Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  The alarm following ‘Wedding-Wind’ passed, but the episode left Larkin tangled in self-criticism and sexual inhibition. His mood can be gauged from the dreams he recorded in the days following Christmas 1946. He had abandoned his dream diary of 1942–3 with the comment that the exercise ‘no longer interests me’.36 Now, once again in quest of his ‘problem’, he wrote down his dreams. The mixture of tones is much as before. In one he tries to direct a friend on a bicycle to a village whose name he does not know, while a hen walks past carrying a rolled magazine. In another his father cruelly ridicules his sister.37 The next dream, however, develops a disturbing complexity:

  I am a negro, by definition rather than observation. I go to an American racecourse, where I go in the negroes’ entrance & use the negroes’ very rickety lavatory. I then meet Hilly, and we walk arm in arm through a very gay scantily dressed beach crowd. I say, with a self-pitying sob, that it is terrible to think I cd be killed (i.e. lynched) for walking with her (I may have said sleeping with her). She agrees, and says something about Russia – a similar atrocity.38

  Larkin’s empathy causes him to identify himself with the most oppressed of racial groups. But his habitual self-criticism leads him at once to accuse himself of self-pity. Similarly, the erotic fantasy of the ‘scantily dressed beach crowd’ is spoiled by a deep anxiety over the dangers of sex.

  Two other dreams have a more immediate erotic focus on Gillian Evans, a friend in Wellington to whom he was briefly attracted. Ruth, he told Amis, had been considering abandoning him for a ‘young homo’, and he had been reviewing alternative possibilities. But his loyalty to Ruth immediately reasserted itself: ‘after all we got on much better than I should ever get on with Miss G. C. Evans, or Miss Jane Exall, or anybody else’.39 The two dreams show a characteristic pattern. In the first an authority figure, in the form of the Chief Clerk of Wellington District Council, puts Gillian through her paces: ‘In a gymnastics class presided over by Astley-Jones, Gillian Evans was called upon to do a difficult exercise in a skimpy sort of playsuit. As far as I remember she didn’t succeed.’40 There is sexual excitement here; but it seems that Larkin also feels empathy with her failure. In the second dream the poet attempts his own difficult exercise: ‘Deliberately & in my capacity as an integrated adult man kiss Gillian Evans. She then says something like “That was entirely undistinguished & meant nothing to me at all!” & changes into Philip Brown. I slap his face viciously & in real anger.’ In this dream Gillian becomes the accusing authority figure, and his response to her humiliating criticism is violent anger. But by the time it is expressed Gillian has become the male Philip.

  Amis was baffled by his friend’s reluctance either to enjoy sex with Ruth or to move on to someone else. Earlier in December 1946, in the comically misspelled idiom of their correspondence, he had offered to buy contraceptives for him, ‘if that’s what’s worring you’.41 Three months later he exhorted his friend to conquer his distrust of ‘Durex porducts’ which are ‘100 PURSE SENT SAFE’,42 and reassured him that, if the worse came to the worst, ‘I can get you abortioning Engines if you find you need them.’43 Throughout 1946 and 1947 he encouraged Philip to follow his own example of shameless promiscuity. Why did he not make Ruth jealous by paying court to Jane Exall? Or, alternatively, why did he not simply transfer his attentions to Jane? But Larkin feared the emotional and social consequences: ‘It seems to me that while pocking Miss Jane Exall is infinitely desirable, preparing Miss Jane Exall to be pocked and dealing with Miss Jane Exall after pocking is not at all desirable – and that pocks do not exist in the void.’44 It may be about this time that Larkin first conceived a sour quatrain which he seems never to have committed to holograph or typescript:

  To shoot your spunk into a girl

  Is life’s unquestioned crown.

  But leading up to it is not;

  And nor is leading down.45

  The lines are insidiously mnemonic, and Anthony Thwaite could not but remember them when Larkin recited them to him years later.

  One simple expedient by which Larkin protected his eroticism from shame and guilt was to keep the unicorn’s virginal horn safe in his own hands. As he wrote with excruciating wit in a pocket diary in 1950, sexual intercourse is ‘like asking someone else to blow your own nose for you’.46 He retreated into vicarious sex, sending ‘facetia’ (pornographic pictures) to Amis with each of his letters. In a contrast of psychologies, Amis was more inhibited about these photographs than about condoms: ‘I don’t know how you can bear to part with them. I wish I had your courage and could become a subscriber myself.’47

  Ruth’s apprehensions were justified. Shortly after his arrival in Leicester Philip met Monica Jones, an Assistant Lecturer who had joined the English Department a few months before. They had been exact contemporaries at Oxford, he in St John’s and she in St Hugh’s, though since she had stuck obediently to her studies and avoided the literary scene they had never met. Both had achieved first-class degrees. For the first three or four years their relationship was to remain a respectful friendship. But, within weeks of their meeting he had lent her the proofs of A Girl in Winter and a copy of Jill, with the self-deprecating comment: ‘They are both very much first shots: Jill perhaps a bit “firster” than the other. Do not say anything of them if no particular verdict occurs to you: and if you think Jill an adolescent bit of rubbish and Winter a pompous lifeless platitude don’t hesitate to say so.’48 He was not bored with Monica’s opinions as he was with Ruth’s. But he hesitated to make a new emotional tie. Indeed, he was eager to move on from Leicester as quickly as possible. Motion mentions applications for posts in the British Museum Library in February 1947, and in the Bodleian in May.49 In February 1948 he applied for a job at Nottingham University College.50

  Puzzlingly, following the leap forward of 1946, Larkin completed no further poems for nearly a year. It seems probable that his energies were focused on his novel-writing. When it did come, in December 1947, his next poem, ‘Waiting for breakfast while she brushed her hair’, resumed the life-and-art debate of ‘Guitar Piece II’, but with a speaker now cast unambiguously as an artist. He stands at a window, gazing at the hotel courtyard, which seems at first colourless and dull. But then the morning mist wandering ‘absolvingly’ past the pinpoints of light in the windows transforms the scene:

  The colourless vial of day painlessly spilled

  My world back after a year, my lost lost world

  Like a cropping deer strayed near my path again [. . .]

  He is visited by the muse, drained of female attributes and with the aspect of a shamanic animal familiar. Euphoric and confused, he turns and kisses the woman who is combing her hair in the hotel room behind him, only to realize immediately that there can be no reconciliation. If he is to follow the muse’s ‘tender visiting, / Fallow as a deer or an unforced field’, then he must send her ‘terribly away’. Significantly, however, the poem ends with a satirical image of himself as ‘Part invalid, part baby, and part saint’. This is the first poem in which Larkin explicitly dramatizes the rivalry between the muse of the imagination and the real girl of social commitment. He signalled its importance to his development by adding it to the reissue of The North Ship of 1966, even though it postdates all the other poems in that volume by more than three years.

  In January 1948 he assembled a collection of twenty-four poems and sent it to his agents A. P. Watt, writing also to Alan Pringle at Faber to tell him that it would soon reach him.51 He chose the arresting title In the Grip of Light, appropriately ambiguous between exaltation and threat. The phrase, he told Sutton grandly, ‘occurred to me & seems to sum up the state of being alive’.52 The contents of the volume have a hidden symmetry. He included six poems carried forward from The North Ship, clearly not regarding the Fortune Press book as publication proper. To these he added six poems from 1945. The remaining half of the volume consists of twelve poems from his latest burst of productivity in 1946.53 Puzzlingly he did not include ‘Waiting fo
r breakfast’. The collection is varied in quality, but contains one or two masterpieces. After his previous experience of poetry publishing he could have had no apprehension of the difficulties which lay ahead.

  7

  Just Too Hard for Me

  1945–50

  The dated drafts in the first workbook make it easy to track the development of Larkin’s poetry in the late 1940s. This is not the case with his fiction, which survives only in discontinuous, usually undated drafts, sometimes written much later than the original inspiration. To compound the difficulty, the accounts which Larkin gives of his fiction in letters to Sutton become increasingly vague and unspecific, while those to Amis show deliberate evasiveness. Moreover Larkin’s later verdicts on his fiction show ambiguities. He usually blamed his failure to complete a third novel on his over-poetic conception of the form. ‘I wanted to be a novelist. I thought novels were a richer form of literature than poetry; I suppose I was influenced by the kind of critical attitude that you used to get in Scrutiny – the novel as dramatic poem. I certainly saw novels as rather poetic things, perhaps too poetic.’1 But he seems uncertain that this is the real explanation, and remains puzzled as to why fiction had not worked for him: ‘When I stopped writing novels it was a great disappointment to me; I went on trying in the 1945–50 period. Why I stopped I don’t really know, it was a great grief to me.’2 To many readers Larkin’s lyric poetry will seem a rarer achievement than that of any novelist. But to him poetry, coming so much more easily, always seemed less impressive than the novels he had failed to write: ‘novels are much more interesting than poems – a novel is so spreading, it can be so fascinating and so difficult. I think they were just too hard for me.’3

  In the months following the completion of The Kingdom of Winter he put on a brave show of moving forward with Lawrentian purpose. In September 1945 he wrote to Sutton that The Kingdom of Winter was ‘a deathly book’ on the theme of ‘the relinquishing of live response to life’:

  Now I am thinking of a third book in which the central character will pick up where Katherine left off and develop logically back to life again. In other words, the north ship will come back instead of being bogged up there in a glacier. Then I shall have finished this particular branch of soul-history (my own, of course) and what will happen then I don’t know.4

  The future perfect tense in which he looks forward to having ‘finished’ this branch of his ‘soul-history’ betrays little relish for the process, and the final sentence has a dispirited, helpless tone. To achieve this re-engagement with life Larkin would surely need, like Lawrence, to commit himself to a Jessie Chambers or elope with a Frieda Weekley. He would have to make a developing relationship with Ruth or Monica the creative centre of his fictional ‘soul-history’, and wander the world in search of new experience. Intriguingly, the two novels with which he wrestled over the next five or more years do show him, in a muted way, attempting something like this. Both protagonists were, it seems, to find new opportunities for themselves in America. But, crucially, Larkin himself never crossed the Atlantic, and the novels were never finished.

  But Larkin is not consistent, and on occasion could give a very different analysis of his fictional ambitions. In an early letter to Sutton of 5 March 1942, he accurately predicted the future shape of his career. He would, he forecast, fail the difficult challenge of fiction ‘before I finally sprout wings and turn into a poet dashing forward like a Hussar’.5 He alludes to Auden’s celebrated sonnet ‘The Novelist’, which contrasts the dashing Hussar poet with the novelist, whose task is to learn ‘How to be plain and awkward, how to be / One after whom none think it worth to turn’. The novelist must ‘Become the whole of boredom, subject to / Vulgar complaints like love, among the Just // Be just, among the Filthy filthy too’.6 This notion of the novelist as a passive recorder of life on all its levels offers an alternative to the more elevated, egotistical notion of the novel as diffused poem or Lawrentian soul adventure. Vernon Watkins had offered Larkin a similar example in poetry of self-effacing devotion to ‘the work’.

  In this version the novelist’s task is one of radical empathy. As Larkin later said: ‘novels are about other people and poetry is about yourself’.7 In his unfinished novels of the late 1940s he was attempting to write not poetically about himself, but prosaically about others. He was no longer the inspired or cursed poet, but an ordinary man. In poetry he rejected the examples of Yeats and Thomas, who had encouraged him to jack himself up to ‘a concept of poetry that lay outside my own life’.8 Similarly, in his fiction he would now learn to be plain and awkward, even perhaps ‘Become the whole of boredom’. While he was working on Jill he boasted to Amis, ‘There is not a single intelligent character in the book,’ and resolved in future drafts to repress Kemp’s growing signs of cleverness.9

  It is tempting to relate this development to Larkin’s association with Kingsley Amis. Between 1947 and 1951 Amis was wrestling with his own ultimately unpublished first novel, The Legacy, and constantly demanding his friend’s advice.10 Amis certainly presented Larkin with the example of fiction lacking the poetic refinement of his own published novels. But Larkin’s determination to empathize with other people is alien to Amis, and it seems that, while offering Amis plentiful advice, Larkin evaded any interaction between his own fiction and that of his friend. Nevertheless Larkin and Amis found themselves moving with the literary current of the time in broadly the same direction. Fiction had moved beyond the modernism of Joyce and Woolf and was beginning to generate from the social realism of George Orwell’s and Graham Greene’s novels of the 1930s the raw post-war ‘angry young man’ idiom of Braine and Sillitoe. Amis’s Lucky Jim was to be a key early work in this literary movement.

  Two substantial groups of drafts survive among Larkin’s papers. Both novels have their biographical origins in the period 1946–8, and he seems to have worked on them in parallel or alternately. One of them, titled in some drafts No For An Answer, focuses on Sam Wagstaff, a young ‘son of the firm’, about to inherit a motor-manufacturing business in Birmingham from his father. The narrative follows Sam’s relationship with his girlfriend Sheila Piggott (in some drafts Stella), a reductive caricature of Ruth Bowman as a cultureless provincial girl. They attend a rugby-club dance, encounter Sam’s lonely, ill father and visit a pub at Christmas. The prevailing tone of meticulous realism is set in the opening scene. Sheila is opening Christmas cards while her mother reads a novel on the sofa: ‘“Look at the price of that,” she said, tossing one over to Mrs Piggott. “Looks like one-and-six, doesn’t it? It’s tenpence really. You can see where they’ve altered it.”’ (‘10d’ has been changed to ‘1/6d’.) Her mother compliments her, ‘“You’re a sharp one,”’ bending her library book back ‘as if to keep it submissive’.

  Her heavy face had stern good-humoured lines, her grey hair was permanently-waved. She wore horn-rimmed spectacles to read and play bridge. With each breath she blew out a faint blue plume from the cigarette she smoked, using a holder. ‘They’ve no money these days.’

  Sheila went on studying [the cards], her small forehead wrinkled as if she were short-sighted. ‘This of Jack Ryman’s, now that only cost a bob but it looks more, doesn’t it? . . . Oh, for heaven’s sake.’ She extinguished the wireless. ‘Where’s Sam got to, I’d like to know.’ She stretched, shivered. ‘It doesn’t take all night to drive from Brum.’11

  It is a perfectly visualized scene and the dialogue is exactly caught. But something is lacking. Does the narrator perhaps not like the Piggotts and Wagstaffs of this world enough to make the writing quite come alive? Or is it that the colourless, omniscient third-person narration precludes the humour, irony and playfulness which give vitality to the Willow Gables works and the later mature poems? Was Larkin repeating the same mistake he had made in The North Ship, rejecting mixed tones in favour of a consistent seriousness?

  Four main drafts and four subsidiary drafts survive (with overlaps), and the page numbering shows that extensive furt
her drafting was destroyed. Larkin devoted many months to the novel during 1947–9.12 The process of composition was clearly strenuous. He repeatedly recast the text, making slight changes of action and wording without changing the basic conception. The high quality of much of the writing makes this puzzling. A less self-critical writer would certainly have pressed on to a finish. Moreover he sets himself new challenges of subject matter and tone. The scene in which Sam and Sheila eat Christmas lunch together, for instance, is peculiarly unsettling:

  For a time they did nothing but eat. As he lifted the first forkful Sam felt water spring in his mouth, and he put in as much at once as he could. The flavour of the turkey, of cloves in the bread sauce, and sage in the stuffing, ran together and ascended his palate in a delicious fume. Every now and then he cleared his taste with bread, or washed the cold metallic claret over his tongue before starting again. They grinned at each other, mouths stuffed full: neither stopped chewing for an instant, but if they had they would have heard the sound of the other’s jaws. They did not want to talk. Their knives and forks worked steadily as spades clearing away snow, until the food was reduced to small heaps, then to nothing. Stella finished first by about a couple of mouthfuls.13