Authors: James Booth
At home in Hull, Larkin gave his support to a campaign to preserve the picturesque wilderness of Spring Bank Cemetery, near to Pearson Park. In February he travelled to his childhood home to receive the Coventry Award of Merit in the City’s Guildhall. In the same month, he and Kingsley Amis attended a performance of
Larkinland
, an arrangement of poems and jazz made by Michael Kustow, the Associate Director of the National Theatre.
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Larkin acted as Chair of the 1977 Booker Prize Panel, taking a pile of the long-listed novels with him to Scotland on his holiday with Monica in the summer. He favoured Pym’s
Quartet in Autumn
, with its moving portrayal of loneliness and paranoia, but the award went to Paul Scott’s
Staying On
.
On 1 September 1977 a sharp reminder of mortality came with the death of Patsy Strang. He wrote later to Amis: ‘Did you know Patsy was dead? [. . .] Found literally dead drunk, it seems – empty Cointreau bottle, ½ empty Benedictine bottle. Fascinating mixture, what.’
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Robert Lowell died a fortnight after Patsy, and Larkin tactfully declined an invitation from his widow to speak at the memorial service.
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After the last poem addressed to Betty in February 1976 poetry had all but deserted him, the only significant new work in 1977 being a fragile love poem written in a copy of
Thorburn’s Mammals
which he gave to Monica: ‘The little lives of earth and form, / Of finding food, and keeping warm, / Are not like ours, and yet [. . .]’ Rather than a sentimental poem it is a meditation on the sentimental fictions with which we fend off hard reality. Abstracting Beatrix Potter into symbolist metaphor, the poet evokes a close-up world as it might appear through rabbit eyes: ‘I see [. . .] / The flattened grass, the swaying stalk, / And it is you I see.’ From the outside, however, this well-worn relationship could look very different. Martin Amis remembers, ‘In Monica’s presence, Larkin behaved like the long-suffering nephew of an uncontrollably eccentric aunt.’
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During the summer of 1977 he worked on ‘Aubade’, abandoned in the middle of the third stanza in June 1974 during his final days in Pearson Park. Over the three months between 18 May and 18 August 1977, he completed the third stanza and reached a near-final version of the last two, filling nine pages with continuous, closely worked redrafts. His revisions make the poem more incisive and authoritative. He introduces the spoiled lyricism of sing-song nursery rhyme: ‘nothing to think with, / Nothing to love or link with’; ‘Being brave / Lets no one off the grave’. And he reduces the faint transcendence of ‘the open emptiness for ever’ to the bleak prose of ‘the total emptiness for ever’. In the third stanza he dismisses with crushing finality both theological and secular arguments against the fear of death. The brief nostalgia of the ‘vast, moth-eaten musical brocade’ of religion is rejected as wishful thinking which we have now outgrown. But equally ineffectual is the materialist rationalizing of death, derived ultimately from Epicurus:
And specious stuff that says
No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel
, not seeing
That this is what we fear – no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell [. . .]
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‘The anaesthetic from which none come round’ is not a figure of speech, but a literal definition of death, from the Greek
an-aesthesis
, the negation of the senses. Recently the philosopher Richard Rorty has attempted to reopen this debate, arguing that ‘“fear of extinction” is an unhelpful phrase. There is no such thing as fear of inexistence as such, but only fear of some concrete loss.’
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This is a distinction without a difference. Inexistence consists precisely of the concrete loss of vision, hearing, touch, taste or smell, and Larkin fears this loss. Moreover it is quite possible to imagine the state of being without one’s senses, and to fear being reduced for ever to that state. There is nothing forced or tenuous about what Larkin called his ‘in-a-funk-about-death poem’.
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The final stanza dramatizes ‘The death-throes of a talent’
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with ruthless candour. Metaphor, threatened from the beginning of the poem, collapses completely. The light ‘strengthens’, and the poet is granted his epiphany: ‘It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know’. Larkin no doubt has in mind Auden’s bedroom intimation of mortality: ‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard, / The desert sighs in the bed, / And the crack in the tea-cup opens / A lane to the land of the dead.’
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But where Auden’s metaphors are extravagant and masterful, Larkin’s prosy metonym sounds flat and unrhetorical. As an image of ‘what we know’ this wardrobe is the hollowest of metaphors. It is scarcely even figurative. As an upended wooden box it is almost a coffin already.
23
As in ‘Going’ we are presented with a transparent riddle, the answer to which is ‘death’. This is metaphor
in extremis
. The inverted, Larkinesque construction, ‘It stands [. . .] what we know,’ throws the weight of meaning cruelly on to the stark ‘what’ noun phrase. The live emotional charge of ‘what I am’ in ‘Best Society’, or ‘What will survive of us’ in ‘An Arundel Tomb’, short-circuits to a resigned ‘what we know’. A more relevant intertext than Auden is perhaps John Wilmot, whose blunt atheist assertion, ‘Dead, wee become the Lumber of the World’, has a similar anti-poetic poetry.
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In ‘The Building’ the death-bound patients saw unattainable beauty in a prosaic glimpse of ordinary life. But here the ‘girls in hairdos’ coming from the cleaners are replaced by a less consoling symbol of everyday life: telephones crouching, ‘getting ready to ring’, in a world where ‘Work has to be done’, and postmen and doctors ‘go from house to house’ ministering to our needs with the contents of their bags.
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But for all its threats and ambiguities this dawn world of offices, typewriters and letters, under a clay-white sky, is still infinitely preferable to ‘sure extinction’.
On 17 November 1977 came the death that mattered most. His mother, already for many months in the twilight of the old fools, died at the age of ninety-one. His dearest old creature was no longer there to expect his next letter. The following day Larkin kept an appointment with Anthony Thwaite at All Souls College, and asked his Anglican friend to accompany him to college prayers in the morning: ‘I think my mother would have liked that.’
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He had left ‘Aubade’ all but complete just over three months earlier, on 18 August. A week or so after his mother’s death he returned to it, and on a single page, with ‘28.11.1977’ at the top and ‘29.11.1977’ at the bottom, he redrafted the last stanza. The final touch seems to have been the insertion of the achingly moving phrases ‘all the uncaring / Intricate rented world begins to rouse’. Only minor adjustments were made in the subsequent typescript. His ‘final’ poem was at last complete. ‘Aubade’ was published in the
Times Literary Supplement
on 23 December 1977. He grimly anticipated the number of Christmas dinners it would spoil.
With ‘Aubade’ he consciously signalled that his oeuvre was complete, and his creative life was over. He was to succeed in blowing the embers briefly into life on only five further occasions over the remaining eight years of his life.
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By the end of 1977 he had made his contribution to each genre and form; he had explored every verbal possibility open to him. His art was his life, and his grasp on life depended on his poetry. If new inspiration did not come in answer to his waiting he could not force it. Writing a poem, as he said, was ‘not an act of the will’. The death of his art in 1977 was as natural and inevitable a process as his biological death in 1985. A flower which has bloomed cannot remake itself as a bud.
However, life went on, and work had to be done. In his daily life his instinct for blithe wit remained undiminished. In January 1978, he received a letter from the Friends of Dove Cottage telling him that, following a recent donation, he had been made a life member. He replied: ‘In fact I was similarly enrolled a few years ago, when I made a similar generous donation, as you so kindly put it, so I now have the distinction of being a life member twice over. I very much fear, however, that they will have to run concurrently.’
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Larkin now found himself saddled with the task of writing a third commissioned work. Fortunately it was a relatively minor affair: a quatrain celebrating the Queen’s Jubilee to be engraved in Queen’s Square, Bloomsbury near Faber’s office. Ted Hughes, Faber’s next most prominent poet, was also to provide a quatrain. Larkin wrote to Monteith at Faber on 2 March:
I’m no good at this lapidary lark. All three nights’ thought can produce is
In times when nothing stood
But worsened, or grew strange,
There was one constant good:
She did not change.
29
You are welcome to first British chiselling rights in that, but please don’t print it. I’m sure Ted will do better.
He could not resist adding his own imagined version of Hughes’s poem, in the style of
Crow
:
The sky split apart in malice
Stars rattled like pans on a shelf
Crow shat on Buckingham Palace
God pissed Himself –
30
It is an amusing comment on the fate of official, public verse that Larkin’s pastiche of Hughes will be more familiar to readers than either poet’s official quatrain.
31
A fortnight later Larkin finally and momentously ‘sorted himself out’ in relation to Maeve. After her mother’s death in May 1977, she had moved with her father into a smaller semi-detached house in St Margaret’s Close, Cottingham, and Philip had helped with the move, changing all the plugs on their appliances.
32
But by early 1978 it seems that he had come to a final decision that this unequal, ‘unreal’ relationship could no longer be sustained. There is an appearance of deliberation, irritation even, about his actions. On 16 March 1978, following its successful run in London,
Larkinland
was performed in the Middleton Hall in the University. Philip attended with Maeve, and she naturally expected to accompany him to the reception in Staff House afterwards. However, as they left the Hall he insisted on going on alone. She was forced to find a friend to drive her home.
With Philip as the guest of honour, and me as his escort, it should have been an enjoyable evening for both of us. Alas, it turned out to be disastrous and resulted in the abrupt termination of our long intimacy. I still find it distressing to recall the details, let alone write about them [. . .] When we met a few days later, Philip had finally determined to end the vacillation of eighteen years and henceforth pledge himself to Monica Jones. I reluctantly accepted his decision: what else could I do?
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Philip wrote to her: ‘I realize that you are very hurt, and that this explains the angry home truths [. . .] I know most of these are justified (not quite all), but they leave their sting. Perhaps when we feel better we can meet again. I don’t say this vindictively: I am extremely sad about it all.’
34
There is anger between the lines, and he stands his ground.
Bereft of poetic inspiration, Larkin was fully occupied with literary business. Though he avoided contact with the University’s English Department, he took an interest in a new lecturer, Andrew Motion, later to become his biographer. In a letter to Anthony Thwaite of 29 January 1978 he gave a thumbnail sketch: ‘Like a latterday Stephen Spender – very tall, sissy voice, gentlemanly, good-looking, all that. I quite like him.’
35
In spring 1978 Larkin wrote an essay on Hull’s first major poet, Andrew Marvell, for the tercentenary of his death.
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In May a well-written letter from the young Vikram Seth, then a student of Economics at Stanford, induced him to break his usual rule of polite refusal to give advice to aspiring poets. He responded that he had read Seth’s work with ‘great interest and a good deal of enjoyment’, though he felt that the subjects he dealt with were ‘not quite as advanced’ as his technique. He undertook to show Seth’s poems to an editor whom he was to meet later in the week. There may not have been much substance in this promise. In July he wrote that he had been disappointed that the editor had ‘not been very impressed by your poems’.
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