Philip Larkin (33 page)

While the typescript of
Lucky Jim
was still being considered by Gollancz, Larkin reviewed his own novelistic efforts in a letter to Patsy Strang: ‘I’ve just dug out 2 unfinished novels of mine & am reading one to see what kind of a thing it was – 233 pages abandoned in Dec. 1949. To me it reads extremely cleverly but without the least flavour of merit.’
⁶⁸
Three months later he finally admitted what had been obvious for several years. He wrote to Patsy on 6 July 1953: ‘I
can’t
write this book: if it is 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. It was planned a long time ago, of course.’
⁶⁹
The last dated outline, ‘Sundry resurveyings’, is headed ‘November 1953’ and when Charles Monteith, who had taken over from Alan Pringle at Faber, asked to see drafts of the third novel, Larkin told him that it was ‘at a halt’.
⁷⁰

In a letter to Patsy written on 25 January 1954, two days before the publication of Amis’s novel, Larkin balanced admiration against objective critical judgement: ‘Of course
Lucky Jim
sends me into prolonged fits of howling laughter [. . .] I do think that it is miraculously and intensely funny, with a kind of spontaneity that doesn’t tire the reader at all.
Apart
from being funny, I think it somewhat over-simple.’
⁷¹
He was aware that his own novel would have been deeper and more ambitious than Amis’s. Augusta Bax is potentially a far more interesting character than Margaret Peel. But once Amis’s novel had been published, to the acclaim which Larkin so confidently forecast, he could not think of continuing with his own fiction. At least
Lucky Jim
was dedicated to him.

11

Various Poems

1953–6

At the very end of 1953, Larkin completed a poem of vocation, ‘Reasons for Attendance’, in which he translated the romantic fervour of ‘The Spirit Wooed’ and ‘Waiting for breakfast’ into his new ‘vernacular’ manner. Though the tone is different, the pattern remains the same. Drawn to the lighted glass by the sound of a trumpet, the poet watches the dancers, face to flushed face, eager for commitment and marriage. He attends instead to art: not now in the form of ‘pristine absolutes’ or ‘tender visitings’, but of a demanding ‘rough tongued bell / (Art, if you like)’. The casual aside ridicules artistic pretension. Nevertheless, he still obeys the call unquestioningly: ‘It speaks; I hear.’ He remains the
poète maudit
, and the reader is expected to register the French nuance of ‘attend’:
attendre à
– to listen to. There is, it seems, as much doubt over ‘Life, if you like’ as over ‘Art, if you like’. However the poet no longer feels on safe enough ground to condemn the ingenuous involvement of the dancers. He justifies his position not by grand Yeatsian gestures, but with a stubborn, sulky shrug. He can’t help it; this is just the way he is made. He concludes inconclusively that both the lonely artist outside and the dancers within ‘are satisfied’: ‘If no one has misjudged himself. Or lied.’ The poet is less deceived about life than the courting couples, but also less deceived about art than a Yeatsian romantic.

During his years in Belfast Larkin had established an unobtrusive reputation by publication in literary magazines. In 1953–5 a number of his poems (including ‘Wires’, ‘Latest Face’ and ‘Arrivals, Departures’) appeared in the
Spectator
. In 1953 John Wain, his friend from Oxford, became the producer of
First Reading
on the Third Programme, and Larkin’s poems began to be heard on the radio. One of the journals in which his work appeared was
Listen
, a small magazine founded in Hull by a twenty-one-year-old former art student, George Hartley, and his wife Jean. Larkin noticed the first number in 1953, and sent the Hartleys ‘Spring’, ‘Dry-Point’ and ‘Toads’, all of which they eagerly accepted for the second issue the following year. ‘Poetry of Departures’ appeared later in 1954 in
Listen
3. The Hartleys immediately fell in love with his work. Jean Hartley recalls their excitement at the poems’ ‘accessibility, wide range of mood and rare combination of wit, lyricism and disenchantment’.
¹
In February 1954 Donald Davie invited Larkin to give a talk at Trinity College, Dublin, where he was teaching. Larkin agreed, telling Patsy Strang: ‘the sweat runs down my back’.
²

Through 1954 and into 1955 poems in his new robust manner alternate in the workbooks with poems of elevated emotion. Even in the most ‘vernacular’ poems a romantic counter-impulse is audible. ‘I Remember, I Remember’ (8 January 1954) blasphemes against his former Lawrentian faith, debunking the depiction of childhood in novels like
Sons and Lovers
. When the poet’s train stops at Coventry, where he was born, the poet is at a loss. The childhood the books tell him he should remember never occurred. He experienced no ‘Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits’, he did not escape to a neighbouring ‘splendid family’ and become ‘Really myself’, nor did his first erotic experience come among the bracken, when ‘all became a burning mist’. Coventry, he concludes, is not where he has ‘his roots’, only where his childhood was ‘unspent’. His passionate denials become comic and his companion protests, ‘You look as if you wished the place in Hell.’ But beneath the plain speaking there are complications. Though the poem is divided into stanzas of five lines, the rhyme-scheme implies a nine-line unit. Larkin claimed, preposterously, that this playful subversion was ‘quite accidental really’.
³
The final hanging line required to complete the scheme resonates perplexingly in the mind: ‘Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.’ At first the words seem merely a glum verdict on the poet’s childhood. But they transcend their context, and haunt the reader like a Wittgensteinian puzzle. The impact of this apparently prosaic work is intensely poetic.

In ‘For Sidney Bechet’, Larkin focused on a very different imagined place: the New Orleans evoked by the narrowing and rising note of Sidney Bechet’s saxophone or clarinet. For some, the poet writes, such music builds ‘a legendary Quarter / Of balconies, flower-baskets and quadrilles, / Everyone making love and going shares –’. This world of uninhibited freedom is, like the clichés of ‘I Remember, I Remember’, an ‘appropriate falsehood’. However, in this case he has no wish to debunk or deride. Rather he spins his own joyful euphoria from the music: ‘On
me
your voice falls as they say love should / Like an enormous yes.’ As he wrote in a different context: ‘everyone has his own dream of America’.
⁴
To experience the real New Orleans would be to court disappointment. Later in life Robert Conquest offered to meet Larkin’s plane in New Orleans, ‘see him to a hotel and so on, so that he could make a local pilgrimage to the blues’ historical milieu’. Conquest explains: ‘This probably shaky enough project failed when he heard that Congo Square had been subsumed into a
Cultural Center
.’
⁵

In contrast ‘Born Yesterday’, celebrating the birth of Kingsley Amis’s daughter Sally on 17 January 1954, presents itself as a plain man’s rewriting of Yeats’s ceremonious ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’. The poet wishes for this baby not beauty, nor innocence and love, but ordinariness, and ‘An average of talents’. He hopes that she will be ‘Not ugly, not good-looking’, without anything ‘uncustomary’ to pull her off her balance. It is an assured exercise, but there is something ventriloquial about it. Larkin has ironed out his contradictions in a polite pretence of being Amis or the early Davie. This world of stolid security is as flimsy a dream as any imagined ‘Crescent City’, but far less exciting. Its tone approaches the ‘unassuming commonsense’ which Donald Davie saw in his poetry.
⁶
‘Poetry of Departures’, completed only days later, was possibly written in reaction against such dull contentedness. The poet derides the idea of ‘home sweet home’: ‘We all hate home / And having to be there: / I detest my room.’ He assumes that ‘we’ all admire the man who ‘just cleared off’. But like ‘Reasons for Attendance’ the poem ends ambiguously. In Larkin’s restless dialectic the Rimbaudian rejection of domesticity seems on reflection a ‘step backwards / To create an object’. The stereotypical Hollywood rebel, swaggering the nut-strewn roads, or crouching in the fo’c’sle, ‘Stubbly with goodness’, is as self-deceived in his ‘perfect’, ‘artificial’ life as the conformist with his orderly books and china. Edgy pararhymes prevail, only the d rhyme of the octaves being perfect. The subtle dissonances create an effect of anarchic wilfulness (‘epitaph / cleared off; think / junk; home / room; fo’c’sle / artificial; if / life’).

This dialectic between realism and fantasy culminated in ‘Toads’, completed in March 1954. Larkin is virtually alone among twentieth-century poets in writing in a natural, first-hand way about work in the sense of paid employment. No other significant poet, except Wallace Stevens, held down a nine-to-five job with no expectation of becoming a ‘full-time’ professional writer. Larkin’s attitude is profoundly ambiguous. In this poem his ‘vernacular’ bluster and garish misrhymes build to a pitch of rowdy anarchy; ‘lanes’ rhymes with ‘sardines’, ‘bucket’ with ‘like it’, ‘toad-like’ with ‘hard luck’ and ‘blarney’ with ‘money’:

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,

And cold as snow [. . .]

‘Made on’ rhymes with ‘pension’, giving Prospero’s beautiful phrase from
The Tempest
an unforgettable new context. The poem features in a collage pasted on the surviving inside cover of Larkin’s diary for 1954–7. A black and white photograph shows an imposing, large-breasted nude looking out, arms akimbo, with abstracted upward gaze. A smaller photograph of a thin-faced Larkin occupies the space under her armpit, staring at the viewer through large spectacles, tie slightly awry. The woman’s right hand presses down on the printed text of ‘Toads’, which covers the lower part of her body. In the corner is a fragment of a French lesbian romance: ‘Sa beauté n’était pas moins insolente que celle de sa soeur’ (‘Her beauty was no less insolent than that of her sister’).
⁷
The collage presents an engagingly self-deprecating image of the poet’s inner landscape.

On 5 and 6 April 1954 Larkin completed two contrasted poems of meditation. ‘Skin’ is an elegant ‘emblem’. The poet sadly sympathizes with his ‘Obedient daily dress’, which is compelled, in a wan bad joke, to ‘learn its lines’, parching and sagging under the wind of time. In a charming twist he apologizes that he has not been able to reward its patient loyalty by wearing it to a ‘brash festivity [. . .] such as / Clothes are entitled to / Till the fashion changes’. In his new anti-rhetorical manner, death becomes merely a change of ‘fashion’. The following day he completed ‘Water’, equally undeceived, but elevated in tone. It begins in light whimsy as he imagines himself being ‘called in’ to construct a religion, but modulates into an exalted evocation of the element of water. Borrowing Christian imagery he invents a ritual of drenching and fording to dry clothes, and presents an image of a glass of water in which the ‘any-angled’ light of dawn ‘Would congregate endlessly’. The poem consists only of twelve short lines, and maintains a playful tone throughout. Nevertheless it achieves an impressive pagan gravity.

He later regretted taking Monica’s advice to change the original wording of this poem. In a letter of 18 April 1971 he wrote: ‘Oh, in the paperb.
TWW
“litany” has been replaced by “liturgy.” I rather wish I hadn’t listened to you on this: it seems to wreck the whole verse, it’s so heavy, as opposed to the dancingness of
litany – liturgy
anticipates
images
in the next line, too, the g sound. I don’t think the meaning is sufficient gain, as no one knows what either word means anyway.’
⁸

On the day that he composed ‘Water’ he told Winifred: ‘Bruce wrote today to borrow £100! Sent him £50. Why he applies to me & not to Kingsley, God only knows.’
⁹
Despite his success as novelist and composer, Montgomery was experiencing financial difficulties because of his extravagant lifestyle. Larkin was notoriously penny-pinching in everyday life. Like his father he wrote up monthly accounts of his outgoings, and in matters of trivial expenditure, for instance in paying for rounds of drinks or for haircuts, he was loudly stingy and ungenerous.
¹⁰
But when it really mattered he could be open-handed, and even sought out occasions for generosity, as when he later offered to subsidize the publication of Barbara Pym’s
Quartet in Autumn
. Over the years, it seems, Montgomery called upon him for frequent financial assistance.