Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  The words lend themselves well to a musical setting. The sections are clear and easily apprehended, beginning with an apostrophe to the ‘Isolate city’ by the sea, ‘Half-turned to Europe’, and continuing with contrasted word pictures of Holderness in summer and winter. The register is a pastiche of ‘Here’, diluted with dignified poetic diction (‘Isolate’, ‘parley’, ‘manifest’). Arresting phrases catch the ear above the music:

  plain gulls stand,

  Sharp fox and brilliant pheasant walk, and wide

  Wind-muscled wheatfields wash round villages,

  Their churches half-submerged in leaf.

  Larkin also gave Hedges the opportunity for fugato chiming effects in the lines ‘Tall church-towers parley, airily audible, / Howden and Beverley, Hedon and Patrington’. The description of the suspended single span of the bridge, ‘A swallow-fall and rise of one plain line’, takes up, appropriately, one plain line. As the final four quatrains turn to the impact of the new bridge the first-person plural pronoun becomes prominent, asserting the new community created by the bridge: ‘our solitude’, ‘our dear landscape’, ‘our lives’, ‘we may give’, ‘we are’, ‘we live’. Descending briefly to vacuous blarney, the poet reviews the ‘Lost centuries of local lives’, which fell short ‘where they began’, but which now ‘reassemble and unclose’, having been ‘resurrected’ by the new connections provided by the bridge. ‘Here’ culminated in a vision of unfenced existence, out of reach; ‘Bridge for the Living’, in contrast, ends with the bridge ‘reaching’ grandiosely ‘for the world’. Nevertheless, it is a rhetorically effective work, with a memorable final line: ‘Always it is by bridges that we live.’25

  The new ‘heady’ relationship with Maeve, delightful and fresh though it was, was not as simply ‘serene’ for him as it seemed to her. Indeed the poem which it inspired is anguished and despairing. Her ‘pre-marital sex’ was for him touched with the anxious intensity of pre-mortality sex. When she departed for Ireland in 1975, leaving him to take his regular holiday in Scotland with Monica, he felt unaccountably bereft. He wrote to her on 7 August: ‘I wish you hadn’t gone away just when you did: I miss you. A fearful boiling night was diversified by two dreams about you, both “losing dreams” – you going off with someone else – wch was all very silly, for how can one lose what one does not possess?’26 These dreams precipitated ‘Love Again’, on which he worked over the following months. Its title appears to be an ironic reference to the song made famous by Marlene Dietrich, ‘Falling in Love Again’.27 The poet’s beloved has left a party with another man and he has returned home for an unsatisfactory wank at ten past three in the morning. In genre the poem is a blues anti-aubade of the small hours. In a bitter echo of ‘Broadcast’ the woman is inaccessible and the poet contemplates his imagined picture of her. But in ‘Broadcast’ the vision was fresh and beautiful; here it is wilfully coarsened by obscene language (‘Someone else feeling her breasts and cunt’), the more shocking since Maeve was herself verbally innocent. When Motion showed her the poem after Philip’s death she thought that ‘wanking’ was ‘waking’ mistyped.28 These are the only appearances in Larkin’s poetry of ‘cunt’ and ‘wanking’. He seems to have been aware, at this last gasp of inspiration, that these key words, with the unique quality they would bring, remained to be used. Without them his oeuvre would be incomplete.

  On the hard-core, impersonal level the poem depicts sex as a simple biological imperative, the time-honoured irritant of ‘Dry-Point’, again subjecting the poet to humiliating desire (‘spilt like petrol’ as he puts it in an early draft),29 followed by the usual post-masturbatory pain, ‘like dysentery’. Worse, the familiar dreary and compulsive situation opens up the long perspective of his failed bachelor life. In ‘Round Another Point’ in 1951 Larkin’s persona, Miller, had painted a grim picture of Geraint’s unmarried future: ‘Well, I hope you enjoy yourself – that’s about all you will enjoy [. . .] when you’re sitting, a wanked-out seventy, in your third-floor bed-sitter in Bayswater staring at a hole in the carpet, waiting for the pubs to open [. . .]’30 Now, at fifty-three, the poet finds himself already in something like this situation.

  The bedroom hot as a bakery,

  The drink gone dead, without showing how

  To meet tomorrow [. . .]

  It seems likely that the title also has a more personal, private significance. In a letter of 8 January 1946 the young Larkin had organized the first meeting between Kingsley Amis and Ruth Bowman. He ended the letter to Kingsley in his customary jokey style: ‘love / philip footwarmer’. Then, apprehensive about the coming confrontation between his abrasive masculine and gentle feminine sides, he added a long, anxious postscript detailing train times and connections. He eventually signed off for a second time: ‘Love again (Don’t look like that.)’31 There seems little doubt that this casual phrase stayed with him, reminding him of this traumatic meeting, and the lifelong failure to ‘sort himself out’ which it symbolized.32

  But the emotions of the poem did not affect the new ‘serenity’ of the relationship as it was perceived by Maeve. On 3 November, she wrote telling him not to be anxious about his forthcoming trip to London to receive the CBE: ‘you are bound to carry off the occasion with grace and great dignity’. She went on to wonder at the continuing freshness of their affection:

  It is very hard for me to believe that after all this time I have not grown stale for you. Needless to say, it is also the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me. It wouldn’t be like that with any marriage partner after 14/15 years, so look what we have gained!

  I shall look forward to hearing all about your visit to London, to see the Queen!33

  Clearly, whatever the exact nature of their renewed relationship it had brought her a deep satisfaction. Touchingly, she abandons her Catholic instincts, if only momentarily, and defers to his misogamist relish for uncommitted evanescence. A decade and a half after their relationship had begun he remained caught, with a new intensity, between his love for Maeve and his duty to Monica. When later in the month he travelled to Buckingham Palace for the CBE award ceremony, it was, of course, Monica who accompanied him.

  At this point Larkin transformed his situation in the most dramatic and creative way. He brought a third woman into his life by initiating a love affair with his secretary of eighteen years, Betty Mackereth. Betty’s description shows how deliberate the ‘seduction’ was on his part. Philip had driven Betty and Pauline Dennison, who was in charge of the Library issue desk, to a dinner at the Pipe and Glass Inn in the village of South Dalton with representatives of Castle Park Dean Hook, the architects of the new Library. Driving back at the end of the evening, Betty was puzzled that he contrived a circuitous route which involved dropping off Pauline first. When they arrived at Betty’s house he surprised her by asking if she was going to invite him in for coffee. He later revealed to her that he had worked out the whole sequence beforehand. She told Andrew Motion later: ‘Nothing much occurred that evening, though Philip did break a saucer! But once on the slippery slope, there seemed nothing I could do to stop (nor did I want to).’34 The broken saucer seems oddly significant. Was it a sign of his guilt and nervousness, a symbol of transgression; or was it a careless assertion of masculine assurance?

  On one level perhaps there was an impulse towards justice in this unexpected move. The new intensity of Maeve’s love cannot but have sharpened his appreciation of Betty’s opposite virtues, and of Betty’s very different but equally devoted affection for him. Over a decade earlier, Mary Judd had detected a ‘jealousy and antagonism’ between the two women in relation to Philip: ‘you could not have found two people more different’.35 Betty had always felt that her own robust qualities were of more use to Philip than Maeve’s naive narcissism.36 He must frequently have felt himself, as on Lisburn Square in 1953, in the position of an early Christian between lions in the Roman arena. As his secretary, Betty would also be gratified by the absolute secrecy of the affair. After they became in
timate, she immediately told him: ‘Don’t worry, Philip. I will never, ever say a word to anybody.’37 Nor did she until more than a decade later, when Andrew Motion finally riddled out the clues. (She has never forgiven him.) From the point of view of his own emotions, an affair with Betty, who describes herself as ‘quite unromantic’,38 would cut through the heady ‘unreal’ relationship with Maeve. Betty, as she says with precision, was not ‘in love with’ him, but over the years had grown to love him.39 His affection for her had also become deep, and physical intimacy will have seemed a natural culmination of their long relationship. More crudely, they were both in their early fifties. It would soon be too late.

  Betty recalls: ‘The whole thing took me by surprise. As far as I was concerned we could have gone on as we were. We were good buddies. I worked with him. I was organized. I knew who to put straight through on the telephone: “Only Downing Street, my publisher and the VC”. Of course I would also put the Chairman of the Library Committee through [. . .]’40 She felt ‘excited’ by the new relationship, not having expected such a thing at her ‘time of life’. Philip was finally acknow­ledging that their feelings went deeper than a professional relationship. One surprising element which drew them together was her misogamy. As she says: ‘I knew all along, deep down, that I would never ever in this life get married.’41 On the other hand her relationship with Philip had some aspects of a marriage: ‘I knew everything a wife knows, more than some wives know, probably.’42 She was enough of a woman of the world to be unconcerned by his taste for pornography, and in an echo of the swearing episode with his colleague in the Warwick Fuel Office in 1942, they had developed that most intimate of relationships for men and women of their generation: one in which obscenity was allowed. By the 1970s, when he irritated her at work she would explode, ‘Well, fuck you!’ and then reproach him for teaching her such bad habits.43 Maeve, she knew, would be quite unable to understand any of this.

  The affair was happy and long lasting. Over the remaining years, until Monica came to live in Newland Park, Betty would visit him occasionally in the evenings, leaving badminton in Hull at 9.00, and taking a shower before going to Newland Park. She would not go earlier because by this time, their written correspondence in decline, Philip rang Monica every night at 8 o’clock and they spoke for an hour. If, by chance, Betty did happen to be there earlier, he would have to leave her in bed and go downstairs for the phone call with Monica. She recalls: ‘And if he didn’t ring she would have to know why. Where had he been? What had he been doing?’44 Philip and Betty would also take occasional day and weekend trips together to the Wolds or the North York Moors around Kirbymoorside. Their secret was not difficult to keep.

  Another motive for this affair also irresistibly suggests itself. Larkin realized that it would give him a last precious access to poetic inspiration. The sexual intensification of his relationship with Maeve had revived the theme of love in his poetry, dormant since the abandonment of ‘The Dance’ over a decade earlier. But ‘Love Again’ was refusing to come right. Its tangled obscenity also suggests that, in descending to sex, the untouched muse of ‘Broadcast’ had become, on some level, spoiled. In a middle-aged version of the youthful lover on Keats’s urn, the poet is racked, in his desolate attic, by the ‘burning forehead’ and ‘parching tongue’ of consummation. After having worked on the poem since August he abandoned it for the time being on 16 December. If he was ever to write love poetry, or muse poetry, again it would have to be in a new relationship. He turned instead, two days later, to his first poem addressed to Betty, completing ‘When first we faced, and touching showed’ on 20 December 1975.

  ‘Face’ (or ‘faces’) occurs, as noun or verb, forty-eight times in Larkin’s poetry after 1945. The husband in ‘To My Wife’ regrets having exchanged ‘all faces’ for ‘your face’. In ‘Maiden Name’ the five light syllables no longer ‘mean your face’. In ‘An Arundel Tomb’ the earl’s and countess’s faces are movingly ‘blurred’ by the passage of the years. In ‘The Dance’ ‘I face you on the floor’, uncomfortably. In ‘Broadcast’ the poet pictures ‘your face among all those faces’. ‘Here’ ends raptly, ‘facing the sun’, while in ‘Solar’ the sun’s ‘Suspended lion face’ gives for ever. In ‘Vers de Société’ the phrase ‘forks and faces’ sums up the inane sterility of social life.45 It is only in ‘When first we faced’ that Larkin uses the word as an intransitive verb, and with an unusually active connotation. There is a hidden intimacy here. Betty is much taller than Monica Jones or Maeve Brennan, closer to Larkin’s height, so she ‘faced’ him more directly than they could.46 The poem is a new version of ‘Latest Face’ written twenty-six years earlier, revised to fit lovers in their fifties. This face is not the object of aesthetic reverence that Winifred’s had been in 1950. Behind the lover’s ‘inch-close eyes’ lie the decades of a different life inaccessible to the poet, which ‘Belonged to others’. Both poet and beloved are laden with depreciating luggage. Nevertheless this is his most tenderly affectionate love poem. Their middle-aged affair possesses the newness of first love:

  But when did love not try to change

  The world back to itself – no cost,

  No past, no people else at all –

  Only what meeting made us feel [. . .]

  ‘I love you’ is always a quotation, but everyone who says the words feels his or her situation to be unique. Even the last face is also a latest face. Larkin sent Betty a copy of the poem on 30 December. As if to underline the complexity of his emotional life at this time, on the following day, the last of the year, he wrote to Maeve: ‘I am very close to Monica and very fond of her . . . But it’s you I love; you’re the one I want.’47 At the age of fifty-three he was involved in three intensely committed relationships.

  At the end of 1975 and early in 1976 Larkin wrote four more substantial poems addressed to Betty. How largely did the promise of new poetic occasions feature in his decision to embark on the relationship? As an artist, Larkin certainly grasped every poetic opportunity Betty offered. The poems cover the widest spectrum of sharply differentiated styles. The initial warm love poem ‘When first we faced’ was followed less than a month later by a witty and subtle sonnet ‘Dear Jake’, which he sent to her on 23 January 1976. Well before their affair began, the appetite of ‘Texas’ for his manuscripts had become a joke between them. On 18 January 1969 he wrote to Betty from Loughborough about Library business, signing off ‘Love as ever Philip’, followed by a carefully stippled imitation of a circular stamp reading ‘TEXAS / MSS / 487’. On the card which accompanied ‘When first we faced’ he referred to the way British literary manuscripts were being bought up by the Harry Ransom Center in Austin. His typescript, he was aware, had a commercial value: ‘Flog it to Texas if it seems embarrassing.’48 In ‘Dear Jake’ he elaborated this idea into a witty satire on Balokowsky, the academic biographer from ‘Posterity’. In ‘Posterity’, Jake had ‘this page microfilmed’. When I first wrote this paragraph in 2011, ‘Dear Jake’ had not yet been published, and I was reading it from my own digital photograph of Larkin’s typescript. In 1976 Larkin was already wrongfooting any Jake or James who might eventually come on the scene.

  The poem cites Balokowsky’s account of ‘the last singular comic episode’ in his subject’s love life, in which he accuses the poet of unloading ‘love and pain and duty’ on to one who was not fitted to cope with them, and assumes that she ‘must have been thankful when it ceased’. The implied circumstances of Jake’s account exactly match Larkin’s biography. Four lives are threatened by the ‘singular’ affair, and its victim has been mentioned earlier ‘on page thirty’, when Betty’s appointment in 1957 would have been recorded. But the biographer’s language observes the decorum demanded by his University press, and the poet finds his mealy-mouthed pretence irritating: ‘I know you really mean “Hey, Mac, / This old goat was so crazy for a fuck he –”’. This is the only appearance of ‘a fuck’ in Larkin’s poetry; the verb has been used once in each of its
idiomatic senses, as a participle (‘fucking’) in ‘High Windows’, and in the metaphorical phrase ‘fuck up’ in ‘This Be The Verse’. Here, as a noun, its force has a unique brutality. The octave runs smoothly into the sestet, the temperature rising up to Jake’s accusatory obscenity, which the poet then interrupts with weary resignation. After this, the final three lines have the quality of a combative retort:

  Well, it was singular; but, looking back,

  Only what men do get, if they are lucky.

  And when it came there was no thought of age.

  From beneath the elaborate hijinks of the posthumous poet’s address to his biographer emerges a delicate compliment addressed in the present to the lover herself. What to Jake is ‘singular’ in the sense of ridiculous is to the poet ‘singular’ in its precious uniqueness. As one might expect, the word ‘singular’ does not occur elsewhere in Larkin’s poetry.49

  The next poem presents yet another contrast. In February 1976 Larkin gave Betty a typed copy of ‘Morning at last: there in the snow’, his purest, most classically impersonal aubade.50 In his Booker Prize Chairman’s speech of the following year he reflected that whereas in novels ‘the emotion has to be attached to a human being, and the human being has to be attached to a particular time and a particular place’, the poem, in contrast, ‘is a single emotional spear-point, a concentrated effect that is achieved by leaving everything out but the emotion itself’.51 The lovers in this poem are ungendered, without indication of age or cultural baggage, and the relationship is reduced to a charged metonym: the ‘small blunt footprints’. A lover has stepped in and out of the poet’s life through that universal symbol of transience, snow. When the footprints have been washed out by the rain, the lovers will be left with ‘What morning woke to’. The form is as simple as possible: three tetrameter triplets with a progression of plangent diphthong rhymes from a long back ‘oh’ (‘snow / go / show’), through a high front ‘i’ (‘wine / sign / mine’) to a low front ‘ai’ (‘rain / remain / pain’). The progression enacts a primitive emotional sequence, ‘oh – eye – eh’, like the formula of a sigh. The simplicity of this poem asserts the anti-ironic spirit which is so frequently the key to Larkin’s emotional power.52