Philip Larkin
Page 13
Postcard1
[St John’s College, Oxford]
Friday
Still no time to write to you – my days are full as eggs, like eggs too, I feel they are rationed. Have you got my polyfoto? It has been sent to you. Please send it to me as soon as possible with comments, as it is awaited with interest here. I have had my last tute – by the way, there are now no grounds for appealing for an extra term. Excuse writing.
Love in abundance,
Philip
1 Addressed to Mrs Sydney Larkin, 73 Coten End, Warwick.
16 December 1941
Postcard1
St John’s College, Oxford
Tuesday
Temporary loss of pen makes pencil unavoidable. Medical are giving me a special “Eyesight Exam”, this afternoon – they thought I was fooling them. I wasn’t.
I don’t know if this is hopeful or not.
Philip
1 Addressed to Mrs Sydney Larkin, 73 Coten End, Warwick.
17 December 1941
Postcard1
St John’s College, Oxford
Wednesday
You will be astounded to hear that so far from failing my section,2 I have got a distinction. So has Norman. This is probably due to mistakes on the part of the examiners but they still stand.
Philip
P.S. This seems a good time to warn you I am down to my last £3.
1 Addressed to Mr & Mrs Sydney Larkin, 73 Coten End, Warwick.
2 On 14 December Philip had written to his parents: ‘I have failed the exam, unless there is a wartime policy of letting through mental defectives as well as everybody else.’
1942
17 January 1942
125, Walton St, Oxford1
Dear Mop & Pop,
I am installed, but without my trunk. I don’t know when this will turn up or how long to give it before becoming worried, but I left the receipt with you. So if you have it, hold it.
These lodgings seem all right. We haven’t been asked to pay yet, and we haven’t really settled all our problems, as regards having tea and things, but most things seem to be very nice. Details are – we are called at 8.0 a.m. with hot water and breakfast at 8.30. Baths – except on Sundays – are awkward and never before breakfast, which consists of shredded wheat, a second course, and toast and marmalade. The second course was bacon and eggs on the first morning and what she2 called “a bag o’ mystery” this morning. It was. Eatable up to a point, it spread over the plate like an enormous rissole. The only grouse I have is that she serves tea for breakfast instead of coffee. I don’t know whether to ask her to change it or not.
Other meals – lunch & dinner – we have in College. She provides – apparently – sheets, towels and so on. In herself she is a kindly and rather sloppy woman, not bad looking but with gleaming false teeth.
With regard to work, I had a nasty shock when Poole told me last night that I was not exempted from Pass Mods.3 and that if I wanted to read for Schools I’d better start brushing up my French & Latin. I have seen my tutor, however, – the Reverend Houghton, S. Peter’s Hall – and he thinks I can plead a special case.4 I should ——— well think so too: if not I have wasted four terms and about £200. I will keep you posted in this direction, and I shall see Poole tonight. I shall be firm.
Until my trunk arrives I’ve nothing to read or wear but this does not bother me as I have my records. My new tutor is well known as a pedantic, uninspired, literary, Christian fool, so we shall get along fine. Norman had him last term and after a terrific quarrel about D. H. Lawrence they were never really on good terms. […]
Love,
Philip
P.P.S. Trunk arrived, slightly damaged. No underclothes. Where are they? Send some, please!
1 On 1 January 1942, Larkin received the notification that his poor eyesight placed him in medical category IV, so he was exempt from military service. At the beginning of term he moved into a flat at 125 Walton Street, Oxford, shared with Philip Brown, who, as a medical student, was also exempt.
2 The landlady, Mrs Burchell.
3 Austin Lane Poole. See note 1 on letter of 14 October 1941.
4 Rev. Ralph Edward Cunliffe Houghton (1896-1990), at this time a Fellow of St Peter’s Hall. In ‘Biographical Details: Oxford’ Larkin recalls him as ‘a tutor I disliked from the start’. About Larkin 23 (April 2007), 9.
26 January 1942
Postcard
125 Walton St, Oxford
Monday
Just had my first tute with my new tutor.!!! He’s too like Kingsland1 to be bearable. But I agreed with everything he said, so we didn’t quarrel. Pants2 still unposted but will follow soon. Breakfasts still very nice, but nearly always cold by the time we get to them. Jim now says he’s going to be a conscientious objector. How he will get on I don’t know.
Love,
Philip
1 English Master at King Henry VIII School, Coventry. He had recommended that Larkin apply for Oxford.
2 Underpants (British usage).
9 February 1942
125 Walton St, Oxford
Dear Mop & Pop,
[…] The Bulletin printed the poem, which was a hack string of images scrawled for the occasion.1 The L.C. Executive Committee didn’t like it, however & my days as a Left Poet seem numbered. The Cherwell is just terrible these days, and if I had anything to send them I would.
A meeting of the Rhythm Club yesterday succeeded in getting three players from London – two negroes & one semi Arabian pianist by the name of Katz. It developed into a one-man show by the negro trumpeter, who was quite unabashed by the depressing university surroundings, and danced, sang, clowned, roared with laughter, addressed women in the audience, insisted on shaking hands with latecomers, and played his trumpet all without the least trace of self consciousness. I, needless to say, heartily enjoyed it.
Bacon & eggs this morning, for Mop’s benefit. Are you a stronger animal now? My rude health, apart from an early morning cold, continues. I had a letter from Colin this morning which runs: “Now I want to speak a very serious word to you. I have known you since infancy. I like you immensely: I like your people, so for God’s sake KEEP OUT of THE ——— ——— ——— ARMY.” He goes on to enumerate the drawbacks – shovelling snow for four days, sleeping on floors of condemned barracks, drilling in the snow at 8 a.m. &c. &c. Altogether I feel well out of things.
Jim has seen various high officers, all unsympathetic. He intends to persist, however: but I warn him to act quickly before being sent abroad as a dangerous element. He agrees.
Well, I must go & work in the Bodleian now. Love to all: be a stronger animal.
Love,
Philip
1 ‘Disintegration’, published in the Labour Club Bulletin, edited by Kingsley Amis. ‘Observation’ had appeared in the issue of November 1941.
21 February 1942
125 Walton St, Oxford
Dear Mop and Pop,
It is about time I sent you a letter, I think: the spectacles have just arrived, for which many thanks: but I have found my fountain pen, praise be. […]
I haven’t forgotten the oculist, but am waiting for the spectacle business to be cleared up. I have had no news as yet from the Army, and am living in hopes. Pop will be infuriated to hear that I have joined the Labour Club, due to the amusing exertions of a Czech woman, Chitra Ruderingova, who is the crankiest communist I have ever met.1 Also they now have club rooms where one can get coffee at 10 p.m. every night – most convenient.
I hope you (Mop) are improving daily; I am still battening and fattening on bacon and eggs. Mrs B. is very shy about money: it pains her deeply when we ask for a bill, and she hides it like a squirrel in a drawer for us, and insists that we do the same with the money. It vanishes. By the way, I think our vac. starts about March 15th. I don’t know what I shall be doing with regard to firewatching, &c. but you asked for the date s
o there it is. Work continues fairly nicely. Hope you liked the poem (did I send it?) I do. The Czech woman thought it “morbid and unhealthy”. She’s crazy.
Yours v. affectionately,
Philip
1 Larkin invited Rudingerova to tea (he misspells her name): ‘We ate toast and marmalade and she told me I was decadent. Nothing else happened.’ ‘Biographical Details: Oxford’, About Larkin 23 (April 2007), 9. See also Zachary Leader (ed.), The Letters of Kingsley Amis (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 13 and fn.
26 April 1942
125 Walton St, Oxford
My dear Mrs Larkin,
Thank you for your very prompt despatch of my few Goods and Chattels! I was truly surprised they arrived so soon. Everything was quite all right, nothing was broken “in transit”, as they say, and I am settled once more in my “digs” as of yore.
That fool Mrs Burchell has put a screen in front of the 1 in front of the fireplace, so I am not expected to warm my aged bones at this time of the year, apparently! My breakfast was stone cold yesterday & the teapot was half full of leaves this morning. That dam’ fool Joyce2 put blacking on my brown shoes last night & I have had to get busy this morning with my gown rubbing it off. She thinks I don’t notice it. But I do. She may think this is an easy job. But I tell her she’ll get called up into munitions as soon as look at her. That shows her which way the wind’s blowing.
I have another new tutor – a b. fool called Hughes from Birmingham, ninety years old and blind, quite incapable of doing anything.3 He can’t even see me, let alone read my essays. A case of the blind leading the blind, oh, dear lady?! I am also going to another tutor sometime to pick up my Anglo Saxon again – it can do with a little “brushing up”!
Negotiations are under way for us to hire a punt for the whole term, in order to laze on the river without having to rush about trying to find one like a crowd of b. fools. As far as I can see, the college won’t even have one. They’re too lazy. I know the type. They’re too slack to do a hand’s turn even if they didn’t know where their next meal was coming from. But if we get one and they leave it so late that they can’t, they’ll laugh on the other side of their faces, I’ll be bound. That will be a slap in the eye for them, with a – with a vengeance.
Well, dear lady. I must thank you yet once again for your kindness during my stay at your delightful residence. I hope to be with you again before very long and “tempus fugit”, you know!
Yours very truly
C. D. Penn4
1 The letters are misformed and the word lurches downward into the next line, as if the author had lost control of the pen.
2 Mrs Burchell’s daughter.
3 Arthur M. D. Hughes (1873–1974) had edited Cobbett: Prose and Poetry for the Clarendon Press (1925). He retired from his chair in Birmingham in 1939 and was at this time an emeritus professor. Larkin exaggerates his age. See letter of 15 May 1942.
4 Larkin gives no explanation of the letters, in slightly disguised handwriting, sent in the name of C. D. (or G. D.) Penn M.A. See Philip Pullen, ‘The Mysterious Mr Penn’, About Larkin 35 (April 2013), 12–14.
29 April 1942
Wednesday
125 Walton St, Oxford
Thank Pop for his letter, cutting, & check. I must ask you for one more thing – Sweet’s Anglo Saxon Reader (blue book) & Sweet’s A. S. Primer (small dis-covered brown book) from the shelves of my desk. I am restarting Old English with a vengeance under the kindly hand of Miss Bisson, a kindly middle-aged lady whom I hope to get on all right with. I think I prefer women tutors to men – they’re gentler.1
Mrs B. has removed the wall-flowers & brought some exotic pink lilies, Gelder lilies & blue things that might be scabious. They look lovely.
Love,
Philip
1 Mrs (not Miss) Isabella Jane Bisson, née Smith (1895–1986) was described in the Somerville College Register as ‘coaching in English at Oxford, 1935’ (no end date given).
10 May 1942
125 Walton St, Oxford
Dear Mop & Pop,
Thanks for letter and forget me nots, which arrived squashed and flat, but still recognisable as f-m-n’s. I will answer any burning questions first.
Wilenski1 was a genial, toad-like man. I “had conversation” with him, mainly desultory, but quite intellectual. He wanted to know why young artists were so ready to fly into political camps; saying that in his day no one expected the artist to justify his work or make it intelligible to the common man any more than the research scientist. I told him why I thought it was – the double successful attack on the artist, internally by the psychologists and externally by the Fascists (I know Pop won’t agree) that had destroyed their self confidence and made them ready to back up the party that promised to deliver them in the new extra-university real-life battle between aesthete and athlete. Needless to say, he was not impressed by all this.
News on the literary front is fairly encouraging. The position is that “Z” (Lehmann) hopes to appear before the term’s end.2 What I have in it I don’t know – probably one poem. I had a couple back with some pencillings – presumably Lehmann’s – reading “Auden again! I am thoroughly sick of the flat middle-class phraseology of the Auden jargon. But this has some fine lines.” Both poems were marked “A” which is a Class number, I suppose, opposed to B & C, and not meaning “Accepted” or “Auden”!
Charles Hamblett returned the story but kept the five poems, sending a very fulsome letter. He says they will be published in the Fortune Press. I don’t really trust him, but I suppose all is grist etc. at this stage of the proceedings. Many people were included in his search for “non Hogarth press” protégés.
Jim is at present at Moreton-in-the-Marsh. Nothing has happened yet about his case. I like my new spectacles immensely. They are slick and shiny.
I think that is all you wanted to know.
One of the things I have learnt about Dylan Thomas, you might tell Pop, is that he rarely reads any poetry but when he does it is Thomas Hardy and A. E. Housman (very simple people) who are his favourites. I suppose this is because he is so under educated … He is also writing for the Govt. in MofI3 film capacity. Beowulf is now hissing at me from a corner, so I must end.
Ever with love,
Philip
My dear Mrs Larkin,4
Don’t you worry about Warwick being raided, dear lady. Jerry has a lot more fish to fry yet, I’ll be bound. I’d like to see him lay a finger on Oxford, either. He’d soon have a pretty mess about his ears, you mark my words.
Yours very sincerely,
C. D. Penn M.A.
1 R. H. Wilenski (1887–1975): art critic and historian, author of The Modern Movement in Art (1928). Larkin was Treasurer of the English Club, and responsible for managing the visits of guest speakers.
2 An anthology of Oxford and Cambridge writing, edited by John Lehmann (1907–87), who founded New Writing in 1936 and the London Magazine in 1954. See Geoff Weston, ‘“Z”: Another Larkin exclusion’, About Larkin 44 (October 2017), 25.
3 Ministry of Information.
4 In disguised handwriting.
15 May 1942
125 Walton St, Oxford
Dear Mop & Pop,
This weekly letter is a trifle schoolboyish in plan, but I hope you appreciate the fact that I really can’t fit it in for certain any other way. The postcards are also too infrequent, I know.
Thank you for the fat little pipe. For some reason, it arouses terrific disgust in all my friends, but I like it. The mouthpiece is wrong, I know, but it actually doesn’t make much difference. Thank you for the chocolate.
I am getting to like my tutor, inasmuch as it is in my nature to like any tutor. He was born in 1873 and before the last war held a position at Kiel University. His appreciative powers make up for what he lacks intellectually – which is a pleasant change from the rest, who just don’t make up for what they lack intellectually.
No poetic news. You might tell pop that a friend of
mine found an Obelisk Press Edition (i.e. unexpurgated) of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” behind the bookcase in his digs, and I am impatiently waiting for him (and his wife) to finish it. “Mine eyes have seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord”. I have also stupidly consented to write a paper for the Essay Society for May 31st, and am going to expand the Isherwood paper the English Club underwent.
Margaret Kennedy is next week’s guest.1 I expect Pop is one of her regular readers, but I really can’t remember anything she has written. The Finances are tough going, but with Philip Brown’s assistance (like Pop’s assistance at my homework – remember? even to the “Yes, but do you see why we do it?”) it hasn’t come unstuck yet.2
I haven’t had much in the way of tea-parties this term, but I went to supper with a friend called Hilary last night who casually produced a crab he had bought and boiled himself. Needless to say he darns his own socks. Truly an amazing kind of person.
By the way, vac. plans loom. I shall be conscripted into the coll. firewatching scheme for 3 weeks. I don’t know when, yet. Also my South Wales holiday may really happen.
Condole Pop on his indisposition & new sports coat. Philip had one arrive yesterday – very nice, but v. expensive (£5.0.0)
Very much love
Philip
PTO
My dear Mrs Larkin,
Please pardon my writing in pencil, but my pen has just run out and someone – that b. fool Joyce, I expect – has run away with the ink. I shall be overjoyed to accept once more the kindly hospitality of you and Mr Larkin this coming vacation.
Don’t be nervous about this fellow Hitler – I’ll wager he’s sorry he ever crossed swords with us, eh?! The bells will ring, dear lady, very soon, but it won’t be for an invasion, you mark my words. It’ll be peace.
Now I must try and get off some of the blacking that b. fool Joyce has put on my brown shoes.