Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  Three days after this (13 August 1960) Larkin returned to complete a poem, ‘Pets’, first drafted in 1954, retitling it ‘Take One Home for the Kiddies’. It is a terse reflection on children’s passion for the novelty of ‘living toys’: ‘fetch the shovel – / Mam, we’re playing funerals now.’ Seven days later he completed ‘A Study of Reading Habits’, on the surface a similar class-biased satire, this time on the facile conventions of popular literature. Beguiled by adventure stories in his youth, the speaker imagined himself a hero dealing out ‘the old right hook / To dirty dogs twice my size’. Later, he graduated to gothic fantasies of vampirism. With his ‘cloak and fangs’ he broke women up, in a malicious rhyme, ‘like meringues’. In the final stanza disillusion has set in: ‘Don’t read much now [. . .]’ He has seen through the clichés, now those of the Western: ‘the dude / Who lets the girl down’, ‘the chap / Who’s yellow and keeps the store’. On the simplest level this is a didactic warning against subliterary escapism. But there is an oblique subtext of self-mockery. The poet is not so different as one might at first think from the poem’s speaker. His responsible professional role has required him to outgrow his own literary dreams. Six years earlier the poet-librarian had feared his employer’s reaction to ‘Toads’. Now, his status safely established, he ensures that one of his most quotable lines will be: ‘Books are a load of crap.’

  Larkin had encouraged his staff to take the Library Association examination, offering to coach them in lunch-time tutorials. Half a dozen signed up, including Maeve Brennan. But, by the autumn of 1960, as Maeve recollected, ‘all my colleagues had dropped out for one reason or another – they got married, or moved away, or became pregnant – and only I stayed the course’.15 By the time she took the examination in December their relationship had intensified. On one level Maeve seemed to Larkin a genius loci of Hull: an ordinary, conventional Catholic girl with a sound but limited education and a charming innocence. She was the daughter of a dentist and at the age of thirty still lived with her parents. In her memoir she depicts herself as one of the crowd, attracted like the other library assistants by Philip’s shyness and vulnerability: ‘his stammer was [. . .] still pronounced and his diffidence of manner never completely left him. In fact his reserve was the key to his popularity with women – of all ages and status – making them feel protective towards him.’16 But he also impressed them with his cosmopolitanism and sophistication. He would cook in his flat, serving ‘fare we did not have at home, such as haggis and smoked kedgeree. He introduced me to avocado pears and asparagus which were then only just beginning to appear in the more upmarket shops in Hull.’ He also had about him the glamour of a published novelist and poet. Culturally and intellectually the relationship between Philip and Maeve was an unequal one. She remarked in retrospect: ‘how this unlikely friendship came about never ceases to surprise me’.17 Her conclusion was that it was based on spiritual affinity. In 1960 she had ‘a steady boy-friend’, also called Philip; ‘we were both Catholics and our outlook on life was therefore similar. But ironically, as I was soon to discover, Philip Larkin and I were on a much closer spiritual level than Philip C. and I had ever been.’18

  The Hartleys were surprised by the freshness of Philip’s affection. He was, Jean says, intensely ‘in love’: ‘Maeve began to be mentioned and, quite soon, brought round to our house and introduced. This was not done in Philip’s usual neutral manner when referring to his women friends. Whenever he spoke of Maeve or looked at her, it was with a sense of having won first prize.’19 More intimately, Maeve later confided to Jean that Philip had told her that she kept him in ‘a state of continuous excitation’.20 Margaret Fowler, who was Maeve’s assistant in the Periodicals and Binding Department of the Library, remembers that he started to ‘wander in’ to their small work room during the day, ‘and, oblivious of my presence, was like a teenager in love for the first time; “besotted” was my word for it’.21

  Two years earlier he had written to Monica that he was ‘not a highly-sexed person, or, if I am, it’s not in a way that demands constant physical intercourse with other people’.22 Maeve’s Catholic propriety generated more erotic intensity than his physically fulfilled relationships. He became more sexually alert. In a letter to Judy Egerton of September 1960 he described visiting the cinema to see The Nudist Story, ‘the sort of thing I do when alone. It confirmed my impression that bad films aren’t so bad when the characters haven’t any clothes on.’23 Late in 1960 he mounted an exhibition in the Library to celebrate the success of the court case which opened the way to the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by Penguin. The exhibits included his own signed copy.24 Richard Bradford takes a different view of the relationship with Maeve, conjecturing that it resulted from ‘mental imbalance’, induced by envy of the ‘recklessly licentious’ Kingsley Amis. Bradford refers to Maeve’s ‘combative, well-defined features’ that we ‘readily associate with maleness’, and argues that Larkin saw in her ‘anxiety, insularity, shyness’ his ‘depressing mirror image’.25

  It is difficult not to conclude that this new stimulus made him more sympathetic towards Monica’s neediness. On 4 October 1960 he recalled her recent visit to Hull: ‘I am thinking of you and wondering if you are in bed & rested. I do hope so. It was nice your bolting here: I hope you found it cheered you up. You are such a nice rabbit – really thoroughly nice. Much love’.26 On 27 November he wrote:

  I did love being with you last weekend. I treasure the memory of your lovely looks, really as I say lovelier than ever. Beautiful handsome girl! You’re really horribly attractive, especially your legs, as you know. It must be all this milk you’re drinking, don’t you think? I wish you had put on the silk dress, but as you said it would probably have come to grief.27

  But Monica remained sunk in mourning depression. He wrote to his mother: ‘she is so low and unhappy and lonely [. . .] she really does seem so near giving up, or perhaps paralysis wd be a better word’.28

  To celebrate the completion of Maeve’s examinations in December 1960 Philip took her to dinner at the White House, the best restaurant in Hull. Afterwards she felt too inebriated to go directly home and they went first to his flat for coffee. She promised him that if she passed the examination she would take him out to dinner in return. But, despite his growing feelings for Maeve, Philip still felt bound in loyalty to Monica: ‘I have built her in my own image and made her dependent on me, and now I can’t abandon her.’29 On New Year’s Day he wrote to Monica with a mixture of sympathy and briskness: ‘I’m terribly sorry you feel so miserable these days, though not surprised – it is a most trying position to be in, and I should hate it and feel utterly down and out, hopeless and scared to death, just as you do.’30 A few days later, on 10 January 1961, he wrote to her again, more affectionately, following a visit they had made together to Lincoln:

  I saw your white furred face turn to go back in the station, as if you were quick to get on with the next thing. In fact I then saw the best view of the cathedral I had had all day: straight up the High Street, floating as if in mid-air, its four red lights on. This is the view Paul Morel and his mother must have had, emerging from the station after coming from Nottingham [. . .] It’s a pity we never turned round: did you see it?31

  Monica would, he knew, understand what this Lawrentian epiphany meant to him. Their shared literary background bound them together in a way he would never be bound to Maeve.

  Since the end of November he had been working on ‘Ambulances’, dating the final draft ‘14/1/61’, and then making further changes before it was published in the London Magazine in April.32 The poem is a set of variations on the grammatical device of the noun phrase, moving away from the literal through ever increasing levels of elaboration and elusiveness. The nouns are at first simple: a ‘wild white face’ is shut away behind ‘fastened doors’. But the phrases become more abstract:

  For borne away in deadened air33

  May go the sudden shut of loss

  Round somet
hing nearly at an end,

  And what cohered in it across

  The years, the unique random blend

  Of families and fashions, there

  At last begin to loosen.

  In one of Larkin’s hallmark ‘what . . .’ constructions, the grammatical subject, ‘what cohered in it’, becomes a fading abstraction, and the verb is delayed by yet another, more intricate noun phrase (‘the unique random blend’). Despite the hopefulness implied by the anacrusis ‘there [. . .]’, which restores the reader’s grammatical balance, this is the beginning only of the end. When the long-delayed verb does come we realize that the grammar has broken down. The words ‘what’ and ‘blend’ are singular, so the verb should be ‘begins’. However what cohered within this blend has now loosened, so the plural is sadly accurate.

  In the first three stanzas the poet has viewed the scene from outside. In the last two stanzas poet and reader share the ambulance with the dying patient:

  Far

  From the exchange of love to lie

  Unreachable inside a room

  The traffic parts to let go by

  Brings closer what is left to come,

  And dulls to distance all we are.

  The subject of the sentence is yet another elusive noun construction enclosing a series of subordinate phrases, and once again the verb (‘Brings’) is delayed, as though the poet is reluctant to face its implications. The parallel grammatical construction in the last two lines is subtly modulated. First the positive-sounding verb ‘brings’ focuses the meagre ‘what is left to come’, then the negative verb ‘dulls’ governs an existential summary of the whole of life: ‘all we are’. The selfish less deceived ‘what I am’ which emerged in ‘Best Society’ becomes here the more generous and tragic (if equally less deceived) ‘all we are’.

  Maeve was successful in her exams, and in early February 1961 she fulfilled her promise to take Philip to the Beverley Arms for dinner. Afterwards they walked arm in arm to the taxi rank through the ‘bright, frosty night’,34 and as she puts it ‘from that evening our friendship entered a new and headier phase’. Shortly afterwards he called her into his office and, with a show of embarrassment which made a great impression on her, presented her with a gift of Elizabeth Arden Mémoire Chérie perfume: ‘never before had I been given so romantic a gift in such touching circumstances – and my quest for romance had always been strong, though hitherto a vain one’.35 For all the differences between Philip and Maeve they shared a simple impulse for romance. Philip’s imagination was taken with the fact that she bore the name of an ancient Irish queen, and that her father, though a Hull dentist, had in his youth been a member of the Republican Irish Volunteers in Dublin and had walked the same streets as Yeats and Maud Gonne. He even compared Maeve to Yeats’s muse, much to her father’s derision: ‘You like Maud Gonne? Don’t be ridiculous. She was very beautiful [. . .]!’36

  As his literary reputation grew, Larkin became more confident in taking public initiatives. In January 1961 his friend Peter Coveney, the Warden of Needler Hall of Residence, introduced him to Donald Mitchell, a music critic who worked for the Daily Telegraph. Mitchell suggested Larkin as a jazz reviewer for the newspaper. He was taken on, and his first review appeared on 11 February 1961. He was to continue to write monthly reviews for the remainder of the decade and beyond.

  On 16 January 1961, Larkin sent a letter to the novelist Barbara Pym offering to write a ‘general essay’ on her work for the Spectator when her next book appeared.37 He was unaware that No Fond Return of Love was just about to appear, and his offer was rather late. He asked to be sent a proof copy of her next novel, so that he could write his essay when it appeared.38 He could not have suspected that this next work would not be published for another sixteen years. His approach, however, initiated a correspondence, which lasted until Pym’s death in 1980. It seems likely that there was a strategic, sexual-political motive in Larkin’s public assertion of affinity with Pym. His sister Kitty, as well as both Monica Jones and Maeve Brennan, were keen readers of Pym’s novels. She, like him, was a misogamist, preferring romantic dream over the ties of marriage. By associating himself with this respectable woman writer, Larkin made his stubborn misogamy seem less antisocial. His was not, he deceptively implied, the lonely artistic dedication of the poète maudit, but a normal, even perhaps a ‘typically English’ life choice. He thus complicated the abrasive masculine ‘Movement’ context imposed on him by critics. Pym cast herself as ‘this old brown spinster’;39 Larkin increasingly cast himself as the bachelor hermit of Hull.

  On 22 February 1961 Larkin put the final workbook touches to one of his most radically ambiguous poems: ‘Naturally the Foundation will Bear Your Expenses’. He explained its inspiration later as ‘a mixture of finding that a number of my friends had gone to India and hearing, as I usually do, the broadcast of the service at the Cenotaph’.40 On one level the poem is satirical: he wrote to Robert Conquest, ‘I hope it annoys all the continent-hopping craps.’41 But Conquest himself, of course, was both a ‘friend’ and a ‘continent-hopping crap’. Conquest and Amis had recently urged Larkin to follow their example. The mention of India seems almost a diversionary tactic, the USA being his friends’ usual destination. The poet’s attitude towards the speaker on his expenses-paid jaunt is not simple condemnation: ‘Certainly it was a dig at the middleman who gives a lot of talks to America and then brushes them up and does them on the Third and then brushes them up again and puts them out as a book with Chatto.’42 His wording is concessive: ‘Certainly it was a dig’; this dig is not the real point of the poem.

  The poet’s attitude towards the Armistice Day ceremony is also not as clear as most commentators have assumed. Though he allowed his emotions full rein in writing to Monica, declaring that hearing the Cenotaph service with the massed bands of the Guards playing Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’ ‘harrows me to my foundations’,43 nevertheless in a 1964 interview he defended his speaker against patriotic critics: ‘Why he should be blamed for not sympathizing with the crowds on Armistice Day, I don’t quite know.’44 Indeed, in writing of the ‘solemn-sinister / Wreath-rubbish’ of the official ceremony, Larkin will certainly have had in mind Siegfried Sassoon’s image in ‘At the Cenotaph’, of the Prince of Darkness attending the ceremony in the hope that it will foster nationalistic jingoism.

  A further ambiguity is provided by the poem’s intimate association with W. H. Auden. The speaker refers to himself, in a sophisticated poeticism, as dwindling ‘down Auster’, the South Wind:

  – But I outsoar the Thames,

  And dwindle off down Auster

  To greet Professor Lal

  (He once met Morgan Forster),

  My contact and my pal.

  The Byronic double rhyme ‘Auster / Forster’ cannot help but bring Auden to mind. It seems not too fanciful to suggest that ‘Auster’ came to Larkin as a rough portmanteau of ‘Wystan Auden’; Auden, like Forster, was a continent-hopping homosexual. The circuit of which the speaker is taking advantage was pioneered by writers like Auden and Dylan Thomas in the years following the Second World War. Larkin derided Auden for descending from the ‘superb, magnetic, wide-angled poet’ of the 1930s to ‘the great American windbag’ of his later years, crossing continents on reading tours.45 Nevertheless the jaunty freeloader of Larkin’s poem, published in Twentieth Century in July 1961, presented an attractive enough picture to prompt Auden’s own genial self-satire, ‘On the Circuit’, published in About the House in 1966. Auden’s speaker clearly owes something to Larkin’s:

  Another morning comes: I see,

  Dwindling below me on the plane,

  The roofs of one more audience

  I shall not see again.

  God bless the lot of them, although

  I don’t remember which was which [. . .]46

  Auden’s persona, like Larkin’s, relishes his sky-borne elevation above the audience that pays for his lifestyle. Larkin’s attitude towards the literary ‘circuit’ i
s envious as well as disapproving. His poem is not morally didactic: ‘I shouldn’t call myself a satirist, or any other sort of -ist [. . .] To be a satirist, you have to think you know better than everyone else. I’ve never done that.’47 Before it was published Larkin remarked to Monica that everybody seemed to be misreading the poem. Brian Cox, then in the Hull English Department, and editor of Critical Quarterly, thought it ‘a bit hard on the Queen’.48 His secretary, Betty Mackereth, joked that its animus against travelling would be attributed to his recent illness; ‘not that I think she gets it any more than Cox did. How to read a page. Ogh ogh ogh [. . .] Well, it may not be a good poem, but it’s a good title.’49 He teasingly omits to explain how this particular page ‘should’ be read. Subsequent commentators continue to interpret the poem as angry moral satire. Motion calls it ‘a piece of savagery’.50

  On 6 March 1961, at a point when he was at the peak of his achievement in both professional and literary terms, Larkin suddenly collapsed during a Library Committee meeting and was rushed to Kingston General Hospital.51 The doctors dismissed his immediate explanations: that his shirt collar was too tight or that his new spectacles had induced dizzy spells, though a recent analysis of Larkin’s spectacles has suggested that a rogue prescription could indeed have been responsible for his disorientation.52 However, in the case of a sensibility so radically psychosomatic as Larkin’s it is tempting to seek personal causes for his mysterious breakdown. Over the previous months he had been overworked and under stress. He had managed the Library transfer and had endured the public exposure of the official opening. More relevantly, perhaps, he was aware that, though he could claim to be still faithful to Monica in physical terms, he was betraying her emotionally by his involvement with Maeve. Richard Bradford suggests a different reason for Larkin’s collapse: intense jealousy of Kingsley Amis’s success in being appointed Official Fellow and Tutor at Peterhouse College, Cambridge.53 This is not an explanation which occurred to Larkin at the time, nor to anyone else since.