by Amis, Martin
Ruth Bowman
Monica Jones
Patsy Strang
Maeve Brennan
Betty Mackereth
Hilly Bardwell
As well as being rich and worldly (she studied at the Sorbonne) Patsy was artistic, and her prickliness took more highbrow form (Kingsley said she was ‘the most uninterestingly unstable woman’ he had ever met). Philip’s liaison with her was manageable and brief (and he was touchingly grateful to have had it). But she scared the life out of him a decade later, drunkenly materialising in Hull – muzzy, weepy, utterly disorganised (wanting to stay the night and accusing him of ‘not being continental’)…As PL admitted, his women inclined towards the ‘neurotic’ and the ‘difficult’, and also the ‘unattractive’. He summed them up himself, in four lines of wearily illusionless verse (quoted below).
Ruth, Patsy, Maeve, Betty – and Monica. His triangulations involved dramas, tears, scenes, twenty-page letters, and decathlons of guilt and reproach – more than enough grief, you’d have thought, to fuel a typical marriage. When Monica was told about Maeve she was physically sick, and soon lapsed into near-clinical depression. The best proof of how much his girlfriends meant to Larkin was his willingness to shoulder – or at least outwait – their episodes of suffering while he had his way.
All this was interspersed with a great deal of yearning, brooding, coveting, fuming, and dreaming, not to mention a great deal of ‘wanking in digs’ (as he put it to a ladyfriend). Larkin had an extra-strong passion for pornography and kept a cache of it in his office (‘to wank to, or with, or at’, as he put it to another ladyfriend). But he was far less blithe or brazen when he went foraging for the blue stuff in red-light London, no doubt because in Soho he was pursuing more specialised tastes (schoolgirls, flagellation). Often the size of the trespass overcrowed him; he would ‘funk it’, and just shuffle away.
The loss of nerve, the withdrawal: it gives us the flavour of the Larkin frustration and the Larkin thwartedness. With lowered head he slips out of the dark sex shop (the bachelors’ bazaar) and into the rain, leaving that copy of Swish unmolested on its shelf as he creeps away, hugging to himself the familiar failure…
Invidia
In July 1959 Kingsley returned from an extended teaching job in America, and wrote to PL about his hyperactive success with the women of Princeton, New Jersey. A few months later Philip completed ‘Letter to a Friend About Girls’ (which he never published). The ‘friend’ of the title is only approximately Kingsley, just as the narrator of the poem is only approximately Philip; but approximation can come very close. The poem begins:
After comparing lives with you for years
I see how I’ve been losing: all the while
I’ve met a different gauge of girl from yours.
Grant that, and all the rest makes sense as well:
My mortification at your pushovers,
Your mystification at my fecklessness –
Everything proves we play in separate leagues.
More than once Kingsley said to Philip: it wasn’t that they met different grades of girl; it was that they met all girls differently. They both had charm, but Kingsley’s was the charm of confidence, and Philip’s the charm of uncertainty; and it remains a maddening truth that both sexual success and sexual failure are steeply self-perpetuating. Philip knew all this, but in the poem the ‘I’ feigns ingenuousness, and evades the really embittering recognition: it wasn’t a case of ‘a different gauge of girl’; as Larkin acknowledged to Anthony Thwaite, it was a case of a different gauge of man. Still, the wretchedness he backs away from is quietly evoked.
Having listed some of the addressee’s ‘staggering skirmishes’ with wives, students, and (it seems) passers-by, Philip goes on: ‘And all the rest who beckon from that world…where to want / Is straightway to be wanted…A world where all nonsense is annulled, // And beauty is accepted slang for yes.’ In honing that last line Larkin must have wondered what it was in himself that qualified as accepted slang for no.
There was another reason why Philip kept ‘Letter to a Friend’ in his bottom drawer. As he very reasonably wrote (again to Thwaite), ‘it would hurt too many feelings’; ‘If it were simply a marvellous poem, perhaps I might be callous, but it’s not sufficiently good to be worth causing pain.’ So it was only in 1988, with the publication of the rather overamplified – and of course posthumous – Collected Poems, that Ruth, Monica, Maeve, and Betty came to read the following (note the resignedly slow rhythms of lines two to five), as the poet summons his women:
But equally, haven’t you noticed mine?
They have their world, not much compared with yours,
Where they work, and age, and put off men
By being unattractive, or too shy,
Or having morals – anyhow, none give in:
Some of them go quite rigid with disgust
At anything but marriage…
you mine away
For months, both of you, till the collapse comes
Into remorse, tears, and wondering why
You ever start such boring barren games…
We can see why Philip was reduced to thinking that sex was too good to share with anyone else. Autoeroticism, for Larkin, wasn’t just a stopgap, an improvised faute de mieux. It answered something fundamental not only in his life but also in the workings of his art. ‘I don’t want to take a girl out, and spend circa £5 when I can toss off in five minutes, free, and have the rest of the evening to myself.’ And, as he wrote to his parents as early as 1947 (when Sydney was still alive), ‘tonight I shall stay in and write. How beautiful life becomes when one’s left alone!’
Something that might be described as ‘positive’ happened to Kingsley a year before he left for America. In response to it Philip wrote (to Patsy):
[It] has had the obvious effect on me. I am a corpse eaten out with envy, impotence, failure, envy, boredom, sloth, snobbery, envy, incompetence, inefficiency, laziness, lechery, envy, fear, baldness, bad circulation, bitterness, bittiness, envy…
And what was this supposed coup of KA’s? His ‘appearance on Network 3 on jazz’ – ‘the first of six programmes’, as Philip moodily adds.
If he felt that way about Network 3 (a radio subchannel devoted to hobbies), how would he feel about this? Just back from Princeton and his lucrative professorship in creative writing (July 1959), Kingsley writes to Philip and apologises for his year-long silence:
…I can plead that I wrote no more than four personal letters the whole time I was away…[and] that for the first half of my time there I was boozing and working harder than I have ever done since the Army, and that for the second half I was boozing and fucking harder than at any time at all. On the second count I found myself at it practically full-time.
By December of that year Philip had completed ‘Letter to a Friend About Girls’.
‘Empathy’ is not as slimy a word as ‘closure’, but it still comes mincingly off the tongue. Even so, Kingsley, here, shows lack of empathy to an almost vicious degree; erotic success is a kind of wealth, after all, and here he is, fanning his wad at a pauper…As we turn to Philip we may say that envy is an offshoot of empathy: from L. invidia, from invidere, from in- ‘into’ and videre ‘to see’. See into. Envy is negative empathy, it is empathy in the wrong place at the wrong time. Satisfyingly, too, ‘envy’ also derives from invidere, ‘regard maliciously’. It is not surprising that PL, much of the time, hated KA.
By all means empathise with the less fortunate, and do so with every consideration. But be careful. Don’t feel your way into the lives of the luckier. If you’re Philip, don’t ‘see into’ Lucky Jim.
* * *
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We began with thre
e snippets about politics; let’s start winding up with three snippets about sex. The first comes from a letter to Monica, the second from a letter to Kingsley. To which of the two is the third letter addressed, would you say?
I think – though of course I am all for free love, advanced schools, & so on – someone might do a little research on some of the inherent qualities of sex – its cruelty, its bullyingness, for instance. It seems to me that bending someone else to your will is the very stuff of sex…And what’s more, both sides would sooner have it that way than not at all. I wouldn’t. And I suspect that means not that I can enjoy sex in my own quiet way but that I can’t enjoy it at all. It’s like rugby football: either you like kicking & being kicked, or your soul cringes away from the whole affair. There’s no way of quietly enjoying rugby football. (1951)
Where’s all this porn they talk about?…[In Hull] it’s all been stamped out by the police with nothing better to do. It’s like this permissive society they talk about: never permitted me anything as far as I recall. I mean like WATCHING SCHOOLGIRLS SUCK EACH OTHER OFF WHILE YOU WHIP THEM, or You know the trouble with old Phil is that he’s never really grown up – just goes along the same old lines. Bit of a bore really. (1979)
It seems to me that what we have is a kind of homosexual relationship, disguised. Don’t you think yourself there’s something fishy about it? (1958)
In the first quote PL declares himself a sexual pacifist or vegan, and seems rather proud of his hypersensitivity (well ‘I wouldn’t’). In the second quote he gives a middleaged (and clearly very drunken) airing to his fantasy about caning schoolgirls, which dates back to his youth. The third quote appears in a letter to Monica. I’ve tried often, but I still don’t understand it. What can it mean? That he, PL, wasn’t very masculine and that she, MJ, wasn’t very feminine? And that they were in-betweeners of the same gender?
Anyway, peculiar, eccentric, innovatory, without any known analogues – you might even call it sui generis.
In a late letter PL observed of the poetry critic Clive James, ‘Just now and again he says something really penetrating: “originality is not an ingredient of poetry, it is poetry” – I’ve been feeling that for years.’
When poets go into their studies, they seek – or more exactly hope to receive – the original. Be original in your study. But not in your bedroom. It is like sanity: your hope, in these two departments, is to be derivative. You don’t want to be out there all on your own.
Violence a long way back
In only one (very late) poem did Philip attempt an explanation of what we may call his erotic misalignment. It comes in the alarmingly gloves-off ‘Love Again’ (1979), which begins as a lyric of violent sexual jealousy – not sexual envy, sexual jealousy:
Love again, wanking at ten past three
(Surely he’s taken her home by now?),
The bedroom hot as a bakery…
Someone else feeling her breasts…
But then just over halfway through this eighteen-liner the poet turns pointedly inward. ‘Isolate rather this element’, he soliloquises,
That spreads through other lives like a tree
And sways them on in a sort of sense
And say why it never worked for me.
Something to do with violence
A long way back, and wrong rewards,
And arrogant eternity.
The last three lines at first feel unyieldingly condensed. ‘Arrogant eternity’, we suppose, refers to the demands of art and to the brevity of the human span; ‘wrong rewards’, we suppose, refers to the haphazard allocation of luck, talent, sex, happiness, and (perhaps) literary recognition. But ‘violence / A long way back’? Motion persuasively argues that PL is not referring to actual abuse but to the ‘smothering nullity’ of his parents’ marriage: ‘they showed him a universe of frustration [and] suppressed fury…which threatened him all his life, and which was indispensable to his genius.’ All true; but I think we can go a little further than that.
In La Tomate off Dupont Circle I said (April 2011), ‘You refer to Syd as Larkin’s “detested father”. Would it were so, O Hitch. That would’ve made for a much simpler story. But Philip loved him.’
‘…Mart, you stagger me. That old cunt?’
‘He loved and honoured that old cunt. It’s all very fresh in my mind I’m afraid.’
‘Mm, I suppose you know more about it than you want to know. Thanks to Phoebe.’
I sighed and said, ‘I was having to think of Syd as my…’
‘Christ, I do see…But there’s nothing about Syd in Letters to Monica.’
‘Just this – “O frigid inarticulate man!” So don’t reproach yourself. It’s all in the Selected Letters and the Life – twenty years ago. Get this. When Syd died Larkin was so cut up he turned to the Church. Quote. “I am being instructed in the technique of religion”! And he describes his sessions with a twinkly old party called Leon.’
‘When was this? How old was he?’
‘Twenty-five. Quote, from Motion. He had always looked up to his father, and they grew steadily closer. To lose him, Larkin thought, would be to lose part of himself.’
‘Christ. Well it was the part of himself he should’ve stomped into the gutter. Couldn’t he see, couldn’t he tell?’
‘The day after the funeral he wrote, I felt very proud of him. Proud. And he started to write a fucking elegy for the old cunt.’
‘Oh, where are they now, the great men of yore? Where the riding whip, where the jackboot?…Well all I can say is, It’s amazing that the poems got out alive.’
The food came, and for the next hour we tried, with only partial success, to recite ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ (eighty lines); we did a little better with ‘An Arundel Tomb’ (forty-two).
* * *
—————
‘Something to do with violence / A long way back’. I think what we are seeing here is PL’s unconscious mind (very tardily) beginning at least to register what he could never absorb. People can be violent non-kinetically; and Larkin Senior was an intensely violent man. Sebastian Haffner in 1940 identified the essence of National Socialism: it was a rallying cry for sadists. And Sydney heard that call.
How lastingly extraordinary it is. Larkin’s fastidious soul was shaken by the Patsy visitation: ‘it seemed a glimpse’, he informed Monica, ‘of another, more horrible world.’ That world was bohemia, whose (sloppy but pacifistic) ethos repelled him all his life. As for the ethos of Bavaria and the Brown House and the Beer Hall Putsch – Larkin never seemed to mind that his father was a votary of the most organised and mechanised cult of violence the world has yet known…
‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad, / They may not mean to, but they do.’ Well, whether or not this dad meant to, here is a clear case of Mission Accomplished. As Philip’s sister Kitty said after the cremation, ‘We’re nobody now. He did it all.’
* * *
—————
Goodbye to the patriarchs, the little overlords, the goosers and gropers, the disseminators of disquiet, the wife crushers and daughter torturers, the fathers that everyone fears, the enemies of ease, the domestic totalitarians of the mid-twentieth century.
*1 D. H. Lawrence. What if anything does PL mean by this sentence? He means, I suppose, that if Lawrence (‘so good I daren’t really read him’) can be called a fascist, then fascism must have its points. Was Lawrence a fascist? See below.
*2 There is a lone mention of Stalinism. It was forced out of him when that ‘old bore’ Robert Conquest sent him his ‘whacking great book on Stalin’s purges’ (this is an allusion to its size). Conquest’s book was the seminal, consciousness-shifting study, The Great Terror (1968). In his thankyou letter for the free copy, PL managed the following (this is an allusion to the Kremlin leadership): ‘Grim crow
d they sound…’ And that was all – ever.
*3 Or not until recently – with the publication in 2018 of Larkin’s Letters Home, edited and introduced at illuminating length by James Booth. Here we learn that Sydney was indeed ‘crudely anti-Semitic’. During the post-war revelations he never ‘acknowledged Nazi barbarism’, turning his guns, rather, on the Nuremberg Trials.
*4 His workplace in City Hall was adorned with Nazi regalia – until the town clerk ordered him to get rid of it. We can just about imagine the scene: Sydney’s bottom-pinching and nipple-twisting against a backdrop of swastikas and lightning bolts.
*5 Christopher’s essay on Letters to Monica had duly appeared in the Atlantic that May…This would be my last trip to the US as a visitor; thereafter I would be a resident. My friend was re-established at the Wyoming, and girding himself for the after-effects of his month in the synchrotron.
*6 Or six, if you’re inclined, as I was for a while, to believe Phoebe Phelps (whose candidate, my mother, would have come between Ruth and Monica). Phoebe can be doubted on optical grounds: if what she said was true, it would be as if Diana Dors had come bustling in on a singletons’ knitting circle in somewhere like Nailsea. Anyway, the Hilly possibility is hereby dismissed.
PART IV
PENULTIMATE
Preamble: The Fire on New Year’s Eve