Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  Larkin drafted ‘When first we faced’ and ‘Morning at last’ in the final, eighth workbook and made typed copies. The workbook also shows two pages of heavily corrected drafting for ‘Dear Jake’, dated ‘22.1.76’. However, the final drafting of ‘Dear Jake’ and the drafts of the remaining two works addressed to Betty, ‘Be my Valentine this Monday’ and ‘We met at the end of the party’, were written not in the workbook but instead at the end of the small manuscript book in which he had drafted ‘Bridge for the Living’ in the summer of 1975. Perhaps he was making a confused attempt at privacy. The workbook was less central to his writing process in the final stage of his career, when he knew he was no longer accumulating works for another volume. Nor could there be any possibility of publishing these particular poems during his lifetime, though the fact that he left typescripts of three of the four major poems surely indicates that he intended them to survive and become part of his oeuvre.

  Years before, Philip had given Betty a comical soft toy crocodile to symbolize her role as the guardian of his privacy. On St Valentine’s Day, Saturday 14 February 1976, knowing he was to be away at the beginning of the week, he left a card for Betty on her desk, depicting a grinning alligator with the caption ‘See you later alligator!’ and continuing inside, ‘You tasty morsel!’ The two stanzas written opposite the caption are light in tone, but have a hidden emotional complexity. He asks her to be his Valentine and to ‘hyphen’ with his heart (an appropriate image for someone who typed his letters, perhaps), even though they cannot be together on the day.

  You are fine as summer weather,

  May to August all in one,

  And the clocks, when we’re together,

  Count no shadows. Only sun.

  There is a hint of menace perhaps in this extraordinary image. Ever since he moved into the east-facing room in Wellington at the beginning of 1946, inescapable light had been for him an image of both euphoric epiphany and threatening exposure. Here, in a weird twist, the sundials stop the passage of time by ‘casting sun’ rather than shadow. Her sunny vitality leaves him no place to hide.

  He sent the final poem, ‘We met at the end of the party’, to Betty from All Souls, Oxford, on 22 February 1976.53 It offers another sharp contrast, being in a mixture of anapaests and iambs, a metre well suited to companionable chattiness. The imagery, however, is powerfully symbolic, and in a unique blend of genres it is both self-elegiac lyric and muse poem. By turning from Maeve to Betty, Larkin had replaced his spoiled muse of innocent beauty with an ageing muse of vitality, more relevant to his situation. Betty was ‘certainly never ill’ and was always ‘full of energy’.54 She was no physically untouchable conventional muse. She was tantalizing and out of reach in the vision of longevity which she embodied.

  The poet and his lover encounter each other at the end of the party of life, when the drinks are dead and the glasses ‘dirty’.55 The sulky poet is bitterly convinced that his life is a spoiled remnant; she however, cheerful and optimistic, encourages him to make the best of what remains: ‘“Have this that’s left,” you said.’ The second stanza follows the same syntactical sequence as the first but the imagery shifts to the seasons:

  We walked through the last of summer,

  When shadows reached long and blue

  Across days that were growing shorter:

  You said: ‘There’s autumn too.’

  Autumn is too late for him. The precious moment of incipience has gone. This unromantic beloved is another of Larkin’s muses of ordinary life: a real girl in a real place. What had made the young Larkin long to be the breathless girl in ‘I see a girl dragged by the wrists’ was not her beauty but her abandoned submission to life. This older muse also embraces willingly what life offers. She moves on, unafraid of the future: ‘Always for you what’s finished / Is nothing, and what survives / Cancels the failed, the famished.’ There is a hint of nagging reproach in his words. He is intimidated by her ability to act as though they ‘had fresh lives’ from the moment of their meeting, as if:

  just living

  Could make me unaware

  Of June, and the guests arriving,

  And I not there.

  The phrase ‘just living’ stumbles metrically and the final line disappoints the reader with only two stresses instead of three.

  In ‘Fourth Former Loquitur’ three decades earlier, pathos was generated by a long perspective which transferred time into place. Having played out the cricket match to its close, the schoolgirls had gone to join the ‘old girls’ in the metaphorical pavilion of adulthood, leaving the fourth-former contemplating Jill’s hat left behind, and the grass newly flattened by their girlish bodies. Now this long perspective is reversed. Where the fourth-former looked forward elegiacally from a vivid youthful present into a future of age and death, the poet in ‘We met at the end of the party’ looks back from an aged present to the vivid party of his young life, still about to begin. By the same elision of time with place he sees the guests arriving in June, while he, decades later in autumn, is unable to find his way back to greet them.

  Betty recalls the debates between them which this poem distils: ‘He said to me one day: “I can’t understand why you, on waking in the morning, don’t think of death.” And I just looked at him and I said: “I cannot understand why you, on waking in the morning, think of death.”’ It is a poignant variation on the pattern of yearning poet and heartless muse. ‘He said to me: “My father died when he was sixty-three” (I mean, he was miserable), “and I expect I shall die when I’m sixty-three.” And I said: “Yes you will, because you are programming yourself to die at sixty-three.”’56 Though he criticized Sylvia Plath for living out a predetermined self-destructive myth in her work, in his own way Larkin followed Plath’s example. He did die at the age of sixty-three, of the same disease as his father. As I write, in early 2011, Betty has, at the age of eighty-six, just set out in the snow for a Bridge Week at Scarborough. She only recently gave up her regular golf engagements, and braved the bitter cold to attend the unveiling of Larkin’s statue on Paragon Station on his death day in 2010.

  22

  Death-Throes of a Talent

  1976–9

  In spring 1976 Larkin made his first excursion into Europe since his visit to Paris with Bruce Montgomery in 1952. He had been awarded the Shakespeare Prize of the Alfred Toepfer Stiftung F.V.S. Foundation, established in 1931 to promote European unification. It was a significant accolade; the prize had recently been awarded to Graham Greene, Harold Pinter and Peter Brook. Larkin, however, declared himself reluctant to have anything to do with ‘those Nazis’.1 He and Monica flew to Hamburg on 19 April, attended the ceremony on 20 April and flew back the next day. In a spirit of polite antagonism he made fun in his acceptance speech of the international ‘circuit’ of prizes and readings. In illustration of ‘the miseries of the lecture tour’ he quoted Auden’s ‘On the Circuit’: ‘very funny, but I think [. . .] rather dreadful too; the lecture circuit suddenly comes to resemble one of those other circuits described in Dante’s Inferno’.2 Nevertheless, writing afterwards to Winifred Bradshaw (formerly Arnott), he guiltily relished the hotel mini-bar which, since the Foundation was bearing their expenses, he and Monica had raided freely for half-bottles of champagne. He added more soberly: ‘All these honours seem ironic; when I was really doing good stuff, no one knew or cared; now all these compliments are paid, and I can’t write a line.’ Taking stock of his life, he continued: ‘To marry wd be an awfully big adventure, as Peter Pan nearly said, but I can’t say my feelings on the subject have altered much. I suppose, if I really have stopped writing, I might risk it.’3 The adventure to which Peter Pan actually refers is, of course, death.

  Also stressful was his appearance on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs programme. In a letter of 30 May 1976 he told his mother that he was slowly recovering from the recording: ‘I didn’t think it went at all well, principally because I was very nervous.’4 To contradict his reputation for reactionary
conservatism he chose Bernard Shaw’s Complete Plays as his book. He made a point of not listening to the programme when it was broadcast on 17 July 1976. His correspondence with Conquest, Amis and Gunner was more peppered than ever with splenetic outbursts:

  I want to see them starving,

  The so-called working class,

  Their wages weekly halving,

  Their women stewing grass [. . .]5

  His holiday with Monica in 1976 was spent in the West Country, where they visited the Hardy Museum in Dorchester. He wrote to Barbara Pym: ‘did you know he kept a calendar on his desk, set to the day he met his first wife? Kept it all through his second marriage till he died. What wives have to put up with!’6

  In September he began the task of reading over and ‘boiling down’ his diaries. He told Conquest: ‘the idea is that I shall then burn them’. It seems that he intended to preserve the ‘boiled down’ version, though there is an odd (perhaps deliberate) ambiguity in his phrasing. But the project was doomed from the start. Though he whimsically anticipated a time when he would be writing his diary one day, ‘boiling it down’ the next and burning it the next, he had so far advanced only as far as 1940.7 Despite his sensitivity about his diaries there is no evidence that they were as utterly disgusting as Andrew Motion imagines: full of ‘bile, resentment, envy and misanthropy’, functioning as:

  a sexual log book full of masturbatory fantasies, and a repository for his rage against the world – his grimmest, sexiest, most angry thoughts [. . .] Even his most candid letters only hint at their intensity. To gauge the anger we might think of the sometimes seethingly bitter things he wrote to Sutton as a young man, then multiply them.8

  The reference is puzzling since the Sutton letters are not notable for their seethingly bitter tone.

  Over the years he had continued to encourage Barbara Pym in her attempts to write a novel which could be published. In 1968 he had commented on The Sweet Dove Died: ‘there’s more potential feeling in this book than in any you have written [. . .] I think it could be a strong, sad book, with fewer characters and slower movement.’9 Lyric poetry had always meant a great deal to Pym and she was particularly impressed by ‘Faith Healing’, ‘Ambulances’ and ‘Posterity’.10 It was partly because of Larkin’s influence that Pym left behind the cosiness of the earlier work. She includes a quotation from ‘Ambulances’ in her account of Marcia’s pathetic last hours in Quartet in Autumn. In 1976 Larkin and Monica Jones visited Pym and her sister in their cottage in Finstock, where they stood together at T. S. Eliot’s grave. On 27 September he wrote of the draft of what was to become Quartet in Autumn: ‘It’s so strange to find the level good-humoured tender irony of your style unchanged but dealing with the awful end of life: I admire you enormously for bringing it off so well.’ He even offered to provide financial help: ‘could you ask whether a subsidy wd make any difference, &, if so, what it would have to be? Do please try. Or I will try if you like. Let me know.’11 When in November she told him that she had received yet another rejection12 he named her in the ‘most underrated’ author section of the 1976 Times Literary Supplement Christmas book feature. By chance Lord David Cecil made the same choice. Interest in Pym at once revived and Larkin responded by writing the essay he had planned years before. ‘Something to Love: The World of Barbara Pym’ was published in the Times Literary Supplement in January 1977.13 After years of neglect Pym was approached by publishers and her earlier novels were reprinted.

  At home in Hull, Larkin gave his support to a campaign to preserve the picturesque wilderness of Spring Bank Cemetery, near to Pearson Park. In February he travelled to his childhood home to receive the Coventry Award of Merit in the City’s Guildhall. In the same month, he and Kingsley Amis attended a performance of Larkinland, an arrangement of poems and jazz made by Michael Kustow, the Associate Director of the National Theatre.14 Larkin acted as Chair of the 1977 Booker Prize Panel, taking a pile of the long-listed novels with him to Scotland on his holiday with Monica in the summer. He favoured Pym’s Quartet in Autumn, with its moving portrayal of loneliness and paranoia, but the award went to Paul Scott’s Staying On.

  On 1 September 1977 a sharp reminder of mortality came with the death of Patsy Strang. He wrote later to Amis: ‘Did you know Patsy was dead? [. . .] Found literally dead drunk, it seems – empty Cointreau bottle, ½ empty Benedictine bottle. Fascinating mixture, what.’15 Robert Lowell died a fortnight after Patsy, and Larkin tactfully declined an invitation from his widow to speak at the memorial service.16 After the last poem addressed to Betty in February 1976 poetry had all but deserted him, the only significant new work in 1977 being a fragile love poem written in a copy of Thorburn’s Mammals which he gave to Monica: ‘The little lives of earth and form, / Of finding food, and keeping warm, / Are not like ours, and yet [. . .]’ Rather than a sentimental poem it is a meditation on the sentimental fictions with which we fend off hard reality. Abstracting Beatrix Potter into symbolist metaphor, the poet evokes a close-up world as it might appear through rabbit eyes: ‘I see [. . .] / The flattened grass, the swaying stalk, / And it is you I see.’ From the outside, however, this well-worn relationship could look very different. Martin Amis remembers, ‘In Monica’s presence, Larkin behaved like the long-suffering nephew of an uncontrollably eccentric aunt.’17

  During the summer of 1977 he worked on ‘Aubade’, abandoned in the middle of the third stanza in June 1974 during his final days in Pearson Park. Over the three months between 18 May and 18 August 1977, he completed the third stanza and reached a near-final version of the last two, filling nine pages with continuous, closely worked redrafts. His revisions make the poem more incisive and authoritative. He introduces the spoiled lyricism of sing-song nursery rhyme: ‘nothing to think with, / Nothing to love or link with’; ‘Being brave / Lets no one off the grave’. And he reduces the faint transcendence of ‘the open emptiness for ever’ to the bleak prose of ‘the total emptiness for ever’. In the third stanza he dismisses with crushing finality both theological and secular arguments against the fear of death. The brief nostalgia of the ‘vast, moth-eaten musical brocade’ of religion is rejected as wishful thinking which we have now outgrown. But equally ineffectual is the materialist rationalizing of death, derived ultimately from Epicurus:

  And specious stuff that says No rational being

  Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

  That this is what we fear – no sight, no sound,

  No touch or taste or smell [. . .]18

  ‘The anaesthetic from which none come round’ is not a figure of speech, but a literal definition of death, from the Greek an-aesthesis, the negation of the senses. Recently the philosopher Richard Rorty has attempted to reopen this debate, arguing that ‘“fear of extinction” is an unhelpful phrase. There is no such thing as fear of inexistence as such, but only fear of some concrete loss.’19 This is a distinction without a difference. Inexistence consists precisely of the concrete loss of vision, hearing, touch, taste or smell, and Larkin fears this loss. Moreover it is quite possible to imagine the state of being without one’s senses, and to fear being reduced for ever to that state. There is nothing forced or tenuous about what Larkin called his ‘in-a-funk-about-death poem’.20

  The final stanza dramatizes ‘The death-throes of a talent’21 with ruthless candour. Metaphor, threatened from the beginning of the poem, collapses completely. The light ‘strengthens’, and the poet is granted his epiphany: ‘It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know’. Larkin no doubt has in mind Auden’s bedroom intimation of mortality: ‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard, / The desert sighs in the bed, / And the crack in the tea-cup opens / A lane to the land of the dead.’22 But where Auden’s metaphors are extravagant and masterful, Larkin’s prosy metonym sounds flat and unrhetorical. As an image of ‘what we know’ this wardrobe is the hollowest of metaphors. It is scarcely even figurative. As an upended wooden box it is almost a coffin already.23 As in ‘Going’ we are presented with a transparent ri
ddle, the answer to which is ‘death’. This is metaphor in extremis. The inverted, Larkinesque construction, ‘It stands [. . .] what we know,’ throws the weight of meaning cruelly on to the stark ‘what’ noun phrase. The live emotional charge of ‘what I am’ in ‘Best Society’, or ‘What will survive of us’ in ‘An Arundel Tomb’, short-circuits to a resigned ‘what we know’. A more relevant intertext than Auden is perhaps John Wilmot, whose blunt atheist assertion, ‘Dead, wee become the Lumber of the World’, has a similar anti-poetic poetry.24 In ‘The Building’ the death-bound patients saw unattainable beauty in a prosaic glimpse of ordinary life. But here the ‘girls in hairdos’ coming from the cleaners are replaced by a less consoling symbol of everyday life: telephones crouching, ‘getting ready to ring’, in a world where ‘Work has to be done’, and postmen and doctors ‘go from house to house’ ministering to our needs with the contents of their bags.25 But for all its threats and ambiguities this dawn world of offices, typewriters and letters, under a clay-white sky, is still infinitely preferable to ‘sure extinction’.