Inside Story (9780593318300)

by Amis, Martin

  But the Third Reich immediately presented itself as a regime of book-burners. Old Syd lamely admired Germany’s ‘efficiency’ and its ‘office methods’ (in fact the Nazi administration was always drowning in chaos). Did these supposed pluses outweigh the Reichstag Fire terror, the Jewish boycott, the gangsterish purge of the Brownshirts, the Nuremberg Laws, the state-led pogrom known as Kristallnacht, the rapes of Czechoslovakia and Poland, and the Second World War?

  Although the discriminatory legislation was already in place, the summer of 1936 – when père et fils paid their maiden visit – saw a brief intermission for Germany’s Jews. It was the year of the Berlin Olympics; and so the country Potemkinised itself for the occasion. Formerly there had been printed or painted signs, in hotels and restaurants and suchlike (NO JEWS OR DOGS) but also on the approach roads of various towns and villages, saying JEWS NOT WELCOME HERE. These were tastefully removed for the Games (the first ever to be televised). Afterwards, of course, the signs were re-emplaced.

  It is said that Sydney had on his Coventry mantelpiece a moustachioed figurine which, at the touch of a button, gave the familiar salute. There was evidently nothing in the fascist spirit that Sydney didn’t warm to: the menacing pageantry, the sweaty togetherness (he

  ‘liked the jolly singing in the beer cellars’), the puerile kitsch of the doll in the living room.

  A sense of danger, a queer, bristling feeling of uncanny danger

  In a diary entry for October 1934 Thomas Mann praised the ‘admirably insightful letter by Lawrence, about Germany and its return to barbarism – [written] when Hitler was hardly even heard of…’ D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Letter from Germany’ was published, posthumously, in the New Statesman; but it was written six years earlier, in 1928, when the author was forty-two (and already dying).

  Now Lawrence harboured many deplorable opinions and prejudices, including a cheaply unexamined strain of anti-Semitism: ‘I hate Jews,’ he wrote in a business letter; and even in the fiction Jewry is his automatic figure for cupidity and sharp practice. Indeed, the critic John Carey, in his essay ‘D. H. Lawrence’s Doctrine’, concludes: ‘the final paradox of Lawrence’s thought is that, separated from his…wonderfully articulate being, it becomes the philosophy of any thug or moron.’

  But that articulacy, that penetration, could sometimes approach the miraculous. Lawrence spoke German and was married to a German (Frieda von Richthofen); and he had a real grasp of the central divide in German modernity: the divide between the tug to the west and the tug to the east, between ‘civilisation’ and ‘culture’, between progressivism and reaction, between democracy and dictatorship (for a retrospective, see Michael Burleigh’s Germany Turns Eastwards). Sydney went there in the late 1930s and had no sense that anything was wrong – at a time when most visitors found its militarised somnambulism ‘terrifying’. Lawrence went there in 1928 and showed us what the human antennae are capable of:

  It is as if the life had retreated eastward. As if the German life were slowly ebbing away from contact with western Europe, ebbing to the deserts of the east…The moment you are in Germany, you know. It feels empty, and, somehow menacing…

  [Germany] is very different from what it was two and a half years ago [1926], when I was here. Then it was still open to Europe. Then it still looked to Europe, for a sort of reconciliation. Now that is over. The inevitable, mysterious barrier, and the great leaning of the German spirit is once more eastward, towards Tartary.

  …Returning yet again to the destructive East, that produced Atilla…But at night you feel strange things stirring in the darkness, strange feelings stirring out of their still-unconquered Black Forest. You stiffen your backbone and listen to the night. There is a sense of danger…Out of the very air comes a sense of danger, a queer, bristling feeling of uncanny danger.

  1928, not 1933. Not 1939, and not 1940 – by which time the exiled historian Sebastian Haffner was writing Germany: Jekyll and Hyde, where he came to the following conclusion:

  This point must be grasped because otherwise nothing can be understood. And all partial acquaintance is worthless and misleading unless it is thoroughly digested and absorbed. It is this: Nazism is no ideology but a magic formula which attracts a definite type of men. It is a form of ‘characterology’ not ideology. To be a Nazi means to be a type of human being.

  And the National Socialist Weltanschauung ‘has no other aim than to collect and rear this species’: ‘Those who, without pretext, can torture and beat, hunt and murder, are expected to gather together and be bound by the iron chain of common crime…’

  And this is the ethos Sydney Larkin ‘admired’ or was ‘really batty about’; this is the ethos his son cautiously ‘disliked’.

  And yet Philip Larkin, despite the crash in his reputation when the Letters and the Life came out (‘racism’, ‘misogyny’), would deservedly – and inevitably – emerge as ‘Britain’s best-loved poet since the war’. It was a war, by the way, in which he played no part. In December 1941 PL was summoned to his medical. According to Andrew Motion, he ‘made no secret of his hopes that he would fail’. And he did fail. Eyesight.

  The PL of this period – a flashy dresser and a charismatic talent who for a while felt socially bold – was trying to sound insouciant; but he was at all other times a sincere patriot, and so he felt humbled and unmanned and above all confused. Floundering and posturing to the last, showing every attribute of youth except physical courage (and now seeking safety in numbers), PL wrote, ‘I was fundamentally – like the rest of my friends – uninterested in the war.’

  Eva, Philip, Sydney, Kitty

  Like the rest of his friends? Did he mean the ones who were in the army? Kingsley, for instance, who passed through France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany (in 1944–5), was interested in the war. For one thing he was interested in surviving it; and as a Communist as well as a Britisher, he would have been ideologically and emotionally interested in winning it. (Kingsley was trained as an infantryman, but he was destined for the Signals and he never fired a shot.) In his version of Machtpolitik, KA hoped for the shoring up of Stalin. Now reread the three quotes with which this section began, and then try to evade the likelihood that PL hoped for the shoring up of Hitler.

  Q: What could have steered the tremulous undergraduate into this morbid and forsaken cul-de-sac? A: Having a father like Sydney (and being very young).

  When it was all so obvious. Even the most reactionary writer in the English canon, Evelyn Waugh, saw the elementary simplicity of September 1939. As Guy Crouchback, the hero of the WW2 trilogy Sword of Honour, puts it:

  He expected his country to go to war in a panic, for the wrong reasons or for no reason at all, with the wrong allies, in pitiful weakness. But now, splendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off…Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle.

  This much had long been clear to everybody: Naziism meant war (and for its enemies a just war par excellence). And, when war came, what type of young man would scorn a place in it – any place whatever?

  Tyrants of mood don’t hug and kiss

  Sydney Larkin was ‘unrepentant’ about many things, including his views on women. ‘Women are often dull, sometimes dangerous and always dishonourable’ was a personal aphorism he cherrypicked for his diary. And this was another set of attitudes that his son, as a tyro adult, found himself dutifully echoing: ‘All women are stupid beings’; they ‘repel me inconceivably. They are shits.’

  Larkin Sr made his daughter’s ‘life a misery’, and over the years reduced his wife, Eva, to a martyred drizzle of anxiety and timorousness. ‘My mother’, PL wrote, ‘is nervy, cowardly, obsessional, boring, grumbling, irritating, self pitying.’ Sydney’s life was short; Eva’s was long. ‘My mother,’ PL resumed, decades later, ‘not content with being motionless, deaf and speechle
ss, is now going blind. That’s what you get for not dying, you see.’ Nevertheless, PL was thoroughgoingly filial, as we’ll see.

  In his office Sydney was always keen for a ‘cuddle’ with female subordinates, ‘not missing an opportunity to put an arm round a secretary’, as an assistant reminisced.*4 He was in addition the kind of patriarch, dourly typical of mid-century England, who set the emotional barometer for those around him – for all those within range.

  * * *

  —————

  As a child I had several friends with this kind of father. They were the mood tyrants. Brooding, frustrated, rancorous, intransigent, their will to power reduced to the mere furtherance of domestic unease. And these household gods all held sway over the same kind of household – the prized but intimidated sons, the warily self-effacing daughters, the mutely tiptoeing spouses, the cringeing, flinching pets…

  Aged thirteen, after a weekend spent in the rain-lashed bungalow of just such a mood tyrant (the father of my best friend Robin), I cycled home to Madingley Road, Cambridge, parked my bike in one of the two outbuildings that housed our Alsatian, Nancy, and her recent litter, and our donkey, Debbie, then entered by the back door, stepping over one of our eldest cats, Minnie. Going in, I felt – I now suppose – like PL going out:

  When I try to tune into my childhood, the dominant emotions I pick up are, overwhelmingly, fear and boredom…I never left the house without the sense of walking into a cooler, cleaner, saner and pleasanter atmosphere.

  But a happy child is no better than a gerbil or a goldfish when it comes to counting its blessings, and as I sauntered into the convivial kitchen I experienced no rush of gratitude towards my warmly humorous and high-spirited parents. I was home: that was all. I was in the place where – while it lasted – I was unthinkingly happy.

  ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’ This is the most famous line in Larkin’s corpus – partly, no doubt, because it was a near-universal tenet of the time (and seemed to be the starting point of all psychiatry). In principle Philip agreed that ‘blaming one’s parents’ led nowhere, or rather led everywhere (‘If one starts blaming one’s parents, well, one never stops!’); but he went on:

  [Samuel] Butler said that anyone who was still worrying about his parents at 35 was a fool, but he certainly didn’t forget them himself, and I think the influence they exert is enormous…What one doesn’t learn from one’s parents one never learns, or learns awkwardly, like a mining MP taking lessons in table manners or the middle aged Arnold Bennett learning to dance…I never remember my parents making a single spontaneous gesture of affection towards each other…

  With PL, in any event, fondness failed to flow. ‘I never got the hang of sex anyway,’ he gauntly clarified in another letter to Monica Jones. ‘If it were announced that all sex wd cease as from midnight on 31 December, my way of life wouldn’t change at all.’ That was written on December 15, 1954. ‘Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three,’ runs Larkin’s most famous couplet; but for him and Monica it was already withering away – in their early thirties. And yet they trundled on until 1985, when Philip died, aged sixty-three: his final hommage to Sydney.

  PL never saw his parents hug and kiss. I and my siblings often saw our parents hug and kiss (and we responded with a mid-century version of what my younger daughters now say when they see their parents hug and kiss: ‘Get a room’). But as I tittered, and blushed (blushed hotly and richly), a necessary transfusion was somehow taking place; I was seeing my mother and father as autonomous individuals, going through the rituals of their own affinity – their own affair. A child axiomatically needs to be the recipient of love; and a child also needs to witness it.

  * * *

  —————

  ‘I read your Larkin piece. Twice,’ I said on the phone (New York–Washington, in the spring of 2011).*5 ‘Full of good things.’ And I listed some of them. ‘God, though, he’s an impenetrable case, don’t you find?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. The poems, they’re as clear as day, they’re…pellucid, but humanly he’s a labyrinth. You get lost in him.’

  ‘That famous aside of his, you quote it – deprivation is for me what daffodils were to Wordsworth. So he liked deprivation because it stirred his muse.’

  ‘Yes, and sometimes making you wonder whether he went looking for it.’

  ‘But he means romantic deprivation. And how d’you go looking for that?’

  ‘Especially when you’ve already got it. No one’s that dedicated. And anyway, in this instance I’d say deprivation came from within.’

  ‘You quote that other line he…Here it is. Sex is always disappointing and often repulsive, like asking someone else to blow your own nose for you. Blow your nose?’

  ‘Blow your nose? Now there he shows real prowess of perversity.’

  ‘You know, I get surer and surer that that’s a big part of the Larkin fascination. The purity of the poems. And then the mystery story, the whodunnit of his – of his murk.’

  ‘It’s all Sydney, don’t you think? That Komodo dragon in the living room.’

  ‘Mm…Brother, we’ll talk. Now. When are you getting here?’

  ‘I’m aiming for Friday afternoon. Around drinks time.’

  ‘What could be more agreeable?’

  ‘Oh, tell me something. You miss the old country, I know. I don’t expect to miss England but I’m sure I’ll miss the English. It’s that tone, that tone of humorous sympathy. Americans are nice too, individually, but you couldn’t call them droll.’

  ‘No. Tocqueville said that humour would be bred out of them by sheer diversity. Anything witty was bound to offend someone. He thought they’d reach the point where nobody’d dare say anything at all.’

  …This could wait for the weekend, but the Hitch was in fact under a serious misapprehension about Philip’s father. He was right about the dragon in the living room: that was Sydney, a reliably unnerving man. What he got dead wrong was how Philip felt about him.

  Every man is an island

  During his time at Oxford (1940–3) Larkin briefly kept a dream journal, whose contents are summed up by Motion:

  Dreams in which he is in bed with men (friends in St John’s [his college], a ‘negro’) outnumber dreams in which he is trying to seduce a woman, but the world in which these encounters occur is uniformly drab and disagreeable. Nazis, black dogs, excrement and underground rooms appear time and time again, and so do the figures of parents, aloof but omnipresent.

  Excrement, black dogs – and Nazis…But as it happens Larkin’s sexuality, seen from a safe distance, managed a reasonable imitation of normality. After a slow start, and many snubs and hurts, there was always a proven partner nearby, and we know a fair bit about what he got up to and with whom. All the same, the eros in him is still mysterious and very hard to infiltrate. It is indeed a maze, or a marshland with a few slippery handholds. And yet, as we wade through it all, we gratefully bear in mind that this – somehow or other – was Larkin’s path to the poems.

  To repeat: as a young man Larkin was intrigued, or better say fatally mesmerised, by the Yeatsian line about choosing between ‘perfection of the life’ and perfection ‘of the work’. But that was a line in a poem (‘The Choice’), not in a manifesto; no one was supposed to act on it (and Yeats certainly didn’t). Larkin seized on the either/or notion, I think, as a highminded clearance for simply not bothering with the life, and settling instead for an unalloyed devotion to solitude and self. As he put it in ‘Love’ (1966): ‘My life is for me. / As well ignore gravity.’ Most crucially, the quest for artistic perfection coincided with his transcendent worldly goal – that of staying single.

  ‘Sex is too good to share with anyone else,’ Larkin half-joked, early on. Yet he found that the DIY approach to romance was always overcome by a prosaic need for female affection and support. And so there were lovers, five of them: Ruth
, Monica, Patsy, Maeve, and Betty.*6 Larkin’s affairs were not evenly spaced out over the thirty-odd years of his ‘active life’. They came in two clusters: Monica overlapped with Ruth and Patsy, in the early 1950s, and she overlapped with Maeve and Betty, in the mid-1970s. This pair of triads represented the twin peaks of Larkin’s libido, which was otherwise conveniently docile (‘I am not a highly sexed person,’ as he kept having to remind Monica).

  Ruth was sixteen when he met her in 1945, ‘a prim little small town girl’, as she phrased it; two years later they became lovers and were briefly engaged. Monica, the mainstay, was an English don at Leicester (and we’ll be spending an evening with her later on). Patsy was the only red squirrel in this clutch of grey Middle-Englanders; a highly educated poet and rather too thoroughgoing free spirit, Patsy died when she was forty-nine (‘literally dead drunk’, as PL noted). Maeve, a quasi-virgin of a certain age, a faux naïf, and a true Believer (who, post mortem, tried to enlist PL’s godless spectre for the Catholic Church), was on the clerical staff at Hull. As was Betty, who, until Larkin made his sudden move, had been his wholly unpropositioned and unharassed secretary for the previous seventeen years.

  Of the five, Betty had the considerable virtue of being ‘always cheerful and tolerant’: i.e., she was a good sport. Ruth, Patsy, Maeve, and overarchingly Monica were not good sports. According to my mother (and nothing in the ancillary literature contradicts her), these women were alike curiously unrelaxed and unrelaxing, oppressed – most likely – by class anxieties and inhibitions that we would now find merely arcane. In addition they all gave off a pulse of entitled yet obscurely injured merit, of vague and tetchy superiority – a superiority quite unconfirmed by achievement; Monica, a noisily opinionated academic all her adult life (but also a close reader, and now and then a trusted editor of Larkin’s verse), never published a word…