Philip Larkin (45 page)

On 22 February 1961 Larkin put the final workbook touches to one of his most radically ambiguous poems: ‘Naturally the Foundation will Bear Your Expenses’. He explained its inspiration later as ‘a mixture of finding that a number of my friends had gone to India and hearing, as I usually do, the broadcast of the service at the Cenotaph’.
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On one level the poem is satirical: he wrote to Robert Conquest, ‘I hope it annoys all the continent-hopping craps.’
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But Conquest himself, of course, was both a ‘friend’ and a ‘continent-hopping crap’. Conquest and Amis had recently urged Larkin to follow their example. The mention of India seems almost a diversionary tactic, the USA being his friends’ usual destination. The poet’s attitude towards the speaker on his expenses-paid jaunt is not simple condemnation: ‘Certainly it was a dig at the middleman who gives a lot of talks to America and then brushes them up and does them on the Third and then brushes them up again and puts them out as a book with Chatto.’
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His wording is concessive: ‘Certainly it was a dig’; this dig is not the real point of the poem.

The poet’s attitude towards the Armistice Day ceremony is also not as clear as most commentators have assumed. Though he allowed his emotions full rein in writing to Monica, declaring that hearing the Cenotaph service with the massed bands of the Guards playing Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’ ‘harrows me to my foundations’,
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nevertheless in a 1964 interview he defended his speaker against patriotic critics: ‘Why he should be blamed for not sympathizing with the crowds on Armistice Day, I don’t quite know.’
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Indeed, in writing of the ‘solemn-sinister / Wreath-rubbish’ of the official ceremony, Larkin will certainly have had in mind Siegfried Sassoon’s image in ‘At the Cenotaph’, of the Prince of Darkness attending the ceremony in the hope that it will foster nationalistic jingoism.

A further ambiguity is provided by the poem’s intimate association with W. H. Auden. The speaker refers to himself, in a sophisticated poeticism, as dwindling ‘down Auster’, the South Wind:

– But I outsoar the Thames,

And dwindle off down Auster

To greet Professor Lal

(He once met Morgan Forster),

My contact and my pal.

The Byronic double rhyme ‘Auster / Forster’ cannot help but bring Auden to mind. It seems not too fanciful to suggest that ‘Auster’ came to Larkin as a rough portmanteau of ‘Wystan Auden’; Auden, like Forster, was a continent-hopping homosexual. The circuit of which the speaker is taking advantage was pioneered by writers like Auden and Dylan Thomas in the years following the Second World War. Larkin derided Auden for descending from the ‘superb, magnetic, wide-angled poet’ of the 1930s to ‘the great American windbag’ of his later years, crossing continents on reading tours.
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Nevertheless the jaunty freeloader of Larkin’s poem, published in
Twentieth Century
in July 1961, presented an attractive enough picture to prompt Auden’s own genial self-satire, ‘On the Circuit’, published in
About the House
in 1966. Auden’s speaker clearly owes something to Larkin’s:

Another morning comes: I see,

Dwindling below me on the plane,

The roofs of one more audience

I shall not see again.

God bless the lot of them, although

I don’t remember which was which [. . .]
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Auden’s persona, like Larkin’s, relishes his sky-borne elevation above the audience that pays for his lifestyle. Larkin’s attitude towards the literary ‘circuit’ is envious as well as disapproving. His poem is not morally didactic: ‘I shouldn’t call myself a satirist, or any other sort of -ist [. . .] To be a satirist, you have to think you know better than everyone else. I’ve never done that.’
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Before it was published Larkin remarked to Monica that everybody seemed to be misreading the poem. Brian Cox, then in the Hull English Department, and editor of
Critical Quarterly
, thought it ‘a bit hard on the Queen’.
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His secretary, Betty Mackereth, joked that its animus against travelling would be attributed to his recent illness; ‘not that I think she gets it any more than Cox did. How to read a page. Ogh ogh ogh [. . .] Well, it may not be a good poem, but it’s a good title.’
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He teasingly omits to explain how this particular page ‘should’ be read. Subsequent commentators continue to interpret the poem as angry moral satire. Motion calls it ‘a piece of savagery’.
⁵⁰

On 6 March 1961, at a point when he was at the peak of his achievement in both professional and literary terms, Larkin suddenly collapsed during a Library Committee meeting and was rushed to Kingston General Hospital.
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The doctors dismissed his immediate explanations: that his shirt collar was too tight or that his new spectacles had induced dizzy spells, though a recent analysis of Larkin’s spectacles has suggested that a rogue prescription could indeed have been responsible for his disorientation.
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However, in the case of a sensibility so radically psychosomatic as Larkin’s it is tempting to seek personal causes for his mysterious breakdown. Over the previous months he had been overworked and under stress. He had managed the Library transfer and had endured the public exposure of the official opening. More relevantly, perhaps, he was aware that, though he could claim to be still faithful to Monica in physical terms, he was betraying her emotionally by his involvement with Maeve. Richard Bradford suggests a different reason for Larkin’s collapse: intense jealousy of Kingsley Amis’s success in being appointed Official Fellow and Tutor at Peterhouse College, Cambridge.
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This is not an explanation which occurred to Larkin at the time, nor to anyone else since.

The next few weeks saw him subjected to extensive medical tests and deeply worried. He wrote compulsively from the ward to Monica. A letter dated 11 March runs to eighteen sides, written uncharacteristically in ballpoint and with an unwonted unsteadiness of hand. It begins with a PS at the top of the first page: ‘I’m afraid this becomes rather a “frightened” letter, & isn’t much fun to read [. . .]’:

It is Saturday & I’ve just had some lunch: it’s 10 to one. There is nothing much to report. I haven’t been x rayed yet, or brain-waved, as I believe they intend to do.

I
feel
about the same – that is, there is something wrong with my vision, wch makes me have to focus specially sometimes, & I feel rather distant from my feet: this is all summed up by being
aware
of my right eye. In addition to this, I am out of sorts in a ’flu-y kind of way – no appetite, coated tongue, bowels sore, & ready to sweat easily. This last symptom seems to interest them.
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He is effusively grateful to her: ‘I must thank you, dearest dearest love, for coming to see me so quickly, and for sending me cards & letters.’ However, he refused to allow her to stay in his flat because ‘I had left a few private papers & diaries lying around. Such things, which I suppose I keep partly for the record in the event of wanting to write an autobiography, & partly to relieve my feelings [. . .] will have to be burned unread in the event of my death [. . .]’ He continues, ‘I’ve been writing for an hour now, partly because I like talking to you, partly to see how my eyes & brain stand it. If this looks legible & makes sense I suppose I’m not too far gone yet [. . .] Oh darling I wish you were here!’
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Pages of abjection follow, with little sign of his usual élan and wit: ‘I can’t bring myself to do anything but lie either whining to you or shuddering to myself.’ ‘I hardly know if I ought to send letters like this. You see, darling, I’m afraid I’m
seriously
ill, & really this is all that’s in my mind, and nobody can give me any comfort. It would be comforting to have you here to talk to, if you could stay all the time, but it wdn’t be any
ultimate
comfort, wd it?’
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He wonders whether the problem may be with his liver: ‘the liver
can
affect vision, can’t it? You know what horrors are associated with livers for me, through my father.’
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The following day, Sunday 12 March 1961, he wrote to Maeve in a more reticent tone: ‘I don’t want to write very much at present. I don’t feel in good enough spirits: I should only moan [. . .] but with all this time to spare, & without getting better, I have not been able to keep from worrying rather.’
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On the same day he wrote a six-page letter to Monica which continued into Monday (beginning at 6.30 a.m.). He wrote again on the same day (eight sides), complaining about the television on the ward, and discussing their plans to attend the Test match at Lord’s: ‘Suppose there is something seriously wrong with my brain! Should I not say these things to you? Is it unfair of me?’
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But his panic was subsiding. On 15 March he wrote only four sides to Monica, discussing the recent heavyweight boxing match involving Ingemar Johansson. On 16 March he wrote six sides, mentioning the radio soap opera
The Archers
, the marriage of Picasso and the death of Sir Thomas Beecham. Peter Coveney offered to let him move into Needler Hall when he was discharged. On 30 March Eva Larkin travelled up to Hull and looked after him there until 4 April. If his breakdown was a subconscious bid for sympathy and attention, it had certainly succeeded.

He was advised not to return to work immediately and paid for further tests in London by the eminent doctor, Sir Walter Russell Brain. Monica and Eva took rooms in different London hotels and he was visited by Kingsley and Hilly Amis,
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Robert Conquest (who brought him pornography), Stephen Spender and John Betjeman. Brain found a ‘deep-seated abnormality in the left cerebral hemisphere’, and commented impenetrably: ‘He has epilepsy of late onset with no positive evidence of an organic cure.’
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Later X-rays of his head, taken in July 1969, were among Larkin’s papers after his death.
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On 10 April 1961 he wrote to Maeve in a chastened tone, noting that in the hospital ‘you can see so many people worse off than yourself [. . .] It was good of you to take it kindly & not tell me to pull myself together
etcetera
! Not that I should have taken such an exhortation particularly kindly, but it might have been justified.’
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However, three days later he told her that he had contracted ear infections from the hospital tests, and was ‘in a great mood of fury & irritation & wishing I’d never set foot in this lazar house.’
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Later in life he blamed his increasing deafness on these infections. On the same day (13 April) he wrote to Betty, expressing pleasure that the Library Assistant Wendy Mann, who was also ill at this time, had avoided surgery, going on to praise his ‘very charming’ doctor, Miss Yen: ‘At present they think my chest interesting. (I feel like Marilyn Monroe.)’
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On 18 April he wrote to Maeve, in the characteristically sincere tone of their correspondence: ‘It has meant a great deal to me to have your sympathetic letters. I don’t connect them with flirtation or my taking advantage of you [. . .] just one person showing kindness to and concern for another. And this is a jolly rare thing in my experience. Thank you, dear, thank you with all my heart.’
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Maeve had been impressed by his consideration for others while he was in hospital. Philip would always ask after Wendy Mann, and after his return to Hull phoned her every week until she returned to the Library.
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Maeve had come to believe that, though he did not share her religious faith, Philip shared her values: ‘I discovered how deeply sensitive he was, and that his yearning for warmth, affection and idealism was as great as my own.’
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Their relationship was a sensuous one. Philip told Jean Hartley that though she rejected ‘sex before marriage’, ‘God knows we do everything but.’
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However, as Maeve put it, ‘I wasn’t prepared to cut myself off from the sacraments.’
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Eva was eager for her son to resolve the situation. But he could not abandon Monica. He joked in a letter to Maeve: ‘Do you think this ailment I am undergoing is God’s way of putting a stop to something He thought might be getting out of hand?’
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In the event, however, things did not get ‘out of hand’ nor was he forced to make a decision. The situation remained unresolved for the better part of the next two decades. It was not until 1978 that, as Maeve recalled, ‘he finally broke with me in favour of Monica’.
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