Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  For the friends and lovers of Larkin who contributed to the writing of this book

  The ultimate joy is to be alive in the flesh.

  (Larkin to James Sutton, 23 June 1941)

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  1 Dear Fambly 1922–40

  2 Exemption 1941–3

  3 Brunette Coleman 1943

  4 Nothing So Glad 1943–5

  5 The Novels 1943–5

  6 The Grip of Light 1945–8

  7 Just Too Hard for Me 1945–50

  8 Crisis and Escape 1947–50

  9 The Best Writing Conditions 1950–2

  10 Single in Belfast 1952–3

  11 Various Poems 1953–6

  12 Hull 1955–7

  13 Poet-Librarian 1956–60

  14 Here 1960–1

  15 Sitting It Out 1961–4

  16 Living for Others 1964–8

  17 Jazz, Race and Modernism 1961–71

  18 Politics and Literary Politics 1968–73

  19 Larkin’s Late Style 1969–72

  20 Winter Coming 1972–4

  21 The End of the Party 1974–6

  22 Death-Throes of a Talent 1976–9

  23 Extinction 1980–5

  Postscript: Petals and Graves

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Plate Section 1

  Plate Section 2

  Plate Section 3

  Acknowledgements

  By the Same Author

  Author’s Note

  Quotations are from The Complete Poems (2012). The Collected Poems (1988), though less comprehensive, has the great advantage, for those wishing to follow Larkin’s biography, of printing the poems in the order in which they were written. Since individual works are easily located in these volumes I have omitted page references.

  Introduction

  Larkin is, by common consent, the best-loved British poet of the last century. Phrases and lines from his poems are more frequently quoted than those of any other poet of his time: ‘What are days for?’; ‘Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three’; ‘What will survive of us is love’; ‘Never such innocence again’. Already during his lifetime the publication of a Larkin work was an event. Within days of the appearance of a new poem in the New Statesman, the Listener or the Times Literary Supplement, ‘people would have it by heart and be quoting it over the dinner table’.1 A recent blogger speaks for many when he recalls reading his slim volumes ‘to tatters’.2 Since his death Larkin’s poetic reputation has become even more secure. A 2003 poll of several thousand readers by the Poetry Book Society and the Poetry Library voted his heart-warming celebration of marriage, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, the most popular poem of the previous half-century.3 His harrowing self-elegy ‘Aubade’ was seventh on the list. The witty, humorous poems are equally popular. As he himself wryly reflected: ‘“They fuck you up” will clearly be my Lake Isle of Innisfree.’4 His poetic range seems all-encompassing.

  He remains, however, a controversial figure, both as a poet and as a man. Even the apparently neutral question of which of his poems deserve to be printed under his name raises fierce passions. During Larkin’s lifetime the mature collections, The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974), established an oeuvre which gave all the appearance of perfection. The modulated sequences in these books seem to carry the same authority as the text of one of his poems. So when, following his friend’s death, Anthony Thwaite was called upon to edit the Collected Poems, his task seemed simple. Editorial tradition required him to reproduce these volumes in their original form, adding poems published in magazines or newspapers in a separate section. Important unpublished works might perhaps be printed in an appendix; unfinished poems must be excluded. However, Thwaite faced a dilemma. There existed a hitherto hidden version of Larkin’s life’s work, more comprehensive than that of the existing publications, and carrying equal if not greater authority. Larkin had constructed his oeuvre with rare deliberation. For three and a half decades, from October 1944 to November 1981, he had written virtually all his poetic drafts in pencil in a series of eight manuscript workbooks, entering dates, usually to indicate a ‘final’ version, and sometimes inserting typescripts with last-minute changes. These workbooks contain his most intimate poetic autobiography.

  Archie Burnett notes that Coleridge advocates ‘a thoroughgoing chronological arrangement’ for a poet’s work, since this enables the reader readily to follow a development from early to late.5 Confronted with the workbooks, Thwaite made the bold decision to adopt this policy in the Collected Poems of 1988. Moreover a number of workbook poems which had remained unpublished, including ‘An April Sunday brings the snow’, ‘The View’ and ‘Love Again’, were clearly of comparable quality to poems already published. Thwaite therefore inserted into the sequence sixty-one ‘new’ poems, including the key incomplete work, ‘The Dance’. The result was revelatory. In an early letter to his friend James Sutton, Larkin referred to his writing as a record of his ‘soul-history’.6 In Thwaite’s edition, this soul-history was laid bare in a new and unexpected way. It was revealed, for instance, that Larkin had been unable to complete a poem for eleven months following the death of his father in 1948. In the abandoned draft of ‘The Dance’ (1963–4) readers were able to follow his never-resolved mid-life crisis. The final poems in the eighth workbook showed his inspiration guttering in the mid-1970s.

  The Whitsun Weddings volume of 1964 conducts the reader, with artful contrasts of comic and tragic, reflective and dramatic, from the opening chords of ‘Here’, through the gloomy meditation of ‘Dockery and Son’ to the yearning finale of ‘An Arundel Tomb’. Thwaite’s sequence reveals, instead, the poet’s emotional journey. ‘An Arundel Tomb’, reflecting his commitment to Monica Jones, was completed in 1956. The serene ‘Here’ came five years later in October 1961, when he was still safely in his thirties, his professional career was at its most satisfying and his relationship with his Hull muse, Maeve Brennan, was at its happiest. By the time of ‘Dockery and Son’, eighteen months later, he had passed the threshold of forty and was descending into crisis. Those who wish to follow the narrative of Larkin’s life as a man and an artist will find Thwaite’s 1988 Collected Poems a surer guide than the lifetime volumes.

  Thwaite’s reconfiguration of Larkin’s life’s work caused a furore. He was accused of disregarding the poet’s ‘intentions’ by destroying the harmony of the lifetime volumes and of releasing ‘second-rate material’ which Larkin had not seen fit to print.7 His critics forgot that publication had not always been simply a matter of Larkin’s intention. One of the reasons he was so hesitant to publish even some of his best work was the trauma of 1948 when his volume In the Grip of Light was rejected by six publishers. Fourteen of the poems in this collection remained unknown until 1988 simply because no publisher had seen fit to print it.

  In the 2003 edition of Collected Poems editorial orthodoxy was re­asserted. The sixty-one additional poems were omitted altogether and the order of the lifetime volumes was restored. In 2005 A. T. Tolley complicated the picture by publishing, in Early Poems and Juvenilia, a large number of works written when Larkin was in his teens. Then, in 2012, a certain closure was achieved in Archie Burnett’s The Complete Poems, which aimed to print ‘all of Larkin’s poems whose texts are accessible’.8 Despite his respect for Coleridge’s chronological principle, Burnett reproduced the order of the lifetime volumes; but added, in a separate section, the ‘new’ 1988 works, the juvenilia and also some hitherto unknown fugitive squibs from letters. The very completeness of Burnett’s project offended some. He was accused of ‘diluting a major
oeuvre and distracting from the real source of its power’,9 and of publishing ‘every napkin- or matchbook-jotting’.10

  The possessive passion which so many readers felt towards the established lifetime canon offers a pointer to the unique nature of Larkin’s poetic achievement. Readers deplored the insertion of works which seemed to lack the authority, the necessary quality of his familiar masterpieces, and they resented seeing his poems placed in the contingent context in which they had been written. These readers need not have worried. As the dust settles it is clear that there has been an expansion rather than a ‘dilution’. Disregarding most (not all) of the juvenilia and the doggerel squibs, the larger Larkin oeuvre revealed in the Collected Poems and The Complete Poems has a rigour and economy equal to and more organic than that of the volumes published in Larkin’s lifetime. Larkin’s complete works contain only a tiny proportion of dross compared with those of, say, Wordsworth or Auden.

  At the age of thirty in 1953 Larkin set out his aim in a tone of jokey presumptuousness: ‘I should like to write about 75–100 new poems, all rather better than anything I’ve ever done before, and dealing with such subjects as Life, Death, Time, Love, and Scenery in such a manner as would render further attention to them by other poets superfluous.’11 He largely succeeded in his aim. Among literary forms the lyric is at the extreme of verbal economy and concentration; a great lyric poem strikes the reader as the distilled ‘last word’ on a universal theme. Larkin’s mature oeuvre has been said to contain ‘a remarkable percentage of the definitive poems of his time’.12 For the moment he seems to have had the last poetic word, on love, on death, on the Great War, on parents, on ageing, on hedgehogs. Poets writing on these subjects today struggle to escape his ‘definitive’ voice and find their own.

  He achieved this definitiveness by the extreme economy of his genres, forms, types of rhyme, even individual words. Larkin’s oeuvre does not comprise, as do those of, say, Yeats, Housman or Hopkins, numerous poems on similar themes and with repeated or overlapping forms. Those who have taught his poetry will be familiar with the frustration of attempting to move on with their students to another Larkin poem similar to ‘An Arundel Tomb’ or ‘This Be the Verse’ or ‘Sunny Prestatyn’, only to be compelled to start again from scratch, since there are no other poems ‘like’ these. Each of his works is ‘its own sole freshly created universe’,13 comprehensively differentiated from the others in terms of form, style and voice. As he put it in an arresting metaphor, ‘Poetry is not like surgery, a technique that can be copied: every operation the poet performs is unique, and need never be done again.’14

  Larkin’s mature body of poetry contains a single mourning elegy (‘An April Sunday brings the snow’), a single prayer (‘Solar’), a single graveyard meditation (‘Church Going’), a single extended narrative poem (‘The Dance’), and so on. Every poem has its own rhyme-colour and its own idiomatic register. Often enough, also, it has its unforgettable key-word or words. Larkin remarked of his abandoned novels of the late 1940s: ‘they were over-sized poems. They were certainly written with intense care for detail. If one word was used on page 15 I didn’t re-use it on page 115.’15 Indeed, a startlingly large number of the words in the mature post-1945 section of the 1988 Collected Poems occur in a single poem only.16 Larkin, it seems, waits for the best time to employ each word, gives it the most memorable context he can contrive and then never uses it again. This is not only the case with distinctive, intrinsically memorable words: ‘unmolesting’, ‘Blindingly’, ‘fishy-smelling’, ‘Immensements’. Larkin also asserts his copyright over more commonplace words, which become unforgettable in the poems in which they make their unique appearances: ‘unsatisfactory’, ‘wonderful’, ‘welcome’, ‘useful’, ‘afresh’, ‘singular’. His instinct for verbal refinement ensures that the briefest snatch brings to mind a whole poem: ‘Such attics!’, ‘awkward reverence’, ‘the exchange of love’, ‘we shall find out’, ‘sure extinction’. This is the source of what Martin Amis terms the ‘frictionless memorability’ of Larkin’s poetry.17 Could this uncanny control be connected perhaps with the ‘deep-seated abnormality in the left cerebral hemisphere’ which revealed itself when he was X-rayed in 1961?18

  Larkin’s reputation as a poet is secure. His reputation as a man is, however, in a less healthy state. The frequently retold story of his fall from grace following the publication of Anthony Thwaite’s edition of the Selected Letters in 1992 and Andrew Motion’s official biography, A Writer’s Life, in 1993 has taken on the quality of a modern morality tale. The Independent set the tone when it headlined an interview with Motion: ‘Mr Nice tackles Mr Nasty’.19 Ideological commentators such as Terry Eagleton, Lisa Jardine and Tom Paulin uncovered ‘the sewer under the national monument’.20 Many readers today believe that Larkin was ‘a Tory snob with sexist and racist tendencies’, and ‘a singularly unattractive man’.21 One reviewer declared of Burnett’s Commentary in The Complete Poems: ‘The only thing we’re reminded of is what a shit Larkin was in real life.’22 Even those who admire the poetry feel it acceptable to refer to ‘the vile mess that was Larkin’,23 and accuse him of living a sterile life. Martin Amis believes that the success of his poetry was earned at the expense of ‘failure’ in his personal life.24 Larkin, he writes, ‘siphoned all his energy, and all his love, out of the life and into the work’. He had ‘no close friends’, and his life story was one of ‘gauntness’, ‘with no emotions, no vital essences, worth looking back on’.25

  There is, of course, no requirement that poets should be likeable or virtuous. But we might ask whether art and life can have been so deeply at odds with each other that the poet who composed the heart-rending ‘Love Songs in Age’, the euphoric ‘For Sidney Bechet’ and the effervescent ‘Annus Mirabilis’ had no emotions, or was a shit in real life. Larkin’s negative public image is built neither on his poetry nor on the evidence of those who knew him well. Those who shared this life simply do not recognize the Mr Nasty version. Dismay and puzzlement at Larkin’s poor image is universal among those I interviewed in writing this book: the women with whom he was romantically involved, Ruth Siverns (Bowman), Monica Jones, Winifred Dawson (Arnott), Maeve Brennan and Betty Mackereth, his friends Anthony and Ann Thwaite, Judy Egerton and Jean Hartley, and his University colleagues, Eddie Dawes, John White, Brenda Moon and Father Anthony Storey. All those who were close to him remember him with affection and feel privileged to have known him. Typically, they found him ‘witty’, ‘entertaining’, ‘considerate’ and ‘kind’.

  Jean Hartley, who knew him for thirty years, recalls his spontaneous empathy: ‘he gave his full attention to everyone he had dealings with. I myself never had the feeling that he was waiting for a gap in the conversation in order to inject his own views. He seemed invariably to follow one’s train of thought rather than his own.’26 His generous inclination to identify himself with the widest range of his fellow beings is central to the appeal of his poetry. He enters into the feelings of young mothers at a playground, a rabbit dying of myxomatosis, his own harassed American biographer. Such wide sympathies, however, bring problems in ‘real life’. Listening to the speakers at the memorial for Larkin in Hull in 1986, Jean Hartley was surprised to discover ‘Philip’s chameleon-like nature’. His interests and sympathies were clearly much wider than she had thought.27 Those who imagined that they knew Larkin tended to see only those aspects which suited their own conceptions. This is one reason why Larkin’s reputation was damaged in some quarters on the publication of the Selected Letters.

  In what seems a deliberate strategy, he maintained long-term correspondences with the widest spectrum of people: the earnest would-be artist Jim Sutton, the irrepressible philistine novelist Kingsley Amis, the flamboyant University lecturer Monica Jones, the liberal-voting art historian Judy Egerton, the right-wing historian of Soviet atrocities Robert Conquest, the left-wing Anglican Anthony Thwaite, the conservative novelist Barbara Pym, the ingenuous Catholic Maeve Brennan, and his lonely wid
owed mother, to whom he wrote at least twice a week for a quarter of a century. A key motive seems to have been the compulsion to express himself in the widest possible range of literary registers, from civilized formality to intimate gossip. There are ‘almost as many different voices’ in the Selected Letters ‘as there are correspondents’.28 (Unfortunately one voice is missing, since none of the letters to his mother were included.) As long as these letters remained private, their contradictory Larkins could cause no offence. On the publication of the Letters, however, he was accused of duplicity. He said one thing to one correspondent and something different to another. He compartmentalized his life. Maeve Brennan was dismayed by the language of his letters to Amis and Conquest; Amis was baffled by the softer sentimental side of his character. Readers were offended by his inability to be polite about the faults of his poetic contemporaries.

  Dryden was suspicious of the Earl of Shaftesbury because of the breadth and intensity of his interests: ‘A man so various, that he seemed to be / Not one, but all Mankind’s Epitome’.29 To some, omnivorousness of spirit will always seem a sign of deviousness and insincerity. But self-contradiction is part of the human condition; and Larkin’s contradictions are central to his greatness. He was a man of many parts and many roles, ironic and unironic. Larkin the poet, for instance (‘Why should I let the toad work / Squat on my life?’), coexisted over the decades with Larkin the hard-working librarian, who oversaw the building of the first new post-war British university library at the same time as managing an inexorable expansion of staff and service provision. An academic from another university, enthusiastically joining in when he overheard Larkin praised at a conference, was puzzled to find that the topic was poetry. He had no idea that the pioneering librarian was also a poet.30 Larkin’s secretary, Betty Mackereth, recalls him pointing to the shelf of bound Library Committee minutes and remarking with glum satisfaction, that this also was part of his oeuvre.31 After his death the Library Association published a volume in his honour.32 Some of Larkin’s fellow writers feel that his ‘day-job’ casts a shadow across the poetry. Seamus Heaney imitates the poet’s self-deprecating tone, ventriloquizing a Larkin who describes himself defeatedly as ‘a nine-to-five-man who has seen poetry’.33 Martin Amis implicitly compares his own father’s genuinely ‘bohemian’ life with Larkin’s provincial life as a ‘nine-to-five librarian, who lived for thirty years in a northern city that smelled of fish’.34