Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  It seems that ‘An April Sunday brings the snow’ was drafted largely outside the workbook, since, unusually, the version in the book is a fair copy, occupying a single page, without corrections and more neatly written than surrounding drafts.10 Larkin followed this poem with another poem addressed to his father, ‘And yet – but after death there’s no “and yet”’. The speaker recalls the dead one’s casual words one day on the lawn: ‘Death doesn’t do you harm.’ All the poet can do, now we have ‘seen you die; and had you burned’, is to hope ‘that you were right’. Further lines at the end have been erased with an india-rubber, leaving the piece an incomplete sonnet with eleven lines. Nevertheless there is an eloquence in the broken-off sestet of three unrhymed lines and the work feels, and possibly is, complete.11 Around this time Larkin was also occupied with No For An Answer, one draft of which describes a visit by Sam Wagstaff to his dying father in hospital.

  Then, six weeks after Sydney’s death, Philip attempted to choose prose over poetry in a literal way, by ‘becoming an adult’ and proposing to Ruth. She had just turned twenty-one. He wrote to Sutton:

  To tell you the truth I have done something rather odd myself – got engaged to Ruth on Monday. You know I have known her since 1943 or 4; well, we have gone on seeing each other until the point seemed to arrive when we either had to start taking it seriously or else drop it. I can’t say I welcome the thought of marriage, as it appears to me from the safe side of it, but nor do I want to desert the only girl I have met who doesn’t instantly frighten me away [. . .] I suspect all my isolationist feelings as possibly harmful and certainly rather despicable. ‘Are you a bloody valuable vase, man, to be kept so carefully?’

  He describes his engagement unpromisingly as ‘a sincere chance of “opening out” towards someone I do love a lot in a rather strangled way’.12 Responsibilities were multiplying. Eva Larkin was disorientated by widowhood and finding it difficult to cope, so Philip submitted to the ordeal of buying a house in Leicester where they could live together. They moved into 12 Dixon Drive in August 1948. He told Sutton dispiritedly, ‘It has all been a bother, though I suppose it will be all right in time.’13 However, it was not all right, and the two years which followed were among the most miserable of his life.

  He later tore out a total of twenty-two pages from the workbook following ‘An April Sunday brings the snow’ (two batches of eight and fourteen pages), probably when he gave the book to the British Library in 1964. The rough violence with which they have been removed, leaving ragged edges and even clipping some words, suggests that he was still haunted by the trauma of these months.14 But since he preserved these pages, the sequence is not difficult to reconstruct.15 Following his father’s death his poetry failed to come right for nearly a year. After ‘And yet – but after death there’s no “and yet”’ he worked briefly on another poem addressed to his father and then on a seven-part work in free verse, ‘Now, without defences’, concerned with his inability to write (dated 26 January 1949). Then, in spring 1949, he broke the block with a distinctive group of poems with a traumatized, dispirited tone, ranging between cynicism and quiet humility. ‘I am washed upon a rock’ (18 March 1949) depicts life, in muted apocalyptic mode, as a moment of transient insecurity:

  My heart is ticking like the sun:

  A lonely cloud drifts in the sky.

  I dread its indecision.

  If once it block the light, I die.16

  ‘To Patients’, completed shortly afterwards, and renamed ‘Neurotics’ in the final typescript, is a grim self-admonitory reflection on mental illness.17 The minds of the neurotics are ‘rusted, stiff [. . .] / Like slot-machines only bent pennies fit’.

  The next poem, ‘Sinking like sediment through the day’, is a surrealist evocation of blockage and frustration, while ‘On Being Twenty-six’ is a self-pitying lament over lost promise whose glumness is barely leavened by a wan, self-mocking rhyme:

  What caught alight

  Quickly consumed in me,

  As I foresaw.

  Talent, felicity –

  These things withdraw,

  And are succeeded by a dingier crop

  That come to stop [. . .]

  In the middle of work on this poem, Larkin broke off to draft a moving declaration of poetic vocation, ‘Once I believed in you’, dated 1 May 1949, and titled in the undated typescript ‘The Spirit Wooed’.18 The poet humbly addresses his elusive muse:

  Once I believed in you,

  And then you came,

  Unquestionably new [. . .]

  You launched no argument,

  Yet I obeyed [. . .]

  The spirit has withdrawn, it seems, because he was overeager, and he resigns himself with the humility of a courtly lover, to a ‘pause’, ‘Longer than life, if you decide it so’. ‘Modesties’, the only poem of this group that he himself saw into print (in his self-published volume XX Poems, 1951), is similarly muted in tone, taking the form of a concise manifesto for a poetry of reticence and sincerity: ‘Words as plain as hen-birds’ wings / Do not lie, / Do not over-broider things – / Are too shy.’

  In sharp contrast, a few days later, on 18 May, he composed ‘To Failure’, which has something of the wry ironic gusto associated with his later ‘Movement’ persona. The imagery boldly confuses motifs from different kinds of B movie. Failure, we are told, does not arrive

  with dragons

  That rear up with my life between their paws

  And dash me butchered down beside the wagons,

  The horses panicking [. . .]

  Reality is less colourful than fantasies of monsters and the Wild West. As he looks out of the window at the chestnut trees ‘caked with silence’, the poet notices that Failure, personified in didactic eighteenth-century mode, has installed himself unobtrusively at his elbow, ‘like a bore’. The poem ends with a lugubrious parenthesis: ‘(You have been here some time.)’19 Despite its theme the poem’s sulkiness is enjoyable and funny. As he wrote later: ‘A good poem about failure is a success.’20 It is surprising that he never published this work. After this burst of poetic activity between March and May 1949, Larkin completed no other poem for the remainder of the year. He was also making little progress with his fiction. On 24 March 1949 he wrote to Sutton: ‘I have given up my novel & Ruth has given up me, not seeing, as you might say, any future in it. Nor do I!’21

  He turned from the complications of the real schoolgirl to unreal but readily available auto-eroticism. Encouraged by her husband, Hilly even agreed to feature in Philip’s pornographic fantasies. Kingsley wrote on 9 May: ‘I have asked Hilly about your dirty-picture proposal, and obtained a modified assent. She is prepared to do corset-and-black-stocking or holding-up-a-towel stuff, and bare-bosom stuff (‘[. . .] they’ll be bigger when I’m feeding the new baby’), but is a bit hesitant about being quite undraped, “though I’ll probably get bolder when I start.” Does this give you the hron? It does me, slightly, oddly. Do you want “some of us together”? (“Why you narcissistic —”).’22 Meanwhile the relationship with Ruth stumbled on, neither Philip nor she having the will or ability to put an end to it. In July Larkin wrote with grim drollery to Sutton: ‘Ruth returned and demanded that we continue being friends, so that is what we are continuing being.’23

  But, around this time, for no obvious reason, Larkin started to recover his self-possession. His spirits began to rise. His letters become more vigorous and a distinctive Larkinesque tone of contrarian jouissance emerges: ‘life seems to have pushed a steamroller up against the door & nailed the windows & stuffed something down the chimney. It is now dancing up & down outside the glass shouting: “Live dangerously!” I turn round and show it my bum.’24 It is from this point that we can date the masculine, bloody-minded assertiveness which is to figure centrally in Larkin’s ‘vernacular’ voice. In a letter to Sutton written on 30 October 1949 he tells himself to take control of his own life:

  Most people, I’m convinced, don’t think about life at all. T
hey grab what they think they want and the subsequent consequences keep them busy in an endless chain till they’re carried out feet first [. . .] Take what you want – and pay for it [. . .] or you’ll get what you don’t want, & pay for that too. My advice to anybody is: Find out what you want. Then get it.25

  He was more certain than ever that what he, Philip Larkin, wanted was not marriage: ‘women don’t just sit still & back you up. They want children: they like scenes: they want a chance of parading all the emotional haberdashery they are stocked with. Above all they like feeling they “own” you – or that you “own” them – a thing I hate.’26 In March 1950 he visited the Amises in Swansea, where Kingsley was now a lecturer at the University College, and found this glimpse of married life decidedly uninviting. He began to lay practical plans to escape from his mother and from Ruth: ‘My chief handicap at present is this bloody set up here, Christ knows how it will all end. But it can only be broken up by a good excuse like a new job, you see [. . .] I do realize that my mother must live with someone – only I’d rather prefer it not to be me.’27

  His new self-confidence shows itself in the final pages of the first workbook. The poems he completed in early 1950 breathe a new vigour and assurance. In a deliberate strategy of sharp emotional contrast the calm elegiac ‘At Grass’ is followed by the tangled anguish of ‘Deceptions’. The delicate epiphany of ‘Coming’ is followed (on the same day) by the acerbic ‘Fiction and the Reading Public’. The argumentative ‘If, My Darling’ is answered a week later by the yearning for oblivion of ‘Wants’. The poems shift vertiginously between brutal realism and soft, ingenuous emotion. With the turn of the year and the decade, it seems, Larkin took the signal to make the poetic breakthrough towards which he had been building. Consequently by the time he did escape his personal impasse in October, he had written half a dozen great poems whose tone and emotional texture mapped out the parameters of his first mature volume, The Less Deceived. This year, 1950, was the most productive of his literary life, and saw him achieve full poetic maturity.

  The sequence begins with ‘At Grass’, completed on 3 January. In retrospect this takes its place as the first in the series of ten great extended elegies which give structure to his oeuvre over the next quarter-century: ‘At Grass’, ‘Church Going’, ‘An Arundel Tomb’, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, ‘Here’, ‘Dockery and Son’, ‘The Building’, ‘The Old Fools’, ‘Show Saturday’, ‘Aubade’ (some readers might add ‘To the Sea’). As frequently in Larkin’s work, the poem was prompted by a casual stimulus. An avid cinema-goer, he was unusually affected by a short supporting film concerned with Brown Jack, a famous racehorse of the 1930s, now out to stud. The horses in his poem fall back into animal anonymity, leaving behind the human world of which they had no comprehension. Just as his eye can hardly pick them out, his mind cannot comprehend their world. There is an elegiac hint in the phrase ‘cold shade’; the horses are fading into the shades, or in the classical terminology are themselves already ‘shades’. Their world is not his, whether because of their animal otherness or because they are nearing death. The poet is not even confident enough to attribute motives to them. ‘Then one crops grass, and moves about / – The other seeming to look on –’. The horse ‘seems’ to look on. It is no spectator in the human sense.

  The poet now steps back to contemplate a larger distance of time. Fifteen years earlier these animals were the stuff of human legend, fabled by their performance over ‘Two dozen distances’. The technical racing term ‘distance’ subtly intimates the underlying theme of the poem, which could be fittingly subtitled ‘Ode to Distance’. The archaic pre-war racing scene is evoked in exquisite intricate phrases. The horses’ names ‘were artificed / To inlay faded, classic Junes –’. The transferred epithets make sense only by a complex manipulation of association and meaning. The strange and dignified verb ‘artificed’ signifies that their names were posted up against the dates of their victories in ornamental lettering (the inlay now faded) in the grandstand roll of fame. Grammatically the names are ‘artificed’ to insubstantial time (‘classic Junes’). For all its rituals of ‘classics’ and almanacks, the world of horse racing is a matter merely of times, distances and the fleeting victory of the last race. The flashback of stanzas two and three concludes with a diminuendo as the cheering of the crowd subsides into the newspaper report of the race:

  the long cry

  Hanging unhushed till it subside

  To stop-press columns on the street.

  Nothing is more poignantly evocative of the transience of life than the urgent news of the stop-press column once it is no longer new.

  The final two stanzas return to the present. The poet toys with the idea that the horses have memories, plaguing their ears ‘like flies’. But he is not deceived. The simile is illusory: it is real flies that cause the horses to shake their heads. Similarly their names never had any meaning for the horses themselves. In retirement they have slipped both reins and names:

  Almanacked, their names live; they

  Have slipped their names, and stand at ease,

  Or gallop for what must be joy,

  And not a fieldglass sees them home,

  Or curious stop-watch prophesies [. . .]

  Mortality is hinted at in the suppressed continuation of the sentence: ‘their names live; they // [Die]’. The names have ‘immortal’ life in the annals of the turf; the animals themselves do not. With an anacrusis which is to become one of the features of Larkin’s greatest mature poems, the penultimate stanza ends with an anticipatory intake of breath (‘their names live; they // Have slipped their names’). The elaborate diction of the racing world (‘handicaps, almanacks, the curious stop-watch’) is suddenly reduced to the formal but simple vocabulary of ‘groom, groom’s boy, bridles’ and the final verb ‘come’, with its sense of consummation. No longer does the ‘curious stop-watch’ prophesy the horses’ galloping. Indeed the verb ‘prophesies’ has become unexpectedly intransitive, trailing away to a sudden halt, leaving the final two lines isolated in a hushed pianissimo:

  Only the groom, and the groom’s boy,

  With bridles in the evening come.

  The men’s titles with their long ‘o’ sounds bring to mind their soothing voices as they lead the horses off into the darkness. Such sounds the animals can understand.28

  ‘At Grass’ is an elegiac masterpiece of poised detachment and modulation. In contrast ‘Deceptions’, completed six weeks later on 20 February, vividly dramatizes unresolved emotion.29 The speaker, doubting his own good faith, strives to sublimate personal motives into detached reflection. The poem’s subject is Hardyesque: a ruined Victorian maid. But its treatment is quite unlike Hardy in its complicated ‘literary’ intertextuality. In a more awkward and dubious ‘Ode to Distance’, the poet attempts to keep his subject at arm’s length by insisting on its mediation through earlier texts. The poem’s original title ‘The Less Deceived’, later transferred to the volume in which the poem ultimately appeared, is an allusion to a scene in Hamlet. The prince cruelly tells Ophelia ‘I loved you not’, and she replies with quiet pathos, ‘I was the more deceived.’30 The biographical parallel with Philip’s relationship with Ruth is clear. Both Hamlet and Larkin have lost their fathers and both are tormenting their beloveds with antisocial moodiness. A second, very different intertext is established by the prefatory quotation from London Labour and the London Poor, Part IV, by Henry Mayhew. The poet is unable to offer consolation across the years to this long-dead Victorian woman betrayed into prostitution. Worse, he is painfully aware that his masculinity implicates him in the guilt of the man who has raped her.

  The subtitle of Mayhew’s fourth volume is ‘Those That Will Not Work’, and in Mayhew’s account the woman, already over forty, is ‘one of that lowest class of women who prostitute themselves for a shilling or less’. Her own crude verdict on her abandonment is: ‘There is always as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it.’ Larkin omits this moral and social
contextualizing, choosing to focus closely on the original moment of violence, when the innocent sixteen-year-old country girl was drugged and raped. ‘I was horrified to discover that I had been ruined, and for some days I was inconsolable, and cried like a child to be killed or sent back to my aunt.’31 Mayhew, superior and judgemental, gives his verdict on the woman; Larkin in contrast submits himself humbly to her judgement. Clumsily, and uselessly, he intrudes on her grief at the moment of most intimate violation, as she lies ‘out on that bed’ in a room flooded with ‘unanswerable’ light. His impulse to share her suffering (‘I can taste the grief’) appears to him shamefully, uncomfortably egotistical: ‘I would not dare / Console you if I could.’

  Nevertheless he cannot stop himself putting himself in the rapist’s place. She was, he insists, less deceived than he, ‘stumbling up the breathless stair / To burst into fulfilment’s desolate attic’. Larkin has chosen an extreme metaphor for his mistreatment of Ruth. Is he any better than this Victorian voluptuary abusing his sixteen-year-old victim in his quest for ultimate fulfilment? In an indirect apology, the poet implicitly casts his choice of art over marriage as a rape. And his new-found frank masculinity leads him into what some have read as an apology for rape itself.32 But the poet makes no claim that the deceived rapist suffers in any way comparable to the less deceived victim. In this traumatic negative aubade the rapist is simply more ‘deceived’ than she is. The poet is all too aware how lame an excuse this sounds.

  Characteristically Larkin followed this stressful self-examination, five days later (25 February), with one of his most serenely beautiful poems, ‘Coming’ (originally titled ‘February’). In something close to free verse, the poet describes a subtle epiphany of existential joy in unobtrusively indicative dimeters and trimeters, unrhymed except for the repeated ‘soon’ at the centre of the poem (‘It will be spring soon’) which acts as its emotional fulcrum.