Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  The mercurial shifts of persona in Larkin’s interviews, essays and letters have been the cause of many misreadings. Larkin claimed in his celebrated Observer interview that he did not want ‘to go around pretending to be me’. However, he conceded elsewhere that ‘one has to dramatize oneself a little’.35 As Jonathan Raban remarked, Larkin spoke to interviewers in the voice of ‘a well-scripted character whose tone was pitched midway between the reactionary acerbities of W. C. Fields and the self-deprecating complaints of Eeyore the donkey’.36 Some readers fail to register the performative playfulness of Larkin’s self-caricatures: ‘Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth’; ‘there’s not much to say about my work’; ‘I don’t want to sound falsely naive, but I often wonder why people get married’; ‘Children are very horrible, aren’t they?’ These are not the words of a gaunt, emotionless failure, but of an ebullient provocateur with an instinct to entertain. He began his interview with the Observer in 1979: ‘I like to think of myself as quite funny.’37 It is easy to see why those who knew him enjoyed his company so much.

  The various ideological Larkins who raise the passions of some critics, are provisional personae. The fervent nationalist Larkin, for instance, is the product of performance as much as of ideology. Tom Paulin speaks of Larkin’s ‘rock-solid sense of national glory’.38 His elegy for the wasted lives of the Great War, ‘MCMXIV’, tells a different story. The famous photograph of the poet sitting inscrutably on the boundary-sign ‘England’ tells us more about his relationship with the woman who took it, Monica Jones, than about its subject, for whom ‘elsewhere’ was always more comfortable than ‘home’.39 Larkin expressed his instinctive view in a letter to Monica: ‘my God, surely nationalism is the surest mark of mediocrity!’40 Similarly, the ardent Tory Larkin proclaims ‘I adore Mrs Thatcher.’41 But when they met and she misquoted a line from his poem ‘Deceptions’, ‘Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives,’ as ‘Her mind was full of knives,’ he remarked slyly, ‘she might think a mind full of knives rather along her own lines’, hastening to correct himself: ‘not that I don’t kiss the ground she treads’.42

  Larkin the racist is a similar fiction. It is frequently remarked that his handful of racist comments, some of them indeed very unpleasant, are confined to private letters written to prejudiced correspondents. But his self-irony escapes the notice of critics, as it no doubt escaped the notice of the original correspondents. In a letter to Monica Jones, he depicts himself settling down for a lazy evening after a dinner of haggis, neeps and claret: ‘& by God wasn’t the toast “Mr Enoch Powell”! Then jazz records to my taste, especially Armstrong.’43 Approval for the politician who prophesied rivers of blood if ‘the black man’ gained the whip hand in Britain is followed by a grateful surrender to black music. It is to be regretted that, on rare occasions, Larkin used the words ‘nigger’, ‘wog’ and ‘yid’ in writing to particular correspondents. However at a time when most British middle-class households would have possessed a tin of ‘nigger brown’ Cherry Blossom shoe polish, and have had in their kitchens jars of Robertson’s marmalade with a golliwog on the label (a feature withdrawn only in 2001), such language was not always the sure sign of poisonous prejudice it has since become. Whatever language Larkin might use, he would never have theorized about racial inferiority or degeneracy, as did some writers of the century. During his early years in Hull Larkin recommended E. R. Braithwaite’s anti-racist novel To Sir, With Love to his staff, and for a time they addressed him, half-ironically, as ‘Sir’.44 In 1946 he dreamt he was a black man walking through racecourse crowds with Amis’s future wife, Hilly Bardwell, sobbing with fear that he might be lynched.45 His subconscious was not racist.

  It is a similar story with Larkin the misogynist. Motion detected in the poet’s youthful high-camp pastiches of girls’-school stories ‘the wish to dominate’ women.46 Another commentator refers to Larkin’s ‘creepy interest in sadistic pornography’.47 In fact domination and sadism were alien to his temperament, and his ‘Brunette Coleman’ writings express, first and foremost, his imaginative desire to be a girl. In our internet era the surviving remnants of his pornography retain little power to shock. There are a few distinctly half-hearted ‘bondage’ photographs, but the majority of the images show a spectrum from stocking-and-suspender titillation to idealized haughty nudity: on the one hand the smiling invitation of the girl next door, on the other a Platonic or Keatsian aestheticism.48 It is these erotic proclivities which underlay his fear of domestic entanglement with Ruth Bowman or Monica Jones, and his muse-adoration of Winifred Arnott and Maeve Brennan. However, in a variant on the usual literary pattern, even his unattainable muses are also, in his own memorable formulation, real girls in real places. His empathy with women was strong, and this made him, as Nuala O’Faiolain records, ‘a most attractive man’.49

  His comments on children show a particularly revealing clash between self-dramatization and reality. In his Observer interview he calls them ‘Selfish, noisy, cruel, vulgar little brutes’.50 Exasperated by his duties in Wellington Library, he told his parents: ‘Children I would willingly bayonet by the score.’51 On the other hand, he also told them that a ‘pleasant old lady’ had complimented him on how good he was with the children. (He added, self-critically, ‘I don’t feel I’m good with anybody.’)52 He went to the trouble, one Christmas, of buying dolls for the daughters of his publishers, the Hartleys, and gave Alison Hartley a piggy-back ride during a walk along the Humber estuary.53 Bridget, Judy Egerton’s elder daughter, recalls: ‘Philip was the friend of my parents I liked the best. He never talked down to me.’54 In a letter decorated with comic sketches of a rabbit and himself in a bow-tie he makes his handwriting round and distinct for her youthful eye.55 He drew sketches in the autograph books of Anthony and Ann Thwaite’s four daughters, patiently admired their card tricks and helped them search for lost balls.56 In a letter to his mother he expressed concern about the ‘squashed & timorous’ demeanour of the Amises’ infant sons in their chaotic domestic environment: ‘Even their crying seems subdued.’57 In his poem ‘Coming’, he compares an intimation of spring to the uncomprehending happiness of a child caught up in a scene of adult reconciling. And in ‘To the Sea’ he observes ‘the uncertain children’ on the beach, ‘grasping at enormous air’. As Colm Tóibín observes, he was ‘a great big sour softie’.58

  Larkin was puzzled when he was accused of lacking feeling. He was aware, on the contrary, of having to strive to avoid emotional excess: ‘I always think that the poems I write are very much more naïve – very much more emotional – almost embarrassingly so – than a lot of other people’s. When I was tagged as unemotional, it used to mystify me; I used to find it quite shaming to read some of the things I’d written.’59 The key to Larkin, the poet and the man, is an ingenuous openness to life’s simplest pleasures and pains. He wrote to his mother from Belfast in 1954: ‘the trees round Queen’s are well-budded and stand in a circle of daffodils. Spring never fails us, does it? How beautiful it is, even though it isn’t spring for us!’60 Shortly after moving to Hull in 1955 he set out energetically on foot from his digs in Cottingham: ‘People had told me to “walk to the Wolds” or the Dales or something’:

  Near home I stopped and watched half a dozen Jersey cows. How lovely they are! like Siamese cats, almost: the patches of white round the eyes and the soft way the coffee-colour melts into the white underbody. They were licking each other affectionately in pairs, on the chest and along the neck. When one stopped the other would begin licking back! The Peaceable Kingdom! In the end I found I’d walked about 11 miles [. . .]61

  No poet was less likely to contemplate suicide. To a writer like Graham Greene life is intrinsically empty. It requires Russian roulette, a dangerous career in espionage or a fear of Hell to give it relish. Larkin possessed the opposite temperament: ‘Everyday things are lovely to me.’62 The sight of a lamb in snow, the sound of a sustained note on a saxophone, a glimpse of newly-weds from a train,
flood his life with meaning and pleasure. By the same token, the suffering of a diseased rabbit, the thought of lonely widowhood, or of his own death, drain his life of joy. No poet shows a more poignant apprehension than Larkin of the ‘million-petalled flower / Of being here’.

  His life was a success. On the public level he took satisfaction from his achievements at the Library in Hull and in his Fellowships of the Royal Society of Literature and the Library Association. He was proud to receive the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry, a CBE and innumerable honorary degrees, and, in his final days, to be made a Companion of Honour. On the personal level he knew that he had the love and respect of those around him. His day-to-day life was packed with affections and epiphanies. And he gained the profoundest satisfaction from writing his poetry. He was, nevertheless, haunted by failure. In some moods his refusal of the social normality of marriage and procreation appeared to him not as the inevitable consequence of his artistic commitment, but as the selfishness of a flawed character. Towards the end, after his poetic inspiration had died, his despairing moods became more frequent. He told Andrew Motion: ‘I used to believe that I should perfect the work and life could fuck itself. Now I’m not doing anything, all I’ve got is a fucked up life.’63

  But the failure which haunted him most deeply and persistently was simpler and more universal than this. From the beginning he was horrified that our precious existence, here, now, must inevitably falter and be extinguished in death. Larkin’s biological clock ticked more loudly than those of other people. Unalloyed happiness was, he felt, unattain­able, if only ‘because you know that you are going to die, and the people you love are going to die’.64 His poems feature the most uncompromising reflections on death outside the soliloquies of Shakespeare:

  The sure extinction that we travel to

  And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,

  Not to be anywhere,

  And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

  Lunching with a young colleague in the staff canteen of Hull University a few months before he died, he asked her how old she was. She told him she was thirty-one. Looking down at his failing body he declared passionately: ‘It’s not fair!’65

  1

  Dear Fambly

  1922–40

  In 1953, on holiday in Weymouth, Philip Larkin was moved to hear his widowed mother Eva quoting snatches of poems by Thomas Hardy which she had learnt by heart ‘simply to please my father’. He was prompted to reflect on his parents’ first meeting, half a century earlier in 1906:

  O frigid inarticulate man! He met my mother on the beach at Rhyl. He was there for 3 days only, on a cycling tour, but before leaving he had a picture of them taken together & exchanged addresses [. . .] & despite a separation of several years his intentions didn’t alter. I find all that very strange & romantic, partly because unlike the father I knew. He must have been as intensely idealistic as a young man as he was nihilistically disillusioned in middle age.1

  Sydney Larkin had been impressed that Eva, a teacher, had continued to read her book while they sheltered from the rain together. But this had been the result of shyness rather than strength of mind, and she became a timid, nervous wife. Beneath his confident exterior Sydney also was painfully inhibited. When his young son claimed shyness he responded crushingly: ‘You don’t know what shyness is.’2 Taking stock of his parents in a letter to his friend James Sutton in 1943 at the age of twenty Larkin wrote: ‘I realized that I contain both of them [. . .] It intrigues me to know that a thirty-years struggle is being continued in me, and in my sister too. In her it has reached a sort of conclusion – my father winning. Pray the Lord my mother is superior in me.’3

  After his father’s death Larkin analysed the marriage with brutal objectivity: ‘I think the situation was technically his fault. His personality had imposed this taut ungenerous defeated pattern of life on the family, and it was only to be expected that it would make them miserable and that their misery would react on him. And despite the fact that my mother grew to be such an obsessive snivelling pest I think if my father had handled her properly she would have done much better.’4 It was his parents’ example that taught him his passionate misogamy. The ‘monotonous whining monologues’ that his mother inflicted on the family, ‘resentful, self-pitying, full of funk and suspicion’, remained in his mind ‘as something I mustn’t, under any circumstances, risk encountering again’. The marriage ‘left me with two convictions: that human beings should not live together, and that children should be taken from their parents at an early age’.5 On the other hand, in his interview with the Observer in 1979, he expressed relief that his line ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’ had not been included in the current Oxford Dictionary of Quotations: ‘I wouldn’t want it thought that I didn’t like my parents. I did like them. But at the same time they were rather awkward people and not very good at being happy.’6

  Sydney planned his family, delaying the birth of the second child until he achieved advancement in his career. Philip was born on 9 August 1922, the year his father was promoted from Deputy Treasurer of Coventry to Treasurer. He was ten years younger than his sister Kitty. His father was thirty-eight at the time of his birth, and his mother thirty-six. Kitty remarked: ‘Really, Philip could do no wrong in his father’s eyes. Or his mother’s. They worshipped him.’7 This emotional closeness made Sydney’s influence on Philip intense and lasting. The father’s brusque precision of expression and emotional idealism are echoed in his son. Sydney gives a glimpse of his personality in a brief account of his early days published in the journal of the Local Government Financial Officers Association a few weeks before he died. He opens with Housman’s famous stanza, ‘That is the land of lost content’, and then, with whimsical self-deprecation, likens borough treasurers to the damned souls of Bunyan’s Grace Abounding. His focus then shifts to Bunyan’s ‘very clear English’. Bunyan does not use ‘any such muddle-headed expression as “and/or” in his works. I do not remember that he uses “implement” as a verb or that he misuses “will” and “would” for “shall” and “should”.’ Sydney’s reticence trembles when he reminisces about his sixteen-year-old first love, now lost in the past: ‘I would not have missed the episode for anything.’8 Philip’s deep intimacy with this passionate, thwarted man, who had such high expectations of him, may have been partly responsible for the stammer from which the poet suffered throughout his youth. He himself always dismissed the idea that it had anything to do with early ‘trauma’, and recorded that it finally faded away in his mid-thirties.9

  Like his librarian son after him, Sydney Larkin rose to the top of his profession. In 1926, four years after taking over the finances of Coventry he established a stabilized, level rate, which, as an anonymous obituary recalls, ushered in a period of prosperity and growth in the city. He also ‘introduced mechanical book-keeping in trading accounts and gained for the position of City Treasurer an international reputation’, travelling ‘many times’ to the continent.10 He attended international conferences on accountancy in Berlin in July 1933, 1936, 1938 and 1939,11 and his reputation brought him briefly to the notice of Hjalmar Schacht, Minister for Economics in the Third Reich from 1934 to 1937, the man whose cautious fiscal policies were widely credited with bringing German inflation under control.12 In 1936 Sydney received the ultimate recognition of election to the Presidency of the Institute of Municipal Treasurers and Accountants.13

  An insight into Larkin’s earliest years is provided by the diaries which Sydney kept of the family’s holidays between 1927 and 1933. He shows an acute self-consciousness. In Lyme Regis in 1927 he carries his bathing costume and towel everywhere, so as not to betray that he is a new arrival, and goes through embarrassing contortions while changing on the beach: ‘I have never seen a rabbit skin itself but the operation must be similar to me trying to get the upper part of a two-piece bathing costume off my wet body.’ In a pattern repeated on later holidays, he sets out to make the family distinctive by buying
himself some shorts and ‘Mamma’ a ‘jazz kerchief’: ‘sufficient to lend that amount of distinction to us that I like in a holiday place. Henceforth, we shall not be ciphers in Lyme Regis. We shall be known.’14 One constant theme is the attractive women around him (‘five very fine girls’; ‘beautiful girls’; ‘a vision in turquoise blue’). Philip, as the child of the family, was ‘spoilt’, and was allowed his independence. In 1929 in Ventnor: ‘Philip did not bathe but reported that he had had three fights with different people.’15 Several times his son’s holiday illnesses elicited fatherly concern. In Newquay in 1930: ‘Philip would not eat his lunch and so he went to sleep in the afternoon, on the bed, and I sat with him.’16 In Falmouth in 1931 the nine-year-old Philip dominated one outing with his moody sentimentalism: ‘After lunch we hiked to Maenporth, Philip being in a vile mood. Half way there we palled up with a black dog [. . .] As time went on Philip became a picture of misery owing to his anxiety over the welfare of the dog – whether he was happy, tired &c and whether he would get home.’17

  Sydney admitted that, as time went on, these holidays shared by four very disparate people became strained. As he wrote before their trip to Bigbury on Sea in 1932: ‘This holiday is even more doomed to failure than the last one (which in spite of the cold was not too bad.) The whole family agree that it is impossible to have an enjoyable holiday with four people all afraid to do what they would really like for fear of upsetting the others.’18 In 1933, they took their last holiday together as a complete family. As an experiment and an economy, Sydney booked them into the new-fangled ‘holiday camp’ opened by the National Association of Local Government Officers near Scarborough. Philip had just turned eleven and his sister was approaching twenty-one. Sydney anticipated the trip with wry pessimism: ‘This year we are taking the biggest gamble ever by going to the Nalgo holiday camp at Cayton Bay [. . .] it will probably be cold and wet. No one has, so far, had a bright word to say about the holiday. We are the funniest family on earth.’