Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  The next few weeks saw him subjected to extensive medical tests and deeply worried. He wrote compulsively from the ward to Monica. A letter dated 11 March runs to eighteen sides, written uncharacteristically in ballpoint and with an unwonted unsteadiness of hand. It begins with a PS at the top of the first page: ‘I’m afraid this becomes rather a “frightened” letter, & isn’t much fun to read [. . .]’:

  It is Saturday & I’ve just had some lunch: it’s 10 to one. There is nothing much to report. I haven’t been x rayed yet, or brain-waved, as I believe they intend to do.

  I feel about the same – that is, there is something wrong with my vision, wch makes me have to focus specially sometimes, & I feel rather distant from my feet: this is all summed up by being aware of my right eye. In addition to this, I am out of sorts in a ’flu-y kind of way – no appetite, coated tongue, bowels sore, & ready to sweat easily. This last symptom seems to interest them.54

  He is effusively grateful to her: ‘I must thank you, dearest dearest love, for coming to see me so quickly, and for sending me cards & letters.’ However, he refused to allow her to stay in his flat because ‘I had left a few private papers & diaries lying around. Such things, which I suppose I keep partly for the record in the event of wanting to write an auto­biography, & partly to relieve my feelings [. . .] will have to be burned unread in the event of my death [. . .]’ He continues, ‘I’ve been writing for an hour now, partly because I like talking to you, partly to see how my eyes & brain stand it. If this looks legible & makes sense I suppose I’m not too far gone yet [. . .] Oh darling I wish you were here!’55 Pages of abjection follow, with little sign of his usual élan and wit: ‘I can’t bring myself to do anything but lie either whining to you or shuddering to myself.’ ‘I hardly know if I ought to send letters like this. You see, darling, I’m afraid I’m seriously ill, & really this is all that’s in my mind, and nobody can give me any comfort. It would be comforting to have you here to talk to, if you could stay all the time, but it wdn’t be any ultimate comfort, wd it?’56 He wonders whether the problem may be with his liver: ‘the liver can affect vision, can’t it? You know what horrors are associated with livers for me, through my father.’57

  The following day, Sunday 12 March 1961, he wrote to Maeve in a more reticent tone: ‘I don’t want to write very much at present. I don’t feel in good enough spirits: I should only moan [. . .] but with all this time to spare, & without getting better, I have not been able to keep from worrying rather.’58 On the same day he wrote a six-page letter to Monica which continued into Monday (beginning at 6.30 a.m.). He wrote again on the same day (eight sides), complaining about the television on the ward, and discussing their plans to attend the Test match at Lord’s: ‘Suppose there is something seriously wrong with my brain! Should I not say these things to you? Is it unfair of me?’59 But his panic was subsiding. On 15 March he wrote only four sides to Monica, discussing the recent heavyweight boxing match involving Ingemar Johansson. On 16 March he wrote six sides, mentioning the radio soap opera The Archers, the marriage of Picasso and the death of Sir Thomas Beecham. Peter Coveney offered to let him move into Needler Hall when he was discharged. On 30 March Eva Larkin travelled up to Hull and looked after him there until 4 April. If his breakdown was a subconscious bid for sympathy and attention, it had certainly succeeded.

  He was advised not to return to work immediately and paid for further tests in London by the eminent doctor, Sir Walter Russell Brain. Monica and Eva took rooms in different London hotels and he was visited by Kingsley and Hilly Amis,60 Robert Conquest (who brought him pornography), Stephen Spender and John Betjeman. Brain found a ‘deep-seated abnormality in the left cerebral hemisphere’, and commented impenetrably: ‘He has epilepsy of late onset with no positive evidence of an organic cure.’61 Later X-rays of his head, taken in July 1969, were among Larkin’s papers after his death.62 On 10 April 1961 he wrote to Maeve in a chastened tone, noting that in the hospital ‘you can see so many people worse off than yourself [. . .] It was good of you to take it kindly & not tell me to pull myself together etcetera! Not that I should have taken such an exhortation particularly kindly, but it might have been justified.’63 However, three days later he told her that he had contracted ear infections from the hospital tests, and was ‘in a great mood of fury & irritation & wishing I’d never set foot in this lazar house.’64 Later in life he blamed his increasing deafness on these infections. On the same day (13 April) he wrote to Betty, expressing pleasure that the Library Assistant Wendy Mann, who was also ill at this time, had avoided surgery, going on to praise his ‘very charming’ doctor, Miss Yen: ‘At present they think my chest interesting. (I feel like Marilyn Monroe.)’65 On 18 April he wrote to Maeve, in the characteristically sincere tone of their correspondence: ‘It has meant a great deal to me to have your sympathetic letters. I don’t connect them with flirtation or my taking advantage of you [. . .] just one person showing kindness to and concern for another. And this is a jolly rare thing in my experience. Thank you, dear, thank you with all my heart.’66

  Maeve had been impressed by his consideration for others while he was in hospital. Philip would always ask after Wendy Mann, and after his return to Hull phoned her every week until she returned to the Library.67 Maeve had come to believe that, though he did not share her religious faith, Philip shared her values: ‘I discovered how deeply sensitive he was, and that his yearning for warmth, affection and idealism was as great as my own.’68 Their relationship was a sensuous one. Philip told Jean Hartley that though she rejected ‘sex before marriage’, ‘God knows we do everything but.’69 However, as Maeve put it, ‘I wasn’t prepared to cut myself off from the sacraments.’70 Eva was eager for her son to resolve the situation. But he could not abandon Monica. He joked in a letter to Maeve: ‘Do you think this ailment I am undergoing is God’s way of putting a stop to something He thought might be getting out of hand?’71 In the event, however, things did not get ‘out of hand’ nor was he forced to make a decision. The situation remained unresolved for the better part of the next two decades. It was not until 1978 that, as Maeve recalled, ‘he finally broke with me in favour of Monica’.72

  Following his illness, he returned to work, and his correspondence with Monica resumed its equilibrium. On 11 June he wrote: ‘How are you? I can remember of course that you were here, & what we did, but you slip so easily into my life, making no disturbance, it’s almost like trying to pick out a rabbit among bracken. Not that rabbits have lovely legs like yours. Your legs are the only legs I ever see the point of, except for walking about on, of course.’73 A week later he completed a sexually charged poem, ‘The Large Cool Store’, ‘unsuspectingly inspired’, Maeve explained, by herself. The poet is puzzled by the contrast between the two worlds implied by the clothes in the shop: on one hand shirts and trousers, ‘Set out in simple sizes plainly’, belonging to the weekday world of ‘factory, yard and site’; on the other ‘Modes For Night’ in ‘Lemon, sapphire, moss-green rose’, belonging to an apparently unrelated ideal world. He concludes that this exotic nightwear shows:

  How separate and unearthly love is,

  Or women are, or what they do,

  Or in our young unreal wishes

  Seem to be: synthetic, new,

  And natureless in ecstasies.

  The word ‘natureless’, which occurs nowhere else in Larkin’s work, recalls Yeats’s ascent ‘out of nature’ in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. On the ‘Listen’ recording of The Whitsun Weddings, made under the auspices of the Marvell Press, Larkin notes that this has been called a ‘silly poem about nighties’.74 It is in fact a moving evocation of the awesome impersonal power of sex.

  Maeve’s account of the occasion of the poem bowdlerizes its erotic content:

  He was very taken with a smart summer handbag I had bought at Marks and Spencer’s. He found it hard to believe that I had found anything quite so stylish there: in 1961 their merchandise was generally less well designed than in later years. The followi
ng Saturday Philip went along to ‘the large cool store’ which he saw through the eyes of working-class women whose humdrum existence was far removed from the tantalizing world represented by the store’s ‘Modes for Night’. Caressing the ‘Bri-Nylon Baby-Dolls and Shorties’, ethereal in colour, texture and design, the women imagine how possession of such a garment might transform their lives [. . .]75

  In her decorous misreading, male fantasies about sex become female fantasies about fashion. Paradoxically, however, this muse’s reimagining of the poem is, in its very incomprehension, an illustration of its central insight. In ‘our’ unreal male wishes, women are rapt in a natureless, self-involved perfection. Maeve’s response to the poem shows exactly this narcissism. Gautier would have interpreted her reaction in the familiar sexist terms of nineteenth-century Romanticism: ‘It is true that women have no more understanding of poetry than has a cabbage or a rose, and this is quite natural and to be expected, since they themselves are poetry or at least the best instruments of poetry; a flute neither hears nor understands the air that is played upon it.’76

  The balance, or imbalance, of Philip’s relationship with Monica was restored. They took their 1961 summer holiday again in Sark. He told Conquest, ‘Had a good time, except that I became shagged with late nights and drink.’77 Shortly afterwards Monica took her cue from Philip’s birthday to suggest that they both make wills (‘I don’t want my relations to inherit all that I have’). He was baffled by her anxiety about what would happen to the money she left him when he himself subsequently died: ‘You seem to be wanting me to do something & I don’t know what it is.’ Unnerved, he told her, ‘it isn’t a topic I relish thinking about’. Then, still clearly not understanding her urgent reasonings, he attempted to placate her: ‘I do see that it is a serious matter and ought to be settled. I also see that you are offering me a great kindness, and I’m properly grateful.’78 A letter of several days later reveals a different, literary cause of friction. She had praised Sir Walter Scott, and he responded with crushing decisiveness: ‘I don’t think I recovered from being advised to read The Heart of Midlothian – was it? At different times I’ve tried that, and The Antiquary, and Old Mortality. All fell from my nerveless fingers. I want W.S. to be good – heavens, one wants anyone to be good [. . .] – but I don’t know, there seemed nothing in his books, no imagination, humour, malice, style, perception, story even.’79 In September a new, more stable pattern to their relationship was established when Monica bought a second home in Haydon Bridge, near Hexham, Northumberland, on the banks of the Tyne. Haydon Bridge was conveniently far away, but near enough to Hull for Philip easily to join her there for short breaks and longer holidays.

  Larkin’s life reached its apogee in late 1961. In ‘Here’, the fifth of his ten great contemplative elegies, completed on 8 October, there is a sense that he has attained the still midday of his life.80 All the poet’s skill is bent to distil a timeless, universal poem from an intensely local, personal inspiration. The poem takes as its title not the topographical ‘Hull’ but the existential adverb ‘Here’. In an extraordinary grammatical manoeuvre the ‘I’ and ‘we’ of ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ and ‘Ambulances’ are ingeniously excluded, making the centre of consciousness the reader her or himself. There is momentous gravity in the poem’s opening phrases. The subject of the first sentence is an elaborate noun phrase, whose repeated gerunds (present participles used as nouns), ‘Swerving [. . .] swerving [. . .] swerving’, create a slow-building climax. The main verb (‘Gathers’) is held back by this spacious grammar until the beginning of the second stanza. Then, in order to throw the emphasis on momentary experience rather than literal topography, this ‘swerving’ gathers not to a town, but to ‘the surprise of a large town’. Though the first sentence could end here, the poet prefers the continuing impetus of a colon followed by ‘Here [. . .]’. The first sentence does not end until the first line of the final stanza.

  Though the unnamed city at the centre of the poem is indeed, in every detail, a ‘literal’ place with unique characteristics, ships up streets, a slave museum, consulates and tattoo shops, it is also a ‘pastoral’, if an unorthodox ‘terminate and fishy-smelling’ one. This ‘urban, yet simple’ world has the idyllic innocence of Theocritus’ or Virgil’s artificial visions of nymphs and shepherds. Its inhabitants, a ‘cut-price crowd’, are precisely observed as they push through plate-glass doors to their desires: ‘Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies’. But this vignette is also an archetype of the social existence of all readers, wherever our particular ‘here’ may be. It is surprising, to put it mildly, to find Larkin describing the poem to Conquest as ‘plain description’.81

  Larkin pulls out all the organ-stops of rhyme and assonance to create a sumptuous music of consonant clusters and shifting vowels, unlike anything else in his poetry: ‘shadows / fields / meadows / shields / solitude / pheasants / presence / mud / [. . .] / stands, thicken / quicken / ascends / distance / beach / existence / reach’. Four octaves of commodious pentameters are orchestrated in alternating variation. Stanzas one and three both rhyme ababcddc, while stanzas two and four rhyme, with more formal closure, abbacdcd. He originally titled the poem ‘Withdrawing Room’, the archaic form of ‘drawing room’, imaging the ever-moving moment of being here as the most intimate of the rooms into which we withdraw. Stanza is the Italian for ‘room’ (usually in the plural, stanze: a suite of rooms). Here, in this spacious, patterned stanza-form, Larkin has found the comfortable withdrawing room of his own which he had been seeking since ‘Dry-Point’ and ‘Best Society’.

  No vehicles are mentioned, but ‘here’ moves implicitly from sitting in a swerving train approaching the city to walking around the streets, to pedalling a bicycle through suburbs and out across the flat landscape to the sea. The goal is ambiguous. On one reading the movement is a withdrawal inwards, from a larger public world of industry and ‘traffic all night north’ to crowded provincial cityscape, and then deeper and deeper into ‘retired’ self-possession. On another it is an opening outwards, from the enclosure of a railway carriage to the roads and shops of the town to a sublimely cleared attic of ‘unfenced existence: / Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach’. Both readings lose time in place. There are no events in the poem, only an undated present. For all its forward movement, largo – allegretto – andante, this is an anti-narrative, stopping the clock. Larkin was aware that his life had reached its point of balance. The photograph of Philip and herself outdoors which Maeve chose for the cover of her memoir is dated October 1961, and shows the poet radiating fulfilment. Larkin had always been uncannily sensitive to life’s climacterics, and had long anticipated the moment when he would reach his ‘prime’. If one were to put a date on this moment it would be October 1961. After ‘Here’ the way is downward.

  To remind himself of cruel reality, Larkin followed this sublime poem with his coldest, most reductive work, headed in the workbook ‘18/10 Life is slow motion dying’ and completed three pages later on 25 October. It was published as ‘Nothing To Be Said’ in the London Magazine on 11 February 1962. In an elliptical anthropological summary the poet reviews a spectrum from the rituals of primitive nomads and pig-hunters through ‘cobble-close’ working-class family life in mill towns to the civilized rituals of garden-parties and law cases. All of them amount to no more than a slow advance on death. The poem ends with a riddling play on words: ‘saying so to some / Means nothing; others it leaves / Nothing to be said’. Some people are optimists, some are pessimists, and that is all there is to it. As the year approached its end Larkin followed this poem, on 3 November, with a mood-piece, ‘And now the leaves suddenly lose strength’. Autumn is over, and seeing another year gone an assortment of people from different eras, ‘Frockcoated gentleman, farmer at his gate, / Villein with mattock, soldiers on their shields’ all silently watch ‘the winter coming on’. He did not publish it.

  But it was not winter yet for Larkin. Three days later, he completed,
in two days of concentrated drafting (5–6 November), one of his warmest works, and the one with the most explicit biographical association with Maeve. On Sunday 5 November she attended a concert at Hull’s City Hall which opened with the ‘storms of chording’ of Elgar’s ‘Introduction and Allegro for Strings’. The resulting poem, ‘Broadcast’, is the only work in which Larkin explicitly addressed his Hull muse. On the ‘Listen’ record he calls it ‘about as near as I get in this collection to a love poem. It’s not, I’m afraid, very near.’82 His repeated stress on nearness (‘about as near’, ‘not very near’) seems almost a joke, since the relationship in the poem is so much a matter of carefully observed distance. Paradoxically what most excites the poet is his separation from his beloved: she in the concert hall hearing the music, he listening over the radio, a mile away, picturing her in his mind. The orchestra’s chords overpower him not directly through their sound, but ‘By being distant’. In a tenuous pun he hears her hands ‘on air’, electronically: ‘tiny in all that air, applauding’. This is more rarefied than the ‘real untidy air’ of ‘Bargains, suffering, and love’. The contrast with ‘Talking in Bed’ is stark. In that poem a uniquely intimate closeness made communication impossible. Here it is the very distance between the lovers which imparts the bloom to their relationship. The imagined details on which the poet focuses: her face, her unnoticed glove, her shoes, create an icon in his mind, and this artifice is underpinned by the echo of the medieval ‘blazon’, a poem of courtly love listing parts of the beloved’s body.83 Her face ‘Beautiful and devout’, true to the Petrarchan tradition, both inspires and forbids desire. For years afterwards Philip would send Maeve Christmas cards playing on this ambiguity. He would annotate each card according to the nature of the illustration: ‘Devout but not beautiful’; ‘Beautiful but not devout’ or, more rarely, ‘Beautiful and devout’.84