Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

For the friends and lovers of Larkin who contributed to the writing of this book

The ultimate joy is to be alive in the flesh.

(Larkin to James Sutton, 23 June 1941)

Contents

Author’s Note

Introduction

1 Dear Fambly 1922–40

2 Exemption 1941–3

3 Brunette Coleman 1943

4 Nothing So Glad 1943–5

5 The Novels 1943–5

6 The Grip of Light 1945–8

7 Just Too Hard for Me 1945–50

8 Crisis and Escape 1947–50

9 The Best Writing Conditions 1950–2

10 Single in Belfast 1952–3

11 Various Poems 1953–6

12 Hull 1955–7

13 Poet-Librarian 1956–60

14 Here 1960–1

15 Sitting It Out 1961–4

16 Living for Others 1964–8

17 Jazz, Race and Modernism 1961–71

18 Politics and Literary Politics 1968–73

19 Larkin’s Late Style 1969–72

20 Winter Coming 1972–4

21 The End of the Party 1974–6

22 Death-Throes of a Talent 1976–9

23 Extinction 1980–5

Postscript: Petals and Graves

Notes

Bibliography

Plate Section 1

Plate Section 2

Plate Section 3

Acknowledgements

By the Same Author

Author’s Note

Quotations are from The Complete Poems (2012). The Collected Poems (1988), though less comprehensive, has the great advantage, for those wishing to follow Larkin’s biography, of printing the poems in the order in which they were written. Since individual works are easily located in these volumes I have omitted page references.

Introduction

Larkin is, by common consent, the best-loved British poet of the last century. Phrases and lines from his poems are more frequently quoted than those of any other poet of his time: ‘What are days for?’; ‘Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three’; ‘What will survive of us is love’; ‘Never such innocence again’. Already during his lifetime the publication of a Larkin work was an event. Within days of the appearance of a new poem in the New Statesman, the Listener or the Times Literary Supplement, ‘people would have it by heart and be quoting it over the dinner table’.¹ A recent blogger speaks for many when he recalls reading his slim volumes ‘to tatters’.² Since his death Larkin’s poetic reputation has become even more secure. A 2003 poll of several thousand readers by the Poetry Book Society and the Poetry Library voted his heart-warming celebration of marriage, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, the most popular poem of the previous half-century.³ His harrowing self-elegy ‘Aubade’ was seventh on the list. The witty, humorous poems are equally popular. As he himself wryly reflected: ‘They fuck you up will clearly be my Lake Isle of Innisfree.’⁴ His poetic range seems all-encompassing.

He remains, however, a controversial figure, both as a poet and as a man. Even the apparently neutral question of which of his poems deserve to be printed under his name raises fierce passions. During Larkin’s lifetime the mature collections, The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974), established an oeuvre which gave all the appearance of perfection. The modulated sequences in these books seem to carry the same authority as the text of one of his poems. So when, following his friend’s death, Anthony Thwaite was called upon to edit the Collected Poems, his task seemed simple. Editorial tradition required him to reproduce these volumes in their original form, adding poems published in magazines or newspapers in a separate section. Important unpublished works might perhaps be printed in an appendix; unfinished poems must be excluded. However, Thwaite faced a dilemma. There existed a hitherto hidden version of Larkin’s life’s work, more comprehensive than that of the existing publications, and carrying equal if not greater authority. Larkin had constructed his oeuvre with rare deliberation. For three and a half decades, from October 1944 to November 1981, he had written virtually all his poetic drafts in pencil in a series of eight manuscript workbooks, entering dates, usually to indicate a ‘final’ version, and sometimes inserting typescripts with last-minute changes. These workbooks contain his most intimate poetic autobiography.

Archie Burnett notes that Coleridge advocates ‘a thoroughgoing chronological arrangement’ for a poet’s work, since this enables the reader readily to follow a development from early to late.⁵ Confronted with the workbooks, Thwaite made the bold decision to adopt this policy in the Collected Poems of 1988. Moreover a number of workbook poems which had remained unpublished, including ‘An April Sunday brings the snow’, ‘The View’ and ‘Love Again’, were clearly of comparable quality to poems already published. Thwaite therefore inserted into the sequence sixty-one ‘new’ poems, including the key incomplete work, ‘The Dance’. The result was revelatory. In an early letter to his friend James Sutton, Larkin referred to his writing as a record of his ‘soul-history’.⁶ In Thwaite’s edition, this soul-history was laid bare in a new and unexpected way. It was revealed, for instance, that Larkin had been unable to complete a poem for eleven months following the death of his father in 1948. In the abandoned draft of ‘The Dance’ (1963–4) readers were able to follow his never-resolved mid-life crisis. The final poems in the eighth workbook showed his inspiration guttering in the mid-1970s.

The Whitsun Weddings volume of 1964 conducts the reader, with artful contrasts of comic and tragic, reflective and dramatic, from the opening chords of ‘Here’, through the gloomy meditation of ‘Dockery and Son’ to the yearning finale of ‘An Arundel Tomb’. Thwaite’s sequence reveals, instead, the poet’s emotional journey. ‘An Arundel Tomb’, reflecting his commitment to Monica Jones, was completed in 1956. The serene ‘Here’ came five years later in October 1961, when he was still safely in his thirties, his professional career was at its most satisfying and his relationship with his Hull muse, Maeve Brennan, was at its happiest. By the time of ‘Dockery and Son’, eighteen months later, he had passed the threshold of forty and was descending into crisis. Those who wish to follow the narrative of Larkin’s life as a man and an artist will find Thwaite’s 1988 Collected Poems a surer guide than the lifetime volumes.

Thwaite’s reconfiguration of Larkin’s life’s work caused a furore. He was accused of disregarding the poet’s ‘intentions’ by destroying the harmony of the lifetime volumes and of releasing ‘second-rate material’ which Larkin had not seen fit to print.⁷ His critics forgot that publication had not always been simply a matter of Larkin’s intention. One of the reasons he was so hesitant to publish even some of his best work was the trauma of 1948 when his volume In the Grip of Light was rejected by six publishers. Fourteen of the poems in this collection remained unknown until 1988 simply because no publisher had seen fit to print it.

In the 2003 edition of Collected Poems editorial orthodoxy was re­asserted. The sixty-one additional poems were omitted altogether and the order of the lifetime volumes was restored. In 2005 A. T. Tolley complicated the picture by publishing, in Early Poems and Juvenilia, a large number of works written when Larkin was in his teens. Then, in 2012, a certain closure was achieved in Archie Burnett’s The Complete Poems, which aimed to print ‘all of Larkin’s poems whose texts are accessible’.⁸ Despite his respect for Coleridge’s chronological principle, Burnett reproduced the order of the lifetime volumes; but added, in a separate section, the ‘new’ 1988 works, the juvenilia and also some hitherto unknown fugitive squibs from letters. The very completeness of Burnett’s project offended some. He was accused of ‘diluting a major oeuvre and distracting from the real source of its power’,⁹ and of publishing ‘every napkin- or matchbook-jotting’.¹⁰

The possessive passion which so many readers felt towards the established lifetime canon offers a pointer to the unique nature of Larkin’s poetic achievement. Readers deplored the insertion of works which seemed to lack the authority, the necessary quality of his familiar masterpieces, and they resented seeing his poems placed in the contingent context in which they had been written. These readers need not have worried. As the dust settles it is clear that there has been an expansion rather than a ‘dilution’. Disregarding most (not all) of the juvenilia and the doggerel squibs, the larger Larkin oeuvre revealed in the Collected Poems and The Complete Poems has a rigour and economy equal to and more organic than that of the volumes published in Larkin’s lifetime. Larkin’s complete works contain only a tiny proportion of dross compared with those of, say, Wordsworth or Auden.

At the age of thirty in 1953 Larkin set out his aim in a tone of jokey presumptuousness: ‘I should like to write about 75–100 new poems, all rather better than anything I’ve ever done before, and dealing with such subjects as Life, Death, Time, Love, and Scenery in such a manner as would render further attention to them by other poets superfluous.’¹¹ He largely succeeded in his aim. Among literary forms the lyric is at the extreme of verbal economy and concentration; a great lyric poem strikes the reader as the distilled ‘last word’ on a universal theme. Larkin’s mature oeuvre has been said to contain ‘a remarkable percentage of the definitive poems of his time’.¹² For the moment he seems to have had the last poetic word, on love, on death, on the Great War, on parents, on ageing, on hedgehogs. Poets writing on these subjects today struggle to escape his ‘definitive’ voice and find their own.

He achieved this definitiveness by the extreme economy of his genres, forms, types of rhyme, even individual words. Larkin’s oeuvre does not comprise, as do those of, say, Yeats, Housman or Hopkins, numerous poems on similar themes and with repeated or overlapping forms. Those who have taught his poetry will be familiar with the frustration of attempting to move on with their students to another Larkin poem similar to ‘An Arundel Tomb’ or ‘This Be the Verse’ or ‘Sunny Prestatyn’, only to be compelled to start again from scratch, since there are no other poems ‘like’ these. Each of his works is ‘its own sole freshly created universe’,¹³ comprehensively differentiated from the others in terms of form, style and voice. As he put it in an arresting metaphor, ‘Poetry is not like surgery, a technique that can be copied: every operation the poet performs is unique, and need never be done again.’¹⁴

Larkin’s mature body of poetry contains a single mourning elegy (‘An April Sunday brings the snow’), a single prayer (‘Solar’), a single graveyard meditation (‘Church Going’), a single extended narrative poem (‘The Dance’), and so on. Every poem has its own rhyme-colour and its own idiomatic register. Often enough, also, it has its unforgettable key-word or words. Larkin remarked of his abandoned novels of the late 1940s: ‘they were over-sized poems. They were certainly written with intense care for detail. If one word was used on page 15 I didn’t re-use it on page 115.’¹⁵ Indeed, a startlingly large number of the words in the mature post-1945 section of the 1988 Collected Poems occur in a single poem only.¹⁶ Larkin, it seems, waits for the best time to employ each word, gives it the most memorable context he can contrive and then never uses it again. This is not only the case with distinctive, intrinsically memorable words: ‘unmolesting’, ‘Blindingly’, ‘fishy-smelling’, ‘Immensements’. Larkin also asserts his copyright over more commonplace words, which become unforgettable in the poems in which they make their unique appearances: ‘unsatisfactory’, ‘wonderful’, ‘welcome’, ‘useful’, ‘afresh’, ‘singular’. His instinct for verbal refinement ensures that the briefest snatch brings to mind a whole poem: ‘Such attics!’, ‘awkward reverence’, ‘the exchange of love’, ‘we shall find out’, ‘sure extinction’. This is the source of what Martin Amis terms the ‘frictionless memorability’ of Larkin’s poetry.¹⁷ Could this uncanny control be connected perhaps with the ‘deep-seated abnormality in the left cerebral hemisphere’ which revealed itself when he was X-rayed in 1961?¹⁸

Larkin’s reputation as a poet is secure. His reputation as a man is, however, in a less healthy state. The frequently retold story of his fall from grace following the publication of Anthony Thwaite’s edition of the Selected Letters in 1992 and Andrew Motion’s official biography, A Writer’s Life, in 1993 has taken on the quality of a modern morality tale. The Independent set the tone when it headlined an interview with Motion: ‘Mr Nice tackles Mr Nasty’.¹⁹ Ideological commentators such as Terry Eagleton, Lisa Jardine and Tom Paulin uncovered ‘the sewer under the national monument’.²⁰ Many readers today believe that Larkin was ‘a Tory snob with sexist and racist tendencies’, and ‘a singularly unattractive man’.²¹ One reviewer declared of Burnett’s Commentary in The Complete Poems: ‘The only thing we’re reminded of is what a shit Larkin was in real life.’²² Even those who admire the poetry feel it acceptable to refer to ‘the vile mess that was Larkin’,²³ and accuse him of living a sterile life. Martin Amis believes that the success of his poetry was earned at the expense of ‘failure’ in his personal life.²⁴ Larkin, he writes, ‘siphoned all his energy, and all his love, out of the life and into the work’. He had ‘no close friends’, and his life story was one of ‘gauntness’, ‘with no emotions, no vital essences, worth looking back on’.²⁵

There is, of course, no requirement that poets should be likeable or virtuous. But we might ask whether art and life can have been so deeply at odds with each other that the poet who composed the heart-rending ‘Love Songs in Age’, the euphoric ‘For Sidney Bechet’ and the effervescent ‘Annus Mirabilis’ had no emotions, or was a shit in real life. Larkin’s negative public image is built neither on his poetry nor on the evidence of those who knew him well. Those who shared this life simply do not recognize the Mr Nasty version. Dismay and puzzlement at Larkin’s poor image is universal among those I interviewed in writing this book: the women with whom he was romantically involved, Ruth Siverns (Bowman), Monica Jones, Winifred Dawson (Arnott), Maeve Brennan and Betty Mackereth, his friends Anthony and Ann Thwaite, Judy Egerton and Jean Hartley, and his University colleagues, Eddie Dawes, John White, Brenda Moon and Father Anthony Storey. All those who were close to him remember him with affection and feel privileged to have known him. Typically, they found him ‘witty’, ‘entertaining’, ‘considerate’ and ‘kind’.

Jean Hartley, who knew him for thirty years, recalls his spontaneous empathy: ‘he gave his full attention to everyone he had dealings with. I myself never had the feeling that he was waiting for a gap in the conversation in order to inject his own views. He seemed invariably to follow one’s train of thought rather than his own.’²⁶ His generous inclination to identify himself with the widest range of his fellow beings is central to the appeal of his poetry. He enters into the feelings of young mothers at a playground, a rabbit dying of myxomatosis, his own harassed American biographer. Such wide sympathies, however, bring problems in ‘real life’. Listening to the speakers at the memorial for Larkin in Hull in 1986, Jean Hartley was surprised to discover ‘Philip’s chameleon-like nature’. His interests and sympathies were clearly much wider than she had thought.²⁷ Those who imagined that they knew Larkin tended to see only those aspects which suited their own conceptions. This is one reason why Larkin’s reputation was damaged in some quarters on the publication of the Selected Letters.

In what seems a deliberate strategy, he maintained long-term correspondences with the widest spectrum of people: the earnest would-be artist Jim Sutton, the irrepressible philistine novelist Kingsley Amis, the flamboyant University lecturer Monica Jones, the liberal-voting art historian Judy Egerton, the right-wing historian of Soviet atrocities Robert Conquest, the left-wing Anglican Anthony Thwaite, the conservative novelist Barbara Pym, the ingenuous Catholic Maeve Brennan, and his lonely widowed mother, to whom he wrote at least twice a week for a quarter of a century. A key motive seems to have been the compulsion to express himself in the widest possible range of literary registers, from civilized formality to intimate gossip. There are ‘almost as many different voices’ in the Selected Letters ‘as there are correspondents’.²⁸ (Unfortunately one voice is missing, since none of the letters to his mother were included.) As long as these letters remained private, their contradictory Larkins could cause no offence. On the publication of the Letters, however, he was accused of duplicity. He said one thing to one correspondent and something different to another. He compartmentalized his life. Maeve Brennan was dismayed by the language of his letters to Amis and Conquest; Amis was baffled by the softer sentimental side of his character. Readers were offended by his inability to be polite about the faults of his poetic contemporaries.

Dryden was suspicious of the Earl of Shaftesbury because of the breadth and intensity of his interests: ‘A man so various, that he seemed to be / Not one, but all Mankind’s Epitome’.²⁹ To some, omnivorousness of spirit will always seem a sign of deviousness and insincerity. But self-contradiction is part of the human condition; and Larkin’s contradictions are central to his greatness. He was a man of many parts and many roles, ironic and unironic. Larkin the poet, for instance (‘Why should I let the toad work / Squat on my life?’), coexisted over the decades with Larkin the hard-working librarian, who oversaw the building of the first new post-war British university library at the same time as managing an inexorable expansion of staff and service provision. An academic from another university, enthusiastically joining in when he overheard Larkin praised at a conference, was puzzled to find that the topic was poetry. He had no idea that the pioneering librarian was also a poet.³⁰ Larkin’s secretary, Betty Mackereth, recalls him pointing to the shelf of bound Library Committee minutes and remarking with glum satisfaction, that this also was part of his oeuvre.³¹ After his death the Library Association published a volume in his honour.³² Some of Larkin’s fellow writers feel that his ‘day-job’ casts a shadow across the poetry. Seamus Heaney imitates the poet’s self-deprecating tone, ventriloquizing a Larkin who describes himself defeatedly as ‘a nine-to-five-man who has seen poetry’.³³ Martin Amis implicitly compares his own father’s genuinely ‘bohemian’ life with Larkin’s provincial life as a ‘nine-to-five librarian, who lived for thirty years in a northern city that smelled of fish’.³⁴

The mercurial shifts of persona in Larkin’s interviews, essays and letters have been the cause of many misreadings. Larkin claimed in his celebrated Observer interview that he did not want ‘to go around pretending to be me’. However, he conceded elsewhere that ‘one has to dramatize oneself a little’.³⁵ As Jonathan Raban remarked, Larkin spoke to interviewers in the voice of ‘a well-scripted character whose tone was pitched midway between the reactionary acerbities of W. C. Fields and the self-deprecating complaints of Eeyore the donkey’.³⁶ Some readers fail to register the performative playfulness of Larkin’s self-caricatures: ‘Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth’; ‘there’s not much to say about my work’; ‘I don’t want to sound falsely naive, but I often wonder why people get married’; ‘Children are very horrible, aren’t they?’ These are not the words of a gaunt, emotionless failure, but of an ebullient provocateur with an instinct to entertain. He began his interview with the Observer in 1979: ‘I like to think of myself as quite funny.’³⁷ It is easy to see why those who knew him enjoyed his company so much.

The various ideological Larkins who raise the passions of some critics, are provisional personae. The fervent nationalist Larkin, for instance, is the product of performance as much as of ideology. Tom Paulin speaks of Larkin’s ‘rock-solid sense of national glory’.³⁸ His elegy for the wasted lives of the Great War, ‘MCMXIV’, tells a different story. The famous photograph of the poet sitting inscrutably on the boundary-sign ‘England’ tells us more about his relationship with the woman who took it, Monica Jones, than about its subject, for whom ‘elsewhere’ was always more comfortable than ‘home’.³⁹ Larkin expressed his instinctive view in a letter to Monica: ‘my God, surely nationalism is the surest mark of mediocrity!’⁴⁰ Similarly, the ardent Tory Larkin proclaims ‘I adore Mrs Thatcher.’⁴¹ But when they met and she misquoted a line from his poem ‘Deceptions’, ‘Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives,’ as ‘Her mind was full of knives,’ he remarked slyly, ‘she might think a mind full of knives rather along her own lines’, hastening to correct himself: ‘not that I don’t kiss the ground she treads’.⁴²

Larkin the racist is a similar fiction. It is frequently remarked that his handful of racist comments, some of them indeed very unpleasant, are confined to private letters written to prejudiced correspondents. But his self-irony escapes the notice of critics, as it no doubt escaped the notice of the original correspondents. In a letter to Monica Jones, he depicts himself settling down for a lazy evening after a dinner of haggis, neeps and claret: ‘& by God wasn’t the toast Mr Enoch Powell! Then jazz records to my taste, especially Armstrong.’⁴³ Approval for the politician who prophesied rivers of blood if ‘the black man’ gained the whip hand in Britain is followed by a grateful surrender to black music. It is to be regretted that, on rare occasions, Larkin used the words ‘nigger’, ‘wog’ and ‘yid’ in writing to particular correspondents. However at a time when most British middle-class households would have possessed a tin of ‘nigger brown’ Cherry Blossom shoe polish, and have had in their kitchens jars of Robertson’s marmalade with a golliwog on the label (a feature withdrawn only in 2001), such language was not always the sure sign of poisonous prejudice it has since become. Whatever language Larkin might use, he would never have theorized about racial inferiority or degeneracy, as did some writers of the century. During his early years in Hull Larkin recommended E. R. Braithwaite’s anti-racist novel To Sir, With Love to his staff, and for a time they addressed him, half-ironically, as ‘Sir’.⁴⁴ In 1946 he dreamt he was a black man walking through racecourse crowds with Amis’s future wife, Hilly Bardwell, sobbing with fear that he might be lynched.⁴⁵ His subconscious was not racist.

It is a similar story with Larkin the misogynist. Motion detected in the poet’s youthful high-camp pastiches of girls’-school stories ‘the wish to dominate’ women.⁴⁶ Another commentator refers to Larkin’s ‘creepy interest in sadistic pornography’.⁴⁷ In fact domination and sadism were alien to his temperament, and his ‘Brunette Coleman’ writings express, first and foremost, his imaginative desire to be a girl. In our internet era the surviving remnants of his pornography retain little power to shock. There are a few distinctly half-hearted ‘bondage’ photographs, but the majority of the images show a spectrum from stocking-and-suspender titillation to idealized haughty nudity: on the one hand the smiling invitation of the girl next door, on the other a Platonic or Keatsian aestheticism.⁴⁸ It is these erotic proclivities which underlay his fear of domestic entanglement with Ruth Bowman or Monica Jones, and his muse-adoration of Winifred Arnott and Maeve Brennan. However, in a variant on the usual literary pattern, even his unattainable muses are also, in his own memorable formulation, real girls in real places. His empathy with women was strong, and this made him, as Nuala O’Faiolain records, ‘a most attractive man’.⁴⁹

His comments on children show a particularly revealing clash between self-dramatization and reality. In his Observer interview he calls them ‘Selfish, noisy, cruel, vulgar little brutes’.⁵⁰ Exasperated by his duties in Wellington Library, he told his parents: ‘Children I would willingly bayonet by the score.’⁵¹ On the other hand, he also told them that a ‘pleasant old lady’ had complimented him on how good he was with the children. (He added, self-critically, ‘I don’t feel I’m good with anybody.’)⁵² He went to the trouble, one Christmas, of buying dolls for the daughters of his publishers, the Hartleys, and gave Alison Hartley a piggy-back ride during a walk along the Humber estuary.⁵³ Bridget, Judy Egerton’s elder daughter, recalls: ‘Philip was the friend of my parents I liked the best. He never talked down to me.’⁵⁴ In a letter decorated with comic sketches of a rabbit and himself in a bow-tie he makes his handwriting round and distinct for her youthful eye.⁵⁵ He drew sketches in the autograph books of Anthony and Ann Thwaite’s four daughters, patiently admired their card tricks and helped them search for lost balls.⁵⁶ In a letter to his mother he expressed concern about the ‘squashed & timorous’ demeanour of the Amises’ infant sons in their chaotic domestic environment: ‘Even their crying seems subdued.’⁵⁷ In his poem ‘Coming’, he compares an intimation of spring to the uncomprehending happiness of a child caught up in a scene of adult reconciling. And in ‘To the Sea’ he observes ‘the uncertain children’ on the beach, ‘grasping at enormous air’. As Colm Tóibín observes, he was ‘a great big sour softie’.⁵⁸

Larkin was puzzled when he was accused of lacking feeling. He was aware, on the contrary, of having to strive to avoid emotional excess: ‘I always think that the poems I write are very much more naïve – very much more emotional – almost embarrassingly so – than a lot of other people’s. When I was tagged as unemotional, it used to mystify me; I used to find it quite shaming to read some of the things I’d written.’⁵⁹ The key to Larkin, the poet and the man, is an ingenuous openness to life’s simplest pleasures and pains. He wrote to his mother from Belfast in 1954: ‘the trees round Queen’s are well-budded and stand in a circle of daffodils. Spring never fails us, does it? How beautiful it is, even though it isn’t spring for us!’⁶⁰ Shortly after moving to Hull in 1955 he set out energetically on foot from his digs in Cottingham: ‘People had told me to walk to the Wolds or the Dales or something’:

Near home I stopped and watched half a dozen Jersey cows. How lovely they are! like Siamese cats, almost: the patches of white round the eyes and the soft way the coffee-colour melts into the white underbody. They were licking each other affectionately in pairs, on the chest and along the neck. When one stopped the other would begin licking back! The Peaceable Kingdom! In the end I found I’d walked about 11 miles [. . .]⁶¹

No poet was less likely to contemplate suicide. To a writer like Graham Greene life is intrinsically empty. It requires Russian roulette, a dangerous career in espionage or a fear of Hell to give it relish. Larkin possessed the opposite temperament: ‘Everyday things are lovely to me.’⁶² The sight of a lamb in snow, the sound of a sustained note on a saxophone, a glimpse of newly-weds from a train, flood his life with meaning and pleasure. By the same token, the suffering of a diseased rabbit, the thought of lonely widowhood, or of his own death, drain his life of joy. No poet shows a more poignant apprehension than Larkin of the ‘million-petalled flower / Of being here’.

His life was a success. On the public level he took satisfaction from his achievements at the Library in Hull and in his Fellowships of the Royal Society of Literature and the Library Association. He was proud to receive the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry, a CBE and innumerable honorary degrees, and, in his final days, to be made a Companion of Honour. On the personal level he knew that he had the love and respect of those around him. His day-to-day life was packed with affections and epiphanies. And he gained the profoundest satisfaction from writing his poetry. He was, nevertheless, haunted by failure. In some moods his refusal of the social normality of marriage and procreation appeared to him not as the inevitable consequence of his artistic commitment, but as the selfishness of a flawed character. Towards the end, after his poetic inspiration had died, his despairing moods became more frequent. He told Andrew Motion: ‘I used to believe that I should perfect the work and life could fuck itself. Now I’m not doing anything, all I’ve got is a fucked up life.’⁶³

But the failure which haunted him most deeply and persistently was simpler and more universal than this. From the beginning he was horrified that our precious existence, here, now, must inevitably falter and be extinguished in death. Larkin’s biological clock ticked more loudly than those of other people. Unalloyed happiness was, he felt, unattain­able, if only ‘because you know that you are going to die, and the people you love are going to die’.⁶⁴ His poems feature the most uncompromising reflections on death outside the soliloquies of Shakespeare:

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,

Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

Lunching with a young colleague in the staff canteen of Hull University a few months before he died, he asked her how old she was. She told him she was thirty-one. Looking down at his failing body he declared passionately: ‘It’s not fair!’⁶⁵

1

Dear Fambly

1922–40

In 1953, on holiday in Weymouth, Philip Larkin was moved to hear his widowed mother Eva quoting snatches of poems by Thomas Hardy which she had learnt by heart ‘simply to please my father’. He was prompted to reflect on his parents’ first meeting, half a century earlier in 1906:

O frigid inarticulate man! He met my mother on the beach at Rhyl. He was there for 3 days only, on a cycling tour, but before leaving he had a picture of them taken together & exchanged addresses [. . .] & despite a separation of several years his intentions didn’t alter. I find all that very strange & romantic, partly because unlike the father I knew. He must have been as intensely idealistic as a young man as he was nihilistically disillusioned in middle age.¹

Sydney Larkin had been impressed that Eva, a teacher, had continued to read her book while they sheltered from the rain together. But this had been the result of shyness rather than strength of mind, and she became a timid, nervous wife. Beneath his confident exterior Sydney also was painfully inhibited. When his young son claimed shyness he responded crushingly: ‘You don’t know what shyness is.’² Taking stock of his parents in a letter to his friend James Sutton in 1943 at the age of twenty Larkin wrote: ‘I realized that I contain both of them [. . .] It intrigues me to know that a thirty-years struggle is being continued in me, and in my sister too. In her it has reached a sort of conclusion – my father winning. Pray the Lord my mother is superior in me.’³

After his father’s death Larkin analysed the marriage with brutal objectivity: ‘I think the situation was technically his fault. His personality had imposed this taut ungenerous defeated pattern of life on the family, and it was only to be expected that it would make them miserable and that their misery would react on him. And despite the fact that my mother grew to be such an obsessive snivelling pest I think if my father had handled her properly she would have done much better.’⁴ It was his parents’ example that taught him his passionate misogamy. The ‘monotonous whining monologues’ that his mother inflicted on the family, ‘resentful, self-pitying, full of funk and suspicion’, remained in his mind ‘as something I mustn’t, under any circumstances, risk encountering again’. The marriage ‘left me with two convictions: that human beings should not live together, and that children should be taken from their parents at an early age’.⁵ On the other hand, in his interview with the Observer in 1979, he expressed relief that his line ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’ had not been included in the current Oxford Dictionary of Quotations: ‘I wouldn’t want it thought that I didn’t like my parents. I did like them. But at the same time they were rather awkward people and not very good at being happy.’⁶

Sydney planned his family, delaying the birth of the second child until he achieved advancement in his career. Philip was born on 9 August 1922, the year his father was promoted from Deputy Treasurer of Coventry to Treasurer. He was ten years younger than his sister Kitty. His father was thirty-eight at the time of his birth, and his mother thirty-six. Kitty remarked: ‘Really, Philip could do no wrong in his father’s eyes. Or his mother’s. They worshipped him.’⁷ This emotional closeness made Sydney’s influence on Philip intense and lasting. The father’s brusque precision of expression and emotional idealism are echoed in his son. Sydney gives a glimpse of his personality in a brief account of his early days published in the journal of the Local Government Financial Officers Association a few weeks before he died. He opens with Housman’s famous stanza, ‘That is the land of lost content’, and then, with whimsical self-deprecation, likens borough treasurers to the damned souls of Bunyan’s Grace Abounding. His focus then shifts to Bunyan’s ‘very clear English’. Bunyan does not use ‘any such muddle-headed expression as and/or in his works. I do not remember that he uses implement as a verb or that he misuses will and would for shall and should.’ Sydney’s reticence trembles when he reminisces about his sixteen-year-old first love, now lost in the past: ‘I would not have missed the episode for anything.’⁸ Philip’s deep intimacy with this passionate, thwarted man, who had such high expectations of him, may have been partly responsible for the stammer from which the poet suffered throughout his youth. He himself always dismissed the idea that it had anything to do with early ‘trauma’, and recorded that it finally faded away in his mid-thirties.⁹

Like his librarian son after him, Sydney Larkin rose to the top of his profession. In 1926, four years after taking over the finances of Coventry he established a stabilized, level rate, which, as an anonymous obituary recalls, ushered in a period of prosperity and growth in the city. He also ‘introduced mechanical book-keeping in trading accounts and gained for the position of City Treasurer an international reputation’, travelling ‘many times’ to the continent.¹⁰ He attended international conferences on accountancy in Berlin in July 1933, 1936, 1938 and 1939,¹¹ and his reputation brought him briefly to the notice of Hjalmar Schacht, Minister for Economics in the Third Reich from 1934 to 1937, the man whose cautious fiscal policies were widely credited with bringing German inflation under control.¹² In 1936 Sydney received the ultimate recognition of election to the Presidency of the Institute of Municipal Treasurers and Accountants.¹³

An insight into Larkin’s earliest years is provided by the diaries which Sydney kept of the family’s holidays between 1927 and 1933. He shows an acute self-consciousness. In Lyme Regis in 1927 he carries his bathing costume and towel everywhere, so as not to betray that he is a new arrival, and goes through embarrassing contortions while changing on the beach: ‘I have never seen a rabbit skin itself but the operation must be similar to me trying to get the upper part of a two-piece bathing costume off my wet body.’ In a pattern repeated on later holidays, he sets out to make the family distinctive by buying himself some shorts and ‘Mamma’ a ‘jazz kerchief’: ‘sufficient to lend that amount of distinction to us that I like in a holiday place. Henceforth, we shall not be ciphers in Lyme Regis. We shall be known.’¹⁴ One constant theme is the attractive women around him (‘five very fine girls’; ‘beautiful girls’; ‘a vision in turquoise blue’). Philip, as the child of the family, was ‘spoilt’, and was allowed his independence. In 1929 in Ventnor: ‘Philip did not bathe but reported that he had had three fights with different people.’¹⁵ Several times his son’s holiday illnesses elicited fatherly concern. In Newquay in 1930: ‘Philip would not eat his lunch and so he went to sleep in the afternoon, on the bed, and I sat with him.’¹⁶ In Falmouth in 1931 the nine-year-old Philip dominated one outing with his moody sentimentalism: ‘After lunch we hiked to Maenporth, Philip being in a vile mood. Half way there we palled up with a black dog [. . .] As time went on Philip became a picture of misery owing to his anxiety over the welfare of the dog – whether he was happy, tired &c and whether he would get home.’¹⁷

Sydney admitted that, as time went on, these holidays shared by four very disparate people became strained. As he wrote before their trip to Bigbury on Sea in 1932: ‘This holiday is even more doomed to failure than the last one (which in spite of the cold was not too bad.) The whole family agree that it is impossible to have an enjoyable holiday with four people all afraid to do what they would really like for fear of upsetting the others.’¹⁸ In 1933, they took their last holiday together as a complete family. As an experiment and an economy, Sydney booked them into the new-fangled ‘holiday camp’ opened by the National Association of Local Government Officers near Scarborough. Philip had just turned eleven and his sister was approaching twenty-one. Sydney anticipated the trip with wry pessimism: ‘This year we are taking the biggest gamble ever by going to the Nalgo holiday camp at Cayton Bay [. . .] it will probably be cold and wet. No one has, so far, had a bright word to say about the holiday. We are the funniest family on earth.’

On the first evening in the camp at an ‘initiation ceremony’, ‘we were christened Oxo, Pussy, Snooker and Godiva – which Kitty and Philip voted to be a bit balmy’. Sydney encouraged his family to enter into the spirit of things: ‘We all filed down to the beach hut where we had community singing to the light of the numerous fairy lamps and Chinese lanterns. Philip got to bed very late.’ With something of the diffident self-ridicule characteristic of his son, Sydney joked that he had come close to winning the booby prize in a whist competition. On the other hand he boasted that he and Kitty had walked to Scarborough and back in one and a half hours, ‘a thing no camper has done before’. His verdict on the holiday was mixed: ‘Mamma was not at all well during the whole period and could not enjoy it properly. Kitty is not cut out for camp life – not speaking to any other person unless spoken to. Philip enjoyed the table tennis and bathed occasionally but caught cold.’ Nevertheless, Sydney calculated, the holiday had cost only ‘about one half the usual and was therefore much better value for money. Philip ought to take his spectacle case.’¹⁹

Sydney was delighted when his son passed the entrance examination for the respected King Henry VIII School in Coventry. But the surviving drafts of his school reports show that Philip made a hesitant start. In 1934 the Headmaster, A. A. C. Burton, wrote: ‘Inclined to take things too easily, perhaps.’ In 1935 at the age of twelve he was ranked about the middle of his year-group, and since he was more than a year younger than his classmates it was decided that he should repeat the year. This easing of pressure had its effect and in April 1936 he was rated ‘Very Good’ in some areas, but: ‘Would be better still if he would bring more enthusiasm to his work.’ From July 1936 onwards he regularly came first in English, but showed no enthusiasm for other subjects. By Christmas 1937, at the age of fifteen, his future was in the balance. Burton commented: ‘unlikely to pass the School Certificate unless he devotes himself to the task’. In 1938 his report reads: ‘Conduct: Moderate. Tendency to foolishness must be checked; Progress: Much too one-sided. His considerable ability in English is more than off-set by weaknesses in languages and science. This must be corrected if he is to pass S.C.’ He was now placed twentieth out of twenty-eight boys. Then in the summer of 1938 he joined the Arts Sixth and no longer needed to apply himself to mathematics or sciences. The result was a dramatic improvement. He came second in a class of eight, his friend Noel Hughes being placed first. In his final report, on 26 July 1940, Larkin was placed first in English and History, and third in French, German and Latin. He left King Henry VIII School a lanky youth, already six feet tall, but weighing only ten stone seven pounds.²⁰

At school Larkin developed two contrasted relationships: a pattern which was to be repeated in different forms throughout his life. He shared his deepest feelings with a paying pupil, James Sutton, an aspiring painter and son of a local builder. But he was also inseparable from the cocky defier of authority, Colin Gunner, who would throw paper darts around the Assembly Hall and then deflect collective punishment by gamely owning up to his crime.²¹ Larkin later described Gunner as ‘a small, agile, tough boy, with a face like a nut’, and remembered sharing fantasies out of the boys’ weekly magazine, the Magnet, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Dracula and ‘the more colourful aspects of the Hitler regime’ with him. When pupils were each presented with a George VI coronation mug, he recalled his friend ‘shying his own into the squalid sewer the River Sowe (I have mine still)’.²² The young Larkin took care himself that his ‘tendency to foolishness’ did not land him in serious trouble and, in a school regime in which corporal punishment played a prominent role, it seems that he avoided ever being beaten. His father, it seems, would not have permitted it. Though the obscure reference to ‘violence a long way back’ in Larkin’s late poem ‘Love Again’ (altered in drafting from ‘difference a long way back’) has led some to speculate that Sydney might have been prone to domestic violence, the evidence is quite to the contrary. Larkin’s father was sensitive to any hint of physical duress. He recollected in his autobiographical essay that he had himself been beaten, as a boy, by a sadistic woman teacher: ‘I always thought she herself seemed to get a thrill out of it too.’²³

For two years there were no family holidays. In 1934 and 1935 Sydney and Eva holidayed on their own in Germany and then Switzerland. Then in 1936 they took Philip with them to Germany, and again around the time of his fifteenth birthday in 1937. As Sydney’s holiday diaries show, he now felt at home in Germany. He paid his dutiful respects to German culture: ‘Beethoven was a remarkable man. We saw his piano [. . .] He was a most wonderful genius and his life is worth studying.’²⁴ But his main pleasures were of a simpler kind: lake bathing, beer drinking and fleeting encounters with young women, though he always refers to ‘Mamma’ with proper respect. Glued into the diaries of 1934 and 1935 are photographs of ‘Kath’, ‘les girls’ and ‘Backs of girls’. In Königswinter in 1936, he writes: ‘we left the awful dullness of the Mattern Hotel’ after dinner, and ‘went to the Bier Klause, where the fun was fast and furious. Tired at last we went to bed.’²⁵ He does not mention whether Philip accompanied them on this occasion, but a repeated theme of the diaries of 1936 and 1937 is his determination to find a good place for ‘bier’, in order to initiate his son into this adult masculine pleasure.

But though the poet was indeed to become a confirmed beer-drinker, he did not share his father’s enthusiasm for Germany. ‘My father liked the jolly singing in beer-cellars, three-four time to accordions [. . .] think of that for someone who was just buying the first Count Basie records!’²⁶ His recollections of these two holidays were of embarrassment: ‘I found it petrifying, not being able to speak to anyone or read anything, frightening notices that you felt you should understand and couldn’t.’²⁷ His most excruciating German experience, he later told Kingsley Amis, arose from a failure of language. On one trip, given pride of place at the front of a bus, he assumed that the driver had asked ‘Have you been to Germany before?’ and replied ‘No.’ He was puzzled when the driver took offence and avoided him for the remainder of the excursion. Later he was mortified to learn that his words had actually been ‘Do you like Germany?’²⁸ These early expeditions, he later wrote, ‘sowed the seed of my hatred of abroad’.²⁹ Possibly because of Philip’s resistance to a third German trip, in 1938 the family spent their holiday in Sidmouth, and in 1939 in Jersey.³⁰ Then, the day after returning from Jersey, on 16 August 1939, father and son set out on a tour of Somerset, taking the train to Bath and spending a week cycling together between Radstock, Glastonbury and Ilminster. Reading between the lines of Sydney’s sparse diary, this outing seems to have been an idyll. At the end he proudly recorded: ‘Philip’s cyclometer indicated that we had ridden 162 miles.’³¹ Much of Philip’s leisure time in Belfast and during his early years in Hull was to be spent in the countryside on a bicycle.

Larkin claimed that when he later tried to ‘tune into’ his childhood in 1 Manor Road, Coventry, the emotions he picked up were ‘overwhelmingly, fear and boredom’. It seems, however, that with two doting parents in a ‘dull, pot-bound, and slightly mad’ home his childhood was happier than most.³² ‘It was all very normal: I had friends whom I played football and cricket with and Hornby trains and so forth.’³³ His short essay ‘Not the Place’s Fault’, written in 1959, breathes a warm nostalgia. He attributes ‘the slight scholarly stoop in my bearing today’ to his habit of looking for cigarette cards of ‘Famous Cricketers’ in Coventry gutters.³⁴ His schoolfriend Noel Hughes later recalled the ‘intimidating tidiness’ of his house, ‘its highly waxed furniture and the practice of hushed conversation’, though Mrs Larkin always welcomed him with ‘unfailing graciousness’.³⁵ The young Philip would escape for long hours to the more relaxed atmosphere of James Sutton’s home: ‘One of my strongest memories of their house is of its long attic, that ran the whole length of the house, and which contained among many other things the debris of a hat-shop the family had once owned.’³⁶ He would give Sutton novels by Lawrence, and Sutton gave him books on Cézanne. The description in ‘Coming’ of the poet’s childhood as ‘a forgotten boredom’ rings true in its poetic context. But Larkin’s childhood was, in fact, a vividly remembered scene of pleasurable activity.

His warmest recollections were of jazz. ‘I became a jazz addict at the age of 12 or 13, listened avidly to all the dance bands of the day and tried to learn to play the drums.’³⁷ At first he felt some highbrow reservations. In a letter written on 9 August 1939, his seventeenth birthday, and signed ‘Snooker’, he told Sutton: ‘you simply can’t think of Jazz after Beethoven. It’s a physical impossibility [. . .] it’s just big, that’s all. Jazz isn’t big . . . but I refuse to start theorizing again on Jazz and its ethics, morals, foundations etc. etc.’³⁸ It was not long before jazz overwhelmed him: ‘On Saturday afternoons we sat, frowning intently, in the glass cubicles at Hanson’s, trying to decide whether both sides of the latest Parlophone Rhythm-Style Series or Vocalion Swing Series were sufficiently good to justify expenditure of the record’s stiffish price of three shillings.’³⁹ Looking back from 1968, in the Introduction to All What Jazz, he rises to lyrical eloquence:

Sitting with a friend in his bedroom that overlooked the family tennis-court, I watched leaves drift down through long Sunday afternoons as we took it in turn to wind the portable HMV, and those white and coloured Americans, Bubber Miley, Frank Teschmacher, J. C. Higginbotham, spoke immediately to our understanding. Their rips, slurs and distortions were something we understood perfectly. This was something we had found for ourselves, that wasn’t taught at school (what a prerequisite that is of nearly everything worthwhile!), and having found it, we made it bear all the enthusiasm usually directed at more established arts.⁴⁰

In a letter to Jim Sutton at the time, he declared, ‘I’d back coloured against white most times, and as Count Basie is top of the coloured outfits I think I’m right in saying that he is the tops.’⁴¹ Sydney Larkin raised no objection to his son’s passion for what a German Fascist would have seen as degenerate negro music. Indeed Sydney went to the expense of a subscription to the Chicago-based magazine Down Beat, and also a drum kit on which his son could express his passion for ‘hot’ music: ‘I battered away contentedly, spending less time on the rudiments than in improvising an accompaniment to records.’⁴²

On the day war was declared, 3 September 1939, full of anger and frustration at the untold death and destruction which he foresaw would befall Britain and Germany, Sydney began a new, more formal diary in a large hard-bound volume. It was to run to twenty volumes, and continued into 1946.⁴³ His political instincts were coarse, and he shared the anti-Semitism of many of his class and generation. During the thirties he had brightened up his office in Coventry with Nazi paraphernalia brought back from conferences and Nuremberg rallies. Motion reports that John Kenyon, Professor of History at Hull University, related that Philip told him that his father ‘had a statue of Hitler on the mantelpiece [at home] which at the touch of a button leapt into a Nazi salute’.⁴⁴ Richard Bradford elaborated Motion’s description, referring to ‘a 12-inch statue’.⁴⁵ However, when this object came to light in 2002, it turned out, in fact, to be a tiny hand-painted figurine, barely three inches high, with brown shirt and piercing blue eyes – the kind of souvenir which many tourists to Germany in the 1930s would have brought home. There is no button; the arm simply props up on a catch.⁴⁶ Philip later denied Noel Hughes’s claim that his father’s commitment to Nazism had extended to membership of the fascistic Anglo-German friendship organization, the Link.⁴⁷ Indeed it seems likely that such membership would have been ruled out by his public office.⁴⁸ As Philip records, Sydney called himself ‘a conservative anarchist’,⁴⁹ placing himself in an English, rather than a German, intellectual tradition. His personal views did not alter his devotion to his work nor affect his service on the wartime National Savings Committee, for which he was awarded the OBE.

Rejecting his beloved father’s simplifications, and also as his mother’s son, Philip was beginning to develop the empathy and self-doubt which were to mark his mature writing. His response to the declaration of war is a subtle and complex cartoon, ‘Portrait of the Author and Family’, drawn in a letter to Sutton of 6 September 1939. His father, ‘Pop’, appears as an endearing eccentric, leaning back in his chair, his balding head seen from behind, one hand gesticulating, the other holding a newspaper with the headline ‘WAR’. In a speech balloon he defends Hitler, ‘The british govt. have started this war . . . Hitler has done all he could for peace,’ and launches into a farrago worthy of Lawrence’s Fantasia of the Unconscious: ‘This is the end of civilisation . . . after all, man has to be superseded, sooner or later . . . we’re only a stage in the earth’s development . . . a very unimportant stage, too.’ ‘Mop’ mildly replies: ‘Oh, do you think so? I wonder what we ought to have for lunch tomorrow . . . don’t scrape the floor like that, Philip [. . .] I hope Hitler falls on a banana skin.’ Meanwhile ‘Sister’ is preoccupied by what Joyce told her about her missed date with a storm trooper she had met on a recent trip to Munich. The poet himself, in a bow-tie, sits at the far left, pencil in hand, looking out of the picture, his face coloured with embarrassment and a huge exclamation mark above his head.⁵⁰ The assured blend of affection and detached irony in this cartoon is astonishing in a young man of seventeen.

Philip soon developed his own attitude to the war. He wrote to Sutton in 1942, ‘the German system is, from all accounts, much more evil than last time’,⁵¹ and recast his father’s apocalyptic despair into a disengaged quietism of his own: ‘I believe we must win the war. I dislike Germans and I dislike Nazis, at least what I’ve heard of them. But I don’t think it will do any good. And I have no driving power to bring it about [. . .] I can’t believe that anything I can do as an Englishman would be of the slightest use, nor do I see any hope in the future.’⁵² In one of his earliest letters to Sutton, written probably when he was seventeen, he had ventriloquized his father’s anti-Semitism: ‘As for photos in Down Beat . . . our worst fears. All oily Jews.’⁵³ But three years later he wrote to his family from Oxford: ‘My bookplate has aroused dislike as it is in the shape of a Star of David. On the wave of anti-semitism that is almost bound to come after the war I may be hung up on the nearest lamp post.’⁵⁴ His early exposure to Sydney’s controversial views had the lifelong effect of neutralizing Larkin’s political instincts. It is a key feature of his sensibility that he disclaims any coherent political ideology. There are virtually no expressions of political belief in Larkin’s letters of the later 1940s and 1950s and those which are detectable show him leaning towards the left. By the time he met Monica Jones in 1947 it seems that his left-wing views were pitted against her unreflecting conservatism.

He remained in crucial respects, however, his father’s son. Philip learnt his religious scepticism from Sydney, who told him never to believe in God. Sydney also imparted to his son his own adventurous appetite for literature. Larkin later recalled with gratitude that though ‘most boys of my class were brought up to read Galsworthy and Chesterton as the apex of modern literature, and to think Somerset Maugham a bit hot’, his father had filled the house with works by Hardy, Shaw, Samuel Butler, Wilde, D. H. Lawrence, Huxley and Katherine Mansfield. From an early age, also, Philip made full use of the local