Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love
Page 22
In ‘For Sidney Bechet’, Larkin focused on a very different imagined place: the New Orleans evoked by the narrowing and rising note of Sidney Bechet’s saxophone or clarinet. For some, the poet writes, such music builds ‘a legendary Quarter / Of balconies, flower-baskets and quadrilles, / Everyone making love and going shares –’. This world of uninhibited freedom is, like the clichés of ‘I Remember, I Remember’, an ‘appropriate falsehood’. However, in this case he has no wish to debunk or deride. Rather he spins his own joyful euphoria from the music: ‘On me your voice falls as they say love should / Like an enormous yes.’ As he wrote in a different context: ‘everyone has his own dream of America’.4 To experience the real New Orleans would be to court disappointment. Later in life Robert Conquest offered to meet Larkin’s plane in New Orleans, ‘see him to a hotel and so on, so that he could make a local pilgrimage to the blues’ historical milieu’. Conquest explains: ‘This probably shaky enough project failed when he heard that Congo Square had been subsumed into a Cultural Center.’5
In contrast ‘Born Yesterday’, celebrating the birth of Kingsley Amis’s daughter Sally on 17 January 1954, presents itself as a plain man’s rewriting of Yeats’s ceremonious ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’. The poet wishes for this baby not beauty, nor innocence and love, but ordinariness, and ‘An average of talents’. He hopes that she will be ‘Not ugly, not good-looking’, without anything ‘uncustomary’ to pull her off her balance. It is an assured exercise, but there is something ventriloquial about it. Larkin has ironed out his contradictions in a polite pretence of being Amis or the early Davie. This world of stolid security is as flimsy a dream as any imagined ‘Crescent City’, but far less exciting. Its tone approaches the ‘unassuming commonsense’ which Donald Davie saw in his poetry.6 ‘Poetry of Departures’, completed only days later, was possibly written in reaction against such dull contentedness. The poet derides the idea of ‘home sweet home’: ‘We all hate home / And having to be there: / I detest my room.’ He assumes that ‘we’ all admire the man who ‘just cleared off’. But like ‘Reasons for Attendance’ the poem ends ambiguously. In Larkin’s restless dialectic the Rimbaudian rejection of domesticity seems on reflection a ‘step backwards / To create an object’. The stereotypical Hollywood rebel, swaggering the nut-strewn roads, or crouching in the fo’c’sle, ‘Stubbly with goodness’, is as self-deceived in his ‘perfect’, ‘artificial’ life as the conformist with his orderly books and china. Edgy pararhymes prevail, only the d rhyme of the octaves being perfect. The subtle dissonances create an effect of anarchic wilfulness (‘epitaph / cleared off; think / junk; home / room; fo’c’sle / artificial; if / life’).
This dialectic between realism and fantasy culminated in ‘Toads’, completed in March 1954. Larkin is virtually alone among twentieth-century poets in writing in a natural, first-hand way about work in the sense of paid employment. No other significant poet, except Wallace Stevens, held down a nine-to-five job with no expectation of becoming a ‘full-time’ professional writer. Larkin’s attitude is profoundly ambiguous. In this poem his ‘vernacular’ bluster and garish misrhymes build to a pitch of rowdy anarchy; ‘lanes’ rhymes with ‘sardines’, ‘bucket’ with ‘like it’, ‘toad-like’ with ‘hard luck’ and ‘blarney’ with ‘money’:
Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff
That dreams are made on:
For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow [. . .]
‘Made on’ rhymes with ‘pension’, giving Prospero’s beautiful phrase from The Tempest an unforgettable new context. The poem features in a collage pasted on the surviving inside cover of Larkin’s diary for 1954–7. A black and white photograph shows an imposing, large-breasted nude looking out, arms akimbo, with abstracted upward gaze. A smaller photograph of a thin-faced Larkin occupies the space under her armpit, staring at the viewer through large spectacles, tie slightly awry. The woman’s right hand presses down on the printed text of ‘Toads’, which covers the lower part of her body. In the corner is a fragment of a French lesbian romance: ‘Sa beauté n’était pas moins insolente que celle de sa soeur’ (‘Her beauty was no less insolent than that of her sister’).7 The collage presents an engagingly self-deprecating image of the poet’s inner landscape.
On 5 and 6 April 1954 Larkin completed two contrasted poems of meditation. ‘Skin’ is an elegant ‘emblem’. The poet sadly sympathizes with his ‘Obedient daily dress’, which is compelled, in a wan bad joke, to ‘learn its lines’, parching and sagging under the wind of time. In a charming twist he apologizes that he has not been able to reward its patient loyalty by wearing it to a ‘brash festivity [. . .] such as / Clothes are entitled to / Till the fashion changes’. In his new anti-rhetorical manner, death becomes merely a change of ‘fashion’. The following day he completed ‘Water’, equally undeceived, but elevated in tone. It begins in light whimsy as he imagines himself being ‘called in’ to construct a religion, but modulates into an exalted evocation of the element of water. Borrowing Christian imagery he invents a ritual of drenching and fording to dry clothes, and presents an image of a glass of water in which the ‘any-angled’ light of dawn ‘Would congregate endlessly’. The poem consists only of twelve short lines, and maintains a playful tone throughout. Nevertheless it achieves an impressive pagan gravity.
He later regretted taking Monica’s advice to change the original wording of this poem. In a letter of 18 April 1971 he wrote: ‘Oh, in the paperb. TWW “litany” has been replaced by “liturgy.” I rather wish I hadn’t listened to you on this: it seems to wreck the whole verse, it’s so heavy, as opposed to the dancingness of litany – liturgy anticipates images in the next line, too, the g sound. I don’t think the meaning is sufficient gain, as no one knows what either word means anyway.’8
On the day that he composed ‘Water’ he told Winifred: ‘Bruce wrote today to borrow £100! Sent him £50. Why he applies to me & not to Kingsley, God only knows.’9 Despite his success as novelist and composer, Montgomery was experiencing financial difficulties because of his extravagant lifestyle. Larkin was notoriously penny-pinching in everyday life. Like his father he wrote up monthly accounts of his outgoings, and in matters of trivial expenditure, for instance in paying for rounds of drinks or for haircuts, he was loudly stingy and ungenerous.10 But when it really mattered he could be open-handed, and even sought out occasions for generosity, as when he later offered to subsidize the publication of Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn. Over the years, it seems, Montgomery called upon him for frequent financial assistance.
Early in 1954 George MacBeth and Oscar Mellor, editors of the Fantasy Press, which had already published pamphlets of poems by Elizabeth Jennings and Geoffrey Hill, asked Larkin for a selection of his work, and in March five poems appeared in Fantasy Press Poets, Philip Larkin, No. 21: ‘Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album’, ‘Whatever Happened’, ‘If, My Darling’, ‘Arrivals, Departures’ and ‘At Grass’. At the same time ‘Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album’ and ‘Latest Face’ appeared in the Spectator. He sent the printed versions to Winifred, but she was too preoccupied with her wedding preparations to pay much attention. On April Fool’s Day 1954 she sent him a cool letter insisting that her life was not over as his poems implied. On 7 April he replied, saying that he was ‘glad, at long last, the two poems eventually got published and you saw them’. He continued: ‘frightful as marriage is, it’s worse if you don’t embrace it whole-heartedly. I shall put away my inconvenient emotions and wish you nothing but good.’11 Half a century later the muse was still arguing with the dead poet. After two marriages, with three children, three stepchildren and seventeen grandchildren, Winifred was, if anything, even more indignant about Philip’s misogamy. She gave a late retort in 2002, in ‘Photograph Albums Revisited’:
Cousins, cats, cars, canals: a cornucopia of pleasures,
The brilliance of the world revealed in a dozen larger, newer albums.12
For Winifred life had become clearer and larger with the passage of the years.
In one poem addressed to Winifred, ‘Long roots moor summer to our side of earth’, Larkin adopted a positive view of marriage. In this, his most deeply felt and personal epithalamium, dated the day of Winifred’s wedding, 12 June 1954, though drafted over a longer period, Larkin abjectly concedes his own sterility, renouncing wit and aestheticism to address her as a woman rather than as a muse. The imagery recalls the Lawrentian organicism of ‘Wedding-Wind’, and like that poem it is also an aubade. The poet awakes to find summer already taller than ‘the green / River-fresh castles of unresting leaf’. Procreative nature burgeons around him:
It unfolds upward a long breadth, a shine
Wherein all seeds and clouds and winged things
Employ the many-levelled acreage.
He turns away in despair from this epiphany of fertility, feeling ‘outdistanced, out-invented’. He is unable to make the only adequate response:
what
Reply can the vast flowering strike from us,
Unless it be the one
You make today in London: to be married?
A conviction of his failure to rise to the challenge of life is a persistent, tragic element in his sensibility. He left this painfully personal poem unpublished.
On 28 July, after a discontinuous drafting process of three months, Larkin completed what was to become a key work for his early reputation. He had already, in ‘At Grass’, set the pattern for the long stanzaic Horatian odes or reflective elegies which are a central feature of his middle and late periods. ‘Church Going’ has a more public theme than ‘At Grass’, and takes its place in the sequence which was to develop further with ‘An Arundel Tomb’ (1956), ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ (1958), ‘Here’ (1961) and ‘Dockery and Son’ (1963). Like Keats’s odes, each of these poems has a precisely conceptualized abstract theme, though this remains unstated. ‘Church Going’ is an ‘Ode on Faith’. At the time he did not foresee its later popularity, and was diffident about its value. He was dismayed and irritated when he realized it was destined to become a defining work in his public ‘Movement’ image.
He was aware, as he composed it, that its complex mixture of tones is not wholly coherent. It is easy to read the work as a less deceived retort to T. S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’, published thirteen years earlier in 1942. Like ‘A Stone Church Damaged by a Bomb’, ‘Church Going’ subverts Eliot’s patriotic belief in the ‘significant soil’ of English Anglicanism (‘You are here to kneel / Where prayer has been valid’).13 The poet’s ‘awkward reverence’ as he removes his bicycle clips is half ironic. He disrespectfully apes the vicar at the lectern (‘Here endeth’), and is dismissive about ruin-bibbers who know what rood-lofts are. He donates an Irish sixpence, as he explained to Monica, ‘a comic compromise between giving NOTHING and giving REAL MONEY’.14 The Church represents a moribund authority to which the poet sulkily refuses to defer. However, in writing to Monica, with her more conventional religious attitudes,15 he stressed his distance as poet from the speaker: ‘do remember [. . .] that I write it partly to exhibit an attitude as well as to try to arouse an emotion – the attitude of the “young heathen” of whom there are plenty about these days – the first line, for instance, is designed both as sincere statement of fact & also as heavy irony.’16
Thus his ironic disrespect in the phrase ‘ghostly silt’ mocks Eliot’s nostalgia for traditional faith. But it is tempered by more positive feelings. Towards the end the speaker himself adopts the tones of Anglican piety:
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete [. . .]
Is this, perhaps, the blather of some Reverend Flannel intoning with poetical inversion ‘A serious house on serious earth it is’, and speaking vacuously of ‘blent air’ and ‘robed destinies’? No. Dubious though the tone is, there is genuine emotion here. Writing to Monica, Larkin implied that ‘blent’ is intended as a genuinely moving poeticism.17 His tone thus allows his pious readers to imagine that the poet himself shares their superstitious self-deception. Christian readers have from the beginning claimed that the poet is expressing here the sincere pensiveness of a fundamentally religious man: ‘under the pose he is homo religiosus, with an awareness of sacred time and sacred place’.18
But it is not religion that prompts the poet’s churchgoing. Eliot may deceive himself; Larkin does not. Cultural Anglicanism exerted a powerful hold over him. Echoing A. E. Housman’s self-description as ‘a High-Church atheist’,19 he termed himself an ‘anglican agnostic’, and later in ‘Aubade’ expressed a poignant affection for the ‘vast moth-eaten musical brocade’ of Christianity. But his atheism is never in doubt. He was disconcerted by religious misreadings of the poem. When Brenda Moon, Assistant Librarian in Hull, called it ‘wonderful’, Larkin ‘looked surprised and said: “If I’d known how popular it would be, I would have taken more trouble over it.”’20 He never quarrelled with sincere religious readers since the poem is not intended as a polemic. However, he objected to those who ingeniously perverted it into an assertion of faith. ‘I was a bit irritated by an American who insisted to me it was a religious poem. It isn’t religious at all. Religion surely means that the affairs of this world are under divine superveillance, and so on, and I go to some pains to point out that I don’t bother about that kind of thing, that I’m deliberately ignorant of it – “Up at the holy end”, for instance.’ He was even driven to sarcasm: ‘Ah no, it’s a great religious poem; he knows better than me – trust the tale and not the teller, and all that stuff.’21 In fact there is no doubt that the House of God in the poem is empty. God is mentioned only in the calculatedly offhand, secular phrase ‘God knows’. And the reason the poet gravitates towards the churchyard is secular and conditional: ‘If only that so many dead lie round.’
During his final year or so in Belfast Larkin established a relationship with Judy Egerton, who was to become one of his most significant correspondents. He was detailed to show Judy, a teaching assistant in History and wife of the Economics lecturer, Ansell, round the library. As they went they worked on a Times crossword together and became immediate friends. Later she told him how much he had impressed her.22 The Egertons made a dashing, faintly glamorous addition to the cosmopolitan mix of Queen’s. They included him on a trip to Dublin where he visited Donald Davie. He wrote to Patsy on 9 October 1954: ‘I went & returned with some married Australians called Egerton, whose big Rover rushed from Davy Byrnes to 30 Elmwood Avenue, through patches of autumnal mist and sending nocturnal rats scuttling to the hedgerows, in two and a half hours flat.’23 Shortly afterwards he gave more detail:
They are a rich young Australian couple who’ve run out of things to say to each other, and are now sucking fresh life from Alec & myself. We play bridge there far too often, & eat good food, & drink good drink. Now they have started buying LP Bechets & giving me recipés, and muttering archly ‘I don’t know why you call yourself an indigestible sterility . . .’ out of the blue. In answer to your unspoken question, no, she isn’t attractive: just ‘well groomed’. He is about 6’6” and terrifically strong. Plays cricket, of course.24
Later Ansell secured him tickets for Test matches at Lords, and his friendship with the Egertons became a permanent strand in his life. He would visit them in London, and he and Judy were to exchange letters regularly for the rest of his life.
Larkin was beginning to feel that his sojourn in Ireland had run its course, particularly after his different adventures with Patsy Strang and Winifred Arnott had come to their ends. Central though it was to his poetic development, Belfast was es
sentially a diversion. In his next completed poem, ‘Places, Loved Ones’ (10 October 1954), the speaker meditates on rootlessness, expressing surprise at the way things have turned out: ‘No, I have never found / The place where I could say / This is my proper ground, / Here I shall stay.’ Nor has he found ‘that special one’ with whom he might share his name. There is no assertion here of artistic vocation. This speaker has happened to miss out on these things for no apparent reason. Larkin was once again beginning to question whether his rejection of the call to join the dance of life was the product of anything more than immaturity. As the second exemption of Belfast drew to an end, his choice of life opened up again. Once he returned to England these issues would confront him with new force.