Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  On 14 April 1971 Larkin enclosed in a letter to Anthony Thwaite a typed version of ‘This Be The Verse’ with slightly different wording from that finally published.25 Like the previous poems it is allusive and mediated. He joked: ‘I’ve dashed off a little piece suitable for Ann’s next Garden of Verses’, alluding to the annual of new writing for children, Allsorts, which Ann Thwaite edited between 1968 and 1975.26 The title refers to Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Requiem’ (‘This be the verse you grave for me’), published in A Child’s Garden of Verses, 1885.27 The reference is, however, highly ironic, and this is one of Larkin’s most original works. He reasserts his own voice against the literary clutter of the previous months in the confident Armstrong-like trumpet line of this, his most pungently ‘Larkinesque’ comic poem. No doubt also, in a familiar dialectic of contraries, he felt the need to answer the filial piety of ‘To the Sea’ with something less ‘bloody dull’. His elliptical late style is evident in the way the first line appropriates, and as it were copyrights, the most commonplace of phrases. The sentence ‘your parents certainly fuck you up’ or ‘your mum and dad always seem to fuck you up’, or even Larkin’s precise formulation, ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’, must have been uttered millions of times in ordinary conversation. But simply by ordering the words into a neat tetrameter in a brisk abab stanza of facile rhymes, he makes it into an unforgettable aphorism:

  They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

  They may not mean to, but they do.

  They fill you with the faults they had

  And add some extra, just for you.

  This sentiment will now always be a quotation from Larkin. The casual inflections are perfect for recitation, and the malicious relish of that final insinuating phrase ‘some extra, just for you’ has the verbal taste of vermouth in a martini. The poem takes the imperious form of a crude syllogism: thesis, antithesis, synthesis: i) Your parents fuck you up; ii) but they were fucked up too; iii) because we are all fucked up. To add to the fun the concluding synthesis modulates into ripe fatalistic orotundity (‘Man hands on misery to man’), and portentous ‘apocalyptic’ imagery (‘It deepens like a coastal shelf’). The poem’s sentiment is sad, but the poem is full of jouissance. This must bid fair to be the funniest serious English poem of the twentieth century. It must also already rival Gray’s ‘Elegy’ in the number of parodies and pastiches it has generated.

  The following month Larkin completed ‘Vers de Société’ (20 May 1971), reworking the antisocial theme of ‘The Card-Players’, but replacing Hogspeuw’s sordid cave with a civilized withdrawing room of aesthetic privacy. In a recasting of the unpublished ‘Best Society’ of exactly twenty years earlier, the ageing poet accepts defeat at the hands of society. Torn between an evening with a ‘crowd of craps’ and the solitude of his breathing gas fire and darkly swayed trees outside, he decides to reject Warlock-Williams’s invitation, unwilling to see more of his ‘spare time’ flow ‘Straight into nothingness by being filled / With forks and faces’. The lamp, the wind, the moonlit windowscape offer implicitly to repay his time with poetic inspiration. But he no longer feels unquestioningly obedient to the call. ‘The time is shorter now for company,’ and solitude no longer seems unambiguously the best society. The contemptible room of social intercourse offers at least an escape from loneliness; ‘sitting by a lamp more often brings / Not peace, but other things.’ At the end he returns from the shifting rhyme-schemes of the middle stanzas to the direct aabbccdd couplet stanza with which he began, and begins to write – not a poem, but an acceptance of the invitation. ‘Beyond the light stand failure and remorse / Whispering Dear Warlock-Williams: Why of course –’. There is perhaps a private, self-derisive joke in the use of the word ‘remorse’ which Bruce Montgomery had so ridiculed in Larkin’s early Yeatsian poetry.

  Two weeks later, on 2–3 June, Larkin completed the exquisite lyric ‘Cut Grass’, one of his poems drafted on a single workbook page. (He made a second column of text so as not to spill over on to the next page.)28 Its economical but intensely charged poetic diction recalls Edward Thomas: ‘young-leafed June’, ‘hedges snowlike strewn’; and ‘that high-builded cloud / Moving at summer’s pace’. In a letter to Monica Jones he criticized the poem’s pure lyric beauty:

  Its trouble is that it’s ‘music’, i.e. pointless crap. About line 6 I hear a kind of wonderful Elgar river-music take over, for wch the words are just an excuse [. . .] There’s a point at wch the logical sense of the poem ceases to be added to, and it continues only as a succession of images. I like it all right, but for once I’m not a good judge.29

  He had no reason to doubt his judgement. It is difficult to understand what he means by ‘the logical sense of the poem’ which allegedly prevails in the first five lines, or to hear how this is lost after that point. But his less deceived superego compels him to disown mere ‘wonderful’ music.

  On 22 July 1971 Barbara Pym wrote to tell him that she was to undergo a mastectomy, and he attempted to boost her morale by congratulating her on having ‘nobbled it quickly’.30 His mother was now becoming frail. In the previous year, 1970, when he and his sister took their holidays at the same time, they had persuaded her to spend a fortnight in an Abbeyfield House residential care home in Loughborough. The same problem occurred in August 1971, and she again spent a fortnight in respite care.31 A longing to be free of such domestic anxieties is perhaps one element in ‘Forget What Did’, which Larkin completed on 8 August 1971, the day before his forty-ninth birthday. It is another intertextual work. In Chapter 2 of Susan Coolidge’s girls’ classic What Katy Did the sisters read the diary of their ‘pale, pudgy’ six-year-old brother, Dorry, and find, alongside entries like ‘played’, or ‘Had rost befe for diner, and cabage, and potato’, several which read simply ‘Forgit what did’.32 Larkin kept a diary all his life, but, strong as was his impulse to self-examination, it was matched by the desire to escape the self. He had had the idea for a poem about giving up a diary as early as 1952, and the first drafts of this poem date to January 1967. By a symbolist leap Dorry’s casual phrase licenses the poet’s ‘blank starting’. In future, he resolves, the pages of his diary shall be empty, or if they are ever filled, it shall be with records only of ‘Celestial recurrences, / The day the flowers come, / And when the birds go’.

  In September 1971, shortly after his return from his holiday with Monica in Islay, Jura and Mull, he received a letter from his old schoolfriend Colin Gunner, with whom he had had no contact since the 1940s. Gunner had led a varied life, serving in the army in North Africa and Italy, converting to Roman Catholicism and then moving through a series of short-term jobs. Though Larkin prudently did not meet his old friend, he read the ‘almost-illegible typescript’33 of Gunner’s account of his service in the Irish Guards, Adventures with the Irish Brigade, and gave him advice. It had the faults of an ‘amateur’s book’,34 and he suggested that Gunner might boil it down to an article for Blackwood’s magazine. He went to the trouble of approaching publishers. Eventually Gunner decided to have it printed privately and in a letter of 26 July 1973 Larkin agreed to write a short foreword.35 Gunner’s book finally appeared, with the foreword, in 1975 in an edition of twenty-four copies. Gunner’s letters show him to have been the most uninhibitedly bigoted of the poet’s later correspondents.

  The poet’s life was briefly shadowed at this point by an omen of the future. On 7 October the University’s Medical Officer, Dr Raines, sent him to Hull Royal Infirmary for X-rays. He wrote gaily to Judy Egerton on 4 November 1971: ‘My neck is incurable . . . because there is nothing wrong with it. Ha ha. [. . .] The X-ray languidly reported “Possibly some narrowing of the joints (what joints?) that might be indicative of a pre-arthritic state” or some such jazz.’36 As Christmas approached, Eva’s determination to observe the accustomed rituals in York Road, Loughborough, even proposing to cook a duck, prompted an outburst of exasperation rare in the letters to his mother: ‘Let us have peace, and not all this blasted cookin
g and eating (and washing up!).’37

  Nevertheless his poetic momentum was growing stronger. Early in October he had completed ‘I have started to say’, in which the speaker expresses horror at having become, as it were, ‘historical’, finding himself saying ‘A quarter of a century’ or ‘thirty years back’ about events in his own life. The poem remained unpublished, but the thought prompted an ambitious sequence of historically distanced dramatic monologues, ‘Livings’, written towards the year’s end. ‘Livings I’, completed on 16 October 1971, has an archaic quality, reminding the reader of the world of Arnold Bennett or Somerset Maugham. A commercial traveller meditates on his routines:

  Afterwards, whisky in the Smoke Room: Clough,

  Margetts, the Captain, Dr. Watterson;

  Who makes ends meet, who’s taking the knock [. . .]

  The formal surnames and the slang have a dated feel. Though the speaker gives a close-up picture of his life, he occupies an ‘historical present’ deeper than mere grammatical tense. Then, in the third stanza, sociological detail and literary colour are left behind in an epiphany of pure living:

  Later, the square is empty: a big sky

  Drains down the estuary like the bed

  Of a gold river, and the Customs House

  Still has its office lit.

  His dull world is briefly touched with beauty before he returns to the comic hunting pictures and ‘ex-Army sheets’ of his hotel, musing on whether he needs a change in his life. He wonders ‘why / I think it’s worth while coming. Father’s dead: / He used to, but the business now is mine. / It’s time for change, in nineteen twenty-nine.’ The facile rhyme (‘mine / nineteen twenty-nine’) underlines the speaker’s ignorance of the significance of the date. His desultory aimlessness is about to be overwhelmed by the Great Crash. But there is no heavy Sophoclean irony. The date simply intensifies the reader’s sense that life is only ever a fragile livelong minute.

  The initial intention was for ‘I deal with farmers’ to be the first of a sequence entitled ‘Vocations’. The title Larkin finally settled on, ‘Livings’, is more existentially abstract, and lacks any hint of an artistic calling. Also ‘living’ is more purely lyrical, being a gerund in the present participial form, rather than a static noun like ‘Vocations’ or ‘Lives’. In the event the sequence extended only to three works. Larkin wrote to Brian Cox on 23 February 1972 that he found them ‘rather fun to do [. . .] Perhaps I shall do some more: they are miniature derivatives of Browning’s dramatic lyrics, I suppose. As for LIVINGS: well, I don’t know – the way people live, kinds of life, anything like that. I thought LIVINGS brought in the Crockford element, too.’38 Crockford’s Clerical Directory, first published in 1858, lists all the livings of the Anglican clergy.

  The central poem in the triptych, completed on 23 November 1971, adopts a purer lyric register, stripped of literary mediation. A lighthouse-keeper celebrates his isolation in the grip of light, atop a seventy-foot tower. This is one of Larkin’s most uncompromisingly symbolist poems. Ever since he first moved to Hull in 1955 he had been engaged in building his own tower. At the beginning of Stage 1 of the new Library the Viennese sculptor Willi Soukop had created bas-reliefs over the entrances. Larkin wrote to Judy Egerton in 1959 expressing doubt about his ‘Genius of Light’, ‘an abstract figure bearing a torch that is already sprawled in rough over the front door’.39 The image incorporates a pun on the name of the University’s founder Thomas Ferens, whose name in Latin signifies bearing or carrying: hence the University’s motto Lampada Ferens, ‘bearing the lamp’. Larkin always appreciated a good, or bad, pun. For the whole of his mature life the poet-librarian entered his place of work, which eventually became the dazzling tower of light of Stage 2, through the doorway beneath this ‘Genius of Light’.

  Since ‘Sympathy in White Major’ the aesthete’s ivory tower had offered the poet only a compromised romantic glamour. Rather than a man with a vocation, the keeper of the light in ‘Livings II’ is a kind of sublime Mr Bleaney. He keeps himself to himself, and passes the time in familiar routines. The poem’s uncompromising unrhymed, ‘modernist’ trimeters express his edgy selfhood:

  By day, sky builds

  Grape-dark over the salt

  Unsown stirring fields.

  Radio rubs its legs,

  Telling me of elsewhere [. . .]

  The sound of the radio, like that of a cricket which has strayed inside from the sterile salt ‘fields’ of the sea, keeps him company while making no social demands. He prefers the best society of his uncomfortable lighthouse to the warm sociability of cosy inns ashore, their sea-pictures ‘kippering’ humorously in the tobacco-smoke: ‘Keep it all off!’ In ‘The Card-Players’ the sociable lamplit cave of the drinkers was wide open to the flux of the elements outside. Here, the antisocial lamplit attic of the keeper is safely locked, and he plays cards only with himself. But paradoxically he is still at one with the surrounding elements of nature: ‘Creatures, I cherish you!’ This innocuous Lucifer, ‘Guarded by brilliance’, seems to have penetrated the padlocked cube of light of ‘Dry-Point’. He has somehow succeeded in inhabiting the out-of-reach skyscape of ‘Here’, the cleared attics of ‘Absences’. For all its self-doubt and irony this is an extravagantly romantic poem.

  The final poem in the triptych was completed on 10 December 1971, shortly before Larkin departed to spend Christmas with his mother in York Road. He had heard the first sentence of the poem, ‘Tonight we dine without the Master’, with its archaic Oxbridge formality, in February, in casual conversation before dinner at Pembroke College, Oxford. Realizing that the words made a perfect tetrameter, he commented that this would make a good first line of a poem.40 ‘Livings III’ evokes a more subdued version of ‘The Card-Players’, set not in a lamplit cave but amid the thin candleflames of a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century college common room. Outside are vapours and muddy fields; inside the jordan is set behind a screen making it unnecessary to brave the cold. These port-drinking dons are, like Brouwer’s peasants, ‘all right’ in their aimless learned gossip and college politics; ‘assertions fly / On rheumy fevers, resurrection, / Regicide and rabbit pie’. And above them, with a touch of muted transcendence, ‘Chaldean constellations / Sparkle over crowded roofs.’

  About this time he was asked to write a poem to preface the report of a Government Working Party on ‘The Human Habitat’ chaired by Raine, Countess of Dartmouth. For the first time in his career, he agreed to write to a commission, and early in the new year completed ‘Going, Going’ (25 January 1972). Required to strike an attitude, he wrote as a public spokesman, lamenting the loss of ‘England’. His introspection is uncharacteristically egocentric: ‘I thought it would last my time –’; ‘I knew there’d be false alarms’; ‘what do I feel now?’; ‘I feel somehow’; ‘I just think it will happen’. With tragic portentousness he laments ‘that will be England gone’, ‘England’ being defined by five emotive epithets: ‘The shadows, the meadows, the lanes, / The guildhalls, the carved choirs’. The word ‘England’ appears elsewhere in his mature poetry only in neutral or uncomfortably ironic contexts: in ‘I Remember, I Remember’ (‘Coming up England by a different line’), ‘The Importance of Elsewhere’ (‘Living in England has no such excuse’) and ‘Naturally the Foundation will Bear Your Expenses’ (‘O when will England grow up?’). ‘Going, Going’ contains the only unambiguously positively charged use of the word in his poetry; and it strikes a false note.

  The poem does, however, paint a moving picture in terms of Larkinesque social stereotypes. It seems, at first, that the degradation of the environment is to be blamed on the lower orders: ‘The crowd / Is young in the M1 café; / Their kids are screaming for more – / More houses, more parking allowed, / More caravan sites, more pay.’ But, Larkin at once corrects the balance:

  A score

  Of spectacled grins approve

  Some takeover bid that entails

  Five per cent profit (and ten

  Per c
ent more in the estuaries): move

  Your works to the unspoilt dales [. . .]

  The suggestion that capitalist greed might be as environmentally destructive as better pay for the working class proved too much for the Countess and her Committee. Larkin wrote to Conquest in May 1972: ‘Have you seen this commissioned poem I did for the Countess of Dartmouth’s report on the human habitat? It makes my flesh creep. She made me cut out a verse attacking big business – don’t tell anyone. It was a pretty crappy verse, anyway, not that she minded that.’41 When the poem appeared in High Windows the offending lines were restored. He described the poem to Charles Monteith as ‘thin ranting conventional gruel’.42

  The drafts of this piece of ‘required writing’ had run across the end of the seventh workbook, and on to the first three pages of the eighth and – as he must have realized – last. Then, on the fourth page of the new book, on 13 January 1972, he began the confident draft of a new ‘inspired’, rather than ‘required’, poem. ‘The Meeting House’ was different from, and more ambitious than, anything he had attempted since ‘Dockery and Son’ and the ill-fated ‘The Dance’ almost a decade earlier. After four pages devoted to the new poem he forced himself to return to the commissioned piece on 24 January, but was uncomfort­able at having to ‘cut across’ his new inspiration with ‘thinking about the environment’.43 The new extended elegy, soon renamed ‘The Building’, showed a return from the intertextuality and symbolism of his recent works to the more direct and universal lyric mode of his Whitsun Weddings style. It was to usher in the last great flowering of his genius.