Inside Story (9780593318300)

by Amis, Martin

  Michael Bowen, a recent addition to the circle (a fellow jazz buff and one of life’s willing hands), ferried Monica back and forth on that last weekend. ‘If Philip hadn’t been drugged, he would have been raving,’ Bowen told Motion (in 1991): ‘He was that frightened.’ Well, maybe the drugs neutralised what there was of his courage, too, as well as much of his fear; and the fact remains that he wasn’t raving. ‘Why aren’t I screaming?’ he said in a letter, back in January – picking up on a line in ‘The Old Fools’ (1973): ‘Why aren’t they screaming?’

  Yes, why aren’t they screaming? Because one doesn’t, because people don’t. His middle-class inhibitions saw him through, along with his middle-class conscientiousness. Like a good boy he amended his will and turned up for all his appointments (including one with his dentist); he left clear instructions on the disposal – the shredding – of his voluminous (and reportedly ‘desperate’) diaries and notebooks; and he wrote, or rather dictated, a lengthy, calm, generous, and conspicuously graceful letter to Kingsley, the only male friend who excited in him anything that resembled love.

  His last letter was in due course followed by his last words. At the very end he was sufficiently composed to deliver them, faintly, to the nurse who was holding his hand. He said, ‘I am going to the inevitable.’

  December 9. ‘How was it up there?’

  ‘It was all right, I suppose.’

  Kingsley poured a huge glass of Macallan’s and took it off to bed. That was one part of his nightcap. Would he be reaching for the other half?…To him it was more than the loss of a poet, as he told Conquest in a letter – the loss of a presence.

  I sat on with my mother.

  ‘How was that Monica?’

  ‘She didn’t come. Too shattered, apparently. Poor old thing. What’s she going to do now?…Your father can’t stand her of course.’

  ‘Gaw, his women. Mum, you used to say he was scared of girls.’

  ‘I always respected Philip very much. He was the nicest of Kings’s friends. But think. He had a stutter, and then early baldness…’

  ‘And early deafness, and inch-thick specs since childhood. But what I mean is, if he was frightened of girls, why were his girls so frightening – in themselves?’

  ‘They were all frightening, the ones I knew. Even little Ruth. Very proud…You know, don’t you, that he dreaded the thought of imposing himself. And probably the girls who were drawn to him thought, Well it’s up to me to do the imposing.’

  I tried to weigh this. Then I said, ‘A long day in Hull. Mum, you must be exhausted. Did it smell of fish?’

  ‘Not particularly. It was far too cold to smell of anything. They say it smells of fish just before it rains…Your father was very lowered by it all.’

  ‘Well Dad did love him.’

  ‘On the train there he kept saying, “Why have I never been here before? Why’ve I never been to his house?” And on the train back he said, all disappointed like a child, “It’s very strange. I feel I never really knew him.” ’

  Maybe nobody really knew him. Except Margaret Monica Beale Jones. She knew what he was as a man (she was tough enough to sustain that) and she knew what he was as a poet.

  My father’s aversion to Monica survived Larkin’s death – largely because she fell into the habit of ringing him up, most nights, to reminisce drunkenly and interminably about the love of her life. ‘Grief?’ said Kingsley after an eighty-minute session. ‘No. She’s glorying in it.’

  But in truth Monica had little else to glory in, and less and less as the years went by. In 1988 she had the Collected Poems and ‘Letter to a Friend About Girls’ (in which she and the others ‘have their world…where they work, and age, and put off men / By being unattractive’), and in 1992 she had the Selected Letters, where she saw the most elaborate belittlement of all.* Monica lived on in Newland Park, alone and semi-bedridden, until 2001. ‘Oh, he was a bugger,’ she told Andrew Motion. ‘He lied to me, the bugger, but I loved him.’

  During a stay in hospital (one of many in his final year), he was visited by Monica, of course, and also by Maeve and also by Betty (his ‘loaf-haired secretary’). ‘I didn’t want to see Maeve,’ he told Betty. ‘I wanted to see Monica to tell her I love her’…Is it merely sentimental to fantasise about a deathbed wedding (perhaps the only kind of wedding he could honestly respect)? In which case Monica would have passed her remaining sixteen years as Larkin’s widow, and not just as one of the spinsters he left behind.

  * * *

  —————

  ‘When I was young’, he said in an interview, ‘I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realised it was just children I didn’t like…Children are very horrible, aren’t they? Selfish, noisy, cruel, vulgar little brutes.’

  As he got older Kingsley, too, devoted some leisure to the defamation of children. ‘This anti-child routine of yours,’ I once said to him (as a freshly smitten parent). ‘It’s very occasionally quite funny. And I know it’s intentionally mean-spirited. But is it meant to be fatuous?’ Asked by his tightened lips to elaborate, I said, ‘Well – hark at the pot calling the kettle black. What d’you think you were until you were twelve?’

  And this at least gave him pause. Larkin, though, would have had his answer ready. ‘You know I was never a child,’ he announced in a letter of 1980. Was this a prelude to some paedophobic refinement, perhaps? No. He soberly continued: ‘my life began at 21, or 31 more likely. Say with the publication of The Less Deceived’…That is, November 1955, when he was thirty-three. But actually February 1948, when he was twenty-five, has greater explanatory power: ‘I am in bad spirits because of my father’ – who had only weeks to live. ‘I feel I have got to make a big mental jump – to stop being a child and become an adult…’

  This was a serious recognition, and one that might have led to some serious thought about that adult known as Sydney Larkin. Instead, Philip responded to the death as follows: he underwent religious instruction; he got himself engaged to Ruth (an avowedly ‘provisional’ engagement, though one solemnised with a ring); and he moved in with his widowed mother for a ‘frightful’ twenty-five months. He didn’t jump into adulthood. During this time his romantic life sagged and his artistic life ceased.

  And yet: ‘Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.’ I find this epigram fishy on more than one level. Alliterative and ‘eminently quotable’, it was clearly long premeditated; but in retrospect it sounds like a (failing) attempt to glory in gloom. That vein of stubborn persistence was instantly identified by Wystan Auden (they met just once, at a dinner party given by Stephen Spender, in 1972).

  Auden: ‘How do you like living in Hull?’

  Larkin: ‘I’m no unhappier there than I should be anywhere else.’

  Auden: ‘Naughty naughty! Mother wouldn’t like it!’

  Telling the story years later (in the Paris Review), Larkin said he found the remark ‘very funny’, which it is; but it is alarmingly salient, too. What Auden saw was a defensive façade – and one so obvious that he could greet it only with amicable satire.

  The façade was shakily defending Larkin’s failure to construct so much as a remotely and minimally convincing life. And he knew it, he ‘viewed it clear’: this deciding truth, like death itself, stays ‘on the edge of vision, / A small unfocused blur, a standing chill’, but a blur that regularly ‘flashes afresh to hold and horrify’. And as we know, it was a fate that he had prearranged (with some loftiness of spirit) in his early twenties; prompted by Yeats, he bowed to a transparently false opposition between ‘the life’ and ‘the work’ (as if the two were somehow mutually exclusive). And when the work, the poems, duly retreated from him (the date he gives is 1974), he found himself helplessly marooned in ‘a fucked up life’. ‘My life seems stuffed full of nothing’; ‘What an absurd, empty life!’; ‘I suddenly see myself as a freak and a failure, & my way of lif
e as a farce.’

  Together with its almost sinister memorability, and its unique combination of the lapidary and the colloquial, the key distinction of Larkin’s corpus is its humour: he is by many magnitudes the funniest poet in English (and I include all exponents of light verse). Nor, needless to say, is his comedy just a pleasant additive; it is foundational…Was he helped in this – was he somehow ‘swayed on’ – by living a hollow life, ‘a farce’, ‘absurd’, and ‘stuffed full of nothing’? Well, not nothing; his life was stuffed full of the kind of repetitive indignities that make us say, If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry. Yes, and if you didn’t cry, you’d laugh. This is the axis on which the poems rotate. His indignities were his daffodils.

  As we take our leave let us recall a very late poem (1979) that captures some of his personal pathos, his muted benignity, and his exquisitely tentative tenderness. One day he was mowing the lawn and ran over a hedgehog in the taller grass. ‘When it happened,’ said Monica, ‘he came in from the garden howling. He was very upset. He’d been feeding the hedgehog, you see – he looked out for it…He started writing about it soon afterwards.’ The result was ‘The Mower’ (closely related, here, to the Reaper), which ends:

  Next morning I got up and it did not.

  The first day after a death, the new absence

  Is always the same; we should be careful

  Of each other, we should be kind

  While there is still time.

  * Of his (never-finished) third novel Larkin wrote to Patsy in 1953: ‘You know, I can’t write this book: if it is to be written at all it should be largely an attack on Monica, & I can’t do that, not while we are still on friendly terms, and I’m not sure it even interests me sufficiently to go on.’

  The Novelist

  April 2005

  On June 10, 1995, I rang him in Vermont and said,

  ‘Happy birthday. And congratulations.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘But what exactly are the congratulations for?’

  ‘You’re eighty – you’ve made old bones. You should be feeling very proud and grand. Old bones is a great thing. A very great thing.’

  I said it more or less unreflectingly, just to buck him up and give him heart, and I was pleased to hear him laughing (‘Uh – uh – uh’); but a little reflection informs me that old bones is indeed a very great thing.

  ‘Strange Meeting’, the last poem written by Wilfred Owen (1893–1918), proceeds:

  Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,

  Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.

  Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared

  With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,

  Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.

  ‘Strange friend,’ I said, ‘here is no cause to mourn.’

  ‘None,’ said that other, ‘save the undone years…’

  Old bones will give you plenty of causes to mourn, naturally, but you wouldn’t linger long on the undone years. Old bones has the power to enervate death, depriving it of its tragic complexity. Dying two months short of your ninetieth birthday: this may call for any number of adjectives, but not tragic.

  * * *

  —————

  I was at my desk in the coastal village of José Ignacio, in the province of Maldonado, in the country of Uruguay: Uruguay: civically, socially, and humanly the princess of the nether America.

  When we were down there – and we were down there, with intermissions, from 2003 to 2006 – I worked in a separate building a hundred yards from the house (it had a bedroom and a bathroom, and would in fact soon serve as the self-contained cabana of the Hitch, who was coming south for a long weekend). To get to my study, Elena would climb down the external steps from the balcony and walk past the swimming pool, which in April was in my opinion already unusably cold. Because in Latin America, below the latitude of Equador, April is the beginning of fall. Elena was coming by to tell me something.

  This study of mine was glass-fronted and gave you a horizon-wide vista of the sea, which surged about us on all three fronts of the peninsula – the South Atlantic Ocean, with its occasional whales and daily cloud-shadows (and the cloud-shadows always looked like whales idling or basking just beneath the foam); the distinctively pale blue sky issued its weather forecasts, redder than fire when the sun went down, or else racked at dawn by portents of coming tormentas – thunderstorms – that were prehistoric in their power…A human shape now encroached on the stillness, and I knew by her tread and her blank face exactly what she had come to tell me.*1 Elena stood there outside the window slowly shaking her head.

  ‘How did you hear?’ I said as I stepped out into the air.

  ‘It was on the news. The funeral’s tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’ I said. ‘Well that’s that. There’s nothing I can do.’ I waved an uncommunicative and even accusatory arm at her and went back inside.

  …Saul, then, had desisted, desisted from living, stopped being alive. So I went back inside and tasted the ancient flavours of desistence and defeat. And helplessness. Also a kind of terrestrial disaffection: the paradise around me didn’t become infernal or purgatorial; it just became ordinary…

  An hour later I was still muttering it – There’s nothing I can do – when Elena reappeared on the far side of the glass. You see, Elena, as well as being Elena, was an American, and unresigned. She was smiling now and the red-foiled ticket she was holding streamed and palpitated in the wind.

  …So Carrasco Airport in Montevideo, then Ministro Pistarini Airport (known as Ezeiza) in Buenos Aires, then (eleven hours and five minutes later) Kennedy Airport in New York, then Logan Airport in Boston; and I got to Crowninshield Road just as the first of the towncars was leaving for the cemetery in Brattleboro, Vermont – a distance of a hundred miles, to add to my five and a half thousand; and meanwhile, here, winter was stepping aside for spring.

  * * *

  —————

  In the little reception area of the local synagogue there was a cardboard box full of beanies – black skullcaps, yarmulkes. Rosamund took one, and when she saw me hesitate she said,

  ‘You needn’t bother.’

  ‘I don’t mind. And I’m married to a Jew.’

  ‘Well take it, but you won’t have to put it on.’

  Just as the two of us settled in our seats (while the rabbi ululated) an elderly woman turned and with a stiffly and rapidly jutting hand pointed to the crown of her head.

  Rosamund whispered, ‘She wants you to put it on.’

  I put it on.

  …Earlier that day, in the Jewish section of Morningside Cemetery, a black cloth with a white Star of David was drawn away from the coffin just before it was lowered, and at the same time the black ribbons we had been issued were torn up (not just a rite, this, but an enactment – for many did it frowningly, almost scowlingly, as if in great bitterness), to symbolise grief and loss…

  Religion. When I was a child (in a household where that kind of thing just never came up), other children’s parents sometimes took me along to church on Sunday mornings; and I sat through it all in perplexity, estrangement, and, after five or ten minutes, heartfelt and then passionate boredom. But now I was half a century older, and – let’s be fair – the Judaic faith was twice as old as the Christian; so I was intrigued and perhaps minutely solaced by the strength of these continuities and observances.

  By one in particular. On the brink of the grave stood a considerable pyramid of earth intermixed with orange sand. In Jewish lore it is felt that the dead should not be inhumed by strangers – that this work belongs to the near and dear, to the loved and loving, to family and friends. Rosamund went first, getting right down on her haunches and emptying the shovel gently and almost soundlessly; followed by the three sons (the three half-brothers), Gregory
, Adam, Daniel; followed by all able-bodied mourners, in their turn…When it came to Philip Roth, he gave the shovel a dismissive glance and reached into the grit with his bare right hand, raised his arm, and splayed his fingers over the rectangular cavity in the ground.*2 Most of the real spading, and the conscientious levelling of the surface, fell to Mr Frank Maltese, the local man who built Saul’s nearby house, back in 1975.

  And death is still death, whenever it comes – death is always death. Chaucer, The Knight’s Tale:

  What is this world? what asketh man to have?

  Now with his love, now in his cold grave,

  Alone, withouten any company.

  * * *

  —————

  Shiva, the prescribed period of mourning, starts immediately after interment and lasts seven days. I stayed in Boston for about that long, putting up at a downtown Marriott and presenting myself at Crowninshield Road before lunch and leaving after dinner. I was just present and around, autonomous but available, along with Rosamund’s parents, her sister, her niece, and other friends and helpers, and of course Rosie – we were the circled wagons of Rosamund’s train.

  That week there were further attendances at shul, and there were other rituals. At Crowninshield Road life solidified around the kitchen table, where we talked and reminisced, and although there was a great deal of eating there was hardly any cooking. Every day at dusk a family group would appear on the front doorstep: neighbours, in this Judaeo-academic enclave, bearing those tubs and tureens heavy with thick stews and thick soups…You could hear a laconic exchange of words but there was no ingress, no intrusion. And always, it seemed, a companionable little party was in progress on the front path, people coming or going, bearing meals or bearing away various rinsed containers and utensils, and modestly reminding you that food is love.