Philip Larkin (27 page)

That swings me, this Saturday night, away from my midland

Emollient valley, away from the lack of questions,

Away from endearments [. . .]
⁵²

He could neither marry nor become a novelist. He pushed to the back of his life his mother’s demands, his Lawrentian guilts and his desire to ‘be that girl’. Whether he was yet prepared to admit it to himself or not, his novelistic ambitions were over. In the freer environment of Belfast he was, as a poet, to dash forward like Auden’s hussar. Ireland helped to renew his sense of himself, and the next few years were to be among the happiest in his life.

9

The Best Writing Conditions

1950–2

In a long chatty letter to Monica Jones of 1 October 1950 Larkin relished his ‘first day in Ireland’. He described his drab lodging in Queen’s Chambers, close by the University, grumbled amiably that the green of his candles would clash with the newly painted walls, noted that the roast beef at lunch ‘was as pedestrian as a centipede’ and lamented that no food was available after seven o’clock. But his complaints barely conceal his exhilaration at starting life afresh in this room of his own:

No, heark ’ee, cully, this room is grossly underfurnished, the lampshade is made of brown paper, the bulbs are too weak, the noise from the trams tiresome, the sixpenny meter for heat will prove expensive, the students ubiquitous, the servants iniquitous (where’s the strap from my suitcase?). Michael Innes
¹
speaks somewhere of the combination of refined luxury and barbarous discomfort that is the Oxford don’s life: it is the Belfast don’s life, too, except for the refined luxury.
²

There is a sense in this first Belfast letter that he is setting the tone for a substantial future correspondence. Monica is to provide the sounding-board for his responses to his new environment. He ends on an intimate but respectful note:

I hope too your room doesn’t look sad & lonely now my lethargic cadging figure isn’t in it. Truly I shall always remember the fireplace & the cricket-bin & all the battery of things on the mantelpiece, Fifi & blue Neddy & the flowered lamp. Your life there has come into extremely sharp focus for me now: heating milk, singing in the kitchen, drying stockings, etc.

A burst of nostalgia follows: ‘I loved every time I visited you, & do want to thank you again & again for being so kind, so gracious & so generous.’
³
As letters like this arrived regularly over the following months and years it is not surprising that Monica allowed their unresolved long-distance relationship to become a permanent feature of her life.

A serial letter of 28–30 November 1950
⁴
runs to fourteen sides, complete with a sketch of his room, and a cartoon of a shop-girl refusing to allow him to look through a newly arrived pile of Jazz Collector and Tempo records: ‘May I look through these’; ‘Oi’d rather you didn’t.’ He rages: ‘cow of Hell! I have never seen any before, & Belfast is the last place I expected to find them.’
⁵
In the drawing he has accidentally given himself a round-shouldered stoop and huge nose, and writes in the margin: ‘This looks like an anti-semitic cartoon in
Die Stürmer
.’
⁶
The letter ends with a spirited sketch of Monica, seen from behind and above, in her academic gown, flourishing a cigarette. His letters to Monica focus on descriptions of his latest or next anticipated meal, gossip about colleagues, sympathy over her work, fears that guilt will force him to allow his mother to join him in Belfast, and comments on cricket and boxing, Monica’s favourite sports. On 7 June 1951 he begins with a delightful sketch of Monica as a rabbit in an apron cooking over a brazier in her burrow, and follows with a vivid sketch of himself exploding across the page at all angles with a sneeze of hay-fever.
⁷
Monica’s letters were often longer than his. In May 1951 he comments that her last letter is ‘one of the longest I’ve ever received, about 7000 words, the length of a couple of short stories or half a dozen
Times
leaders’.
⁸

Literature is the predominant theme. In an idiom laced with phrases in French and references to Verlaine, Mallarmé, Flaubert and Montherlant, he discusses the latest book he has read, moving smoothly from Llewellyn Powys to Mrs Gaskell to Oscar Wilde to George Bernard Shaw to D. H. Lawrence to Cyril Connolly to Frances Hodgson Burnett and Beatrix Potter. He exclaims that he longs to know what she thinks of Katherine Mansfield’s letters.
⁹
This is not, however, a correspondence of literary or intellectual equals. Though she shared Philip’s love of the English poetic canon, Monica’s perspectives were narrower than his. When asked late in life about Théophile Gautier’s
Mademoiselle de Maupin
, she recollected:

I know that I borrowed it from Philip, early on, but I’m not sure I read it. Later I should have had more confidence in my own judgement and therefore wouldn’t have read it.

How do you mean?

Well. I wouldn’t be reading a foreign book.
¹⁰

He invited Monica’s comments on his poems. She particularly liked ‘Spring’ and ‘Wedding-Wind’: ‘it’s a lovely title, breathing Hardy and Housman’.
¹¹
However she rarely offered advice, and when she did, he did not take it. In June 1951 she warned him against an ‘easy lazy flatness you must watch’ and hesitantly detected a ‘tiny threat’ of this in the third stanza of ‘At Grass’. He responded vigorously, allowing that there will be a ‘prosaic quality’ in some of his poetry, ‘though I don’t find it in the spot you indicate in
At grass
–’.
¹²

Larkin rose to the professional challenges of his new post in what he called ‘the book barn’. He was put in charge of the Queen’s Library issue desk and ‘Readers’ Services’. A strong mutual respect developed between him and the Librarian, Jacob (‘Jack’) Graneek, the son of émigrés who had fled a pogrom in Russia. Outsiders from England and elsewhere formed, with Jewish intellectuals like Graneek, a cultural island in the College amid the surrounding sectarianism.
¹³
Larkin’s social life in Queen’s was pleasant and stimulating. He learnt bridge from Ansell Egerton of the Economics Department and Alec Dalgarno of Mathematics. In the evenings he would join a group of male colleagues in the Senior Common Room bar, among them Alan Grahame from History, Evan John from Music and Arthur Terry from Spanish. He and Terry widened their horizons by borrowing books from the Library to read overnight and then exchange with each other next day. It was in the course of this reading spree, as Terry later told Motion, that Larkin declared Laforgue’s ‘Winter Coming On’ to be ‘the poem I’ve been trying to write all my life’.
¹⁴
It was a stimulating environment for a young poet. Larkin later recalled: ‘The best writing conditions I ever had were in Belfast, when I was working at the University there. Another top-floor flat, by the way. I wrote between eight and ten in the evenings, then went to the University bar till eleven, then played cards or talked with friends till one or two.’
¹⁵

In the month following his arrival, determined to rescue his poetic career from the disaster of
In the Grip of Light
, he put together a new collection of poems. Fearing further rejection he determined on self-publication. Housman had, after all, published
A Shropshire Lad
at his own expense. He approached Carswells, a jobbing printer in Belfast, who undertook to produce a booklet for him. On 16 January 1951 he discussed the title in a letter to Monica:

originally I’d thought of
20 poems for nothing
, but Kingsley shuddered at it: said it was like Roy Campbell. Now I can’t think of another: do you think that is so bad? Apart from all the impossible kinds of title, I don’t like the drab kind (
Poems
), or the self-denigrating kind (
Stammerings
), or the implied-conceit kind (
Moments
of
Vision
), or the clever kind (
Stasis
) [. . .] I want something unaffected & unpretentious – for Lord knows there are few to pretend anything about.
¹⁶

He rejected
Speaking from Experience
as sounding like ‘broadcast talks by the Radio Padre’, and concluded briskly: ‘I don’t
ask
for advice because in such matters I should be extremely unlikely to take it.’
¹⁷
Ultimately he chose the austere
XX Poems
, telling Monica that the title was ‘as free from offence as I can manage, & with a slight undercurrent of Guinness double X and Ezra Pound’s Cantos’.
¹⁸
He dedicated it to Amis. On 27 April 1951, he took delivery of 100 copies, joking that it was printed ‘on what I privately called grocer’s wrapping paper’.
¹⁹

It is a sign of how rapidly Larkin’s poetic self-image was developing at this time that only three pieces were carried forward from
In the Grip of Light
:
‘There is an evening coming in’ (‘Going’), ‘The Dedicated’ and ‘Wedding-Wind’. The new works were: ‘Waiting for breakfast’, ‘Modesties’, ‘At Grass’, ‘Even so distant’ (‘Deceptions’), ‘Coming’, ‘Two Portraits of Sex’, ‘Spring’, ‘If, My Darling’, ‘Wants’, ‘Who called love conquering’ and six poems written since his move to Belfast: ‘Since we agreed’ (later titled ‘No Road’), ‘The widest prairies’ (‘Wires’), ‘Since the majority of me’, ‘Arrival’, ‘Always too eager for the future’ (‘Next Please’) and ‘Latest Face’. In retrospect
XX Poems
seems a trial run for
The Less Deceived
, thirteen of the poems ultimately being carried forward to the later volume.
²⁰
Larkin sent copies to a number of established literary figures who he hoped might review it, including Cyril Connolly and John Lehmann. Later he joked ruefully that the postal rate had just changed and he had put the wrong stamps on the envelopes.
²¹
His worst apprehensions were realized. Charles Madge was the only recipient to make any response. He passed his copy on to D. J. Enright, who reviewed it in the Catholic journal the
Month
, the only notice it received.
²²
Seldom has great poetry been so ignored on its first appearance.

Several of the more recently written poems, dating from the end of 1950 and the beginning of 1951, show what Larkin called his new ‘more vernacular’ style, basing themselves on proverbs or everyday verbal tags.
²³
The metaphor in ‘No Road’ is, for example, so natural and obvious as scarcely to seem a metaphor at all. The road is ‘so little overgrown, / Walking that way tonight would not seem strange, / And still would be allowed’. The tone is conversational, but the syntax becomes tangled as the poet’s guilt and embarrassment intensify. In a strained infinitive construction he tells his former lover that it is his ‘liberty’ to watch ‘a world where no such road will run / From you to me’ as it rises ‘like a cold sun’. The final lopsided couplet stammers with Hardyesque awkwardness:

Not to prevent it is my will’s fulfilment.

Willing it, my ailment.

With a listless wordplay (‘will’s / Willing’), pentameter runs into abrupt trimeter, and the poem ends on the wearily offhand misrhyme ‘fulfilment / ailment’. The ten high short ‘i’ or ‘e’ syllables, and seven ‘t’ sounds in these two lines force the poet’s self-distaste aggressively on the reader.