Lost, Stolen or Shredded

by Rick Gekoski

  And now I’m in the world alone,

  Upon the wide, wide sea;

  But why should I for others groan,

  When none will sigh for me?

  But they did, they did. In the days following publication of the first Cantos, Byron was besieged by female admirers, anxious that he be alone no more. Carriages drew up, invitations arrived, beseeching notes were written. Already with some well-deserved reputation as a roué, all of a sudden Byron became the most sought-after man, not merely in England, but in Europe.

  For a while, anyway. Tempestuous storms of this hysterical sort pass quickly enough and often leave in their wake bitterness and regret. Within a couple of years Byron, once so assiduously courted, was widely reviled in England, accused of many things, none of them specified, quite, and all the more fascinating as a result. He was encouraged, like Oscar Wilde later, to leave England immediately and, unlike Oscar, had the sense to do so. He left in 1816, still a figure of mystery and overweening attractiveness on the continent, never to return to his homeland.

  But first he had to kit himself out properly, in a manner not only befitting his established image but likely to embellish it considerably. Always dandified in dress and manner, he made certain that he would be noticed wherever he went. He travelled from Brussels to Italy in a ‘monumental’ black carriage, containing his bed, as well as a travelling library, silver and china. His biographer puts it crisply: ‘Drawn by four or six horses, it was nothing less than a small palatial residence on wheels.’ Byron could certainly not afford the outlay for this magnificent vehicle, and at the time of his death still owed the £500 to Baxter, his coach-maker.

  Who, one wonders, did he think he was? A king? No, not good enough: there were dozens of kings dotted about, some of them a bit seedy. It was common to be a king. No, he thought of himself as an Emperor, the Emperor. He thought of himself as a sort of Napoleon-lite: ‘I don’t know – but I think, I, even I (an insect compared with this creature), have set my life on casts not a millionth part of this man’s.’

  He wrote odes to his hero, collected memorabilia and suffered during his defeats. Such psychic identification can have disastrous consequences. It was no doubt with his Napoleonic hero in mind that Byron embarked on his military campaigns – about which he knew almost nothing – in Greece, and which might be claimed to have led indirectly to his death. It was an inglorious end, and might easily have been avoided had his doctors, with their obsessive bloodletting, simply allowed him to get some rest and gradually recuperate from debilitating fever and infection.

  His hero-worship of Napoleon, and emulation of him, however, were saved from mere preposterousness by that most telling of all Byron’s intellectual virtues, irony and self-mockery: ‘with me there is, as Napoleon said, but one step between the sublime and the ridiculous.’ He and his hero were, he averred wryly, ‘the two greatest examples of vanity … in the present age’.

  Byron spent eight years on the continent, a period into which he packed more incident, personal relationships and literary composition than most men can produce in a lifetime, living with such intensity that you might have supposed him to be anticipating a premature death. He had, after all, the examples both of his friend Shelley, and of Keats, both dead in their twenties.

  Lord Byron died at the age of thirty-six, a hero amongst the Greeks, revered in Europe, a figure, still, of twitchy fascination in his native land. An early death was a good career decision, as it is hard to imagine Byron in old age, his powers of every sort waning, no longer the swashbuckling figure of a gilded youth. His poetical work is uneven, filled with bombast and unreadable verse drama, and if he is still read today outside the university syllabus and the ranks of the Byronists, it is for a few anthologisable lyrics, and the delightful Don Juan, which scandalised his publisher, who found its ‘approximations to indelicacy’ so offensive that he eventually declined to publish the later Cantos (of which there were sixteen, and an unfinished seventeenth).

  A rambling picaresque satire tracing the career of its much-seduced (rather than seducing) hero, Don Juan reminds us that Byron, at his best, seems to have more in common with Pope than with his putative fellow ‘Romantics’. By this time in his life he was increasingly dismissive of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and Leigh Hunt, and it is certainly harder, and less rewarding, to enumerate the similarities between Byron and Wordsworth than their manifold differences. Certainly none of his contemporaries could have written with such wit, daring and panache, and if he had written little else (one sometimes wishes he had written less), his place in world literature would be assured.

  In this respect, though, he is typical of the Romantic poets – perhaps of all poets – in that his reputation rests upon a slight percentage of his oeuvre, from which a lot of indifferent stuff must be excused. Most of Wordsworth is dross, Keats was still learning his trade, much of Shelley makes one cringe, Coleridge could profitably be condensed into twenty pages. But Byron is luminous in a way that his contemporaries were not, and that is partly because of the life, and the myths that he self-consciously engendered.

  In this he recalls Oscar Wilde (who revered Byron) in so many ways: as author, dandy, aesthete, wit, bisexual libertine. Both flouted convention yet were in thrall to public opinion, hence the ironised self-aggrandisement. Each died at a tragically early age, a victim of his own nature. But the differences are crucial: Wilde wanted to be famous, Byron wanted to be a hero. It is impossible to imagine Oscar as a soldier (though he would have loved flouncing about in uniform), quite inconceivable to imagine him actually fighting. He would have sympathised with – and then used as his own – the aesthete Ernest Thesiger’s later great quip about his service at the front during the First World War: ‘My dear, the noise! And the people!’ Byron would have revelled in both.

  But for both writers the life became a work of art. Famous for being famous, like our contemporary two-bit celebrities? Certainly not. Byron and Wilde were celebrated not merely for the outward show, but because they produced work that continues to amuse, provoke and delight. And, by a further and final irony, in both cases the work for which they should be remembered occurred in the byways and interstices of their literary output. Wilde was an essayist of the highest quality, whose writings on art, life, literature and beauty are abidingly fascinating. And Byron is now most memorable for his letters and journals, which throb and hum with vibrant life. He is one of the great masters of the craft. I suspect he would have been a great memoirist, too, had those two volumes not burned in that fireplace at his misguided publishers on Albemarle Street.

  7

  A Matter of Life and Death: The Diaries of Philip Larkin

  It’s hard to claim that the dashing Lord Byron and the retiring Philip Larkin, who couldn’t have swashbuckled his own raincoat, had much in common. Byron’s life was an overt and passionate testimony to his values – or lack of them – whereas Larkin led an apparently innocuous existence squirrelled away in the Brynmor Jones Library at Hull University, whinging occasionally and producing a small and exquisite body of poems. But when you peel back the apparent dissimilarities, parallels begin to emerge. Both, after a period of high esteem, had their reputations severely challenged, and in both cases intimate works of self-revelation were destroyed upon, or nearly upon, their deaths.

  Like Byron, Philip Larkin was adored by his friends. ‘The funniest man I’ve ever known’, said his editor at Faber and Faber, Charles Monteith; ‘the best company of anyone I have met’, agreed his chum and posthumous editor the poet Anthony Thwaite. Playful, puckish, self-deprecating, a terrific mimic and a natural entertainer, the private Larkin seemed anything but a librarian on leave. As if out on day-release, he seemed determined to be naughty. In his letters and conversation he often defined himself in terms of his dislikes. He was rude about most of his fellow poets, had a near phobia about foreign travel, hated the democratising and lowering effects of modern politics, seemed to despise the new immigrants to British society, cri
nged at the thought of the mass of humans going about their lives.

  He lived in a permanent state of fastidious recoil. Even his jokey persona with his friends was based on ironising and dramatising his dislikes. He was never funnier than when he was loathing something. But though the range of his disapproval was panoptic, there was only one thing that he both detested and feared, and that was death. Not death generally – he could contemplate the large-scale destruction of his fellow man with an equanimity approaching satisfaction. No, what he could not abide was the thought of his own demise.

  At the age of twenty-nine, though he retained some of that youthful insouciance that regards death as something that happens to other people, Larkin was intrigued by the subject:

  To me, death is the most important thing about life (because it puts an end to life and extinguishes further hope of restitution or recompense, as well as any more experience) … I know it might be said that death is about as important as the final whistle in a football match that … it is what happens before that matters. True, but after a football match there are other football matches; after death there’s nothing. I don’t think death can be compared to anything in life, since it is by its nature entirely unlike.

  This feels literary and second-hand, uninfected by personal anxiety. But only nine years later, still a relatively young man, he got a whiff of the thing in itself, and was utterly cowed.

  Larkin and his lover Monica Jones dressing up and enjoying life.

  Admitted to hospital, in March 1961, with a variety of unsettling symptoms (‘there is something wrong with my vision … & I feel rather distant from my feet: all this is summed up by being aware of my right eye’), he wrote a plaintive, meandering letter to his lover Monica Jones, stuffed with terrified foreboding and an overwhelming desire to flee: ‘I dread hospitals, & the very phrase “results of the x ray” makes my blood run cold.’ Fearful as a result of these ill-defined, rather surreal symptoms, he suspects cancer of the brain. Or maybe of the liver. Or flu, perhaps.

  Castigating himself continually – ‘I’m really a horrible coward … I’m rigid with funk … how awful this all is’ – Larkin has a confession, and an apology, to make. It was wrong, he acknowledges and regrets, not to have allowed Monica access to his flat while he was in hospital. The reason he gives is both revealing and guarded:

  I had left a few private papers & diaries lying around. Such things, which I suppose I keep partly for the record in the event of wanting to write an autobiography, & partly to relieve my feelings, will have to be burned unread in the event of my death, & I couldn’t face anyone I thought had seen them, let alone being willing to expose you or anyone else to the embarrassment of & no doubt even pain of reading what I had written.

  What’s that all about, then? Larkin was, even at this relatively early stage of his life, quite open and jokey about his politically incorrect (as they were not yet called) opinions, and his relationship with Monica was certainly frank. In the voluminous correspondence between them – there are over 2,000 letters (now at the Bodleian Library in Oxford) from Larkin to her – he was generally candid. Indeed, the letter I have quoted, full of funk and self-dislike, is not at all concerned to make a good impression, to feign optimism or courage, to mask his anxieties for the sake of Monica’s peace of mind. It makes you wonder what the journals contained.

  His conclusion about the status and fate of them, though, is a little ambiguous: ‘What this will lead me to do about such things in the future I don’t know – assuming there is a future. Perhaps destroy them right away.’ Does ‘right away’ mean right now? Or ‘right away’ in that future, on knowing death to be imminent? Whichever meaning you choose, though, one thing is certain: no one must read them, ever. Which makes you wish you could.

  Larkin’s terror regarding death – it was nothing less – didn’t abate, as one might have assumed, or at least hoped, as time went by and the inevitable approached. One of his most successful poems, ‘Aubade’, tackles the subject directly:

  I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.

  Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.

  In time the curtain-edges will grow light.

  Till then I see what’s really always there:

  Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,

  Making all thought impossible but how

  And where and when I shall myself die.

  Arid interrogation: yet the dread

  Of dying, and being dead,

  Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

  During the course of his final illness in 1985 the prospect of imminent death was constantly (in spite of reassurance from his doctors) in his mind. Letters written in his last months to Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion have a wry, mordant tone, certainly distinguishable from the frantic anxiety of his early letter to Monica from hospital. Six weeks before he died, he wrote to Motion: ‘I have an uneasy suspicion that the curtain is about to go up on Act II of the Larkin Drama – not well, tiresome symptoms, call in the quacks. So brush up on your Shovel and Headstone: Duties of Executors.’

  It was time to put his house in order, but he lacked the will to do so. His health declined, he lost appetite and weight, and, though he continued to visit the doctor, his hopes of recovery were fading. Three days before his death he asked Betty Mackereth, his secretary (and lover), ‘to destroy my diaries’. She did so immediately; after first taking off the covers to preserve them, she fed the thirty volumes into a shredder, and then (for good measure) incinerated the strips of shredded paper. Within hours, the documents that – one imagines – most explicitly revealed the inner life, or at least the most guarded secrets (which is something different), of one of the twentieth century’s great poets were no more.

  Mackereth had no compunction about what she had done. She had followed Philip’s fervent final wish: ‘He was quite clear about it: he wanted them destroyed. I didn’t read them as I put them in the machine, but I couldn’t help seeing little bits and pieces. They were very unhappy. Desperate really.’

  I wonder why Larkin didn’t do it himself. Perhaps it would have felt like a form of suicide? Philip Roth is good on this topic: ‘It takes more courage than one might imagine to destroy … secret diaries … to obliterate forever the relic-like force of those things that, almost alone of our possessions, decisively answer the question: Can it really be that I am like this?’

  Larkin died early on Monday morning, 2 December, remarking faintly to the nurse who was holding his hand at his bedside, ‘I am going to the inevitable’, which feels admirably studied, as if his last moments were spent in considering and honing this final line. Presumably his trip to the inevitable was eased when it was confirmed to him that the diaries were no more.

  It is hard to question the wisdom of obeying a dying man’s last request. Yet many commentators have wondered whether it was right to have acceded to Larkin’s wish. To get this into perspective, we may recall the analogous, and much more consequential, case of Franz Kafka, who left instructions to destroy all of his unpublished manuscripts, which his friend Max Brod chose to ignore. As a result, we have some of the great novels of the twentieth century.

  But the differences between the cases are obvious. Kafka asked for the destruction to be done after his death, so he could never confirm that his wishes had been carried out. And it was clear, even at that moment, that works of high importance to Western literature were at risk if the instruction were to be carried out. There is a nice, almost a classical, conflict of duties here. Should Brod keep his word and honour his friend’s wishes, or break his word and honour his friend’s genius?

  The key lies in the nature and importance of what would have been lost, and who is to decide. Byron’s executors made their decision ostensibly on his behalf, which seems to me reprehensible, though without a hint of what the Memoirs contained it is hard to know if even Byron might finally have concurred with their decision. So when we return to the case of Larkin, we
have to ask: how important were these diaries in themselves, and to our understanding of Larkin as man and artist? Were they sufficiently significant that an intimate friend would have been justified in lying to him about having destroyed them?

  Various friends have speculated about their contents. Jean Hartley, who with her husband, George, published Larkin’s seminal collection The Less Deceived, believed that they revealed Larkin at his bitchiest and most coruscating towards those closest to him. Larkin’s biographer Andrew Motion notes that the ‘diaries function as sexual log-books, and a gigantic repository for bile, resentment, envy and misanthropy’. The disapproving tone here is found on a regular basis in Motion’s generally sympathetic account of Larkin, which led to Martin Amis’s unimprovable rejoinder: ‘In Andrew Motion’s book, we have the constant sense that Larkin is somehow falling short of the cloudless emotional health enjoyed by, for instance, Andrew Motion.’ This is gorgeously dismissive, but its showy assurance masks a real problem. Larkin liked being offensive, or at the very least, larking about with extreme right-wing, misogynist and racist ideas. He revelled in it.

  Following the publication of the Larkin Letters in 1992, various critics were duly offended. Tom Paulin, who has deep reserves of indignation, put the case clearly, describing the contents as ‘a distressing and in many ways revolting compilation which imperfectly reveals and conceals the sewer under the national monument Larkin became’. Joining the chorus of disapprobation, Professor Lisa Jardine, of the University of London, described their author as a ‘casual, habitual racist and an easy misogynist’, observing with some pleasure that ‘we don’t tend to teach Larkin much now in my department of English. The Little Englandism he celebrates sits uneasily within our revised curriculum.’ Even Alan Bennett, himself capable of a bit of smutty puckishness, remarked that Larkin looked a bit like a rapist, and noted unsettling resemblances to John Reginald Halliday Christie, the Rillington Place serial killer.