by James Booth
His thoughts had been concentrated a few weeks earlier when Jack Graneek, the Librarian at Queen’s, feeling his abilities needed a new challenge, had encouraged him to apply for a post at Hull, whose Librarian, Agnes Cuming, was about to retire. In September 1954, Hull gained full University status, having until then been a university college awarding external London degrees. This was an opportunity which Larkin felt he could not pass up, though he was diffident of success, since he was still only thirty-two. ‘Of course it will be all up if any of the committee has read Toads – Listen is printed practically IN Hull.’25 He travelled across for the interview and on 23 November wrote to Monica to say that he had been offered the post. He was to start in March 1955. A few days later, on a chilly 28 November, he reviewed his situation. He was now definitely committed to a career in librarianship, which he depicted as his ‘mask’, the oppositional alter ego of Yeats’s poetic theory. Otherwise he was simply resuming his life where he had left it five years earlier: ‘What a hopeless character mine is. In 1950 I ran away from England & the problems it held, but really they’re still there unchanged & now I’m going back to them . . . Five years older, five years poorer, five years colder, five years . . . can’t think of a rhyme. Surer? Surer of what? Brrr.’26 Graneek commented that he had ‘never seen anyone so depressed by promotion’.27
Top of the list of the issues to be resolved was whether he would marry Monica. On 15 December, he responded to her hints: ‘You seem to suggest that I’ve yet to throw off my mother & grab myself primary emotional interest in a woman my own age. This may well be true – it sounds true – but it’s not a thing one can do by will power.’28 The relationship had gathered emotional momentum during five years of regular correspondence, visits and holidays. But it had its tensions. In the same letter in which he told Monica about the Hull vacancy in September, he was prompted to take issue with her conservatism. A ‘foul article’ by Ronald Duncan in the satirical magazine Punch had celebrated the advent of myxomatosis in the writer’s village: ‘when the first bulging-eyed creature was discovered . . . it was drinks all round at the pub that night’. Continuing what was clearly an ongoing debate between them he condemned the magazine: ‘it is this sort of thing that makes me look down on Punch (you remember you once scolded me for it). It may be the backbone of England, but the New St. wd never offend in that way, and I judge them accordingly.’29 In view of his reputation as a right-wing poet, it is remarkable how many of his occasionally published poems appeared in the New Statesman and other left-leaning journals.
The fact that Monica was, in the sentimental language of their letters, ‘Ears’, ‘Paws’ or ‘Bun’, gave the onset of myxomatosis a painful personal significance, and though he finished his poem on the subject on 28 September, he delayed sending it to her until 14 November. He explained awkwardly: ‘I’m not keeping “the rabbit one” from you: it’s only that in it I kill the rabbit, which makes it totally out of character & rather like a piece of journalism.’30 There is no hint of anthropomorphism in the poem; the title, ‘Myxomatosis’, is chillingly clinical. Assuming no more than shared animal sentience, he guesses at what is going on in the animal’s consciousness:
You may have thought things would come right again
If you could only keep quite still and wait.
‘It’s not much of a poem,’ he wrote to Monica. ‘But of course I felt strongly enough about it. I hardly dare ask what you think of it. I strove (queer word) to give the essential pathos of the situation without getting involved in argument.’ He is anxious about the morality of treating this highly emotive topic at all: ‘Oh dear. Is this “using” the rabbits?’31 The contrast with Ted Hughes is intriguing. Larkin respects the non-human otherness of animals while Hughes endows his birds and rodents with human pride, guilt and deviousness. The world of ‘Crow’ is far closer to Beatrix Potter than are the horses and rabbit of Larkin’s poems.32 Outside the poem, however, Larkin reverts to the consoling artifice of anthropomorphism. Later in this same letter to Monica he inserts a drawing of a rabbit, her skirt flying in a sprightly dance, accompanied on a rustic shawm by a seal beneath a tree. There is moving pathos in the juxtaposition of the rigorous realism of the poem with the sophisticated sentimentalism of their playful animal personae.
Larkin was aware of the quality of his poetic achievement, and becoming impatient for recognition. In September he sent ‘Church Going’ and ‘Myxomatosis’ to the Spectator, where they were mislaid, though he did not discover this until a year later. He felt disappointed, writing on 2 October 1954 to Monica, ‘No word from the Spr about my deathless verse.’33 Then on 10 October, after the trip to Dublin with the Egertons, he told her that, though Donald Davie had been in favour of the Dolmen Press publishing twelve of his recent poems, Davie’s two young Irish co-editors, Thomas Kinsella and Liam Miller, had outvoted him. They thought the poems ‘“too self-pitying” (I offered Davie this phrase & he gladly accepted it) and “too sexy” (his own words). He was very apologetic, but I think the collection hadn’t pleased him as much as he had expected.’ Davie had found ‘Wires’ ‘very feeble’, though he liked ‘Latest Face’ enough to set it as an analytical exercise for his classes in Trinity College. Larkin affected indifference: ‘So there you are. I was disappointed at the time, but not now.’34 Despite his show of unconcern, there can be little doubt that he was angered by these blundering criticisms.
‘Maiden Name’ (January 1955), the last poem Larkin completed in Belfast, returns for the final time to Winifred Arnott and the muse theme. The five light sounds of the maiden name preserve, like the photographs, an innocent perfection now for ever lost. The ‘disused’ name no longer ‘means’ her face nor her ‘variants of grace’. By marriage she has fallen from grace. There is an ominous undertone in the poet’s congratulation to her on being ‘thankfully confused / By law with someone else’. The name now survives only in old lists and letters tied with tartan ribbon. Then with a sudden intimate address the poet speaks directly to her: ‘Try whispering it slowly. / No, it means you.’ But he immediately draws back. This is too intimate a tone to adopt to a married woman. So he re-presents his feeling in the form of a politely circumlocuitous ‘what’ noun phrase: ‘Or, since you’re past and gone, // It means what we feel now about you then.’ The poem becomes an elegy, mourning her youth:
How beautiful you were, and near, and young,
So vivid, you might still be there among
Those first few days, unfingermarked again [. . .]
Her perfection is spoiled by fingering. There is an unsettling emotional complexity in the story which Amis related years later: ‘He had a picture of her in his room. He came back one night full of beer and wrote to say he’d noticed more than usual how it brought out her resemblance to Stan Laurel. “In a hearty way,” he said, “I let a bit of beer fall on it and now I can’t get it off. I can’t get the shine back.”’35 It is likely that Amis’s summary lacks nuances present in Larkin’s original version. However, the pattern is true to his dialectical sensibility. Whenever he felt a powerful emotion he was impelled to answer it with scepticism or desecration; and vice versa.
On 20 December 1954 George Hartley wrote from Hull that, following the success of the first three issues of Listen, he and his wife Jean had decided to venture on a book. Their imprint was to be called the Marvell Press, after Hull’s great seventeenth-century poet, with the implication also that it would be a bloody marvel if the plan was a success.36 They asked him to be their first author. He hesitated, still feeling that it was his destiny to be published by Faber. ‘If only he lived in any other city!’ he wrote to Monica.37 But inertia prevailed, and rather than risk a repeat of the traumatic rejection of seven years earlier, he agreed. Nervous about what his new employer and colleagues might think of ‘Toads’ and ‘If, My Darling’, he asked the Hartleys not to advertise or distribute the volume around Hull. He was somewhat reassured to learn that neither of the Hartleys had any connection with the University
. Remembering his experience with XX Poems, he secured assurances that he would not have to pay for anything himself, and that the volume would be printed on good paper.
He made a list of twenty-three possible inclusions, writing to Monica on 8 January 1955: ‘I can’t decide about Churchgoing – it’s one of the 23, but I’m not sure. What do you think? [. . .] I should like it for its length!’ The title for the volume caused him difficulty: ‘I’d like to call it Such Absences, to draw attention to my favourite poem! Only it doesn’t make sense, since my poems aren’t really “attics cleared of me”.’38 As we have seen, he had omitted ‘Absences’ from XX Poems. Perhaps its sublime theme seemed inappropriate in a collection dedicated to Amis. But his feelings about his friend were now less warm; Amis did not reply to letters nor remember birthdays, and their correspondence was becoming irregular. He was, Larkin told Monica, like a ‘fourth form friend’ he had outgrown: ‘The idea of Kingsley loving a book – or a book “feeding” him, as K.M. wd say – is quite absurd. He doesn’t like books. He doesn’t like reading. And I wouldn’t take his opinion on anything, books, people, places, anything. Probably he has been mistaken, to himself, about me.’39 Other titles Larkin toyed with were: 23 Poems, Poems 1946–1955, In the same breath and True to life. In the end he sent the typescript to the Hartleys with the title Various Poems.40
Monica, meanwhile, was doing her best to persuade him to marry her, by the well-calculated strategy of sympathizing with his misogamy. On 22 January 1955 she conceded: ‘Well, for one thing, a first thing, you can’t marry just because you think it’s a sort of moral duty & a nasty one, a punishment that you ought to take.’ On the other hand she suggested reasonably: ‘One thing that does make me feel we are “suited” is that you can discuss such an idea with me, & that I can hear it without the least offence, & even with understanding – I do see what you mean. But being “suited” & actually wanting to marry is another thing again, too.’41 It is painful to read her careful angling. He responded, after a week, tantalizing her with arguments in favour of commitment: ‘It seemed to me that if we were going to get married this would be a good point to do so. I have a living wage, you want to pack up your job, we both want – or think we want – the same kind of life, we know each other well enough, etc. And we are ageing!’ But he continued with a cruel candour which must have put Monica through the emotional mangle: ‘The sort of thing that gives me pause (paws) is wondering whether I do more than just like you very, very much and find it flattering and easy to stay with you.’42 Two weeks later (10 February) he assumed that it was agreed between them that marriage was impossible: ‘Really you couldn’t say anything more to my way of feeling than that you don’t like the idea of getting married. I dare say I could go through with it, but [. . .]’ He concluded with a crushing Larkinesque aphorism: ‘what frightens me most about marriage is the passing-a-law-never-to-be-alone-again side of it’.43 Monica could be in no doubt where she stood.
Various Poems was a thoughtful choice of title. The volume’s range of styles, forms and emotions is more diverse than that of any other poet of the century. The title also has the advantage of avoiding any hint of an ideological programme. The blurb which Larkin wrote at George Hartley’s request, but which was never used, is disarming: ‘the poems of Philip Larkin have been increasingly well-known for their unusual combination of deep personal feeling and exact, almost sophisticated choice of words’. While ‘no less witty and intelligent than his contemporaries’, he ‘deals with emotion more simply and intensely than is common today’.44 But, accurate though it was, the title lacked distinctiveness and, following discussion with Hartley, Larkin transferred the intended title of the poem ‘The Less Deceived’ to the volume, and renamed that poem ‘Deceptions’. After a ceremonious request the collection was dedicated to Monica.
It is intriguing to speculate how different the whole period might seem had Larkin’s first mature volume been called Such Absences. But the abstract noun phrase ‘the less deceived’ has an authentic Larkinesque quality, and in retrospect the title seems inevitable. With its comparative grammar it stresses the dynamic relativities which Larkin had been exploring in his recent work. The raped girl in ‘Deceptions’ is less deceived than her rapist. The visitor in ‘Church Going’ is less deceived than the religious believer. The aestheticist speaker of ‘Latest Face’ is less deceived than l’homme moyen sensuel wading after the statue in untidy air. The speaker of ‘If, My Darling’ is less deceived than the woman he addresses; or at least so he claims, though with his internal attic full of selfish clutter he is perhaps more deceived than the poet of ‘Absences’ whose attics are sublimely empty. To be less deceived means to transcend sex or self as often as it means to be disillusioned in the usual sense. Rather than dictating a consistent downbeat tone the title opens up conditional or comparative calculations: ‘Whatever happened?’; ‘If no one has misjudged himself’; ‘Nothing [. . .] happens anywhere’; ‘Such attics cleared of me!’; ‘what since is found / Only in separation’.
When the volume was published in November 1955 (the title page has ‘October’), nine months after Larkin’s arrival in Hull, it consisted of twenty-nine poems: thirteen from XX Poems,45 the five poems from the Fantasy Press volume and eleven other recent works: ‘Absences’, ‘Reasons for Attendance’, ‘I Remember, I Remember’, ‘Poetry of Departures’, ‘Toads’, ‘Skin’, ‘Age’, ‘Church Going’, ‘Places, Loved Ones’, ‘Myxomatosis’ and ‘Maiden Name’. Since the Hartleys could not afford to cover the initial production costs, it had been decided to revive the archaic practice of advance subscription. One hundred and twenty subscribers were recruited from the literary world and from among Larkin’s and the Hartleys’ acquaintances. Larkin called it the ‘sucker list’.46 Anxious about the exact terms of the contract Larkin stipulated a time limit on the option clause for his next volume (this ran out well before the completion of The Whitsun Weddings). He agreed that Hartley should have anthology rights following publication, and that, instead of a 10 per cent royalty for the author, the proceeds should be divided according to a ‘profit-sharing’ arrangement. He commented to Monica, ‘this should mean 50% of the profits: hope it does’.47 (A year later he calculated that the result had been similar to that of a 12½ per cent royalty.)48 Seven hundred copies were printed, but to avoid unnecessary expense if the volume failed to sell, only 400 of these were bound up.
By coincidence, at this point the Spectator relocated the typescript of ‘Church Going’ and published it on 18 November, only days before The Less Deceived was published. On seeing the poem Charles Monteith of Faber immediately wrote to Larkin inquiring whether he had enough poems for a volume. Larkin had to reply that he was too late. Already finding his dealings with George Hartley difficult, he commented ruefully in a letter to Monica of 24 November: ‘Just suppose The Spr. had published it when they had it . . . Hartley need never have entered my life [. . .]’49
The book was an immediate success and Larkin’s reputation was made. On 22 December The Times named The Less Deceived one of their books of the year. There were favourable reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman and the London Magazine. The 700 copies were sold rapidly and the types were reset for a new impression. Larkin was benefiting from one of those chance intersections between the career of an individual artist and the current of popular culture which make a particular book seem an expression of the Zeitgeist. As Britain emerged from the war a new cultural consensus had been building which was at this very moment taking a local poetic habitation and a name in the form of the ‘Movement’. In 1954 Anthony Hartley, responding to works by Amis, Gunn and Davie, had written an editorial in the Spectator defining a new literary spirit: ‘bored by the despair of the Forties, not much interested in suffering, and extremely impatient of poetic sensibility, especially poetic sensibility about “the writer and society” [. . .] The Movement, as well as being anti-phoney, is anti-wet; sceptical, robust, ironic’.50 Despite Anthony Thwaite
’s satirical objection that its supposed members all denied knowledge of it, the term rapidly gained currency.51 The Less Deceived was hailed as a foundational text of the ‘Movement’, and ‘I Remember, I Remember’, ‘Toads’ and ‘Church Going’ came to be regarded as key ‘Movement’ works. The labelling was confirmed when in 1956 Larkin’s poems appeared in three anthologies alongside those of the other ‘Movement’ poets: D. J. Enright’s Poets of the 1950s, Robert Conquest’s New Lines and G. S. Fraser’s Poetry Today.
In the ‘Statement’ written for Poets of the 1950s Larkin gave an account of his poetic practice which united no-nonsense ‘Movement’ plain speaking with intense Romantic idealism. He insisted: ‘I make a point of not knowing what poetry is or how to read a page or about the function of myth.’ This may seem an odd assertion, given his fascination with the Pygmalion story. He is, however, thinking not of organic mythic patterns but of the fashionable dropping of classical or biblical names. He continues with Hardyesque clumsiness: ‘I write poems to preserve things I have seen/thought/felt (if I may so indicate a composite and complex experience) both for myself and for others, though I feel that my prime responsibility is to the experience itself, which I am trying to keep from oblivion for its own sake.’52 Beneath the affectation of plain language, this is Walter Pater: ‘Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end [. . .] To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.’53 But Larkin covers his tracks with an offhand, ‘conservative’ disclaimer: ‘Why I should do this I have no idea, but I think the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art.’ By a deft sleight he proclaims the unfathomable mystery of inspiration in the tones of a regular unpoetic bloke. However, the effort is a strain, and his Platonic idealism will not be baulked: ‘As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe.’54