Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  On 17 November 1977 came the death that mattered most. His mother, already for many months in the twilight of the old fools, died at the age of ninety-one. His dearest old creature was no longer there to expect his next letter. The following day Larkin kept an appointment with Anthony Thwaite at All Souls College, and asked his Anglican friend to accompany him to college prayers in the morning: ‘I think my mother would have liked that.’26 He had left ‘Aubade’ all but complete just over three months earlier, on 18 August. A week or so after his mother’s death he returned to it, and on a single page, with ‘28.11.1977’ at the top and ‘29.11.1977’ at the bottom, he redrafted the last stanza. The final touch seems to have been the insertion of the achingly moving phrases ‘all the uncaring / Intricate rented world begins to rouse’. Only minor adjustments were made in the subsequent typescript. His ‘final’ poem was at last complete. ‘Aubade’ was published in the Times Literary Supplement on 23 December 1977. He grimly anticipated the number of Christmas dinners it would spoil.

  With ‘Aubade’ he consciously signalled that his oeuvre was complete, and his creative life was over. He was to succeed in blowing the embers briefly into life on only five further occasions over the remaining eight years of his life.27 By the end of 1977 he had made his contribution to each genre and form; he had explored every verbal possibility open to him. His art was his life, and his grasp on life depended on his poetry. If new inspiration did not come in answer to his waiting he could not force it. Writing a poem, as he said, was ‘not an act of the will’. The death of his art in 1977 was as natural and inevitable a process as his biological death in 1985. A flower which has bloomed cannot remake itself as a bud.

  However, life went on, and work had to be done. In his daily life his instinct for blithe wit remained undiminished. In January 1978, he received a letter from the Friends of Dove Cottage telling him that, following a recent donation, he had been made a life member. He replied: ‘In fact I was similarly enrolled a few years ago, when I made a similar generous donation, as you so kindly put it, so I now have the distinction of being a life member twice over. I very much fear, however, that they will have to run concurrently.’28 Larkin now found himself saddled with the task of writing a third commissioned work. Fortunately it was a relatively minor affair: a quatrain celebrating the Queen’s Jubilee to be engraved in Queen’s Square, Bloomsbury near Faber’s office. Ted Hughes, Faber’s next most prominent poet, was also to provide a quatrain. Larkin wrote to Monteith at Faber on 2 March:

  I’m no good at this lapidary lark. All three nights’ thought can produce is

  In times when nothing stood

  But worsened, or grew strange,

  There was one constant good:

  She did not change.29

  You are welcome to first British chiselling rights in that, but please don’t print it. I’m sure Ted will do better.

  He could not resist adding his own imagined version of Hughes’s poem, in the style of Crow:

  The sky split apart in malice

  Stars rattled like pans on a shelf

  Crow shat on Buckingham Palace

  God pissed Himself –30

  It is an amusing comment on the fate of official, public verse that Larkin’s pastiche of Hughes will be more familiar to readers than either poet’s official quatrain.31

  A fortnight later Larkin finally and momentously ‘sorted himself out’ in relation to Maeve. After her mother’s death in May 1977, she had moved with her father into a smaller semi-detached house in St Margaret’s Close, Cottingham, and Philip had helped with the move, changing all the plugs on their appliances.32 But by early 1978 it seems that he had come to a final decision that this unequal, ‘unreal’ relationship could no longer be sustained. There is an appearance of deliberation, irritation even, about his actions. On 16 March 1978, following its successful run in London, Larkinland was performed in the Middleton Hall in the University. Philip attended with Maeve, and she naturally expected to accompany him to the reception in Staff House afterwards. However, as they left the Hall he insisted on going on alone. She was forced to find a friend to drive her home.

  With Philip as the guest of honour, and me as his escort, it should have been an enjoyable evening for both of us. Alas, it turned out to be disastrous and resulted in the abrupt termination of our long intimacy. I still find it distressing to recall the details, let alone write about them [. . .] When we met a few days later, Philip had finally determined to end the vacillation of eighteen years and henceforth pledge himself to Monica Jones. I reluctantly accepted his decision: what else could I do?33

  Philip wrote to her: ‘I realize that you are very hurt, and that this explains the angry home truths [. . .] I know most of these are justified (not quite all), but they leave their sting. Perhaps when we feel better we can meet again. I don’t say this vindictively: I am extremely sad about it all.’34 There is anger between the lines, and he stands his ground.

  Bereft of poetic inspiration, Larkin was fully occupied with literary business. Though he avoided contact with the University’s English Department, he took an interest in a new lecturer, Andrew Motion, later to become his biographer. In a letter to Anthony Thwaite of 29 January 1978 he gave a thumbnail sketch: ‘Like a latterday Stephen Spender – very tall, sissy voice, gentlemanly, good-looking, all that. I quite like him.’35 In spring 1978 Larkin wrote an essay on Hull’s first major poet, Andrew Marvell, for the tercentenary of his death.36 In May a well-written letter from the young Vikram Seth, then a student of Economics at Stanford, induced him to break his usual rule of polite refusal to give advice to aspiring poets. He responded that he had read Seth’s work with ‘great interest and a good deal of enjoyment’, though he felt that the subjects he dealt with were ‘not quite as advanced’ as his technique. He undertook to show Seth’s poems to an editor whom he was to meet later in the week. There may not have been much substance in this promise. In July he wrote that he had been disappointed that the editor had ‘not been very impressed by your poems’.37

  In July the Royal Society of Literature made Larkin a Companion of Literature. He agreed also to become an adviser to the committee revising the New English Bible, but the task was not congenial and he soon resigned.38 In September 1978 Bruce Montgomery died. Latterly Montgomery had become an alcoholic and both Larkin and Amis had been embarrassed by his requests for loans. But Larkin was grateful for the part the confident, cosmopolitan young Montgomery had played in his early career. He wrote to Kingsley Amis on 19 September: ‘I wish I’d seen more of Bruce when he was still on top of things. Whatever one thought of his books, and his sense (sometimes) of what was funny or desirable, he was an original nobody else was the least like, don’t you think?’39

  As the year drew to its end Larkin succeeded in drafting a wan but deeply affecting poem, ‘The Winter Palace’. In ramshackle, sometimes double-rhymed couplets (‘older / shoulder; century / university’) starkly separated on the page, the poet gives a brutally reductive account of his life. His second quarter-century was spent losing what he had learnt at university, and he is now beginning to experience bouts of forgetfulness. He welcomes these ‘senior moments’ (as we would now call them), since they blank out awareness of the damage of age, providing a foretaste of oblivion: ‘Then there will be nothing I know. / My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.’ The ‘palace’ of the title is another withdrawing room of the mind, ‘cleared of me’. But this thought now prompts weary resignation rather than awe or euphoria. His poetic spirits were so low that he failed to finalize the poem. The third and fourth lines, as printed in the 1988 Collected Poems, have been crossed out in the typescript, and the alternative wording at the bottom of the page reaches no clear alternative.40 Burnett consequently excludes the poem from The Complete Poems, as unfinished.

  An eloquent epitaph on Philip’s relationship with Maeve is provided by a Christmas card which he sent to her at the end of 1978. It falls into the ‘devout and beautiful’ cate
gory, showing a reproduction of a Botticelli Madonna. Following the conventional printed greeting he has written simply ‘and love / from / Philip’. The small size of the card (four inches square) made it useful as a bookmark and it survived in a well-fingered state in one of Maeve’s books.41 She intensified its ‘devout’ aspect by copying out four lengthy inscriptions into the blank spaces, one of them relating to the Pope’s visit to Ireland in 1979: ‘By governing with fidelity those entrusted to his care may he, as successor to the Apostle Peter and vicar of Christ, build your church into a sacrament of unity, love and peace for all the world.’ Facing Philip’s inscription Maeve has written another prayer: ‘Father, we pray that the healing Power of your Sacraments may give us peace [. . .]’ There is something moving about the way the flowing strokes of Larkin’s fountain-pen are hemmed about on all sides by the neat ballpoint of Maeve’s piety. Underneath the second prayer she has copied out a couplet which appealed to her poetic taste: ‘I heard a bird sing in the dark of December. / A magical thing and sweet to remember.’42

  The fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the University’s Library fell on 8 March 1979. For the occasion Larkin wrote the delicate verse ‘New eyes each year’, and the Deputy Librarian Brenda Moon oversaw its printing in a limited edition on the Library’s recently purchased 1833 Albion press. Philip also wrote two more private poems for the occasion. On the inside cover of Brenda’s copy of ‘New eyes’, he addressed his deputy in ‘The daily things we do’. But the poem he wrote in Betty Mackereth’s copy, ‘New Brooms’, has a more intimate warmth:

  New brooms sweep clean,

  They say, and mean

  Change and decay,

  Things brushed away;

  But for old rooms

  Where life has been

  And love seen,

  Keep the old brooms.

  The touching play on the familiar proverb gives this poem more feeling than the other two.

  In March 1979 Larkin had seen a hedgehog several times in his Newland Park back garden, and had fed and taken photographs of it. Then on 10 June he wrote to Judy Egerton: ‘This has been rather a depressing day: killed a hedgehog when mowing the lawn, by accident of course. It’s upset me rather.’43 With Betty the following morning he was less reticent. She recollects: ‘I could always tell what sort of day it was going to be from his mood when he came in. But this day it was different from anything. He just stood at the window of his office, looking out, and said: “I mowed the lawn last night; and I killed the hedgehog.” And the tears rolled down his face.’44 The following day, 12 June 1979, he devoted a single page of workbook drafting to a poem, ‘The Hedgehog’, subsequently retitling it ‘The Mower’ and making one or two adjustments in the typescript.45 The animal elegy goes back to Catullus’ poem on Lesbia’s sparrow, and there are familiar examples by William Cowper, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Matthew Arnold. Larkin’s contribution to the form is unique in its gravity. Rhyme is natural in this sentimental, relatively light genre, and the rhymelessness of Larkin’s poem sounds like a denial of consolation. The poem is also rendered verbally distinctive by one of Larkin’s unique ‘un-’ words: ‘I had mauled its unobtrusive world / Unmendably.’

  The first day after a death, the new absence

  Is always the same; we should be careful

  Of each other, we should be kind

  While there is still time.

  Though this is a mere animal, its passing is registered as ‘a death’, as if it were a human being. ‘Next morning I got up and it did not’: the homespun idiom asserts common human and animal life-rhythms. Some readers may feel uneasy at this. Hedgehogs are nocturnal animals and do not ‘get up’ in the morning. Is this hedgehog perhaps a little too close to Mrs Tiggy-Winkle?46

  On 21–2 March, Larkin had attended the second meeting of the new Manuscripts Group of SCONUL in King’s College London, and delivered a version of his influential essay ‘A Neglected Responsibility’, warning of the threat of contemporary British poetic manuscripts being acquired by American libraries.47 In a letter of 20 March 1979 Ted Hughes wrote to him asking him to join Charles Causley, Seamus Heaney and himself on the Arvon Foundation poetry competition prize panel. Hughes took the opportunity to tell Larkin that he had written him a fan letter on reading ‘Aubade’, though he had not sent it: ‘a really great poem – an event’.48 Hughes’s admiration did not prevent Larkin from making his usual jokes to his friends when Hughes revisited Hull in August 1979 for another reading. A ‘Meet Ted Hughes’ reception was advertised at a cost of £4.50. Larkin wrote to Winifred: ‘Feel like walking up & down outside with a placard reading “Meet P.L. for £3.95”.’49

  What was to be Larkin’s last-completed major poem, ‘Love Again’, had been left unfinished in December 1975, at which time the first stanza and first two lines of the second had reached their final version. Larkin had already formulated the crucial twist of the argument, in which the speaker turns impatiently away from his sterile sexual jealousy: ‘But why put it into words?’ But the remainder of the second stanza needed to be finalized. His 1975 draft concluded with a vision of failure and mortality, as ‘fear-locked squalid pain’ spreads in ‘other lives’ and, in a moving final rhyme: ‘death comes easily as rain’.50 But much slow and discontinuous drafting still lay ahead. In March 1976 and again, after nearly two years in December 1977, he had returned to the draft in the workbook, developing the image of the tree, which spreads harmoniously in other lives, in an echo of Yeats’s ‘Among School Children’.51 Then on 15 August 1978, apparently prompted by the sight of Maeve at a party with her new partner, David Bassett, a lecturer in South East Asian Studies, Larkin began the final pages of drafting, copying out the poem again from the beginning each time. At the end of one draft he wrote: ‘21.9.78 RBM’s funeral’. After two months, on 25 October 1978, he had reached the final version of all but the last three lines, which were to provide the explanation of ‘why it never worked for me’. But here the poem faltered into inscrutably private references: ‘There would need to have been a great difference / A long way back, and the rewards / Might not have meant much personally [. . .]’52 He left space on the page for the conclusion, and turned his attention in the workbook to ‘The Winter Palace’, ‘The Mower’ and a poem entitled ‘Letters to my mind’.

  Then, as the inserted dates show, nearly a year later, on 20 September 1979, he turned back with inspired decisiveness to the final page of the 1978 draft and added the resonant conclusion:

  Something to do with violence

  A long way back, and wrong rewards,

  And arrogant eternity.

  The pattern remains as first conceived, with a Larkinesque modulation from irritable self-analysis to universal elegy. It also has a unique form, consisting of ababcb stanzas, linked together by the same c-rhyme: ‘afterwards / words / rewards’. But now it ends in a tone of eloquent magnanimity rather than elegiac resignation. The penultimate two lines rephrase ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’ with tragic gravity. But the ultimate reason why it never worked for the poet lies beyond the problems of his childhood, in his awareness of ‘arrogant eternity’. The earlier diminuendo ending, ‘And death comes easily as rain’, is replaced by a rhetorical cymbal clash. This is in some ways an atypical poem, written, as the halting drafting process shows, at a time when Larkin was forced to tend his inspiration carefully.

  His next serious poem to be completed would have been ‘Letters to my mind’, which occupies five pages of the final workbook, ending on a page dated at the top ‘20.11.79’. The poet asks his mind: ‘Are you still on my side?’ He complains that it is not ‘friendly’ of his mind to be constantly replaying the ‘fool-film of me’, scalding him with humiliating recollections. What, he asks his mind, does it really want? Is it to be ‘folded cleanly’, ‘waiting emptily’ in a state of senile dementia? The draft falters into unpunctuated silence:

  So that I know no more

  Today – or even less –

&nbs
p; Than when we first

  The remainder of the page is blank.53

  Late in 1979, shortly after the publication of Barry Bloomfield’s bibliography, Larkin agreed to give two interviews intended to consolidate his public image. The first, with Miriam Gross of the Observer, appeared in November, and the second, with John Haffenden, appeared in the April/May 1980 issue of the London Magazine. Both are interviews in the loosest sense, since Larkin has clearly polished every phrase. The Observer piece, particularly, is packed with brittle and outrageous aphorisms as quotable as anything in Oscar Wilde. He dislikes public readings, he says, because ‘I don’t want to go around pretending to be me.’ But this very ‘interview’ is itself the most histrionic of self-impersonations. He proves his claim to be ‘quite funny’ with provocative aphorisms: ‘most people are unhappy, don’t you think?’; ‘you can’t write more than two hours a day and after that what do you do? Probably get into trouble.’ He gives an Amisian caricature of his early novelistic ambition: ‘I’d had visions of myself writing 500 words a day for six months, shoving the results off to a printer and going to live on the Côte d’Azur, uninterrupted except for the correction of proofs. It didn’t happen like that – very frustrating.’ He quotes his own line ‘Books are a load of crap’ as expressing one of those ‘sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo’, adding like an after-dinner speaker: ‘as Dr Johnson said’. Writing a poem makes him feel as if he’d ‘laid an egg’. In philistine mode, he tells his interviewer: ‘I read everything except philosophy, theology, economics, sociology, science, or anything to do with the wonders of nature, anything to do with technology – have I said politics? I’m trying to think of all the Dewey decimal classes.’ He would like to visit China, but only if he ‘could come back the same day’.