Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  In 1963, Barbara Pym, with whom he had been corresponding since 1961, had suffered a rejection at the hands of her publisher, Jonathan Cape. The publisher’s readers, William Plomer and Daniel George, concluded that her seventh novel, An Unsuitable Attachment, would not sell enough copies to be commercially viable. Larkin praised the typescript and made some minor suggestions for improvement. She was as self-critical as he, and it was only after extensive rewriting that she sent it to Faber and Faber. Now, in August 1965, Larkin wrote twice to Charles Monteith at Faber, pressing him to accept it: ‘This is in the tradition of Jane Austen & Trollope, and I refuse to believe that no one wants its successors today. Why shd I have to choose between spy rubbish, science fiction rubbish, Negro-homosexual rubbish, or dope taking nervous-breakdown rubbish?’12 But his repeated ‘rubbish’ sounds strident. Larkin knew that the novels of Graham Greene, James Baldwin and Sylvia Plath were not rubbish. Indeed Pym herself was impressed by Baldwin’s writing, despite its difference from her own. Moreover Larkin seems in danger of selling Pym short, ignoring her subversive wit and depicting her in moralistic terms as a writer of dogged respectable conservatism: ‘I like to read about people who have done nothing spectacular, who aren’t beautiful or lucky, who try to behave well in the limited field of activity they command [. . .]’13 Unsurprisingly, Faber were not persuaded by his arguments. Pym’s next novel did not see print for fourteen years, and An Unsuitable Attachment appeared only after her death.

  Their friendship became warmer. From December 1963 onwards they addressed each other as ‘Barbara’ and ‘Philip’ rather than ‘Miss Pym’ and ‘Mr Larkin’. He offered her crucial support during the years of rejection which followed. As Hazel Holt writes, she ‘badly needed the sort of intelligent, perceptive and affectionate criticism and advice that he gave her. He also cheered her up by sending her lively, funny letters, which told her just the sort of ordinary, frivolous things she liked to know about people.’14 His letters to Pym are full of domestic practicalities, with an occasional self-conscious conservative, ‘English’ touch:

  I had a few quite pleasant days in Shropshire & Herefordshire, looking at eccentric decaying churches, then to Salcombe for a week, which I didn’t really care for [. . .] I was consoled slightly by passing Michael Cantuar15 in a narrow lane one day. I finished with a visit to some friends who now have a ‘country’ house near Newbury: he is turning into a farmer, & most of the meals came out of a ‘deep freeze’ [. . .] The meat was fantastically tough, like some sort of well-tested plastic floor covering.

  He entertains her with details of his University routines: ‘On Tuesday I have to address the freshers on “Books” (“How to Kill, Skin & Stuff Them”).’16

  Larkin remained a champion of Pym’s work, appreciating her ‘gay, confident gift’ for subtle verbal comedy and her ‘ironic perception of life’s absurdities’, tempered by ‘a keen awareness of its ability to bruise’.17 But he was not an uncritical admirer. In 1966 he wrote to Monica of Jane and Prudence: ‘there is a sort of woman’s magazine quality there – a kind of cosyness – surely the best novels aren’t cosy – reassuring, perhaps, but in BP all characters seem potbound, nobody’s ever going to do anything, Harry isn’t going to screw Wilmet, Prudence isn’t really having an affair with Fabian, do you think, even, that Piers buggers Keith?’18 Larkin puts his finger here on an element of Pym’s writing that causes problems even for her greatest admirers. As her first love and lifelong friend Henry Harvey commented: ‘She was without sensuality. Her passions, in so far as they were not kept back to being pretend play passions, stayed in her head and heart.’19

  A larger opportunity for Larkin to make his mark on the culture of the age came in January 1966 when, following Louis MacNeice’s sudden death, Oxford University Press invited him to take over as editor of the new Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Andrew Motion expresses surprise at his acceptance of this task, since it ‘involved a great deal of work which he, an efficient but a lazy man, was bound to resent’.20 This is a puzzling comment. Laziness was not one of Larkin’s qualities. He saw his task of updating Yeats’s 1936 volume as one of restoring balance to the canon, requesting a change in title to The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse, dissociating it from the ‘modern poetry’ of Yeats’s volume. He wrote to Dan Davin of OUP: ‘I am interested in the Georgians, and how far they represented an “English tradition” that was submerged by the double impact of the Great War and the Irish-American-continental properties of Yeats and Eliot.’21 He intended, he said, to select good poems rather than deferring to the big names. His programme sounds persuasive, and not overly polemical or subjective. But he felt defensive and insecure, fearing that he would caricature himself as a philistine traditionalist.

  Closer to home, Larkin found he needed to exert retrospective control over his own early oeuvre. In April 1965 R. A. Caton’s Fortune Press capitalized on the success of The Whitsun Weddings by producing an unauthorized edition of The North Ship. The Society of Authors advised Larkin that, since there was no formal contract for the original publication, he could best reclaim his copyright by authorizing a new edition from Faber. Faber pressed him to include other early poems in a new larger collection. But he resisted a retrospective revision of his career, adding only the single key transitional poem ‘Waiting for breakfast, while she brushed her hair’. His Introduction is self-deprecating. But reading between the lines it is clear that he had a higher regard for his first volume than he generally admitted. In late 1965, after rereading the poems, he wrote to his mother: ‘I had a sneaking feeling that some of them weren’t bad.’22 The new edition was published on 15 September 1966, and Caton was forced to withdraw the Fortune Press copies from sale.

  Meanwhile Larkin continued to perform the tasks of a full-time University librarian. Stage 2 of the Library rebuilding did not offer him the same satisfaction as Stage 1. A huge tower was built over the airy daylit undergraduate reading room which had been so attractive a feature of the original ‘New Library’. Staff who had been involved in the move of 1959 insisted on terming the new Stage merely ‘the extension’. The North Wing of Stage 2 was completed in March 1967, at which time the Library was renamed the Brynmor Jones Library after the Vice-Chancellor of the University from 1956 to 1972. Brynmor Jones and Larkin were pioneers in creating the first new post-war British university library, and their professional relationship was good. However, they had little in common. Larkin wrote jocularly in a letter to Monica: ‘BJ’s the man in charge, / He shouldn’t be at large, / I’m butter, he’s marge.’23 After Larkin’s death Sir Brynmor told Andrew Motion: ‘people who have written about him have made too much of his poems and not enough of him as a librarian’.24

  The tension between his relationships with Monica and Maeve continued throughout the decade and into the next. On 23 July 1964 Philip wrote to Maeve with arch suggestiveness: ‘Writing in bed ought to be easiest . . . It’s just midnight & I am scribbling a note to you because if I don’t heaven knows when I shall [. . .] I go up to Hexham tomorrow as you know [. . .] I shall hope to be agreeable to Monica & not make the visit a disappointment, but one can never be sure how one will behave.’25 He felt no qualm about casually referring to ‘Talking in Bed’, a poem intimately associated with Monica.26 The compartments of his love life remained securely separate. He even jokingly suggested that Maeve should write an article for the Times Literary Supplement: ‘“Writing in Bed”! The life & letters of Maeve Brennan’. A few days later, on 5 August, he wrote to Monica in tones of relaxed, rather gross eroticism: ‘I was terribly hot last night. I lay thinking how nice it would be to have you beside (or under!) me, & not to be drunk, or tired, or watching the clock, just gathering your great smooth hips under me & shoving into you as I felt inclined. How rarely this has happened!’27

  In a letter to Monica of 14 September 1964 he represented his affair with Maeve as in its last throes: ‘We are quite friendly & have to see each other daily – the real breach & dismay is yet
to come, I feel. And I suppose it will come.’ But Monica did not believe him and felt deeply hurt. She wrote with passionate and probably inebriated sarcasm in the margin of this letter: ‘Note the style, the irony of style, & no intention of doing anything like what is said – perhaps style indicates.’ Running out of space she continued in a different margin: ‘& both of you had my sympathy – what a good giggle for both of you too, later. I was terribly upset for both of you while you were giggling together.’ An asterisk directs the reader to the bottom of the page, where she added: ‘I learned a good deal more later.’28 Ten months later, on 20 July 1965, he was still making ineffectual apologies:

  I feel that as long as I was faithful, you could somehow accept the un­satisfactoriness of our relation – we might not be married legally, but we were different and perhaps superior – at least your sacrifice of yourself to me was superior to frogmarching me or anyone to the altar rails. But when I am unfaithful – not technically but spiritually – you can only feel duped and made light of, quite apart from the awful upsetting emotion [. . .]29

  He knew, however, that Monica gave the literary imperatives which governed his life a respect beyond Maeve’s comprehension. Monica’s humility was painful. ‘Dear,’ she told him apologetically, ‘you have to put up with someone who will never distinguish herself.’30

  Appropriately enough his abandonment of ‘The Dance’ had happened to coincide with the end of his sixth workbook. On 14 July 1964 he wrote glumly to Barbara Pym: ‘poetry has deserted me’.31 When it returned it took a new form, very different from the social commentary characteristic of his Whitsun Weddings period. He wrote in the centre of the first page of his seventh workbook: ‘Never write anything because you think it’s true, only because you think it’s beautiful.’32 He could not have said this to Monica Jones, nor to Amis.

  He was returning to his aestheticist roots. The first work in the new book, ‘Solar’, completed six months after the abandonment of ‘The Dance’ on 4 November,33 is the most austerely impersonal poem in his oeuvre. Larkin remarked in an interview: ‘some of my favourite poems have not rhymed or had any metre’, and ‘Solar’ is the most severely rhymeless of his works.34 One might perhaps recall Milton’s rejection of ‘the jingling sound of like endings’ as inappropriate in a serious religious poem. For, though the title implies godless scientific objectivity, ‘Solar’ is a pagan incantation: a hymn to the sun. Source of all life, the sun gives without limit, making no emotional demands, and taking no sentimental interest in human affairs. It pours ‘unrecompensed’. These are the materialist perspectives of Lucretius, Housman and Hardy. Nevertheless the tone is one of exalted spirituality, and the poem’s spare staccato imagism distils an intense metaphorical concentration. The twenty-one lines are packed with the metaphors through which humanity seeks to accommodate its understanding to this awesome force. The sun, in an ‘unfurnished’ sky, has a lion’s face. It is a stalkless flower with a ‘petalled head of flames’. Heat, in an extraordinary synaesthesia, is an ‘echo’ of its gold colour. It is ‘coined’ among horizontals. It uncloses ‘like a hand’. Our needs, recalling Jacob’s ladder in Genesis, ascend to it ‘like angels’. The form, three stanzas each of seven lines, may perhaps hint at arcane numerology. Three and seven have since antiquity been regarded as numbers of mysterious significance. To be comprehensive Larkin’s oeuvre needed to include a prayer, and this was the point in his life when the form was most appropriate to his situation. He was, however, disappointed that he could not make this key poem as large and monumental as its theme demanded. He told Monica: ‘it’s the sort of thing anyone could write, and indeed it ought to be much longer & deeper & altogether better’.35

  Nineteen-sixty-four saw a definitive shift in Larkin’s work. At this point the hitherto dominant theme of marriage disappears for ever, except in retrospect. Whatever the future contortions of his love life, the pros and cons of his own commitment to a woman cease to be a concern in his poetry. The themes of ageing and death come to the fore. His style begins slowly to harden, while at the same time it develops ever more surprising and ingenious rhetorical strategies. The gestures of comedy, bitterness and yearning of his earlier work are reprised in new mannered forms and abrupt mixtures. And an acute, unacknowledged contradiction develops between his public image and his poems. Acting up to the version of himself reflected by such correspondents as Monica Jones, Amis and Conquest, he appears in interviews and essays as a reductive, plain-spoken traditionalist. His poetry, however, becomes ever more self-ironic and elusive. The hard-won poems of the next five years are rich in literary allusion: elliptical, symbolist, sometimes even difficult.

  In a characteristic swing of the pendulum his next completed poem after ‘Solar’, ‘Ape Experiment Room’, originally titled ‘Laboratory Monkeys’ (24 February 1965),36 is a poem of anti-vivisectionist propaganda. (He was to leave half his estate, ultimately, to the RSPCA.) Forgetting his guiding principle of not making poetry ‘do things’, he writes with shallow ideological indignation, attacking the animal experimenter: ‘a Ph.D. with a beard / And nympho wife who —’.37 The caricature is loose, and mention of the beard shows nothing more than topical prejudice. As if aware of this the speaker stops before he gets into his stride. Larkin did not publish the poem, perhaps conscious that he had forced his inspiration. The real poet is however glimpsed in the chilling incongruity between the animal’s ‘eared / Head like a grave nut’ on the one hand and the lights and sterilizers of the white rooms in which it is ‘buried’ on the other. Its apparently human gesture of ‘the arms folded round’ is no sentimental anthropomorphism. This enigmatic body language has a simian not a human meaning.

  The first drafts of what was to become ‘High Windows’ followed, at the bottom of one page of which Larkin dashed off under the date ‘3.3.65’ a quatrain titled first ‘Time & Motion Study’ then ‘Staff Management’, and finally ‘Administration’. An office manager notes the strengths and weaknesses of his staff: ‘Who deserves a smile, and who a frown’. Then with candid political incorrectness he observes that the girls you have to tell ‘to pull their socks up / Are those whose pants you’d most like to pull down’. He did not publish the poem, and such feelings did not spill over into his actual behaviour. One member of staff who worked in the Library in the early 1970s commented: ‘He never ogled the girls unlike some of the academic staff [. . .] He did like big busts, preferably with a pretty face above, but not in a creepy fashion.’38

  He abandoned work on ‘High Windows’ for the time being and on 24 November 1965, more than a year later than ‘Solar’, completed ‘How Distant’. Its theme is historical: the emigration of young men at the start of the century, keen to get away from ‘married villages’ and make a new life elsewhere. From on board they watch the ‘fraying cliffs of water’ and the ‘differently-swung stars’, or they glimpse a girl doing her laundry in the steerage:

  This is being young,

  Assumption of the startled century

  Like new store clothes,

  The huge decisions printed out by feet

  Inventing where they tread,

  The random windows conjuring a street.

  At this point in their lives all is incipient opportunity; impressions have not yet hardened into habit. The poem evokes a detached distance between the present and the beginning of the century. But echoes of ‘Single to Belfast’ and ‘Arrivals, Departures’ suggest that Larkin is also thinking of a more personal distance. The poem is a fictionalized remin­iscence of his own emigration to Belfast fifteen years earlier.

  The sonnet ‘Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel’, completed six months later on 20 May 1966, also has a personal subtext. Its evocation of life at the terminus revisits ‘Here’ five years on, in tones which point the way towards his ‘late’ style. The atmosphere of the Royal Hotel in Hull, a frequent venue for meetings with Maeve, is still today much as evoked in the poem.39 But realist description is merely the starting point for an elaborate m
etaphor. In ‘Here’ the reader was transported across country to an epiphany of unfenced existence. In ‘Friday Night’ he or she is exiled in the stasis of a waiting room. The rhetoric is playfully surreal. ‘Light spreads darkly downwards’ like a thick liquid. The personified chairs ‘face each other’ in sinister confrontation. Reality is defamiliarized by a grammar which subordinates material things (chairs, doors, knives, glasses, carpet) to abstractions (light, loneliness, silence). The dining room elaborately ‘declares / A larger loneliness of knives and glass’, and the overextended ‘octave’ of nine lines (a ‘nonave’?) ends on a note of orotund vacuity: