Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  Similarly it is easy to read ‘Love, we must part now’ (XXIV) as a Yeatsian spell, designed to avert the threat of Ruth’s growing emotional dependence by anticipating the end of the relationship in fin de siècle world-weariness:

  Love, we must part now: do not let it be

  Calamitous and bitter. In the past

  There has been too much moonlight and self-pity [. . .]

  There is a whiff of the nineties decadents Dowson and Symons here. And the young poet was only too aware that such gorgeous rhetorical gestures were irrelevant to his real situation. His and Ruth’s parting, nearly six years later, was indeed to be ‘calamitous and bitter’. But he could not realistically expect her to share his enjoyment of his gaudy rhetoric of tall ships ‘wet with light’, ‘waving apart’ as the sun boldly paces the sky. The poem’s tone, indeed, is so high-falutin that one might suspect the young poet of mocking himself, in Montgomery mode, inserting invisible inverted commas of irony: ‘There is regret. Always, there is regret. / But it is better that our lives unloose [. . .]’ It seems that following the bitter reproaches and self-reproaches of his long engagement to Ruth he felt painfully embarrassed by the manipulative bad faith of these poems. The quarrel was perhaps less with Yeats’s rhetoric itself than with his own use of it in the emotional mistreatment of Ruth.

  Implicit in the imagery of The North Ship is an ominous gender theme. At times we see a Larkin concerned to empathize with women in a straightforward human way. The speaker of ‘Ugly Sister’ (XIX), disregarded, climbs the thirty steps to her high room.

  Since I was not bewitched in adolescence

  And brought to love,

  I will attend to the trees and their gracious silence,

  To winds that move.

  This lonely, ugly girl offers a protest against simplificatory gender archetypes which do not allow ugly sisters to be objects of empathy. But she is not quite a real girl in a real place. The theme is expressed in the terms of the ‘myth-kitty’; she finds her consolation in a symbolic attic, communing with the elements. Overwhelmingly in the volume, women remain archetypal and idealized. They are muses, ‘sudden angels’, sweet severed images, floating wing-stiff in the sun; or, like the Polish airgirl, they are embodiments of Beauty. They may even be, as in ‘The North Ship’, femmes fatales.

  In the most complex poem in the volume, ‘I see a girl dragged by the wrists’ (XX), the girl is on the one hand the male poet’s unattainable muse; on the other she shows, in Brunette vein, his intense desire to ‘be that girl!’ The mixing of the two motives makes for a powerful but muddled effect. The poem opens with a stark antithesis between the girl rejoicing in the flux of life and the male poet alienated and self-doubting. With affected world-weariness he regrets his inability to identify himself with this girl as she is dragged laughing across the snow in courtship horseplay:

  Nothing so wild, nothing so glad as she

  Rears up in me,

  And would not, though I watched an hour yet.

  He will never, as he had once hoped, ‘be / As she is’. Remarkably, the man who is dragging the girl by the wrists is of no concern to the poet. He feels no rivalry, no envy of this man’s masterful control over the girl. Instead he strains to identify himself with her delighted passivity. His vain hope had been to achieve her breathless submission to life. On this level the poem propounds, if with an unusual gender twist, the familiar fin de siècle theme of the alienated poet’s exclusion from the everyday world which his poetry serves and celebrates.

  However, his resignation to his lot has, it seems, caused the ‘first brick’ of a new imaginative building to be laid, and he finds himself suddenly excited ‘to fever-pitch again’ by the sight of ‘two old ragged men’ clearing the drifts ‘with shovels and a spade’:

  The beauty dries my throat.

  Now they express

  All that’s content to wear a worn-out coat,

  All actions done in patient hopelessness [. . .]

  The beauty he had seen in the young girl reappears in the epiphany of these two shabby old men. They ‘sweep the girl clean from my heart’. Here it seems is a different version of the muse, realer and less conventionally beautiful than the girl. The structure of the poem imitates that of Yeats’s early Platonic meditation ‘To the Rose upon the Rood of Time’. Yeats sought ‘Eternal beauty wandering on her way’ in the symbolic rose itself, but then found that he must come down to earth and turn his attention also to the ‘rose-breath’: to the reflection of eternal beauty in the mortal world of ‘common things that crave’.27 Larkin retreads Yeats’s tortuous poetic steps, turning from the transcendent beauty of the girl to the less obvious beauty of the commonplace old men. The speaker claims, ‘I’m content to see / What poor mortar and bricks / I have to build with.’

  But at this point the young poet begins to slip and slide between alternative inspirations and the momentum falters. He abruptly reverts to his hopeless desire to be the girl, and the old men change from alternative muses into metaphorical artists:

  Damn all explanatory rhymes!

  To be that girl! – but that’s impossible;

  For me the task’s to learn the many times

  When I must stoop, and throw a shovelful [. . .]

  The poem ends by leaping to a quite different evocation of the beauty he seeks, in the form neither of the girl nor of the two old men, but of a preposterous Yeatsian ‘snow-white unicorn’, which in reward for his service may ‘Descend at last to me, / And put into my hand its golden horn.’ Are there invisible inverted commas of irony here? Unicorns traditionally entrust themselves to virgins; is he perhaps making derisive reference to his own virginal state? The word ‘horn’, which in letters to male friends Larkin uses frequently in its vulgar meaning, also hints at an obscene joke. The poet conjures an image of a girlish muse while holding a horn in his hand as he stoops to throw a shovelful.

  On its publication in the summer of 1945 The North Ship received only a single brief notice, in the Coventry Evening Telegraph (26 October 1945), which gives every sign of having been written by Larkin himself: ‘He has an inner vision that must be sought for with care. His recondite imagery is couched in phrases that make up in a kind of wistful, hinted beauty what they lack in lucidity.’28 Nevertheless his literary career was at last on track, however modestly. In May, shortly after Victory in Europe Day, he completed work on his second novel, The Kingdom of Winter, in ‘Proustian’ mood, and Montgomery’s agent Peter Watt agreed to seek a publisher for it. By now Montgomery had completed his own second novel, The Moving Toyshop, intensifying Larkin’s feeling of impatience at not yet being a published novelist. He remained passive, however. Kingsley Amis, demobbed in September 1945, was horrified to find that the finished manuscript of The Kingdom of Winter was still untyped. Larkin wrote to his parents asking for help and they paid the £5 typist’s fee. He sent the book to Watt in October 1945. Months were to pass before, in June 1946, he heard that no less a publisher than Faber had accepted it, offering an advance of £30. At last, it seemed, he was breaking into the larger literary world. Then in October 1946 the Fortune Press published Jill. He sent a copy to his father who, characteristically, responded with a cheque in payment.29 Faber followed, in February 1947, with The Kingdom of Winter, the title having been changed after discussion to the more saleable A Girl in Winter, though Larkin had earlier rejected this as ‘Mills & Boony’.30 With a volume of poems and two novels in print, Larkin now had some reason to feel that he had arrived as a writer.

  5

  The Novels

  1943–5

  The momentum created in his final months at Oxford had driven Larkin forward, and he had completed two novels in less than two years, between August 1943 and May 1945. They are highly precocious works for a writer in his early twenties. But they led him into an artistic and personal dead end. He was not fully to regain creative self-possession until he moved to Belfast in 1950 and abandoned his ambitions as a novelist. The narratives of
both works drive inexorably towards negative conclusions. Self-depreciation was, as John Banville has said, ‘not second but first nature’ to Larkin,1 and a strong subtext of both novels is a scathing critique of his own masculine selfishness and immaturity. As a Bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel, Jill is very sour. Unlike Lawrence’s Paul Morel or Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus, Larkin’s Kemp has no promising future. Similarly A Girl in Winter, contradicting its final published title, is the bitterest of anti-romances. He later said ‘I always think of [it] as The Kingdom of Winter’, and it seems appropriate to employ the original title here rather than the misleadingly sentimental version forced on him by Faber.2

  Jill, like Michaelmas Term at St Bride’s, which he was writing when he first conceived it, transfers Willow Gables to Oxford. The protagonist, Kemp, is a Pygmalion aesthete enchanted, as was Hilary, by a dream of innocence. But grim heterosexual reality replaces comic lesbian fantasy. Hilary’s dream of Mary ultimately became flesh; Kemp’s dream of Jill is from the start unattainable. The delightful pastoral of Willow Gables is reduced to the obsessive delusion of ‘a very poor young man who goes to Oxford who is exceptionally nervous and rather feminine’, and whose ‘complicated sexless daydream’ is broken by the appearance of a real-life Jill. As Larkin put it, with brisk relish, in a letter to Sutton, written shortly after he first conceived the novel: ‘the rest of the story, in action and in a long dream, serves to disillusion him completely’.3

  In a later interview he dismissed the idea that Jill had the ‘political overtones’ of later works by Sillitoe, Wain, Waterhouse and Amis. His ineffectual, moody protagonist is no class champion or victim, but a displaced version of himself: ‘John’s being working-class was a kind of equivalent of my stammer, a built-in handicap to put him one down.’4 At first sight Kemp might seem a similar self-projection to Jim Dixon in Amis’s Lucky Jim, ‘unlucky John’ perhaps. Larkin’s and Amis’s protagonists are both versions of the blundering ‘northern scholar’, invented by Larkin and his undergraduate friends.5 Both descend into a spiral of disaster, ending in drunkenness and physical mayhem. But the tones of the novels are quite different. Lucky Jim takes sides with its protagonist. The reader is encouraged to identify him or herself with the young man’s pursuit of the girl and the money. The desires of Larkin’s ‘exceptionally nervous’ protagonist are altogether more elusive.

  Kemp’s is a fundamentally poetic sensibility. As early as 1940 Larkin had declared to Sutton that ‘A novel should be a diffused poem,’6 and in August and September 1943 his letters were full of admiring references to George Moore’s ‘real prose poem’, Esther Waters, the elusive novels of Henry Green and, most enthusiastically, the poetic prose of Katherine Mansfield. Kemp’s consciousness is rendered with something of Mansfield’s cool descriptive precision:

  From the stone façades pigeons fluttered down on to the pavements and waddled uneasily about, casting a wary eye at him, but he paid no attention to them. The wind blew and a whole wall of ivy danced in the sun, the leaves blowing back to show their white undersides. So in him a thousand restlessnesses yearned and shook.7

  On one level Larkin was trying again to ‘be that girl’ by writing, as he announced to Sutton, with ‘double-distilled purity of essence-of-Mansfield’.8 But, characteristically, even as he was embarking on the novel he was doubting this strategy, ridiculing his poetic prose in the Lawrentian dialect of a Mr Morel: ‘It’s got no guts, no earth. Wheer keeps tha ba’s, lad?’9 Jill was, he told Sutton, ‘very tiny and thin’ compared with Sons and Lovers, which he could feel mocking him from the bookcase, ‘breathing, very slightly’.10

  On the realistic level, Kemp’s fantasy is a barely plausible attempt to impress his public-school room-mate, Warner, who regrets not being closer to his own sister. But the novel insists on a more aesthetic version. The fantasy takes on an imaginative life of its own. Kemp is an artist offering selfless devotion to a muse. An emotional climax is reached when he starts writing letters to the imagined Jill, and posting them: ‘He was trembling when he dropped [the letter] into a pillar-box, and leant against the wall a moment, filled with exultation at the idea of thus speaking with nothingness. He envisaged the envelope wandering around England, collecting pencilled scribbles of suggestions on the front and back until, perhaps a year or more hence, it came to rest in some dusty corner of a dead-letter office.’11 In Gautier’s theory ‘there is something grand and beautiful about loving a statue; the love is perfectly disinterested, there is no fear of satiety nor conqueror’s disgust, and you cannot reasonably hope for the miracle that happened to Pygmalion’.12 Kemp is such a selfless aesthete, absorbed in his own creation, speaking excitedly with nothingness.

  Like his creator before him Kemp seeks to bring his vision closer by literary transgendering. He pursues the Pygmalion miracle by writing Jill’s diary, in a pale version of the Willow Gables mode:

  All my kirbi-grips had vanished for a start this morning (yes, and WHO took them?), so what with searching for them and trying to find a slide, I hadn’t time to get my hymn-book before prayers – and of course the Badger had to choose today to inspect them, as she said she’d seen too many girls sharing recently. I suppose she thinks I like sharing with Molly.13

  But, like the blessing of the gods which breathes life into the statue, or the visitation of the poet’s muse, the epiphany cannot be forced or willed. When it does come, it is quite unexpected, and catches him unawares:

  The final possession came one day at lunch, when he was quietly eating bread and cheese and listening to casual talk [. . .] The sensation he had was of looking intently into the centre of a pure white light: he seemed to see the essence of Jill, around which all the secondary material things formed and reformed as he wrote them down. He thought he saw exactly what she was and how he should express it: the word was innocent, one he had used dozens of times in his own mind, and yet until that moment had never understood.14

  In a version of the hyacinth-girl episode in The Waste Land, Kemp looks ‘into the heart of light, the silence’.

  By the time Larkin came to write the later part of the novel reality had caught up with his artificial fiction. Just as Kemp comes upon the very Jill of his imagination in an Oxford bookshop, with her blue woollen gloves, her belted fawn coat with flaps over the pockets and her Wellingtons, so the young Larkin had met the all-too-real schoolgirl Ruth Bowman. In the novel Gillian insists on being a real girl in a real place. She is, indeed, the cousin of Elizabeth, the sexually aware girlfriend of Kemp’s room-mate, the odious public-school ‘hearty’, Warner. Warner’s friends, Patrick and Eddy, crudely mock Kemp’s obsession: ‘This man’s got a letch on your kid cousin.’ He can only protest feebly, ‘I’m not a damn baby snatcher’,15 and cling stubbornly to his dream: ‘The door to the different world had been left half ajar and swiftly, lightly, coolly, calmly, he must slip through it and be for ever safe.’16 However, his preparations to entertain Jill to tea take on a hopeless fatalism as he makes his room tidy and neat, sets out large quantities of cakes and lettuce, and then rushes out distractedly to buy a too-large packet of salt. Dream cannot possibly become reality. And, indeed, instead of Gillian it is Elizabeth who arrives. Gillian, she quite properly insists, is too young and fragile for his attentions.

  Until this point the war has scarcely registered with the reader. None of the characters has shown any interest in the progress of the conflict, and casual references to the black-out, fire-watching and changes in the age of the army call-up have served merely to reinforce the atmosphere of insecurity. Now, it seems, the bombing of his home town is to bring about Kemp’s awakening to reality. As he sets out on the train to discover his parents’ fate, he ‘seemed to be leaving a region of unreality and insubstantial pain for the real world where he could really be hurt’.17 Ominously, however, he remains a self-obsessed neurotic, imagining that his parents must have been killed to punish him personally for his neglect: ‘he deserved to be punished in this way [. . .] he was tormented
with thinking the worst had happened, they had been killed because he treated them lightly’.18 He views the ruins of the city with refined objective detachment: familiar streets uncannily deserted; ‘broken bricks, lurching floors and laths sticking out like delicate broken bones’.19 On his visit to Coventry Larkin had been accompanied by Noel Hughes. In the novel, however, John roams the ruins of Huddlesford poignantly alone. Personal tragedy and loss are omitted. John’s own area of the city is untouched and he discovers that his family is safe in Preston. The most vivid image is the Larkinesque deserted living room of his family home:

  Bending close to the window-pane, he looked into the front room: it was tidy as usual, there were ornaments on the mantelpiece and the clocks showed the right time. There was a pile of newspapers on the table and behind a glass vase he could see the half-dozen letters he had written home all put neatly together. It was strange, like looking into a doll’s house, and putting his hands against the window frames he felt as protective as a child does feel towards a doll’s house and its tiny rooms.20

  A numb, traumatized quality infuses the narrative. The pub-goers seem embarrassed rather than sympathetic as they listen to the commercial traveller whose wife has been killed in a direct hit on their hotel: ‘“I reckon they’ll do this to everywhere,” said the young man, looking up again. “Everywhere. There won’t be a town left standing.” His voice had a half-hysterical eager note as if he desired this more than anything.’21