Philip Larkin (68 page)

Unable to contemplate buying the house in Pearson Park himself, and becoming a landlord, he set about finding a new home (if home existed). He was at last forced to own his own establishment and, to make things worse, he chose to live at ground level, overlooking neither a green park nor an arterial road. His class prejudice took him to the most expensive and exclusive residential area of Hull, Newland Park. Despite its name, it is a cul-de-sac in the form of a figure of eight, the outer loop of which issues at two points on to the Cottingham Road, opposite the University. The houses, the earliest dating from the 1880s, but with many later infills, are detached and individually designed, with large gardens (hence ‘Park’). Pressured by the need to vacate his beloved flat, and with no relish for house-hunting, Larkin took the first house to become available, number 105. Built in the 1950s, it lies down a slight slope, and in his day presented to the road a blank white garage door.
⁴⁴
It is at virtually the midpoint of the inner loop, as far away from the main road as possible. However, apart from seclusion, it shared none of the characteristics of the compact rented flat in Pearson Park with its blue windowscape.

The end of an era, in a larger sense, was foreshadowed at the end of 1973 by a request from the Hull construction company, Fenner, for Larkin to write the words to a cantata to mark the completion of the Humber Bridge, work on which had begun the previous year. This new link with the south would end Hull’s precious isolation which he so valued. The world which had formed him was slipping into the past. On 15 January 1974 he wrote a formal letter to Benjamin Britten asking whether he ‘would be prepared in any circumstances to entertain a suggestion that has recently been made in Hull – namely, the completion of the Humber Bridge in (it is hoped) 1976 should be commemorated by the composition and performance of a choral work by yourself (with words by myself) [. . .] My own part in the project is simply due to the fact that I have lived in this neighbourhood for nearly twenty years, and have written one or two poems about it.’
⁴⁵
However, this joint work by Britain’s greatest poet and composer was not to be. Britten replied through his secretary that, having recently undergone a serious operation, he ‘must very regretfully turn down your request for him to compose the music for a choral work to a text by yourself’.
⁴⁶
Anthony Hedges, Reader in Composition at Hull, whose delightful Ayrshire Serenade had been written in 1969, was commissioned to write the music instead.

A month later, on 17 February, Larkin wrote to Judy Egerton on his familiar 32 Pearson Park notepaper, making as much lugubrious fun as he could of his situation:

my days in Pearson Park are coming to an end. I have blindly, deafly, & dumbly said I will buy an utterly undistinguished little modern house in Newland Park (plus ça change, plus c’est la même parc) [. . .] I can’t say it’s the kind of dwelling that is eloquent of the nobility of the human spirit. It has a huge garden – not a lovely wilderness (though it soon will be) – a long strip between wire fences – oh god oh god [. . .] So Larkin’s Pearson Park Period ends, & his Newland Park Period commences.
⁴⁷

He attempted to raise his spirits by mentioning his recent election to membership of the MCC and hoping that his and Monica’s annual ‘Lords dinner’ get-together with the Egertons, which had survived the couple’s separation, would continue. He complimented her on the success of the Liberal Party in the polls, and looked forward to the collapse of the economy following the recent Middle Eastern oil crisis: ‘Hull University will be shut down. I shall earn a few pence sweeping crossings [. . .]
You
can sell your pictures – at rock bottom prices. Gloomy old sod, aren’t I?’
⁴⁸

A few weeks later, in the cruellest month, April, he began ‘Aubade’, the initial intensive drafts taking up nine workbook pages, dated between 11 April and 7 June. Unusually, he left the verso of the final page blank as if anticipating the poem’s early completion.
⁴⁹
He reached a near-final version up to the opening of the third stanza, though he was to change some phrases in the final version: ‘I have the leisure to remark / That more than half of life has elapsed by now / (Two-thirds; three quarters’); ‘Ancient interrogation’; ‘The endless absent dark we travel to’. This, the tenth and last of his major contemplative elegies, is also the only one of his aubades
to announce its genre
in the title. Here there is no traditional parting of lovers. Dawn in ‘Aubade’ prompts the poet’s farewell to life itself. The grip of light has become ominous and threatening.

The theme is the ‘dread / Of dying and being dead’. The celebration of ‘being here’, always the
raison d’être
of Larkin’s poetry, falters as the poet imagines the extinction of his imagination. Figurative language fails him, and a dispirited prosiness prevails: ‘I work all day, and hit the jug at night’ (in the final version: ‘and get half-drunk at night’). In bitterly ironic self-quotation he falls back on familiar, richly romantic vocabulary recycled from his earlier work. In ‘The Trees’ (1967) the ‘unresting castles’ of leaf, renewing themselves each year, told the poet to ‘Begin afresh’.
⁵⁰
Now with the end of such renewals in sight, the adverb ‘afresh’ is attached not to rebirth but to the thought of death, which ‘Flashes afresh to hold and horrify’. In the final draft three years later he cruelly transferred ‘unresting’ from the living foliage to death itself. It is an indication of the precision with which he imposes his linguistic authority that he confidently expects his readers to hear the verbal echoes of the earlier, already ‘canonical’ poem.

The stanzas preserve the richly interwoven form of the intricately rhymed Horatian or Keatsian ode, and there are poignant flickers of poeticism: ‘that vast brocade, / Moth-eaten and musical’ (in the final version ‘That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade’). But this ornamental complexity is contradicted by bald indicative prose: ‘nothing more terrible, nothing more true’. However, the poem’s failure of élan is itself paradoxically eloquent, and the anti-rhetorical rhetoric is immediately accessible to the reader. The phrase ‘the open emptiness for ever’ (in the final version ‘total emptiness’) is instantaneously memorable, while ‘Not to be here, / Not to be anywhere’ has a naturalness which will make it sound to many readers like a quotation from themselves. This is the poetry of ‘What oft was thought, but ne’er so well exprest’.
⁵¹
Few poets have succeeded in conveying so directly our familiar dismay at death. Mortality annihilates ‘What I am’; it dissolves ‘all we are’. Larkin’s lyric naivety generates a candid dismay which other poets would repress in embarrassment. Any reader who has felt outraged at the sight of a loved one reduced to an inanimate mannikin in an empty room will respond to this.

Copies of
High Windows
arrived from Faber in May 1974, in the middle of his drafting of ‘Aubade’. The grey cloth cover reminded Larkin of Auden’s
Look, Stranger
which he felt to be ‘a specially good omen’. It was, indeed, in terms of poetry publishing, a best-seller. The initial impression of 6,000 copies was sold by September; 7,500 more were printed, followed by another 6,000 in January 1975.
⁵²
His poetic future, however, was bleak. He was aware of having all but completed his oeuvre, and his inspiration was guttering. It is thus perhaps not as surprising as it might at first seem that, having drafted half of one of his greatest poems, he abandoned it for the time being. No doubt the upheaval of his removal interrupted the flow. Perhaps, also, the manifest status of ‘Aubade’ as his ‘last’ poem inhibited him from putting the final touches on the tenth, blank page. He was not yet prepared to throw in the poetic towel. Larkin was to live for another twelve years following the end of his ‘Pearson Park Period’, and a brief poetic Indian summer lay ahead, in the poems he wrote to Betty Mackereth in the following year. But, with the final completion of ‘Aubade’ three years later in 1977, his literary life would be effectively over.

21

The End of the Party

1974–6

All his life Larkin had avoided ‘furniture and loans from the bank’.
¹
When he moved house on 27 June 1974 he no longer needed loans. But he did at last have to furnish his life in the expected manner. He described the upheaval to Anthony Thwaite with gloomy wit: ‘I’ve been v. upset [. . .] in most senses: feel like a tortoise that has been taken out of one shell and put in another.’ He had had to cope with a jammed door, lost key and ill-fitting carpet, and needed to ‘buy heap furniture fast’. Moreover, ‘The garden is growing. Feel like Hölderlin going bonk.’ He concluded in the plaintive tones of an exile: ‘Drop me a line occasionally.’
²
Judy Egerton helped him choose a stylish lampshade in London.
³
He bought a new washing machine and no longer had the pleasure of wringing out his socks and underwear by hand, as he had done all his life. He mourned the loss of his simple attic existence. He could not find a satisfactory place to work, so he recreated his flat, sitting in an armchair by the fire downstairs, his back to the garden, bookshelves within reach. He wrote to Barbara Pym, ‘Perhaps I shall produce a version of
About the House
(Auden’s sequence about his Austrian “pad”),’ adding a grim self-quotation: ‘“Well, we shall find out.”’
⁴

Andrew Motion’s interpretation of Larkin’s state of mind at this point seems ungenerous. He sees the move to Newland Park as a devious strategy, a ‘form of creative suicide, one which left his achievements untarnished, his put-upon identity intact, and his need for sympathy undiminished [. . .] he could both relish his success and seem not to enjoy it. He could freeze his talent to avoid the responsibility of having to live up to his reputation.’
⁵
The letters and poems of this period do not bear out this picture of manipulativeness and ‘put-upon’ self-pity. Larkin was not perversely freezing his talent. He was struggling to keep up his spirits and maintain his dying inspiration.

To all outward appearances his life had reached its zenith of success.
High Windows
was universally praised. He was awarded honorary degrees by St Andrews and Sussex Universities.
⁶
The eminent photographer Fay Godwin visited to take photographs which established a potent iconic image in the public imagination. He wrote to Godwin on 12 July 1974, saying that he liked some of her images ‘very much indeed. I wish I always looked like that.’ But he was apprehensive of the effect of others in reinforcing a negative stereotype. ‘The photographs I “didn’t like” [. . .] were simply the ones where I am peering out from among dark shelves with a somewhat furtive/whimsical appearance.’
⁷
Later, in 1982, he refused permission for one of these photographs to be used in Thwaite’s
Larkin at Sixty
tribute volume. Later still, on 11 November 1983, he wrote to Godwin: ‘I think it must have been to Fabers that I gave vehement instructions that the ones of me among the shelves on sheet 1892 should never be used. However, I take heart from your assurances that insofar as it lies within your control the Boston Strangler will not reappear.’
⁸
It is regrettable that Faber chose one of these images for the front dustwrapper of Martin Amis’s selection of Larkin’s poems in 2011, repeating it on the back, cropped to show a single sinister, bespectacled eye.
⁹

His poetry was, for the time being, at a stand. After abandoning ‘Aubade’, he completed nothing until the day before his fifty-second birthday, eight months later. ‘The Life with a Hole in It’ (8 August 1974) was, he wrote, using Bruce Montgomery’s
nom de plume
, ‘what my old friend Edmund Crispin calls “demotic”, I believe’.
¹⁰
Its jokey reference to the advertisement for Polos (‘the mint with the hole’) announces a richly self-parodic poem in ‘Movement’ vein. It is one of those works composed on a single page of the workbook, with only minor corrections. Never has an attack of the sulks been dramatized with such
jouissance
:

When I throw back my head and howl

People (women mostly) say

But you’ve always done what you want,

You always get your own way
[. . .]

The women may be sympathetic and genuinely puzzled, but in his extravagantly self-pitying mood he hears only, as the italics suggest, a caricature feminine nagging. Then, determined to give offence (if he hasn’t already), he turns the minimal civility of ‘(women mostly)’ into the crude insult of ‘the old ratbags’. All he can be justly accused of, he protests, is never having ‘done what I don’t’. He may have managed not to do what he doesn’t want (marry and settle down). But this does not mean that he has done what he wanted. In this ‘demotic’ context what he wanted is imaged in terms not of symbolist transcendence, but of a novel-writing career in Ian Fleming mode. However, this turns out to be another dead end, since the life of ‘the shit in the shuttered chateau’ with its ‘bathing and booze and birds’, clearly repels him. Well, at least he has avoided the destiny the old ratbags would have preferred for him. He is not a ‘spectacled schoolteaching sod’ with six children, a pregnant wife and her parents coming to stay. The poem’s real subject now emerges. This staged and artificial bellyaching is a displacement activity intended to distract him from ‘larger gestures’. Choices of life are becoming irrelevant as age advances. In a grand didactic finale of emphatic noun phrases he declares that life is an ‘immobile, locked’ stasis, a struggle between ‘Your wants’, which remain unmet, ‘the world’s [wants] for you’, which you strain to fulfil, and the ultimate winner, the ‘unbeatable slow machine’ which will bring ‘what you’ll get’. ‘Days sift down it constantly. Years.’