Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  Despite all the professional and domestic pressures, Larkin’s spirits were rising. The Hartleys had warned him that ‘Hull was the armpit of the East Riding’ and had expressed surprise that he should want to come and work in the place from which they had failed to escape.25 But, though Hull might be ‘a frightful dump’ and the room in which he was living hideous,26 he was beginning to feel at home here. On 26 September, returning from a visit to Monica, he wrote:

  Dearest,

  Back to this dreary dump,

  East Riding’s dirty rump,

  Enough to make one jump

  Into the Humber –

  God! What a place to be:

  How it depresses me;

  Must I stay on, and see

  Years without number?

  – This verse sprang almost unthought-of from my head as the train ran into Hull just before midday. I’m sure no subsequent verse could keep up the high standard. Pigs & digs rhyme, of course, likewise work & shirk, & Hull & dull, but triple rhymes are difficult. Anyway, it gives an indication of how I’m feeling.27

  How he was feeling was pretty cheerful. Just as a good poem about failure is a success, so a good piece of doggerel about misery is a tonic. He already has in mind a ‘subsequent’ version of this poem, and six years later, in a typical Larkinesque dialectic, this glum celebration of Hull was to be recast as the gorgeous, serene ‘Here’. He was, as he foresaw, to spend the remaining three decades of his life in the city, and never seriously regretted it.

  On 18 August 1955 shortly before the publication of The Less Deceived Monica expressed her admiration for his writing: ‘I like your poetry better than any that I ever see – oh, I am sure that you are the one of this generation! I am sure you will make yr name! Yr mark, do I mean – really be a real poet, I feel more sure of it than ever before, it is you who are the one, I do think so.’28 Philip’s letters to Monica frequently include finished poems or drafts, and occasional requests for advice. However, there was never any significant poetic collaboration between them. The few suggestions she made were not always well judged. She decided, for instance, that the phrase ‘that much never can be obsolete’ in ‘Church Going’ is ungrammatical, and that Larkin should have written ‘so much’. On the appearance of The Less Deceived in November 1955 she wrote: ‘I wish you could have altered “that much” – it is a blemish on a lovely stanza of a lovely poem – a bit of grit that scrapes every time.’29 No other reader would see this problem, and it seems surprising that five months later in March 1956 he should still be ‘brooding’ over it. He conceded that the phrase is ‘grammatically wrong’, but insisted that ‘so much’ would imply, misleadingly, ‘that what will never be obsolete is really quite a lot’. In a pattern which was to be repeated, he ostensibly deferred to Monica while rejecting her advice: ‘I know you are right & I am wrong, but there it is.’30

  His mother now added to his anxieties. She was suffering from depression and the letters show that in early December 1955 she was admitted to Carlton Hayes Hospital, Narborough, for patients with mental problems. On 4 December, the day after his first visit, in a letter headed ‘Don’t answer if you feel you can’t!’ Philip wrote that he was sorry she was finding the hospital ‘so bewildering and un-private’. ‘No doubt the idea is that the company of others (however quaint the others are) is meant to draw you out of the prison of misery you find yourself in [. . .]’ She wrote to him on 7 December: ‘My very dear Creature, This morning I had my first electrical treatment, but beyond feeling a bit shaky and sick afterwards I felt nothing of it.’ On Sunday 11 December, he wrote reminding her that he was to visit her the next Saturday: ‘keep your tail up. With very special love, Philip.’ A card followed on Wednesday, promising to see her ‘as often as possible’ over Christmas. On Friday 16 December he wrote in advance of his visit the next day, to tell her that her medical superintendent had given her ‘“leave of absence for Christmas” from 10 a.m. Dec 24th to 6 p.m. Dec 28th’. He decided to book them both into the Angel Hotel in Grantham, with an excursion on Christmas Day to a hotel in Melton Mowbray where his sister Kitty had booked a family Christmas dinner. Throughout this grim, depressing period his letters maintain a steady flow of calming reassurance. He tells Eva not to worry, to eat well and to recover from her cold. On 20 December he wrote: ‘I am looking forward to our time together at Grantham. You will enjoy a trip into the outside world, and I shall be all the happier to be with you at this time of year.’31

  A constant theme in these weeks was the bitter cold: ‘Nowhere is really warm in weather like this.’ His sense of exposure, physical and also emotional, found expression on 27 December in ‘Pigeons’, originally ‘Pigeons in Winter’, prompted, as he told his mother, by watching the birds from their hotel room in Grantham while she slept through the short afternoons.32 It is a poem of austere, detached description, evoking the pigeons’ restiveness as they shift together on the shallow slates of a roof: ‘Backing against the thin rain from the west / Blown across each sunk head and settled feather’. As in ‘At Grass’ and ‘Myxomatosis’ there is no anthropomorphism. The distance between human and animal worlds is respectfully observed as the birds become lost to the eye in the dusk:

  Soon,

  Light from a small intense lopsided moon

  Shows them, black as their shadows, sleeping so.

  The effect is intimate but impersonal, like a black and white woodcut by Gwen Raverat or Eric Ravilious. The poem was read on the radio in September 1956, and published in the Oxford student magazine Departure IV in 1957.

  On 1 January 1956 he wrote to Eva from the Royal Hotel, Winchester where he and Monica were staying. He mentions visiting Winchester Cathedral, ‘where Jane Austen is buried’, and attending evensong at Salisbury Cathedral. By this time Eva was on the road to recovery. By 8 January he was writing to her at The Woodlands, Forest Road, Narborough, ‘a nicer place for you to be in than the hospital’. His sister Kitty had told him that ‘the agreement is for you to “come out” on January 21st’. At this point he draws a tiny sketch of the seal-like ‘old creature’ in a mob-cap, peeping timidly out from behind a door.33 The anxiety of the situation resulted in a brief health scare of his own. He was sent for X-rays, but was able to reassure his mother that there was ‘nothing seriously wrong’: ‘Apparently the pain or discomfort is caused, as I felt, by nervous spasms that contract the oesophagus when I eat & prevent my food getting into the stomach at all. The only sure cure is to stop worrying! So I’m to try to relax before meals, & go on taking belladonna medicine, & hope for the best.’34

  At this point, as the crisis over his mother subsided and the pressure for him to make immediate decisions about his domestic situation diminished, he wrote one of his greatest poems. During their New Year holiday he and Monica had visited Chichester Cathedral, and on 20 February he completed ‘An Arundel Tomb’,35 which, though it takes the form of a detached meditative elegy or ode, is on one level a love poem to the less deceived Monica. It begins simply, gathering rhetorical complexity by degrees. The pre-baroque plainness of the monument ‘Hardly involves the eye’ until it ‘meets’ the clasped hands with a ‘sharp tender shock’. The aspirated ‘h’ alliteration takes the reader’s breath away: ‘His hand withdrawn, holding her hand’.36 The centuries through which the statues have persisted are unobtrusively telescoped into a medley of kaleidoscopic images:

  Snow fell, undated. Light

  Each summer thronged the glass. A bright

  Litter of birdcalls strewed the same

  Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths

  The endless altered people came [. . .]

  The seasons flicker ‘undated’ over the graveyard, as in a speeded-up film: the snow of winter, the light of summer. Time passes in a sensuous blur of synaesthesia: light thronging the glass, a ‘bright / Litter of birdcalls’ strewing the ground. Meanwhile, isolated from this lively bustle, the effigies retain their archaic posture: ‘Rigidly they // Persisted’. There is even a hint of irr
itation in the tone. The poet is no ‘ruin-bibber’ with a sentimental investment in the ‘olden days’.

  Indeed, in order to ensure the most intense rhetorical effect the poet carries his cynicism beyond what is strictly warranted. There seems no reason why he should assume that the couple ‘hardly meant’ the affection implied by the ‘sweet commissioned grace’ of the clasped hands, or that it was less important to them than the ‘Latin names around the base’.37 The gesture is rare in medieval monuments and brasses, and it seems not unreasonable to assume that the couple invested emotional as well as dynastic feelings in the monument which they left for posterity.38 But, though the poet’s cynicism might be felt to make the poem a touch less magnanimous and universal, adding a gratuitous drop of acid to the mix, this scepticism makes the rhetorical coup of the final stanza the more stark and dramatic. The couple lie in stone, and this stone may lie:

  Time has transfigured them into

  Untruth. The stone fidelity

  They hardly meant has come to be

  Their final blazon, and to prove

  Our almost-instinct almost true:

  What will survive of us is love.

  A resounding cymbal-clash descends to a poignant diminuendo. The first line lurches with a reversed foot into an abrupt denial of consolation, ‘Untruth’, with its wrenched accent, coming at the culmination of a three-fold sequence of ‘un-’ words each of which occurs only here in his work: ‘undated’, ‘unarmorial’, ‘Untruth’. But, like Keats’s Grecian urn, the cold pastoral of the monument teases us out of thought. Logic tells us that love cannot defeat death, but the words stumble with a contradictory Hardyesque awkwardness, and the contorted syntax, by making ‘love’ the poem’s final ringing word, strives to assert permanence. The poet knows that the concluding affirmation is mere rhetoric; but its ineffectuality is precisely what makes it so moving.

  Larkin consulted Monica Jones during the drafting of ‘An Arundel Tomb’ more than in the case of any other poem. Its mix of stark pessimism and yearning despair seems to owe much to her histrionic personality. He claimed that he merely ‘played at’ pessimism, while Monica was the genuine pessimist,39 and the flat comment on one page of the workbook draft, ‘Love isn’t stronger than death just because two statues hold hands for six hundred years’, bears the stamp of her acerbic intelligence.40 He also consulted her over fine points of wording, asking her to adjudicate between ‘That what survives of us is love’ and ‘All that survives of us is love’.41 She later told Andrew Motion that it was she who had suggested the felicitous medievalism ‘blazon’, meaning a public, armorial proclamation.42 It is perhaps Monica’s intimate association with the poem which explains his subsequent criticism of it to her. It was published in the May 1956 issue of the London Magazine and its classic status was recognized at once. But he was uneasy. In a letter to Monica in December he accused it of being over-clever:

  I don’t, myself, like it very much: it belongs to that period after publication when one tries to write ideas of poems instead of real poems. In fact I think it’s embarrassingly bad! and I fancy you will too when you see it again. Real poems have more bite to them. Mr Bleaney is more real. ‘Lambs’ is not bad: better than Tomb.43

  It is tempting to suspect a personal subtext here. The scepticism of the poem could be read as simply misogamist. Is he trying to reassure Monica about his fundamental loyalty by condemning this poem’s artifice, and asserting that he prefers the wry shrug of ‘Mr Bleaney’, and the ingenuous sentiment of ‘First Sight’, written immediately after ‘An Arundel Tomb’?

  Larkin spent Easter 1956 with his mother, now quite recovered. The ten-page letter he wrote to Monica from Loughborough on 31 March is crammed with moment-by-moment experiences. He nearly fell downstairs on Sheffield station, knocking a woman with his case. He has mown his mother’s lawn and installed roof-felt on the lean-to over the mower. He is surprised to be enjoying a recently bought record of ‘progressive’ jazz by Dave Brubeck. He has come upon some early letters that Monica wrote to him ‘in 1947 or so’. ‘They made very strange reading. You were still a lady.’ There was also a letter from Colin Gunner, ‘about Winter’, written when he had been ‘mining near Bulawayo’, advising that he give the heroine of his next novel ‘a love affair with an oran outang [. . .] that’ll send up your S. African circulation’. The letter continues the following day, evoking the ‘maelstrom of boredom, irritation, pathos, anger, fear, remorse, nostalgia, & all the rest’ aroused in him by his mother and sister. He has told Eva about Monica’s latest fashion accessory, pop beads, and Eva ‘thinks she’ll buy a lemon twin set for the summer’. He listens to Macbeth on the radio and describes a toad he has disturbed in the garden: ‘not a very good-looking fellow’. The letter concludes with a Larkinesque aphorism: ‘I can’t imagine anyone is really happy unless they’re old enough to have utterly escaped from home, & young enough not to be thinking about death.’44 As often in Larkin’s correspondence, a bitter conclusion contradicts, or is contradicted by, omnivorous involvement with his surroundings.

  Back in Cottingham towards the end of April, he rejoices that he will soon be leaving 200 Hallgate, escaping the ‘elderly nephew’ of the household, who sings Italian opera as he flushes the outside lavatory. He had intended to take a trip across the estuary that afternoon on the New Holland Ferry. But he arrived too late at Victoria Pier and, after a visit to the public lavatory there (‘fantastically clean, like the inside of a ship: I complimented the attendant – probably an old sailor’),45 he ate a lunch of beer and biscuits in the Minerva Hotel. ‘After that I cycled round the dock area a good bit, then eventually got out on the west side of Hull, and tried to find Tranby Croft, to photograph it for you.46 But I got lost, & tried to photograph lambs instead: but as soon as I approached two a sheep lifted its head and said something, & they ran away to her.’47 On his return he fell asleep in his chair while listening to the radio. ‘It’s delightful to doze when the wireless is on, it becomes a sort of hallucination, part of one’s dreams.’ Under the heading ‘Nearly bed time’ he turns to ‘visions of you [. . .] that had better remain untranscribed. Not for the sake of decency so much as because such things always look so silly written down! Or would you like eulogies of your breasts and hips, and the tiny creases your pink shoes make by squeezing your toes together?’ He becomes lascivious: ‘you’ve been cavorting round my mind dressed in pink shoes & pink pop-beads and nothing else [. . .] All much to the detriment of my typing.’ The next day finds him reading Dylan Thomas in America,48 appalled by the Welsh poet’s squandering of his talent, and feeling a ‘hatred of Caitlin – “Is there no man in America worthy of me?” – My God. Had a letter from Kingsley today – repeating that his prof is trying to hold him at the [promotion] bar.’49 Amis was to remain a lecturer at Swansea until 1961.

  Between April and October 1956 Larkin lived at 192a Hallgate, Cottingham, a short distance from his previous lodging. In September he took the opportunity of a conference on librarianship in Liverpool to make a detour to Wellington, where he stayed overnight at the Charlton Arms and saw Ruth. His account of the visit in a letter to his mother is retrospective and mellow. Ruth, he wrote cryptically, was ‘much the same as usual. I haven’t seen anyone else I know, thank God. It’s a curious little town, ugly & graceful all mixed up together. The Library was shut when I arrived, but I could see they have altered it a good deal.’50 But he was more preoccupied with the new accommodation in Hull into which he was shortly to move. He noted that the cooker and gas fire were the same as those he had had in Belfast: ‘the whole thing will be like a superior Belfast – I hope!’51 On 27 October he moved into a high-windowed, top-floor flat at 32 Pearson Park, a Victorian house belonging to the University overlooking a picturesque but at that time somewhat run-down park, between the University and the city.

  As a colleague who lived temporarily in the same building in 1963 recollected, these flats were reserved as transitory lodgings for new University staff while the
y searched for something better. But Larkin was unwilling to make another move and ‘somehow negotiated continued residence there long after he had ceased to be in any sense a new member of staff’.52 As he settled in he grumbled amiably to Monica about the cold and the noise: ‘The fire has been on full since about 5, but sitting by it I can still feel a cold breath from the door [. . .] Funnily enough a Yank mag with Mr Bleaney in it came today. I hope he has receded for a bit.’53 He names the draught ‘Daisy Mae’, as if it were an American hurricane, and gives comic descriptions of his attempts to keep it out with newspaper and draft excluders. He complains also about the noise from the flat below, but concedes that he is as noisy as his neighbours, and hopes they are not getting into a competition to drown each other out.54 In this ‘temporary’ lodging he was to spend some of the happiest and most creative years of his life. He had found his ‘proper ground’. Here he would stay.