Authors: James Booth
Over the next decade Larkin was to reveal his most intimate thoughts in letters to Sutton. Shortly after his friend’s departure he described to him a series of lectures on psychology delivered in Oxford by the Jungian anthropologist John Layard. Layard, who had featured as ‘Barnard’ in Christopher Isherwood’s
Lions and Shadows
and had had an affair with Auden (who called him ‘loony Layard’), made a great impression on Larkin. On 15 May, after one of the lectures, he devoted much of a six-page letter to his sister Catherine
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to Layard’s ideas on the common symbolism of ancient Egypt and modern Yugoslavian peasants, and to diagrams of the ‘hypothetical line of perfection’ between ‘God’ and ‘animal’ in the human psyche. It was, he told her, ‘like an evening spent with truth’.
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He explained to Sutton later in June: ‘The solution as he saw it was that women should be the priestesses of the unconscious and help men to regain all the vision they have lost.’ Since women are ‘rubbing shoulders with all these archetypes and symbols that man so needs’, they need to ‘bring them up and give them to man. How this is to be done, he didn’t really know.’
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Earnest though he is he ends characteristically with a shrug of scepticism.
Larkin found an alternative, less problematic access to his unconscious in jazz. While still at school he had theorized pretentiously about the centrality of jazz to the modern predicament: ‘Jazz is the new art of the unconscious [. . .] the unconscious is in a new state, and has a new need, and has produced a new art to satisfy that need [. . .]’
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As he recorded in an account of his Oxford years, typed in September 1942 and October 1943 under the title ‘Biographical Details: OXFORD’,
the first friendships he made in Oxford outside his own school and college circle came ‘via hot jazz’. These evenings of beer and records were ‘the most exciting thing about Oxford I had yet encountered’.
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He wrote to Sutton: ‘I rushed out on Monday & bought “Nobody Knows The Way I Feel Dis Morning”. Fucking, conting, bloddy good! (sic) Bechet is the great artist. As soon as he starts playing you automatically stop thinking about anything else and listen. Power and glory.’
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On 5 May 1941, within days of Sutton’s departure, Larkin encountered Kingsley Amis, in many ways Sutton’s opposite. Amis was to take the subversive role in Larkin’s life which had been filled by Colin Gunner at school. Larkin’s later account of their first meeting is carefully nuanced. He was walking across the quadrangle with Norman Iles:
a fair-haired young man came down staircase three and paused on the bottom step. Norman instantly pointed his right hand at him in the semblance of a pistol and uttered a short coughing bark to signify a shot – a shot not as in reality, but as it would sound from a worn sound-track on Saturday afternoon in the ninepennies.
The young man’s reaction was immediate. Clutching his chest in a rictus of agony, he threw one arm up against the archway and began slowly crumpling downwards, fingers scoring the stonework. Just as he was about to collapse on the piled-up laundry [. . .] he righted himself and trotted over to us. ‘I’ve been working on this,’ he said, as soon as introductions were completed. ‘Listen. This is when you’re firing in a ravine.’
We listened.
‘And this is when you’re firing in a ravine and the bullet ricochets off a rock.’
We listened again. Norman’s appreciative laugher skirled freely: I stood silent. For the first time I felt myself in the presence of a talent greater than my own.
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There is a twinkle in that last sentence: the ‘talent’ in question is, after all, merely the ability to mimic the conventions of ‘western’ films.
This hint of dubiety underpins the lifelong relationship between the two men. They at once developed an intimate masculine bond. But theirs was always a very unequal relationship. Motion writes that Amis’s was a ‘sensibility very like Larkin’s’, one which ‘checked lyricism with mockery, and spurned any sign of pretension’.
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But though this is an accurate description of Amis, it covers only one small part of Larkin. Amis later recalled that Larkin’s was ‘the stronger personality [. . .] I was always full of ridiculous, foolish, very young man’s ideas. But he seemed to have grown up.’
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Richard Bradford observes that Larkin ‘corresponded with virtually every one of his acquaintances, from Sutton and Gunner through his Oxford friends to his mother and father’, while ‘Amis wrote almost exclusively to Larkin.’
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Amis demanded that his friend be ‘an exact replica of himself’. ‘I enjoy talking to you more than to anybody else [. . .] because you are savagely uninterested in all the things I am uninterested in.’
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Larkin obliged by adopting Amis’s tone of beer-drinking, jazz-loving ribaldry, and even outdid his friend in contempt for the Oxford Literature syllabus: Anglo-Saxon was ‘ape’s bumfodder’;
The Faerie Queene
and
Paradise Lost
vie with each other for the title of
‘the most
boring
poem in English’.
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It was in Amis’s copy of Keats’s
Eve of St Agnes
that Larkin wrote against the lines: ‘like a throbbing star / Into her dream he melted’ – ‘YOU MEAN HE FUCKED HER.’
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Larkin soon introduced his new friend to his record collection: ‘Kingsley’s enthusiasm flared up immediately. I suppose we devoted to some hundred records that early anatomizing passion normally reserved for the more established arts.’ The clarinettist Pee Wee Russell ‘was,
mutatis mutandis
, our Swinburne and our Byron. We bought every record he played on that we could find.’
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Amis was also an ally in Larkin’s quest for poetic recognition. As Larkin wrote in ‘Biographical Details’, ‘Keyes was rapidly forging ahead, and winning a reputation for himself that extended far beyond the limits of Oxford.’
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Amis became editor of the
Labour Club Bulletin
, and published Larkin’s poems ‘Observation’ and ‘Disintegration’ in the issues of November 1941 and February 1942:
Time that scatters hair upon a head
Spreads the ice sheet on the shaven lawn;
Signing an annual permit for the frost
Ploughs the stubble in the land at last [. . .]
(‘Disintegration’)
The young poet was still convinced that his best route to success lay through ventriloquizing Auden. He was also aware that he was beginning to lose his head of fine fair hair.
In his early months in Oxford Larkin made his first serious attempts at narrative prose. Four stories from 1941–2, three in typescript and one a substantial handwritten fragment, give thinly fictionalized accounts of conversations and drunken outings with his Oxford friends, who for a brief period named themselves ‘The Seven’. Larkin explained in ‘Biographical Details’:
This arose from an idea that we should form some definite group with definite ideas, set against the college authorities and all the intellectuals and scholars we disliked. As a matter of fact, after one meeting the ideas and ideals degenerated into one big supper-party per week, supplied by two people. These suppers were perhaps the most thrilling and amusing things in the whole year. They may have been only projections of ‘dorm feeds’ onto a college scale, but they were never so enjoyable when only a few of us were there. It is quite impossible to recall just what went on.
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Norman Iles remembered the group, in a more serious tone, as a hand with seven digits: ‘We made a fist against the Dons [. . .] I see myself as the thumb. Next to me is Philip Brown. In the middle come Nick Russel, Hilary Morris, and David Williams. Kingsley Amis is the third finger. The little finger, the opposite to me, is Philip Larkin.’
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The atmosphere of Larkin’s stories echoes the schoolboy context of Christopher Isherwood’s
Lions and Shadows
. The first typescript is dated ‘January–July 1941’, and the title added in pen, ‘Story 1’, indicates that Larkin regarded it at the time as a significant start in his writing. In a plain, dogged third person it follows the students from lecture to pub to party, achieving vividness only towards the end when one of them realizes that homosexual desire has overcome him at a college ‘drunk’. He staggers spectacleless and blinded by cigarette smoke back to his room, which has, in the meantime, been wrecked by his fellow students. His sexual hysteria develops into a long unparagraphed purple patch of melodrama. He feels ‘absolute shame’ as he recalls ‘the loathsome rapid servility of his hands to execute the vapid mirages of mind. Hands swam before his eyes, grasping, touching, manipulating, cleverly overcoming obstacles so that the mind could gratify its absurd beliefs, half-desires, and hallucinations, conspiring like vicious and unimaginative courtiers to burden further the patient and ox-like peasantry of the body.’ The imagery becomes picturesquely phallic: ‘That which, left alone, would like a lupin point for the sky in admirable symmetry he had, and not in the few previous hours only, warped and torn like an imbecile gardener [. . .] He was foul. Foul. Foul.’
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Was Larkin himself perhaps drunk when he wrote this comic sub-Lawrentian farrago?
The holograph prose fragment ‘Peter’, written a short time later, reveals the passive, relaxed mood of his early months in Oxford: ‘Peter felt his university life to be happily and even creatively aimless. The beauty and luxury of the colleges pleased him; he did not feel his work either difficult or unpleasant [. . .]’
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The choice of name for the protagonist alludes archly to a record by the high-voiced, gender-ambiguous jazz-singer Billy Banks (‘Oh Peter, you’re so nice. It’s Paradise. When you’re by my side, that’s when I’m satisfied. Come on and kiss me do, and hug me tight.’)
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Larkin’s narrative, however, has no such sophistication, amounting to little more than a desultory diary, the awkward third-person narrator clearly being ‘Peter’ himself. Norman Iles appears as ‘Edwin’:
Each despised academic work, social polish, and intellectual discussion: each unspokenly believed that personal relationships were the only things worth caring for. Each was restless, sexually unsatisfied and nervous, yet capable of great personal loyalty, if not wholehearted passion.
On the other hand, there were too many differences between them for them to be inseparable. Edwin was impetuous, honest, unthinking, child-like; any emotion or thought he experienced he immediately expressed. It rarely occurred to him that he could be in the wrong, and in consequence he had no sympathy with people who differed from him.
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The friends visit a medical student, ‘Philip’ (Philip Brown with whom Larkin was later to share a room), who shows them slides on his microscope, including human semen. Edwin comments: ‘I never knew it looked so beautiful.’ Peter refuses to look. They sit by the fire and Edwin aims an imaginary revolver into the centre of the flames. The narrator reflects that Peter and Edwin are ‘day boys’ and ‘completely virgin’, in contrast to their more sexually experienced boarding school contemporaries.
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‘Geoffrey’ who appears at dinner, is clearly Amis. ‘Peter despised Geoffrey ultimately, but had a liking for him because he flattered him and could make him laugh. He had a gift for mimicry of a very high order: any peculiarity he could caricature and use as a nucleus for a fantastic monologue, that always the same, passed into the repertory of the group’s humour’. While admiring ‘his talent’ Peter finds Geoffrey ‘impossible to take seriously’.
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The fragment ends as Peter visits Edwin next morning, to find him still in bed. They talk uneasily about ‘this buggery business’.
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In June 1941 Sydney Larkin moved the family home from 1 Manor Road, Coventry to a new house at 73 Coten End, Warwick. Here the young Larkin found himself, during vacations, in the first of the high, secluded rooms in which he was to live most of his creative life. He described the house to Sutton: ‘It is long and tall. I sleep in one of the attics and write this in the other. Everywhere junk is piled.’
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On his return to Oxford in October 1941, the pattern repeated itself: ‘My room, due to a misunderstanding with the Senior Tutor, was an attic in the president’s lodgings.’ Again he found himself in a solitary retreat up flights of stairs: ‘I preferred it to college. The room had a small but vehement electric fire, and this I kept on all day and most of the night – frequently all night. This was before the days of fuel-rationing and so on. Consequently the room grew like a tiny oven, and earned the scorn of my friends. But I liked it.’
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