Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  The young man’s reaction was immediate. Clutching his chest in a rictus of agony, he threw one arm up against the archway and began slowly crumpling downwards, fingers scoring the stonework. Just as he was about to collapse on the piled-up laundry [. . .] he righted himself and trotted over to us. ‘I’ve been working on this,’ he said, as soon as introductions were completed. ‘Listen. This is when you’re firing in a ravine.’

  We listened.

  ‘And this is when you’re firing in a ravine and the bullet ricochets off a rock.’

  We listened again. Norman’s appreciative laugher skirled freely: I stood silent. For the first time I felt myself in the presence of a talent greater than my own.8

  There is a twinkle in that last sentence: the ‘talent’ in question is, after all, merely the ability to mimic the conventions of ‘western’ films.

  This hint of dubiety underpins the lifelong relationship between the two men. They at once developed an intimate masculine bond. But theirs was always a very unequal relationship. Motion writes that Amis’s was a ‘sensibility very like Larkin’s’, one which ‘checked lyricism with mockery, and spurned any sign of pretension’.9 But though this is an accurate description of Amis, it covers only one small part of Larkin. Amis later recalled that Larkin’s was ‘the stronger personality [. . .] I was always full of ridiculous, foolish, very young man’s ideas. But he seemed to have grown up.’10 Richard Bradford observes that Larkin ‘corresponded with virtually every one of his acquaintances, from Sutton and Gunner through his Oxford friends to his mother and father’, while ‘Amis wrote almost exclusively to Larkin.’11 Amis demanded that his friend be ‘an exact replica of himself’. ‘I enjoy talking to you more than to anybody else [. . .] because you are savagely uninterested in all the things I am uninterested in.’12 Larkin obliged by adopting Amis’s tone of beer-drinking, jazz-loving ribaldry, and even outdid his friend in contempt for the Oxford Literature syllabus: Anglo-Saxon was ‘ape’s bumfodder’; The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost vie with each other for the title of ‘the most boring poem in English’.13 It was in Amis’s copy of Keats’s Eve of St Agnes that Larkin wrote against the lines: ‘like a throbbing star / Into her dream he melted’ – ‘YOU MEAN HE FUCKED HER.’14

  Larkin soon introduced his new friend to his record collection: ‘Kingsley’s enthusiasm flared up immediately. I suppose we devoted to some hundred records that early anatomizing passion normally reserved for the more established arts.’ The clarinettist Pee Wee Russell ‘was, mutatis mutandis, our Swinburne and our Byron. We bought every record he played on that we could find.’15 Amis was also an ally in Larkin’s quest for poetic recognition. As Larkin wrote in ‘Biographical Details’, ‘Keyes was rapidly forging ahead, and winning a reputation for himself that extended far beyond the limits of Oxford.’16 Amis became editor of the Labour Club Bulletin, and published Larkin’s poems ‘Observation’ and ‘Disintegration’ in the issues of November 1941 and February 1942:

  Time that scatters hair upon a head

  Spreads the ice sheet on the shaven lawn;

  Signing an annual permit for the frost

  Ploughs the stubble in the land at last [. . .]

  (‘Disintegration’)

  The young poet was still convinced that his best route to success lay through ventriloquizing Auden. He was also aware that he was beginning to lose his head of fine fair hair.

  In his early months in Oxford Larkin made his first serious attempts at narrative prose. Four stories from 1941–2, three in typescript and one a substantial handwritten fragment, give thinly fictionalized accounts of conversations and drunken outings with his Oxford friends, who for a brief period named themselves ‘The Seven’. Larkin explained in ‘Biographical Details’:

  This arose from an idea that we should form some definite group with definite ideas, set against the college authorities and all the intellectuals and scholars we disliked. As a matter of fact, after one meeting the ideas and ideals degenerated into one big supper-party per week, supplied by two people. These suppers were perhaps the most thrilling and amusing things in the whole year. They may have been only projections of ‘dorm feeds’ onto a college scale, but they were never so enjoyable when only a few of us were there. It is quite impossible to recall just what went on.17

  Norman Iles remembered the group, in a more serious tone, as a hand with seven digits: ‘We made a fist against the Dons [. . .] I see myself as the thumb. Next to me is Philip Brown. In the middle come Nick Russel, Hilary Morris, and David Williams. Kingsley Amis is the third finger. The little finger, the opposite to me, is Philip Larkin.’18

  The atmosphere of Larkin’s stories echoes the schoolboy context of Christopher Isherwood’s Lions and Shadows. The first typescript is dated ‘January–July 1941’, and the title added in pen, ‘Story 1’, indicates that Larkin regarded it at the time as a significant start in his writing. In a plain, dogged third person it follows the students from lecture to pub to party, achieving vividness only towards the end when one of them realizes that homosexual desire has overcome him at a college ‘drunk’. He staggers spectacleless and blinded by cigarette smoke back to his room, which has, in the meantime, been wrecked by his fellow students. His sexual hysteria develops into a long unparagraphed purple patch of melodrama. He feels ‘absolute shame’ as he recalls ‘the loathsome rapid servility of his hands to execute the vapid mirages of mind. Hands swam before his eyes, grasping, touching, manipulating, cleverly overcoming obstacles so that the mind could gratify its absurd beliefs, half-desires, and hallucinations, conspiring like vicious and unimaginative courtiers to burden further the patient and ox-like peasantry of the body.’ The imagery becomes picturesquely phallic: ‘That which, left alone, would like a lupin point for the sky in admirable symmetry he had, and not in the few previous hours only, warped and torn like an imbecile gardener [. . .] He was foul. Foul. Foul.’19 Was Larkin himself perhaps drunk when he wrote this comic sub-Lawrentian farrago?

  The holograph prose fragment ‘Peter’, written a short time later, reveals the passive, relaxed mood of his early months in Oxford: ‘Peter felt his university life to be happily and even creatively aimless. The beauty and luxury of the colleges pleased him; he did not feel his work either difficult or unpleasant [. . .]’20 The choice of name for the protagonist alludes archly to a record by the high-voiced, gender-ambiguous jazz-singer Billy Banks (‘Oh Peter, you’re so nice. It’s Paradise. When you’re by my side, that’s when I’m satisfied. Come on and kiss me do, and hug me tight.’)21 Larkin’s narrative, however, has no such sophistication, amounting to little more than a desultory diary, the awkward third-person narrator clearly being ‘Peter’ himself. Norman Iles appears as ‘Edwin’:

  Each despised academic work, social polish, and intellectual discussion: each unspokenly believed that personal relationships were the only things worth caring for. Each was restless, sexually unsatisfied and nervous, yet capable of great personal loyalty, if not wholehearted passion.

  On the other hand, there were too many differences between them for them to be inseparable. Edwin was impetuous, honest, unthinking, child-like; any emotion or thought he experienced he immediately expressed. It rarely occurred to him that he could be in the wrong, and in consequence he had no sympathy with people who differed from him.22

  The friends visit a medical student, ‘Philip’ (Philip Brown with whom Larkin was later to share a room), who shows them slides on his microscope, including human semen. Edwin comments: ‘I never knew it looked so beautiful.’ Peter refuses to look. They sit by the fire and Edwin aims an imaginary revolver into the centre of the flames. The narrator reflects that Peter and Edwin are ‘day boys’ and ‘completely virgin’, in contrast to their more sexually experienced boarding school contemporaries.23 ‘Geoffrey’ who appears at dinner, is clearly Amis. ‘Peter despised Geoffrey ultimately, but had a liking for him because he flattered him and could make him laugh. He had a gift for mimicry of a very high order: any peculi
arity he could caricature and use as a nucleus for a fantastic monologue, that always the same, passed into the repertory of the group’s humour’. While admiring ‘his talent’ Peter finds Geoffrey ‘impossible to take seriously’.24 The fragment ends as Peter visits Edwin next morning, to find him still in bed. They talk uneasily about ‘this buggery business’.25

  In June 1941 Sydney Larkin moved the family home from 1 Manor Road, Coventry to a new house at 73 Coten End, Warwick. Here the young Larkin found himself, during vacations, in the first of the high, secluded rooms in which he was to live most of his creative life. He described the house to Sutton: ‘It is long and tall. I sleep in one of the attics and write this in the other. Everywhere junk is piled.’26 On his return to Oxford in October 1941, the pattern repeated itself: ‘My room, due to a misunderstanding with the Senior Tutor, was an attic in the president’s lodgings.’ Again he found himself in a solitary retreat up flights of stairs: ‘I preferred it to college. The room had a small but vehement electric fire, and this I kept on all day and most of the night – frequently all night. This was before the days of fuel-rationing and so on. Consequently the room grew like a tiny oven, and earned the scorn of my friends. But I liked it.’27

  In ‘Biographical Details’ his imagination is fired by the topic of living rooms. He is entranced by the stylish decadence of a new freshman, Hilary, who had ‘a childish mane of fairish flopping hair, and pouting lips’. Hilary’s room boasts ‘two silky cushions – if not more – of green and orange, peculiar pictures (one seemed like a Japanese print), and a white, voluptuous lambskin on the floor’:

  I might digress on the subject of rooms. Norman’s was redolent of a smashed culture [. . .] Kingsley’s was also squalid and untidy, but without the debauched culture [. . .] His room, which grew to be our centre, was gradually made chaotic: records, papers, teacups and plates, books borrowed and not returned – all were thrown about the room in astonishing confusion. Nor would his fire ever burn. Nor would his cupboard shut. The scouts had a horror of our rooms. I don’t wonder. Philip’s, on the same staircase as Hilary’s, betrayed no character. It had a picture or two, a few books and a microscope, and mice: it could be very draughty in the winter [. . .] My own room was a mixture of natural chaos and neurotic tidiness – it looked untidy, but everything was actually in its place.28

  Then he makes an unexpected poetic leap:

  I learnt something about untidiness when visiting an empty set of rooms in New [College] for some money. Needless to say, the owner was out, but the room was expensively untidy, with dozens of delicious books jumbled everywhere, mixed with letters, bottles, invitations, rackets, records, more books, and to top it all a chessboard with men neatly arranged to suggest a game or problem still in progress, ledged on the corner of a trunk.29

  He is entranced by a glimpse of the deserted room of someone he will never meet. The inscrutable chessboard on the trunk has the air of a poetic symbol.

  His determination to be in the literary swim was intense. He told his sister in a letter of 24 January 1941 that he was about to pay 2s 6d to join the Ark, a Christian association, ‘just to hear and see’ T. S. Eliot. ‘I want to confirm my opinion that he really is an unpleasant guy.’30 He became Treasurer of the University English Club, and over the next two years was involved in entertaining a wide variety of speakers, including Stephen Spender, R. H. Wilenski and Lord Berners. On 3 March 1943 he wrote to his parents: ‘Met George Orwell, who is very nice, though not quite Pop’s political line.’ The visit which made the greatest impact was that of Dylan Thomas in the winter of 1941. Larkin was eager to put the image in Augustus John’s celebrated portrait to the test: ‘To my mind, his face was smaller and more triangular than John made it, and his hair (composed of beautiful curls seeming to range in colour from lemon to prussian blue) more luxuriant. His lips were more loose, and were perpetually holding an out-thrust cigarette.’31 Larkin records every gesture and mannerism, noting that he ‘did not drink as much sherry as I expected’. They talked about the documentary films Thomas had made for the Ministry of Information. ‘I told him I sincerely admired “Balloon Site”, which he seemed to find incredible [. . .] He smoked perpetually, lighting fresh cigarettes from the stubs of old ones.’32 As they waited ‘in some girl’s room’ in St Hilda’s College, the ambitious young undergraduate attempted to make an impact on his distinguished guest: ‘I said I had been reading “Contemporary Poetry and Prose”, a little surrealist magazine in which D.T. had published stories and poems. He gave a brief biography of Roger Roughton the editor, commenting on his suicide “Bloody little fool”.’33

  During the reading Thomas, still in his coat, sat near the fire, hunched over ‘a great wad of typescript, dogeared and scribbled’. After ‘a little pyrotechnic introduction, full of bad puns and spoonerisms (“pillars of the Swiss”)’ and ‘a topical poem of which all I can remember is “As I tossed off on Pembroke Bridge”’, Thomas read two passages from a draft novel and ‘about four poems: “Paper and sticks and shovel and match”, A Centenarian Killed in an Air Raid, and two others I don’t recall. These too seemed wonderful to me. He read very slowly, lingering on the vowels.’ Larkin’s past tense is deliberately chosen. By the time he records his enthusiasm for this ‘wonderful’ reading it has already faded. In a letter to Sutton, written the week following the visit, he had given a brisker, upbeat account, mentioning that Thomas (‘Hell of a fine man: little, snubby, hopelessly pissed bloke’) had read ‘a parody of Spender entitled “The Parachutist” which had people rolling on the floor’.34

  In view of Thomas’s extravagant bardic image it is notable that what particularly impressed Larkin was his refusal of pretension: ‘One girl questioned the phrase “innocent as strawberries”; DT admitted he had no sinful desires about strawberries [. . .] a long discussion of his Poem in October ensued, DT saying that he’d merely gone for a walk along a seashore in October and felt a bit queer, and wanted to make the reader feel queer also.’35 Larkin carefully assesses his own shifting reactions. His final, dismissive judgement comes as a slight surprise: ‘On the whole, he was rather a pathetic figure. It was difficult to connect the man and his poetry. I felt impatient because of his social manner, which I thought assumed. He seemed to use it as an artful protection.’36

  On 16 November Larkin attended a very different performance. He wrote to Sutton that ‘McCready and I shagged up to London to attend a Jam session at HMV Studios in S. John’s Wood.’ He was filled with excitement at being present at an historic occasion, the first jam session, indeed, to be recorded in England. He conceded that the quality of the music was not high, but criticism was disarmed:

  the audience was in front, behind, underneath, hanging from the lights, and so on. There was a beautifully informal atmosphere as they shat about at first, all dropping one by one into ‘My Blue Heaven’ as practice. Then the engineer asked them to play something to test the recording apparatus. ‘Honeysuckle Rose’ was then bashed out for 10 minutes [. . .] we left at 5.30 and just caught our ’bus. The outstanding player on the session was Carl Barriteau, a negro clarinet player who sounded wonderful in the flesh. Played hellish loud, as Bechet would.37

  The experience made him aware that ‘an American session would be colossal’. ‘Barriteau was amazingly good: every one of his sides ended with a terrific cheer from the audience, which I hope goes on the record. It deserves it.’ The listener today can hear Barriteau playing in ‘Tea for Two’ at this very recording session on the CD set of Larkin’s Jazz.38

  The young poet was enjoying his new experiences. He was popular and happy. He wrote to Sutton with shocking candour: ‘Perhaps you think I am being a bit selfish but I just don’t want to go into the Army. I want to pretend it isn’t there; that there’s no war on.’39 But the shadows were gathering, and on 16 December he was called for his medical examination. He was told that if his eyesight was graded at 4 or below he would be exempt. As term came to an end he sold all his books and burnt his lecture
notes. He would, it seemed, be in uniform within a matter of weeks. ‘So it all came to an end,’ he wrote portentously in ‘Biographical Details’:

  Everybody – that is, Norman, Philip, Nick, and Kingsley – gave me a Bessie Smith record each, which touched me more deeply than I showed. I was staying on till Christmas, firewatching, and I saw Philip and Norman off [. . .] The parting was one of the most harrowing things I had to go through, and I returned blindly to college in the December gloom, to play a record or two before dinner.40

  This valedictory diminuendo is followed by a dramatic reversal: ‘On New Year’s Day I received my hideous letter marked O.H.M.S. in bed. It informed me that my medical category was IV. Never have I, except at the news of the Munich agreement, felt so relieved.’41 The equation of his personal exemption with the national relief of 1939 is rich with comic euphoria. The Munich agreement had of course turned out to be a temporary delusion.

  For the time being his dearest wish was fulfilled. He was exempt and could pretend there was no war on. At the beginning of 1942 he returned to his beloved Oxford free of the shadow which had haunted him. He moved with Philip Brown, who as a medical student was in an exempt category, into 125 Walton Street, not quite an attic, but a large, first-floor room with a piano,42 and they became a homosocial couple, ‘the two Philips’ or ‘big Philip and little Philip’. Brown gave Larkin a copy of Housman’s A Shropshire Lad. He recalled in 1991: ‘Philip may have been in love with me [. . .] there were a few messy encounters between us, yes. Nothing much. Philip’s sexuality was so obscured by his manner of approach and his general diffidence that frankly I would be surprised to hear that he ever had sex with anyone.’43 Larkin’s ‘crush’ on him, he recalled, did not lead to ‘any serious action. Besides, I was extremely interested in girls. And so was he.’44 Larkin wrote in ‘Biographical Details’: ‘We were all still very childish about sex.’ But though Larkin lacked experience he adopted an assured attitude towards sexual matters in his writing. In a letter of 16 May 1942 he wrote to his mother: ‘Tell Pop that a friend has found an unexpurgated version of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” behind the bookcases in his digs. I am impatiently waiting for him (and his wife) to finish it.’ It is difficult to imagine many other nineteen-year-olds making such a joke to their parents at this period.