Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  The influx of a new generation of academic colleagues added to his sense of embattlement and alienation. When I arrived in the Hull English Department in 1968, having picked my way through a sit-down protest on the way to the interview, there were so many newly appointed lecturers that a special welcoming dinner was held in a packed staff refectory. The same ritual was necessary the following year. I soon discovered that one of my colleagues in the English Department was a charismatic apologist for Stalin’s purges. Towards the end of the year Larkin wrote to Monica:

  a nasty little maths lecturer called Jarvis who sells treasonable literature in the street has been in hospital after selling it in ‘The Grapes’ in Clough Road: a man [. . .] asked him (Jarvis) if he remembered him telling him to ‘shove his Newsletters up his arse’ last week? Jarvis said he didn’t. The chap waited outside & beat him up. There’s a man to admire! While we sit with our cigarettes & our attitudes, here’s a sincere & conscientious man who puts aside comfort & pleasure & does something about it [. . .] Doesn’t it warm your heart? Just what the medico commanded.11

  Larkin’s relish for this brutality is distinctly unpleasant. He enclosed a cutting from the student magazine Torchlight in which Trevor Jarvis described being kicked several times in the face: ‘I was taken to the Hospital where I had two stitches in my forehead and I couldn’t open my mouth and one eye for two days.’12

  Larkin’s relationships with his academic colleagues were formal and professional. In the 1950s and early 1960s several distinguished scholars had worked in the English Department. Richard Hoggart, Malcolm Bradbury, Barbara Everett and Rosemary Woolf all taught in Hull before moving on elsewhere. In 1959 Brian Cox, who had arrived shortly before Larkin, founded the influential Leavisite literary magazine Critical Quarterly, together with his former student friend A. E. Dyson, the pioneering campaigner for homosexual rights, who was at Bangor. The magazine became central to the development of English Studies, publishing the criticism of Raymond Williams, Frank Kermode and David Lodge, and the poetry of Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn and Sylvia Plath. During the 1960s Larkin gave Cox’s magazine a number of poems which focused on contemporary social mores: ‘A Study of Reading Habits’ (1960), ‘Breadfruit’ (1961), ‘Love’ (1966) and ‘High Windows’ (1968).13

  Cox, who moved to a Chair at Manchester in 1966, saw the 1968 student unrest as the symptom of mistaken educational theory, and conceived the idea of publishing ‘Black Papers’ on education attacking the ‘White Papers’ in which government policy was published. Eventually five appeared, attacking the excesses of ‘progressive education’ and the introduction of 11–18 ‘comprehensive’ education, which was replacing the socially divisive system of ‘grammar’ and ‘secondary modern’ schools. The Black Paper contributors deplored what they saw as a collapse of intellectual rigour resulting from the headlong expansion of the university sector. Kingsley Amis, a prominent contributor, was loud in disapproval of new university courses in Sociology and associated subjects, which he saw as cover for Marxist subversion. Uninhibited by the fact that he had failed his BLitt at Oxford, he deplored declining standards. His epigrammatic summary of the state of Higher Education, coined in 1961, was: ‘more will mean worse’.14

  Following the stir caused by the first Black Paper, Fight for Education, Larkin was persuaded to lend his celebrity to the second, Crisis in Education, published in March 1969. His contribution was a snappy trochaic quatrain, set out on the page in octameters instead of tetrameters to form an uncouth, loping couplet:

  When the Russian tanks roll westward, what defence for you and me?

  Colonel Sloman’s Essex Rifles? The Light Horse of L.S.E.?

  Albert Sloman was Vice-Chancellor of Essex University, then a hotbed of radicalism, while students at the London School of Economics routinely disrupted meetings addressed by right-wing speakers. The implication of Larkin’s lines is that the fellow-travelling radicals of the British education system will offer scant defence against the Red Army’s advance across Europe.

  But Larkin was not writing as one who had seriously considered education policy, any more than ‘Breadfruit’ or ‘High Windows’ embodied the Leavisite moral earnestness of Critical Quarterly. A more personal insecurity lies behind his public attitudes at this time. Students, for instance, unsettled him on a more primitive level than ideology. As he wrote to Cox in October 1968: ‘Tomorrow I have to address the freshers [. . .] and feel as usual scared of it.’15 This annual public exposure was an ordeal. And there is a tone of abject exhaustion in his comment to Pym a fortnight later: ‘Wretched term has started again, & the place is full of replicas of Che Guevara & John Lennon, muttering away and plotting treason. How wearisome it all is! I wish I didn’t have to work so hard: every day, all day . . . and about two evenings a week are snatched into the maw as well. How do you find time to write?’ Characteristically, he had found time, despite everything, to read a draft of Pym’s latest novel, The Sweet Dove Died, and in the same letter offered dispassionate and useful advice.16

  But the dominant tone of his letters at this time is of a man overworked and at the end of his tether. He let loose in a letter to Monica of 27 November 1968:

  Dearest bun,

  Morning, noon & bloody night,

  Seven sodding days a week,

  I slave at filthy work, that might

  Be done by any book-drunk freak.

  This goes on till I kick the bucket:

  FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT

  Nice to be a pawet, ya knaw, an express ya feelins. Eh? The last line should be screamed in a paroxysm of rage.17

  His personal unhappiness increasingly displaced itself in shallow political rant. His verdict on the Wilson government in a letter to Amis was intemperate: ‘Fuck the whole lot of them, I say, the decimal-loving, nigger-mad, army-cutting, abortion-promoting, murderer-pardoning, daylight-hating ponces, to hell with them, the worst government I can remember.’18 It is difficult to believe that he was genuinely agitated about the decimalization of the currency or the adjustment of clocks to British Summer Time. In a letter to Monica of 3 March 1968 he broke off from such complaints to exclaim: ‘But isn’t it an angry time – how easily one gets cross, how when left to oneself irritation begins to ferment like some neglected juice! [. . .] Only drink releases me from this bondage.’19

  Inwardly Larkin may have shared the desperation of Guy the Gorilla in London Zoo, two photographs of whom he kept on his desk at work, but he remained all the while a highly professional university librarian. Trevor Jarvis recalls that the local Association of University Teachers always found him constructive in negotiation and scrupulous in carrying out agreed policy, unlike some other members of Hull University’s management.20 Larkin’s relations with John Saville, then Senior Lecturer in Economic History at Hull, whose promotion to professor was allegedly held back because of his radical views, show how complex Larkin’s politics really were. As the University’s Librarian, he gave Saville every assistance in what he jokingly called his ‘seditious’ projects, building up the Library’s Archive of Labour History into an essential reference collection. In particular he supported Saville’s acquisition of the early archive of the National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty) and the papers of the political cartoonist ‘Vicky’ (Victor Weisz). He was also instrumental in the acquisition of papers concerned with Jock Haston (1913–86), a Trotskyist merchant seaman who contested a seat in Parliament in the 1945 election as a member of the short-lived Revolutionary Communist Party.21 Larkin would occasionally lunch with Saville and they would share their passion for jazz. After his death Saville commented that he was ‘an efficient librarian who really knew what he was about [. . .] his very conservative politics did not confuse his role as a librarian [. . .] I mourn him still.’22

  Nevertheless during the angry time of 1968–9 Larkin came closer than before to becoming the conservative caricature he frequently impersonated. He wrote to Monica on 7 February 1968:

  Listening to My
Word over supper23 I heard them cite a bit of Ver’s song from LLLost, & this sent me tumbling to the bookcase for my New Temple – aren’t the 2 songs lovely together! My eyes fill with tears [. . .] ‘When turtles tread, and rooks, and daws, And maidens bleach their summer smocks’ – oh darling! I can hardly write for tears, & only you can share it with me. Isn’t it marvellous for there to be Shakespeare, & for him to be English! Or for us to be English!

  It is dispiriting to see his spontaneous sense of the beauty of the poetry being reduced to a narrow defensive nationalism: ‘only you can share it with me’. He congratulates Monica on not being ‘a Czech, ceaselessly grumbling’, and himself on not being ‘a Yank, writing a thesis on water-imagery in Ezra Pound’.24 But later in the same letter his reflection on literary nationality grows more complex. He describes being shown round the Oxford University Press Printers and seeing ‘a queer thing called Dictionary for Advanced Readers of English – “What’s that,” I said. “Oh, that’s a dictionary for ‘emergent nations’,” he said, giving the inverted commas.’ The reprints, Larkin was told, were never fewer than a quarter of a million, most of which went to Africa. He was moved: ‘I must confess I felt touched to think of them all winging their way there. Troops out, books in. I don’t know.’25 The diffident phrasing (‘I must confess’, ‘I don’t know’) deflects any possible explosion to the right by Monica against this soft liberalism.

  On 30 June 1968 he described ‘Posterity’ to her:

  It gets in Yanks, Yids, wives, kids, Coca Cola, Protest, & the Theatre – pretty good list of hates, eh? I long to write a political poem – the withdrawal of troops east of Suez started me, now I see someone boasting that in a few years’ time we shall be spending ‘more on Education than “Defence”’ – this shocks me to the core, & I seriously feel that within our lifetime we shall see England under the heel of the conqueror – or what used to be England, but is now a bunch of bearded layabout traitors & National Assistant ‘Black Englishmen’ – if I had the courage I wd emigrate – terrible –26

  Several months later, in January 1969, he completed his only substantial poem directly concerned with topical politics, ‘Homage to a Government’. He was more than usually hesitant about this particular poem, though he did send it to the Sunday Times: ‘if they print it I’ll say why it fails. But they may send it back. Probably the kindest thing.’27 It appeared on 19 January. His motive was fundamentally literary. Determined to explore every available form and genre at some point in his career, he intended this deliberately as ‘a political poem’. The topic he chose, the withdrawal of British troops from the outpost of Aden on the Persian Gulf, was indeed a promising one for a right-wing polemicist. The Labour government stood accused of bungling the troop withdrawal because of its ideological commitment to pell-mell ‘decolonization’ at all costs.28 It was also alleged that domestic finance played a greater role in the decision than foreign policy, a sore point in view of the current union agitation for higher pay.

  Larkin made a poem out of this situation, not by forthright satire, as in the Black Paper epigram. Instead he aimed to rouse the reader’s moral indignation through Swiftian indirection, adopting the faux naïf persona of an honest citizen attempting to justify to himself the corrupt motives of his government:

  Next year we are to bring the soldiers home

  For lack of money, and it is all right.

  Places they guarded, or kept orderly,

  Must guard themselves, and keep themselves orderly.

  We want the money for ourselves at home

  Instead of working. And this is all right.

  The repetition ‘it/this is all right’ conveys the speaker’s lack of conviction, while the rhyme scheme, abccab, listlessly repeats exactly the same words in each stanza (‘home, right, orderly, orderly, home, right’, etc.). As a dramatization of disillusion this is effective. But the tone is insecure. Is the persona meant to be genuinely naive, or is he speaking with heavy irony? Sarcasm certainly breaks the surface in the crude point-scoring phrase ‘Instead of working’, which seems interpolated from a more vigorously polemical poem.

  The poem’s attitude towards the specific military incident which had brought Aden into the news is also problematic. Opinion had been polarized by Lieutenant Colonel Colin Campbell Mitchell, ‘Mad Mitch’, who in 1967 led the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in re­occupying a district of Aden taken over by local nationalists in anticipation of the troop withdrawal. To many at the time the bloodshed of what was dubbed by the press ‘the Last Battle of the British Empire’ seemed gratuitous. The Labour MP Tam Dalyell asked in Parliament whether Mitchell had ‘disobeyed operational and administrative orders of his senior officers’,29 and Mitchell’s men were accused of brutality. Larkin’s reference to this scandal in the poem is oddly oblique and mild. He concedes to his left-wing readers that ‘from what we hear / The soldiers there only made trouble happen’. If the satire is to work effectively the phrase ‘from what we hear’ should strike the reader with heavy irony (‘from what we hear from communist subversives’). But it does not. Indeed the tone seems to imply real doubt. Larkin’s poetic integrity prevents him from simplifying the situation. He could not stop himself exploding (or at least fizzling momentarily) ‘to the left’.

  Crucially the poem fails to address the larger issue of imperialism itself, though this is central to its ideological context. Larkin’s new-found interest in the British Empire fails to convince. He had shown not the slightest interest in the decolonization of Africa and the Middle East during the previous decades. Harold Macmillan’s ‘Wind of Change’ had passed him by. ‘You know I don’t care at all for politics, intelligently.’30 He quickly realized that this was not, after all, a ‘political poem’ in any true sense of the phrase. In a later interview, he clumsily denied that he had intended to take a political stand at all: ‘Well, that’s really history rather than politics [. . .] I don’t mind troops being brought home if we’d decided this was the best thing all round, but to bring them home simply because we couldn’t afford to keep them there seemed a dreadful humiliation.’31 He does not mention the poem’s allegation that the withdrawal served to line the pockets of workshy strikers. He was uneasily aware that decolonization was considered ‘the best thing all round’ by politicians of the right as well as the left. And as Blake Morrison comments: ‘financial motives are as involved in the posting of troops to colonies as they are in the withdrawal of them’.32 In everyday life, however, Larkin was less circumspect, acting out the stereotype of a Tory loyalist. When Mitchell later headed a national campaign against the dissolution of his regiment, Larkin’s car sported a ‘Save the Argylls’ bumper sticker.33

  His attempt to unite his University and poetic roles by involvement with the Compton Lectureship in poetry brought him disappointment of a more personal kind. In 1968 he was co-opted on to the Arts Council committee administering a bequest by the philanthropist Joseph Compton. He proposed that some of the money be used to set up a fellowship, installing a writer in a university for a year. He hoped that students and staff from across the disciplines would take advantage of this opportunity: ‘both music and poetry tend to be thought of in terms of the departments that teach them [. . .] This seems to me quite wrong. Both are forms of art, and art is universal, not simply a subject to be taught.’34 His proposal of Hull as a suitable place for the Fellowship was accepted. He had recently inaugurated a ‘Poetry Room’ in the Library, complete with records and audio-tapes. He approached Betjeman as a possible first Fellow, but he declined. His next choice, Cecil Day-Lewis, accepted, and gave his inaugural lecture on 17 January 1969. The arrangement was for Day-Lewis to be available for consultation in the University once a fortnight, and to deliver a lecture once a term. Larkin congratulated himself on his coup when Day-Lewis was appointed Poet Laureate late in 1968, shortly before taking up the Fellowship. However the literary politics of the time were not propitious. The generation gap was too wide and students were apathetic towar
ds such official initiatives. Moreover, Day-Lewis was not a charismatic personality, and his poetic reputation was fading (Larkin himself called his poetry ‘harshit’, horse-shit).35 On the first day Day-Lewis and Larkin waited, but no one came. His subsequent visits to the University were only slightly more successful. The Fellowship was continued over the following four years. Richard Murphy, Peter Porter, Ian Hamilton and Douglas Dunn all served as Compton Fellows. But the initiative met with only modest success. The paper concerning the Fellowship which Larkin delivered later at a meeting of SCONUL was entitled, with litotes, ‘A Faint Sense of Failure’.36

  Early in 1969, as if to confirm the loss of his youth, he heard that he was to be awarded an Honorary DLitt by Queen’s University Belfast, which he had left fourteen years earlier. His supposed Orange sympathies did not extend to admiration for Loyalist politicians, and he hoped that the ceremony would not ‘involve writing an ode to the Reverend Ian Paisley’. He could not, however, resist penning a suit­able quatrain:

  See the Pope of Ulster stand,

  Spiked shillelagh in each hand,

  Vowing to uphold the Border,

  Father, Son, and Orange Order.

  He added: ‘I had better make sure of getting my Doctorate first.’37

  The established routines of his life continued. In August he snatched a week’s holiday in Norwich with his mother in ‘marvellous weather’, followed by a touring holiday in Ireland with Monica in his new car, an ‘enormous 4-litre Vanden Plas Princess, with a Rolls Royce engine . . . 2nd, or even 3rd, hand’. It was ‘love at first sight’, he told Barbara Pym.38 He wrote to Maeve about the number of Brennans they had encountered, including one Maeve Brennan: ‘I can’t forget you, even if I had any inclination to, which I haven’t. Accept a big kiss and some spectral maulings – are you wearing tights? Or stockings?’39 Stage 2 of the new Library building had been opened in spring 1969, and he took pride in the imposing seven-storey tower which won awards from the Civic Trust and the Royal Institute of British Architects.40 However, by the beginning of the academic year in autumn 1969, he already felt displaced within it: ‘There are so many new members of staff that I feel like a stranger in my own building.’ He was relying increasingly on Betty Mackereth, who had now been his secretary for twelve years. As he told his mother in October 1969: ‘My mainstay is Betty: boundless energy, always cheerful & tolerant, and if she doesn’t do half my work she sort of chews it up to make it easier for me to swallow. I’d be lost without her.’41 Betty had learned to cope with his volatile moods. One morning she might receive a phone call shortly after nine in the accent of a Yorkshire pub landlord: ‘We’ve got a geezer ’ere. Been under t’table all night, dead to t’world. And ’e says ’is name’s Philip Larkin.’ On another day he would sit at his desk staring at nothing, and she would flit silently in and out to collect the necessary papers.42