Philip Larkin (43 page)

The caricatures, however, are deployed within a complex dialectic. From a feeble defence of his own wimpishness the poet slips into a sour but empathetic defence of the lives of the girls of his own ‘gauge’. The ‘My Darlings’ or Margaret Peels with whom he is fated to spend his life do not inhabit a Platonic world of beauty and sex. Instead they ‘work, and age’. Against a male caricature of rampant licentiousness the poem pits a female caricature of prissy homeliness. The women in the poet’s league are confined within social proprieties. They ‘put off men / By being unattractive, or too shy’. Some of them go ‘quite rigid with disgust / At anything but marriage’. The poet concedes that the lives of such women may not amount to much, compared with that of his friend. But he humbly asks his friend at least to ‘notice’ them. The humour of the poem is uncomfortable, and Larkin made no attempt to publish it. His recourse to comic stereotype at precisely the moment of Monica’s deepest grief no doubt shows his determination to distance himself from her. But, on a more profound level, the poem is a gloomy acknowledgement of their bond. They share the same gauge.

Andrew Motion interprets Philip’s attitude towards Monica at this point as unfeeling and strategic: ‘He was too self-absorbed to respond to her grief, and his obsession with his independence made him emotionally stingy. His defence of his actions could not disguise their cruelty.’
⁶⁵
This seems wrong. Larkin failed to rally to Monica’s side because he was in danger of being overwhelmed by her grief. Loyalty was his strongest instinct, and his inability to console Monica at this time distressed him deeply. Betty Mackereth recalls him saying to her with feeling, following the death of Monica’s father, ‘I am the only one in her life.’
⁶⁶
In March 1960 he told his mother that Monica was ‘very depressed & low. I sometimes wonder if she will ever get over all this: her work seems to weigh her down so much & she feels so alone in the world.’
⁶⁷
Later, when Jean Hartley queried Philip’s assertion that he really ought to marry Monica, he responded lugubriously: ‘well at least she’s an orphan’.
⁶⁸

Protective sympathy, and also perhaps sexual feelings aroused by Maeve Brennan, produced a marked change of tone in his letters to Monica during 1960. Complaints about holiday disasters and analyses of their sexual incompatibility give way to warm solicitousness, erotic tenderness and sentimental rabbit language. Motion writes: ‘By turning to Maeve when he did, Larkin ensured that Monica could not become too dependent on him.’
⁶⁹
The opposite seems to be the case. The fresh delight in life which he derived from Maeve gave him the emotional strength to offer continuing support to Monica. Without it he would have been dragged under by Monica’s despair. Her bereavement had set the final seal on her dependence on him. After this trauma, for better or for worse, he would never be able to abandon her.

14

Here

1960–1

The University was expanding rapidly. By 1960 student numbers had risen to 1,660 and Larkin’s Library staff had virtually doubled to twenty. With the new building and reorganization to his credit, it seemed logical to make another career move. He applied for the post of Librarian at Reading. On 7 March he visited the Egertons in London on his way to the interview. Something of his apprehension is perhaps audible in the poem he wrote that night. Before going up to bed the Egertons’ ten-year-old daughter Bridget sketched a figure holding a lamp under the extravagant heading ‘Good night World’. Larkin’s accompanying words are rich in self-indulgent escapism: ‘Goodnight World / Your toils I flee / Send no importunate / Messengers after me.’
¹
On 9 March he fled his appointment with destiny. He was given a tour round the Library and looked round the town. But, instead of attending the interview, he caught the train back to Hull. On his return he wrote to Monica, saying that after a rest he felt ‘more cheerful – I’m not going to Reading: didn’t care for the looks of it: withdrew my application what. Just withdrew what [. . .] I have lots of good reasons for this, but I was certainly in a funk too, and I shouldn’t wonder if it was just that.’
²
The idea of moving away from Hull put him in turmoil, but he was evasive about the reason. A relocation would have interrupted his involvement in the further development of Hull’s Library. A ‘Stage 2’ building programme was provisionally approved only a week later with a target date of 1966–8 and a costing of £600,000.
³
However, a more private ‘good reason’ for staying must have been his growing attraction to the ‘latest face’ of Maeve Brennan. Indeed, it seems likely that the application to Reading was an attempt to escape this new threat to his relationship with Monica.

Despite, or because of, the complications of his personal and professional life, Larkin’s poetry continued to broaden in scope and deepen in emotion. ‘Faith Healing’, completed on 10 May 1960, offers a variation on the theme of our ‘almost-instinct’. The immediate impetus for the poem was the ‘dramatized documentary’
The Savage Eye
, which won a BAFTA award in 1960, and featured a prayer meeting filmed in Los Angeles. As in the poem an evangelist with a ‘deep American voice’, silver hair, dark suit and white collar asks a stream of elderly women, many of them in a highly emotional state, ‘What’s the matter?’ or ‘What’s the trouble?’, before directing God to cure an eye or a knee.
⁴
At the end of his poem Larkin modulates from the brutal realism of ‘Moustached women in flowered frocks’ to an almost embarrassing empathy with their longing for a life lived ‘according to love’:

To some it means the difference they could make

By loving others, but across most it sweeps

As all they might have done had they been loved.

That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache,

As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps,

Spreads slowly through them.

The less deceived sentiment echoes that in Gray’s ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College’:

             all are Men,

Condemned alike to groan;

The tender for another’s pain,

Th’ unfeeling for his own.
⁵

An appeal to common humanity transcends cynicism.

A week later on 17 May Larkin completed ‘MCMXIV’,
⁶
one of the impersonal set-piece meditations characteristic of his middle period. He had recently read Leon Wolff’s
In Flanders Fields: The 1917 Campaign
(1959) and been ‘stunned at the awfulness of it all’.
⁷
The opening image of the poem, a line of young men queuing up to enlist ‘as if it were all / An August Bank Holiday lark’, recalls a sepia photograph or a jerky scrap of film from the sunny summer of 1914. The form of the date is that on the Cenotaph and monuments ‘For the Fallen’ on village greens and in town squares. But the poet has no ideological investment in a sentimentalized Georgian past. This England, with its ‘differently-dressed’ servants, living in ‘tiny rooms in huge houses’, where children were named after royalty and men queued like sheep to die for their country, is no nostalgic idyll. The details imply no ideology, being purely contingent: tin advertisements for ‘cocoa and twist’, bleached sunblinds over shopfronts, place-names ‘all hazed over / With flowering grasses’, and ‘The dust behind limousines’. He is concerned with the tragedy of the war, not with sociology or politics. The conclusion develops into an ironic retrospective epithalamium. The men leave the gardens tidy, and their new marriages last ‘a little while longer’, but without substance, since the husbands are already as good as dead. Only an attitude remains, in the form of monuments with quaint Latin inscriptions. The insistent repetition of ‘never’ hints that this collective memory of innocence is only almost true, while the omission of the expected main verb (‘As changed itself’ rather than ‘Has changed itself’) makes the entire poem into a single complex noun phrase.
⁸
The poem does not record a real historical ‘change’. It embodies a collective myth.

On 20 June 1960 the Queen Mother officially opened ‘Stage 1’ of the Library redevelopment. Both Eva and Monica came to Hull to celebrate this milestone in Philip’s career. The ceremony saw Larkin at the apex of his public role, and he was proud of his achievement. The Vice-Chancellor introduced him to the royal visitor with the words, ‘This is Mr Larkin our poet-librarian’, and the Queen Mother replied, ‘Oh, what a lovely thing to be.’
⁹
For some time afterwards he delighted in imitating Brynmor Jones’s Welsh lilt and the Queen Mother’s high-voiced reply. Four decades later Maeve Brennan remembered the occasion vividly: ‘I wore an elegant chocolate and coffee-coloured dress of satinised cotton with cream hat and gloves.’
¹⁰
Maeve had already met Eva, who visited her son in Hull every year. The two women found they had much in common and liked each other. At the ceremony Eva introduced Maeve to Monica. Maeve recalled later that she was ‘mildly interested to meet my boss’s girl-friend!’ She was not to speak to Monica for another twenty-five years.
¹¹
In July Larkin spent a week in Minehead with his mother, before going on holiday with Monica to the island of Sark. This ‘village surrounded by sea’, as he called it, was to become one of their favourite holiday retreats.
¹²
His letters to Monica at this time, addressed to ‘Dear bun’ or ‘Dearest bunny’, show increasing affection. On 4 August he wrote: ‘I miss the drink and the laziness of our holiday, & your company & readiness to trade chuckles and gull cries.’
¹³

‘Talking in Bed’ was completed on 10 August 1960, the day after his thirty-eighth birthday and exactly ten years since he and Monica had first slept together.
¹⁴
Apart from the uncomfortable seduction by Patsy Strang in 1952–3 Larkin remained faithful to Monica, in strictly sexual terms at least, for a quarter of a century, from 1950 until 1975. This is Larkin’s most intensely felt love poem, describing a committed relationship, for better or for worse. Its impact is muted and bleak but it is charged with restive verbal expressionism. It opens with a ‘bad’ pun: ‘Lying together’ carries a sexual and also a moral meaning. Like the earl and countess, the lovers form an ‘emblem of two people being honest’, which ‘goes back so far’: as far indeed as Adam and Eve, who lay together following the Fall and then lied to God about it. The first few lines maintain detachment, but there is a strain between the intimate subject and the dispassionate tone. Then in line eight a gesture of extravagant despair breaks the poem’s composure: ‘None of this cares for us.’ The hissing monosyllable ‘this’ with its high short vowel seems arrogant; the lower vowel of ‘us’, unprotected by an opening consonant, is defenceless against it. A verbal perversity unique to this poem intensifies the emotional excess. The double negative phrase ‘incomplete unrest’ conveys a meaning more logically represented by ‘complete unrest’, but the grammatically correct ‘complete’ would imply restfulness. This wedding-wind is agitated and anxious. The final sentence presents the reader with a series of verbal tripwires. The phrase ‘this unique distance from isolation’ actually means unique closeness to isolation, but the poet disregards correct grammar in order to make sure that all three words in the phrase express alienation (‘distance, ‘from’, ‘isolation’). His meaning would be expressed correctly by ‘distance
and
isolation’; but this would be limp in comparison. The concluding Hardyesque double negative, ‘not untrue and not unkind’, should logically resolve itself into ‘true and kind’. Instead it conveys something more subtly intimate and tragic. The poem’s tricksy verbal contortions do not detract from its gravity. Rather their far-fetched strangeness serves to give the poem an emotional power quite out of proportion to its length: twelve tetrameter lines.

Three days after this (13 August 1960) Larkin returned to complete a poem, ‘Pets’, first drafted in 1954, retitling it ‘Take One Home for the Kiddies’. It is a terse reflection on children’s passion for the novelty of ‘living toys’: ‘fetch the shovel – /
Mam, we’re playing funerals now
.’ Seven days later he completed ‘A Study of Reading Habits’, on the surface a similar class-biased satire, this time on the facile conventions of popular literature. Beguiled by adventure stories in his youth, the speaker imagined himself a hero dealing out ‘the old right hook / To dirty dogs twice my size’. Later, he graduated to gothic fantasies of vampirism. With his ‘cloak and fangs’ he broke women up, in a malicious rhyme, ‘like meringues’. In the final stanza disillusion has set in: ‘Don’t read much now [. . .]’ He has seen through the clichés, now those of the Western: ‘the dude / Who lets the girl down’, ‘the chap / Who’s yellow and keeps the store’. On the simplest level this is a didactic warning against subliterary escapism. But there is an oblique subtext of self-mockery. The poet is not so different as one might at first think from the poem’s speaker. His responsible professional role has required him to outgrow his own literary dreams. Six years earlier the poet-librarian had feared his employer’s reaction to ‘Toads’. Now, his status safely established, he ensures that one of his most quotable lines will be: ‘Books are a load of crap.’