Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  ([. . .] I think he was a terrific romantic; & my mother was the equivalent of Emma Lavinia Gifford [Thomas Hardy’s first wife]. Poor father! My heart bleeds for him. What a terrible fate!) I think there’s something quite frightening about all the widows, living effortlessly on, with their NH specs & teeth & wigs, cackling chara-loads of them, while in the dingy cemeteries their shadowy men lie utterly effaced – I want to write a poem on this called To my mother & the memory of my father, but can’t/daren’t.29

  It is characteristic of Larkin’s genius that the poem he actually completed on this theme, two months later, ‘Love Songs in Age’, replaces the bitterness of the letter with empathy and compassion.

  The first ideas for the poem go back to 1953, the final version being reached after much workbook drafting in January 1957.30 In contrast to ‘Mother, Summer, I’ and ‘Reference Back’, the speaker is uncharacterized: a detached, genderless, ageless voice. This ensures that the widow’s consciousness dominates the poem. The opening is casual and demotic: ‘She kept her songs, they took so little space, / The covers pleased her [. . .]’ The songs have waited, disregarded, while her life passed by: one bleached by the sun, one marked by a vase, another mended in ‘a tidy fit’ when she was young, then ‘coloured, by her daughter’ when she was old. An anticipatory metrical anacrusis imitates the woman’s sudden intake of breath as she is overwhelmed by a rush of recollection:

  and stood

  Relearning how each frank submissive chord [. . .]

  The songs once again perform their function, and ‘the unfailing sense of being young’ spreads out ‘like a spring-woken tree’, singing of freshness and ‘That certainty of time laid up in store’. But her store of time has been spent. The promise of the songs to ‘solve, and satisfy, / And set unchangeably in order’ has been tested and, inevitably, has failed, if only because her husband is now dead. Further anacruses across the ends of the lines imitate the aftershocks which follow her initial discovery:

  ushered in

  Word after sprawling hyphenated word [. . .]

  Each syncopated enjambment opens out another long perspective:

  But, even more,

  The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love [. . .]

  The shock slowly subsides and the final anacrusis is merely a quiet monosyllabic sigh:

  So

  To pile them back, to cry

  Was hard, without lamely admitting how

  It had not done so then, and could not now.

  This is a masterpiece in the new poetic manner which was to dominate The Whitsun Weddings. The poet’s own personality is excluded, the eloquent phrases build to a generous emotional climax, and the rhetorical form is bold and uniquely memorable.

  The greatest masterpiece of his new style is the fourth of his great Odes, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, which he began later in 1957 and completed on 18 October 1958 after sustained drafting from March onwards. The idea had come to him during the summer bank holiday in 1955 (1 August), when he had travelled to his mother’s house in Loughborough, changing from the London train at Grantham. He wrote to Monica on 3 August 1955: ‘I went home on Saturday afternoon, 1.30 to Grantham – a lovely run, the scorched land misty with heat, like a kind of bloom of heat – and at every station, Goole, Doncaster, Retford, Newark, importunate wedding parties, gawky & vociferous, seeing off couples to London.’31 He alters the time of the poem to hint at the Christian festival of Pentecost, celebrating the descent of the Holy Ghost on the disciples. Secular though it is, the poem concerns a sacrament. Larkin described the experience in an interview in 1981, adding the final stage into London to his original journey. He was struck, he said, by the ‘sense of gathering emotional momentum. Every time you stopped fresh emotion climbed aboard. And finally between Peterborough and London when you hurtle on, you felt the whole thing was being aimed like a bullet – at the heart of things, you know. All this fresh, open life. Incredible experience. I’ve never forgotten it.’32 He was fond of claiming that ‘Happiness writes white.’33 In this case happiness wrote in full colour. ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ introduces a sequence of poems in which Larkin adopts the voice of a celebrant of social rituals, an affectionate observer of contemporary life, rather than an alienated, less deceived artist. As he passionately insisted: ‘I don’t want to transcend the commonplace, I love the commonplace, I lead a very commonplace life. Everyday things are lovely to me.’34 For many readers these poems constitute his greatest achievement.

  Unlike ‘Maiden Name’ and ‘Long roots moor summer to our side of earth’, this wedding poem offers no personal challenge to the speaker, who remains an observer. As in ‘Church Going’ and ‘An Arundel Tomb’ the poet settles gradually into his narrative. He catches the exact ‘feel’ of settling down, exempt from obligation, in the secure travelling room of a train compartment: ‘All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense / Of being in a hurry gone’. The feeling of enclosure, the heat of the seats and the smell of ‘buttoned carriage-cloth’ will be unknown to the younger reader of today. But the feeling of release and escape at the beginning of the journey remains the same, as does the blurred rising and sinking of the passing embankments and hedges, precisely imitated in the poem by enjambment:

  A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped

  And rose [. . .]

  The weddings are described in terms of recognizable stereotypes, affectionately rendered. In instructions for a reading on radio, Larkin commented, ‘It is of course humorous, here and there, but any supercilious note should be rigorously excluded.’35 The girls become metonymic ‘heels and veils’, ‘unreally’ separated from the other celebrants by their ‘lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres’. The children frown, the fathers have ‘never known // Success so huge and wholly farcical’; the women share the secret ‘like a happy funeral’. The girls, anticipating the ‘religious wounding’ of consummation, stand ‘posed irresolutely’, watching the train depart:

  As if out on the end of an event

  Waving goodbye

  To something that survived it.

  Abstract noun phrases (‘the end of an event’, ‘something that survived it’), transform the prose of the social stereotypes into something more evanescent and elusive: a ‘frail / Travelling coincidence’:

  – An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,

  And someone running up to bowl –

  Everyone who has travelled on a train in England in summer has seen this bowler, snatched from sight before his run-up is complete. But only the poet understands that such glimpses distil the livelong minute of life. The couples are too involved in the event itself:

  – and none

  Thought of the others they would never meet

  Or how their lives would all contain this hour.

  As in Hardy’s ‘The Self Unseeing’, they are ‘looking away’.36

  The poem becomes an Ode to Incipience. What the poet or the wedding couples do when they reach their destination, what their different fates will be, are irrelevant questions. The poem is concerned only with the moment, the shared ‘hour’, in and for itself. In a bold metaphor, London yields a fertile human harvest: ‘spread out in the sun, / Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat’.37 The poet drowses as the train approaches the capital and in a complex image combining kinetic sensation with inner emotion he hears the rushing sound of the brakes as the falling of an arrow shower. There is a specific recollection of the memorable scene in Laurence Olivier’s film of Shakespeare’s Henry V.38 However, this projectile is fruitful rather than threatening. He vaguely apprehends that the arrows sent ‘out of sight’ are ‘somewhere becoming rain’. There is an unmistakable sexual implication in the imagery here: ‘there swelled / A sense of falling’. The journey is consummated and the city is fertilized as the train decelerates in a kind of detumescence.

  In an influential essay ‘Philip Larkin: The Metonymic Muse’, David Lodge placed this poem at the centre of his argument that Larkin is fundamentally un
metaphorical, with limited transcendences. The details of the weddings, he wrote, ‘are observed with the eye of a novelist or documentary writer and allowed to stand, untransformed by metaphor’.39 Metonym is, for Lodge, descriptive and half-hearted in contrast with the explicit rhetorical trope of metaphor or simile. Only at the end of the poem, Lodge asserts, does Larkin surprise us with a simile proper (‘like squares of wheat’), ‘with its mythical, magical and archaic resonances [. . .] so different from anything else in the poem’.40 But metaphors are not, as Lodge imagines, cherries studding the plain cake of the literal. Metaphor is the poetic element itself. Lodge fails to mention that a journey is the most ancient metaphor for life itself. T. S. Eliot comments: ‘you can hardly say where the metaphorical and the literal meet’.41 Many of Larkin’s poems, Lodge claims, ‘have no metaphors at all’.42 He cites ‘Afternoons’, ‘Myxomatosis’, ‘Poetry of Departures’, ‘Days’ and ‘As Bad as a Mile’. Does he imagine that Larkin ‘literally’ discussed mortality with rabbits, believed days to be geographically located or worried about his aim with an apple core? Moreover, metonym, in which figurative implications arise organically from the ‘literal’, is the most profound of metaphorical tropes: ‘That vase’, ‘The apple unbitten in the palm’, ‘someone running up to bowl’. Larkin is a great master of metaphor.

  It is a sign of the constant volatility of Larkin’s mood that Motion finds it possible to summarize this period in the poet’s life, when he was writing his most exhilarating poetry, as ‘a low-key, low-spirited time – burrowing into his flat, digging into his job, feeling alternately bothered and lonely, actively frustrated, dozily feeble. More often than before, he turned to Judy Egerton for the comfort of complaining.’43

  After ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, Larkin felt the need to administer an antidote. In a characteristic dialectical reversal, ‘Self’s the Man’, dated in the workbook 5 November 1958, three weeks later than ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, reverts to his ‘vernacular’, misogamist register. Here the poet once again characterizes himself as a less deceived bachelor. He may, he readily concedes, be more ‘selfish’ than his colleague Arnold, a kind of married version of Mr Bleaney. But, after all, he contends, Arnold was ‘out for his own ends’ just as much as he. He ‘married a woman to stop her getting away’ and his reward (in a vicious rhyme) is that ‘Now she’s there all day’. On this, now familiar, poetic ground, Larkin has great fun in elaborating a caricature of henpecked working-class domesticity, reminiscent of the radio monologues of the Northern comedian Al Read, a favourite of Philip and Monica: ‘With the nippers to wheel round the houses / And the hall to paint in his old trousers / And that letter to her mother / Saying Won’t you come for the summer.’ The original name in the typescript was ‘Arthur’, and Larkin admitted that a model for Arnold was the Deputy Librarian, Arthur Wood, ‘horrible cadging little varmint’.44 He concludes the poem by admitting that he and Arnold are the same; the only difference is that the poet knows better ‘what I can stand / Without them sending a van –’. Then with a familiar turn of self-doubt he adds: ‘Or I suppose I can.’ Perhaps, after all, it is he who has made the mistake, not Arnold. The poem is characteristically confident and at the same time radically self-doubting.

  Larkin had by now achieved a significant public reputation. Late in 1957 he accepted an invitation from the PEN Committee to co-edit with Bonamy Dobree and Louis MacNeice the seventh annual anthology of PEN New Poems, a task which occupied him during 1958. In February 1958 he read a selection of his poems on the Third Programme. Then a few months later Anthony Thwaite invited him on behalf of the BBC to contribute to a programme for the European Service entitled Younger British Poets of Today.45 He read ‘Skin’, ‘An Arundel Tomb’ and ‘Church Going’. He met Thwaite for the first time on 2 July 1958 and they immediately became friends. Thwaite remembers Larkin testing out the parameters of their relationship on their first meeting. In a taxi between the BBC and a pub where they were to join Kingsley Amis, Philip took the opportunity to open the mail he had brought with him from Hull. One large envelope yielded a ‘girlie magazine’. ‘This is the sort of thing that Bob [Conquest] sends me,’ he remarked with an interrogative hint. Thwaite gave a decidedly neutral response, and the relationship developed along more literary lines.46

  Thwaite had left Oxford in 1955 and taught in Japan for two years before joining the BBC as a trainee radio producer. His first volume, Home Truths, had been published by the Marvell Press a year earlier, in 1957, and his early poetry, with its ‘Movement’ imagery and quiet gravity, appealed to Larkin. Thwaite’s Bleaneyesque poem ‘Mr Cooper’ became a reference point in their correspondence. The fact that Thwaite is a sincere, reticent Anglican, with political views very much to the left, never hindered the relationship; indeed it seems to have cemented it. Larkin’s letters to the younger poet often give a more complex version of his feelings, particularly about poetry itself, than those to more intimate correspondents who expected him to share their prejudices. Thwaite went on to be Literary Editor of the Listener (1962–5) and of the left-wing New Statesman (1968–72) where he published many of Larkin’s reviews and mature poems, including ‘The Trees’, ‘Sad Steps’, ‘Vers de Société’ and ‘The Building’. Larkin later named Thwaite, together with the much younger Andrew Motion, as one of his literary executors.

  In September 1958, in a bolt from the blue, it seemed that Larkin’s secure position as Hull’s Librarian might be about to end, and his life be ruined. Jean Hartley tells the story:

  in 1958 he received a letter on headed notepaper, putatively from the Vice Squad, saying that his name and address had been found on the mailing list of a pornographic publisher and that legal proceedings would be taken against the subscribers. Philip appeared on our doorstep trembling, white-faced and panic-stricken. He was certain that his mug-shot and crude headlines would be blazoned over the News of the World and the Hull Daily Mail and that he would lose his job, along with the respect of his colleagues. He might even be sent to prison. What should he do? Burn the contents of the cupboard? Tea and sympathy were offered and a waiting game advised.47

  He visited his solicitor, Terry Wheldon, to explore his legal position. The danger evaporated, however, when Robert Conquest revealed that the letter was a practical joke. Astonishingly, once the alarm was over, Larkin ruefully appreciated the prank, and remained on cordial terms with Conquest.48 He wrote to him on 9 September 1958, with a mixture of discomposure and relief, accusing his friend of inflicting ‘a frightful scar on my sensibility’. In future ‘nude pics will act as a detumescent [. . .] not that I shall ever have the courage to buy any. You’ve probably turned me homo, come to think of it. Perhaps you’ll be the first to suffer the fearful consequences of this. What?’49 He had no desire to put an end to his correspondence with so interesting and original a friend. A year later, in a letter to Monica, he described a visit to Conquest’s chaotic flat in London. He had risen early on the Sunday and done ‘all the accumulated washing up – I get great satisfaction from washing up, given hot water & Daz’. Conquest, he told her, ‘prepared fairly eatable brecas, just what I have myself. “Will you have fruit juice and bacon? I should perhaps warn you there’s — all else.” He had his usual litter around him – Astounding Science Fiction, The Polish Revolt, London Magazine, Frolics at St Freda’s. He is an odd chap. A real character [. . .]’50

  George Hartley had decided to make audio recordings of key Marvell Press poets, and on 24 October 1958 Larkin and he travelled to the HMV studios in London.51 By this time there was a constant tension between the two men over one thing or another. The record sleeve of The Less Deceived, for instance, featured carefully posed photographs of the poet in Spring Bank Cemetery. Larkin wrote to Judy Egerton: ‘I had a row (too mild) with the Thing from Outer Hessle, who gave himself credit for the sleeve photos focussed & set with my camera loaded with my film on my tripod by me; he just pressed the cable release.’52 When the record finally appeared in January 1959 he wrote tha
t it was ‘quite distractingly upset by bumps & various other poltergeistic activities in the background, nor do I think much of my readings. One or two are not too bad – unimportant ones for the most part – but I don’t make much of the party pieces & a lot of the time it all goes dull and rather insignificant.’53 For all his reservations his beautifully modulated, unforced readings have an authority beyond any which have followed them.

  After the acerbic ‘Self’s the Man’, Larkin returned, in ‘Home is so Sad’, to his new impersonal but generous lyric voice. Dated in the workbook to the last day of 1958, it focuses on a tragic archetypal living room seen through the eyes of an uncharacterized speaker. The original inspiration of the poem was intensely personal; indeed this is an anniversary poem. Like the living room of his parental home in Warwick following his father’s death a decade earlier in 1948, the room stays ‘as it was left, / Shaped to the comfort of the last to go’. But the life for which it was decorated and furnished has ended. Like ‘Love Songs in Age’, this is a retrospective, ironic epithalamium. The room, unobtrusively personified, is ‘bereft / Of anyone to please’, and the relics of the hopeful start of family life (‘A joyous shot at how things ought to be’) have become symbols of inevitable failure. In an arresting apostrophe the poet suddenly speaks as if he and the reader are standing together in the room: ‘Look at the pictures and the cutlery. / The music in the piano stool. That vase.’ ‘That vase’ is a completely unspecific signifier. It may be one of the loving couple’s early purchases, or a prized or despised wedding present, or a casual insignificant holiday souvenir. Whichever of these it is, it has become over the years a familiar metonym of ‘home’. Few readers will fail to recognize the equivalent of this vase in their own lives. With his instinct for contrast, Larkin followed this intimately emotional poem with the coolly impersonal meditation ‘Far Out’ (dated in the workbook 1 February 1959), contemplating the galaxies of deep space with their ‘evasive dust’ of stars, unmythologized and offering neither guidance nor delight to humankind. It remained unpublished until Collected Poems (1988).