Philip Larkin

by Philip Larkin

  D. H. Lawrence is a constant reference point. On his arrival in Oxford Philip tells his father that he has seen a manuscript letter by Lawrence for sale in Blackwell’s. He buys Lawrence’s Apropos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, commenting: ‘I don’t think we have this, have we?’ He gives his sister and his father amusing accounts of his attempt to order the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the volume of Lawrence’s paintings in the Bodleian: ‘I couldn’t get them, however, without being engaged upon a “study” of Lawrence. Anyway, I preserved a chilly air of hauteur and remarked that the restrictions appeared singularly childish. They aren’t, actually, but I was rather disgusted’ (to Sydney, 8 March 1941). A year later, on 15 May 1942, he joked to Eva:

  You might tell Pop that a friend of mine found an Obelisk Press Edition (i.e. unexpurgated) of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ behind the bookcase in his digs, and I am impatiently waiting for him (and his wife) to finish it. ‘Mine eyes have seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord.’

  It is very difficult to imagine any other son of his generation writing to his mother in such a tone.

  Most crucially, mother and father followed their son’s literary ventures with keen interest. Sydney would ask for Philip’s literary opinion in a tone of respect, and pasted a cutting of his first published poem ‘Ultimatum’14 into his diary. Later, in 1947, Eva describes how she and Sydney pounced on a review of Larkin’s novel A Girl in Winter in the Sunday Times which had dropped through their letterbox: ‘Daddy peered over my shoulder and spotted it first and said “read it out to me.” Well, I began to read it, but it was so marvellous that I had great difficulty in reading to the end – in fact both of us became very deeply moved. I consider it the most wonderful achievement, and am very, very proud’ (3 March 1947). She added a halo to a self-ironic drawing of the young writer puffed up with pride which Philip had drawn in his previous letter home. Sydney had sent his own, brief ‘hearty congratulations’ a day earlier.

  For many readers a key point of interest will be the light these letters throw on the character of Sydney Larkin and his impact on his son. Though Sydney was notorious among his colleagues for his right-wing eccentricity, he was a public figure of some distinction, nationally respected for his achievement in balancing Coventry’s books by his farsighted reforms. In 1936 he had been elected to the presidency of the Institute of Municipal Treasurers and Accountants, and later his work as chair of the wartime National Savings Committee helped to earn him the OBE. He maintained his reputation by the difficult route of rigorous integrity. In February 1944 he wrote to his son:

  I am at present about to engage in a battle with the Labour party and the Council on a question of ‘dishonesty’ in expenses on the part of a Councillor. The trouble in this matter is that Councillors stick together on matters of this sort but I have ‘right’ on my side. Local Government is made up (or should be) of this sort of thing. Love S. L.

  He termed himself, as his son recalled, ‘a Conservative Anarchist’, meaning, Philip explained, that although ‘he consented to do his part in maintaining the fabric of society he despised it in his heart and wished it at the devil’.15

  Now that his twenty-volume diary, ‘The Fools’ War’, written between 3 September 1939 and 1 October 1946, is available,16 Sydney’s character can be better estimated. His enjoyment of his visits to international accountancy conferences in 1930s Berlin, together with holidays in Germany, had given him an uncritical admiration for the early Nazi achievement in re-establishing the German economy and national confidence. On the first page of his diary he gives a crude version of history in accordance with Nazi propaganda:

  The trouble arose through the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, who was determined to put Germany on her feet, and to his constant success in this direction from 1933 to the present date. This roused the jealousy of the British people who were also annoyed at the doctrines of the National-Socialist Party in Germany which were directed against all subversive and foreign elements, notably the communists and the Jews […] Those who had visited Germany were much impressed by the good government and order of the country as by the cleanliness and good behaviour of the people – both in marked contrast to our own country.17

  His opinions, however, were not predictable. The anarchist element in his conservatism made him a champion of individual conscience against authority. He was outraged by the tribunals set up to decide on cases of conscientious objection, which he felt were biased towards religion and designed to catch out sincere objectors with ‘trick’ questions. On the other hand he was crudely anti-Semitic. His diary is scattered with newspaper cuttings about British Jews hoarding gold instead of handing it in to the authorities as required. Even after the revelations concerning the Holocaust at the end of the war, Sydney never acknowledged Nazi barbarism. Instead he chose a moral high ground consistent with his prejudices, sniping at the verdicts of the ‘dummy court set up at Nuremburg’:

  The prosecutors – chiefly ourselves, Russia and United States – are also the judges […] the prosecution-and-judges are themselves guilty of […] burning alive hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children in Germany and Japan [and] murdering in Russia millions of opponents of the communist regime of their country.18

  These political views are, however, quite absent from the family letters. In his relationship with his son, Sydney was the opposite of a fascist bully. Despite his racism, he had taken out a subscription on his schoolboy son’s behalf to the Chicago jazz magazine Down Beat, and even bought him a drum kit, a sacrifice of domestic calm which even liberal-minded parents would have baulked at. The letters show that he respected his son’s intellectual independence. And Philip showed no sign of adopting his father’s politics, commenting in a letter to his school friend Jim Sutton that ‘the German system is, from all accounts, much more evil than last time’.19 The young Philip’s attitude towards his father is seen in his brilliant drawing of his family in a letter to Jim Sutton of 6 September 1939.20 ‘Pop’ appears as an endearingly pathetic figure, leaning back in his chair, thinning hair on view, holding a newspaper with the headline ‘WAR’. Flinging out his arm, he defends Hitler and spouts a farrago of Lawrentian rhetoric about ‘the end of civilisation’. Eva sits knitting opposite him, worrying about what the family ought to have for lunch and hoping that ‘Hitler falls on a banana skin … by the way I only washed four shirts today.’ Later, when Philip mentions to his parents, in his letter of 7 March 1943, that he has inadvertently chosen the ‘Official Star of David’ for his bookplate, he ostentatiously declines the opportunity to echo his father’s anti-Semitism. Instead, with a moral complexity, not dissimilar to his father’s, he turns himself into a hypothetical victim of race prejudice: ‘On the wave of Anti Semitism that is almost bound to come after the war I may be hung up on the nearest lamppost.’

  In some ways the example Sydney set his son was unambiguously positive. In his account of the blitz on Coventry in ‘The Fools’ War’ it is clear, reading between the lines, that Sydney played a leading role in the firefighting. But, almost perversely, he avoids any hint of self-dramatisation:

  On the night of the 14th November Coventry was heavily bombed and the centre of the city destroyed. I was in the Council House all night and although the whole town was in flames the Council House was only hit at extreme ends by high explosive bombs, while the 8 or 10 incendiary bombs which fell on the roof were dealt with by the staff volunteers. The town remained in a state of chaos for a fortnight at the end of which period fires were still smouldering. Gas, electricity, water, sewerage were all disconnected and transport thrown out of gear by reason of impassable streets.21

  This is the language of a City Treasurer, dispassionate, conveying the facts with an eye to future action. The first-hand objectivity of Philip’s account of his experiences in wartime Oxford owes something to his father’s example. His undergraduate letters show little of the self-involved narcissism one might expect of a youthful poet; and when they do show
it, it is subjected to brisk irony.

  Larkin also learned from his father his meticulous grammar, spelling and syntax. Sydney took an obsessive interest in the history of words, and pursued ultra-correct usage. He was very clear on the distinction between ‘should’ and ‘would’, looked askance at the use of ‘implement’ as a verb, and queried whether his son’s ‘orientate’ should not, more correctly, be ‘orient’ (‘In your letter this morning, you mention that death is lonely and that to death we should all orientate’; 8 September 1944). In one of his earliest letters an embarrassed Philip accepts his father’s rebuke that he has addressed a letter to him with an incorrect epistolary formula: ‘Sorry I called you “S. Larkin” – I could have sworn I put “Esqu.” in’. But he cannot resist the impulse to challenge his father’s pedantry: ‘Anyway, I’ve half a mind to address this to the “Lord High City Keeper of ye Moneybags” just to nark you’ (15 October 1940).

  But Philip was impressed by his father’s terse, elliptical style. It prompted him to an elaborate mythification which must owe something to W. B. Yeats’s ‘The Fisherman’. With a faint note of impertinence he takes the liberty of appraising his father’s personality:

  You know, reading your letters through, I am coming to the conclusion that you have a powerful style! You sound utterly detached, cold, impersonal: as if you were writing in an old farmhouse on a windy and stone littered moor, far from any human noise or movement. Only the wind answers your sentences: ‘I find that the days go rapidly by and I have not answered your last letter’; ‘I am sorry you have a cold and can offer no remedy’; ‘You are none the worse for knowing nothing about the war. We don’t either’; ‘It is usual to put Mr. or even “Esq.” in case of public officials’. Then you fold the parchment, seal it with the old heirloom of a seal, and put it for the carrier to take when he calls in two days’ time. Then you sink into your austere, wooden chair by the fire and listen to the wind around the high chimney pots or watch the racing clouds through the tall windows.

  (12 November 1940)

  Amusement and respect are blended with intimate affection.

  Philip’s parents worshipped him, but in different ways. Sydney required his son to earn his respect and was concerned to win his respect in return. It is no wonder that Philip stammered badly from the age of four. Eva’s love, in contrast, was unconditional. Dominant though Sydney’s personality was, if the correspondence had been left in his hands all that would survive would be a string of short, pithy interchanges. It is Eva, with her detailed accounts of daily events and unfailing interest in her son’s activities, who sustains the momentum. It is as if a gender theorist had created the letters to illustrate the performative extremes of masculine self-command on the one hand, feminine domesticity on the other. As Philip commented: ‘My mother constantly toiled at “running the house”, a task that was always beyond her, even with the aid of a resident maid and a daily help.’22 In a joint letter from mother and father of 7 February 1944 Eva gives an account of washing clothes and reflects on how her son might make certain of getting enough bread at meal times in his lodgings. She continues with a sad reference to a neighbour’s son who has been reported missing in the conflict. Sydney then intervenes to advise his son to reclaim a rebate on his first year’s subscription to the National Association of Local Government Officers, since he signed on late in the year and so is owed 2/6d. Eva then concludes the letter: ‘I think I have no more to add except that I am now going to darn some socks. Much love from both. Mop.’ A hint of defiant resistance is audible in her tone (‘Well, I hope Hitler falls on a banana skin’; ‘I think I have no more to add except that I am now going to darn some socks.’)

  The degree to which Philip adopted Eva’s attitudes is startling. She is as significant an influence on his style of letter writing as his father. On 7 March 1943 he boasts about the care he has taken over his socks: ‘I darned 2 pairs last Tuesday with great satisfaction. Only not having any khaki wool I had to darn in grey.’ On 23 February 1947 he writes from Leicester: ‘I bought two pairs of socks yesterday […] they are pure wool and therefore, Miss Sutcliffe tells me, will wear through in no time. She advises me to strengthen the heels & toes by preliminary darning: do you advise this?’ Nor is this influence confined to the 1940s. The darning or washing of socks recur as leitmotivs from the beginning of the correspondence to the end. On 18 July 1972, shortly after entering Berrystead Nursing Home, Eva wrote to her son: ‘I got all your socks out this morning and mended one before breakfast.’ On 14 December 1975 Philip told his mother: ‘last night I mended eleven pairs of socks’.23

  In a letter of 18 November 1940 addressed to ‘Dear fambly’ describing his visit to Coventry with his friend Noel Hughes after the blitz, Larkin adopted an indicative concision which his father would have appreciated. ‘We heard the blasting all afternoon. Hughes’ house was standing but empty: however, we got some bread & cheese at a neighbouring house, & then visited the Riders’. From these sources we gained some impression of the chaotic state of things.’ But later in the letter his tone becomes more complex and literary as he depicts himself holding forth over dinner ‘to an astonished commoners’ table’ – ‘By God … Just back from Coventry … What a sight … pass the peas … any factories hit? … Ha, ha! … all be out of production for a month … blowing up the city … streets full of broken glass … pass the potatoes …’ He then wrenches gear again and imitates his mother’s domestic, fussy tone: ‘Remarks to Mop: No marmite yet. We subsist on weird & peculiar pots of fishpaste (2 for 5½d) in all flavours. Anchovy is the favourite […] I broke the handle from a tea-cup the other day, unfortunately. This was the first breakage of any sort we have had. We lost the strainer the other day, but on questioning the Scout found it had only been mislaid. It is still the best thing we have.’ In addressing Eva he gives the breaking of a tea-cup handle the same dramatic impact as the dynamiting of ruins in Coventry.

  Larkin’s father did not bother to comment on the drawings with which Philip adorned his letters home. His mother, however, responded readily to their ingenuous frivolity. The image of himself as a ‘creature’ formed itself as a distraction from the stress of revision for his final examination in 1943, and in the first instance it was his undergraduate friend Diana Gollancz who inspired him.24 Eva was enchanted by the drawings: ‘How I do love your “creatures”. It is amazing how each one conveys so much meaning in such few lines – and they are all the same and yet have such different expressions, and all are so full of action’ (14 February 1944). She tried to emulate him, painstakingly drafting images of herself with long hair in pencil before inking them in. But she was intimidated by her son’s mastery and her own drawings remain few. Larkin will have included similar drawings in the lost letters of the late 1940s to his fiancée, Ruth Bowman, who saw herself as a cat, and he was later to develop images of Monica Jones and himself as rabbits and Maeve Brennan as a mouse. But it is in the ‘creature’ drawings in the letters to his mother that his sketches are at their most varied and adventurous.

  Kitty, the third correspondent included in this volume, has attracted little comment until now. In a letter to Sutton in April 1943, the twenty-year-old Larkin traced the impact of his parents on both himself and his sister: ‘I realized that I contain both of them […] It intrigues me to know that a thirty-years struggle is being continued in me, and in my sister too. In her it has reached a sort of conclusion – my father winning. Pray the Lord my mother is superior in me.’25 His wording is misleading, seeming to imply that Kitty has become like their father, when Kitty was in fact very much her mother’s daughter.26 He actually means that their father has bullied Kitty into internalising his low estimation of her (‘winning’). Eva, their mother, in contrast, had succeeded in stubborn domestic resistance, maintaining her emotional space in the face of her husband’s disregard; hence Philip’s wish that his mother should be ‘superior’ in him.

  In his autobiographical sketch of 1953 Philip accused his father of cont
empt for Kitty: ‘His first child, my sister, he thought little better than a mental defective, who was showing regrettably few signs of marrying and clearing out.’ This is highly coloured and perhaps not fair to Sydney, though it must be significant that, after the crisis of the Coventry blitz on 14/15 November 1940, Sydney sent a telegram of reassurance to his son in Oxford but not to his daughter in Leicester.27 It is evident that the mutual respect and affection between father and son never existed between father and daughter. Philip wrote that ‘the ten years’ difference in our ages made me for practical purposes an only child’.28 This was no doubt increasingly the case, particularly after Kitty moved out of the family home. But in the earliest years Philip and his sister were inevitably close. When he was five, Kitty was fifteen. Kitty told her daughter, Rosemary, that she had ‘really brought him up when my grandmother wasn’t able to cope’.29

  Though Philip shows something of his father’s impatience with Kitty, he also has sympathy with her plight.

  My sister, whose qualities of literal-mindedness and fantasy-spinning had infuriated my father until he made her life a misery, did not have many friends and endured, I should say, a pallid existence until she took up art, and even then day classes at Midland Art School did not lead to the excitements they should have.30

  While we seem to have virtually all the letters from Philip to his parents, only twenty-nine of his early letters and cards to Kitty survive, dated between 1936 and 1947. Twenty-two of them are from 1940–1.31 They show Philip at his most empathetic, praising his sister’s ideas and asking her advice on artistic and theatrical matters. Just as he imitated his father and mother’s styles, it seems he copied Kitty’s florid handwriting on his envelopes and in his signature. He thanks her for ‘your letter and elaborate envelope’, and tells her that he enjoyed one of her letters ‘very much, notepaper included’. He asks for her view on his own experiments: ‘My idea with the orange & red paper was to use orange paper & red envelopes & vice versa. What is your opinion on this?’ (6 March 1941). On 24 October 1941 he tells their mother that Kitty had written to him ‘on her swagger crested paper in answer to one of my orange telegrams’. His letters project a high-spirited aestheticism and artiness. He eagerly looks forward to the shantung silk tie she has bought him for Christmas: ‘You will have my tie by now, I suppose. I like ’em subtle, sister. Wheel ’em in and lay ’em out’ (12 December 1940). He boasts: ‘I have bought a pair of crimson trousers – dark crimson. They are the only pair in the University’ (15 May 1941). The experiments with his sister’s name in the earliest letters show a teasing intimacy. She is addressed in various letters as ‘K’, ‘Kit’, ‘Kath’, ‘Kathryn’, ‘Katherine’ and ‘Katharine’ (‘the best spelling don’t you think?’).32 (Later he settles back on ‘Kitty’.) The various forms of the name recur in his later writing. It is surely highly significant that the hypersensitive, vulnerable refugee heroine of A Girl in Winter is called Katherine. Moreover, in ‘Dublinesque’ (1970) the name ‘Kitty, or Katy’ echoes down the streets of a dreamlike Dublin, ‘As if the name meant once / All love, all beauty.’