Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  At first, however, his poetry showed little change. There is an eloquent epigrammatic bleakness in the five lines of ‘To S.L.’ in which the poet craves the ‘gift’ of his father’s ‘courage and indifference’ in the face of a hostile world.10 However, the other poems completed during 1945 do not reach this level. ‘Coming at last to night’s most thankful springs’ is irritatingly obscure; ‘Plymouth’, a portrait of an aged seafarer, is clumsily phrased; ‘Lift through the breaking day’, ‘Portrait’ and ‘Past days of gales’ are elusively symbolist.11 However, ‘Who whistled for the wind’, written in December, has hidden surprises:

  Who whistled for the wind, that it should break

  Gently, on this air?

  On what ground was it gathered, where

  For the carrying, for its own sake,

  Is night so gifted?

  Montgomery no doubt easily found the answer to the poem’s riddle. This gently breaking, whistled-for wind, gathering and then ‘gifting’ the night, is a fart, a poetically appropriate, if unconventional reminder of the process of corruption and decay: ‘Mind never met / Image of death like this [. . .]’ Perhaps the poem is a disrespectful end-of-year farewell to the Yeatsian mode.12

  The following month, January 1946, Larkin moved into new lodgings at 7 Ladycroft, Wellington, the windows of which faced east.13 As the days lengthened he was woken earlier and earlier in the morning by the sun. The impact of this insistent dawn light was powerful, long lasting and ambiguous. In numerous later poems light figures as a source of exaltation (‘Wedding-Wind’, ‘Here’, ‘Livings II’), or alternatively as the threatening agent of exposure (‘Deceptions’, ‘Aubade’). His light-enforced wakefulness coincided with a new literary influence: ‘It seemed too early to get up, so I used to read, and it happened that I had Hardy’s own selection of his poems, and I began to read them and was immediately struck by them. I was struck by their tunefulness and their feeling, and the sense that here was somebody writing about things I was beginning to feel myself.’14 Here, it seemed, was a poet who had more direct relevance to Larkin’s life in Wellington than his previous models: ‘I was beginning to find out what life was about, and that’s precisely what I found in Hardy [. . .] He’s not a transcendental writer, he’s not a Yeats, he’s not an Eliot; his subjects are men, the life of men, time and the passing of time, love and the fading of love.’15 Read in the hard light of dawn, Hardy offered Larkin a corrective to the metaphysics of Dylan Thomas and the twilight of Yeats. ‘When I came to Hardy it was with the sense of relief that I didn’t have to try and jack myself up to a concept of poetry that lay outside my own life – this is perhaps what I felt Yeats was trying to make me do. One could simply relapse back into one’s own life and write from it.’16

  The influence of Hardy on Larkin was all-pervasive. Some of his later writing echoes the earlier poet. The conclusion of ‘An Arundel Tomb’ has the same rhetorical turn as that of ‘The Darkling Thrush’, building poignant hope on transparently flimsy foundations. The jam in Larkin’s ‘An April Sunday brings the snow’ metonymically recalls his father’s life in the same way as the burning logs recall Hardy’s sister in ‘Logs on the Hearth’. ‘No Road’ is Larkin’s version of ‘Neutral Tones’. ‘Skin’ and ‘Send No Money’ may be compared with ‘I Look into My Glass’. ‘Nothing To Be Said’ seems to owe something to ‘The Dead Man Walking’. Less specifically there is something Hardyesque about such subjects as old-fashioned sheet music in a piano stool (‘Love Songs in Age’), an evangelical preacher (‘Faith Healing’), an empty church viewed with a sceptical eye (‘Church Going’), the picturesque muddle of provincial weddings (‘The Whitsun Weddings’). More generally, he shares Hardy’s empathy with marginalized or victimized women.

  As Larkin’s sensibility matured, his poetry underwent an unobtrusive transformation. The fourteen poems completed in 1946 are all more clearly focused and assured than the 1945 works. Anthony Thwaite’s decision, in the 1988 Collected Poems, to separate the ‘early poems’ from the mature poetry at the beginning of 1946 seems all but inevitable. ‘Going’, completed on 23 February 1946, and at first un­titled, stands at the beginning of his mature phase. Like ‘Who whistled for the wind’ it is a primitive riddle, the answer being ‘Death’. Indeed it would not seem out of place in a collection of Anglo-Saxon riddles. But it is also a latter-day imagist poem. Its rhymelessness, its symbolist imagery, the abrupt sentences and final rhetorical question align it with such poems as ‘The Pool’ and ‘Sea Rose’, by HD. And the way the initial regular iambs disintegrate into unmetrical free verse imitates the darkening of dusk/death in the way recommended by Ezra Pound in his descriptions of the ‘image’. The result is a memorable jewel of a poem. In 1947 in the typescript of In the Grip of Light he titled it ‘Dying Day’, eliding the dying of the light at sunset with the day of the speaker’s death. He also included it, untitled, in XX Poems (1951) and it became, with its final title, the earliest written of the works included in his first mature collection, The Less Deceived, in 1955.

  As the quality of his poetry improved, Larkin’s poetic output slowed. The collected Early Poems and Juvenilia (2005), containing work written over eight years (1938–46), comprises 255 poems and takes up 344 pages.17 In contrast the (slightly overlapping) first section of the 1988 Collected Poems, containing poetry written over three and a half decades (1946–82), comprises 176 poems and takes up 219 pages.18 From 1946 onwards he scrupulously rations his forms, rhetorical devices and, most remarkably, individual words in order to make each poem tell with the greatest possible force. In hindsight it seems that in the late 1940s Larkin set about consciously constructing an oeuvre, his life’s work, a task which he was to pursue single-mindedly for the next three decades.

  Antagonistic though they were towards each other, Ruth and Kingsley shared the view that Philip’s difficulties would be dispelled by a full sex life. But he was hesitant. In ‘Deep Analysis’ he adopts the voice of a woman reproaching her lover for his unresponsiveness:

  I am a woman lying on a leaf;

  Leaf is silver, my flesh is golden,

  Comely at all points [. . .]

  Why would you never relax, except for sleep,

  Face turned at the wall [. . .]

  Your body sharpened against me, vigilant,

  Watchful, when all I meant

  Was to make it bright, that it might stand

  Burnished before my tent?19

  Echoes of the biblical Song of Songs (‘comely’, ‘burnished’, ‘assuaged’), of D. H. Lawrence (‘your straight sides’) and of Yeats (‘only your grief under my mouth’) dramatize female abjection with an embarrassing intensity. Larkin is determined to make Ruth’s case for her as eloquently as he can.

  In April 1946 Amis grew impatient: ‘When these things have reached a certain stage they must be completed. Why don’t you have it all out with her (that’s right)?’20 The contrast of sexual register between the poem and Amis’s letter is stark. It was to the more understanding Sutton that Larkin gave the explanation of his difficulty:

  in my character there is an antipathy between ‘art’ and ‘life’. I find that once I ‘give in’ to another person, as I have given in not altogether voluntarily, but almost completely, to Ruth, there is a slackening and dulling of the peculiar artistic fibres that makes it impossible to achieve that mental ‘clenching’ that crystallizes a pattern and keeps it still while you draw it [. . .] this letting-in of a second person spells death to perception and the desire to express, as well as the ability. Time & time again I feel that before I write anything else at all I must drag myself out of the water, shake myself dry and sit down on a lonely rock to contemplate glittering loneliness. Marriage, of course (since you mentioned marriage), is impossible if one wants to do this.21

  Images of dawn and light haunt the poetry of 1946. ‘Come then to prayers’, completed in May, shows the incongruous influence of T. S. Eliot’s religious writing. In an echo of Murder in the Cathedral, we are req
uired ‘to give up pride’, including the ‘pride in being humble’, and our reward will be the freedom to greet the dawn with gladness: ‘the dawn / Hunts light into nobility, arouse us noble’. There is something strained about Larkin’s attempt to dispel his domestic difficulties with Eliotic light.

  This was an unsettling time. In June Kingsley Amis introduced him to his new girlfriend, Hilary Bardwell, then not yet eighteen years old, among whose attractions was an enthusiasm for jazz. Amis encouraged Philip’s relationship with her. On 24 June 1946 he wrote insinuatingly: ‘Hilary liked you very much which is nice isn’t it?’ He relates her impressions of Philip: ‘charming stammer’, ‘amuses me a lot’, ‘the nicest of all your friends’. On 15 July Kingsley tells Philip: ‘Hilary is very nice, as you will agree (she dreamed you were kissing her the other night).’22

  Larkin was becoming restless in Wellington, which did not offer him the professional challenges he needed. A letter to Sutton, written in July, reflects his desultory, dissatisfied mood:

  some silly sod in South Africa sent us a book the other day for the library: it was privately printed and was on very good paper. Inside were about two hundred aphorisms, with a little row of asterisks between each one. They were of the ‘As the Daisy opens to the Sun, so the force of Personality opens to the force of Love’ variety. When I had read perhaps ten, I opened a razor blade and slit the linen at the back so that the boards could be easily ripped off. Then I cut the sewing and taking each set of pages tore them neatly into four. After that I felt a lot better. Lot of bloody rubbish. For Christ’s sake!23

  Wellington, he told Sutton, was a ‘hole of toad’s turds’, and he needed to escape.24 Since 1944 he had applied unsuccessfully for posts with Chambers Encyclopaedia in London, and in the university colleges of Liverpool25 and Southampton.26 In June 1945 his father had even ghost-written his application for a post at University College London. Philip had written gratefully: ‘things reach a pretty pass when I don’t even write out my own applications, but I really am grateful to you when you do it for me. I shrink from it – I hate laying myself open – I hate being prodded and turned over and pinched like fish on a slab.’27 Now he applied for the post of Deputy Librarian at University College, Leicester. He was interviewed at the end of June, and this time he was successful. He was to take up his new position in September.

  Once his escape was certain he began to feel a sentimental affection for Wellington. The reaction of users of the Library was ‘embarrassingly regretful. I am beginning to long for someone to come up & say, “You’re goin’, eh? Good riddance to rotten bad rubbish!”’28 He could not, however, resist the witticism: ‘I’d have missed it for anything.’29 Around the time of the move to Leicester his poems show a rise in emotional temperature. In mid-September he completed a beautiful, moody reflection on death: ‘And the wave sings because it is moving’.

  Death is a cloud alone in the sky with the sun.

  Our hearts, turning like fish in the green wave,

  Grow quiet in its shadow. For in the word death

  There is nothing to grasp; nothing to catch or claim;

  Nothing to adapt the skill of the heart to [. . .]

  There is little evidence here of echo or influence.

  The second of the ‘Two Guitar Pieces’, completed a few days later, is the first of Larkin’s poems to deal explicitly with the poet’s vocation. He casts the tension between art and life in terms of an elaborate room allegory. The speaker shares a cigarette with his lover as he looks out through a window at a ‘platz’ where a man is walking among wreckage. We are, it seems, in the continental world of Auden and Isherwood. Behind the pair their friend is collecting up the cards, though the pack is short, ‘And dealing from now till morning would not bring / The highest hands.’ When this friend turns to playing a guitar the speaker finds himself unbearably moved. The music ‘builds within this room a second room; / And the accustomed harnessing of grief / Tightens [. . .]’ However this room of art is not, in reality, a room, ‘nor a world; but only / A figure spun on stirring of the air’. At the end of the poem the speaker remains hopelessly caught between the claims of human intimacy and the airy unreal figures of music, which ‘spread’ him (in a Prufrockian phrase) ‘over the evening’.

  Ruth was apprehensive that Philip’s exposure to new stimuli in Leicester would draw him away from her, and he felt under pressure to reassure her. Towards the end of September this tension prompted another poem in the voice of a woman, ‘Wedding-Wind’. By dramatizing the ecstatic joy of a farmer’s wife on her wedding morning in terms reminiscent of The Rainbow he might perhaps persuade himself into action.30 In the poem a woman has lain overwhelmed by happiness through her wind-blown wedding night while her husband, an archetypal ‘He’, attended to the frightened horses. Now he has left her to look at the floods, and she feeds the chickens from a chipped pail, her apron ‘thrashed’ by the wind:

  Can it be borne, this bodying-forth by wind

  Of joy my actions turn on, like a thread

  Carrying beads? Shall I be let to sleep

  Now this perpetual morning shares my bed?

  Completed on 26 September 1946, the poem seems to mark a year to the day since he and Ruth had first slept together. This became a key poem in the construction of his mature oeuvre. It is the only one of the group of his early poems in a woman’s voice to be included in his first mature collection, The Less Deceived.31 Also, appropriately enough in view of the importance which the genres were to develop for him, it is both an epithalamium, celebrating a wedding, and an aubade, a poem dramatizing a parting of lovers at dawn.

  In a calculated contrast, in ‘Träumerei’, completed the following day, dawn brings not ecstatic love but the fear of death. The poet describes a surreal dream, in which he walks in a silent crowd under a wall. Another wall closes in, shutting them in ‘Like pigs down a concrete passage’. The poet notices a ‘giant D’ whitewashed high above; he knows already that E will come next. Like water in a sewer the crowd passes beneath a ‘striding A’ and the ‘decapitated cross’ of a T. Then:

  The walls of my room rise, it is still night,

  I have woken again before the word was spelt.

  With weird superstition he implies that had he slept through until dawn the word would have been completed and he would be dead.

  As a work of art ‘Wedding-Wind’ is eloquent and beautiful, but its intended therapy misfired. Ruth wrote that she might be pregnant.32 Confronted with the possibility of fatherhood, Larkin wrote, eight days after ‘Wedding-Wind’ on 4 October 1946, a very different anti-aubade. In ‘At the chiming of light upon sleep’ a male speaker cowers in his bed in fear of the ‘Morning, and more / Than morning’ flooding into his room. He had been dreaming of a clenched, evergreen world of frost and ‘Unchanging holly’. Now the dawn provokes procreative desire, and pitches him into the cycle of nature. He is compelled to fulfil his biological destiny and expend himself. From blossom comes fruit, and with fruit comes decay. Love, which is death’s harbinger, ‘Hangs everywhere its light’. With a wild pun on his failure to use a condom, he sees himself repeating the Original Sin of Adam:

  Unsheath

  The life you carry and die, cries the cock

  On the crest of the sun: unlock

  The words and seeds that drove

  Adam out of his undeciduous grove.

  He has spent his seed, and his wages are death. This strange masculinist poem owes something to the seventeenth-century misogyny of Marvell’s ‘The Garden’: ‘Such was that happy Garden-state, / While man there walk’d without a Mate [. . .] Two Paradises ’twere in one / To live in Paradise alone.’33

  The poetic ferment of 1946 culminated, less than a fortnight later, in another light-focused poem, reprising the same theme in a more objective philosophical tone. ‘Many famous feet have trod’, completed on 15 October, depicts each new morning as a miraculous rebirth into light. The rhetoric is reminiscent of Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayya
m, his father’s favourite poem:34

  We are born each morning, shelled upon

  A sheet of light that paves

  The palaces of sight, and brings again

  The river shining through the field of graves.

  The tone is sacramental, but Eliotic religiosity has been replaced by secular materialism. Each evening and morning we kneel before the gate of light and dark, of waking and sleep. All we ever achieve is a trembling moment of inconclusive incipience: ‘Nothing’s to reach, but something’s to become.’

  At first sight there seems little sign in these 1946 poems of any influence from Hardy. Indeed there is much apocalyptic allegory and surrealism. However in one specific verbal nuance Hardy’s influence is clearly audible. Larkin commented in a later review on the ‘quaint’ element in Hardy’s style: ‘often in Hardy I feel that the quaintness, if it is quaintness, is a kind of striving to be accurate’.35 There is a memor­able awkwardness of diction at points of high emotion in Hardy’s work: ‘richened’, ‘misrepresenter’, ‘the unseen water’s ejaculations’, ‘wistlessness’. Larkin’s use of ‘Undeciduous’ in ‘At the chiming of light upon sleep’ has this clumsy Hardyesque memorableness, while the phrase ‘the irrecoverable keys’ in ‘The wave sings because it is moving’ stumbles with Hardyesque emotionality. It is difficult to imagine that, without the example of Hardy, Larkin would have arrived at such awkward felicities in his mature poems as ‘all but the unmolesting meadows’ in ‘At Grass’, or ‘to prove / Our almost-instinct almost true’ in ‘An Arundel Tomb’.