PHILIP LARKIN
Letters Home
1936–1977
EDITED BY
JAMES BOOTH
CONTENTS
Title Page
List of Plates
Acknowledgements
The Archive
Introduction
Timeline
Letters Home
1936
1938
1939
1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
1946
1947
1948
1949
1950
1951
1952
1953
1954
1955
1956
1957
1958
1959
1960
1961
1962
1963
1964
1965
1966
1967
1968
1969
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974
1975
1976
1977
Appendix: Letters from Home
Index
Plates
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright
PLATES
Except where noted, all photographs are reproduced by permission of the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Philip Larkin and are copyright © the Estate of Philip Larkin.
Formal portrait of Sydney Larkin, from the late 1920s.
Formal portrait of Eva Larkin, from the late 1920s.
Philip photographing his sister Kitty in the early 1930s.
The Larkins and the Days, c. 1930.
The Larkin family on holiday, Bigbury on Sea, 1932.
Eva photographed by Sydney in Germany, 1934
Sydney and Eva in Schoenau, 1935
Philip at fifteen, North Rhineland-Westphalia (1937).
Fellow students, from Larkin’s Oxford photograph album.
Larkin in Oxford.
Oxford album: ‘J. B. Sutton in battledress’, c. 1941.
Diana Gollancz, c. 1943.
Darned socks, recovered from 105 Newland Park in 2004 after Monica Jones’s death. © James Booth
Larkin at twenty-four. Photograph-postcard sent to Kitty for her birthday, 20 August 1946.
Ruth Bowman, mid-1940s.
Bruce Montgomery.
Monica Jones, c. 1947.
Hilly Amis.
Kingsley Amis.
Eva Larkin, August 1947.
Sydney Larkin, August 1947.
Larkin’s niece Rosemary aged 4½ months, 1947.
Larkin’s sister Kitty with baby Rosemary, 1947.
Entrance to Warwick Hospital, where Sydney died in 1948.
Eva. ‘First day at 12 Dixon Drive’, August 1948.
Larkin’s photograph of Graduation Day at Queen’s University, Belfast, 1951.
Library assistant Molly Sellar, later Terry, 1955.
Leo Japolsky, Lecturer in French at QUB, c. 1954.
George Hartley, mid-1950s.
Betty Mackereth, late 1950s.
Mary Judd (Wrench) with her newborn daughter Helen, 1962.
Philip and Eva with Walter, Kitty and Rosemary Hewett, late 1950s.
‘Blak Pussy’, Kitty’s nightdress case. © Rosemary Parry
Philip with Maeve Brennan, c. 1963.
The Hartleys’ daughters, Laurien and Alison, late 1960s. © Alison Hartley
The Brynmor Jones Library Staff in 1968.
Eva and Nellie on holiday.
Eva, Philip and Nellie, January 1958.
Monica Jones’s Haydon Bridge retreat, c. 1961.
Monica and Philip at Haydon Bridge, 1977.
Eva Larkin in the Conservatory in Pearson Park, Hull, 1961.
Two of the seven portraits of Eva sent with a letter of 1 October 1967.
Philip and Eva with the wicker rabbit ‘Virginia’.
Philip and Eva in the Duke’s Head Hotel, King’s Lynn, July 1971.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am most grateful to Philip Larkin’s literary executors, Anthony Thwaite and Sir Andrew Motion, for their support and patience, and to Lisa Dowdeswell at the Society of Authors, administrator of Larkin’s estate, for her assistance and advice.
I owe particular debts, among those who knew Larkin, to his niece Rosemary Parry (Hewett); Molly Terry (Sellar), who knew Larkin in Belfast; Mary Judd (Wrench), former library assistant in Hull, and her daughter Helen, Larkin’s god-daughter; Larkin’s secretary in Hull, Betty Mackereth; and his Hull friends and colleagues Professor Edwin A. Dawes and John White.
The advice and assistance of the University of Hull archivist, Simon Wilson, and the staff of the Hull History Centre have been invaluable.
Particular points in the text were clarified by: Professor John Kelly, Emeritus Research Fellow in English, St John’s College, Oxford; Anthony Head, Peter Foss and Chris Thomas of the Powys Society; and John White and Don Lee of the Philip Larkin Society.
I am grateful to those who have helped me to improve the introduction, particularly Rosemary Parry, Anthony Thwaite, Ann Thwaite, Andrew Motion, Geoff Weston, Philip Pullen, Janet Brennan, Don Lee and Peter Lodge; also Graham Chesters, the late Ivor Maw, Sheila Jones, Philip Weaver and Suzette Hill. I owe special debts of gratitude to Anthony Thwaite for his constant support, quite beyond the call of duty, and to Rosemary Parry for the insight she provided into Larkin’s family relationships. Finally I must thank my typesetter, Donald Sommerville, for his invaluable suggestions and unwavering attention to detail.
Unpublished material by Larkin is used with the permission of the Larkin Estate. Unpublished material by Sydney and Eva Larkin and by Catherine Hewett (Larkin) is used with the permission of Rosemary Parry (Hewett). Every attempt has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the editor and publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the earliest possible opportunity.
THE ARCHIVE
The letters published here are extracted from various deposits in the University of Hull collection currently held at the Hull History Centre, as follows:
Deposited by Rosemary Parry (Hewett) in 1994
U DLN/1/31 Picture postcard (24 August 1936) from Philip Larkin to his sister Catherine (Kitty) Larkin (later Hewett): in a group of seven cards sent from Germany between 1933 and 1939, from Sydney to Eva Larkin, Sydney to Kitty (3), Sydney to Philip, Kitty to Philip and Philip to Kitty.
U DLN/3/2–3 Eleven letters from Philip to his sister Catherine: February 1941–September 1943, together with a telegram of 7 July 1943 (‘IT SEEMS I HAVE GOT A FIRST’).
U DLN/3/5–7 Fifteen letters and eight picture postcards from Philip to his niece, Rosemary Hewett (later Parry) (1960–83), including correspondence of 1966 concerning a visit to Warwick University where she was then an undergraduate studying English and European Literature.
U DLN/3/8 A letter from Philip to his sister Catherine dated 2 May 1947 welcoming the birth of her daughter Rosemary, together with two picture postcards and ten letters from Larkin to Catherine dated 1972–82. The file is devoted mainly to correspondence with Berrystead Nursing Home, and legal papers concerned with the sale of 21 York Road after Eva’s death.
U DLN/4/5 Picture postcard sent to Catherine Larkin on 20 August 1946, showing a portrait of Philip.
Deposited by Rosemary Parry (Hewett) in 2008
U DLN/6 Approximately 4,000 letters, lettercards, postcards and picture postcards written by Philip to his parents (1938–48)
, and later to his widowed mother Eva (1948–77); with fourteen letters to his sister Catherine (dated 1940–4).
U DLN/7 Approximately4,000 letters, lettercards, postcards and picture postcards written to Philip by Sydney and Eva, separately or together (December 1943–February 1948), and later by the widowed Eva (1948–77); with two letters from Catherine to Philip from 1944.
INTRODUCTION
On the morning of Sunday 13 September 1964, Philip Larkin sat in his flat at 32 Pearson Park, Hull, writing a polite, ceremonious letter to his mother, ‘My very dear old creature’:
Once again I am sitting in my bedroom in a patch of sunlight embarking on my weekly task of ‘writing home’. I suppose I have been doing this now for 24 years! on and off, you know: well, I am happy to be able to do so, and I only hope my effusions are of some interest to you on all the different Monday mornings when they have arrived.
His ‘writing home’, as he notes with his customary precision, began exactly twenty-four years earlier in October 1940, when he started his first term at St John’s College, Oxford. He sees the correspondence as continuous since then, but his phrase ‘on and off, you know’ conceals a major discontinuity. For the first seven and a half years ‘home’ had been a household of two or three: his father, Sydney Larkin, City Treasurer of Coventry (‘Pop’); his mother, Eva (‘Mop’); and also on occasion his sister, Catherine (‘Kitty’), ten years older than him, who became a teacher of art and design in Leicester, and married in 1944. This phase ended abruptly with the death of Sydney early in 1948. There followed two years during which the poet and his mother lived together and the correspondence was at a halt. The second phase of the correspondence began when Philip departed for a new post in Belfast in September 1950, and lasted for twenty-seven years until Eva’s death in November 1977 at the age of ninety-one. From this phase the letters which survive are almost exclusively those between mother and son. Kitty seems to have destroyed her letters from Philip after 1947 and only a small handful survive from 1969–82.
Larkin’s letters home make a consistent thread through his life. From the beginning, he would usually write, when not living at home, at a rate of more than one letter a week. From the 1940s the archive contains between 59 and 73 letters, lettercards or postcards per year, some very long. For most of the second phase, between 1950 and 1972, he wrote a regular Sunday letter to his mother, and/or a letter or card during the week. From this phase the archive preserves between 77 and 111 letters per year. Then, between February 1972 and her final months, Philip wrote to Eva most days, sometimes twice on the same day. There are, for instance, 277 letters from 1972. Of Larkin’s nine major correspondences1 this is by far the largest in volume and most extensive in duration. It dwarfs the others, being twice as extensive as that with Monica Jones. From 1938 to 1977 there are about 4,000 letters or cards home from Philip, and 4,000 replies from Eva. Philip writes almost always with a fountain pen and never types his letters. Eva similarly writes with a pen, occasionally a ballpoint.2 The handwriting of both is clearly legible and, with few exceptions, both begin each letter with the full date: day, month and year.
Only a fraction of the archive could be included in this selection. In all, 607 letters or cards written by Philip are represented, either complete or in extracts: 82 addressed jointly to ‘Dear fambly’ or ‘My dear Mop and Pop’, 485 to Eva, 20 to Sydney and 20 to Kitty. The selection is to an extent arbitrary. References to literary matters, and to emotional relationships, are included, while repetitive accounts of the weather and familiar routines or responses to Eva’s news about relatives are cut back. But inevitably many letters of interest, and many amusing drawings, have been excluded. To allow the poet’s correspondents to be heard in their own voices, and to give context to his letters, an appendix, ‘Letters from Home’, is included, comprising one joint letter from Eva and Sydney, ten letters from Eva, seven letters from Sydney and two from Kitty.
The main strand in the correspondence is the humdrum and domestic (‘Many thanks for the load of beautiful lilies’, ‘How long in minutes do you pummel & squeeze a woolly?’ ‘how exciting about the lavatory!’) However the story they tell is psychologically fascinating. When Anthony Thwaite quailed at the sight of all the shoe-boxes full of envelopes, and decided to exclude the family correspondence from the Selected Letters (1992), he still had no difficulty in producing a bulky volume covering every aspect of Larkin’s literary and personal life. But the letters he omitted constitute Larkin’s most intimate and committed correspondence, and take us to the tragic core of the poet’s life. His love for his mother is matched by his sense of obligation to ensure her well-being. He wrote on 13 February 1965: ‘Nothing I can give you will equal all you have done for me. I only wish I had achieved a more satisfactory position in life. And of course I ought to find some solution for you.’ Here we find a clue, perhaps, as to why, as he put it in ‘Love Again’, ‘it never worked for me’.
The continuous series of family letters begins with Philip’s arrival in Oxford on 9 October 1940. The letters are addressed firstly to the initial family home, ‘Penvorn’, 1 Manor Road, Coventry,3 then, after the blitz and consequent dispersal, and ‘near-fall of the House of Penvorn’,4 to the new home which Sydney bought in June 1941: 73 Coten End, Warwick. For six and a half years it was to Coten End that the young poet wrote; and it was to an attic room in this house that he returned during vacations. Our view of Larkin’s early home life is perhaps unduly coloured by his autobiographical fragment in the first pages of his fifth poetry workbook, written probably in Belfast in 1953, a time when he was particularly concerned to distance himself psychologically from his family: ‘I never left the house without a sense of walking into a cooler, cleaner, saner and pleasanter atmosphere.’5 The affectionate tone of his letters of the 1940s contradicts this sour recollection. A card of 10 November 1941 ends ‘Love, love, love, Philip’. On 27 May 1947 he wrote to his parents: ‘Once again I have to thank you for a very happy weekend. What struck me this time was really how young you both are – not young in the sense of silly, but young in keen response to things.’
Oxford was a high point.6 He was exempted from military service because of his poor eyesight, and completed the full three-year course, achieving the first-class degree which gave him a secure self-confidence for the rest of his life. But despite this success he had no idea what to do next, except to become a writer, and it was not until after four months ‘sitting at home quietly writing Jill’ that he was prompted by a letter from the Ministry of Labour to apply for the post of Librarian in Wellington, Shropshire.7 His letters from his time at Wellington, beginning at the end of November 1943, breathe disappointment at talent wasted, but also show him rising with determination to the challenges of the job, improving the library’s holdings and facilities, and coping with a growing number of borrowers.8 But he was eager to improve his position, and after three years he gained appointment, in 1946, to the post of Deputy Librarian at University College Leicester.9 Throughout his time in Oxford and Wellington, and during his first year at Leicester, he wrote regularly to ‘Pop’ and ‘Mop’. Then, late in 1947, a little more than a year into his appointment at Leicester, his father became ill, and died on Good Friday, 26 March, 1948, at the age of sixty-three. The first phase of the family correspondence was at an end.
Despite the starkly contrasted personalities of Larkin’s parents, the shared ‘family’ identity of the letters of the 1940s is striking.10 Though Philip addressed letters concerned with money or career advice to Sydney alone, and wrote separately to Kitty in Leicester, most letters are, as he writes, ‘common property’, intended to be read by the family as a whole. Numerous envelopes are addressed to ‘Mr and Mrs Sydney Larkin’. An envelope directed to ‘Sydney Larkin Esq.’ will contain a letter beginning ‘Dear Mop and Pop’. While addressing his mother Philip will direct questions at Sydney, or engage in asides (‘Tell Pop that …’, ‘Pop would be interested to know …’) There are hints that Eva may have read
their son’s letters out loud to her husband. Similarly, it was normal for his father and mother to place their replies in a single envelope, even on occasion to write on the same sheet. Their marriage was not as dysfunctional as it has seemed to some observers. When it came to parenting their son they made an effective team. Philip diagnosed a common weakness of temperament which kept them united: ‘My father was intensely shy, inhibited, not robust, devoid of careless sensual accuracy (though not of humour), and I don’t think he did well to choose a wife of the same pattern.’11
Family unity extended to cultural and social attitudes. Though, in writing to his parents, Philip is understandably reticent about the women in his life, the letters show no sign of the conflict between generations which is so familiar an element in the early lives of other writers, John Betjeman and Kingsley Amis for instance. There is never a hint of serious censure or disapproval from either Eva or Sydney. This must be partly a result of the intense affection of parents for a son born late, when his father was thirty-eight and his mother thirty-six. His sister Kitty remarked: ‘Really, Philip could do no wrong in his father’s eyes. Or his mother’s. They worshipped him.’12 But they were also unusually open-minded. Moreover Sydney’s restless enthusiasm for books made their home a stimulating environment for a would-be writer. As Larkin later noted, his school friends ‘were brought up to read Galsworthy and Chesterton as the apex of modern literature, and to think of Somerset Maugham “a bit hot”’.13 In contrast his father filled their house with works by Hardy, Shaw, Samuel Butler, Wilde, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley and Katherine Mansfield. In a letter of 28 February 1944, Sydney mentions that he is reaching the end of volume five of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He then goes on to mention Carlyle and the Koran which he compares with Law’s eighteenth-century Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. Elsewhere he gives his verdict on a novel by Agatha Christie (‘silly as all crime stories are’), the Letters of Katherine Mansfield and Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel, The Unlit Lamp.
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