‘You should spend more, Philip. No, really. You’ve bought the car, and that’s good. Now you –’
‘I just wish they wouldn’t keep on sending me all these bills.’
‘Well it costs a bit to run a car.’
‘I just wish they wouldn’t keep sending me all these bills.’
If given the slightest encouragement, I might have gone on to suggest, with juvenile impertinence, that he move to London and … and what? Well, start to live, I suppose. ‘He didn’t listen,’ I said to my father as I drove him home. ‘He just went on and on about his bills.’
Larkin died in 1985. And when the Letters and the Life appeared, almost a decade later, I wrote a long piece in his defence. I should say that I too was struck by Larkin’s reflexive, stock-response ‘racism’, and by his peculiarly tightfisted ‘misogyny’. But I bore in mind the simple truth that writers’ private lives don’t matter; only the work matters. A better understanding of the Larkin puzzle would come later. But I felt a premonitory twinge about this, in 1992, when I construed the nature of Larkin’s feelings about my father – supposedly his closest friend.
It was always clear to everyone that Kingsley loved Philip with a near-physical passion. Philip probably felt the same, at first (and Kingsley remained his most rousing correspondent). But in his letters to others he seldom mentions my father without sourness. We could adduce envy (sexual and material). Yet there is also a social distaste that feels wholly unworthy: the fastidious suspicion with which the bourgeois regards the bohemian. Kingsley was effectively spurned by the Letters; but he never spoke ill of Philip (and continued to read two or three of his poems every night, all the way to his own death in 1995). Still, I remember my father defeatedly saying, on his return from Larkin’s funeral, ‘It sounds odd, but I sometimes wonder if I ever really knew him.’
No conceivable disclosure could make me demote Larkin’s work. But I have come to find his life ever more estranging, and this involves a reevaluation of his character. The long process of assimilating Philip Larkin has been complicated by a process of my own: the ageing process, and what it means.
Nikolai Gogol, who deliberately starved himself to death at the age of forty-two, had this to say, in Dead Souls, about the river of time:
[A]s you pass from the tender years of youth into harsh and embittered manhood, make sure you take with you on your journey all the human emotions! Don’t leave them on the road, for you will not pick them up afterwards! Old age … is terrible and menacing, for it never gives anything back, it returns nothing!
Implicit here, though, is the suggestion that old age does or can give something back: all the human emotions, in the form of memory. The past goes on being present, especially the erotic and romantic past (and a sense of youth remains, vicariously refreshed by one’s children). This is an indispensable and, I believe, a near-universal resource.
Now consider the abysmal capitulation of Larkin’s letter to Monica Jones in 1956:
Hum. Ha. Ah, don’t talk about our lives and the dreadful passing of time. Nothing will be good enough to look back on, I know that for certain: there will be nothing but remorse & regret for opportunities missed …
This is near-nihilistic: he was thirty-four. And, sure enough, in a letter of 1973 to a fellow poet, Larkin wrote: ‘Middle age is depressing anyway. The things one tries to forget get bigger and bigger.’ This is a psyche trapped in neutral gear: he was fifty-one.
Why did Larkin abandon his third novel? I quote from a letter of 6 July 1953 to the poetess Patsy (described by Kingsley, in a letter to Philip, as ‘the most uninterestingly unstable character’ he had ever met; she went on to die of alcohol poisoning at the age of forty-nine):
You know, I can’t write this book: if it is to to be written at all it should be largely an attack on Monica, & I can’t do that, not while we are still on friendly terms, and I’m not sure it even interests me sufficiently to go on.
The novel ‘should’ be an attack on Monica? Well of course. What else is there to write about?
The attack on Monica was published six months later. But its title was Lucky Jim – where Monica is remade as the unendurable anti-heroine, with her barndancer clothes, her mannerisms and affectations, her paraded sensitivity, and her docile-hostile adhesiveness. And Lucky Jim was mentored by Larkin. In his one concession to gallantry, he made Kingsley change the girl’s name – from Margaret Beale to Margaret Peel. The real-life Monica’s full name was Monica Margaret Beale Jones.
In 1982 I had dinner with Philip and Monica (and with my brother, father, mother, and stepfather). At the time I found the occasion only mildly bizarre, and wrote about it cheerfully enough in a memoir published in 2000 (though I see that I did describe Monica as ‘virile’. This understates the case). Ten years on, I look back at that evening with something close to horror. In Monica’s presence, Larkin behaved like the long-suffering nephew of an uncontrollably eccentric aunt. And she was the love of his life.
But that was the kind of life it was. Larkin cleaved to a Yeatsian principle: seek ‘perfection of the work rather than perfection of the life’ (this is what he means, in ‘Poetry of Departures’, by ‘a life/Reprehensibly perfect’). All the same, there must be a life. And it isn’t fanciful to surmise that the gauntness of Larkin’s personal history (with no emotions, no vital essences, worth looking back on) contributed to the early decline of his inspiration – and, indeed, of his physical instrument. Self-starved, like Gogol, he died at sixty-three.
Larkin is the novelist’s poet. He is most definitely this novelist’s poet. And it is symmetrical, at least, that my final attempt to parse him will be in the form of prose fiction. If I do get anywhere, I may rest assured that I won’t be telling his shade anything it doesn’t know. Larkin’s self-awareness, his internal candour, was merciless. Here are the first and last stanzas of the sixteen-line ‘Money’. It shows, as clearly as any poem can, that Larkin siphoned all his energy, and all his love, out of the life and into the work. That he succeeded in this is a tragic miracle; but it is still a miracle.
Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:
‘Why do you let me lie here wastefully?
I am all you never had of goods and sex.
You could get them still by writing a few cheques.’
[…]
I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down
From long french windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.
In quality, Larkin’s four volumes of verse are logarithmic, like the Richter scale: they get stronger and stronger by a factor of ten. My selection reflects this. From The North Ship (1945), one poem out of thirty-two; from The Less Deceived (1955), eleven out of twenty-nine; from The Whitsun Weddings (1964), twenty-four out of thirty-two; from High Windows (1974), twenty-two out of twenty-four. There are four uncollected poems (among them ‘Aubade’). I also include two unpublished poems, ‘Letter to a Friend about Girls’ and (after much hesitation) ‘Love Again’. ‘Love Again’ is there because it is the only poem in which Larkin tries to account for what he called his ‘neutered’ nature. The attempt fails, partly for technical reasons. As he remarked to an ex-colleague, ‘It broke off at a point at which I was silly enough to ask myself a question, with three lines in which to answer it.’ ‘Love Again’ concludes:
… but why put it into words?
Isolate rather this element
That spreads through other lives like a tree
And sways them on in a sort of sense
And say why it never worked for me.
Something to do with violence
A long way back, and wrong rewards,
And arrogant eternity.
‘Well, of course,’ Larkin continued, ‘anyone who asks a question by definition doesn’t know the answer, and I am no exception. So there we are.’
from THE NORTH SHIP
Dawn
To wake, and hear a cock
Out of the distance crying,
To pull the curtains back
And see the clouds flying –
How strange it is
For the heart to be loveless, and as cold as these.
from THE LESS DECEIVED
Coming
On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork.
It will be spring soon –
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.
Next, Please
Always too eager for the future, we
Pick up bad habits of expectancy.
Something is always approaching; every day
Till then we say,
Watching from a bluff the tiny, clear,
Sparkling armada of promises draw near.
How slow they are! And how much time they waste,
Refusing to make haste!
Yet still they leave us holding wretched stalks
Of disappointment, for, though nothing balks
Each big approach, leaning with brasswork prinked,
Each rope distinct,
Flagged, and the figurehead with golden tits
Arching our way, it never anchors; it’s
No sooner present than it turns to past.
Right to the last
We think each one will heave to and unload
All good into our lives, all we are owed
For waiting so devoutly and so long.
But we are wrong:
Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.
Going
There is an evening coming in
Across the fields, one never seen before,
That lights no lamps.
Silken it seems at a distance, yet
When it is drawn up over the knees and breast
It brings no comfort.
Where has the tree gone, that locked
Earth to the sky? What is under my hands,
That I cannot feel?
What loads my hands down?
Wants
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone:
However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flagstaff –
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.
Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
The costly aversion of the eyes from death –
Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.
Church Going
Once I am sure there’s nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,
Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new –
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don’t.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
‘Here endeth’ much more loudly than I’d meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.
Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?
Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort or other will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,
A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,
Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation – marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these – for which was built
This special shell? For, though I’ve no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
If only that so many dead lie round.
Toads
Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?
Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison –
Just for paying a few bills!
That’s out of proportion.
Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losels, loblolly-men, louts –
They don’t end as paupers;
Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines –
They seem to like it.
Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets – and yet
No one actually starves.
Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff
That dreams are made on:
For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
An
d cold as snow,
And will never allow me to blarney
My way to getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.
I don’t say, one bodies the other
One’s spiritual truth;
But I do say it’s hard to lose either,
When you have both.
Poetry of Departures
Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.
And they are right, I think.
We all hate home
And having to be there:
I detest my room,
Its specially-chosen junk,
The good books, the good bed,
And my life, in perfect order:
So to hear it said
He walked out on the whole crowd