Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  On the first evening in the camp at an ‘initiation ceremony’, ‘we were christened Oxo, Pussy, Snooker and Godiva – which Kitty and Philip voted to be a bit “balmy”’. Sydney encouraged his family to enter into the spirit of things: ‘We all filed down to the beach hut where we had community singing to the light of the numerous fairy lamps and Chinese lanterns. Philip got to bed very late.’ With something of the diffident self-ridicule characteristic of his son, Sydney joked that he had come close to winning the booby prize in a whist competition. On the other hand he boasted that he and Kitty had walked to Scarborough and back in one and a half hours, ‘a thing no camper has done before’. His verdict on the holiday was mixed: ‘Mamma was not at all well during the whole period and could not enjoy it properly. Kitty is not cut out for camp life – not speaking to any other person unless spoken to. Philip enjoyed the table tennis and bathed occasionally but caught cold.’ Nevertheless, Sydney calculated, the holiday had cost only ‘about one half the usual and was therefore much better value for money. Philip ought to take his spectacle case.’19

  Sydney was delighted when his son passed the entrance examination for the respected King Henry VIII School in Coventry. But the surviving drafts of his school reports show that Philip made a hesitant start. In 1934 the Headmaster, A. A. C. Burton, wrote: ‘Inclined to take things too easily, perhaps.’ In 1935 at the age of twelve he was ranked about the middle of his year-group, and since he was more than a year younger than his classmates it was decided that he should repeat the year. This easing of pressure had its effect and in April 1936 he was rated ‘Very Good’ in some areas, but: ‘Would be better still if he would bring more enthusiasm to his work.’ From July 1936 onwards he regularly came first in English, but showed no enthusiasm for other subjects. By Christmas 1937, at the age of fifteen, his future was in the balance. Burton commented: ‘unlikely to pass the School Certificate unless he devotes himself to the task’. In 1938 his report reads: ‘Conduct: Moderate. Tendency to foolishness must be checked; Progress: Much too one-sided. His considerable ability in English is more than off-set by weaknesses in languages and science. This must be corrected if he is to pass S.C.’ He was now placed twentieth out of twenty-eight boys. Then in the summer of 1938 he joined the Arts Sixth and no longer needed to apply himself to mathematics or sciences. The result was a dramatic improvement. He came second in a class of eight, his friend Noel Hughes being placed first. In his final report, on 26 July 1940, Larkin was placed first in English and History, and third in French, German and Latin. He left King Henry VIII School a lanky youth, already six feet tall, but weighing only ten stone seven pounds.20

  At school Larkin developed two contrasted relationships: a pattern which was to be repeated in different forms throughout his life. He shared his deepest feelings with a paying pupil, James Sutton, an aspiring painter and son of a local builder. But he was also inseparable from the cocky defier of authority, Colin Gunner, who would throw paper darts around the Assembly Hall and then deflect collective punishment by gamely owning up to his crime.21 Larkin later described Gunner as ‘a small, agile, tough boy, with a face like a nut’, and remembered sharing fantasies out of the boys’ weekly magazine, the Magnet, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Dracula and ‘the more colourful aspects of the Hitler regime’ with him. When pupils were each presented with a George VI coronation mug, he recalled his friend ‘shying his own into the squalid sewer the River Sowe (I have mine still)’.22 The young Larkin took care himself that his ‘tendency to foolishness’ did not land him in serious trouble and, in a school regime in which corporal punishment played a prominent role, it seems that he avoided ever being beaten. His father, it seems, would not have permitted it. Though the obscure reference to ‘violence a long way back’ in Larkin’s late poem ‘Love Again’ (altered in drafting from ‘difference a long way back’) has led some to speculate that Sydney might have been prone to domestic violence, the evidence is quite to the contrary. Larkin’s father was sensitive to any hint of physical duress. He recollected in his autobiographical essay that he had himself been beaten, as a boy, by a sadistic woman teacher: ‘I always thought she herself seemed to get a thrill out of it too.’23

  For two years there were no family holidays. In 1934 and 1935 Sydney and Eva holidayed on their own in Germany and then Switzerland. Then in 1936 they took Philip with them to Germany, and again around the time of his fifteenth birthday in 1937. As Sydney’s holiday diaries show, he now felt at home in Germany. He paid his dutiful respects to German culture: ‘Beethoven was a remarkable man. We saw his piano [. . .] He was a most wonderful genius and his life is worth studying.’24 But his main pleasures were of a simpler kind: lake bathing, beer drinking and fleeting encounters with young women, though he always refers to ‘Mamma’ with proper respect. Glued into the diaries of 1934 and 1935 are photographs of ‘Kath’, ‘les girls’ and ‘Backs of girls’. In Königswinter in 1936, he writes: ‘we left the awful dullness of the Mattern Hotel’ after dinner, and ‘went to the Bier Klause, where the fun was fast and furious. Tired at last we went to bed.’25 He does not mention whether Philip accompanied them on this occasion, but a repeated theme of the diaries of 1936 and 1937 is his determination to find a good place for ‘bier’, in order to initiate his son into this adult masculine pleasure.

  But though the poet was indeed to become a confirmed beer-drinker, he did not share his father’s enthusiasm for Germany. ‘My father liked the jolly singing in beer-cellars, three-four time to accordions [. . .] think of that for someone who was just buying the first Count Basie records!’26 His recollections of these two holidays were of embarrassment: ‘I found it petrifying, not being able to speak to anyone or read anything, frightening notices that you felt you should understand and couldn’t.’27 His most excruciating German experience, he later told Kingsley Amis, arose from a failure of language. On one trip, given pride of place at the front of a bus, he assumed that the driver had asked ‘Have you been to Germany before?’ and replied ‘No.’ He was puzzled when the driver took offence and avoided him for the remainder of the excursion. Later he was mortified to learn that his words had actually been ‘Do you like Germany?’28 These early expeditions, he later wrote, ‘sowed the seed of my hatred of abroad’.29 Possibly because of Philip’s resistance to a third German trip, in 1938 the family spent their holiday in Sidmouth, and in 1939 in Jersey.30 Then, the day after returning from Jersey, on 16 August 1939, father and son set out on a tour of Somerset, taking the train to Bath and spending a week cycling together between Radstock, Glastonbury and Ilminster. Reading between the lines of Sydney’s sparse diary, this outing seems to have been an idyll. At the end he proudly recorded: ‘Philip’s cyclometer indicated that we had ridden 162 miles.’31 Much of Philip’s leisure time in Belfast and during his early years in Hull was to be spent in the countryside on a bicycle.

  Larkin claimed that when he later tried to ‘tune into’ his childhood in 1 Manor Road, Coventry, the emotions he picked up were ‘overwhelmingly, fear and boredom’. It seems, however, that with two doting parents in a ‘dull, pot-bound, and slightly mad’ home his childhood was happier than most.32 ‘It was all very normal: I had friends whom I played football and cricket with and Hornby trains and so forth.’33 His short essay ‘Not the Place’s Fault’, written in 1959, breathes a warm nostalgia. He attributes ‘the slight scholarly stoop in my bearing today’ to his habit of looking for cigarette cards of ‘Famous Cricketers’ in Coventry gutters.34 His schoolfriend Noel Hughes later recalled the ‘intimidating tidiness’ of his house, ‘its highly waxed furniture and the practice of hushed conversation’, though Mrs Larkin always welcomed him with ‘unfailing graciousness’.35 The young Philip would escape for long hours to the more relaxed atmosphere of James Sutton’s home: ‘One of my strongest memories of their house is of its long attic, that ran the whole length of the house, and which contained among many other things the debris of a hat-shop the family had once owned.’36 He would give Sutton novels by Lawr
ence, and Sutton gave him books on Cézanne. The description in ‘Coming’ of the poet’s childhood as ‘a forgotten boredom’ rings true in its poetic context. But Larkin’s childhood was, in fact, a vividly remembered scene of pleasurable activity.

  His warmest recollections were of jazz. ‘I became a jazz addict at the age of 12 or 13, listened avidly to all the dance bands of the day and tried to learn to play the drums.’37 At first he felt some highbrow reservations. In a letter written on 9 August 1939, his seventeenth birthday, and signed ‘Snooker’, he told Sutton: ‘you simply can’t think of Jazz after Beethoven. It’s a physical impossibility [. . .] it’s just “big”, that’s all. Jazz isn’t big . . . but I refuse to start theorizing again on Jazz and its ethics, morals, foundations etc. etc.’38 It was not long before jazz overwhelmed him: ‘On Saturday afternoons we sat, frowning intently, in the glass cubicles at Hanson’s, trying to decide whether both sides of the latest Parlophone Rhythm-Style Series or Vocalion Swing Series were sufficiently good to justify expenditure of the record’s stiffish price of three shillings.’39 Looking back from 1968, in the Introduction to All What Jazz, he rises to lyrical eloquence:

  Sitting with a friend in his bedroom that overlooked the family tennis-court, I watched leaves drift down through long Sunday afternoons as we took it in turn to wind the portable HMV, and those white and coloured Americans, Bubber Miley, Frank Teschmacher, J. C. Higginbotham, spoke immediately to our understanding. Their rips, slurs and distortions were something we understood perfectly. This was something we had found for ourselves, that wasn’t taught at school (what a prerequisite that is of nearly everything worthwhile!), and having found it, we made it bear all the enthusiasm usually directed at more established arts.40

  In a letter to Jim Sutton at the time, he declared, ‘I’d back coloured against white most times, and as Count Basie is top of the coloured outfits I think I’m right in saying that he is the tops.’41 Sydney Larkin raised no objection to his son’s passion for what a German Fascist would have seen as degenerate negro music. Indeed Sydney went to the expense of a subscription to the Chicago-based magazine Down Beat, and also a drum kit on which his son could express his passion for ‘hot’ music: ‘I battered away contentedly, spending less time on the rudiments than in improvising an accompaniment to records.’42

  On the day war was declared, 3 September 1939, full of anger and frustration at the untold death and destruction which he foresaw would befall Britain and Germany, Sydney began a new, more formal diary in a large hard-bound volume. It was to run to twenty volumes, and continued into 1946.43 His political instincts were coarse, and he shared the anti-Semitism of many of his class and generation. During the thirties he had brightened up his office in Coventry with Nazi paraphernalia brought back from conferences and Nuremberg rallies. Motion reports that John Kenyon, Professor of History at Hull University, related that Philip told him that his father ‘had a statue of Hitler on the mantelpiece [at home] which at the touch of a button leapt into a Nazi salute’.44 Richard Bradford elaborated Motion’s description, referring to ‘a 12-inch statue’.45 However, when this object came to light in 2002, it turned out, in fact, to be a tiny hand-painted figurine, barely three inches high, with brown shirt and piercing blue eyes – the kind of souvenir which many tourists to Germany in the 1930s would have brought home. There is no button; the arm simply props up on a catch.46 Philip later denied Noel Hughes’s claim that his father’s commitment to Nazism had extended to membership of the fascistic Anglo-German friendship organization, the Link.47 Indeed it seems likely that such membership would have been ruled out by his public office.48 As Philip records, Sydney called himself ‘a conservative anarchist’,49 placing himself in an English, rather than a German, intellectual tradition. His personal views did not alter his devotion to his work nor affect his service on the wartime National Savings Committee, for which he was awarded the OBE.

  Rejecting his beloved father’s simplifications, and also as his mother’s son, Philip was beginning to develop the empathy and self-doubt which were to mark his mature writing. His response to the declaration of war is a subtle and complex cartoon, ‘Portrait of the Author and Family’, drawn in a letter to Sutton of 6 September 1939. His father, ‘Pop’, appears as an endearing eccentric, leaning back in his chair, his balding head seen from behind, one hand gesticulating, the other holding a newspaper with the headline ‘WAR’. In a speech balloon he defends Hitler, ‘The british govt. have started this war . . . Hitler has done all he could for peace,’ and launches into a farrago worthy of Lawrence’s Fantasia of the Unconscious: ‘This is the end of civilisation . . . after all, man has to be superseded, sooner or later . . . we’re only a stage in the earth’s development . . . a very unimportant stage, too.’ ‘Mop’ mildly replies: ‘Oh, do you think so? I wonder what we ought to have for lunch tomorrow . . . don’t scrape the floor like that, Philip [. . .] I hope Hitler falls on a banana skin.’ Meanwhile ‘Sister’ is preoccupied by what Joyce told her about her missed date with a storm trooper she had met on a recent trip to Munich. The poet himself, in a bow-tie, sits at the far left, pencil in hand, looking out of the picture, his face coloured with embarrassment and a huge exclamation mark above his head.50 The assured blend of affection and detached irony in this cartoon is astonishing in a young man of seventeen.

  Philip soon developed his own attitude to the war. He wrote to Sutton in 1942, ‘the German system is, from all accounts, much more evil than last time’,51 and recast his father’s apocalyptic despair into a disengaged quietism of his own: ‘I believe we must “win the war”. I dislike Germans and I dislike Nazis, at least what I’ve heard of them. But I don’t think it will do any good. And I have no driving power to bring it about [. . .] I can’t believe that anything I can do as an Englishman would be of the slightest use, nor do I see any “hope” in the future.’52 In one of his earliest letters to Sutton, written probably when he was seventeen, he had ventriloquized his father’s anti-Semitism: ‘As for photos in “Down Beat” . . . our worst fears. All oily Jews.’53 But three years later he wrote to his family from Oxford: ‘My bookplate has aroused dislike as it is in the shape of a Star of David. On the wave of anti-semitism that is almost bound to come after the war I may be hung up on the nearest lamp post.’54 His early exposure to Sydney’s controversial views had the lifelong effect of neutralizing Larkin’s political instincts. It is a key feature of his sensibility that he disclaims any coherent political ideology. There are virtually no expressions of political belief in Larkin’s letters of the later 1940s and 1950s and those which are detectable show him leaning towards the left. By the time he met Monica Jones in 1947 it seems that his left-wing views were pitted against her unreflecting conservatism.

  He remained in crucial respects, however, his father’s son. Philip learnt his religious scepticism from Sydney, who told him never to believe in God. Sydney also imparted to his son his own adventurous appetite for literature. Larkin later recalled with gratitude that though ‘most boys of my class were brought up to read Galsworthy and Chesterton as the apex of modern literature, and to think Somerset Maugham “a bit hot”’, his father had filled the house with works by Hardy, Shaw, Samuel Butler, Wilde, D. H. Lawrence, Huxley and Katherine Mansfield. From an early age, also, Philip made full use of the local lending library: ‘I suppose I must have read a book a day.’ He also took early to writing, pouring out prose and verse in abundance, resting his pages on a record of Beethoven’s opus 132 quartet, the only classical disc he owned.55 Like his father he used for preference a 2B Royal Sovereign pencil, and his handwriting, fluent and regular, is uncannily similar to his father’s.56 His earliest datable writing was printed in the school magazine, the Coventrian, in 1933, when he was eleven. It is a prose description entitled ‘Getting Up in the Morning’, already assured in its focus, with no evidence of stumbling over phrasing or idiom. He regarded reading and writing as his own province, without reference to school: ‘I did not much like the senior Eng
lish master, and I do not think he much liked me.’57 He neatly transcribed or typed his earliest poems and sewed them into dainty booklets.

  By the time he was in his final years at school he had developed a writer’s sense of different audiences. He earned the approval of teachers by such contributions to the school magazine as his first ‘published’ poem, ‘Winter Nocturne’, which appeared in the Coventrian in December 1938 when he was sixteen. It is a fluent Shakespearean sonnet:

  Mantled in grey, the dusk steals slowly in,

  Crossing the dead, dull fields with footsteps cold [. . .]

  As quiet as death. The sky is silent too,

  Hard as granite and as fixed as fate.

  He ends with an echo of Gray’s Elegy: ‘Dark night creeps in, and leaves the world alone.’ It is notable that ‘Going’, the first-written poem in his first mature volume, The Less Deceived, is essentially this same poem in a more accomplished form.