Authors: James Booth
Larkin’s mature body of poetry contains a single mourning elegy (‘An April Sunday brings the snow’), a single prayer (‘Solar’), a single graveyard meditation (‘Church Going’), a single extended narrative poem (‘The Dance’), and so on. Every poem has its own rhyme-colour and its own idiomatic register. Often enough, also, it has its unforgettable key-word or words. Larkin remarked of his abandoned novels of the late 1940s: ‘they were over-sized poems. They were certainly written with intense care for detail. If one word was used on page 15 I didn’t re-use it on page 115.’
15
Indeed, a startlingly large number of the words in the mature post-1945 section of the 1988
Collected Poems
occur in a single poem only.
16
Larkin, it seems, waits for the best time to employ each word, gives it the most memorable context he can contrive and then never uses it again. This is not only the case with distinctive, intrinsically memorable words: ‘unmolesting’, ‘Blindingly’, ‘fishy-smelling’, ‘Immensements’. Larkin also asserts his copyright over more commonplace words, which become unforgettable in the poems in which they make their unique appearances: ‘unsatisfactory’, ‘wonderful’, ‘welcome’, ‘useful’, ‘afresh’, ‘singular’. His instinct for verbal refinement ensures that the briefest snatch brings to mind a whole poem: ‘Such attics!’, ‘awkward reverence’, ‘the exchange of love’, ‘we shall find out’, ‘sure extinction’. This is the source of what Martin Amis terms the ‘frictionless memorability’ of Larkin’s poetry.
17
Could this uncanny control be connected perhaps with the ‘deep-seated abnormality in the left cerebral hemisphere’ which revealed itself when he was X-rayed in 1961?
18
Larkin’s reputation as a poet is secure. His reputation as a man is, however, in a less healthy state. The frequently retold story of his fall from grace following the publication of Anthony Thwaite’s edition of the
Selected Letters
in 1992 and Andrew Motion’s official biography,
A Writer’s Life
, in 1993 has taken on the quality of a modern morality tale. The
Independent
set the tone when it headlined an interview
with Motion: ‘Mr Nice tackles Mr Nasty’.
19
Ideological commentators such as Terry Eagleton, Lisa Jardine and Tom Paulin uncovered ‘the sewer under the national monument’.
20
Many readers today believe that Larkin was ‘a Tory snob with sexist and racist tendencies’, and ‘a singularly unattractive man’.
21
One reviewer declared of Burnett’s Commentary in
The Complete Poems
: ‘The only thing we’re reminded of is what a shit Larkin was in real life.’
22
Even those who admire the poetry feel it acceptable to refer to ‘the vile mess that was Larkin’,
23
and accuse him of living a sterile life. Martin Amis believes that the success of his poetry was earned at the expense of ‘failure’ in his personal life.
24
Larkin, he writes, ‘siphoned all his energy, and all his love, out of the life and into the work’. He had ‘no close friends’, and his life story was one of ‘gauntness’, ‘with no emotions, no vital essences, worth looking back on’.
25
There is, of course, no requirement that poets should be likeable or virtuous. But we might ask whether art and life can have been so deeply at odds with each other that the poet who composed the heart-rending ‘Love Songs in Age’, the euphoric ‘For Sidney Bechet’ and the effervescent ‘Annus Mirabilis’ had no emotions, or was a shit in real life. Larkin’s negative public image is built neither on his poetry nor on the evidence of those who knew him well. Those who shared this life simply do not recognize the Mr Nasty version. Dismay and puzzlement at Larkin’s poor image is universal among those I interviewed in writing this book: the women with whom he was romantically involved, Ruth Siverns (Bowman), Monica Jones, Winifred Dawson (Arnott), Maeve Brennan and Betty Mackereth, his friends Anthony and Ann Thwaite, Judy Egerton and Jean Hartley, and his University colleagues, Eddie Dawes, John White, Brenda Moon and Father Anthony Storey. All those who were close to him remember him with affection and feel privileged to have known him. Typically, they found him ‘witty’, ‘entertaining’, ‘considerate’ and ‘kind’.
Jean Hartley, who knew him for thirty years, recalls his spontaneous empathy: ‘he gave his full attention to everyone he had dealings with. I myself never had the feeling that he was waiting for a gap in the conversation in order to inject his own views. He seemed invariably to follow one’s train of thought rather than his own.’
26
His generous inclination to identify himself with the widest range of his fellow beings is central to the appeal of his poetry. He enters into the feelings of young mothers at a playground, a rabbit dying of myxomatosis, his own harassed American biographer. Such wide sympathies, however, bring problems in ‘real life’. Listening to the speakers at the memorial for Larkin in Hull in 1986, Jean Hartley was surprised to discover ‘Philip’s chameleon-like nature’. His interests and sympathies were clearly much wider than she had thought.
27
Those who imagined that they knew Larkin tended to see only those aspects which suited their own conceptions. This is one reason why Larkin’s reputation was damaged in some quarters on the publication of the
Selected Letters
.
In what seems a deliberate strategy, he maintained long-term correspondences with the widest spectrum of people: the earnest would-be artist Jim Sutton, the irrepressible philistine novelist Kingsley Amis, the flamboyant University lecturer Monica Jones, the liberal-voting art historian Judy Egerton, the right-wing historian of Soviet atrocities Robert Conquest, the left-wing Anglican Anthony Thwaite, the conservative novelist Barbara Pym, the ingenuous Catholic Maeve Brennan, and his lonely widowed mother, to whom he wrote at least twice a week for a quarter of a century. A key motive seems to have been the compulsion to express himself in the widest possible range of literary registers, from civilized formality to intimate gossip. There are ‘almost as many different voices’ in the
Selected Letters
‘as there are correspondents’.
28
(Unfortunately one voice is missing, since none of the letters to his mother were included.) As long as these letters remained private, their contradictory Larkins could cause no offence. On the publication of the
Letters
, however, he was accused of duplicity. He said one thing to one correspondent and something different to another. He compartmentalized his life. Maeve Brennan was dismayed by the language of his letters to Amis and Conquest; Amis was baffled by the softer sentimental side of his character. Readers were offended by his inability to be polite about the faults of his poetic contemporaries.
Dryden was suspicious of the Earl of Shaftesbury because of the breadth and intensity of his interests: ‘A man so various, that he seemed to be / Not one, but all Mankind’s Epitome’.
29
To some, omnivorousness of spirit will always seem a sign of deviousness and insincerity. But self-contradiction is part of the human condition; and Larkin’s contradictions are central to his greatness. He was a man of many parts and many roles, ironic and unironic. Larkin the poet, for instance (‘Why should I let the toad
work
/ Squat on my life?’), coexisted over the decades with Larkin the hard-working librarian, who oversaw the building of the first new post-war British university library at the same time as managing an inexorable expansion of staff and service provision. An academic from another university, enthusiastically joining in when he overheard Larkin praised at a conference, was puzzled to find that the topic was poetry. He had no idea that the pioneering librarian was also a poet.
30
Larkin’s secretary, Betty Mackereth, recalls him pointing to the shelf of bound Library Committee minutes and remarking with glum satisfaction, that this also was part of his oeuvre.
31
After his death the Library Association published a volume in his honour.
32
Some of Larkin’s fellow writers feel that his ‘day-job’ casts a shadow across the poetry. Seamus Heaney imitates the poet’s self-deprecating tone, ventriloquizing a Larkin who describes himself defeatedly as ‘a nine-to-five-man who has seen poetry’.
33
Martin Amis implicitly compares his own father’s genuinely ‘bohemian’ life with Larkin’s provincial life as a ‘nine-to-five librarian, who lived for thirty years in a northern city that smelled of fish’.
34
The mercurial shifts of persona in Larkin’s interviews, essays and letters have been the cause of many misreadings. Larkin claimed in his celebrated
Observer
interview that he did not want ‘to go around pretending to be me’. However, he conceded elsewhere that ‘one has to dramatize oneself a little’.
35
As Jonathan Raban remarked, Larkin spoke to interviewers in the voice of ‘a well-scripted character whose tone was pitched midway between the reactionary acerbities of W. C. Fields and the self-deprecating complaints of Eeyore the donkey’.
36
Some readers fail to register the performative playfulness of Larkin’s self-caricatures: ‘Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth’; ‘there’s not much to
say
about my work’; ‘I don’t want to sound falsely naive, but I often wonder why people get married’; ‘Children are very horrible, aren’t they?’ These are not the words of a gaunt, emotionless failure, but of an ebullient provocateur with an instinct to entertain. He began his interview with the
Observer
in 1979: ‘I like to think of myself as quite funny.’
37
It is easy to see why those who knew him enjoyed his company so much.
The various ideological Larkins who raise the passions of some critics, are provisional personae. The fervent nationalist Larkin, for instance, is the product of performance as much as of ideology. Tom Paulin speaks of Larkin’s ‘rock-solid sense of national glory’.
38
His elegy for the wasted lives of the Great War, ‘MCMXIV’, tells a different story. The famous photograph of the poet sitting inscrutably on the boundary-sign ‘England’ tells us more about his relationship with the woman who took it, Monica Jones, than about its subject, for whom ‘elsewhere’ was always more comfortable than ‘home’.
39
Larkin expressed his instinctive view in a letter to Monica: ‘my God, surely nationalism is the surest mark of mediocrity!’
40
Similarly, the ardent Tory Larkin proclaims ‘I adore Mrs Thatcher.’
41
But when they met and she misquoted a line from his poem ‘Deceptions’, ‘Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives,’ as ‘Her mind was full of knives,’ he remarked slyly, ‘she might think a mind full of knives rather along her own lines’, hastening to correct himself: ‘not that I don’t kiss the ground she treads’.
42
Larkin the racist is a similar fiction. It is frequently remarked that his handful of racist comments, some of them indeed very unpleasant, are confined to private letters written to prejudiced correspondents. But his self-irony escapes the notice of critics, as it no doubt escaped the notice of the original correspondents. In a letter to Monica Jones, he depicts himself settling down for a lazy evening after a dinner of haggis, neeps and claret: ‘& by God wasn’t the toast “Mr Enoch Powell”! Then jazz records
to my taste
, especially Armstrong.’
43
Approval for the politician who prophesied rivers of blood if ‘the black man’ gained the whip hand in Britain is followed by a grateful surrender to black music. It is to be regretted that, on rare occasions, Larkin used the words ‘nigger’, ‘wog’ and ‘yid’ in writing to particular correspondents. However at a time when most British middle-class households would have possessed a tin of ‘nigger brown’ Cherry Blossom shoe polish, and have had in their kitchens jars of Robertson’s marmalade with a golliwog on the label (a feature withdrawn only in 2001), such language was
not always the sure sign of poisonous prejudice it has since become. Whatever language Larkin might use, he would never have theorized about racial inferiority or degeneracy, as did some writers of the century. During his early years in Hull Larkin recommended E. R. Braithwaite’s anti-racist novel
To Sir, With Love
to his staff, and for a time they addressed him, half-ironically, as ‘Sir’.
44
In 1946 he dreamt he was a black man walking through racecourse crowds with Amis’s future wife, Hilly Bardwell, sobbing with fear that he might be lynched.
45
His subconscious was not racist.