Authors: James Booth
Thwaite had left Oxford in 1955 and taught in Japan for two years before joining the BBC as a trainee radio producer. His first volume,
Home Truths
, had been published by the Marvell Press a year earlier, in 1957, and his early poetry, with its ‘Movement’ imagery and quiet gravity, appealed to Larkin. Thwaite’s Bleaneyesque poem ‘Mr Cooper’ became a reference point in their correspondence. The fact that Thwaite is a sincere, reticent Anglican, with political views very much to the left, never hindered the relationship; indeed it seems to have cemented it. Larkin’s letters to the younger poet often give a more complex version of his feelings, particularly about poetry itself, than those to more intimate correspondents who expected him to share their prejudices. Thwaite went on to be Literary Editor of the
Listener
(1962–5) and of the left-wing
New Statesman
(1968–72) where he published many of Larkin’s reviews and mature poems, including ‘The Trees’, ‘Sad Steps’, ‘Vers de Société’ and ‘The Building’. Larkin later named Thwaite, together with the much younger Andrew Motion, as one of his literary executors.
In September 1958, in a bolt from the blue, it seemed that Larkin’s secure position as Hull’s Librarian might be about to end, and his life be ruined. Jean Hartley tells the story:
in 1958 he received a letter on headed notepaper, putatively from the Vice Squad, saying that his name and address had been found on the mailing list of a pornographic publisher and that legal proceedings would be taken against the subscribers. Philip appeared on our doorstep trembling, white-faced and panic-stricken. He was certain that his mug-shot and crude headlines would be blazoned over the
News of the World
and the
Hull Daily Mail
and that he would lose his job, along with the respect of his colleagues. He might even be sent to prison. What should he do? Burn the contents of the cupboard? Tea and sympathy were offered and a waiting game advised.
47
He visited his solicitor, Terry Wheldon, to explore his legal position. The danger evaporated, however, when Robert Conquest revealed that the letter was a practical joke. Astonishingly, once the alarm was over, Larkin ruefully appreciated the prank, and remained on cordial terms with Conquest.
48
He wrote to him on 9 September 1958, with a mixture of discomposure and relief, accusing his friend of inflicting ‘a frightful scar on my sensibility’. In future ‘nude pics will act as a detumescent [. . .] not that I shall ever have the courage to buy any. You’ve probably turned me homo, come to think of it. Perhaps you’ll be the first to suffer the fearful consequences of this. What?’
49
He had no desire to put an end to his correspondence with so interesting and original a friend. A year later, in a letter to Monica, he described a visit to Conquest’s chaotic flat in London. He had risen early on the Sunday and done ‘all the accumulated washing up – I get great satisfaction from washing up, given hot water & Daz’. Conquest, he told her, ‘prepared fairly eatable brecas, just what I have myself. “Will you have fruit juice and bacon? I should perhaps warn you there’s — all else.” He had his usual litter around him –
Astounding Science Fiction
,
The Polish Revolt
,
London Magazine
,
Frolics at St Freda’s
. He
is
an odd chap. A real character [. . .]’
50
George Hartley had decided to make audio recordings of key Marvell Press poets, and on 24 October 1958 Larkin and he travelled to the HMV studios in London.
51
By this time there was a constant tension between the two men over one thing or another. The record sleeve of
The
Less Deceived
, for instance, featured carefully posed photographs of the poet in Spring Bank Cemetery. Larkin wrote to Judy Egerton: ‘I had a row (too mild) with the Thing from Outer Hessle, who gave himself credit for the sleeve photos focussed & set with
my
camera loaded with
my
film on
my
tripod
by me
; he just pressed the cable release.’
52
When the record finally appeared in January 1959 he wrote that it was ‘quite distractingly upset by bumps & various other poltergeistic activities in the background, nor do I think much of my readings. One or two are not too bad – unimportant ones for the most part – but I don’t make much of the party pieces & a lot of the time it all goes dull and rather insignificant.’
53
For all his reservations his beautifully modulated, unforced readings have an authority beyond any which have followed them.
After the acerbic ‘Self’s the Man’, Larkin returned, in ‘Home is so Sad’, to his new impersonal but generous lyric voice. Dated in the workbook to the last day of 1958, it focuses on a tragic archetypal living room seen through the eyes of an uncharacterized speaker. The original inspiration of the poem was intensely personal; indeed this is an anniversary poem. Like the living room of his parental home in Warwick following his father’s death a decade earlier in 1948, the room stays ‘as it was left, / Shaped to the comfort of the last to go’. But the life for which it was decorated and furnished has ended. Like ‘Love Songs in Age’, this is a retrospective, ironic epithalamium. The room, unobtrusively personified, is ‘bereft / Of anyone to please’, and the relics of the hopeful start of family life (‘A joyous shot at how things ought to be’) have become symbols of inevitable failure. In an arresting apostrophe the poet suddenly speaks as if he and the reader are standing together in the room: ‘Look at the pictures and the cutlery. / The music in the piano stool. That vase.’ ‘That vase’ is a completely unspecific signifier. It may be one of the loving couple’s early purchases, or a prized or despised wedding present, or a casual insignificant holiday souvenir. Whichever of these it is, it has become over the years a familiar metonym of ‘home’. Few readers will fail to recognize the equivalent of this vase in their own lives. With his instinct for contrast, Larkin followed this intimately emotional poem with the coolly impersonal meditation ‘Far Out’ (dated in the workbook 1 February 1959), contemplating the galaxies of deep space with their ‘evasive dust’ of stars, unmythologized and offering neither guidance nor delight to humankind. It remained unpublished until
Collected Poems
(1988).
In addition to running the Library day to day and overseeing the building programme, Larkin also had the Library Committee minutes to write, the Bookshop Committee to attend, and a yearly speech of introduction to the new first-year students to give, a task he found particularly stressful. It is not surprising that when in 1959 he was included for the first time in
Who’s Who
, he gave his occupation as ‘librarian’, on the principle that ‘a man is what he is paid for’.
54
But his life in the Library also had its lighter moments. He encouraged a decorous playfulness among his staff. In July 1959, just as the summer holidays began, in a benign echo of Conquest’s practical joke of the previous year, Mary Wrench, Betty Mackereth and Maeve Brennan delivered mock letters of resignation, all in the same envelope, citing the impossible strains of the job. A few days later Mary, left solitary in the Library, wrote to Betty, telling her: ‘we’ve had a brilliant creative reply from Sir’, from the Kirkwall Hotel, Orkney, where he was on holiday with Monica. Mary copied out his letter:
25 July 1959
My dear Mary, Betty, Maeve,
It was delightful to get your letters yesterday [. . .] Your resignations are, individually and collectively, refused. I am sorry you find your working conditions intolerable, but that is implicit in the very phrase
working
conditions. How many times must I tell you that you don’t come to work to be happy? [. . .] In any case, I am compelled to point out that you are by now hopelessly unfitted for work anywhere else. Does Betty think she could still take down a letter delivered at normal speed? Or Mary endure a post where G.M.T.
55
was still accepted? Or Maeve undertake duties that weren’t one long languorous dalliance with romantic Scotchmen?
56
It is no wonder his staff remember working in the Library with such pleasure. In the current jargon he was a natural and instinctive ‘human resource manager’.
The Library staff had to take their holidays early so as to be on duty for the final move into the new building in August 1959. Larkin had a number of stout wooden boxes with handles specially made in the University workshop, three feet long, into each of which a shelf-full of books could be packed for the short drives to and fro across the campus in two vans hired from Hammonds, the Hull department store. Larkin was stationed at the receiving end, and carefully assigned each batch to the correct pink or blue colour-coded stacks. After the move they enjoyed a party, the only time Betty remembers seeing Philip really drunk. The Vice-Chancellor, Sir Brynmor Jones, gave them a day off and Betty, Maeve, Mary and Wendy Mann took the opportunity for a long weekend in the impressive hotel on the cliff-top at Ravenscar, which had an open-air swimming pool. Betty remembers ‘there was a lot of giggling’.
57
In the midst of all this activity, Larkin completed ‘Afternoons’, dated in the workbook ‘14.9.1959’. The albums ‘lettered /
Our Wedding
’ lie near the television as the mothers watch their children playing on the recreation ground. ‘Something is pushing them / To the side of their own lives.’ By September the Library move was finally over, and Larkin experienced a certain awe at the up-to-date facilities over which he now presided. He told Monica on 7 October: ‘This building is like a tiger I have got on & can’t get off.’
58
This might have seemed the ideal time for him to have followed the example of his friends Amis, Conquest and Wain, and taken one of the proffered opportunities to make a short or long-term visit to America. Amis and Conquest both sang the praises of the USA and urged him to go. But perhaps Monica’s earlier refusal of her chance made this difficult for him. Would she expect to accompany him? Perhaps he was too comfortable where he was. However this may be, it seems that, by this stage in his life, he was firmly decided against the USA. In April, he had turned down an offer from the University of Cincinnati to be ‘their Something lecturer for six weeks in 1960 for 200 gns A WEEK and expenses. Sounded pure hell to me. Betjeman was it in 1957. Can’t help feeling flattered, but am refusing, of course.’
59
In late 1959, as the Library upheaval subsided, his relationship with Monica hit a crisis which changed its character for ever and put the seal on its permanence. His feelings for her were still in a lacklustre phase. On 11 August he expressed himself baffled by his contradictory emotions: ‘As usual when you aren’t here I should like to scramble to bed with you!!! How to reconcile this with my apathetic exhaustion in your presence is more than I can fathom.’
60
But now his feelings were intensely engaged. Her mother and father both fell seriously ill. He scarcely knew them, and was at an emotional loss. He wrote to Monica on 7 October: ‘I don’t like to think of you all alone with two such ill people, & parents at that, on your hands.’
61
Then, on 11 October, Monica sent him a dramatic telegram announcing her mother’s death. He responded as best he could: ‘Dearest, I was very upset to get your telegram & did feel for you strongly.’ He expressed regret that he had met her mother only twice, and, in clumsy consolation, deferred to Monica’s Tory views, welcoming reports of the election results: ‘To die with Conservative gains coming in is not the worst of ways!’
62
He was clearly afraid of involvement. There is a distinct awkwardness in the wording of his letter of 13 October: ‘I thought of you yesterday, and deeply hoped you were not being simultaneously ravaged & numbed by it all.’
63
Then in December Monica’s father also died, and she sank into depression. In a fascinating psychological twist, the crisis sent Larkin back to the draft of a poem he had begun in 1957, ‘Letter to a Friend about Girls’, which contrasts his attitudes towards Kingsley and Monica in terms of comic caricature. Larkin’s correspondence with his friend still preserved, in a time warp, the masculine lewdness of their early relationship. During the Amises’ visit to Princeton in 1958–9 Kingsley boasted in his letters about his sexual exploits, and on his return to England he and Conquest shared a life of promiscuity. Larkin wrote to Monica in August 1959 after a weekend visit to London to see them both: ‘Everyone is having affairs with all the old people & lots of new ones.’
64
In ‘Letter to a Friend’ Larkin defers to Amis’s self-image as a glamorous sexual success. The poet’s friend enjoys erotic ‘skirmishes / In train, tutorial and telephone booth’ in a Platonically perfect world where ‘beauty is accepted slang for yes’. The poet, however, finds himself in a separate ‘league’. He has, somehow, always met ‘a different gauge of girl from yours’. It is, he asserts in mock-heroic resignation, one of those things which, in Hamlet’s words, lie beyond philosophy.