Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  The detailed description of these two healthy members of the lumpen-bourgeoisie gorging themselves makes for a subtly gross, disgusting effect. The author may not ‘want to be’ these unpoetic characters in the way that he earlier wanted ‘to be that girl’, but he certainly takes us uncomfortably into their skins. As Richard Bradford comments, ‘Had the novel been completed and found a publisher [. . .] it might have subtly altered the course of post-war literary history,’ by anticipating by a decade the work of Braine, Barstow, Sillitoe, Storey, Amis and Wain, whose works showed that ‘good writing could coexist with states of mind that had little time for high culture’.14 The originality and adventurousness of such writing would have transformed the context for later novelists.

  The scene which, in his notes to the novel, Larkin calls the ‘seduction fiasco’ explores, with an insight ahead of its time, the social phenom­enon later called ‘heavy petting’. The new post-war freedom of the young, no longer respectful of earlier conventions of courtship, was to become a major theme of novels in the 1950s. The encounter, which Larkin rewrote five times with slight variations, also looks further forward to what would now be called ‘date rape’. After dinner, Sam and Sheila/Stella engage in horseplay which gets out of hand:

  The sensation was like getting drunk extremely quickly: he forgot everything except that he was making love to Stella and that he must go on doing so at all costs. He got his hand under the edge of her long skirt and slid it up her nyloned right leg till she was holding it tightly between her two bare thighs. His cuff caught against the edge of her girdle and again he was impatient to get undressed. He felt desperate to have her, far too desperate to conduct successfully the polite moves necessary to get her, too desperate not to try. A dozen things about her were throbbing in him all at the same time, smells, sights, tastes, touches, all bucking like a jawful of aching teeth. But try as he might his hand could get no further.15

  Larkin catches with embarrassing directness the interplay of raw sex and social convention: Sam’s blundering impatience; Sheila’s clenched thighs and strict sense of propriety. In one of the drafts Sheila slaps Sam’s face and exclaims: ‘All right, I’ve had about enough [. . .] No one’s going to, to treat me like that. You’ve had it. Absolutely had it.’16 It is not surprising that Larkin kept the novel secret from Ruth Bowman. When she first read it fifty years later in 1999, she was understandably offended at this depiction of a crude, inarticulate relationship, so different from their real-life mutual respect and shared artistic enthusiasms: ‘if Sam and Sheila are any metamorphosis of Philip and me it must be left to literary critics to make the connection. They say nothing to me.’17

  The narrative was to explore a familiar triangle. Sam’s affections are divided between the coarse-grained Sheila and the pathetic victim, Grace, a working-class girl whom he knocks over in his car and then visits in hospital. Larkin’s plot-outline suggests that Sam was ultimately to be condemned for failing to respond to Grace’s love. However, in a contradictory subtext, the novel was, it seems, to celebrate Sam’s escape from his tangled guilts and responsibilities. At the end he was to leave both Sheila and Grace behind and take ship for a business trip to the USA. Also on board were to be members of the Washington Band whose ‘hot’ music was to represent, Larkin’s notes indicate with ironic inverted commas, ‘the “falsity” of the American brand of spontaneity’.18 It seems that the attempt to realize a world of ordinary Midland provincial life was to be short-circuited by an escapist wish-fulfilment fantasy not dissimilar to the ending of Lucky Jim, though in Larkin’s version Sam is not accompanied by a glamorous Christine.

  The other explanation which Larkin gave for his inability to complete a third novel, apart from his over-poetic notion of the form, was his deficiency in empathy. ‘I think that was the trouble, really. I didn’t know enough about other people, I didn’t like them enough.’19 He was morally scathing about his failure: ‘I suppose I must have lost interest in other people, or perhaps I was only pretending to be interested in them.’20 This explanation does not ring true. Larkin was, in fact, capable of the keenest psychological insights. From the comedy of Marie’s Jungian experiments and Philippa’s belt fetishism in Michaelmas Term at St Bride’s to the tragedy of Kemp’s self-destructive breakdown at the end of Jill and Katherine’s alienation in a foreign England in The Kingdom of Winter, he shows a generous instinct to venture beyond his own immediate subjectivity and a fascination with different worlds of experience.

  The four surviving fragments of the second unfinished novel, whose intended title when Larkin abandoned it was A New World Symphony, indeed show Larkin attempting a particularly direct and intimate empathy. As in his published novels he turns from a male protagonist, Sam Wagstaff, to a female centre of consciousness, Augusta Bax, a character transparently based on Monica Jones. The first letters of their names perhaps suggest that Augusta and Wagstaff represent alpha and omega in an alphabet of gender. When Larkin began the novel he and Monica were merely colleagues, not committed to a long-term relationship. His attitude to the fictionalized character seems dispassionately exploratory as much as sympathetic. Reality is transposed into fiction with literal directness. Augusta Bax has Monica Jones’s bad teeth, migraines and pulsing vein in her temple, as well as her right-wing prejudices. Pamela Hanley, a Library Assistant in Leicester in 1948, observed: ‘Augusta has all Monica Jones’s physical and personal characteristics, apart from her hair being dyed blonde, not red. Her distinctive flamboyant style of dressing in brightly coloured clothes is exactly described.’21 Monica’s mother frequently visited Leicester at this time, and the opening scene submerges the reader in the intimately feminine relationship between mother and daughter as they scour the shops determined to find a dress of exactly the right colour at a bargain price.

  Augusta’s name, ‘empress’ in Latin, suggests a prickly, ironized dignity. She is restless and uneasy in her shared flat, with its jealously guarded spaces of privacy:

  In the larder the seven or eight women who lived in the house each had her small store of food collected inviolably together, surrounded on the slab by a space. ‘And this is the dining-room [she tells her mother] – we all take our little messes in, at least, they take their big messes, whenever we feel like – it’s just a room to eat in, when you want to eat.’ Augusta stared a moment round the characterless furnishings, then led the way back to her room, lightly tucking wisps of hair into place with the tips of her fingers.22

  There is an ambiguity in the narrator’s attitude. Augusta’s censoriousness inhibits the emotional identification which the reader felt with Katherine in The Kingdom of Winter. The bane of Augusta’s life is a Jewish refugee, Mrs Klein,23 a specialist in Child Psychology (‘“Strewth”, Mrs Bax commented deliberately’), who insists on calling her ‘Bax’, despite her own insistence on the formal ‘Mrs Klein’:

  ‘Mrs Klein makes the biggest messes – huge goulaschy messes she sits gorging surrounded by saucepans – on newspapers if she remembers.’

  ‘This lady sounds as if she needs an agitation working up against her,’ said Mrs Bax as if she had seen a non-member crossing a green in high heels.

  ‘Yes, and don’t I wish you were here to do it. And she isn’t a lady. I know that’s an old-fashioned thing to say but I shall go on saying it as long as there are people like Mrs K. about. I do really think that the point about the Kleins is that they go about being so terrible and odious until people are forced to band together in sheer self-defence, and then they set up a howl about persecution and move on to deceive a fresh lot of kind souls into helping them.’24

  Augusta mentions casually that Mrs Klein’s husband was murdered during the war: ‘Well, I gather the Nazis decided they could get along without him. If he was anything like her I appreciate their point of view for once.’25 The mean-spiritedness of mother and daughter spoils the comedy.

  However, the opening chapters of the novel give only a limited idea of Larkin’s intentions. The plot outlines,
on which he continued to work in the early 1950s, promise dramatic future developments. Augusta was to quarrel with her mother and Mrs Klein was to develop beyond the anti-Semitic caricature of the initial description. Broader horizons were to open out, breaking down Augusta’s defensive small-mindedness. Mrs Klein’s American relatives, a family of ‘Wonderful loving Yanks’,26 were to offer her a lifeline after she had been sacked from her post. At the end of the novel Augusta was to leave for the USA as companion to the Yanks’ delinquent daughter, and the novel was to close with a ‘hymn to America’: ‘a real new world symphony. I mean she feels she’s in a new world.’27 Here Larkin does appear to be making a (much displaced) attempt to develop ‘back to life again’, bringing the north ship back from the glacier. However, either these later scenes were never written or the drafts were destroyed.

  In real life Larkin was developing a protective loyalty towards Monica, intensified by the unremitting hostility of Amis, who was jealous of this new rival. Amis had visited Larkin shortly after he had taken up his post in Leicester and, inspired by a glimpse of the common room, had begun drafting the novel which eventually became Lucky Jim, in which Monica Jones features as the neurotic, manipulative Margaret Peel. Amis took every opportunity to ridicule his rival for Larkin’s affections. In a letter of 1948 he derided Monica’s research on the ‘Augustan’ poet Crabbe: ‘It doesn’t surprise me in the least that Monica is studding Crab [sic]; he’s exactly the sort of priggish, boring, featureless [. . .] long-winded, inessential man she’d go for.’28 Larkin’s portrayal of Augusta suggests that he shared some of the criticisms of his friend. But he was attracted by this witty, beautiful, if also difficult and vulnerable woman, to whom he was to become attached for the rest of his life. Larkin kept the content of his novel entirely secret from both of them. Neither Kingsley nor Monica learnt of the novel’s existence until half a century later, after Larkin’s death.

  A New World Symphony foundered on Larkin’s risky strategy of making fiction directly out of his own immediate experience. Monica’s future was to be nothing like that of Augusta, and as she became a familiar part of his life the novel’s imaginative conviction seems to have faded. He could scarcely think of publishing the novel after his relationship with her had deepened in 1950 and become physical. The sensitivities of real-life relationships conflicted with impersonal art. This is not a problem that would have concerned Amis, who took satisfaction in expressing his real-life animosities in fiction, taking ‘revenge’ on those he disliked. Monica Jones becomes, without a qualm, Margaret Peel, and Amis anticipated with relish putting his father-in-law into a book ‘recognisably, so that he will feel hurt and bewildered at being so hated’.29

  But Larkin’s direct transposition of real-life events also created simpler, more practical difficulties. According to his notes the plot was to reproduce in detail the situation in the Leicester English Department in 1946–7. The character of Butterfield (Praed in some fragments)30 is based on the popular Head of English, Arthur Collins, who, when professorships were created in the course of college restructuring, was compelled to apply for his own post. He was unsuccessful and suffered a demotion. In the most vividly realized of the fragments the wretched Butterfield spends a Sunday afternoon in comic despair, filling out the professorial application form in the fading light as he drinks sherry direct from the bottle.31 In Larkin’s outlines Butterfield/Praed commits suicide. In real life Arthur Collins continued to work in the Leicester department for many years. Had it been published the novel would have caused the widest offence: to Arthur Collins, to Arthur Humphreys, the new Head of English, and to the then Principal of Leicester University College, Frederick Attenborough (father of Richard and David). It might even have laid Larkin open to litigation. The novel indeed was unpublishable for these reasons alone.

  But also perhaps, like No For An Answer, it lacked the spark of true inspiration. After reading the drafts in 1999 Monica Jones concluded: ‘it wasn’t going as he liked. I think that he was realizing that he was drawing on real things and constantly checking with reality – and imagination doesn’t come then.’32 It seems that Larkin did not finally abandon his ambition to be a novelist until the acceptance of Lucky Jim by Gollancz in 1953. But by the end of the decade it was already only too apparent that he would never publish a third novel. After all, he found poetry less laborious than fiction: ‘When I lapsed back into poetry, it was so much easier, so much quicker.’33

  8

  Crisis and Escape

  1947–50

  At the end of 1947 Larkin found himself suddenly beset by personal and literary crises. In December, as if to confirm all his inhibitions about sex, Hilary Bardwell became pregnant. Amis reported that attempts to induce a miscarriage with ‘a lot of chemicals’ had been unsuccessful,1 and his ignorant confidence in ‘abortioning Engines’ was shaken when a doctor friend warned him of the dangers of the 100-guinea back-street termination which he had arranged. Larkin looked on as his friend resigned himself with as good a grace as possible to the role of dutiful husband and father. The marriage took place on 21 January 1948,2 and the Amises’ first son, born later in the year, was named Philip after the poet.

  Sydney Larkin had realized his ambition to retire early, in June 1944 (his present had been the sixteen-volume complete works of Edmund Burke), and during the following years 73 Coten End had offered the young poet a secure refuge from his troubles. Earlier in 1947 he had been feeling particularly affectionate towards his parents. In May he complimented them on how young they still seemed: ‘young in keen response to things [. . .] It makes home a very nice place to come to.’3 Now this home was broken. At Christmas Sydney Larkin became ill. An operation for gallstones early in the New Year failed to dispel the problem. On 28 January 1948 Philip wrote to Sutton: ‘he is still in hospital & I fancy total recovery is by no means inevitable’.4

  He felt that his creative energy had stalled. He was, he told Sutton, ‘fuddling’ his head with books on psychology and now imagined himself as ‘every kind of neurotic to be found in the early poems of Auden’:

  my predominant sensation these days is one of blockage – I feel somewhere I am not functioning – I long for some metaphysical big bad wolf to come & huff & puff & blow the obstruction away as one blows a foul clot out of a pipe stem. [. . .] I’m glad you liked the poems. They are just starting out on their round of publishers. I can’t really imagine them being published, but one never knows. The great obstacle lies in the fact that I am ‘optioned’ – only Fabers can take them with an option on my next [. . .]

  Outside it’s pissing with rain & I sit in my enormous duffel coat before my lukewarm fire, hands like two chilly frogs.5

  The ‘great obstacle’ took an altogether more substantial form when early in February Faber rejected In the Grip of Light. Over the following months the volume was turned down by five other publishers: John Lane, J. M. Dent, Macmillan, Methuen and John Lehmann. This failure increased Larkin’s self-doubt and he became even more scathing about his own writing. Also in February, Eva fell and broke her wrist. Philip loyally offered to move back into the family home to look after her, but she declined the offer.

  On 24 February he wrote to Sutton that it was ‘all up’ with his father: ‘matter of weeks. Please don’t tell anyone as he doesn’t know & we don’t want it to become known in Coventry [. . .] I feel that I have got to make a big mental jump – to stop being a child & become an adult – but it isn’t easy for me, though I keep trying.’6 Sydney Larkin died of cancer of the liver on Good Friday, 26 March. Just over a week later on 4 April Larkin wrote to Monica Jones, thoughtfully hoping that she had ‘managed to recuperate’ from the strain of teaching before going on to relate his own news:

  My holiday was rather as I expected – my poor father grew steadily worse & died on Good Friday. Since then mother & I have been rather hopelessly looking at the stock in the house – this morning I shifted 100 lbs of jam – 1945, 1946, & 1947 years – and about 25 Kilner jars
of bottled fruit [. . .] I don’t know what will happen to it all – I don’t like sweet things, you remember.7

  The only poem Larkin had completed during the last sixteen months was ‘Waiting for breakfast’, the previous December. Now he composed what was to remain his only mourning elegy, ‘An April Sunday brings the snow’. In his letter he told Monica: ‘It is snowing here at the moment: this accords very well with mood and circumstance, both of which are Hardyish.’ In the poem mourner and mourned are reduced to a generic level of basic humanity. The speaker is uncharacterized and ungendered and the jam-maker could be a mother, a lover or a friend. The poet’s immediate consciousness, however, is intimately evoked as he moves from cupboard to cupboard storing the jam made by the lost loved one. Every object mentioned is metonymic of transience. The wintry snow will be gone in an ‘hour or two’; the blossom of spring will last a little longer. The autumn fruit from these same trees, temporarily preserved in jars, ‘Behind the glass, under the cellophane’, will be consumed at next summer’s teas. But the jam-maker will not be there to enjoy it.8 With poignant simplicity the jam contains:

  your final summer-sweet,

  And meaningless, and not to come again.

  Reticence makes grief the more eloquent. Larkin was aware that this was one of his finest poems. This may be the poem which he had in mind when he said in an interview in 1973, ‘I wrote my first good poem when I was 26,’ though he did not reach this age until August 1948.9 It is an indication of the intensity of its personal grief that he did not publish it during his lifetime.