Authors: James Booth
During his first years in Hull the Library staff had something of the aspect of a family, and his youth gave piquancy to his role of paterfamilias. When he moved into the Pearson Park flat he asked his female colleagues for their help. As Maeve Brennan recollects:
He discussed his furnishing plans with us, asked our advice on the best shops for his needs, and regaled us with his purchases in the weeks before he moved: a rose-pink carpet for the sitting-room, offset by bottle-green chintz arm chairs and settee, book cases, storage units for records and, last but not least, a primrose-patterned tea-service which received much use in the coming months. Once everything was in place, he invited us in twos for tea on Sunday afternoons – a series of mini-house-warmings. We admired in particular the spacious attic sitting-room, with its arched high windows at tree-top level, overlooking the park below.
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He could scarcely fail to make an impression: unmarried in his thirties, considerate to the point of ceremoniousness, but refreshingly informal at a time when pre-war deferences and decorums were breaking down.
Following the success of his first mature volume he was now confident of his ultimate poetic destiny. When the Queen paid a brief visit to the University in May 1957 and he was not presented to her, he commented to his mother: ‘Ah well, one day I shall meet her as Philip Larkin, not the paltry librarian of a piffling university.’
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His fame was spreading. It was enthusiasm for
The Less Deceived
which impelled one of his library assistants, Mary Wrench, to apply for her post in 1956. She had been working for some years in the London Institute of Education, and decided to apply for the position in Hull to see what the poet was like, rather than with a serious intention of taking the job. She was, however, charmed at the interview. ‘Philip was so nice to me and insisted on seeing me off on the coach, saying “I do hope you’ll come”.’ On her move up to Hull Mary found Maeve Brennan particularly kind and welcoming, and the pleasant informality of the Library made a sharp contrast to the stifling atmosphere at the London Institute: ‘He was so friendly with all the staff, using our Christian names and wanting to be called Philip. Everyone liked him. He was very likeable.’
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He made a tradition of the staff Christmas parties at which he supplied the drinks while the ‘girls’ provided the food. Maeve Brennan recollects: ‘He joined in the long, extended congas through the book stacks with sheepish enthusiasm [. . .] going out of his way to put everyone, even the youngest junior, at ease.’
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He followed the love lives of his colleagues, congratulating them on their engagements, and sympathizing with them during their ‘disengagements’. Maeve comments: ‘I myself experienced both states twice in his first three years!’ Her ingenuous exclamation mark catches something of the innocence of the time.
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Mary Wrench detected a strategic element in the young librarian’s attentiveness: ‘He was quite wily with it. He would make comments which you would think were only meant for you. But then you realized that he was doing this with everyone.’
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It was at some point in the mid- or late 1950s that he pasted thirty-five numbered renderings of his own name (‘Philip Larkin’, ‘Philip Larkin Esq’) into his diary, cut from envelopes, each written by a different correspondent, from his mother and Ruth Bowman to John Betjeman and C.P. Snow.
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Perhaps he was meditating on his various identities.
In the period following ‘An Arundel Tomb’ Larkin’s relationship with Monica coarsened. The difference in their characters played its part. Philip was deriving increasing satisfaction from managing the Library, and enjoyed his new status. At the same time he was writing reviews, maintaining several diverse correspondences, and creating the poems which were his main purpose in life. For all its frustrations his life was full and creative. In contrast Monica found her lecturing job a ‘hardship’, and fretted at its relatively modest demands. Writing from 192a Hallgate on 28 July 1956, Philip erupts at her attitude towards ‘holidays’:
You sounded as if I’d irritated you in some way over holidays! Just think how lucky you are to be at home all July,
all
August, ALL September [. . .] AT HOME,
free
, among your belongings & making your own days, never doing any filthy work & money coming into the bank just the same – twelve
consecutive
weeks . . . I honestly don’t think a week at Stratford with my mother & a week at Swansea with Kingsley is in the same street, as How to Live [. . .] you’re immeasurably better off. I don’t suppose I’ve had more than 3 weeks consecutive holiday since I left Oxford –
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A number of her students recall Monica as a lively, inspirational tutor and lecturer.
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But she had a perfectionist reluctance, not uncommon among Oxford-educated academics of her generation, to bring her work to publication. Consequently, since research was a requirement of her contract, Leicester University held her at the ‘promotion bar’ in 1957,
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and she never moved beyond the lecturer grade. She worked on a study of George Crabbe but nothing ever emerged. It is easy to sympathize with Philip’s puzzlement in a letter of 3 November 1958: ‘I wonder why you’re finding your work hard.’
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There was also a lack of accord on literary principles. Not infrequently Philip seems to be deferring to Monica’s judgement simply in order to avoid a quarrel. His favourite poem in
The Less Deceived
had been ‘Absences’. Monica now wrung from him an assurance that he rejected symbolism in favour of common sense:
Of course I agree with all you say about symbolism! How could I not? My mind is stodgy as usual tonight, but I know I’m with you there, like a rabbit huddled against a warm pipe outside the greenhouse on a frosty night. As soon as you start meaning one thing by saying another you open up a gap & the thing sounds hollow. Rabbits wouldn’t understand symbolism.
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It is dispiriting to see him deferring to her cosy ‘rabbit’ philistinism. However, in his poems he remains true to himself. Some of his greatest works rely on the metaphorical gap between saying and meaning.
By the end of 1956 their physical relationship had become the focus of earnest discussion between them. He was baffled by her passivity, and welcomed her explanation of her feelings:
you rarely
seem
to like anything more than anything else. I think, if you analysed it stroke by stroke, my – or anyone’s – way of making love is directed as much towards pleasing you as pleasing myself, and probably it grows by learning what you like – so if you don’t give any definite signs in this direction, it makes it a little – a little what? Less straightforward? Less confident? Anyway, if you like most things, there’s nothing to worry about, is there. I don’t reckon I ‘understand’ you at all, even if I do sometimes!
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Some months later, in July 1957, a mismatch between their levels of libido caused a problem. Monica complained that his lovemaking was ‘impersonal’ and not ‘tender’ enough, whereas he found her lacking in ‘lustfulness’: ‘If you don’t feel non-personally lustful too, then clearly a large gap remains to be bridged [. . .]’
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On 7 August he sent her a two-page letter apologizing for not having organized their annual holiday: ‘when it [. . . ] came to the point, this year I kept putting off the task of deciding what to do or discussing where to go, partly out of lack of initiative & partly because I doubted if we were likely to make a better success of it than last year, until the time came when it seemed too late. I can quite see how nasty & inconsiderate this has been.’ He ended the letter abjectly: ‘More later – it’s taken nearly an hour to write this.’ The following day (the day before his birthday) he seemed inclined to call a halt to their yearly routine: ‘I certainly thought at the time
Well, you don’t have to go on these holidays if you don’t want to
, and while this wasn’t a resolve not to, I felt I’d better be sure any further holiday was more likely to succeed.’
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Larkin’s feelings for Mary Wrench no doubt added to his dissatisfaction with Monica. In a letter written jointly to Maeve Brennan and Betty Mackereth in 1986 following Larkin’s death, Mary recollected: ‘I used to see quite a bit of him outside the university until my marriage, though I didn’t think this was a very wise thing to let the staff generally know [. . .] I think Betty knew all this at the time but I don’t know that Maeve did [. . .] Anyway, I was in a long line of female friends and why not?’ Their relationship was fresh and innocent. He told Mary never to put jam in an omelette, as Winifred had done in Belfast. Mary recalls, ‘he always did the cooking’.
one of my funniest memories [. . .] was that on one of these evenings he drew my attention to something in the corner of the room so that I had my back to him. Then he called me and miaowed and when I turned round he had put on a cat mask. He had made this himself. I think, still, that this revealed a very innocent natural sense of fun which few people who didn’t know him, except through the writings, would ever guess that he possessed.
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When the University acquired the books from Busby Hall, near Helmsley in North Yorkshire, Betty, the only driver on the Library staff, took Philip, Mary Wrench and another Library Assistant, Wendy Mann, in a hired car to the Moors. (The books travelled separately in the University van.) They stopped for a picnic on the way. In 1986 Mary wrote that her memory of the occasion ‘still makes me giggle’: ‘my trousers began to drop down and very simply and naturally he got on his knees, in the middle of all that rural expanse of moor and wrestled with a safety pin to secure my nether garments. I met Betty’s grinning face and we all three girls had difficulty in not exploding with laughter.’
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At times like this the young Librarian must have felt that the world of Willow Gables had become real and he had been given privileged access to it.
In October 1957 the question of marriage arose again when Monica’s Head of Department suggested she might take up a visiting lecturership in New York. Philip responded with exasperating indecision: ‘if I’m prepared to marry you it shouldn’t need an American invitation to precipitate the proposal [. . .] I am simply terrified at the prospect of us going on year after year & not getting married [. . .] You’ll say Mum is at the bottom of all this. Well, if she is, I don’t know what to do about it. [. . .] Do you think it wd part us if you went?’
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In the event she did not take the risk and turned down the offer. In January 1958 Philip suggested bizarrely that theirs was ‘a kind of homosexual relation, disguised’. Did she not agree that there was ‘something fishy about it’? He continued, ‘It seems to me I am spoiling yr life in a hideously ingenious way.’
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On another interpretation, these subtle wrangles show that they were perfectly matched. Both had sex in the head, and they were involved in an absorbing erotic
agon
which neither would have wished to end.
Larkin’s relationship with his mother also remained unresolved. He wrote to Eva as frequently as to Monica, with a continuous stream of reassurance and news. However, it was now apparent that he would not bring her to live with him. On 6 May 1956 he wrote immediately after his return from a visit to express penitence at a rare lapse of patience with her: ‘Home safely – am about to go to bed, but I must say how bitterly I regret my inexplicable irritability.
Please
forgive me. You do everything to make my visits enjoyable & then I have to go & upset everything. I have
no
self control, it’s awful. I love you very dearly & you mustn’t worry about me. I’m sure I’ll get better eventually.’
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On 13 November 1956 he confided to Monica his retrospective sympathy for his father, locked into marriage with this difficult woman:
([. . .] I think he was a terrific romantic; & my mother was the equivalent of Emma Lavinia Gifford [Thomas Hardy’s first wife]. Poor father! My heart bleeds for him. What a terrible fate!) I think there’s something quite frightening about all the widows, living effortlessly on, with their NH specs & teeth & wigs, cackling chara-loads of them, while in the dingy cemeteries their shadowy men lie utterly effaced – I want to write a poem on this called
To my mother & the memory of my father
, but can’t/daren’t.
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