Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  The phrase ‘new, slightly outmoded shoes’ was a private joke. Philip was particularly taken, Maeve revealed, by this pair of shoes which were ‘an unusual colour of pearlized bronze, very smart, with stiletto heels and long, pointed toes, popularly known as winkle-pickers’.85 Twenty years earlier Larkin would ‘do the foot fetishist’ for his undergraduate friends.86 Now he acted out a version of this mime for Maeve’s amusement, or bemusement.

  Philip raved about the shoes. He used to take them off my feet, hold them up, stroke them, put them down on the sofa and continue to admire them; not just once, but every time I wore them. He thought they were the last word in fashion, until one day, slightly exasperated, I teased: ‘I don’t know why you go on so about these shoes. They’re almost out of fashion now. You know how I haven’t the nerve to wear anything until it’s been in vogue for six months.’ He laughed and said: ‘Well. I still adore them even if they are slightly outmoded!’87

  One may doubt that Maeve was quite as innocent as she depicts herself in The Philip Larkin I Knew. But by this account the cross-purpose between their different shoe-fetishisms is total: eroticism on his part, narcissism on hers.88 Larkin’s inscription in Maeve’s copy of the Listener in which ‘Broadcast’ first appeared on 25 January 1962 reads: ‘To Maeve, who wd. sooner listen to music than listen to me.’ The unfeeling muse ignores her poet’s service.

  Maeve was a more complex muse than Penelope Scott Stokes or Winifred Arnott. They were both soon lost to sight. Maeve broke the pattern by positively relishing their long-drawn-out delayed courtship. Over the period of the relationship he was to write more than 200 letters to her, without any of the pungency or literary complexity of his letters to Monica or Judy Egerton. He soon found an appropriate animal language for their intimacy. At Christmas 1961 he gave her a gold chain with a pearl pendant, and shortly afterwards introduced her to the Rescuers series of novels for children by Margery Sharp, featuring the mouse Miss Bianca, who shared Maeve’s initials and always wore such a chain. He became Miss Bianca’s admirer, ‘a rather commonplace-looking mouse named Bernard’.89 His letters to her are sometimes adorned with drawings of ‘Miss Mouse’, in contemplative mood, or weighing herself on bathroom scales or choosing material in a shop.90

  Maeve believed that Philip’s tolerance of the delay in physical consummation was a result of his respect for her beliefs: ‘he may at times have found my strict adherence to the Church’s teaching on sexual ethics disconcerting. However, he understood and respected my principles with a facility which struck me as remarkable.’91 Even when, after his death, she discovered more sides to his personality, her perception was unchanged: ‘Knowing, as I do now, of Philip’s darker side, it seems all the more remarkable that his view of love coincided so closely with mine.’92 In fact his restraint owed less to respect for religion than to a Keatsian relish for trembling incipience. Maeve kept alive this frisson by remaining sexually unavailable. In late autumn 1961 she gave Philip a copy of Evelyn Waugh’s Unconditional Surrender and, realizing the possible double entendre of the title, she forestalled him by saying: ‘Now don’t think for a moment that this gives you the green light to go ahead because that’s the last thing I have in mind!’93 Her limited moral code and unreflecting gender double standard allowed her to feel self-approval for forbidding her lover ‘pre-marital sex’, while at the same time overlooking his own ‘pre-marital sex’ with Monica. It never occurred to her that it was only Philip’s regular sexual relations with Monica that enabled him to preserve the decorum of their prolonged, unreal courtship. On 18 January 1962, a week before he wrote the Listener dedication to Maeve, he had told Monica, ‘I should like to stroke your little rabbit brow & large rabbit hindquarters,’ and related to her how he had paid 4s 6d to sit ‘among giggling Chinese’ at the cinema watching Nudes of the World.94

  Just as John Kemp had determined to keep the innocent Jill from Warner and his world, so Larkin kept the innocent Maeve from Amis and his world. Had his more cosmopolitan friends met Maeve, they would have seen only a grotesque mismatch, and would not have understood his feelings. Judy Egerton recalls a rare visit to Hull, when she stayed in the Pearson Park Hotel. On knocking at the door of Philip’s flat she heard a furtive scramble, and when the door was opened Maeve was blushingly rearranging her dress. Egerton’s impression was that the Library Assistant was ‘absolutely thrilled – tickled pink’ to be discovered in this liaison with her boss.95 Most importantly, it was essential that Kingsley Amis should never meet Maeve. Even if he had only glimpsed her for a minute or two, Amis could have repeated the pattern of Lucky Jim and featured in his next novel an hilarious simpering, social-climbing ‘Maud Brosnan’ or ‘Mavis Byrne’, radiating comic vulgarity and smug prudishness.

  Monica was deeply hurt when ‘Broadcast’ was published, and Philip was forced on to the defensive. He was, he wrote on 8 February 1962, ‘ashamed of myself for causing you embarrassment vis à vis old Charity-Boots [. . .] I don’t know that it’s worth saying anything except that my delight in you isn’t pretended: you blot out anyone else.’ This was ‘the first “love” poem I’ve written since Maiden name in about 1954, & I shd think both are pretty tenuous, pretty remote, as far as general approach goes. In fact I think this one just a shade ludicrous!’96 This may seem at first sight an improvised excuse, cooked up simply to pacify Monica. But on reflection the word has real justification. There was indeed something ‘ludicrous’ about writing a love poem to someone with whom, in intellectual, cultural and social terms, his relationship was so insubstantial.

  15

  Sitting It Out

  1961–4

  Once again the poet felt compelled, as it were, to spill beer on the perfect photograph, answering ‘Broadcast’ (6 November 1961) with the sour misogamist poem ‘Breadfruit’ (19 November). This is one of his poems drafted during one day on a single page (though it was revised before publication in Critical Quarterly).1 Larkin dismissed it in a letter to Conquest as a ‘little squib’: ‘just about the worst poem I have ever let get set up’.2 Its imagery calls on cartoons of the 1950s and 1960s showing puny weaklings with spectacles and tiny bumps for biceps gawping at curvaceous native girls in grass skirts. In the boys’ dreams the girls bring them breadfruit as bribes to teach them sexual positions on the sand.3 This fantasy impels the boys to play tennis, jive at the Mecca and use deodorants in order to lure ex-schoolgirls into marriage, with inevitable consequences: ‘A mortgaged semi- with a silver birch; / Nippers; the widowed mum; having to scheme / With money; illness; age’. Though the mode is reductive stereotype, the vivid detail ‘with a silver birch’ gives an authentic poetic inflection, as does the relentless list, modulating into bleak elegy: ‘illness; age’. After this cadenza, the poem ends with the boys, now old men, still dreaming of naked native girls bringing breadfruit, ‘Whatever they are’.

  The moment of serene stasis recorded in ‘Here’ had passed. As the year of his fortieth birthday, 1962, approached Larkin’s thoughts turned to his physical condition:

  I have simplified my own grub down to chopped cabbage, grated carrot, cheese, with egg (raw) and Worcester sauce on the side, with milk and wholemeal bread and butter. This is at the instigation of my secretary, who’s certainly never ill and is full of energy. Unfortunately she says it’ll be two years before the poison is worked out of my system.4

  On 28 December he wrote to Judy Egerton that he had ‘felt pretty depressed over Christmas, & spent some time labelling packages for my executors. I really have no sense of the future now, except as the approach of death’.5 The new year, however, saw a hesitant return of vitality. The unpublished poem ‘January’ answers ‘And now the leaves suddenly lose strength’, celebrating what Eliot called ‘midwinter spring’, when life stirs beneath the debris of winter. In an urban wasteland a decrepit figure reminiscent of a Samuel Beckett character turns towards the faintest hint of spring:

  Some ajar face, corpse-stubbled, bends round

  To see the sky over
the aerials –

  Sky, absent paleness across which the gulls

  Wing to the Corporation rubbish ground.

  A slight relax of air. All is not dead.

  There is a touch of self-parody here: ‘we are all on a one way trip to the grave, etc. etc. etc.’ He wrote to Monica that he was taking ‘two phenob.’s at night, & tranquillisers during the day’ to calm his ‘boiling’ brain.6 In April he told Judy Egerton with grim cheeriness: ‘I am taking Yeast Tablets in the hope they will give me Fresh Force at Forty.’7

  He was also plumbing murkier erotic depths. In the magazine Encounter John Sparrow riddled out the obscure passage in Lady Chatterley’s Lover where Mellors and Constance indulge in anal sex as a way of burning out ‘shame’ and confronting the ultimate obscenity of physical being. In a letter to Monica of 23 January 1962 Philip reflects that, though it seems ‘much too difficult technically, all things being equal it would please me to share it with you, as fit expression of a feeling you’re well aware of [. . .] I can’t imagine there is much in it for you, though.’8

  His letters of the time bristled with edgy discontent. On 9 December he complained to Conquest that George Hartley, or ‘the ponce’ as he called him on account of his natty appearance, had allowed The Less Deceived to go out of print for six months: ‘Jesus, he’s got the best selling prospect since the ShrLad and he can’t even keep the frigging thing in print.’ At the same time Hartley was, he wrote, wasting money making a ‘Listen’ record of ‘old Davie droning out his tosh’.9 On 20 February he grumbled about Al Alvarez’s Introduction to The New Poetry, which compared ‘At Grass’, quoted without permission, with ‘something of the Mexborough Marvell’s’ (Ted Hughes’s ‘A Dream of Horses’). ‘Says I’m badly dressed, too, which I take a bit hard.’ He then skewered the humourless clergyman-poet R. S. Thomas in an unforgettable cameo: ‘Our friend Arsewipe Thomas suddenly was led into my room one afternoon last week, and stood there without moving or speaking: he seems pretty hard going. Not noticeably Welsh, which is one comfort.’10 On 27 March he wrote to Anthony Thwaite, then Literary Editor of the Listener, declining to review Robert Graves’s New Poems in case it encouraged other editors to approach him, adding: ‘if he says publicly just once more that he has a large family to support, I shall write to the papers asking whose fault he thinks that is’.11

  In May 1962, in the midst of discussions about the Stage 2 Library building programme, he completed ‘Wild Oats’, putting the final full-stop against his relationship with Ruth Bowman:

  Parting, after about five

  Rehearsals, was an agreement

  That I was too selfish, withdrawn,

  And easily bored to love.

  Well, useful to get that learnt.

  His sulky masculine shrug shows that he still felt bruised by this failure. His next poem was at an opposite extreme of philosophical detachment. ‘Essential Beauty’, substantially completed in June, and published in the Spectator in October 1962, presents itself as a satire on the deceptiveness of advertisements which ‘Screen graves with custard, cover slums with praise / Of motor-oil and cuts of salmon’. However, these naive images of perfection – the milk in the meadow, the stock cube towards which all hands stretch – are presented with affectionate humour. Larkin commented when the poem was broadcast that billboards ‘seem to me beautiful and in an odd way sad, like infinitely-debased Platonic essences’:12

  they rise

  Serenely to proclaim pure crust, pure foam,

  Pure coldness to our live imperfect eyes

  That stare beyond this world, where nothing’s made

  As new or washed quite clean [. . .]

  The poem’s title is quite unironic. There may be anger in the portrayal of the dying smoker’s glimpse of the perfect girl of the advertisements, ‘Smiling, and recognising, and going dark’. But it is not the fault of advertisers that she is beyond reach; it is the fault of the human condition. The indignation of a cheated consumer is lost in sorrow over mortality.

  On 10 August, prompted no doubt by his birthday the previous day, he returned to the drafts of what was to become ‘Send No Money’, originally begun nearly two years earlier under the title ‘What Goes On’.13 It is a howl of tragi-comic bitterness. As he had hoped, his dedication to his artistic vocation has given him a clear sight of the truth. But this truth has been of no more use to him than a ‘truss-advertisement’, proving ‘Sod all’. He does not reproach himself for having made the wrong decision. He had been well aware from the beginning that the rough-tongued bell of art offered nothing in return for his service. But in his youth the pleasures of creativity had amply outweighed this bleak knowledge. Even now the poet still derives cathartic satisfaction from writing a good poem about failure. But now that ‘Half life is over’ he can no longer sustain his self-congratulation at having sat life out rather than having ‘a bash’ at marriage and procreation. Two days later he lamented to Monica that he had ‘done nothing with that fat fillet-steak part of life, 20 to 40’.14 But, even if he had made different choices, his face would still be this ‘bestial visor, bent in / By the blows of what happened to happen’. Among Larkin’s effects, bought by the Philip Larkin Society after Monica Jones’s death, was a circular swivel-mirror on a metal stand, one side of which is concave, reflecting a hugely magnified image of every pore and blemish.15

  Compared with Monica’s, however, his life was full of satisfaction and interest. She felt unfulfilled and longed for their lives to be united. But his visits to Haydon Bridge, and their regular holidays à deux can only have convinced him that living together would have been a challenge. It is to this period that Motion dates their defacing of Monica’s hardback first edition of Iris Murdoch’s 1956 novel The Flight from the Enchanter, though this might have been done earlier.16 Few pages are unmarked and it is dismaying to contemplate the many hours of sterile boredom represented by their trivial, repetitive graffiti. It is not always possible to distinguish which of the two has made a change, but it is clear that Monica is as foul-mouthed as he. The title is altered, probably in her handwriting, to The Shite from the Non-Enchanter, and he changes the publisher’s details to ‘Shatto and Break-Windus Shit-shovellers to Greater London Council “You Write It – We’ll Shift It”’. Most of the alterations are grossly lavatorial or sexual. ‘Rosa sat up abruptly’ becomes ‘Rosa shat abruptly’; ‘She swung her arms about a lot’ becomes ‘She swung her tits about a lot.’17 ‘Sit’ and ‘sat’ are mechanically altered to ‘shit’ and ‘shat’; ‘uncurling their long legs’ becomes ‘uncurling their long pricks’; ‘made as if to kiss Rosa’s hand’ becomes ‘made as if to kiss Rosa’s cunt’.18 And so it goes on, page after page, a total of about 1,300 alterations. To return after a spell of this kind of thing to Maeve’s innocent propriety must have been a great relief.

  One or two of the marginalia show a nasty xenophobia. Murdoch’s dedication to Elias Canetti, with whom she had had an affair, is elaborated in Philip’s handwriting: ‘To a Wop Tool – Peelias Canetti (Eytie for ‘‘little cunt’’) (he shagged me)’. The chapter heading ‘Three’ becomes ‘Any Greek’s Breath reeks’. The character Jan is described, in Monica’s handwriting, as ‘a dirty scrounging sex-mad foreigner’.19 Her anti-Semitism, which was an undercurrent in A New World Symphony, is also in evidence. Once, when Philip and Monica were staying with the Thwaites in the 1960s or 1970s, she shocked everyone by declaring in the middle of a casual conversation: ‘Well. What can you expect when they’re Jews!’20 Her insecurities drew Philip into a narrow, defensive intimacy. When she took the well-known photograph of him sitting on an ‘ENGLAND’ road-marker, after their holiday in Scotland in 1962, Monica was confirming what she saw as one of the sure foundations of their relationship.21 Like Amis, she demanded that he reduce himself to her version of him.

  It was a version he was determined should not become permanent. At the end of September 1962 Monica wrote an abject letter pleading for him to share his life with her. She was ‘v
ery conscious of what a short time we are here for, & how little of that time we have left, you & I; it isn’t much, and for all we know it might be very short, & I wish I could spend what is left with you, or more of what is left than I do spend’. She continued: ‘tears are behind my eyes, making eyes & head ache’.22 In reply he rebukes her emotional blackmail: ‘I don’t say I want to bore you with my feelings, or be bored, so to speak, by yours, but I have a curious feeling that in some ways we are not in sympathy [. . .] you either know me too well or don’t know me enough.’ After criticizing his own anti­social tendency, he concluded: ‘I do think you dislike people more than I do.’23 Philip was committed to Monica but, except for short periods, a woman with her limitations could not but disappoint and bore him. On 1 October, she ruthlessly spelled out the truth at which he hinted, ‘you don’t like me enough to marry me’, adding bitterly: ‘it seems rather unkind for you to want to tell me so, & perhaps tell me all the things that are wrong with me’.24 He responded characteristically by taking all the blame on himself: ‘I do feel terrible about our being 40 & unmarried. I fear we are to turn slowly into living reproaches of the way I have dallied and lingered with you [. . .]’25 She was socializing a good deal with one of her students, Bill Ruddick, and Philip experienced a certain jealousy: ‘It gives me a queer disagreeable feeling to think of you with someone else.’26 But he made no active intervention.