Philip Larkin

by Philip Larkin

  Yrs v. sincerely

  C. D. Penn, M.A.

  1 Novelist and playwright (1896–1967), best-known for her novel, The Constant Nymph (1924).

  2 Larkin was Treasurer of the English Club.

  21 May 1942

  125 Walton St, Oxford

  Thursday

  Dear Pop,

  Thanks for your words in season. I haven’t got hold of the book yet, but I can’t imagine Lawrence doing anyone any harm, who knew what he was talking about. And I do know what he’s talking about – I hope. However, I will walk warily, as you suggest.

  A drifting, rainy day here – not particularly objectionable. I have to prepare a question on ‘Bacon as a moralist’, and having carefully constructed the epigram “Bacon was a moralist without being an idealist” am finding it refuted in all introductions, prefaces, essays &c. By the way, Hughes (my tutor) edited that Cobbett I used at school – remember? – in the Clarendon Series.1 Also three others – Shelley, Burke and someone else.

  You know, I regard “Lady C.” as the last piece to be put in my Lawrence jigsaw. All his work I have read and reread. This last book is the final flower, crown, jewel – whatever you like. Anyway, I have just read the most disgusting and revolting book ever written, which should be immediately banned instead of selling thousands to the RAF – “No Orchids for Miss Blandish”.2

  All Love,

  Philip

  1 A. M. D. Hughes (ed.), Cobbett: Prose and Poetry (Clarendon Press, 1925).

  2 A lurid crime novel published in 1939 by James Hadley Chase (1906–85).

  26 May 1942

  Postcard1

  St John’s College, Oxford

  Tuesday

  Things miserable here, for a variety of reasons. Raining solidly for several days. Feel like death. Essay a bore. Work too heavy. Life in decay. Hope you’re both happier.

  Love,

  Philip

  P.S. I’m not quite so gloomy as this may suggest.

  1 With printed letterhead, but text written in pencil by Larkin.

  7 June 19421

  [125 Walton St, Oxford]

  My dear Mrs Larkin,

  How is the sun finding you these days, eh? Don’t forget to get out a bit, even if it’s only for half an hour in the – in the afternoons. My laundry troubles have been cleared up satisfactorily, but I am a little short of handkerchiefs, you know, due to the pestilential hay-fever. hugh!!

  My regards to you & Mr Larkin.

  Yours very sincerely,

  G. D. Penn2

  1 The final side of a four-side letter.

  2 Sic. In other letters he signs himself ‘C. D. Penn’.

  9 June 1942

  Postcard1

  125 Walton St

  Tragedy. ‘Z’ appeared, without me.2 Please send 2 botts. arsenic, 2 botts. strychnine, 1 revolver plus 7 rounds of ammunition, a rope with a noose in it, and a deep pond with a bridge over it.

  Philip

  1 Addressed to Mrs Sydney Larkin, 73 Coten End, Warwick.

  2 An anthology of Oxford and Cambridge writing, edited by John Lehmann. See letter of 10 May.

  5 November 1942

  Postcard1

  125 Walton St, Oxford

  Thursday night

  Thank you for your nice letters. Sorry I don’t tell you more of what I do etc. but there’s no use in it. Still raining, Dylan been & gone – I’ll tell you more when I write. Thank Pop for cutting – Alex. Comfort2 is no one but anyone can lecture “Truth” in matters requiring the least sensitivity of feeling or perception. My cold comes & goes in direct ratio to smoking. I am really quite all right but work makes me worse. Thanks for the underwear which I am wearing under. As regards dreams, I had an excellent one last night when two girls (one dark, one fair) kissed each other due to my benevolent presence. This symbolises integration of conscious & unconscious and I may expect to blossom into Tarzan of the Apes in the near future.

  Very much love to you both,

  Philip

  1 Addressed to Mrs Sydney Larkin, 73 Coten End, Warwick.

  2 Alex Comfort (1920–2000), physician, anarchist and conscientious objector, was known, at this stage in his career, as the author of the novel No Such Liberty (1941) and the collection of poems A Wreath for the Living (1942). Later he achieved fame with the popular manual The Joy of Sex (1972).

  8 November 1942

  [125 Walton St, Oxford]

  Dear Mop & Pop,

  I am in a better mood this morning: the sun is shining and I am sitting in front of the hell of a fire. Let me tell you about my meeting with the greatest poet at present writing. Dylan Thomas is an incredibly small and tousled, grubby Welshman. He has a mass of tangled curly hair ranging from blue to fairest lemon. He wore two sailor’s jerseys, a shabby purple-yellow checked sports coat, and speckled grey trousers. His face is round, with a comical snubby nose, fat cheeks, incipient double chin and two flabby lips. He smoked literally all the time, except when eating or drinking. His voice sounded ‘cultured’ to me but Philip said it was pure Welsh.

  The meeting was a great success; he read extracts from a novel he was writing and they were brilliant. He has perfected a dream-technique which enables him to be fantastically funny and poetical at the same time. I have always thought that any great book at present must be funny too, but it’s harder than you’d think. Afterwards we went to the Eastgate Hotel for coffee. Next morning the Committee including myself and Philip who came too met in the Mitre Tavern for a drink. Philip & I were honoured by Dylan’s talking to us the whole time. I should imagine he’d had enough of the Committee the night before. I didn’t dare talk shop, and the conversation veered uneasily from one thing to another, like his saying he’d agreed never to firewatch when there was a raid, not caring a ——— ——— about the premises of Samuel P. 1 Tailor, etc. and there were always a couple of ———s in every squad who really enjoyed it etc. etc. Then we dispersed for lunch, feeling slightly drunk from our contact with a great & original talent. There is an enormous contrast between him and his work.

  I expect you find this boring. Last night we went to “The Seagull” a Tchekov play & felt gloomy. I began writing a poem which I hope to finish some time today. Let me think of something to interest Mop – I am determined to get needles and wool from somewhere to darn my socks, but so far I haven’t had the courage. The trouble is, my socks are too small, really, and my toes always come through. I haven’t got a cold any more & feel fine. I am wearing my old Edwardian sweater till it’s grey with filth, but really it’s my favourite jersey. The brown windcheater is too short and the blue poloneck can’t be worn in Hall. So I go around looking like a dirty Old Etonian.

  For Pop – academically, I am sunk. I suppose I shall get a third – might even scrape a second, but I doubt it. You and I, who have been brought up to regard reading as one of the major pleasures of life, are bunkered by the insistence of the necessity of attitude. I can read a whole author without having an attitude towards him. I do not want to know where he got his vocabulary from or whether he didn’t make the best of his subject. My tutor has openly stopped trying to make an intelligent man of me & I have openly stopped pretending to be interested. He can think I have finished an essay when I have stopped at the end of my first line of argument. I am so disgusted that I let him think it, the bloody old fool. I hope this winter takes him off.

  However – Colin Gunner is still training for that Commission – I wonder how Jim has got on during the recent Libya doings.2 Please ask Pop to tell me what’s really happened. I suppose the losses have been enormous – Jim will be pretty sick even if he’s safe himself.

  No more now – have to write elsewhere.

  Love to both,

  Philip

  1 Illegible.

  2 Jim Sutton had joined the Royal Army Medical Corps in April 1941.

  1943

  18 January 1943

  125 Walton St, Oxford

  Sunday<
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  Dear Mop & Pop,

  I am writing this before breakfast (9.10) because I happen to be up “early”. The day is overcast & windy.1 […]

  Pop might like to know that the Everyman Yellow Book isn’t at all interesting – it’s the old Yellow Book: some drivelling Italianate documents whence Browning derived the Ring & the Book. I was expecting a ‘feuillet’ [sic] of decadent verse & prose poems, if feuillet is the right word.2

  No news of my own immortal nonsense.

  Mop’s book token has bought rather a luxury which may not be fully worth it – Frank Harris’ ‘Oscar Wilde’.3 You remember I was reading Wilde just before I left, and fell under his fascination as a talker and writer. I think it’s delightful that the best biography of Wilde should be “all lies”, in view of Oscar’s Essay on the decay of lying …

  I have changed my eating arrangements. Nowadays I lunch at a British Restaurant4 (like a pig among pigs), sometimes have tea & toast at tea time, and dine at the Anglo Chinese. This costs about 4/- per day: in college – last term – I was paying anything from 4/6 – 5/-, excluding drinks of course. So I am economising, in theory. I wonder what my battels were. Stupidly I forebore to open them, I can’t think why. I feel they are enormous –

  My breakfast has arrived now – looks like liver & “bag of mystery”.5 I will rise up, and eat, and eructate.

  Love from all the apes,

  Philip

  1 The letter was written mostly on Sunday 17 January. ‘8’ has been superimposed over ‘7’ in the date.

  2 Larkin has ‘corrected’ ‘feuillot’ both times to ‘feuillet’, or vice versa. ‘Feuillet’ means a leaf or page in French.

  3 Frank Harris (1855–1931), Oscar Wilde: His life and confessions (1916).

  4 Communal kitchens that offered cheap, nourishing meals without requiring any ration coupons to be presented.

  5 The landlady of 125 Walton Street, Mrs Burchell, called any unidentifiable ingredient in her breakfasts a ‘bag o’ mystery’. See also letter of 17 January 1942, above.

  31 January 1943

  125 Walton St

  Dear Mop & Pop,

  We are in the middle of a 2-day invasion exercise. Yesterday we had the preliminary air-raid & divebombing of the city, with huge Whitleys and Wellingtons roaming over the roofs and bombs being let off in the streets. Today the Americans are due to capture the town from the North & West: gas, tanks, etc. will be used in profusion. Luckily we’re safely indoors and have no official part to play.

  I think I shall have to be a warden or a trailer-pump trainer or something, but on the other hand I feel I am being swindled as other wrecks from other colleges are getting off scotfree.

  I shall take an obstructionist attitude to it all. But the whole survey is for statistics to answer that old dolt in the “Times” who proved with a lot of phony figures that the Universities were slacking. […]

  I haven’t any ‘homely’ things to tell you, as far as I remember: Karl Lehmann recently stayed a night with us, and assures us from the height of his B.B.C. experience that we’ve already won the war.1 Can’t say I’ve noticed it. At present I am tousled and unshaved in an armchair, dressed in my green trousers, green dressing gown, and red shirt.2 I appear languidly at the window occasionally to scandalise the enthusiastic bands of dripping-wet wardens who are hanging about outside. It’s a wet day with a strong gale that rattles the windows and tears the smoke away from the chimneys. I have so much to do today. I just dare not start doing any of it.

  Loud explosions punctuated this letter – I don’t know where they come from, but it adds a distinct Stalingrad atmosphere.3 A friend has just called, having run the gauntlet of police etc.

  Forgive this slightly newspapery letter. My best love to Ginger P.4 I wrote to Kitty recently a miserable little note.

  With much love,

  Philip

  1 Karl Lehmann was a friend of Larkin’s flatmate, Philip Brown, and a keen disciple of Carl Gustav Jung.

  2 This letter is written on red notepaper.

  3 The Battle of Stalingrad, one of the bloodiest of the war, ended with the surrender of the German Sixth Army on 2 February 1943.

  4 ‘Ginger P’: probably Eva herself.

  7 February 1943

  125 Walton St, Oxford

  Sunday

  Dear Mop & Pop,

  Excuse this ink,1 it’s a relic from my colourful days of 1941. I filled a pen full of it to brighten up my daily round. […]

  Today I have discarded my cardigan and clawed on my white sweater. You will be pleased to hear it has shrunk a little but looks beautiful & swan-white. Oh, incidentally, du Cann didn’t go down after all.2 His father pulled a few Admiralty strings and got him another term. He celebrated his return by swallowing a pin and having X-rays at the local hospital. He is now quite well – luckily the pin fell head-first.

  I read a review of a new novel based on K. M.’s life.3 I think it’s called “daughter of the earth” or some such nonsense.4 The reviewer said it was a bad & embarrassing book, but all the same it might be interesting. Have you heard of Vernon Watkins? He is a poet who has published 1 book, and came to the English Club last week. I rather liked him, and he left a lot of books of Yeats’ poems with me which I shall eventually return. He is a timid little man.5

  According to Karl Lehmann we have already won the war.

  I was charmed by your remarks on squirrel and bird-life. Some rooks are building near here, though. Philip has been teaching me to recognise elms and poplars and other trees. I’m not very good at it.

  Give my love to Pop – and I do hope he’s well again.

  Love to you too,

  Philip

  1 Bright blue.

  2 After the war Edward du Cann, Larkin’s contemporary at St John’s, became an MP and Chairman of the Conservative Party.

  3 Katherine Mansfield.

  4 Nelia Gardner White, Daughter of Time: The Life of Katherine Mansfield in Novel Form, 1942. Larkin has confused the title with that of the autobiography of Agnes Smedley, Daughter of the Earth (1929).

  5 Vernon Watkins (1906–67): Welsh poet, translator and painter; close friend of Dylan Thomas. His visit to the Poetry Club stirred Larkin’s enthusiasm for W. B. Yeats.

  10 February 1943

  Postcard

  St John’s College, Oxford

  Wednesday

  Thank you for your lively letter. Today is another of those days – I went to a friend’s 21st b’day party last night with disastrous results. At 1 p.m. I am still in pyjamas etc. having eaten a breakfast of 3 peppermints. I think I shall see “Bambi” this afternoon.1 Kitty wrote me a sad little letter.

  Large Love,

  Philip

  1 The classic of animation, Bambi, produced by Walt Disney, was released by RKO Radio Pictures in August 1942.

  28 February 1943

  125 Walton St, Oxford

  Dear Mop & Pop,

  It is 5 to 10, but nevertheless I am writing this before breakfast. Philip has a 9.15 lecture every day of the week except Sunday so he takes Sunday to luxuriate on. I am a trifle hungry but feel bound to wait for him out of politeness. There is some kind of cold tongue for breakfast.

  Thanks for letter & cutting. I agree with what you say about Mrs B.1 but really what can one buy? It’s all very difficult. Scent – well, I can’t think she’d use it really. She might like it, I can’t tell. She’s worth something really expensive, but we can’t afford that. It’s a great problem. As a matter of fact, we might even not leave her. Philip’s finding difficulty in getting unlicensed digs in the area & price he wants.

  “Arabesque” came out.2 I bought 1 for myself & 1 family copy which I sent to Kitty – thought she needed cheering up.

  Mrs Bisson has been ill recently – Good!! – but suddenly sent me a mountain of work to be done by Monday. Blessed are they which do not expect. I am sick of this Cook’s tour of literature – one gets as much or as little benefit from it as fro
m any other Cook’s tour.

  Well, Philip has just tottered down so I will hold my horses till I have eaten my breakfast.

  The tongue was a little desiccated. Yesterday I was seized with a crazy desire to have a bookplate printed – you know, one of those ex libris things – so I sketched a very simple design and intend putting things in motion tomorrow. Kitty will moan that I haven’t made all I might of it. It is merely a symbol – – my name, and a couplet from Blake.3 The O.U.P. will do it fairly cheaply. – 10/- – 15/-.

  I may stay up here some time – I’m not sure when I shall come home. I daren’t leave the libraries because I have so much work.

  But I will return –

  Love,

  Philip

  1 Mrs Burchell: landlady of 125 Walton Street.

  2 ‘I dreamed of an out-thrust arm of land’, and ‘Mythological Introduction’ appeared in Arabesque in Hilary Term (January–March) 1943. On 21 February he referred to the journal as ‘that ballet club thing’.

  3 ‘How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way / Is an immense world of delight clos’d by your senses five?’ (‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’)

  3 March 1943

  Postcard

  125 Walton St, Oxford

  Wednesday

  Sorry I missed a p.c. yesterday but I was very busy rushing about. I met George Orwell who is very nice, though not quite Pop’s political line.1 Your letters arrived as a pleasant surprise this morning. I thought Pop had sunk into a senile apathy that only permitted him to make a mark on the bottom of municipal documents.

  Kitty sent me another mournful letter which depressed me a little. But otherwise I am fairly happy, having a great deal to do in all ways – work, poems, essays, etc. I have ordered my bookplate at last. – Don’t know when it’ll be done.