Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  He was also producing less public writing for the entertainment of his friends and schoolmates. ‘Coventria’ is a scurrilous parody of the school song, making fun of the teachers:

  We are the school at the top of the hill,

  That Henry the King did will,

  If he came back and saw it now

  The sight would make him ill!

  The Head’s a lout – Hardy’s a weed

  With his lop-eared, pop-eyed gaze [. . .]58

  ‘Phippy’s Schooldays’ is a spoof biography of the English teacher, in dramatic prose, its farcical mayhem owing something to the Billy Bunter stories:

  Bates hurled himself across the study, and crashed Philipson to the floor. The Hon. Percy was not far behind. There was a rending sound as a cheap waistcoat and jacket split up the back, and a squeal of anguish.

  ‘OOOHH . . . Bates, I shall report you to the Head Prefect . . . Oh! . . . ow . . . my jacket . . . my waistcoat . . .’

  The remains of the punch were swamped over Phippy’s meagre features, and his steel-rimmed spectacles were cracked into a thousand pieces. A pair of poor-fund boots were dragged off and thrown into the fire.59

  There were also comical accounts of ‘the combat between Gunner and myself and the sponges’ (conformist pupils), and a ‘Tour of K.H.S.’, in which the Headmaster A. A. C. Burton shows a visitor around, enthusiastically thrashing the wretches under his charge as he goes.60

  Very different are three poems concerned with Philip’s schoolfriend Earnest Stanley Sanders, which show the influence of Auden:61

  Disparaging my taste in ties

  Relaxèd warmly on my lap,

  I gazed into his lovely eyes

  And saw the snow beyond the gap [. . .]

  For life is not a storm of love,

  Nor a tragedy of sex;

  It only is a question of

  Deriving joy from shapely necks.

  (‘À un ami qui aime’)

  The confident form and tone of these poems is as remarkable as their lack of inhibition, at a time when homosexuality was a taboo topic: ‘I, fascinated, watch your tongue / Curl pink beyond your little ivory teeth’ (‘Stanley et la Glace’). It seems certain however that Larkin was not yet sexually active.

  It was decided that, like John Kemp, the protagonist of his later novel, Jill, he should take the Oxford scholarship examination a year early, since in five years’ time Oxford and Cambridge might well ‘be nothing but ruins’.62 King Henry VIII School had two ‘closed scholarships’ at St John’s College, so it was there that he went for the examinations in March 1940. He was awarded a scholarship in English, while Noel Hughes gained the other place to study Modern Languages. A few months earlier the seventeen-year-old Larkin had reviewed his writings up to that point, burning much and preserving an anthology of the best: fragments of novels, poems, satirical playlets and essays. With the instinct for balance and symmetry which shows itself throughout his life, he took care to devote exactly equal numbers of pages to prose and to poetry.63 He had ambitions to be a novelist, but poetry always came more easily to him than prose, and it was in poetry that he made his first real start. Before going up to Oxford he sent five poems to the Listener, one of which, ‘Ultimatum’, was accepted for publication, and appeared in the issue of 28 November 1940. It is an Audenesque sonnet with self-consciously obscure imagery: ‘For on our island is no railway station, / There are no tickets for the Vale of Peace, / No docks where trading ships and seagulls pass.’

  As an undergraduate Larkin wrote a steady stream of informative and entertaining letters and cards to his parents, ‘Pop’ and ‘Mop’, or ‘Dear Fambly’, sometimes separately, sometimes jointly. On his first arrival he wrote to tell his father that he had seen an original letter of D. H. Lawrence in Blackwell’s, priced at fifteen shillings. He had also attended his ‘first and (I trust) last chapel’:

  On Monday I attended my first lecture – Edmund Blunden talking about biography. Very strange. B. was a nervous man with a shock of hair, a nose like a wedge, and a twitching mouth. He delivered his lecture in staccato phrases, semi-ironically, only half concealing his genuine enthusiasm for his subject. After that I heard Nichol-Smith talking about Dryden, and yesterday Prof. Wyld on the History of English. The latter was very interesting but hard to follow.64

  The description of the matriculation ceremony is clearly intended for his proud mother’s eyes:

  This entailed dressing up in all the full apparel – I didn’t look half bad at all – and shambling down to Divinity Schools to receive the Statutes of the University and being blessed in Latin by the Vice Chancellor. This was only a very hasty affair – cut down to a mere nothing – and conducted to the accompaniment of bombers overhead. God, there are hundreds! My Latin name, by the way, is Philippus Arturus Larkin.65

  The city was under-populated and the atmosphere muted. The age and specifications for call-up into the army were constantly being revised and undergraduates knew that their studies might be interrupted at any time. The traditional routines and rituals were reduced. Rooms were shared, students were rationed to one bottle of wine a term from the buttery, and meals could no longer be taken in one’s rooms. As Larkin wrote later in his Introduction to Jill: ‘This was not the Oxford of Michael Fane and his fine bindings, or Charles Ryder and his plovers’ eggs.’66 Bombers took off continually from the nearby aerodrome: ‘I heard that old Brett-Smith, lecturing on mediaeval romance, paused in his discourse, peered over his spectacles, and inquired “Do I hear an unacademic sound? . . .” Everyone roared with laughter and the lecture continued.’67 At first Larkin associated only with his tutorial mate Norman Iles and friends from his school, particularly Noel Hughes with whom he shared his room at St John’s, and Jim Sutton who was at the Slade School of Art, which had been relocated to the Ashmolean Museum.

  Then on 14 November 1940, only weeks after he had left Coventry, the first major blitz of the war was visited on his home city, killing 554 people and injuring 1,000. Sydney Larkin stayed all night at his post in the Council House, which was hit by two bombs and several incendiaries. Two days later he sent a telegram to his son, consisting with characteristic thrift of the minimum number of letters: ‘Am quite safe. Daddy.’68 Sydney decided to shut up the house in Manor Road and took Eva to stay with relatives in Lichfield. On 17 November, before receiving this telegram, Larkin hitch-hiked home with Noel Hughes to see the damage. His desperate anxiety is recalled in his novel Jill, written three years later. The protagonist John Kemp ‘gasped aloud that he would do anything, promise anything, if only it would be all right. Any attempts at a personal life he had made seemed merely a tangle of a hypocritical selfishness: really he was theirs, dependent on them for ever.’69 Larkin’s parents may have fucked him up but he loved them deeply.

  In sharp contrast, in the letter to ‘Dear Fambly’ which he wrote on 18 November, after receiving Sydney’s telegram, he strikes an insouciant tone. Larkin recounts his and Hughes’s hitch-hiking strategies and relates that they had not been able to approach the city centre because it was being dynamited. But the main account of what they have seen comes in a retrospective which he depicts himself delivering with mock-heroic self-importance to his undergraduate friends over dinner:

  I was able to hold forth to an astonished commoners’ table – ‘By God . . . Just back from Coventry . . . What a sight . . . pass the peas . . . any factories hit? . . . Ha, ha! . . . all be out of production for a month . . . blowing up the city . . . streets full of broken glass . . . pass the potatoes . . . no gas . . . all candles . . . no electricity – can’t hear the news on the wireless – absolutely no communications . . . bread please . . . getting water from shellholes . . . danger of typhoid . . .’

  At the end of the letter, in ‘Remarks to Mop’, he puts the bombing at an even further distance, addressing his mother in a tone of soothing triviality: ‘I broke the handle from a tea-cup the other day, unfortunately. This is the first breakage of any sort we have had.
We lost the strainer the other day, but on questioning the Scout found it had only been mislaid. It is still the best thing we have.’70 By this sophisticated literary strategy he quite defuses the impact of his disturbing subject matter.

  In his later undergraduate memoir ‘Biographical Details’, Larkin relates that he could not write poetry while actually in Oxford: ‘in fact, all my best poems have always been written at home. Oxford lacks silence.’71 One of the best of his juvenile works, ‘Out in the lane I pause’, dates from his first vacation, Christmas 1940, spent in Lichfield, where his family had taken refuge with relatives. The poet stands alone under a starless sky beside the railway bridge, contemplating the futures of the ‘Girls and their soldiers from the town’ whose steps he can hear on the steep road towards the shops.72 From his invisible vantage point he contemplates the disappointments to come: ‘Each in their double Eden closed / They fail to see the gardener there / Has planted Error.’ There is a touch of Donne about the biblical rhetoric and also the poem’s complicated rhymed stanzas. The poet imagines the lovers going their separate ways from each other, and turning back in the future ‘with puzzled tears’:

  So through the dark I walk, and feel

  The ending year about me lapse,

  Dying, into its formal shapes

  Of field and tree;

  And think I hear its faint appeal

  Addressed to all who seek for joy,

  But mainly me.

  It is a studied, self-conscious exercise, but the assured authority of the poem’s lonely detached voice is impressive from a writer of just eighteen.

  In tracing Larkin’s literary development we are naturally mainly concerned with close and explicit influences: Auden, Yeats, Hardy, Laforgue. But of crucial importance also are the attitudes which he absorbed from his official undergraduate studies. Larkin was very much the product of the Oxford English Faculty of his day. English had been established as a respectable academic ‘discipline’ only two decades earlier as a result of the pioneering work of I. A. Richards in ‘Practical Criticism’ in Cambridge. From the beginning Oxford took a more historically based, less ideological approach. As an undergraduate Larkin attended lectures by J. R. R. Tolkien on Anglo-Saxon, Nevill Coghill on Chaucer and Shakespeare, C. S. Lewis on medieval and Renaissance literature, Charles Williams on Milton, Edmund Blunden on the Lake Poets and Lord David Cecil on the Romantics.73 He recollected that his first college tutor, Gavin Bone, an Anglo-Saxon specialist, ‘was mildly condescending’, and ‘very kind’ to him and Norman Iles, appearing ‘to regard us both as village idiots. I don’t really blame him, considering the work and remarks we used to produce.’74 Amis later made much of Larkin’s contempt for Anglo-Saxon: ‘I can just about stand learning the filthy lingo it’s written in. What gets me down is being expected to admire the bloody stuff.’75 But in fact Larkin never shared Amis’s philistinism. He admired, absorbed, parodied and derided writing of all periods, learning lessons for his own work.76

  Larkin’s fundamental attitudes towards art are rooted in the prin­ciples he imbibed at Oxford. His insistence that poetry is ‘not an act of the will’77 owes much to that favourite discussion topic in the Romantic section of the syllabus of his day: Coleridge’s distinction between Imagination and Fancy in Biographia Literaria. When Larkin later insists that writing is an involuntary attempt to satisfy ‘that mysterious something that has to be pleased’,78 he is echoing Coleridge’s idea of ‘secondary imagination’ which ‘dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate’, or at all events ‘struggles to idealize and to unify’. In contrast, Larkin’s ‘required’ writings, the reviews and the commissioned poems, are the product of Coleridge’s ‘fancy’, a ‘mode of memory’ manipulated by ‘the will’ and dealing only with ‘fixities and definites’.79

  Most influentially, T. S. Eliot’s 1919 essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ had set the prevailing theoretical context of literary studies. Eliot argued that the work of a great poet distils all previous poetry while also being quite new. The poet, he argued, must ‘write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order’.80 Eliot’s language is elitist and nationalistic. Larkin is less ideologically strained. In his ‘Conversation with Ian Hamilton’ in 1964, he mocks the self-consciousness of Eliot and Pound. They were ‘keen on culture, laughably keen’: ‘every poem must include all previous poems, in the same way that a Ford Zephyr has somewhere in it a Ford T Model – which means that to be any good you’ve got to have read all previous poems. I can’t take this evolutionary view of poetry. One never thinks about other poems except to make sure that one isn’t doing something that has been done before.’81 Larkin chooses his words carefully. He rejects not tradition but the reification of tradition. The Oxford syllabus of his day was aimed at making him thoroughly familiar with what ‘has been done before’, while Oxford’s relaxed cultural omnivorousness exposed him to many other influences outside the syllabus.

  Larkin’s reading was as wide and deep as Eliot’s; but it was not driven by a self-conscious idea of culture. Consequently he achieves a wider range of spontaneous poetic effects than Eliot. The reader need not be aware of it, but a subtext of tradition serves to give depth and resonance to his poems. After the apprenticeship of his Oxford years, he could wait ‘for it to come to me, in whatever shape it chose’,82 safe in the knowledge that the shapes it chose would carry within them the accumulated force of centuries of poetic precedent: Donne, Marvell, Gray, Pope, Keats, Gautier, Baudelaire, Tennyson, Laforgue, Yeats, Hardy and Auden. When he finally graduated from Oxford, he gained not merely the qualification which secured him a job in librarianship; he graduated as a poet.

  2

  Exemption

  1941–3

  Jim Sutton was called up into the 14th Field Ambulance Corps in April 1941, after only two terms in Oxford. In early June Larkin wrote another Audenesque sonnet, ‘Conscript’, which he later dedicated to his friend when it became Poem V in The North Ship. A young man’s land is ‘violated’ by a ‘bunch of horsemen’ whose leader asks for his help in a war for which, obscurely, ‘he was to blame’. The young man scorns evasion or ‘replacement’, and resigns himself fatalistically to ‘follow further / The details of his own defeat and murder’. The poem was published later in the year in the fugitive magazine Phoenix (October–November 1941). Another Audenesque sonnet, ‘A Writer’, had been published in Cherwell in May. However Larkin’s hopes of a smooth rise to literary prominence were disappointed when he was excluded from Eight Oxford Poets, edited in 1941 by Michael Meyer and Sidney Keyes. Kingsley Amis records that Keyes may have intended a deliberate slight, being aware ‘that Philip considered him a third-rate personage’.1 Larkin never forgave this rejection, expressing his contempt for Keyes even after his death in action at the age of twenty in 1943.

  Over the next decade Larkin was to reveal his most intimate thoughts in letters to Sutton. Shortly after his friend’s departure he described to him a series of lectures on psychology delivered in Oxford by the Jungian anthropologist John Layard. Layard, who had featured as ‘Barnard’ in Christopher Isherwood’s Lions and Shadows and had had an affair with Auden (who called him ‘loony Layard’), made a great impression on Larkin. On 15 May, after one of the lectures, he devoted much of a six-page letter to his sister Catherine2 to Layard’s ideas on the common symbolism of ancient Egypt and modern Yugoslavian peasants, and to diagrams of the ‘hypothetical line of perfection’ between ‘God’ and ‘animal’ in the human psyche. It was, he told her, ‘like an evening spent with truth’.3 He explained to Sutton later in June: ‘The solution as he saw it was that women should be the priestesses of the unconscious and help men to regain all the vision they have lost.’ Since women are ‘rubbing shoulders with all these archetypes and symbols that man so needs’, they need
to ‘bring them up and give them to man. How this is to be done, he didn’t really know.’4 Earnest though he is he ends characteristically with a shrug of scepticism.

  Larkin found an alternative, less problematic access to his unconscious in jazz. While still at school he had theorized pretentiously about the centrality of jazz to the modern predicament: ‘Jazz is the new art of the unconscious [. . .] the unconscious is in a new state, and has a new need, and has produced a new art to satisfy that need [. . .]’5 As he recorded in an account of his Oxford years, typed in September 1942 and October 1943 under the title ‘Biographical Details: OXFORD’, the first friendships he made in Oxford outside his own school and college circle came ‘via hot jazz’. These evenings of beer and records were ‘the most exciting thing about Oxford I had yet encountered’.6 He wrote to Sutton: ‘I rushed out on Monday & bought “Nobody Knows The Way I Feel Dis Morning”. Fucking, conting, bloddy good! (sic) Bechet is the great artist. As soon as he starts playing you automatically stop thinking about anything else and listen. Power and glory.’7

  On 5 May 1941, within days of Sutton’s departure, Larkin encountered Kingsley Amis, in many ways Sutton’s opposite. Amis was to take the subversive role in Larkin’s life which had been filled by Colin Gunner at school. Larkin’s later account of their first meeting is carefully nuanced. He was walking across the quadrangle with Norman Iles:

  a fair-haired young man came down staircase three and paused on the bottom step. Norman instantly pointed his right hand at him in the semblance of a pistol and uttered a short coughing bark to signify a shot – a shot not as in reality, but as it would sound from a worn sound-track on Saturday afternoon in the ninepennies.