Philip Larkin (46 page)

Following his illness, he returned to work, and his correspondence with Monica resumed its equilibrium. On 11 June he wrote: ‘How are you? I can remember of course that you were here, & what we did, but you slip so easily into my life, making no disturbance, it’s almost like trying to pick out a rabbit among bracken. Not that rabbits have lovely legs like yours. Your legs are the only legs I ever see the point of, except for walking about on, of course.’
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A week later he completed a sexually charged poem, ‘The Large Cool Store’, ‘unsuspectingly inspired’, Maeve explained, by herself. The poet is puzzled by the contrast between the two worlds implied by the clothes in the shop: on one hand shirts and trousers, ‘Set out in simple sizes plainly’, belonging to the weekday world of ‘factory, yard and site’; on the other ‘Modes For Night’ in ‘Lemon, sapphire, moss-green rose’, belonging to an apparently unrelated ideal world. He concludes that this exotic nightwear shows:

How separate and unearthly love is,

Or women are, or what they do,

Or in our young unreal wishes

Seem to be: synthetic, new,

And natureless in ecstasies.

The word ‘natureless’, which occurs nowhere else in Larkin’s work, recalls Yeats’s ascent ‘out of nature’ in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. On the ‘Listen’ recording of
The Whitsun Weddings
, made under the auspices of the Marvell Press, Larkin notes that this has been called a ‘silly poem about nighties’.
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It is in fact a moving evocation of the awesome impersonal power of sex.

Maeve’s account of the occasion of the poem bowdlerizes its erotic content:

He was very taken with a smart summer handbag I had bought at Marks and Spencer’s. He found it hard to believe that I had found anything quite so stylish there: in 1961 their merchandise was generally less well designed than in later years. The following Saturday Philip went along to ‘the large cool store’ which he saw through the eyes of working-class women whose humdrum existence was far removed from the tantalizing world represented by the store’s ‘Modes for Night’. Caressing the ‘Bri-Nylon Baby-Dolls and Shorties’, ethereal in colour, texture and design, the women imagine how possession of such a garment might transform their lives [. . .]
⁷⁵

In her decorous misreading, male fantasies about sex become female fantasies about fashion. Paradoxically, however, this muse’s reimagining of the poem is, in its very incomprehension, an illustration of its central insight. In ‘our’ unreal male wishes, women are rapt in a natureless, self-involved perfection. Maeve’s response to the poem shows exactly this narcissism. Gautier would have interpreted her reaction in the familiar sexist terms of nineteenth-century Romanticism: ‘It is true that women have no more understanding of poetry than has a cabbage or a rose, and this is quite natural and to be expected, since they themselves are poetry or at least the best instruments of poetry; a flute neither hears nor understands the air that is played upon it.’
⁷⁶

The balance, or imbalance, of Philip’s relationship with Monica was restored. They took their 1961 summer holiday again in Sark. He told Conquest, ‘Had a good time, except that I became shagged with late nights and drink.’
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Shortly afterwards Monica took her cue from Philip’s birthday to suggest that they both make wills (‘I
don’t
want my relations to inherit all that I have’). He was baffled by her anxiety about what would happen to the money she left him when he himself subsequently died: ‘You seem to be wanting me to do something & I don’t know what it is.’ Unnerved, he told her, ‘it isn’t a topic I relish thinking about’. Then, still clearly not understanding her urgent reasonings, he attempted to placate her: ‘I do see that it is a serious matter and ought to be settled. I also see that you are offering me a great kindness, and I’m properly grateful.’
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A letter of several days later reveals a different, literary cause of friction. She had praised Sir Walter Scott, and he responded with crushing decisiveness: ‘I don’t think I recovered from being advised to read
The Heart of Midlothian
– was it? At different times I’ve tried that, and
The Antiquary
, and
Old Mortality
. All fell from my nerveless fingers. I
want
W.S. to be good – heavens, one wants anyone to be good [. . .] – but I don’t know, there seemed nothing in his books, no imagination, humour, malice, style, perception, story even.’
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In September a new, more stable pattern to their relationship was established when Monica bought a second home in Haydon Bridge, near Hexham, Northumberland, on the banks of the Tyne. Haydon Bridge was conveniently far away, but near enough to Hull for Philip easily to join her there for short breaks and longer holidays.

Larkin’s life reached its apogee in late 1961. In ‘Here’, the fifth of his ten great contemplative elegies, completed on 8 October, there is a sense that he has attained the still midday of his life.
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All the poet’s skill is bent to distil a timeless, universal poem from an intensely local, personal inspiration. The poem takes as its title not the topographical ‘Hull’ but the existential adverb ‘Here’. In an extraordinary grammatical manoeuvre the ‘I’ and ‘we’ of ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ and ‘Ambulances’ are ingeniously excluded, making the centre of consciousness the reader her or himself. There is momentous gravity in the poem’s opening phrases. The subject of the first sentence is an elaborate noun phrase, whose repeated gerunds (present participles used as nouns), ‘Swerving [. . .] swerving [. . .] swerving’, create a slow-building climax. The main verb (‘Gathers’) is held back by this spacious grammar until the beginning of the second stanza. Then, in order to throw the emphasis on momentary experience rather than literal topography, this ‘swerving’ gathers not to a town, but to ‘the surprise of a large town’. Though the first sentence could end here, the poet prefers the continuing impetus of a colon followed by ‘Here [. . .]’. The first sentence does not end until the first line of the final stanza.

Though the unnamed city at the centre of the poem is indeed, in every detail, a ‘literal’ place with unique characteristics, ships up streets, a slave museum, consulates and tattoo shops, it is also a ‘pastoral’, if an unorthodox ‘terminate and fishy-smelling’ one. This ‘urban, yet simple’ world has the idyllic innocence of Theocritus’ or Virgil’s artificial visions of nymphs and shepherds. Its inhabitants, a ‘cut-price crowd’, are precisely observed as they push through plate-glass doors to their desires: ‘Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies’. But this vignette is also an archetype of the social existence of all readers, wherever our particular ‘here’ may be. It is surprising, to put it mildly, to find Larkin describing the poem to Conquest as ‘plain description’.
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Larkin pulls out all the organ-stops of rhyme and assonance to create a sumptuous music of consonant clusters and shifting vowels, unlike anything else in his poetry: ‘shadows / fields / meadows / shields / solitude / pheasants / presence / mud / [. . .] / stands, thicken / quicken / ascends / distance / beach / existence / reach’. Four octaves of commodious pentameters are orchestrated in alternating variation. Stanzas one and three both rhyme ababcddc, while stanzas two and four rhyme, with more formal closure, abbacdcd. He originally titled the poem ‘Withdrawing Room’, the archaic form of ‘drawing room’, imaging the ever-moving moment of being here as the most intimate of the rooms into which we withdraw.
Stanza
is the Italian for ‘room’ (usually in the plural,
stanze
: a suite of rooms). Here, in this spacious, patterned stanza-form, Larkin has found the comfortable withdrawing room of his own which he had been seeking since ‘Dry-Point’ and ‘Best Society’.

No vehicles are mentioned, but ‘here’ moves implicitly from sitting in a swerving train approaching the city to walking around the streets, to pedalling a bicycle through suburbs and out across the flat landscape to the sea. The goal is ambiguous. On one reading the movement is a withdrawal inwards, from a larger public world of industry and ‘traffic all night north’ to crowded provincial cityscape, and then deeper and deeper into ‘retired’ self-possession. On another it is an opening outwards, from the enclosure of a railway carriage to the roads and shops of the town to a sublimely cleared attic of ‘unfenced existence: / Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach’. Both readings lose time in place. There are no events in the poem, only an undated present. For all its forward movement,
largo – allegretto – andante, this is an anti-narrative, stopping the clock. Larkin was aware that his life had reached its point of balance. The photograph of Philip and herself outdoors which Maeve chose for the cover of her memoir is dated October 1961, and shows the poet radiating fulfilment. Larkin had always been uncannily sensitive to life’s climacterics, and had long anticipated the moment when he would reach his ‘prime’. If one were to put a date on this moment it would be October 1961. After ‘Here’ the way is downward.

To remind himself of cruel reality, Larkin followed this sublime poem with his coldest, most reductive work, headed in the workbook ‘18/10
Life is slow motion dying
’ and completed three pages later on 25 October. It was published as ‘Nothing To Be Said’ in the
London Magazine
on 11 February 1962. In an elliptical anthropological summary the poet reviews a spectrum from the rituals of primitive nomads and pig-hunters through ‘cobble-close’ working-class family life in mill towns to the civilized rituals of garden-parties and law cases. All of them amount to no more than a slow advance on death. The poem ends with a riddling play on words: ‘saying so to some / Means nothing; others it leaves / Nothing to be said’. Some people are optimists, some are pessimists, and that is all there is to it. As the year approached its end Larkin followed this poem, on 3 November, with a mood-piece, ‘And now the leaves suddenly lose strength’. Autumn is over, and seeing another year gone an assortment of people from different eras, ‘Frockcoated gentleman, farmer at his gate, / Villein with mattock, soldiers on their shields’ all silently watch ‘the winter coming on’. He did not publish it.

But it was not winter yet for Larkin. Three days later, he completed, in two days of concentrated drafting (5–6 November), one of his warmest works, and the one with the most explicit biographical association with Maeve. On Sunday 5 November she attended a concert at Hull’s City Hall which opened with the ‘storms of chording’ of Elgar’s ‘Introduction and Allegro for Strings’. The resulting poem, ‘Broadcast’, is the only work in which Larkin explicitly addressed his Hull muse. On the ‘Listen’ record he calls it ‘about as near as I get in this collection to a love poem. It’s not, I’m afraid, very near.’
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His repeated stress on nearness (‘about as near’, ‘not very near’) seems almost a joke, since the relationship in the poem is so much a matter of carefully observed distance. Paradoxically what most excites the poet is his separation from his beloved: she in the concert hall hearing the music, he listening over the radio, a mile away, picturing her in his mind. The orchestra’s chords overpower him not directly through their sound, but ‘By being distant’. In a tenuous pun he hears her hands ‘on air’, electronically: ‘tiny in all that air, applauding’. This is more rarefied than the ‘real untidy air’ of ‘Bargains, suffering, and love’. The contrast with ‘Talking in Bed’ is stark. In that poem a uniquely intimate closeness made communication impossible. Here it is the very distance between the lovers which imparts the bloom to their relationship. The imagined details on which the poet focuses: her face, her unnoticed glove, her shoes, create an icon in his mind, and this artifice is underpinned by the echo of the medieval ‘blazon’, a poem of courtly love listing parts of the beloved’s body.
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Her face ‘Beautiful and devout’, true to the Petrarchan tradition, both inspires and forbids desire. For years afterwards Philip would send Maeve Christmas cards playing on this ambiguity. He would annotate each card according to the nature of the illustration: ‘Devout but not beautiful’; ‘Beautiful but not devout’ or, more rarely, ‘Beautiful
and
devout’.
⁸⁴

The phrase ‘new, slightly outmoded shoes’ was a private joke. Philip was particularly taken, Maeve revealed, by this pair of shoes which were ‘an unusual colour of pearlized bronze, very smart, with stiletto heels and long, pointed toes, popularly known as winkle-pickers’.
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Twenty years earlier Larkin would ‘do the foot fetishist’ for his undergraduate friends.
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Now he acted out a version of this mime for Maeve’s amusement, or bemusement.