Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  Increasingly deaf, overworked and alienated, Larkin was being pushed to the side of his own professional life. His response was to engineer an escape from Hull, if only a temporary one. Since early 1966 he had been giving occasional attention to his OUP Twentieth-Century Verse anthology. He could now reasonably request leave in Oxford, where he would have access to the Bodleian copyright Library and could finish work on the project. He wrote to Barbara Pym on 3 February 1970:

  I am hoping to go to All Souls for 6 months in the autumn – a ‘Visiting Fellow’. I went there recently: it’s rather like an academic nursing-home. ‘We don’t want you to have any worries while you’re here.’ My excuse is to finish off this wretched Oxford Book – or let it finish me off. I have dreams of reliving my youth – of doing all the things I never did – going to Bach choir concerts – the Playhouse – having coffee at Elliston’s – walking to those places I’ve never seen, like Bagley Wood & all that Scholar-(Gipsy/Gypsy) jazz. Bet I don’t.43

  It was indeed, to a large extent, an ‘excuse’. Looking at his final selection of poems, it is difficult to believe that the major poets would have been any differently represented had he not spent this time in the Bodleian, though it did provide him with a number of less well-known works. Most importantly the Fellowship took him away from the stresses of Hull and its Library.

  He spent the winter and spring terms of 1970–1 in Oxford. The historian A. L. Rowse told Motion that, on his arrival, Larkin seemed to be ‘Falling over backwards to be philistine’ and was an alarmingly heavy drinker.44 His expectation of an escapist idyll was more or less fulfilled: ‘I did experience a remarkable return to youth – I bought a college scarf [. . .] and nearly bought a pipe, but reason remounted her throne in time. I tried to do all the things I said I would, like watch the OURFC,45 and go to the theatre & the Bach choir, but this collapsed after a while: the theatre was just as boring as ever, and I never got as far as the Bach Choir.’46 He lived at Beechwood House in the village of Iffley, south of Oxford, though he frequently spent weekends with his mother and Monica in Loughborough and Leicester. In the fine weather of the first months of his stay he would walk into Oxford along the Thames towpath and spend the morning on the fourth floor of the New Library. After lunch in the King’s Arms he would move to the Upper Reading Room, where he would be provided with xeroxes of poems which had caught his attention earlier in the day. After tea in college he would return to Beechwood, often along the towpath again. He would then drive back into college for dinner. He continued his work through the winter. It was not until November that Maeve visited him for a weekend; he searched out a suitable Catholic church for her to worship at. After spending Christmas with his mother he returned to Oxford on 14 January 1971, and shortly afterwards he showed his selection to Anthony Thwaite, who had earlier drawn up a helpful list of ‘musts, probables and possibles’. Larkin took little notice of his recommendations.47 The anthology was submitted to the publisher in early spring, allowing time for negotiation and revisions.

  In 1966 Larkin had reassured Dan Davin at Oxford University Press that ‘it is none of the business of an Oxford book of this character to be eccentric’.48 Both he and Davin were concerned to avoid the perversity of Yeats’s notorious 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935, which began with an invented vers libre ‘poem’ by Walter Pater, omitted Wilfred Owen on the empty pretext that ‘passive suffering is not a theme for poetry’, and devoted many pages to Yeats’s personal friends, Oliver St John Gogarty (‘one of the great lyric poets of the age’), AE, Lady Gregory, Walter James Turner, Shri Purohit Swami and Yeats’s lover at the time, Margot Ruddock.49 A measure of Yeats’s and Larkin’s different editorial intentions is the contrast between their prefatory comments. Yeats’s lengthy idiosyncratic Introduction surveys the literary scene and makes magisterial judgements. Larkin confines himself to a Preface of little over a page, in which he sets out his principles of selection in a businesslike tone. Whatever reservations there might be about Larkin’s anthology it is at least free of Yeats’s shameless egocentricity and partisanship.

  In 1966, at the beginning of the project, Larkin had written to Monica, ‘the book would be half Hardy if I had my way’.50 It is intriguing therefore that, in an interview after publication, Anthony Thwaite could query the fact that Hardy and Auden had been given only twenty-four pages each, while Eliot had twenty-nine. Larkin was defensive, taking his interviewer half-heartedly to task for ‘counting pages’: ‘I thought I had given the maximum representation to Hardy: he certainly got more poems than anyone else. You must remember that some people write longer poems than others.’51 Larkin was right to point out that mere counting exercises are suspect; but they are inevitable if any analysis is to be done. Numbers of lines perhaps provide a more objective comparative measure than either Thwaite’s number of pages or Larkin’s number of poems. A count of lines yields some surprises. In what cannot but appear as a deliberate policy Larkin allocates almost equal proportions of lines to the ‘traditional’ Hardy (699 lines, twenty-seven poems), and the ‘modern’ Yeats (684 lines, nineteen poems). But their sections are dwarfed by that of Eliot, who has 1,047 lines (nine poems). This is by far the largest allocation of lines to any poet in the volume, and contradicts the idea that Larkin is pursuing an anti-modernist programme.52 Larkin’s Eliot selection is indeed slightly more ‘modernist’ than Yeats’s, including ‘Prufrock’ and ‘The Waste Land’, which Yeats excluded. Larkin omits the other high modernists, Pound and Stevens, as American. But Wyndham Lewis is represented by the 104 lines of ‘The Song of the Militant Romance’ (no. 178), a raucous call for the revitalization of English poetry in baggy free verse. ‘I am the master of all that is half-uttered and imperfectly heard. / Return with me where I am crying out with the gorilla and the bird!’

  After Hardy, Yeats and Eliot, the next best-represented poet of the early generation, in terms of lines, is Monica’s favourite, Kipling, with 652 (thirteen poems). Back in 1951 Larkin had disputed Monica’s high valuation of Kipling, whom she had compared to Dryden as a public poet. Larkin retorted that while Dryden wrote for the discriminating ear of ‘the ruling gang’, Kipling wrote ‘for the press, the penny (or halfpenny) press at that’. Since the time of Dryden, ‘A process of vulgarisation has set in & gone a long way.’53 Now, two decades later, he is content to take Kipling at Monica’s high estimation. No ideological motive is detectable, however. The Kipling selection includes fine poems with no imperialist associations. Similarly puzzling is the contrast between A. E. Housman, given only 126 lines in eight poems, and Robert Bridges, represented by 298 lines in five items, including a turgid 115-line extract in sham medieval spelling from ‘The Testament of Beauty’ (no. 34).

  It is difficult to identify any consistent unifying programme. Larkin’s allocations contradict his known preferences in haphazard ways. It is tempting to conclude that he simply lost his way during his Bodleian holiday. His initial aim of rediscovering an English ‘Georgian’ tradition, submerged by the Great War and the dominance of Yeats and Eliot, had soon been abandoned. He wrote to Judy Egerton on 19 April 1968: ‘I’d always vaguely supposed that the by ways of 20th century English poetry were full of good stuff, hitherto suppressed by the modernist claque: now I find that this isn’t so.’ He was depressed to discover, for instance, that the ‘Dymock’ poet, Wilfrid Gibson, despite a career of regular publication, ‘never wrote a good poem in his life. Grim thought.’54 In view of this comment it is puzzling that, in the event, he gave Gibson 222 lines in his selection, though only six poems. Perhaps his judgement changed between 1968 and 1971, or perhaps he felt he needed to keep faith with his original conception, even if half-heartedly. Rupert Brooke is given a handful more lines than Gibson at 240 (six poems); Walter de la Mare has 179 lines; Edward Thomas 160 lines, W. H. Davies 97 lines. These allocations do not seem eccentric. The poets of the Great War also receive even-handed treatment. Owen is represented by 251 lines (though neither ‘Futility’ nor ‘Strange
Meeting’ is included). Sassoon is accorded 93 lines, but perversely only two of the seven chosen poems belong to the war-protest genre on which his permanent reputation rests.

  The major voices of the 1930s and 1940s are given rough justice. Uncontroversially enough, W. H. Auden has 764 lines (sixteen poems), the next highest representation in the volume after Eliot. Betjeman is represented by an overgenerous 629 lines (twelve poems), more than twice as many as Louis MacNeice at 279 lines (eight poems). Perhaps traces of an ‘English’, middlebrow agenda can be glimpsed here. MacNeice had been the original intended editor of the anthology, and it is fascinating to reflect how different his selection would have been from Larkin’s. Stephen Spender, whose poetry had been the butt of Larkin’s contempt since his schooldays, has a generous 134 lines: more than A. E. Housman. The Poet Laureate, Day-Lewis, who was to die in 1972 before the volume appeared, is accorded a respectful 185 lines, in six poems, including ‘The Album’, concerning a book of photographs. The hero of Larkin’s student days, Dylan Thomas, is accorded 342 lines, 287 fewer than Betjeman, but 63 more than MacNeice. Stevie Smith has a respectable 170 lines. In 1953 Larkin had insisted to Monica that he could find no right-wing writer worthy of respect.55 Now he gives the supporter of Franco, Roy Campbell, a substantial 187 lines. The works selected, however, justify inclusion on poetic grounds and show no hint of politics.

  One problematic issue was nationality. Larkin’s Preface begins:

  I have taken ‘twentieth-century English verse’ to mean verse written in English by writers born in these islands (or resident here for an appreciable time) [. . .] These terms of reference mean that I have not included poems by American or Commonwealth writers [. . .] No doubt in making up the collection I have unwittingly broken most of these self-imposed limitations at one time or another.56

  In 1936 Yeats had included the Americans, Pound and Eliot, arguing that they seemed to English readers ‘part of their own literature’, by reason of ‘subject, or by long residence in Europe’.57 He had also included, quite arbitrarily, Sir Rabindranath Tagore and Shri Purohit Swami. But by the time of Larkin’s anthology history had moved on, and editorial policy needed to be more clearly defined. Larkin had compounded his problem by insisting on the word ‘English’ in the title, with the vague implication of cultural consensus. Thus he includes the by now naturalized Eliot, but excludes Pound and Frost, both of whom were resident in England ‘for an appreciable time’ and made a significant impact on the English literary scene. One might suspect that it was convenient for him that his ‘rules’ excluded Pound’s modernism. But, though Pound’s very ‘English’ poem ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ is excluded, Larkin does, surprisingly, include Basil Bunting’s ‘Chomei at Toyama’, a derivative Poundian monologue of 321 lines spoken by a medieval Japanese Buddhist. A similar arbitrariness prevails in his exclusion of Sylvia Plath, despite his high opinion of her work. Plath wrote all her mature poetry in London and Devon, and had an English husband. One cannot help but wonder if Larkin would have included Plath had Monica Jones not been so close to the selection process.

  The question of Ireland was also vexed. Yeats could scarcely be excluded, despite having been a Senator in the Irish Free State. Fortunately most of his career fell before Irish independence. However the inclusion of a ninety-line extract from Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘The Great Hunger’ is problematic, since Kavanagh was a native of County Monaghan and wrote all his works as a citizen of the Irish Republic. The Northern Irish Heaney could be omitted since his reputation was so recent, though Larkin included four English poets born later than Heaney, among them Douglas Dunn and Brian Patten.

  Problems emerge also in relation to the Anglophone ‘Commonwealth’, which by the late 1960s included, as well as the old Dominions, a number of independent nations in Africa and the Caribbean.58 This was a problem which any editor of the time would have found difficult, and one to which Larkin’s political instincts were inadequate. Its intractability is indicated by the fact that there are now separate Oxford Books of American poetry, Caribbean verse, Canadian verse, Australasian verse and Irish verse. Larkin’s solution was haphazard. He excluded major Canadian and Australian poets, but included 179 lines by Derek Walcott, a poet born in St Lucia and resident mainly in the Caribbean and USA.59 Larkin’s breaking of his own rules in this case cannot have been inadvertent. ‘Letter from Brooklyn’ is included, one suspects, because it so eloquently mourns the death of Walcott’s father a quarter of a century earlier.

  Larkin wrote in his Preface that in the case of the top ‘two or three dozen names’ he could ‘let the century choose the poets while I chose the poems’. With hindsight it seems that, apart from the exclusion of Pound and Frost and a few questionable emphases, Larkin’s representation of major poets does avoid eccentricity. His other choices, he wrote, were mainly ‘poems judged by me to be worthy of inclusion without reference to their authors’.60 Yeats’s anthology featured 98 poets; Larkin’s has 207, many of whom are represented by only two or three poems, and 88 by a single poem. On its publication most of the debate about the volume focused on particular individual poems, apparently chosen in accordance with a residual ‘Georgian’ agenda, or because they would appeal to his friends, or because they resembled or anticipated his own poems. On a few occasions he made a genuine discovery: May Wedderburn Cannan’s war poem ‘Rouen’, for instance (no. 283),61 Joan Barton’s ‘The Mistress’ (no. 395), Jon Silkin’s moving elegy on his son (no. 552), David Gascoyne’s haunting evocation of the great surrealist’s paintings ‘Salvador Dali’ (no. 462). Other inclusions are more intimately personal, Martin Bell’s ‘Winter Coming On: A caricature from Laforgue’ (no. 470) for instance. Two poems reflect his fear of disease: J. B. S. Haldane’s ‘Cancer’s a Funny Thing’ (no. 252), and James Kirkup’s ‘A Correct Compassion’, concerning a ‘mitral stenosis valvulotomy in the General Infirmary at Leeds’ (no. 509). These examples are intriguing and characterful. But there is also a large number of unimpressive poems which wear their crudely ‘Larkinesque’ credentials on their sleeves: the sour sing-song celebration of sterile spinsterhood, ‘The Old Ladies’, by Colin Ellis for instance (no. 270), the shamelessly middlebrow ‘Good and Clever’ (no. 29) by Elizabeth Wordsworth, C. H. Sisson’s four-line assertion of atheism ‘The Temple’ (no. 451), and many more. One early attack on the volume, in the Listener, focused on the inclusion of Brian Patten’s ‘Portrait of a Young Girl Raped at a Suburban Party’ (no. 583), which inevitably reminds the reader of ‘Deceptions’.

  In his Preface Larkin thanks ‘Miss M. M. B. Jones for her constant encouragement and for many valuable suggestions for the book’s improvement’.62 The eighteenth-century Georgic pastiche by Victoria Sackville-West (no. 250) seems specifically intended for her. Judy Egerton felt that Monica played a key part in ‘buttressing his resolve’ or, as some might feel, his stubbornness.63 Other inclusions are compliments to particular friends. The anti-Soviet propaganda of Sir Alan Herbert’s poem (no. 246) would appeal to Robert Conquest, while Amis and Conquest would both appreciate Edgell Rickword’s ‘Augustan’ satire on a fashionable literary avant-gardist (no. 302). Larkin’s jazz friends would be amused by Robert Garioch’s ‘I Was Fair Beat’ (no. 402), in which the speaker recalls in broad Scots dialect ‘a nicht amang the cognoscenti’, during which he heard ‘modern jazz wi juicy / snell wud-wind chords [. . .] // Man, it was awfie.’

  But the most idiosyncratic strand is the large number of poems concerning animals. Larkin wrote to Douglas Dunn on 16 January 1971: ‘Most of it is about animals (you know I’m a life member of the RSPCA). Perhaps OUP could get a subsidy from them.’64 And shortly before the volume appeared he joked to Judy Egerton that it would be better titled ‘the Oxford Book of Nineteen & a Half Century’s Right-Wing Animal-Lovers Verse’.65 Some of the animal poems are genuine finds: Patricia Beer’s ‘The Lion Hunt’ (no. 510) for instance, and Hal Summers’s ‘My Old Cat’ (no. 415). Others have little more effect than to remind the reader that t
he anthologist is Philip Larkin. Dorothy Wellesley’s ‘Horses’ (no. 240) can have been included only because of its anticipation of ‘At Grass’, while F. R. Higgins’s more moving ‘The Old Jockey’ (no. 284) clearly earned its place for the same reason. Other anthologists would surely have overlooked Ralph Hodgson, but the author of ‘At Grass’ cannot resist including the lengthy evocation of animal retirement ‘The Bull’ (no. 114). Hodgson’s ‘Hymn to Moloch’ (no. 116), attacking the trade in bird-feathers, is also a natural choice for the author of ‘Take One Home for the Kiddies’. Startlingly, the allocation given to Hodgson, 272 lines, dwarfs that of Housman or Edward Thomas. But this number is exceeded by Sir John Squire’s ‘The Stockyard’ (no. 180), dedicated to Robert Frost, with its harrowing description in almost 300 lines of the slaughterhouse at Chicago, ‘the filthiest place in the world’.