Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  He ventures so far as ‘to make 3 rules’, advising her to restrict herself to two or at the most three sentences at a time, to ‘abandon altogether your harsh didactic voice, & use only the soft musical one (except in special cases)’; and not to ‘do more than glance at your interlocutor (wrong word?) once or twice while speaking. You’re getting a habit of boring your face up or round into the features of your listener – don’t do it! It’s most trying.’ He realizes he has gone too far and tells her, ‘Please don’t mind what I say.’14 But it is clear that he does hope she will mind what he says.

  Despite the dissatisfactions, Philip remained loyal, and as time passed his developing routines with Monica assumed the aspect of a marriage in every sense except day-to-day cohabitation. In late October 1952, following a visit to Leicester, Monica suspected she might be pregnant. Having recently experienced the threat of Patsy’s pregnancy and confident of his own precautions, his response was relaxed: ‘really, I must say I think the chances are extremely slender & remote of there being anything in the air. To my certain knowledge I was never within a mile of endangering you.’ The alarm was soon over. A letter of the following day, 24 October, begins lightly: ‘Dearest Bun, I’m so glad you’re out of your worry! So now you can go about your lavender-drying with a cheerful heart.’15

  The contrast between Monica’s and Patsy’s personalities focused itself in terms of their attitudes towards animals. A year earlier, in November 1951 Larkin had been startled by a mouse creeping out from behind the fireplace while he was writing to Monica: ‘not very nice! First time I’ve seen him. He scuttled back on realizing he wasn’t alone.’ It is characteristic that he sees the situation from the animal’s point of view. But the experience made him sad: ‘This depresses me rather – Beatrix Potter’s all very well in print but . . .’16 Now, on 29 November 1952, he wrote to Monica that Patsy had denounced his sentimentalism, condemning Beatrix Potter as ‘anthropomorphist’, and accusing him ‘of not liking animals at all, only Potter ones & ones on my mantelpiece’. Patsy’s attack disconcerted him, but he followed his instinct and refused to be consistent: ‘I was somewhat at a loss. I do sometimes feel ashamed of liking these sweet little bunnies, but the emotion is there & she [Potter] touches it [. . .] Of course I’m not going to stop reading Potter, because I can’t defend myself, & I don’t take my inability to do so very seriously anyway.’17 It is notable that his serious animal poems avoid anthropomorphism in favour of detached empathy.

  Philip’s friendship with Winifred Arnott had been resumed following her return from London in September 1952. She lived some of the time with her uncle and aunt in Lisburn, eight miles from Belfast, and he would visit her there and play with her two young cousins.18 He was eager that she should share his literary world, and when she suffered a short illness he lent her a thoughtful selection of five books: Les Jeunes Filles by Montherlant, At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien (both of which she found too masculine for her taste), Antigua Penny Puce by Robert Graves, Dusty Answer by Rosamond Lehmann and The Real Charlotte by Somerville and Ross.19 Then at the beginning of 1953 she returned from the vacation with the news that she was engaged to be married. In a letter to his mother, he depicts his feelings, with some sincerity perhaps, as those of a disappointed suitor: ‘I am feeling a bit balked concerning her – my paw was raised to be brought down on her – and now she scuttles away into the shadow of a rock! Bah!’20

  Winifred commented that at this point Philip ‘became a whole lot more affectionate’.21 In ‘When she came on, you couldn’t keep your seat’, titled in the workbook ‘He Hears that his Beloved has become Engaged’, completed in February 1953, the poet reproaches his rival for appropriating his beloved’s perfection. He himself has refrained from spoiling her untouched beauty by forcing himself upon her. The successful suitor, in contrast, has blundered straight in and joined the woman in the dance: ‘fancying you improve her’. To the poet such ‘love’ is only ‘interference’. He complains in sulky italics, ‘You’ll only change her.’ Like ‘Latest Face’, this is a very literary poem: a playful exposition of purist aestheticism. And the poet acknowledges, with a bad grace, that he is out of step with society: ‘Still, I’m sure you’re right.’ The suitor is, after all, simply following the instincts of ‘the ordinary fellow’. And Winifred herself was only too eager to be changed by marriage. The muse did not share her poet’s aesthetic vision. He did not show this poem to her.

  Meanwhile Patsy was vigorously acting out her own very different poetic myth, as the helpless victim of a doomed passion. On 16 December 1952 as she prepared to return to England at the end of term she wrote in her diary: ‘no post, no job, no child, no home – nothing to look forward to but a few doubtful hours of anxious, taut “pleasure”. Weeks of fretful, furtive planning for what, a long day’s waiting – and a short night’s panting and sobbing. Yet I shall do it all again – if possible.’22 She was painfully aware that she was more committed than he, and was hurt by his failure to pay any attention to her own writing, beyond polite praise. He flattered her by implying that she, as an experienced self-confident cosmopolitan, was testing his timid limits, but he was not prepared to play the role dictated by her emotional needs. Later Monica Jones told Andrew Motion that Patsy had offered to leave her husband and ‘look after Philip and do all the earning so that he could just write’.23 This was not an arrangement that a man of Larkin’s temperament could possibly have borne. His domestic bachelor routines were established, and in the letters to Monica he describes the prospect of tidying his own room with some relish.24

  In a diary entry of 13 January 1953 Patsy anticipated her return to Belfast with melodramatic rhetoric: ‘Desire is a deadly disease. I want I want – the demands vary but have we no other cry? [. . .] Oh Belfast – City of Dreadful Night.’25 On 9 February she was driven to anguish by Larkin’s cold artistic detachment: ‘Man and Superman – the artist and the woman. Oh God – must it be as he says. Every natural impulse, then, must be twisted, concealed, mocked. Why? Why?’26 It is difficult not to contrast this with Geraint’s plea in ‘Round Another Point’: ‘I’m not going to bed with [. . .] somebody’s daughter who’ll tell me she’s “two people really” and demand a row and a reconciliation every week-end. I want to screw decent ordinary girls of my own sort without being made to feel a criminal about it.’27 Tension was high when in April 1953 Philip, Winifred and Patsy all made part of a group which Alec Dalgarno drove to Dublin in his car to hear, appropriately enough perhaps, Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.28 At Easter 1953 Larkin returned to the mainland for a month to visit his mother and Monica, but did not even telephone Patsy in Oxford. Then, when he brought Winifred to her birthday celebration in Belfast in late May, she felt hurt and jealous. The chemistry between Philip and Winifred was clearly apparent:

  Winifred came to dinner last night. She brought cheese biscuits and a box of chocolates [. . .] Did she hope to impress Philip with her generosity, or perhaps she realized she had not been invited because we wanted to see her. So she nearly bought a Bikini printed with cuttings from the News of the World – did she!29

  In a droll clash of perspectives, Winifred remembers that Patsy’s exotic food intimidated her and that Philip bent over and whispered subversively: ‘Shall I ask for just an egg for you dear?’ She has no recollection of the bikini.30 Patsy attempted to rise above the situation, presenting her jealousy as superior detached philosophy: ‘I was not aware of this power of our sex – it seems a cheap weapon, and not, I believe, a very durable one.’31

  Preparing to leave Belfast at the end of May 1953 to spend the summer in Oxford, Patsy consoled herself with world-weary reflections on the failure of her grand passion: ‘No two people travel the same route – they may go a few miles together now and then but it would be very foolish to assume that they will walk together for long [. . .] Still – a little company now and then is very welcome.’32 She perhaps took heart from Philip’s discontent with Monica, with whom he was to go to Skye in Ju
ly: ‘I must say I don’t look forward to this bloody holiday’, he told her; ‘if I feel in as ugly a humour as at present it may be the last we take together. There seems no point in carrying on, if it’s out of pure cowardice as it mainly is. Well! This may be taking an unduly black view. We’ll see.’33 In fact it was the relationship with Patsy rather than that with Monica which was about to end. In August 1953 she wrote that her husband had been appointed to a post in Newcastle, and she was to remain in Oxford.34 Once the pressure was released, Philip composed, on 6 August, a letter of generous valediction: ‘So much of my content in the last two years was due to you [. . .] But oh dear, oh dear! You were so wonderful!’35 The ‘oh dears’ hint at his dismay at the impropriety of the relationship, and the past tense (‘you were’) is decisive.

  The day before this, 5 August, he had sent Monica a near-final version of ‘Days’, ‘hardly a poem at all [. . .] a change from the old style’. It had been largely drafted early in 1951, and he had now completed it on a single page of the workbook. He was elaborately diffident about it: ‘I shouldn’t think there’s much danger of yr taking it seriously, having just re-read it, but I can’t rub it out.’36 However, he was aware that he had written a timeless masterpiece: the imagist ‘Going’ reformulated in lighter vein. The faux naïf poet asks, ‘What are days for?’ and answers himself disarmingly, eliding time with place, ‘Days are where we live.’ That is, of course, until priest and doctor, vividly pictured without explanation ‘Running over the fields’, usher us away. The poem could be twee; but it isn’t. Rarely have ten lines of informal, unrhymed trimeters and dimeters carried such a pure poetic charge.

  Larkin’s relationship with Monica weathered the many pressures upon it. Though he was the least political of men, her rigid right-wing opinions occasionally caused friction. He criticized ‘the wood of [her] conservatism’, and she replied sarcastically that she ‘thought you didn’t care either way’. ‘I certainly never knew you fancied yrself a Socialist, & I must say you’ve kept it pretty dark.’ On 5 August 1953 he attempted to defuse the quarrel:

  the idea of my brooding and fretting over your political opinions is enough to make a Staffordshire cat laugh. You know I don’t care at all for politics, intelligently. I found that at school when we argued all we did was repeat the stuff we had, respectively, learnt from the Worker, the Herald, Peace News, the Right Book Club (that was me, incidentally: I knew these dictators, Marching Spain, I can remember them now) and as they all contradicted each other all we did was get annoyed. I came to the conclusion that an enormous amount of research was needed to form an opinion on anything, & therefore I abandoned politics altogether as a topic of conversation. It’s true that the writers I grew up to admire were either non-political or left-wing, & that I couldn’t find any right-wing writer worthy of respect, but of course most of the ones I admired were awful fools or somewhat fakey, so I don’t know if my prejudice for the left takes its origin there or not.37

  Two days later he wrote: ‘well dear [. . .] even if we neither at bottom care, the fact does remain that you explode to the right & I explode to the left’, conceding that she made ‘a better job’ of defending her opinions than he of defending his. He drew a caricature rabbit-Monica on a soapbox above a poster reading ‘SPEED UP THE BURROWING PROGRAMME’, facing a seal-Philip also on a soapbox above a poster reading ‘NO CREATURE COMFORT WITHOUT WORK’.38 A quarter of a century later in the Observer interview of 1979 Larkin asserted: ‘I’ve always been right-wing.’39 In fact his deepest instinct was to avoid politics, while his shallower instincts, contrary to popular opinion, gave him, at least in his earlier years, a ‘prejudice for the left’.

  During August and September 1953 he devoted thirteen pages of the workbook to drafts of a thirty-first-birthday poem, ‘At thirty-one, when some are rich’, an engaging meditation on his relationships with women. He wrote ‘unfinished’ on the typescript,40 though this seems an expression of personal dissatisfaction rather than an indication of formal incompleteness. The poem is in fact beautifully finished. As summer turns to autumn below his window, in ‘deep gardenfuls of air’, the poet settles down to write yet another of the letters which have become the measure of his life: less love letters than letters of kindness, or (more cynically) egotistical letters addressed to ‘people wise enough to see my worth’. His situation seems pleasant enough, but he is dissatisfied: ‘I’m kind, but not kinetic.’ These letters ‘plot no change’. As he addresses the envelope ‘a bitter smoke / Of self-contempt, of boredom too, ascends’.

  In ‘Mother, Summer, I’, written at the same time, and also unpublished during his lifetime, he turns back to the first woman in his life. Taking his cue again from the weather, he notes that his mother hates thunderstorms, and loses her ‘worried summer look’ only when the rain and frost return. He, her son, ‘though summer-born / And summer-loving’, also relaxes ‘when the leaves are gone’. The ‘Emblems of perfect happiness’ of summer days offer a challenge to which he cannot rise. Like his mother he awaits:

  A time less bold, less rich, less clear:

  An autumn more appropriate.

  The poem has an Eeyorish glumness about it, hinting perhaps at self-parody.

  In a letter to Eva he gave a more upbeat version of his mood:

  Can you feel the autumn where you are? It seems to hang in the air here, and sharpen my senses, & again I feel a sense of a great waste in my life. We must go again up that road to the wood, where we found the scarlet toadstool, & listen to the wind in the trees [. . .] Here the moon is large and lemon-yellow, & drifts up into the sky at night like a hollow phosphorescent fungoid growth.41

  After his departure from Leicester in 1950, Philip developed the habit of corresponding with his mother at least twice a week. He addressed her as ‘Dearest Mop’, ‘Dearest Old Creature’ or ‘My very dear old creature’. She called him ‘My dear creature’ or ‘My very dear creature’. On Sundays he made sure to fill at least four pages with trivial comments, advice and delicate caricatures of mother or son going about their domestic business. She responded in kind. They expected and relied upon next-day postal delivery (including Sundays), and when either of them missed a letter an apology would follow. In October 1953, he wrote that he had not received her usual letter, and she hastened to reassure him by telegram: ‘HOPE YOU HAVE LETTER NOW. AM QUITE WELL. MUCH LOVE MOTHER’.42 This is by far his most consistent and extensive correspondence, running to about 4,000 letters and cards by the time of Eva’s death in 1977.

  As the time for Winifred’s departure from Belfast approached, Philip was moved to write ‘Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album’. This poem, drafted between August and December 1953, shows the richest combination of genres he had yet attempted. It champions the social realism of photography. But beneath the surface it is both an address to the unattainable muse and also a seduction poem in the witty seventeenth-century cavalier tradition. The woman is a modern muse of real life, a ‘real girl in a real place’, beautiful, as Jill had been, because of her perfect ordinariness. Photography performs a self-contradictory function. ‘Faithful and disappointing’ it preserves reality with objective accuracy, recording ‘Dull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds’. But it also transfigures the ordin­ariness of what it records: ‘what grace / Your candour thus confers upon her face!’ As the spiritual word ‘grace’ implies, the young lady, though ‘empirically true’, and blemished, is as transcendentally beautiful as the traditional ideal muse. ‘Candour’ implies both blunt, ingenuous truthfulness and (from its root in the Latin ‘candor’) ‘brilliant whiteness’. Perhaps Larkin has in mind the hyperreal whiteness of skin in black and white photographs taken outdoors.

  But the girl with the album, though a symbol of perfection, has more emotional complexity and humanity than the airgirl in ‘Like the train’s beat’ or the vagrant face in ‘Latest Face’. What brings her to life is the poem’s chivalrous rhetoric of seduction. Seventeenth-century lovers addressed poems to their ‘L
ady’. In the subtly different idiom of the 1950s, this poet woos a ‘young lady’. Like Marvell or Suckling he appeals to her to take pity on him. Such loudly innocent pleas for mercy conventionally cloak sexual intentions. Here, though sexual innuendo is leeringly signalled (‘My swivel eye hungers from pose to pose’), the poet’s ultimate aim is quite decorous. He seduces the young lady into surrendering not her body, but her photograph album: ‘At last you yielded up the album, which, / Once open, sent me distracted.’ The lover’s parodic, mock-heroic desire is satiated by images rather than by the woman herself. The nearest we approach to seduction is the poet’s brief temptation to steal ‘this one of you bathing’. He desires to possess not the flesh-and-blood ‘real girl’, but her image. He will penetrate no further. Indeed, he is more concerned to arouse the woman’s narcissistic appreciation of her younger self in the photographs than to inveigle her into bed.

  It is here that Larkin’s genre-blending produces its subtlest and most moving effect. This is a muse poem in which the perfect object of desire has descended from her pedestal to become charmingly real and vulnerable. It is also a love poem in which the poet is less concerned with seduction than with the woman’s lost youth. The key to the central metaphor is that the ‘real girl’ in the photographs is the victim of time. She no longer exists:

  Those flowers, that gate,

  These misty parks and motors, lacerate

  Simply by being over; you

  Contract my heart by looking out of date.