Philip Larkin (21 page)

We are born each morning, shelled upon

A sheet of light that paves

The palaces of sight, and brings again

The river shining through the field of graves.

The tone is sacramental, but Eliotic religiosity has been replaced by secular materialism. Each evening and morning we kneel before the gate of light and dark, of waking and sleep. All we ever achieve is a trembling moment of inconclusive incipience: ‘Nothing’s to reach, but something’s to become.’

At first sight there seems little sign in these 1946 poems of any influence from Hardy. Indeed there is much apocalyptic allegory and surrealism. However in one specific verbal nuance Hardy’s influence is clearly audible. Larkin commented in a later review on the ‘quaint’ element in Hardy’s style: ‘often in Hardy I feel that the quaintness, if it is quaintness, is a kind of striving to be accurate’.
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There is a memorable awkwardness of diction at points of high emotion in Hardy’s work: ‘richened’, ‘misrepresenter’, ‘the unseen water’s ejaculations’, ‘wistlessness’. Larkin’s use of ‘Undeciduous’ in ‘At the chiming of light upon sleep’ has this clumsy Hardyesque memorableness, while the phrase ‘the irrecoverable keys’ in ‘The wave sings because it is moving’ stumbles with Hardyesque emotionality. It is difficult to imagine that, without the example of Hardy, Larkin would have arrived at such awkward felicities in his mature poems as ‘all but the unmolesting meadows’ in ‘At Grass’, or ‘to prove / Our almost-instinct almost true’ in ‘An Arundel Tomb’.

The alarm following ‘Wedding-Wind’ passed, but the episode left Larkin tangled in self-criticism and sexual inhibition. His mood can be gauged from the dreams he recorded in the days following Christmas 1946. He had abandoned his dream diary of 1942–3 with the comment that the exercise ‘no longer interests me’.
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Now, once again in quest of his ‘problem’, he wrote down his dreams. The mixture of tones is much as before. In one he tries to direct a friend on a bicycle to a village whose name he does not know, while a hen walks past carrying a rolled magazine. In another his father cruelly ridicules his sister.
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The next dream, however, develops a disturbing complexity:

I am a negro, by definition rather than observation. I go to an American racecourse, where I go in the negroes’ entrance & use the negroes’ very rickety lavatory. I then meet Hilly, and we walk arm in arm through a very gay scantily dressed beach crowd. I say, with a self-pitying sob, that it is terrible to think I cd be killed (
i.e.
lynched) for walking with her (I may have said sleeping with her). She agrees, and says something about Russia – a similar atrocity.
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Larkin’s empathy causes him to identify himself with the most oppressed of racial groups. But his habitual self-criticism leads him at once to accuse himself of self-pity. Similarly, the erotic fantasy of the ‘scantily dressed beach crowd’ is spoiled by a deep anxiety over the dangers of sex.

Two other dreams have a more immediate erotic focus on Gillian Evans, a friend in Wellington to whom he was briefly attracted. Ruth, he told Amis, had been considering abandoning him for a ‘young homo’, and he had been reviewing alternative possibilities. But his loyalty to Ruth immediately reasserted itself: ‘after all we got on much better than I should ever get on with Miss G. C. Evans, or Miss Jane Exall, or anybody else’.
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The two dreams show a characteristic pattern. In the first an authority figure, in the form of the Chief Clerk of Wellington District Council, puts Gillian through her paces: ‘In a gymnastics class presided over by Astley-Jones, Gillian Evans was called upon to do a difficult exercise in a skimpy sort of playsuit. As far as I remember she didn’t succeed.’
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There is sexual excitement here; but it seems that Larkin also feels empathy with her failure. In the second dream the poet attempts his own difficult exercise: ‘Deliberately & in my capacity as an integrated adult man kiss Gillian Evans. She then says something like “That was entirely undistinguished & meant nothing to me at all!” & changes into Philip Brown. I slap his face viciously & in real anger.’ In this dream Gillian becomes the accusing authority figure, and his response to her humiliating criticism is violent anger. But by the time it is expressed Gillian has become the male Philip.

Amis was baffled by his friend’s reluctance either to enjoy sex with Ruth or to move on to someone else. Earlier in December 1946, in the comically misspelled idiom of their correspondence, he had offered to buy contraceptives for him, ‘if that’s what’s worring you’.
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Three months later he exhorted his friend to conquer his distrust of ‘Durex porducts’ which are ‘100 PURSE SENT SAFE’,
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and reassured him that, if the worse came to the worst, ‘I can get you abortioning Engines if you find you need them.’
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Throughout 1946 and 1947 he encouraged Philip to follow his own example of shameless promiscuity. Why did he not make Ruth jealous by paying court to Jane Exall? Or, alternatively, why did he not simply transfer his attentions to Jane? But Larkin feared the emotional and social consequences: ‘It seems to me that while pocking Miss Jane Exall is infinitely desirable, preparing Miss Jane Exall to be pocked and dealing with Miss Jane Exall after pocking is not at all desirable – and that pocks do not exist in the void.’
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It may be about this time that Larkin first conceived a sour quatrain which he seems never to have committed to holograph or typescript:

To shoot your spunk into a girl

Is life’s unquestioned crown.

But leading up to it is not;

And nor is leading down.
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The lines are insidiously mnemonic, and Anthony Thwaite could not but remember them when Larkin recited them to him years later.

One simple expedient by which Larkin protected his eroticism from shame and guilt was to keep the unicorn’s virginal horn safe in his own hands. As he wrote with excruciating wit in a pocket diary in 1950, sexual intercourse is ‘like asking someone else to blow your own nose for you’.
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He retreated into vicarious sex, sending ‘facetia’ (pornographic pictures) to Amis with each of his letters. In a contrast of psychologies, Amis was more inhibited about these photographs than about condoms: ‘I don’t know how you can bear to part with them. I wish I had your courage and could become a subscriber myself.’
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Ruth’s apprehensions were justified. Shortly after his arrival in Leicester Philip met Monica Jones, an Assistant Lecturer who had joined the English Department a few months before. They had been exact contemporaries at Oxford, he in St John’s and she in St Hugh’s, though since she had stuck obediently to her studies and avoided the literary scene they had never met. Both had achieved first-class degrees. For the first three or four years their relationship was to remain a respectful friendship. But, within weeks of their meeting he had lent her the proofs of
A Girl in Winter
and a copy of
Jill
, with the self-deprecating comment: ‘They are both very much first shots:
Jill
perhaps a bit “firster” than the other. Do not say anything of them if no particular verdict occurs to you: and if you think
Jill
an adolescent bit of rubbish and
Winter
a pompous lifeless platitude don’t hesitate to say so.’
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He was not bored with Monica’s opinions as he was with Ruth’s. But he hesitated to make a new emotional tie. Indeed, he was eager to move on from Leicester as quickly as possible. Motion mentions applications for posts in the British Museum Library in February 1947, and in the Bodleian in May.
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In February 1948 he applied for a job at Nottingham University College.
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Puzzlingly, following the leap forward of 1946, Larkin completed no further poems for nearly a year. It seems probable that his energies were focused on his novel-writing. When it did come, in December 1947, his next poem, ‘Waiting for breakfast while she brushed her hair’, resumed the life-and-art debate of ‘Guitar Piece II’, but with a speaker now cast unambiguously as an artist. He stands at a window, gazing at the hotel courtyard, which seems at first colourless and dull. But then the morning mist wandering ‘absolvingly’ past the pinpoints of light in the windows transforms the scene:

The colourless vial of day painlessly spilled

My world back after a year, my lost lost world

Like a cropping deer strayed near my path again [. . .]

He is visited by the muse, drained of female attributes and with the aspect of a shamanic animal familiar. Euphoric and confused, he turns and kisses the woman who is combing her hair in the hotel room behind him, only to realize immediately that there can be no reconciliation. If he is to follow the muse’s ‘tender visiting, / Fallow as a deer or an unforced field’, then he must send her ‘terribly away’. Significantly, however, the poem ends with a satirical image of himself as ‘Part invalid, part baby, and part saint’. This is the first poem in which Larkin explicitly dramatizes the rivalry between the muse of the imagination and the real girl of social commitment. He signalled its importance to his development by adding it to the reissue of
The North Ship
of 1966, even though it postdates all the other poems in that volume by more than three years.

In January 1948 he assembled a collection of twenty-four poems and sent it to his agents A. P. Watt, writing also to Alan Pringle at Faber to tell him that it would soon reach him.
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He chose the arresting title
In the Grip of Light
, appropriately ambiguous between exaltation and threat. The phrase, he told Sutton grandly, ‘occurred to me & seems to sum up the state of being alive’.
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The contents of the volume have a hidden symmetry. He included six poems carried forward from
The North Ship
, clearly not regarding the Fortune Press book as publication proper. To these he added six poems from 1945. The remaining half of the volume consists of twelve poems from his latest burst of productivity in 1946.
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Puzzlingly he did not include ‘Waiting for breakfast’. The collection is varied in quality, but contains one or two masterpieces. After his previous experience of poetry publishing he could have had no apprehension of the difficulties which lay ahead.

7

Just Too Hard for Me

1945–50

The dated drafts in the first workbook make it easy to track the development of Larkin’s poetry in the late 1940s. This is not the case with his fiction, which survives only in discontinuous, usually undated drafts, sometimes written much later than the original inspiration. To compound the difficulty, the accounts which Larkin gives of his fiction in letters to Sutton become increasingly vague and unspecific, while those to Amis show deliberate evasiveness. Moreover Larkin’s later verdicts on his fiction show ambiguities. He usually blamed his failure to complete a third novel on his over-poetic conception of the form. ‘I wanted to be a novelist. I thought novels were a richer form of literature than poetry; I suppose I was influenced by the kind of critical attitude that you used to get in
Scrutiny
– the novel as dramatic poem. I certainly saw novels as rather poetic things, perhaps too poetic.’
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But he seems uncertain that this is the real explanation, and remains puzzled as to why fiction had not worked for him: ‘When I stopped writing novels it was a great disappointment to me; I went on trying in the 1945–50 period. Why I stopped I don’t really know, it was a great grief to me.’
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To many readers Larkin’s lyric poetry will seem a rarer achievement than that of any novelist. But to him poetry, coming so much more easily, always seemed less impressive than the novels he had failed to write: ‘novels are much more interesting than poems – a novel is so spreading, it can be so fascinating and so difficult. I think they were just too hard for me.’
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