Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  In addition to running the Library day to day and overseeing the building programme, Larkin also had the Library Committee minutes to write, the Bookshop Committee to attend, and a yearly speech of introduction to the new first-year students to give, a task he found particularly stressful. It is not surprising that when in 1959 he was included for the first time in Who’s Who, he gave his occupation as ‘librarian’, on the principle that ‘a man is what he is paid for’.54 But his life in the Library also had its lighter moments. He encouraged a decorous playfulness among his staff. In July 1959, just as the summer holidays began, in a benign echo of Conquest’s practical joke of the previous year, Mary Wrench, Betty Mackereth and Maeve Brennan delivered mock letters of resignation, all in the same envelope, citing the impossible strains of the job. A few days later Mary, left solitary in the Library, wrote to Betty, telling her: ‘we’ve had a brilliant creative reply from Sir’, from the Kirkwall Hotel, Orkney, where he was on holiday with Monica. Mary copied out his letter:

  25 July 1959

  My dear Mary, Betty, Maeve,

  It was delightful to get your letters yesterday [. . .] Your resignations are, individually and collectively, refused. I am sorry you find your working conditions intolerable, but that is implicit in the very phrase working conditions. How many times must I tell you that you don’t come to work to be happy? [. . .] In any case, I am compelled to point out that you are by now hopelessly unfitted for work anywhere else. Does Betty think she could still take down a letter delivered at normal speed? Or Mary endure a post where G.M.T.55 was still accepted? Or Maeve undertake duties that weren’t one long languorous dalliance with romantic Scotchmen?56

  It is no wonder his staff remember working in the Library with such pleasure. In the current jargon he was a natural and instinctive ‘human resource manager’.

  The Library staff had to take their holidays early so as to be on duty for the final move into the new building in August 1959. Larkin had a number of stout wooden boxes with handles specially made in the University workshop, three feet long, into each of which a shelf-full of books could be packed for the short drives to and fro across the campus in two vans hired from Hammonds, the Hull department store. Larkin was stationed at the receiving end, and carefully assigned each batch to the correct pink or blue colour-coded stacks. After the move they enjoyed a party, the only time Betty remembers seeing Philip really drunk. The Vice-Chancellor, Sir Brynmor Jones, gave them a day off and Betty, Maeve, Mary and Wendy Mann took the opportunity for a long weekend in the impressive hotel on the cliff-top at Ravenscar, which had an open-air swimming pool. Betty remembers ‘there was a lot of giggling’.57

  In the midst of all this activity, Larkin completed ‘Afternoons’, dated in the workbook ‘14.9.1959’. The albums ‘lettered / Our Wedding’ lie near the television as the mothers watch their children playing on the recreation ground. ‘Something is pushing them / To the side of their own lives.’ By September the Library move was finally over, and Larkin experienced a certain awe at the up-to-date facilities over which he now presided. He told Monica on 7 October: ‘This building is like a tiger I have got on & can’t get off.’58 This might have seemed the ideal time for him to have followed the example of his friends Amis, Conquest and Wain, and taken one of the proffered opportunities to make a short or long-term visit to America. Amis and Conquest both sang the praises of the USA and urged him to go. But perhaps Monica’s earlier refusal of her chance made this difficult for him. Would she expect to accompany him? Perhaps he was too comfortable where he was. However this may be, it seems that, by this stage in his life, he was firmly decided against the USA. In April, he had turned down an offer from the University of Cincinnati to be ‘their Something lecturer for six weeks in 1960 for 200 gns A WEEK and expenses. Sounded pure hell to me. Betjeman was it in 1957. Can’t help feeling flattered, but am refusing, of course.’59

  In late 1959, as the Library upheaval subsided, his relationship with Monica hit a crisis which changed its character for ever and put the seal on its permanence. His feelings for her were still in a lacklustre phase. On 11 August he expressed himself baffled by his contradictory emotions: ‘As usual when you aren’t here I should like to scramble to bed with you!!! How to reconcile this with my apathetic exhaustion in your presence is more than I can fathom.’60 But now his feelings were intensely engaged. Her mother and father both fell seriously ill. He scarcely knew them, and was at an emotional loss. He wrote to Monica on 7 October: ‘I don’t like to think of you all alone with two such ill people, & parents at that, on your hands.’61 Then, on 11 October, Monica sent him a dramatic telegram announcing her mother’s death. He responded as best he could: ‘Dearest, I was very upset to get your telegram & did feel for you strongly.’ He expressed regret that he had met her mother only twice, and, in clumsy consolation, deferred to Monica’s Tory views, welcoming reports of the election results: ‘To die with Conservative gains coming in is not the worst of ways!’62 He was clearly afraid of involvement. There is a distinct awkwardness in the wording of his letter of 13 October: ‘I thought of you yesterday, and deeply hoped you were not being simultaneously ravaged & numbed by it all.’63

  Then in December Monica’s father also died, and she sank into depression. In a fascinating psychological twist, the crisis sent Larkin back to the draft of a poem he had begun in 1957, ‘Letter to a Friend about Girls’, which contrasts his attitudes towards Kingsley and Monica in terms of comic caricature. Larkin’s correspondence with his friend still preserved, in a time warp, the masculine lewdness of their early relationship. During the Amises’ visit to Princeton in 1958–9 Kingsley boasted in his letters about his sexual exploits, and on his return to England he and Conquest shared a life of promiscuity. Larkin wrote to Monica in August 1959 after a weekend visit to London to see them both: ‘Everyone is having affairs with all the old people & lots of new ones.’64 In ‘Letter to a Friend’ Larkin defers to Amis’s self-image as a glamorous sexual success. The poet’s friend enjoys erotic ‘skirmishes / In train, tutorial and telephone booth’ in a Platonically perfect world where ‘beauty is accepted slang for yes’. The poet, however, finds himself in a separate ‘league’. He has, somehow, always met ‘a different gauge of girl from yours’. It is, he asserts in mock-heroic resignation, one of those things which, in Hamlet’s words, lie beyond philosophy.

  The caricatures, however, are deployed within a complex dialectic. From a feeble defence of his own wimpishness the poet slips into a sour but empathetic defence of the lives of the girls of his own ‘gauge’. The ‘My Darlings’ or Margaret Peels with whom he is fated to spend his life do not inhabit a Platonic world of beauty and sex. Instead they ‘work, and age’. Against a male caricature of rampant licentiousness the poem pits a female caricature of prissy homeliness. The women in the poet’s league are confined within social proprieties. They ‘put off men / By being unattractive, or too shy’. Some of them go ‘quite rigid with disgust / At anything but marriage’. The poet concedes that the lives of such women may not amount to much, compared with that of his friend. But he humbly asks his friend at least to ‘notice’ them. The humour of the poem is uncomfortable, and Larkin made no attempt to publish it. His recourse to comic stereotype at precisely the moment of Monica’s deepest grief no doubt shows his determination to distance himself from her. But, on a more profound level, the poem is a gloomy acknowledgement of their bond. They share the same gauge.

  Andrew Motion interprets Philip’s attitude towards Monica at this point as unfeeling and strategic: ‘He was too self-absorbed to respond to her grief, and his obsession with his independence made him emotionally stingy. His defence of his actions could not disguise their cruelty.’65 This seems wrong. Larkin failed to rally to Monica’s side because he was in danger of being overwhelmed by her grief. Loyalty was his strongest instinct, and his inability to console Monica at this time distressed him deeply. Betty Mackereth recalls him saying to her with feeling, following the death of Monic
a’s father, ‘I am the only one in her life.’66 In March 1960 he told his mother that Monica was ‘very depressed & low. I sometimes wonder if she will ever get over all this: her work seems to weigh her down so much & she feels so alone in the world.’67 Later, when Jean Hartley queried Philip’s assertion that he really ought to marry Monica, he responded lugubriously: ‘well at least she’s an orphan’.68

  Protective sympathy, and also perhaps sexual feelings aroused by Maeve Brennan, produced a marked change of tone in his letters to Monica during 1960. Complaints about holiday disasters and analyses of their sexual incompatibility give way to warm solicitousness, erotic tenderness and sentimental rabbit language. Motion writes: ‘By turning to Maeve when he did, Larkin ensured that Monica could not become too dependent on him.’69 The opposite seems to be the case. The fresh delight in life which he derived from Maeve gave him the emotional strength to offer continuing support to Monica. Without it he would have been dragged under by Monica’s despair. Her bereavement had set the final seal on her dependence on him. After this trauma, for better or for worse, he would never be able to abandon her.

  14

  Here

  1960–1

  The University was expanding rapidly. By 1960 student numbers had risen to 1,660 and Larkin’s Library staff had virtually doubled to twenty. With the new building and reorganization to his credit, it seemed logical to make another career move. He applied for the post of Librarian at Reading. On 7 March he visited the Egertons in London on his way to the interview. Something of his apprehension is perhaps audible in the poem he wrote that night. Before going up to bed the Egertons’ ten-year-old daughter Bridget sketched a figure holding a lamp under the extravagant heading ‘Good night World’. Larkin’s accompanying words are rich in self-indulgent escapism: ‘Goodnight World / Your toils I flee / Send no importunate / Messengers after me.’1 On 9 March he fled his appointment with destiny. He was given a tour round the Library and looked round the town. But, instead of attending the interview, he caught the train back to Hull. On his return he wrote to Monica, saying that after a rest he felt ‘more cheerful – I’m not going to Reading: didn’t care for the looks of it: withdrew my application what. Just withdrew what [. . .] I have lots of good reasons for this, but I was certainly in a funk too, and I shouldn’t wonder if it was just that.’2 The idea of moving away from Hull put him in turmoil, but he was evasive about the reason. A relocation would have interrupted his involvement in the further development of Hull’s Library. A ‘Stage 2’ building programme was provisionally approved only a week later with a target date of 1966–8 and a costing of £600,000.3 However, a more private ‘good reason’ for staying must have been his growing attraction to the ‘latest face’ of Maeve Brennan. Indeed, it seems likely that the application to Reading was an attempt to escape this new threat to his relationship with Monica.

  Despite, or because of, the complications of his personal and professional life, Larkin’s poetry continued to broaden in scope and deepen in emotion. ‘Faith Healing’, completed on 10 May 1960, offers a variation on the theme of our ‘almost-instinct’. The immediate impetus for the poem was the ‘dramatized documentary’ The Savage Eye, which won a BAFTA award in 1960, and featured a prayer meeting filmed in Los Angeles. As in the poem an evangelist with a ‘deep American voice’, silver hair, dark suit and white collar asks a stream of elderly women, many of them in a highly emotional state, ‘What’s the matter?’ or ‘What’s the trouble?’, before directing God to cure an eye or a knee.4 At the end of his poem Larkin modulates from the brutal realism of ‘Moustached women in flowered frocks’ to an almost embarrassing empathy with their longing for a life lived ‘according to love’:

  To some it means the difference they could make

  By loving others, but across most it sweeps

  As all they might have done had they been loved.

  That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache,

  As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps,

  Spreads slowly through them.

  The less deceived sentiment echoes that in Gray’s ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College’:

  all are Men,

  Condemned alike to groan;

  The tender for another’s pain,

  Th’ unfeeling for his own.5

  An appeal to common humanity transcends cynicism.

  A week later on 17 May Larkin completed ‘MCMXIV’,6 one of the impersonal set-piece meditations characteristic of his middle period. He had recently read Leon Wolff’s In Flanders Fields: The 1917 Campaign (1959) and been ‘stunned at the awfulness of it all’.7 The opening image of the poem, a line of young men queuing up to enlist ‘as if it were all / An August Bank Holiday lark’, recalls a sepia photograph or a jerky scrap of film from the sunny summer of 1914. The form of the date is that on the Cenotaph and monuments ‘For the Fallen’ on village greens and in town squares. But the poet has no ideological investment in a sentimentalized Georgian past. This England, with its ‘differently-dressed’ servants, living in ‘tiny rooms in huge houses’, where children were named after royalty and men queued like sheep to die for their country, is no nostalgic idyll. The details imply no ideology, being purely contingent: tin advertisements for ‘cocoa and twist’, bleached sunblinds over shopfronts, place-names ‘all hazed over / With flowering grasses’, and ‘The dust behind limousines’. He is concerned with the tragedy of the war, not with sociology or politics. The conclusion develops into an ironic retrospective epithalamium. The men leave the gardens tidy, and their new marriages last ‘a little while longer’, but without substance, since the husbands are already as good as dead. Only an attitude remains, in the form of monuments with quaint Latin inscriptions. The insistent repetition of ‘never’ hints that this collective memory of innocence is only almost true, while the omission of the expected main verb (‘As changed itself’ rather than ‘Has changed itself’) makes the entire poem into a single complex noun phrase.8 The poem does not record a real historical ‘change’. It embodies a collective myth.

  On 20 June 1960 the Queen Mother officially opened ‘Stage 1’ of the Library redevelopment. Both Eva and Monica came to Hull to celebrate this milestone in Philip’s career. The ceremony saw Larkin at the apex of his public role, and he was proud of his achievement. The Vice-Chancellor introduced him to the royal visitor with the words, ‘This is Mr Larkin our poet-librarian’, and the Queen Mother replied, ‘Oh, what a lovely thing to be.’9 For some time afterwards he delighted in imitating Brynmor Jones’s Welsh lilt and the Queen Mother’s high-voiced reply. Four decades later Maeve Brennan remembered the occasion vividly: ‘I wore an elegant chocolate and coffee-coloured dress of satinised cotton with cream hat and gloves.’10 Maeve had already met Eva, who visited her son in Hull every year. The two women found they had much in common and liked each other. At the ceremony Eva introduced Maeve to Monica. Maeve recalled later that she was ‘mildly interested to meet my boss’s girl-friend!’ She was not to speak to Monica for another twenty-five years.11 In July Larkin spent a week in Minehead with his mother, before going on holiday with Monica to the island of Sark. This ‘village surrounded by sea’, as he called it, was to become one of their favourite holiday retreats.12 His letters to Monica at this time, addressed to ‘Dear bun’ or ‘Dearest bunny’, show increasing affection. On 4 August he wrote: ‘I miss the drink and the laziness of our holiday, & your company & readiness to trade chuckles and gull cries.’13

  ‘Talking in Bed’ was completed on 10 August 1960, the day after his thirty-eighth birthday and exactly ten years since he and Monica had first slept together.14 Apart from the uncomfortable seduction by Patsy Strang in 1952–3 Larkin remained faithful to Monica, in strictly sexual terms at least, for a quarter of a century, from 1950 until 1975. This is Larkin’s most intensely felt love poem, describing a committed relationship, for better or for worse. Its impact is muted and bleak but it is charged with restive verbal expressionism. It opens with a ‘bad’ pun:
‘Lying together’ carries a sexual and also a moral meaning. Like the earl and countess, the lovers form an ‘emblem of two people being honest’, which ‘goes back so far’: as far indeed as Adam and Eve, who lay together following the Fall and then lied to God about it. The first few lines maintain detachment, but there is a strain between the intimate subject and the dispassionate tone. Then in line eight a gesture of extravagant despair breaks the poem’s composure: ‘None of this cares for us.’ The hissing monosyllable ‘this’ with its high short vowel seems arrogant; the lower vowel of ‘us’, unprotected by an opening consonant, is defenceless against it. A verbal perversity unique to this poem intensifies the emotional excess. The double negative phrase ‘incomplete unrest’ conveys a meaning more logically represented by ‘complete unrest’, but the grammatically correct ‘complete’ would imply restfulness. This wedding-wind is agitated and anxious. The final sentence presents the reader with a series of verbal tripwires. The phrase ‘this unique distance from isolation’ actually means unique closeness to isolation, but the poet disregards correct grammar in order to make sure that all three words in the phrase express alienation (‘distance, ‘from’, ‘isolation’). His meaning would be expressed correctly by ‘distance and isolation’; but this would be limp in comparison. The concluding Hardyesque double negative, ‘not untrue and not unkind’, should logically resolve itself into ‘true and kind’. Instead it conveys something more subtly intimate and tragic. The poem’s tricksy verbal contortions do not detract from its gravity. Rather their far-fetched strangeness serves to give the poem an emotional power quite out of proportion to its length: twelve tetrameter lines.