Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  Robert Conquest, editor of New Lines, was to become one of Larkin’s regular correspondents. The two men met for the first time in September 1955 when Philip and Monica stopped off in London on their way to a holiday on Sark. Five years older than Larkin, Conquest had been educated at Winchester, Grenoble and Oxford, and after serving seven years in the army, was now working in the Foreign Office.55 Surprisingly the two men became fast friends, their relationship cemented by their shared taste for pornography. New Lines included poems by Larkin, Amis, Davie, Enright, Thom Gunn, John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, John Wain and Conquest himself (the same list as in Enright’s volume with the addition of Thom Gunn). Larkin is the dominating presence, represented by eight poems.56 He was, however, uncomfortable with the polemical tone of Conquest’s Introduction, which claimed that the poetry of the fifties ‘submits to no great systems of theoretical constructs nor agglomerations of unconscious commands. It is free from both mystical and logical compulsions and – like modern philosophy – is empirical in its attitude to all that comes.’57 Before the anthology appeared Larkin wrote uneasily: ‘no doubt I shall come in for a good deal of anti-Movement sniping’.58

  By all definitions the ‘Movement’ foregrounds plain indicatives: empiricism, realism, scepticism and clearly legible irony. It would be difficult to find a less apt description of Larkin’s work. It is, in retrospect, astonishing that so many early commentators should have read the label rather than the poems, and accused Larkin of offering ‘intense parochialism’ and a ‘stepped-down version of human possibilities’.59 By the early 1960s the label had become firmly fixed. Al Alvarez’s Introduction to the Penguin volume The New Poetry, en­titled ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ (1962) cites the ‘common sense’ and ‘gentility’ of Larkin’s ‘Church Going’ in an attack on the ‘Movement’. Larkin’s speaker, Alvarez alleges, offers in ‘concentrated form [. . .] the image of the post-war Welfare State Englishman: shabby and not concerned with his appearance; poor – he has a bike not a car; gauche but full of agnostic piety; underfed, underpaid, overtaxed, hopeless, bored, wry.’60 Alvarez’s caricature is utterly inaccurate as a description of Larkin’s speaker, who shows not the slightest sign of being shabby, underfed, poor, overtaxed or bored. Larkin is not concerned to speak for a sociologically defined generation, and the poetry is diminished by assuming that he does. It is scarcely surprising that the poet adopts such an acerbic tone in referring to Alvarez in later letters. Alvarez’s crude misreading, repeatedly cited, continues to dog his reputation to this day.

  But, as Larkin realized, whatever the drawbacks of the ‘Movement’ label, it gave his work a ‘brand’ image, and in the literary world, as elsewhere, this is a great aid to publicity. For better or worse, his simplified ‘Movement’ persona took its place in the nation’s cultural consciousness, and over subsequent decades he could not resist pretending to be this persona: ‘there’s not much to say about my work. When you’ve read a poem, that’s it, it’s all quite clear what it means.’61 Already in 1956 the ‘Movement’ was familiar and established enough to generate self-parody. Amis collected together a sequence for publication, ‘All Aboard the Gravy Train: Or, Movements among the Younger Poets, by Ron Cain’.62 Larkin produced for the occasion a droll Larkinesque piece, ‘The local snivels through the fields’.63 The poet is discovered, among mums in felt hats, on the final stretch of his train journey back from holiday, comfortably enjoying his disappointment at the end of the spree which the labels on his luggage ‘shout’ about. In a comic zeugma the mothers are laden with: ‘Baby-sized parcels, bags of plums / And bones of gossip’. And the poem ends in a virtuoso anti-climax as the journey ‘runs out’ in a lopsided ‘feminine’ misrhyme:

  Death will be such another thing,

  All we have done not mattering.

  This may be self-parody, but there is tragic conviction in the gloss he gave to Monica: ‘Nothing will be good enough to look back on. I know that for certain: there will be nothing but remorse & regret for opportunities missed not only for getting on the gravy train but for treating people decently.’64

  For better or worse the ‘Movement’ remains a relevant category to Larkin’s work, though exactly what it implies is disputed. David Lodge later gave ‘Movement’ poetics a moral and academic rationale. The ‘Movement’ poets, he wrote, ‘aimed to communicate clearly and honestly their perceptions of the world as it was. They were empiricists, influenced by logical positivism and “ordinary language” philosophy.’65 But Larkin was as much a Jungian as a logical positivist in the mould of Gilbert Ryle or A. J. Ayer; and in any case, his poetry evokes moods and attitudes rather than proselytizing on behalf of a world view. Blake Morrison has identified the ‘Movement’ with an anti-Romantic return to tradition,66 with ‘caution and consolidation [. . .] orderliness and rationalism [. . .] neutrality and loss of nerve’.67 Conquest, on the other hand, writing in 2009, is surprised at the reductive literalism with which his Introduction to New Lines was interpreted. Far from being ‘anti-Modernist’, he took it as read, at the time, that ‘We had, indeed, all been brought up on, and had digested, “Modernism” of every type.’68 Larkin certainly had.

  In serious contexts Larkin consistently rejected the label of ‘Movement’ poet, asserting that he had no common programme with the other writers. He had some acquaintance with Donald Davie, and with John Wain, who had been a freshman in St John’s when Larkin was in his third year. But his only close associate in the group was Kingsley Amis, with whom he was increasingly out of sympathy: ‘we have inevitably had less time for each other during the last five years or so’.69 In later years he mentions the label with irritation: ‘Bob Conquest’s New Lines in 1956 put us all between the same covers. But it certainly never occurred to me that I had anything in common with Thom Gunn, or Donald Davie, for instance.’70 Ironically, it was because Larkin’s voice was so independent and unprogrammatic compared with those of the other poets of the ‘Movement’ that he became its pre-eminent representative in the public mind.

  12

  Hull

  1955–7

  Arriving in Hull in March 1955 Larkin stayed briefly in University-owned accommodation while he looked for somewhere more permanent to live. In late March he moved into a room in 11 Outlands Road, a modern semi-detached house just off the main road between the University and Cottingham. Here he was badgered by the noise from the landlady downstairs; ‘her filthy radio floods the whole house.’1 This uncomfortable episode is reflected in ‘Mr Bleaney’, completed on 19 May.2 No other poem by Larkin has such plain, colourless rhymes: abab (‘stayed / till / frayed / sill // land / took / hand / hook’). The poet declares that how we live ‘measures our own nature’, so the lonely working-class caricature Bleaney who formerly occupied his room is probably a fair image of what his own life is worth. The language is truculently unpoetic (‘My bit of garden’, ‘stub my fags’, ‘Stuffing my ears’), and elegy enters the poem through a bad pun. While living here Mr Bleaney worked at a factory making car-bodies.3 As the landlady explains, ‘He stayed / The whole time he was at the Bodies, till / They moved him,’ reminding us that we all stay in our bodies until ‘They’ move us. Mr Bleaney’s room is the most prosaic and literal of spaces; but it is also intensely metaphorical: a figure for failure. ‘I’ll take it,’ the poet says, fatalistically stepping into the shoes of a sad man who keeps the garden properly in order, does the football pools to a system and spends ‘Christmas at his sister’s house in Stoke’.4 In letters to Monica over the next few years Larkin looked back to these early days in Hull when he was ‘living the life of Bleaney’, and would speak of ‘Bleaney’ as his fate or nemesis.

  However, the poem is ambiguous. There is a certain exoneration in having only what one warrants in life, rather than being challenged by something ‘better’. The delight in privacy which Larkin expressed in ‘Best Society’ has faded, but this ‘hired box’ is still a refuge of self-possession. It presents no threat of ‘furniture and loans
from the bank’, and cannot possibly be shared. On one level this sterile version of ‘home’, a room without even ‘room’ for books, suits the poet perfectly. Crucially, its window offers a brief, beautiful epiphany: ‘building land, / Tussocky, littered’, and ‘the frigid wind / Tousling the clouds’. The hidden dialectic here is that dramatized in ‘Success Story’, written a year earlier in March 1954.5 The speaker’s life is a failure by the usual standards, but ‘a curious counter-whispering’ late at night tells him that actually he has scored a great success: ‘you’ve dodged the dirty feeding’. He has rejected the ‘pretence’ that ‘the other thing’ really matters. His superego tells him he should be disappointed in himself for descending to Bleaney’s level, but his vagrant poetic ego whispers that no material success could give him anything more valuable than this glimpse of wind-blown clouds. Bleaney’s room reveals itself to be a ‘less deceived’ version of Yeats’s glamorous ‘foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart’, ‘where all the ladders start’.6

  Larkin’s correspondence gives no detailed account of his first impressions of his publishers, the Hartleys. We can only guess, from Jean’s vivid account, at the degree of his culture shock. She describes their rented house at 253 Hull Road, Hessle: ‘It was a tiny two-up-and-two-down, hundred-and-fifty-year-old, jerry-built workman’s cottage, on the main road from Hull, with an outside lavatory, no bathroom, a cold-water tap in the kitchen, a shallow yellow stone sink and indoor slugs.’7 The Hartleys were at first overawed:

  I was greatly alarmed when I saw a dignified gent, slim, with dark hair (receding), very formally-suited, serious and quite unsmiling. His frequent ‘White Rabbit’ glances at his pocket-watch did nothing to put us at our ease [. . .] With his chin well tucked in he paced up and down our small living-room, his tall body bowed to avoid head-on collision with the light bulb.8

  But despite their different backgrounds Philip soon came to rely heavily on the Hartleys for support and companionship. In May he moved from Outlands Road into rather more comfortable lodgings at 200 Hallgate, Cottingham, a leafy village-suburb, two miles from the University. His Saturdays soon fell into a routine. He would cycle the four miles from Cottingham into Hull, buy his groceries in the food hall of Hammonds, an upmarket department store, and then, with his purchases in a haversack on his back, cycle the four miles to the Hartleys’ home. Jean Hartley recalls him ‘bowling along on his enormous bike [. . .] the biggest I have ever seen, looking more than life-size as he pedalled down Hull Road, Hessle’.9 As in Belfast, though now without the company of a Winifred, he would explore the local villages, taking photographs of churches and landscapes. Over the years he was to develop his talent for photography to a high level.

  On 13 June, less than a month after ‘Mr Bleaney’, he completed ‘The Importance of Elsewhere’, a different meditation on how our nature is measured. In Ireland the prevailing context of strangeness made sense of the poet’s difference. He had been ‘separate’, exempt from the reproaches of his peers and of his own conscience. In a characteristic double negative he was ‘not unworkable’, his existence ‘underwritten’ by elsewhere. Now he has returned home he no longer has this ‘excuse’. In the context of his own ‘customs and establishments’ the pressure to conform reasserts itself: ‘It would be much more serious to refuse.’ But, in the event, neither the grim image of ‘Mr Bleaney’ nor the pressure of his own establishments was powerful enough to make Larkin do what was expected of him. Neither of the two futures prepared for his return materialized. On the one hand his mother had the idea that he should ‘buy a house, here, & that I should live in half of it, & she, with a companion-help paid out of my rent, in the other’.10 On the other hand, Monica, oppressed by her lecturing duties, wanted marriage. He acknowledged that he was letting her down: ‘I haven’t done for you what I could – take you away from all these trying people & the hardship of having a job.’11 There is perhaps some irony in that last phrase.

  On Saturday 23 July 1955, he wrote to Monica:

  9.50 p.m. I went a long bike ride in boiling weather, enjoying it in snatches [. . .] I went to Beverley in a roundabout way, had tea at the Beverley Arms, then went west in a long arc round the villages and wolds to Kirk Ella & Hessle, for the sake of calling on Jean Hartley to see what the position was now. But she was out & the filthy sluttish mother-in-law merely shouted at me through the window – why is my life in the hands of the workingclass? By the time I got back I must have done nearly 20 miles & felt tired.12

  Philip was in fact on quite good terms with George’s mother, but her manner was loud and grating. When the Hartleys’ literary friends visited, she would shout out: ‘Them poetry blokes is here.’13 As an antidote to her shouting Larkin evoked in his letter the quiet of St Mary’s church, where he had seen the celebrated carving which inspired the White Rabbit in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland:

  In Beverley I went into St Mary’s and found the rabbit (see enclosed leaflet). I like this church: I hope one day you’ll see it. The rabbit is not a very attractive one: I should say it is sneering rather, and some of it has broken away. Then again it might be a hare, I suppose. But it is certainly wearing a satchel [. . .] a lone invader of a hated ecclesiastical stronghold. I expect the satchel contains carrots. Looking into a small papershop for cricket scores I found a pile of Beatrix Potters, & read Apply Dapply’s Nursery Rhymes [. . .] It made me wish you were with me –14

  A short time earlier, on 26 July 1955, casting about, in a letter to Judy and Ansell Egerton in Belfast, for one ‘nice’ thing to write about Hull, he had concluded: ‘oh yes, well, it’s very nice & flat for cycling: that’s about the best I can say. I usually pedal miles & miles at the week-end, always winding up in the Beverley Arms for tea, not because it’s good tea but because I never know where else to go.’15 From early 1955 on an essential insight into Larkin’s moods and activities is given by his letters to Judy Egerton. The chemistry between them was strong, but there was never any question of a sexual relationship, though Ansell was aware that his wife became ‘devoted to Philip’. The first half-dozen letters were addressed to both of them. Later Larkin addressed letters to her alone (she would toss them across to her husband but ‘he was always more interested in the stock market’).16 Philip would tell her to ‘give my regards to Ansell – hope the markets are steady’.17 Over time they developed routines. He would make sure to write to her on or around Trafalgar Day (21 October), and every year she would send him an illustrated London diary. Philip’s tone in writing to this sensitive, Liberal-voting woman, who was later to make an independent career in London as an art historian, lacks the performative hijinks and strategic evasions of his letters to his more intimate correspondents. Over the decades his letters to her become one of the most reliable registers of the course of his life.

  He settled into bachelor, or spinsterish, routines. Later he told Jean Hartley that he took ‘a lot of pleasure’ in washing out his own socks and underclothes: ‘Very satisfying dabbling and wringing and then seeing them hang out to dry.’18 On 3 August he dyed three pairs of white socks mauve: ‘They came out blindingly bright.’19 His mother’s loneliness was on his conscience, but his reluctance to bring her to Hull was intensified by a visit to Loughborough shortly before his thirty-third birthday on 9 August. In ‘Reference Back’, completed later in the month, he dramatized the relationship with touching empathy. The mother calls upstairs from the hall to her son playing jazz records alone in his room: ‘That was a pretty one.’ Her touching attempt to make contact across the generations precipitates bitter self-reproach on the son’s part for selfishly wasting this time at home ‘that you / Looked so much forward to’. In the future, every time he hears Oliver’s Riverside Blues, the recorded notes played by ‘those antique negroes’ the year after he was born will remind him how the music ‘made this sudden bridge / From your unsatisfactory age / To my unsatisfactory prime’. Having repeated the word ‘unsatisfactory’ four times in this poem, he made sure never to use it again
in his poetry.20 It would be a mistake to interpret the poem as expressing irritation with his mother. He wrote to Eva a few months later to tell her that ‘The one about you saying “that was a pretty one” is being broadcast early in February – you never thought, when you said it, that you’d be repeated over the BBC, did you?’21

  At the conclusion of the poem the lines lengthen, tetrameters and trimeters becoming spacious pentameters to make one of Larkin’s most beautiful, sustained rhetorical climaxes:

  Truly, though our element is time,

  We are not suited to the long perspectives

  Open at each instant of our lives.

  They link us to our losses: worse,

  They show us what we have as it once was,

  Blindingly undiminished, just as though

  By acting differently we could have kept it so.

  Such writing has the ‘frictionless memorability’ which Martin Amis identifies as Larkin’s characteristic strength.22 Every word seems inevitable.

  His salary was now twice as large as that he had received in Belfast, but his new post imposed far more responsibility and stress upon him. In letters to his mother he frequently expresses his diffidence: ‘God knows how I shall ever get through the next few years, building this new library. A sad life for an unambitious creature!’23 He had two senior male colleagues, the remaining nine staff being women library assistants. Much of his time was taken up with a busy round of meetings. Having received its University charter only six months before his arrival the University was embarking on a programme of expansion. Plans for an enlarged library had already been agreed under the previous Librarian, Agnes Cuming. But their inadequacy was already apparent. As he wrote to the Egertons: ‘The Library they are planning looks at present like a rejected design for a cinema: if it is put up, it will be the laughing stock of the British Isles.’24 Worse, student access would be inadequate. He involved himself with the Estates Office and architects in the revision of the plan, familiarizing himself with technicalities of design and construction. Early in 1956 the project gathered new impetus when Brynmor Jones, Head of Chemistry at Hull since the 1930s, was appointed internally as the new Vice-Chancellor.