Authors: James Booth
Winifred came to dinner last night. She brought cheese biscuits and a box of chocolates [. . .] Did she hope to impress Philip with her generosity, or perhaps she realized she had not been invited because we wanted to see her. So she nearly bought a Bikini printed with cuttings from the News of the World – did she!
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In a droll clash of perspectives, Winifred remembers that Patsy’s exotic food intimidated her and that Philip bent over and whispered subversively: ‘Shall I ask for just an egg for you dear?’ She has no recollection of the bikini.
30
Patsy attempted to rise above the situation, presenting her jealousy as superior detached philosophy: ‘I was not aware of this power of our sex – it seems a cheap weapon, and not, I believe, a very durable one.’
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Preparing to leave Belfast at the end of May 1953 to spend the summer in Oxford, Patsy consoled herself with world-weary reflections on the failure of her grand passion: ‘No two people travel the same route – they may go a few miles together now and then but it would be very foolish to assume that they will walk together for long [. . .] Still – a little company now and then is very welcome.’
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She perhaps took heart from Philip’s discontent with Monica, with whom he was to go to Skye in July: ‘I must say I don’t look forward to this bloody holiday’, he told her; ‘if I feel in as ugly a humour as at present it may be the last we take together. There seems no point in carrying on, if it’s out of pure cowardice as it mainly is. Well! This may be taking an unduly black view. We’ll see.’
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In fact it was the relationship with Patsy rather than that with Monica which was about to end. In August 1953 she wrote that her husband had been appointed to a post in Newcastle, and she was to remain in Oxford.
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Once the pressure was released, Philip composed, on 6 August, a letter of generous valediction: ‘So much of my content in the last two years was due to you [. . .] But oh dear, oh dear! You were so wonderful!’
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The ‘oh dears’ hint at his dismay at the impropriety of the relationship, and the past tense (‘you were’) is decisive.
The day before this, 5 August, he had sent Monica a near-final version of ‘Days’, ‘hardly a poem at all [. . .] a change from the old style’. It had been largely drafted early in 1951, and he had now completed it on a single page of the workbook. He was elaborately diffident about it: ‘I shouldn’t think there’s much danger of yr taking it seriously, having just re-read it, but I can’t rub it out.’
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However, he was aware that he had written a timeless masterpiece: the imagist ‘Going’ reformulated in lighter vein. The
faux naïf
poet asks, ‘What are days for?’ and answers himself disarmingly, eliding time with place, ‘Days are where we live.’ That is, of course, until priest and doctor, vividly pictured without explanation ‘Running over the fields’, usher us away. The poem could be twee; but it isn’t. Rarely have ten lines of informal, unrhymed trimeters and dimeters carried such a pure poetic charge.
Larkin’s relationship with Monica weathered the many pressures upon it. Though he was the least political of men, her rigid right-wing opinions occasionally caused friction. He criticized ‘the wood of [her] conservatism’, and she replied sarcastically that she ‘thought you didn’t care either way’. ‘I certainly
never
knew you fancied yrself a Socialist, & I must say you’ve kept it pretty dark.’ On 5 August 1953 he attempted to defuse the quarrel:
the idea of my brooding and fretting over your
political opinions
is enough to make a Staffordshire cat laugh. You know I don’t care at all for politics, intelligently. I found that at school when we argued all we did was repeat the stuff we had, respectively, learnt from the
Worker
, the
Herald
,
Peace News
, the
Right Book Club
(that was me, incidentally:
I knew these dictators
,
Marching Spain
, I can remember them now) and as they all contradicted each other all we did was get annoyed. I came to the conclusion that an enormous amount of research was needed to form an opinion on anything, & therefore I abandoned politics altogether as a topic of conversation. It’s true that the writers I grew up to admire were either non-political or left-wing, & that I couldn’t find any right-wing writer worthy of respect, but of course most of the ones I admired were awful fools or somewhat fakey, so I don’t know if my prejudice for the left takes its origin there or not.
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Two days later he wrote: ‘well dear [. . .] even if we neither at bottom care, the fact does remain that you explode to the right & I explode to the left’, conceding that she made ‘a better job’ of defending her opinions than he of defending his. He drew a caricature rabbit-Monica on a soapbox above a poster reading ‘SPEED UP THE BURROWING PROGRAMME’, facing a seal-Philip also on a soapbox above a poster reading ‘NO CREATURE COMFORT WITHOUT WORK’.
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A quarter of a century later in the
Observer
interview of 1979 Larkin asserted: ‘I’ve always been right-wing.’
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In fact his deepest instinct was to avoid politics, while his shallower instincts, contrary to popular opinion, gave him, at least in his earlier years, a ‘prejudice for the left’.
During August and September 1953 he devoted thirteen pages of the workbook to drafts of a thirty-first-birthday poem, ‘At thirty-one, when some are rich’, an engaging meditation on his relationships with women. He wrote ‘unfinished’ on the typescript,
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though this seems an expression of personal dissatisfaction rather than an indication of formal incompleteness. The poem is in fact beautifully finished. As summer turns to autumn below his window, in ‘deep gardenfuls of air’, the poet settles down to write yet another of the letters which have become the measure of his life: less love letters than letters of kindness, or (more cynically) egotistical letters addressed to ‘people wise enough to see my worth’. His situation seems pleasant enough, but he is dissatisfied: ‘I’m kind, but not kinetic.’ These letters ‘plot no change’. As he addresses the envelope ‘a bitter smoke / Of self-contempt, of boredom too, ascends’.
In ‘Mother, Summer, I’, written at the same time, and also unpublished during his lifetime, he turns back to the first woman in his life. Taking his cue again from the weather, he notes that his mother hates thunderstorms, and loses her ‘worried summer look’ only when the rain and frost return. He, her son, ‘though summer-born / And summer-loving’, also relaxes ‘when the leaves are gone’. The ‘Emblems of perfect happiness’ of summer days offer a challenge to which he cannot rise. Like his mother he awaits:
A time less bold, less rich, less clear:
An autumn more appropriate.
The poem has an Eeyorish glumness about it, hinting perhaps at self-parody.
In a letter to Eva he gave a more upbeat version of his mood:
Can you feel the autumn where you are? It seems to hang in the air here, and sharpen my senses, & again I feel a sense of a great waste in my life. We must go again up that road to the wood, where we found the scarlet toadstool, & listen to the wind in the trees [. . .] Here the moon is large and lemon-yellow, & drifts up into the sky at night like a hollow phosphorescent fungoid growth.
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After his departure from Leicester in 1950, Philip developed the habit of corresponding with his mother at least twice a week. He addressed her as ‘Dearest Mop’, ‘Dearest Old Creature’ or ‘My very dear old creature’. She called him ‘My dear creature’ or ‘My very dear creature’. On Sundays he made sure to fill at least four pages with trivial comments, advice and delicate caricatures of mother or son going about their domestic business. She responded in kind. They expected and relied upon next-day postal delivery (including Sundays), and when either of them missed a letter an apology would follow. In October 1953, he wrote that he had not received her usual letter, and she hastened to reassure him by telegram: ‘HOPE YOU HAVE LETTER NOW. AM QUITE WELL. MUCH LOVE MOTHER’.
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This is by far his most consistent and extensive correspondence, running to about 4,000 letters and cards by the time of Eva’s death in 1977.
As the time for Winifred’s departure from Belfast approached, Philip was moved to write ‘Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album’. This poem, drafted between August and December 1953, shows the richest combination of genres he had yet attempted. It champions the social realism of photography. But beneath the surface it is both an address to the unattainable muse and also a seduction poem in the witty seventeenth-century cavalier tradition. The woman is a modern muse of real life, a ‘real girl in a real place’, beautiful, as Jill had been, because of her perfect ordinariness. Photography performs a self-contradictory function. ‘Faithful and disappointing’ it preserves reality with objective accuracy, recording ‘Dull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds’. But it also transfigures the ordinariness of what it records: ‘what grace / Your candour thus confers upon her face!’ As the spiritual word ‘grace’ implies, the young lady, though ‘empirically true’, and blemished, is as transcendentally beautiful as the traditional ideal muse. ‘Candour’ implies both blunt, ingenuous truthfulness and (from its root in the Latin ‘candor’) ‘brilliant whiteness’. Perhaps Larkin has in mind the hyperreal whiteness of skin in black and white photographs taken outdoors.
But the girl with the album, though a symbol of perfection, has more emotional complexity and humanity than the airgirl in ‘Like the train’s beat’ or the vagrant face in ‘Latest Face’. What brings her to life is the poem’s chivalrous rhetoric of seduction. Seventeenth-century lovers addressed poems to their ‘Lady’. In the subtly different idiom of the 1950s, this poet woos a ‘young lady’. Like Marvell or Suckling he appeals to her to take pity on him. Such loudly innocent pleas for mercy conventionally cloak sexual intentions. Here, though sexual innuendo is leeringly signalled (‘My swivel eye hungers from pose to pose’), the poet’s ultimate aim is quite decorous. He seduces the young lady into surrendering not her body, but her photograph album: ‘At last you yielded up the album, which, / Once open, sent me distracted.’ The lover’s parodic, mock-heroic desire is satiated by images rather than by the woman herself. The nearest we approach to seduction is the poet’s brief temptation to steal ‘this one of you bathing’. He desires to possess not the flesh-and-blood ‘real girl’, but her image. He will penetrate no further. Indeed, he is more concerned to arouse the woman’s narcissistic appreciation of her younger self in the photographs than to inveigle her into bed.
It is here that Larkin’s genre-blending produces its subtlest and most moving effect. This is a muse poem in which the perfect object of desire has descended from her pedestal to become charmingly real and vulnerable. It is also a love poem in which the poet is less concerned with seduction than with the woman’s lost youth. The key to the central metaphor is that the ‘real girl’ in the photographs is the victim of time. She no longer exists:
Those flowers, that gate,
These misty parks and motors, lacerate
Simply by being over; you
Contract my heart by looking out of date.
Beneath the muse poem and the love poem lies the most universal of all genres: elegy. The photographs, like Plato’s unchanging Forms, preserve a reality which we, whose element is time, cannot possess. The photographs are ‘Smaller and clearer as the years go by’, literally because, photographic materials being hugely expensive at this time, Winifred’s snaps are tiny. But they also belong to a distant time made vivid by nostalgia. The poet contemplates ‘without a chance of consequence’ the growing gulf between the woman’s mortal body and her pristine image, now for ever ‘out of date’. He joins her on the ‘useless’ level of her past, that no one now can share, no matter whose her future.
Winifred left Belfast on 27 September 1953. The day before this, by a strange accident, she met Monica for the first and only time, with Philip in the square at Lisburn. It was an awkward, tongue-tied encounter. Winifred immediately wrote to Philip, reproaching him for not properly introducing them, hoping that Monica had not registered the
Numéro Douze
scent, which Philip had given her, and reassuring him that Monica would certainly have noticed her engagement ring. She concluded: ‘It’s no use my saying how much I shall miss you, and the Library, and Ulster – I wish you could say them for me in a poem. Thank you for all you have been to me this year, when you have had so little in return.’ He replied at once, amused at the ‘comic encounter’, and apologizing for not making the introductions: ‘I felt a little like an early Xtian, who feels it hardly necessary to introduce a pair of lions that have met over his recumbent body.’ He slyly sympathized with Winifred’s nostalgia for their relationship: ‘
I’m
sorry I had so little in return, too (“he made his Havelock Ellis face”),
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but, well, as I said, you could have treated me much, much worse, and I have dozens of happy memories which, like pressed flowers, I can spend all winter arranging.’
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