulf between man and poet at this point that while in the letters he complains about the bills he has to pay, in the poems it is the accumulation of wealth that oppresses him. He is, it seems, making a good living, but without living. With so much money why does he not feel fulfilled? Money, a medium of exchange with no intrinsic use, is Larkin’s most thought-provoking metonym of life. It is the metaphorical abstraction of all our dreams of happiness and fulfilment; or, as he reductively puts it, ‘goods and sex’. It reproaches him: ‘You could get them still by writing a few cheques.’ His friends and neighbours have used their money, he slyly observes, to obtain ‘a second house and car and wife’. But a poet’s life cannot be measured in houses, cars or wives. For him the reflection that ‘money has something to do with life’ is deeply puzzling. He reflects on its lyric elusiveness: it exists only in being used. Like life, money is ours by leasehold. It will in the end buy us only the final shave given to the corpse before it lies in the chapel of rest.

  So far the poem, with its briskly rhymed couplets (set out capriciously with indentations appropriate to alternate rhyme) might seem to be light and playful. But at this point Larkin springs a beautiful surprise. If money is a metonym of life, it is equally a metonym of poetry, as Wallace Stevens perceived: ‘Money is a kind of poetry.’26 In the final stanza Larkin pulls out the symbolist throttle and gives expression to this insight in one of the least anticipated epiphanies in his work:

  I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down

  From long french windows at a provincial town,

  The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad

  In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

  This is a coup worthy of Verlaine or Rimbaud. Yet two years earlier he had written to Douglas Dunn while at work on the Oxford anthology: ‘my own mind is so shallow that I can only respond to lighter poems, written in total explicit style. No obscurities!’27 Significantly, however, he held back from contradicting Barbara Everett’s appreciative analysis of his symbolist mode (1980),28 and when Andrew Motion published his short monograph on Larkin’s work in 1982,29 he commented non-committally in a letter to Anthony Thwaite: ‘his line on the poems is rather école d’Everett – Larkin as Mallarmé, and so on. Well, it makes a change.’30

  Larkin was by now a national figure. In early April 1973 he and Monica were invited to a Garden Party at Buckingham Palace. He commented to Judy Egerton: ‘Queen was pleasant enough, but I didn’t have enough of her to lose my nervousness [. . .] I got on well enough with the Keeper of the Royal Stamps.’31 In May, Faber published a paperback edition of The North Ship. However his professional life was becoming more stressful. With the oil crisis of 1973 the quinquennial grant, the government’s funding mechanism for universities, was suddenly reduced. Nevertheless it remained national policy for higher education to expand. Student numbers at Hull grew inexorably while staffing was reduced. The elitist replica of Oxbridge which Larkin had entered in 1955 was under pressure to turn itself into an institution of mass education.32 Between 1974 and 1977 there was a net loss of 13.5 full-time equivalent posts in the Library.33 Despite this contraction the work was becoming more complex and technologically more complicated. A full-time archivist was appointed, and the first experiments in computerization were made. Larkin was never comfortable with the new technology, which he delegated to Brenda Moon, Deputy Librarian from 1962 until 1980. By the beginning of 1974 he listed among ‘Crises at Hull’: ‘New Computer to be stuffed into vital Library area, because they’ve nowhere to put it, me going down fighting’.34

  His mother was now eighty-seven and in the midst of all his activities he found time to keep her supplied with an unbroken flow of news and reassurance. In a one-page letter of Thursday 3 May 1973 he tells her, ‘It’s a grey day here, windy and rather chilly.’ He describes an interview with the local radio station about the Oxford anthology. ‘I had a nice letter from you this morning – thank you for taking the trouble to write. I don’t expect you have got your new spectacles yet, but I know they have been ordered. It will be nicer when they come, you’ll be able to read more easily.’ He inserts a charming cartoon of a seal in a mob-cap reading a newspaper, and ends, ‘Have you had any of Brenda’s cake?’ There is something deeply moving about this lifelong correspondence: intimate, polite and interminable.

  In the late 1960s and early 1970s Larkin had succeeded in making for himself the private creative space for the poems which he was still able to write. But he was aware that his inspiration was failing. Now, in June 1973, having completed two new reflective elegies (‘The Building’ and ‘The Old Fools’), and despairing of being able to produce a collection of the extent of The Less Deceived (twenty-nine poems) or The Whitsun Weddings (thirty-two), he assembled a volume of twenty-five poems (counting the ‘Livings’ sequence as three), including the uneasy ‘Homage to a Government’ and the commissioned ‘Going, Going’.35 He sent it to Faber with an apologetic letter: ‘if I thought I were likely to write five more poems in the space of a few months I should hold back until I had done so. Unfortunately I don’t feel this.’36 He knew that this would be his final volume. At the age of fifty he had all but fulfilled his literary potential, and was burnt out.

  His valedictory mood was intensified by the death, in September, of his boyhood idol W. H. Auden. He wrote to Anthony Thwaite: ‘So Auden is no more. I felt terribly shocked when I saw the news. I imagined he would knock on another ten years, he seemed to have life taped.’ He added dispassionately: ‘At the same time I still don’t think he’d written much worth reading since 1939, and in some respects (“Graffiti”) he’d become a positive embarrassment.’37 A memorial service was held at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, on 27 October 1973. After the ceremony Betjeman confided that he was considering resigning the Laureateship and asked Larkin if he might be prepar
ed to take it on.38 Larkin evaded the question. It was already too late.

  His next poem, the poignantly lacklustre ‘Show Saturday’, reflects the valedictory gloom of this time. For many years Philip and Monica had made regular visits to the Autumn Fair in Bellingham, Northumberland. Now as winter 1973 came on, he clung for stability to this fixed ritual. He dated a near-final draft in the workbook ‘3.12.73’, and a week later wrote to Anthony Thwaite: ‘I don’t know whether to shove it into HIGH WINDOWS, of which I have now had the proofs and which they want back by January 4th. It would add bulk and roughage, I suppose – both much needed qualities.’39 There is more here, perhaps, than his customary self-critical reflex. Though ‘Show Saturday’ has the form and extent of one of his major reflective odes, its impact is moody and subdued in comparison with ‘The Building’ and ‘The Old Fools’.

  It is by far the most crowdedly ‘literal’ of Larkin’s works, reading at times like jotted directions to the director of a documentary film: ‘Grey day for the Show, but cars jam the narrow lanes. / Inside, on the field, judging has started: dogs / (Set their legs back, hold out their tails) [. . .]’ The visual details catch exactly the mix of business-deals and homespun holiday pleasure of such country fairs (‘Bead-stalls, balloon-men, a Bank; a beer-marquee that / Half-screens a canvas Gents’). But there is little sense of charm or enjoyment. The poet seems listless and bemused, willing himself into enthusiasm for these quaint rituals: ‘The jumping’s on next [. . .] There’s more than just animals [. . .]’ However, a contrasting undercurrent of surrealist abstraction makes the proceedings seem weird and enigmatic:

  Folks sit about on bales,

  Like great straw dice. For each scene is linked by spaces

  Not given to anything much, where kids scrap, freed,

  While their owners stare different ways with incurious faces.

  The kids have ‘owners’ rather than parents. This depersonalization continues in the slow-motion gymnopedic description of the wrestlers: ‘One falls: they shake hands, / [. . .] They’re not so much fights / As long immobile strainings that end in unbalance / With one on his back, unharmed, while the other stands / Smoothing his hair.’ The Harrington Brothers were a fixture in the Bellingham programme and Larkin photographed them on more than one visit. But this description has no familiarity or affection about it. It is formal and abstracted: Seurat or Satie rather than Surtees.

  The poet’s attention turns to the ‘tent of growing and making’. There is a hint of boredom in the listing of the categories to be judged:

  four brown eggs, four white eggs,

  Four plain scones, four dropped scones, pure excellences that enclose

  A recession of skills. And after them, lambing-sticks, rugs,

  Needlework, knitted caps, baskets, all worthy, all well done [. . .]

  The bald prosiness is hardly redeemed by the makeshift poetic waffle of ‘pure excellences that enclose / A recession of skills’. Is the speaker perhaps irritated at being required to feign an interest in these trivialities (‘all worthy, all well done’)? Can we read a subtext of refracted dialogue here, as the poet and his companion roam about the show, she holding the programme of events, directing his attention to the next attraction, while he, unable to snap out of his depression, pays listless attention? It seems painfully obvious that the poet has no real interest in knitted caps or lambing-sticks. Andrew Motion suggests that ‘Show Saturday’ is in some sense a love poem to Monica.40 And this may account for the way it sometimes reads like a conversation with a shadowy companion who comes between poet and reader.

  It is in the final three stanzas that the work realizes its poetic potential; but in a strangely indirect way. The car-park thins as the community breaks up into its constituent families, returning to private addresses ‘In high stone one-street villages, empty at dusk’. There is a wan echo here of the affirmation of social community of ‘The Whitsun Weddings’. Common humanity is embodied in stereotypes, though with less warmth than in the earlier work: ‘dog-breeding wool-defined women, / Children all saddle-swank, mugfaced middleaged wives / Glaring at jellies [. . .]’ The humour lacks élan. Moreover ‘one-street villages, empty at dusk’, make an ambiguous image of continuing life. The poet’s valediction implies an ending more conclusive than seems justified by the subject. They all return: ‘To winter coming, as the dismantled Show / Itself dies back into the area of work’. With its private subtextual reference to Laforgue’s poem, this is more self-elegy than celebration of communal solidarity. Like the architecture of the hospital in ‘The Building’, the Show is an elaborate displacement activity, ‘something people do’ to keep the thought of death at bay:

  Let it stay hidden there like strength, below

  Sale-bills and swindling; something people do,

  Not noticing how time’s rolling smithy-smoke

  Shadows much greater gestures; something they share

  That breaks ancestrally each year into

  Regenerate union. Let it always be there.

  The incantatory language, with its ceremonious conservative rhetoric (‘ancestrally [. . .] Regenerate union’) only underlines the feebleness of the command: ‘Let it always be there.’

  It is difficult to detect in any of this the nationalistic celebration which some critics have found in the poem. Motion calls it ‘a huge hymn to old England’. Neil Corcoran feels that the final lines ‘witness to a genuine religious feeling’ attached to ‘an enduring Englishness’. In a characteristic misreading Seamus Heaney misquotes the final phrase to give it more ideological fervour, ‘Let it always be so,’ and asserts that the conclusion ‘beautifully expresses a nostalgic patriotism which is also an important part of this poet’s make-up’.41

  On 8 January 1974 Larkin wrote to Anthony Thwaite thanking him for his positive verdict on ‘Show Saturday’. His final collection was complete and he took the opportunity to take stock of his achievement:

  you know I am a self-deprecating sort of character – I don’t think I write well – just better than anyone else – No, seriously, this book does seem a ragbag, and I do think that the word will go forth ‘Donnez la côtelette à Larquin!’ (‘Give Larkin the chop’) – in a way it’s a compliment (only big trees get the axe) but in another it’s melancholy [. . .]

  Talking about la côtelette, I had a French translation of ‘Livings’ sent me today. Bloody funny. The first line is

  Je fais des affaires avec les fermiers, dans le genre bains anti-parasites et

  aliments pour bestiaux

  Quite Whitmanesque, isn’t it? ‘Our butler, Starveling’ comes out as ‘Notre maître d’hotel, Laffamé’.42

  His comment that he doesn’t write well, ‘just better than anyone else’, would be vanity from any other poet. But he does genuinely doubt the quality of even his best work. And he is right that, in comparison with the earlier mature volumes, High Windows is something of a ‘ragbag’. The inspiration of many of the poems is heavily mediated and secondary, and the style elusive and elliptical: the work of ‘Larquin’ rather than Larkin. In this final volume however we find the most unpredictably beautiful colours in his oeuvre. ‘Strangeness’ always made more sense to him than his own familiar ‘establishments’, and poems like ‘The Card-Players’, ‘The Old Fools’, ‘Livings II’ and ‘Money’ have the strangeness of unique originality.

  Larkin’s final collection was named after the high-windowed room in which he had lived for most of the last two decades. Now, shortly after Christmas, he learnt that this room was no longer to be his. The University intended to sell off some of its ‘worst properties’, including 32 Pearson Park. In a letter to Anthony Thwaite of 30 December he anticipated his rehousing with grim gusto:

  This was Mr Bleaney’s bungalow,

  Standing in the concrete jungle, o-

  ver-looking an arterial road –

  Here I live with old Toad.43

  Unable to contemplate buying the house in Pearson Park himself, and becoming a landlor
d, he set about finding a new home (if home existed). He was at last forced to own his own establishment and, to make things worse, he chose to live at ground level, overlooking neither a green park nor an arterial road. His class prejudice took him to the most expensive and exclusive residential area of Hull, Newland Park. Despite its name, it is a cul-de-sac in the form of a figure of eight, the outer loop of which issues at two points on to the Cottingham Road, opposite the University. The houses, the earliest dating from the 1880s, but with many later infills, are detached and individually designed, with large gardens (hence ‘Park’). Pressured by the need to vacate his beloved flat, and with no relish for house-hunting, Larkin took the first house to become available, number 105. Built in the 1950s, it lies down a slight slope, and in his day presented to the road a blank white garage door.44 It is at virtually the midpoint of the inner loop, as far away from the main road as possible. However, apart from seclusion, it shared none of the characteristics of the compact rented flat in Pearson Park with its blue windowscape.

  The end of an era, in a larger sense, was foreshadowed at the end of 1973 by a request from the Hull construction company, Fenner, for Larkin to write the words to a cantata to mark the completion of the Humber Bridge, work on which had begun the previous year. This new link with the south would end Hull’s precious isolation which he so valued. The world which had formed him was slipping into the past. On 15 January 1974 he wrote a formal letter to Benjamin Britten asking whether he ‘would be prepared in any circumstances to entertain a suggestion that has recently been made in Hull – namely, the completion of the Humber Bridge in (it is hoped) 1976 should be commemorated by the composition and performance of a choral work by yourself (with words by myself) [. . .] My own part in the project is simply due to the fact that I have lived in this neighbourhood for nearly twenty years, and have written one or two poems about it.’45 However, this joint work by Britain’s greatest poet and composer was not to be. Britten replied through his secretary that, having recently undergone a serious operation, he ‘must very regretfully turn down your request for him to compose the music for a choral work to a text by yourself’.46 Anthony Hedges, Reader in Composition at Hull, whose delightful Ayrshire Serenade had been written in 1969, was commissioned to write the music instead.