by Alan Bennett
Timorous though Larkin was, he was not shamefaced and made no secret of his predilections. Just as Elsie, secretary to his father, took her bottom-pinching Führer-friendly boss in her stride, so Betty, the secretary to the son, never turned a hair when she came across his lunch-time reading in the shape of the splayed buttocks of some gym-slipped tot, just covering it briskly with a copy of the Library Association Record and carrying on cataloguing. One of the many virtues of Motion’s book is that it celebrates the understanding and tolerance of the average British secretary and the forbearance of women generally. As, for instance, the friend to whom Larkin showed a large cupboard in his office, full of both literary and photographic porn. ‘What is it for?’ she asked. ‘To wank to, or with, or at’ was Larkin’s reply, which Motion calls embarrassed, though it doesn’t sound so, the question, or at any rate the answer, presumably giving him a bit of a thrill. Like the other documents of his life and his half-life, the magazines were carefully kept, if not catalogued, in his desolate attic, though after twenty-odd years’ perusal they must have been about as stimulating as Beowulf.
One unremarked oddity in the Selected Letters is a note from Larkin to Conquest in 1976 mentioning a visit to Cardiff, where he had ‘found a newsagent with a good line in Yank homo porn, in quite a classy district too. Didn’t dare touch it.’ I had assumed that in the matter of dirty magazines, be it nurses, nuns or louts in leather, you found whatever knocked on your particular box and stuck to it. So what did Larkin want with ‘this nice line in homo porn’? Swaps? Or hadn’t all that messy homosexuality really evaporated? Certainly pictured holidaying on Sark in 1955 he looks anything but butch. One here for Jake Balokowsky.
I am writing this before the book is published, but Larkin’s taste for pornography is already being touted by the newspapers as something shocking. It isn’t, but, deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life. Illogically I tend to assume that if you dream of caning schoolgirls ‘bottoms it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy. It doesn’t, of course − more often it’s the other way round − but when Larkin and Conquest rant about the country going to the dogs there’s a touch of hypocrisy about it. As an undergraduate Larkin had written two facetious novels set in a girls’ school, under the pseudonym of Brunette Coleman. It’s tempting to think that his much advertised adoration of Mrs Thatcher (‘What a superb creature she is, right and beautiful!’) owes something to the sadistic headmistress of St Bride’s, Miss Holden.
As Pam finally pulled Marie’s tunic down over her black-stockinged legs Miss Holden, pausing only to snatch a cane from the cupboard in the wall, gripped Marie by her hair and, with strength lent by anger, forced down her head till she was bent nearly double. Then she began thrashing her unmercifully, her face a mask of ferocity, caring little where the blows fell, as long as they found a mark somewhere on Marie’s squirming body. At last a cry was wrung from her bloodless lips and Marie collapsed on the floor, twisting in agony, her face hidden by a flood of amber hair.
Whether Mr Heseltine is ever known as Marie is a detail; that apart it could be a verbatim extract from A History of Cabinet Government 1979–90. Meeting Larkin at Downing Street in 1980, Mrs Thatcher gushed that she liked his wonderful poem about a girl. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘“Her mind was full of knives.”’ The line is actually ‘All the unhurried day/Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives,’ but Larkin liked to think that Madam knew the poem or she would not have been able to misquote it. Inadequate briefing seems a likelier explanation and, anyway, since the line is about an open mind it’s not surprising the superb creature got it wrong.
Mrs Thatcher’s great virtue, Larkin told a journalist, ‘is saying that two and two makes four, which is as unpopular nowadays as it always has been.’ What Larkin did not see was that it was only by banking on two and two making five that institutions like the Brynmor Jones Library could survive. He lived long enough to see much of his work at the library dismantled; one of the meetings he was putting off before his death was with the Vice-Chancellor designate, who was seeking ways of saving a quarter of a million pounds and wanted to shrink the library by hiving off some of its rooms. That was two and two making four.
Andrew Motion makes most of these points himself, but without rancour or the impatience this reader certainly felt. Honest but not prurient, critical but also compassionate, Motion’s book could not be bettered. It is above all patient, and with no trace of the condescension or irritation that are the hazards of biography. He is a sure guide when he relates the poetry to the life, even though the mystery of where the poetry came from, and why, and when, sometimes defeats him. But then it defeated Larkin, or his writing would not have petered out when it did. For all that, it’s a sad read, and Motion’s patience with his subject is often hard to match. Larkin being Larkin, though, there are lots of laughs and jokes never far away. Before he became a celebrity (and, wriggle though he did, that was what he became) and one heard gossip about Larkin it was generally his jokes and his crabbiness that were quoted. ‘More creaking from an old gate’, was his dedication in Patrick Garland’s volume of High Windows, and there were the PCs (which were not PC at all) he used to send to Charles Monteith, including one not quoted here or in the Selected Letters. Along with other Faber authors, Larkin had been circularized asking what events, if any, he was prepared to take part in to mark National Libraries Week. Larkin wrote back saying that the letter reminded him of the story of Sir George Sitwell being stopped by someone selling flags in aid of National Self-Denial Week: ‘For some of us’, said Sir George, ‘every week is self-denial week.’ ‘I feel’, wrote Larkin, ‘exactly the same about National Libraries Week.’ The letters are full of jokes. ‘I fully expect,’ he says of ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’, ‘to hear it recited by 1000 Girl Guides before I die’; he gets ‘a letter from a whole form of Welsh schoolgirls, seemingly inviting mass coition. Where were they when I wanted them?’ And in the cause of jokes he was prepared to dramatize himself, heighten his circumstances, darken his despair, claim to have been a bastard in situations where he had actually been all charm. What one wants to go on feeling was that, the poems apart, the jokes were the man, and the saddest thing about this book and the Selected Letters is to find that they weren’t, that beyond the jokes was a sphere of gloom, fear and self-pity that nothing and no one touched. And, so far from feeling compassion for him on this score, as Motion always manages to do, I just felt impatient and somehow conned.
Trying to locate why takes one back to Auden:
A writer, or at least a poet, is always being asked by people who should know better: ‘Whom do you write for?’ The question is, of course, a silly one, but I can give it a silly answer. Occasionally I come across a book which I feel has been written especially for me and for me only. Like a jealous lover I don’t want anybody else to hear of it. To have a million such readers, unaware of each other’s existence, to be read with passion and never talked about, is the daydream, surely, of every author.
Larkin was like that, certainly after the publication of The Less Deceived and even for a few years after The Whitsun Weddings came out. Because his poems spoke in an ordinary voice and boasted his quiescence and self-deprecation, one felt that here was someone to like, to take to, and whose voice echoed one’s inner thoughts, and that he was, as he is here engagingly indexed (under his initials), a PAL. So that in those days, certainly until the mid-seventies, Larkin seemed always a shared secret. The great and unexpected outpouring of regret when he died showed this sentiment to have been widespread and that through the public intimacy of his poetry he had acquired a constituency as Betjeman, partly through being less introspective and more available, never entirely did. And while we did not quite learn his language or make him our pattern to live and to die, what one is left with now is a sense of betrayal whi
ch is quite difficult to locate and no less palpable for the fact that he never sought to mislead the public about his character, particularly as he got older.
They were deceived, though. When Anthony Thwaite published the Selected Letters last year, the balance of critical opinion was disposed to overlook − or at any rate excuse − his racist and reactionary sentiments as partly a joke, racism more pardonable these days in the backlash against political correctness. Besides, it was plain that in his letters Larkin exaggerated; he wasn’t really like that. Motion’s book closes down this escape route. ‘You’ll be pleased to see the black folk go from the house over the way,’ he says in a 1970 letter, and were it written to Amis or Conquest it might get by as irony, wit even, a voice put on. But he is writing to his mother, for whom he did not put on a voice − or not that voice anyway. Did it come with the flimsiest of apologies it would help (‘I’m sorry,’ as I once heard someone say, ‘but I have a blind spot with black people’). How were the blacks across the way different from ‘those antique negroes’ who blew their ‘flock of notes’ out of ‘Chicago air into/A huge remembering pre-electric horn/The year after I was born’? Well, they were in Loughborough for a start, not Chicago. Wanting so much for him to be other, one is forced against every inclination to conclude that, in trading bigotries with an eighty-year-old, Larkin was sincere; he was being really himself:
I want to see them starving
The so-called working class
Their weekly wages halving
Their women stewing grass.
The man who penned that might have been pleased to come up with the slogan of the 1968 Smethwick by-election: ‘If you want a nigger neighbour, Vote Labour.’ Larkin refused the Laureate-ship because he couldn’t turn out poetry to order. But if he could churn out this stuff for his letters and postcards he could have turned an honest penny on the Sun any day of the week.
Then there is Larkin the Hermit of Hull. Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull. No matter that of the four places he spent most of his life − Hull, Coventry, Leicester and Belfast − Hull is probably the most pleasant; or that poets are not and never have been creatures of the capital: to the newspapers, as Motion says, remoteness is synonymous with integrity. But Hull isn’t even particularly remote. Ted Hughes, living in Devon, is further from London (as the crow flies, of course) than Larkin ever was, but that he gets no credit for it is partly the place’s fault, Devon to the metropolitan crowd having nothing on the horrors of Hull. Hughes, incidentally, gets much the same treatment here as he did in the Selected Letters, more pissed on than the back wall of the Batley Working Men’s club before a Dusty Springfield concert.
Peter Cook once did a sketch in which, dressed as Garbo, he was filmed touring the streets in an open-topped limousine shouting through a megaphone ‘I want to be alone’. Larkin wasn’t quite as obvious as that, but poetry is a public-address system too and that his remoteness was so well publicized came about less from his interviews or personal pronouncements than from the popularity of poems like ‘Here’ and ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ which located Larkin, put him on (and off) the map, and advertised his distance from the centre of things.
That Hull was the back of beyond in the fifties wasn’t simply a London opinion: it prevailed in Hull itself. In 1959 I tentatively applied there for a lectureship in medieval history, and the professor kicked off the interview by emphasizing that train services were now so good that Hull was scarcely four hours from King’s Cross. It wasn’t that he’d sensed in me someone who’d feel cut off from the vivifying currents of capital chic, rather that my field of study was the medieval exchequer, the records of which were then at Chancery Lane. Still, there was a definite sense that a slow and stopping train southwards was some kind of lifeline and that come a free moment, there one was going to be aimed. Even Larkin himself was aimed there from time to time, and though his social life was hardly a hectic round, he put himself about more than he liked to think.
Until I read Motion’s book I had imagined that Larkin was someone who had largely opted out of the rituals of literary and academic life, that he didn’t subscribe to them and wasn’t taken in by them. Not a bit of it. There are umpteen formal functions, the poet dutifully getting on the train to London for the annual dinner of the Royal Academy, which involves a visit to Moss Bros (‘and untold expense’); there’s at least one party at Buckingham Palace, a Foyle’s Literary Luncheon at which he has to give a speech, there are dinners at his old college and at All Souls, and while he does not quite go to a dinner up a yak’s arse he does trundle along to the annual festivities of the Hull Magic Circle. Well, the chairman of the library committee was an enthusiastic conjuror, Larkin lamely explains. When Motion says that Larkin had reluctantly to accept that his emergence as a public man would involve more public duties it’s the ‘reluctantly’ one quibbles with. Of course there’s no harm in any of these occasions if you’re going to enjoy yourself. But Larkin seemingly never does, or never admits that he does. But if he didn’t, why did he go? Because they are not difficult to duck. Amis has recorded how much pleasanter life became when he realized he could refuse invitations simply by saying ‘don’t do dinners’ − a revelation comparable to Larkin’s at Oxford when it dawned on him he could walk out of a play at the interval and not come back. But Larkin did do dinners, and not just dinners. He did the Booker Prize, he did the Royal Society of Literature, he did the Shakespeare Prize; he even did a dinner for the Coventry Award of Merit. Hermit of Hull or not, he dutifully turns up to collect whatever is offered to him, including a sackful of honours and seven honorary degrees. He was going to call a halt at six only Oxford then came through with ‘the big one’, the letter getting him seriously over-excited. ‘He actually ran upstairs,’ says Monica. And this is a recluse. Fame-seeking, reputation-hugging, he’s about as big a recluse as the late Bubbles Rothermere.
Motion says that institutional rewards for his work annoyed him, but there’s not much evidence of it. Still, to parade in a silly hat, then stand on a platform to hear your virtues recited followed by at least one formal dinner is no fun at all, as Larkin is at pains to point out, particularly when you’ve got sweaty palms and are frightened you’re going to pass out. His account of the Oxford ceremony makes it fun, of course. His new suit looks like ‘a walrus maternity garment’, and the Public Orator’s speech was ‘a bit like a review in Poetry Tyneside’, so he gets by, as ever, on jokes. But if to be celebrated is such a burden why does he bother with it while still managing to suggest that his life is a kind of Grand Refusal? Because he’s a public figure is Motion’s kindly explanation. Because he’s a man is nearer the point. A crucial text here is ‘The Life with a Hole in it’ (1974):
When I throw back my head and howl
People (women mostly) say
But you’ve always done what you want,
You always get your own way
− A perfectly vile and foul
Inversion of all that’s been.
What the old ratbags mean
Is that I’ve never done what I don’t.
It’s a set-up, though, that repeats itself so regularly in Larkin’s life − Larkin wanting his cake but not wanting it to be thought he enjoys eating it − that it’s hard to go on sympathizing as Monica and Maeve (and indeed Motion) are expected to do, as well as any woman who would listen. Not the men, of course. Larkin knows that kind of stuff just bores the chaps, so they are fed the jokes, the good ladies his dizziness and sweaty palms, thus endearing him to them because it counts as Opening up’.
About the only thing Larkin consistently didn’t do were poetry readings (‘I don’t like going about pretending to be myself’) and television. On the 1982 South Bank Show he allowed his voice to be recorded but refused to appear in person, and it’s to Patrick Garland’s credit that he managed to persuade the then virtually unknown Larkin to take part in a 1965Monitor film, which happily survives. He was intervie
wed, or at any rate was talked at, by Betjeman, and typically, of course, it’s Larkin who comes out of it as the better performer. Like other figures on the right − Paul Johnson, Michael Wharton and the Spectator crowd − Larkin regarded television as the work of the devil, or at any rate the Labour Party, and was as reluctant to be pictured as any primitive tribesman. Silly, I suppose I think this is, and also self-regarding. Hughes has done as little TV as Larkin and not made such a song and dance about it. There is always the danger for a writer of becoming a pundit, or turning into a character, putting on a performance of oneself as Betjeman did. But there was little danger of that with Larkin. He claimed he was nervous of TV because he didn’t want to be recognized, but one appearance on the South Bank Show doesn’t start a stampede in Safeways, as other authors could regretfully have told him.
If sticking in Hull seemed a deprivation but wasn’t quite, so were the circumstances in which Larkin chose to live, a top-floor flat in Pearson Park rented from the university and then an ‘utterly undistinguished modern house’ he bought in 1974, ‘not quite the bungalow on the by-pass’ but ‘not the kind of dwelling that is eloquent of the nobility of the human spirit’. It’s tempting to think Larkin sought out these uninspiring places because for him they weren’t uninspiring but settings appropriate to the kind of poems he wrote. But he seems never to have taken much pleasure in the look of things − furniture, pictures and so on. His quarters weren’t particularly spartan or even Wittgenstein-minimalist (deck-chairs and porridge), just dull. The implication of living like this is that a choice has been made, another of life’s pleasures foregone in the cause of Art, part of Larkin’s strategy for a stripped-down sort of life, a traveller without luggage.