Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  Later, on 10 October, in more cheerful mood, Larkin completed a genial riposte to ‘Send No Money’. In ‘Toads Revisited’ the Librarian’s voice replaces that of the poète maudit.27 Instead of a lonely romantic artist dissociating himself from his contemporaries of middling sensuality, the speaker is now a bourgeois conformist, distancing himself from those too stupid or too weak to hold down a job. He expresses faux naïf puzzlement that his idle stroll in the park does not feel ‘better than work’. The park’s inhabitants, the palsied elderly, the jittery neurotics and tramps, have, after all, succeeded in dodging work, as he had longed to do in ‘Toads’. But the price they have paid for their exemption is too high. At first he exclaims with distaste: ‘Think of being them!’ Then, having given the idea some thought, he repeats the phrase without the exclamation mark and in a more pensive tone. He is no heartless Norman Tebbit berating the workshy. Indeed their detachment from the flux of getting and spending gives their lives a hint of lyrical beauty:

  Watching the bread delivered,

  The sun by clouds covered,

  The children going home;

  Think of being them,

  Turning over their failures

  By some bed of lobelias [. . .]

  But the comic misrhyme ‘failures / lobelias’ unsettles the brief epiphany. The poet is still thankful for his secure pensionable life. He even pieces together an alternative epiphany of his own out of the prosaic material of work itself: his in-tray, his loaf-haired secretary and the importunate telephone:

  What else can I answer,

  When the lights come on at four

  At the end of another year?

  Give me your arm, old toad;

  Help me down Cemetery Road.

  A week or so later in ‘Sunny Prestatyn’ Larkin gave a new turn to the meditation on Platonic perfection of ‘The Large Cool Store’ and ‘Essential Beauty’. The image on the holiday poster depicts what Larkin calls on the ‘Listen’ recording ‘the universal symbol of happiness, a pretty girl’. Innocent though she is, however, she inevitably offers erotic invitation. Behind her a ‘hunk’ of coast and a hotel ‘with palms / Seemed to expand from her thighs and / Spread breast-lifting arms’. The ‘hunk’ and ‘palms’ hint, through crude sexual puns, at the male viewer wanting to get his hands on her thighs and breasts. And the sexual message has indeed hit home, as is shown by the response of the vandals, who make the subtext brutally explicit by giving her ‘Huge tits and a fissured crotch’. Larkin has been accused of misogynistic enjoyment of this degradation. On the ‘Listen’ record he acknowledges that ‘some people think’ the poem was intended to be ‘funny’, others that it is ‘horrific’. He, the poet, thinks it was ‘intended to be both’.28

  The vandals’ response is ambiguous. On one level they reinforce the satirical theme. They are not deceived by the advertiser’s trick. Like the feminists who object to airbrushed photographs, they know that real girls in real places do not have perfect teeth and may squint. But more crudely they simply lust after her:

  the space

  Between her legs held scrawls

  That set her fairly astride

  A tuberous cock and balls [. . .]

  However, there is more here than an impulse to rape. The cock and balls are ‘Autographed Titch Thomas’. This diminutive vandal seems ironically aware of his own sexual inadequacy. More sombre, even sinister, is the ferocity with which another anonymous vandal has ‘used a knife / Or something to stab right through / The moustached lips of her smile’. There is despair in this violence. The girl’s image taunts the vandals not only with beauty but also with happiness (‘her smile’). Their desecration may be seen as the thwarted expression of a yearning for perfection. It is a sad, self-hating impulse. Again, the poem is not satire or social analysis, but elegy. The perfect girl is ‘too good for this life’.

  The poem has complex genre associations. It is an ‘ekphrastic’ poem, a description of a work of visual art, albeit a stereotypical poster rather than an archetypal painting by Bruegel as in Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ and Berryman’s ‘Hunters in the Snow’. It is also an Eros-Thanatos elegy, juxtaposing sex and death in the contrasting posters with which it begins and ends. Its theme is a version of the ‘death and the maiden’ motif of Western art, the girl’s violated image recalling those medieval and Renaissance paintings in which amorous skeletons drag their buxom victims by the hair into yawning graves as they struggle to cover their modesty with a winding-sheet.29 Larkin’s version lacks the moralizing sexism of the traditional version. Instead, more simply and sadly, a vision of beauty is vicariously dismembered and subjected to the humiliation of disease. ‘Very soon, a great transverse tear / Left only a hand and some blue. / Now Fight Cancer is there.’ In the ‘Listen’ reading Larkin stammers momentarily at the word ‘cancer’.

  Larkin’s moods always ran to extremes, and three days after he completed ‘Sunny Prestatyn’ he experienced an exalted epiphany during one of his solitary cycle rides in the country. He wrote to Monica on 23 October that he had stopped at the small village of Wawne, to the north of Hull, where he had ‘poked about in the churchyard, turning up chestnuts in the grass, & noting George Beulah, who had outlived two wives before dying in 1909’:

  a woman called that if I was going into the church, wd I be careful to shut the door, as the heating was on. I hadn’t really intended to, but thought I would, as the heating was on! I was glad I did, because it was all decorated for Harvest Home! Really very thrilling, & funny, the lines of cabbages and cauliflowers, piles of tomatoes in little stone niches, a box of dates (!) on the harmonium, celery up the aisle, chrysanthemums everywhere, a big sheaf of corn, then on the table a bunch of black grapes, a pot of honey (home-made), and a loaf, specially baked I should say. I don’t think I have seen a church so decorated for years, and the shock of it was tremendous – of course I thought of you, although rabbits would be unlikely to take part in such a ceremony, or at least not in the way intended. You would have liked it. I left them a pound, and shut the door carefully – all I harvest is money, but they were welcome to some of that.30

  This glowing prose poem reads as an alternative version of ‘Church Going’. Omitting any reference to religion or belief, he responds emotionally to the ‘thrilling, & funny’ social ritual of Harvest Home. In contrast to the ironic Irish sixpence of ‘Church Going’, he gives a pound note, a very large sum in 1962: ‘all I harvest is money, but they were welcome to some of that’.

  The next poem Larkin completed, on 7 December 1962, has the bold title ‘Love’.31 Its epigrammatic tone and its structure owe much to Blake’s ‘The Clod and the Pebble’. With anti-intuitive logic the poet argues that the difficult part of love is ‘being selfish enough’ to upset an existence ‘Just for your own sake’. On the other hand unselfish love seems to him equally unacceptable: ‘Putting someone else first / So that you come off worst? / My life is for me.’ Nevertheless he concedes, ‘Love suits most of us.’ The speaker, who excludes himself from both ‘virtuous’ unselfish love and ‘vicious’ selfish love, is a social outcast:

  Only the bleeder found

  Selfish this wrong way round

  Is ever wholly rebuffed,

  And he can get stuffed.

  After this egotistical poem, he spent eight pages, as the year drew to an end, drafting a poem evoking the early life of his parents: ‘Increasingly I think of them as young.’ But he could not find his way beyond the second stanza. The next poem he completed, early in the New Year, was ‘Long Last’, a selfless meditation prompted by the death of one of his mother’s friends. Effacing his own personality, he tells the poignant story of an eighty-year-old woman left unable to cope when her younger sister dies. She is taken away in a van, her feeble ‘No’ disregarded:

  This long last childhood

  Nothing provides for.

  What can it do each day

  But hunt that imminent door

  Through which all that understood<
br />
  Has hidden away?

  This is the first glimpse in Larkin’s poetry of the subject of senility which he was to make peculiarly his own in ‘The Old Fools’ ten years later.

  His mother was now seventy-six. One of his Sunday letters to ‘My very dear old creature’, dated 16 December 1962, shows his consistent cheery, comforting tone: ‘Hasn’t it been windy! but what a relief to have it mild. I found my spirits soaring when I stepped out into the dark rushing rainy morning – it always cheers me up more than most people. When I went to London Tuesday–Wednesday it was beastly cold.’ As he describes recording a reading for radio, he slips affectionately into the Midland idiom which he and she shared when he was a child: ‘I didn’t stammer hardly at all, but I got into a mess by reading a singular as a plural: had to start again.’ He ceremoniously apologizes for having sent only one postcard during his two-day trip: ‘I’m sorry I didn’t after all send a card for Saturday – Friday was a tiresomely busy day & I had so much to do it just went out of my head. I hope you weren’t disappointed.’32

  Through February and March 1963 Larkin worked on ‘Dockery and Son’, the last-written poem to be included in The Whitsun Weddings, and the sixth of his ten great contemplative elegies. A year earlier, on 12 March 1962, he had attended the funeral in Oxford of Agnes Cuming, his predecessor as Librarian at Hull, and the following day had jotted the first two lines of the poem in his workbook. The occasion of his visit explains his punning description of himself as ‘Death-suited, visitant’. He is dressed in mourning black; but he is also ‘suited’, in the more general sense, for death. He is making a brief ‘visit’; but also he is a ghostly visitant, haunting his past life. The Dean casually mentions that the son of one of his college contemporaries is now in residence, and the poet recalls being disciplined as an undergraduate by a previous Dean. He tries ‘the door of where I used to live: // Locked’. The preferred location for a Larkin speaker is secure in his room, gazing out through closed windows at a skyscape (‘The piled gold clouds’) or a framed glimpse of the lives of others (‘someone running up to bowl’). Only in moments of greatest stress and self-dissatisfaction, in ‘Dry-Point’, ‘Reasons for Attendance’ and here in ‘Dockery and Son’, does he find himself outside, denied entry. Others, sons of Dockery and his like, are now living where he used to live. He cannot simply open the door and walk back into his youth. His response is irrational shock. As he emerges from the staircase ‘The lawn spreads dazzlingly wide.’ He feels exposed and vulnerable. ‘A known bell chimes,’ haunting him with recollections. It is only when he is safe in his railway carriage that his memories dwindle to a picturesque vista: ‘I catch my train, ignored. / Canal and clouds and colleges subside / Slowly from view.’ The brief trauma is over.

  During his return journey he reflects on the young man who now lives in his place. To be already an undergraduate, Dockery’s son must have been born in 1943. But he cannot even recall which of his dimly remembered contemporaries Dockery was. He dozes off, waking only at Sheffield, where ‘I changed [. . .]’, the omission of ‘trains’ giving the word a playfully ominous implication. Waiting for his connection he casually contemplates a suitable metaphor for these long perspectives:

  and walked along

  The platform to its end to see the ranged

  Joining and parting lines reflect a strong

  Unhindered moon.

  He is awed by Dockery’s confidence in starting a family so young. What Dockery saw as increase the poet sees as dilution. He philosophizes desultorily on the differences in their attitudes. After all, Dockery, he concludes, did not really know what he wanted and got it. Rather his and Dockery’s lives, with their different ‘Innate assumptions’, have both been determined by what happened to happen. Dockery has had a bash and now has a grown-up son. In contrast, the poet has ‘Nothing with all a son’s harsh patronage’. Even without a child to patronize him he cannot escape the humiliation of age. The poem ends with one of Larkin’s most splendidly lugubrious verdicts on life:

  Life is first boredom, then fear.

  Whether or not we use it, it goes,

  And leaves what something hidden from us chose,

  And age, and then the only end of age.

  Larkin felt that this poem marked a watershed in his life. He commented to Monica later: ‘I don’t think I shall ever get past “Dockery and Son”.’33 After completing it he set about putting the poems for his next volume in order, and on 11 June he sent The Whitsun Weddings to Faber. His reputation was now established and he received an acceptance after only two days, with the offer of an advance 50 per cent larger than usual. Then, at the end of June, he began an ambitious poem, ‘The Dance’, initially with the idea that it could be inserted at the last minute into the forthcoming collection. Ten years earlier, in ‘Reasons for Attendance’, he had declined to attend the dance of social engagement, attending instead to his art. Now, in 1963, three years into his relationship with Maeve, he attempted to argue himself into the opposite decision. It was Maeve who had taught him, literally, how to dance ‘in the privacy of his flat’.34 Could he now join her in the public dance of society? Even as he was debating marriage to Monica in his letters, he was debating marriage to Maeve in this poem. Had he completed it, it would have been a self-epithalamium, celebrating his marriage to the muse of his latest volume. The couple had reached the stage of tentative discussions about domestic arrangements: ‘You would have to give up work. It wouldn’t do for the wife of the Librarian to work.’35 He even acquired, without telling her, a copy of the Roman Catholic marriage service.36

  Larkin was at the crossroads of his life. Was he to submit to the customs and establishments of society: even to a church sacrament? Or was he to remain an existential vagrant? On the crudest level he needed to sort out his sex life. He had asked ingenuously in ‘Reasons for Attendance’, ‘what / Is sex?’ And the question was a real one for him. In a letter written to Monica on 17 August 1963, he discussed his desire for ‘unreal’ erotic images of her, rather than the ‘real’ woman:

  When you talk about hair under the arms and bare breasts and nipples and the like it makes me think of you in these respects and I get colossally excited, almost unreally really – well, really unreally, I suppose [. . .] It’s this mood that prompted the talk of Polaroid cameras – in one sense there’s nothing I’d like more than photographs of you in your private clothes, or in no clothes at all, but I can’t feel it’s right when it seems more exciting than the reality.37

  His ‘live imperfect eyes’ crave pure, ‘essential’ sex, rather than the woman herself. Years earlier he had explored with Amis and Hilly the possibility of pornographic photographs.38 A Polaroid Land camera was found among Larkin’s effects after Monica’s death.39 The photographs he took with it, however, have not survived.

  Byron accused Keats of ‘frigging his Imagination’ in his poems,40 and it is easy to detect a similar masturbatory impulse to that of ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ in such Larkin works as ‘Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album’ and ‘The Large Cool Store’. Larkin has the intense erotic idealism found in both aestheticist art and soft-core pornography. In an early letter to Conquest, of 10 March 1956, he writes: ‘So you’re a Harrison Marks man too, are you?’41 Marks specialized in photographs, sent under plain cover, of well-built ‘nudes’ in statuesque poses. He founded his magazine Kamera in 1957.42 But the erotic fantasies which Larkin feared might vitiate his ‘real’ love life covered a wider spectrum than this, from the tastefully aesthetic to titillating stocking-and-suspender hijinks and ‘real girls’ of the ‘readers’ wives’ genre. His fundamental instincts were, Conquest told Motion, ‘really very unchallenging. Perhaps a bit of spanking, that’s all, but nothing violent.’43 Jean Hartley was ‘neither stirred nor impressed’ by the samples he showed her to satisfy her curiosity, though she reflects that he might have shown her a ‘beginner’s selection’.44 In the 1960s Amis would avail himself of flats in London, hired by Conquest for the
purpose of casual sexual liaisons. Larkin’s tastes, however, were of a ‘more introversive, voyeuristic’ kind, and he never availed himself of this opportunity.45 For him a relationship with an actual woman would inevitably entail respect and commitment.

  In order to do the ‘right thing’ by marrying either Monica or Maeve, Philip would need to overcome not only the obstacle of his poetic vocation, but also its less culturally glamorous, if equally ‘glamorous’, shadow: the self-possession of bachelor auto-eroticism. Larkin’s porno­graphy collection is almost entirely lost. However, among his effects there survived a tattered manila envelope with the postmark 11 June 1959, sent to 32 Pearson Park from Harrison Marks’s premises in Kingston upon Thames.46 It contained thirty-one black and white photographs from nine different ‘sets’, possibly not all by Marks, nor of the same date. The nearest approach to ‘hard-core’ is a group of five images of a woman with huge breasts, her face turned anonymously away, perfunctorily ‘bound’ with tapes looped loosely around her curves. Ten of the images are from a set showing the model Sophia Dawn in striking poses.47 Some feature further well-built Marks-style nudes and others a half-dressed woman sitting or lying coquettishly on a bed. Three are from a set in which an older ‘headmistress’, in flowered frock and high heels, canes an equally implausible ‘schoolgirl’ in her twenties, wearing a gymslip, stockings, suspenders and high heels. It seems that Larkin kept part of his pornography collection in the sturdy plastic-covered eggshell-blue ring-binders circulated annually around the University to update Regulations and Procedures. They were lettered boldly on the spine ‘Staff Handbook’, a designation equally appropriate to their new use.48