Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  Within the closed academic world of the University, Larkin was becoming comfortably settled. In a letter to Monica of 13 June 1951 he accepted her envious perception of his ‘effortless popularity’, and listed his cynical strategies for being liked: ‘Never contradict. Be pliable [. . .] Be funny.’44 By all accounts he was a witty and entertaining companion, imitating the Belfast accent perfectly and always ready with amusing anecdotes. Though he remained essentially an outsider, the Protestant culture of the Province provided him with new experiences and images. In ‘March Past’, he appropriated the Ulster marching tradition to his own poetic purposes, excluding any mention of politics.45 Indeed the benign, mock-heroic tone suggests that he might be recalling a Salvation Army march in Coventry. The march is presented in innocent, festive terms, as in an operetta:

  out of the street-shadow into the sun

  Discipline strode, music bullying aside

  The credulous, prettily-coloured crowd,

  Evoking an over-confident, over-loud

  Holiday where the flags lisped and beckoned [. . .]

  Like the later ‘To the Sea’, the poem celebrates a public ritual of touching human solidarity. But the real theme of the poem seems to be more personal. The full-dress pomp of the march reproaches the poet with a glimpse of a world of glamorous perfection: ‘Pure meetings, pure separations, / Honeycombs of heroic apparitions’.46 This flimsy suggestion of a nobler life overwhelms him with

  blind

  Astonishing remorse for things now ended

  That of themselves were also rich and splendid

  But, unsupported, broke, and were not mended –

  Reading biographically it seems that Larkin blames himself for breaking off the ‘rich and splendid’ relationship with Ruth Bowman. He never attempted to publish this poem; possibly he felt that it relied too heavily on unexplained personal feeling. It is difficult to detect the ‘rock-solid sense of national glory’ which Tom Paulin finds in it,47 or the ‘burgeoning Orange sympathies’ to which Andrew Motion refers.48

  Less than two months after being charmed by this march Larkin was confronted by impure marchings which struck him as anything but poetic. In a letter to Monica of 12 July 1951, he gives a set-piece description of the annual Belfast Orange Day March, very much in the manner of one of D. H. Lawrence’s travel essays. Cycling out to the ‘nasty little suburb’ of Finaghy he watches the Loyal Orange Lodges march by, with their huge silk banners. He is at first amused by the picturesque or absurd images: King William landing at Carrickfergus, the Battle of Aughrim, Protestants drowned in the River Bann (‘this was a rather fetching one of plump naked ladies up to their waists in water being gesticulated at by Puritanical-looking fellows in green’). But as the ritual unfolds he is repelled and offended by its self-righteous moral fervour and bad taste. He notes on the banners ‘strange symbolic scenes of young women on rocks, clutching at a huge cross (“Our Sole Hope & Refuge”), all done in this pink-yellow-and-purply High Church postcard style’. And he records how the bands of fifes, drums, brass, ‘and even accordion’, each kept a strong beat, all slightly out of time with each other:

  The dominant impression from this endless tramping file of faces was of really-depressing ugliness. Slack, sloppy, sly, drivelling, daft, narrow, knobby, vacant, vicious, vulpine, vulturous – every kind of ugliness was represented not once but tenfold – for you’ve no idea how long it was. They started coming by at 12 noon: at 12.45 I was expecting the end, but no! we left for lunch at 1.15 & the parade didn’t finish going by till 2. About 20,000 men in all shambled by, or 280 Lodges. It was a parade of staggering dullness (every face wore the same ‘taking-himself-seriously’ expression) & stupefying hypocrisy (‘Civil & religious liberty’ was a catchphrase much repeated, like Ridley & Latimer). Having seen it, I shall not see it again. But the drums go beating about the town all day.49

  In a letter to his mother he drily spelled out the politics behind ‘civil and religious liberty’: ‘(i.e. denying civil & religious liberty to Catholics & Nationalists, & damn the Pope, etc.).’50

  Larkin’s new social life was beginning to develop complexities, and around this time he composed a prose interrogation of his misogamist self-possession in the form of ‘Round Another Point’, a companion débat to the playlet concerned with novel-writing of the previous year. Geraint declares that he has ‘finished with sex’, or rather with the painful rituals involved in its fruitless pursuit: Gillian’s ‘photograph album of all those filthy foreign towns she’s been to, coffee made “a new way”, and endless records of that neat little twerp Mozart’.51 Miller suggests that his friend resorts to a brothel, but Geraint is too sensitive for this recourse. He fantasizes ‘sex clubs, rather like tennis clubs, where men and girls could meet each other [. . .] Contraceptives would be on sale and beds available.’52 Miller counters with an awesome vision of sex as an impersonal imperative in humanity’s struggle against death:

  On the cloud of innumerable centuries [Life] maintains a thin bright edge of sixty or seventy years. Death enlarges ceaselessly, hoping to obliterate it. But life equally expands, just managing to keep in the lead, and its golden mainspring is sex. Does that convey to you anything of its intense, its exciting all-importance?53

  Geraint responds by rejecting both Nature, which after all sanctions ‘bubonic plague and syphilis’, and Society, which produces ‘war and lynching-parties’. ‘Nature baits the trap of marriage with the cheese of sex. Man wants to eat the cheese without getting nabbed.’54 Miller appeals to sentiment. The ‘ordinary fellow’, he argues, actually enjoys having children, ‘guiding their first tottering steps, and buying cricketbats and fishingrods and partyfrocks’. He spells out Geraint’s life choice: ‘the intricacy, the delicacy, the variety of emotion on the one hand simply towers over the alternative sordid discharge of seed’. Geraint, he alleges, is stuck at an immature stage where ‘the hootings of some deplorable “jam session” outshine the Jupiter’ (Mozart’s last symphony).55 The phone rings and Miller tells the caller that Geraint would welcome a visitor. Realizing that Gillian is about to arrive Geraint gives a howl, swings about on the chandelier till it breaks, and as the curtain descends falls on top of his friend.

  Philip’s relationship with Monica was becoming more intimate and familiar. He occasionally felt Lawrentian impulses towards wholehearted commitment. In a letter of 19 September 1951 he told her, ‘I long to abandon myself entirely to someone else,’ feeling asphyxiated by his ‘monstrous infantile shell of egotism’.56 However, his tone remains detached and analytical, and in other letters he stresses his need for solitude. From May 1951 onwards, imagery of rabbits becomes a recurrent feature of their correspondence. Letters begin ‘Forepaws’, ‘Ears’ or ‘Bun’ (Bunny-rabbit) in reference to their shared delight in the stories of Beatrix Potter. He adorns his letters with charming sketches of a rabbit in a skirt: watching cricket under a parasol, searching her room for lost scissors, playing croquet, sleeping under a huge mushroom in the rain (complete with slugs and dangling spiders), writing with a quill pen by candlelight. He depicts himself as a rather shapeless seal, in a schoolboy pun on ‘sealed with wax’ or ‘sealed with affection’ which goes back to his earliest family letters. His engaging self-dramatizations and generous concern for Monica’s well-being create a secure shared world. In September 1951 he was sent on a tour of universities in the North of England (Leeds, Hull and Durham) to study issue-desk layouts. He regretted being unable to make arrangements for them to meet during his tour, but gave her detailed accounts in his letters: ‘there was a cinema in Hull called “The Monica”!’57

  Back in Belfast his domestic situation improved when, on 13 October 1951, he moved to rooms at the top of 30 Elmwood Avenue. Here he had his own kitchen and could lock his room from the inside, a degree of privacy impossible in his previous accommodation in Queen’s Chambers, where the warden enforced strict rules. He described his new arrangements in a letter to Winifred Arnott in London, as ‘romantic attics
– and delightful they are’. Here, he told her, he would be able to write his poems and play his records of jazz and Monteverdi.58 His contentment with his new situation put him increasingly out of sym­pathy with his long-term correspondent James Sutton. Larkin was never to lose his respect for D. H. Lawrence, but he had moved beyond his friend’s earnest Lawrentianism. He wrote to his mother that Jim was ‘fuller and fuller of windy philosophical tosh about mankind’. Characteristically he added: ‘However it shows a nicer, more unselfish nature than mine.’59

  In a letter (‘Sunday’) loosely inserted at the end of the second workbook Jim recommends that his friend make a different choice of life:

  For instance physical work, perhaps farming, would surely tend to put to sleep your self conscious mind? Or you could see the world as a tramp – there are casual wards for tramps where they give you a huge sandwich at night & a huge sandwich in the morning, make you have a bath & ask no questions. At least I’m told these places still exist today. I’d be most willing to join you in either of these ventures.60

  But farming or vagabondage held little attraction for Philip, engrossed as he was in poetry and social activities. He was content with simple, existential pleasures. In October he wrote to Jim: ‘By the Gor the weather is fine these days – life turns and beckons to me like an underwater swimmer in a soundless tank, beguiling, impossible.’61 It would be difficult to imagine a more poignant expression of happiness than this tiny prose poem. At the end of the year Jim paid a visit to Belfast, but Philip was too preoccupied with his own affairs to pay his old schoolfriend much attention. The following month their twelve-year correspondence came to an abrupt end. In his final letter of 21 January 1952 Larkin half apologized for having been ‘unjustly neglectful of you during your stay’, and reverting, perfunctorily, to their register of high seriousness, wished his friend good luck with his painting: ‘if you go grinding away at yourself you will in the end attain an irreducible defiant value’. But this was no longer his idiom. Earlier in the letter he had given an insight into his relaxed, hedonistic mood: ‘Every Sunday I wallow in the luxury of freedom, lying on my bed in sheer exultant laziness: to do that every day – Golly! One would feel like a great steaming manure heap in the sun, lazy, pregnant, valuable.’62

  10

  Single in Belfast

  1952–3

  In 1952 Larkin’s self-possession came under threat from a new relationship. Patsy Strang was unlike any other woman in his life, with a sexually adventurous lifestyle and literary ambitions of her own. She was married to a lecturer in Philosophy at Queen’s University, Colin Strang, whom Larkin had known briefly in Oxford. The Strangs had helped Larkin move to Elmwood Avenue in October 1951.1 Patsy, twenty-two years old at this time, was a wealthy South African, the daughter of a diamond-mining magnate. She had read Medicine at Oxford, and inspired by the French tutor at Somerville, Enid Starkie, former lover of André Gide, she was determined to be a writer.2 She had lived for a time in Paris. Philip gave nothing away in his description of Patsy to Monica in November 1951: ‘She is (have you met her?) a large, pale, weak stomached girl, very nice, very charming, but a bit dependent on being with amusing people or in London, which means she spends a lot of time knitting and eating sweets which isn’t good for her. She’s a doctor.’3 Winifred Arnott gives a rather different perspective: ‘I was frightened of her. She would have quite despised me as a middle-class virginal wimp. She was experienced and sophisticated and rich.’4

  Patsy’s deepest wish was to devote her life to the service of a poet. Philip had told Winifred decisively, ‘As far as I’m concerned, other men’s wives are completely banned’, and it is clear from the diary which Patsy began on 9 May 1952, inspired by Philip’s example, that she took the initiative. He was not, however, totally candid about his own commitments, presenting himself as less experienced than he was and playing down his relationship with Monica: ‘You’re only my second young lady, and look like being my last.’5 Patsy’s sophisticated cosmopolitanism appealed to the author of ‘Femmes Damnées’ and The Kingdom of Winter. It seems possible that the relationship was precipitated by Patsy’s reading his diary when left alone in his room, a transgression which deeply upset him. She was, however, unfazed by its masculine revelations. Among Patsy’s papers, now in the McFarlin Library Special Collections, University of Tulsa, is a photograph of the poet leering at a girlie magazine, presumably taken by her.6

  It was to Colin and Patsy together that Philip wrote to share his enthusiasm for Paris, when he and Bruce Montgomery made a brief trip there in May 1952: ‘The street is so noisy & the bed so warm I don’t seem to sleep till about 4 a.m. or want to. My heart beats in a new, queer way & I daren’t lie on my left side for fear of stopping it.’ His senses were overwhelmed:

  On Friday night we drank till late, on Saturday we saw the Monet, drank what can only have been a bottle of champagne each in the Ritz bar & saw Benjamin Britten (this, to Bruce, was like being vouchsafed a vision of Martin Luther after years of devout Roman Catholicism), went up the Eiffel tower (never again for me!), & at night after a luxurious meal went to a night club where Bechet was reputed to be appearing. This proved fallacious in fact, but we did hear Claude Luter’s band, which I knew from records & was pretty exciting at times. To balance this we intend hearing Salome on Monday (Mayol tonight . . .) always assuming we have enough money.7

  When the Strangs returned to England for several months in the early summer of 1952, joint communication was replaced by more intimate letters addressed to Patsy alone. Ruth had been a cat; Monica was a rabbit; he addresses Patsy as ‘Dearest Honeybear’ or ‘Dear Honeyguzzler’ in reference to her sweet tooth.

  Motion sees this as ‘the most happily erotic of all his affairs’.8 But happy eroticism had no place in Larkin’s emotional repertoire. Nor was Patsy a happy person. Winifred relates that one of her standard topics of discussion with Philip was ‘why Patsy was so miserable’.9 In July 1952 Patsy arranged to return secretly to Belfast so that they could spend a weekend together. The visit coincided with the Orange parades, and her diary records that he was alarmed at every sound in the street, in case they might be discovered. Afterwards he wrote to apologize for his ‘gibbering funk’ that had ‘come near to spoiling such a happy weekend, such as I’ve never had before’.10 At the end of the month she wrote that she was pregnant by him. But before he could reply to her letter, she suffered a miscarriage. He had already begun an answer (‘After feeling sorry & alarmed & guilty, I find it rather thrilling’) when he received her second letter, and he continued in a somewhat brutal tone: ‘I fancy you should be thankful [. . .] you wd have got pretty tired of “a lifetime of deceit”, which really is what it would’ve turned out to be.’11 He assumes without question that neither of them would have revealed the child’s true paternity. He illustrates his letter with drawings of a seal smiling down on a baby seal, followed by a drawing of the seal waving goodbye to the baby. Perhaps his heartlessness was part of a strategy. By August he was already attempting to disentangle himself. Patsy proposed meeting when he returned to England to visit his mother. But he prevaricated.12

  Whatever the complexities of their relationship, Patsy made Monica seem insular by comparison. The ‘yearly frame’ of Philip’s and Monica’s future relationship was beginning to establish itself: he saw her regularly in Leicester whenever he visited his mother in nearby Loughborough, and they took regular holidays together, though never beyond the British Isles, nor in company with anybody else. But it was by no means inevitable that this would become the permanent pattern of his life. Edgy, defensive, loud and with little interest in other people, Monica was not an easy companion. Anthony Thwaite remembers being baffled, when he first met her a few years later, that the urbane Philip should have paired himself with so socially inept and ungracious a partner. After a holiday in the Lake District in 1952, during which they visited Beatrix Potter’s house at Sawrey, Philip allowed himself to express something of the exasperation she cause
d him. To soften the blow he told her to think of the advice as coming from the wise mother cat in Potter’s The Pie and the Patty-Pan:

  in my view you would do much better to revise, drastically, the amount you say and the intensity with which you say it. You are vaguely aware of this already, aren’t you? You say you ‘chatter like a jay’ – do you remember saying that, standing on a corner of Clarendon Park Road, after closing time, before catching your bus? – and that you talk ‘tediously & unnecessarily’: I don’t say that exactly: what I do feel is that you’ve no idea of the exhausting quality of yourself in full voice. Perhaps I am unduly (morbidly?) sensitive, but it does affect me just in that way – I feel quite unable to answer, just that I want to go and be quiet somewhere. No doubt you can recall times when I seemed a bit grumpy at Grasmere!13