Philip Larkin (25 page)

His new self-confidence shows itself in the final pages of the first workbook. The poems he completed in early 1950 breathe a new vigour and assurance. In a deliberate strategy of sharp emotional contrast the calm elegiac ‘At Grass’ is followed by the tangled anguish of ‘Deceptions’. The delicate epiphany of ‘Coming’ is followed (on the same day) by the acerbic ‘Fiction and the Reading Public’. The argumentative ‘If, My Darling’ is answered a week later by the yearning for oblivion of ‘Wants’. The poems shift vertiginously between brutal realism and soft, ingenuous emotion. With the turn of the year and the decade, it seems, Larkin took the signal to make the poetic breakthrough towards which he had been building. Consequently by the time he did escape his personal impasse in October, he had written half a dozen great poems whose tone and emotional texture mapped out the parameters of his first mature volume,
The Less Deceived
. This year, 1950, was the most productive of his literary life, and saw him achieve full poetic maturity.

The sequence begins with ‘At Grass’, completed on 3 January. In retrospect this takes its place as the first in the series of ten great extended elegies which give structure to his oeuvre over the next quarter-century: ‘At Grass’, ‘Church Going’, ‘An Arundel Tomb’, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, ‘Here’, ‘Dockery and Son’, ‘The Building’, ‘The Old Fools’, ‘Show Saturday’, ‘Aubade’ (some readers might add ‘To the Sea’). As frequently in Larkin’s work, the poem was prompted by a casual stimulus. An avid cinema-goer, he was unusually affected by a short supporting film concerned with Brown Jack, a famous racehorse of the 1930s, now out to stud. The horses in his poem fall back into animal anonymity, leaving behind the human world of which they had no comprehension. Just as his eye can hardly pick them out, his mind cannot comprehend their world. There is an elegiac hint in the phrase ‘cold shade’; the horses are fading into the shades, or in the classical terminology are themselves already ‘shades’. Their world is not his, whether because of their animal otherness or because they are nearing death. The poet is not even confident enough to attribute motives to them. ‘Then one crops grass, and moves about / – The other seeming to look on –’. The horse ‘seems’ to look on. It is no spectator in the human sense.

The poet now steps back to contemplate a larger distance of time. Fifteen years earlier these animals were the stuff of human legend, fabled by their performance over ‘Two dozen distances’. The technical racing term ‘distance’ subtly intimates the underlying theme of the poem, which could be fittingly subtitled ‘Ode to Distance’. The archaic pre-war racing scene is evoked in exquisite intricate phrases. The horses’ names ‘were artificed / To inlay faded, classic Junes –’. The transferred epithets make sense only by a complex manipulation of association and meaning. The strange and dignified verb ‘artificed’ signifies that their names were posted up against the dates of their victories in ornamental lettering (the inlay now faded) in the grandstand roll of fame. Grammatically the names are ‘artificed’ to insubstantial time (‘classic Junes’). For all its rituals of ‘classics’ and almanacks, the world of horse racing is a matter merely of times, distances and the fleeting victory of the last race. The flashback of stanzas two and three concludes with a diminuendo as the cheering of the crowd subsides into the newspaper report of the race:

the long cry

Hanging unhushed till it subside

To stop-press columns on the street.

Nothing is more poignantly evocative of the transience of life than the urgent news of the stop-press column once it is no longer new.

The final two stanzas return to the present. The poet toys with the idea that the horses have memories, plaguing their ears ‘like flies’. But he is not deceived. The simile is illusory: it is real flies that cause the horses to shake their heads. Similarly their names never had any meaning for the horses themselves. In retirement they have slipped both reins and names:

Almanacked, their names live; they

Have slipped their names, and stand at ease,

Or gallop for what must be joy,

And not a fieldglass sees them home,

Or curious stop-watch prophesies [. . .]

Mortality is hinted at in the suppressed continuation of the sentence: ‘their names live; they // [Die]’. The names have ‘immortal’ life in the annals of the turf; the animals themselves do not. With an anacrusis which is to become one of the features of Larkin’s greatest mature poems, the penultimate stanza ends with an anticipatory intake of breath (‘their names live; they // Have slipped their names’). The elaborate diction of the racing world (‘handicaps, almanacks, the curious stop-watch’) is suddenly reduced to the formal but simple vocabulary of ‘groom, groom’s boy, bridles’ and the final verb ‘come’, with its sense of consummation. No longer does the ‘curious stop-watch’ prophesy the horses’ galloping. Indeed the verb ‘prophesies’ has become unexpectedly intransitive, trailing away to a sudden halt, leaving the final two lines isolated in a hushed pianissimo:

Only the groom, and the groom’s boy,

With bridles in the evening come.

The men’s titles with their long ‘o’ sounds bring to mind their soothing voices as they lead the horses off into the darkness. Such sounds the animals can understand.
²⁸

‘At Grass’ is an elegiac masterpiece of poised detachment and modulation. In contrast ‘Deceptions’, completed six weeks later on 20 February, vividly dramatizes unresolved emotion.
²⁹
The speaker, doubting his own good faith, strives to sublimate personal motives into detached reflection. The poem’s subject is Hardyesque: a ruined Victorian maid. But its treatment is quite unlike Hardy in its complicated ‘literary’ intertextuality. In a more awkward and dubious ‘Ode to Distance’, the poet attempts to keep his subject at arm’s length by insisting on its mediation through earlier texts. The poem’s original title ‘The Less Deceived’, later transferred to the volume in which the poem ultimately appeared, is an allusion to a scene in
Hamlet
. The prince cruelly tells Ophelia ‘I loved you not’, and she replies with quiet pathos, ‘I was the more deceived.’
³⁰
The biographical parallel with Philip’s relationship with Ruth is clear. Both Hamlet and Larkin have lost their fathers and both are tormenting their beloveds with antisocial moodiness. A second, very different intertext is established by the prefatory quotation from
London Labour and the London Poor
, Part IV, by Henry Mayhew. The poet is unable to offer consolation across the years to this long-dead Victorian woman betrayed into prostitution. Worse, he is painfully aware that his masculinity implicates him in the guilt of the man who has raped her.

The subtitle of Mayhew’s fourth volume is ‘Those That Will Not Work’, and in Mayhew’s account the woman, already over forty, is ‘one of that lowest class of women who prostitute themselves for a shilling or less’. Her own crude verdict on her abandonment is: ‘There is always as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it.’ Larkin omits this moral and social contextualizing, choosing to focus closely on the original moment of violence, when the innocent sixteen-year-old country girl was drugged and raped. ‘I was horrified to discover that I had been ruined, and for some days I was inconsolable, and cried like a child to be killed or sent back to my aunt.’
³¹
Mayhew, superior and judgemental, gives his verdict on the woman; Larkin in contrast submits himself humbly to her judgement. Clumsily, and uselessly, he intrudes on her grief at the moment of most intimate violation, as she lies ‘out on that bed’ in a room flooded with ‘unanswerable’ light. His impulse to share her suffering (‘I can taste the grief’) appears to him shamefully, uncomfortably egotistical: ‘I would not dare / Console you if I could.’

Nevertheless he cannot stop himself putting himself in the rapist’s place. She was, he insists, less deceived than he, ‘stumbling up the breathless stair / To burst into fulfilment’s desolate attic’. Larkin has chosen an extreme metaphor for his mistreatment of Ruth. Is he any better than this Victorian voluptuary abusing his sixteen-year-old victim in his quest for ultimate fulfilment? In an indirect apology, the poet implicitly casts his choice of art over marriage as a rape. And his new-found frank masculinity leads him into what some have read as an apology for rape itself.
³²
But the poet makes no claim that the deceived rapist suffers in any way comparable to the less deceived victim. In this traumatic negative aubade the rapist is simply more ‘deceived’ than she is. The poet is all too aware how lame an excuse this sounds.

Characteristically Larkin followed this stressful self-examination, five days later (25 February), with one of his most serenely beautiful poems, ‘Coming’ (originally titled ‘February’). In something close to free verse, the poet describes a subtle epiphany of existential joy in unobtrusively indicative dimeters and trimeters, unrhymed except for the repeated ‘soon’ at the centre of the poem (‘It will be spring soon’) which acts as its emotional fulcrum.

His emotional life was now firmly set on an opposite course from that of the now married but still sexually predatory Amis. As Richard Bradford comments, Larkin must have found Amis’s callous assumption that his new wife was in ‘contented ignorance’ of his infidelities both ‘farcical and odious’.
³³
Hilly wrote to Philip on 3 March 1950, saying that she was ‘simply wild’ with jealousy about Philip’s involvement ‘with this school girl or who ever she is’. Kingsley, she writes, is chasing after other girls, ‘Barbara and Terry’, while their friend James Michie has a Jamaican girlfriend. She, in contrast, lacks romantic adventures. Kingsley has just departed for the weekend. ‘They are having a party on Sat. Night & I’m sure K will “do” all the pretty women there, & here am I stuck at Sketty, Swansea where
all
the men are dull, stupid & too short.’ She continues: ‘I’ve got a weekend off in April when I shall be going to London, I dream that I’m meeting you there, & that we’ll have loads to drink & then go to bed together, but alas, only a dream.’ She ends, ‘Lots of love sweet meat – remember no more women – unless it’s Hilly x x x x’.
³⁴
Whether or not she was serious, she knew well that Philip would never take the risk of becoming involved with a friend’s wife who, moreover, had recently become a mother.

Larkin initiated his second workbook later that month, gluing a photograph of Thomas Hardy on the inside cover above the axiom ‘The ultimate aim of a poet should be to touch our hearts by showing his own.’
³⁵
Not surprisingly, given his situation at the time, the first two poems in the new book, revised later in
XX Poems
under the heading ‘Two Portraits of Sex’, express disillusion. Their contrasted styles wittily imitate the techniques of the visual artist. ‘Oils’, based on the template of George Herbert’s poem ‘Prayer’, has the wet, rich colour of oil painting; ‘Etching’ has the dry, acid-traced black on white lines of that very different technique. Nevertheless the theme is the same: sex as the awesome wellspring of existence driving its victims to expend themselves in desire and procreation. In ‘Oils’, Larkin employs the gaudy imagery of his ‘Apocalyptic’ manner and a bardic gravity of tone borrowed from Dylan Thomas. A Layardian shaman shakes his magic weed as he dances, while the second stanza takes us into the womb (‘Working-place to which the small seed is guided’). At this point the poet’s gravity falters. The indelicate line ‘Inlet unvisited by marine biologist’ is surely a joke. However, he recovers his aplomb, and there is real archetypal force in the strange slow-motion spondaic beat of ‘New voice saying new words at a new speed’. The third stanza obscurely laments the iron grip of sex on life, its control even extending to ‘the dead’ whom death grips and ‘begin[s] to use’. Presumably this is a strained way of saying that the organic matter of life is constantly recycled between the living and the dead.

Though the manner of ‘Etching’ is reductive and ironic, paradoxically it conveys a more intense mood of mythic seriousness than ‘Oils’. The crude punning title (‘Etching’ / ‘itching’) relieves the poet of the burden of high seriousness, which means that he can get away with extravagant rhetoric in his evocation of the diffused poignancy of orgasm (‘The wet spark comes, the bright blown walls collapse, // But what sad scapes we cannot turn from then’). The pretentiousness of ‘Oils’ is humanized and imbued with pathos. The final lines give an archetypal vision of an impossible imagined ‘padlocked cube of light’ where sex obtains no right of entry. Marvell’s masculinist vision of an Eden where man ‘walked without a mate’, before the cycle of procreation had begun, is reimagined in terms of modern psychology. Larkin later detached ‘Etching’ from its less rhetorically secure companion-piece and in
The Less Deceived
it appears under the sexually suggestive title ‘Dry-Point’ with a sly implied reference to the drinking toast: ‘here’s lead in your pencil’.