Philip Larkin (54 page)

During 1967 Larkin encouraged Jean Hartley during her ‘O’ and ‘A’ level examinations, which she was taking as a mature student. She recalls that he ‘had taken a close paternal interest in my progress since I first began my studies, even to the extent of calling round to go through each literature paper after I’d sat it and discuss the answers I’d given’.
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On hearing that she had been awarded a B in ‘A’ level English he wrote to Monica: ‘Not bad for someone who was in hospital and anyway had never taken an exam in her youth.’
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When Jean began a degree course at Hull University the following year he opened a £25 account for her at Brown’s Bookshop
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(in 1968 Penguin paperbacks cost typically between four and six shillings).

Like ‘High Windows’, ‘The Trees’, begun on 9 April and dated in the workbook ‘2 June 1967’,
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contrives a fragile epiphany out of mere rhetoric. The first two stanzas prepare the ground. A beautiful description of buds relaxing and spreading into full leaf leads to a
faux naïf
question, ‘Is it that they are born again’? No, the poet answers, ‘they die too’. The trees’ apparent immortality is a ‘trick’ betrayed by their rings of grain. But then he side-steps logic, creating an upbeat ending through emotional sound-writing: ‘Yet still the unresting castles thresh / In fullgrown thickness every May [. . .] Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.’ To a sentimental reader the final line will read as ecstatic affirmation. To a less deceived reader it will read as imperious command, reminding us that the time will come soon enough when we will be unable to respond. Larkin recognized that this would be one of his most popular poems, but he was unpersuaded by his own achievement. In a letter to Monica he called it ‘very corny’,
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and in the workbook he added after the date: ‘Birthday of T. Hardy 1840 / bloody awful tripe’.
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The next page of the workbook features a startling contrast of tone and manner. ‘Annus Mirabilis’ was begun on 16 June and completed, apart from typescript adjustments, after only one more page of drafting on 12 July.
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It is a public poem, making out of the ‘annus mirabilis’ of 1963 a cultural myth to which readers of subsequent generations can easily relate:

Sexual intercourse began

In nineteen sixty-three [. . .]

Between the end of the
Chatterley
ban

And the Beatles’ first LP.

Like ‘MCMXIV’ the poem has a Latin title, and refers to a specific date. Its theme is also an artificially reified social myth, though here in mock-heroic rather than tragic mode. Sex did not really begin in 1963 any more than innocence ended in 1914. Well-read readers will recognize the reference to Dryden’s patriotic poem concerning the year 1666–7, describing the Fire of London, the plague and sea battles with the Dutch. The poet impudently asserts that 1963 is a date of similar national importance. There is no propaganda against the ‘permissive society’, as it was then called. The poet’s self-mocking presence, ‘(Which was rather late for me)’, merely adds piquancy, ‘me’ being a stereotype of old-fashioned inhibition. Indeed, the poem is delightfully politically incorrect (though the term did not come into use until the 1990s).

Larkin’s forty-fifth-birthday poem, ‘Sympathy in White Major’, completed on 31 August 1967, shows his symbolist
High Windows
manner fully developed. Like his youthful ‘Brunette’ renderings of Villon and Baudelaire, the title makes an irreverent English reference to a French original: Théophile Gautier’s ‘Symphonie en Blanc Majeur’.
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When asked in an interview in 1964 whether he read much foreign poetry Larkin responded in the voice of his crudely philistine persona: ‘Foreign poetry. No!’
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However, the title of this poem is incomprehensible without knowledge of Gautier. Whether or not he read foreign poetry, it still haunted his imagination. He had commented that the last line of ‘Absences’ sounded ‘like a slightly unconvincing translation from a French symbolist’.
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The title of ‘Sympathy in White Major’ is, precisely, an unconvincing translation from a French symbolist.

‘Symphonie en Blanc Majeur’ is a central document in the doctrine of ‘L’art pour l’art’, a sumptuous white-on-white description of a swan-maiden descending to humankind from a chill empyrean of dispassionate aesthetics. It concludes: ‘Oh! Qui pourra mettre un ton rose / Dans cette implacable blancheur?’ ‘Who could infuse a rose tint into this implacable whiteness?’ Who would dare sully such purity with the colour of blood and emotion? This is the Platonic perfection which Larkin had celebrated from the beginning: the angled features of the Polish airgirl, beyond all ‘humanity of interest’, the essential beauty of pure foam, pure coldness. He opens with his own cynical version of Gautier’s white-on-white prescription:

When I drop four cubes of ice

Chimingly in a glass, and add

Three goes of gin, a lemon slice,

And let a ten-ounce tonic void

In foaming gulps until it smothers

Everything else up to the edge,

I lift the lot in private pledge:

He devoted his life to others
.

In this clear ice, liquid and foam he will drown his sorrows. In the second stanza he insists that unlike his contemporaries, who wore other people ‘like clothes’ in their lives, he had set himself to bring ‘the lost displays’ to the select few ‘Who thought I could’. A true aesthete, he has devoted himself to art for art’s sake. His verdict now is as dismissive as it had been five years earlier in ‘Send No Money’: ‘It didn’t work for them or me.’

But the theme of the poem is peculiarly doubled: Anglo-Saxon as well as Gallic. In a typescript of the poem inserted at the end of Workbook 7, Larkin has written the title in capitals: ‘SYMPHONY IN WHITE MAJOR’.
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He has then crossed out the first word in pencil and replaced it with ‘SYMPATHY’ (the only appearance of this word in Larkin’s mature oeuvre).
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It was an inspired afterthought. By replacing Gautier’s ‘Symphonie’ with ‘Sympathy’ the speaker imparts the rose tint, perverting the poem’s focus from poetic vocation to moralized emotion.
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In the light of experience his pursuit of beauty no longer appears as the simple antithesis to playing the socially responsible ‘white man’ which it had seemed to be in ‘Reasons for Attendance’ and ‘Send No Money’.
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He has attempted to follow both vocations, bohemian and respectable, and they have led to the same bitter outcome: the sacrifice of his life to others. The two voices blend and merge. In roman type he speaks as a lonely dedicated aesthete; in italics he speaks as a loyal pillar of the community shouldering the white man’s burden: ‘
A decent chap, a real good sort, / Straight as a die, one of the best
[. . .]’. The bitter, histrionic irony builds up, phrase after phrase, into an excruciating self-epitaph: ‘
Here’s to the whitest man I know
– Though white is not my favourite colour.’ In a letter written shortly before the appearance of
High Windows
in 1974, Larkin revealed that the title he ‘really wanted’ for his final volume was
Living for Others
; ‘only I could never write the title-poem’.
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Had this poem been less elliptical and elusive it could have fulfilled that function.

Larkin’s next two completed poems continue the process of stock-taking. ‘Sad Steps’ (dated 24 April 1968) offers a tragic point-by-point riposte to the tenuous transcendence of ‘High Windows’. The earlier poem concluded with an empty daytime windowscape. ‘Sad Steps’ opens with a crowded night-time windowscape. The ‘wedge-shadowed gardens’ and ‘wind-picked sky’ are reminiscent of Laforgue, but this ‘laughable’ epiphany goes off half cock, and the poet becomes, as in ‘High Windows’, entangled in words: not now words of envy and frustration, but of another bad translation from a French symbolist: ‘Lozenge of love! Medallion of art! / O wolves of memory! Immensements!’ In Laforgue’s ‘Complainte de cette bonne lune’ the moon is ‘le médaillon’, and in ‘Litanies des premiers quartiers de la lune’ it is a ‘blanc médaillon’.
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But the less deceived English poet rejects his role as decadent
Pierrot lunaire
with a quiet monosyllabic ‘No’, and the poem ends where ‘High Windows’ began, with a vision of youth – not this time in the form of a shallow caricature generated by envy, but with tragic gravity, in the form of an intimate recollection of:

the strength and pain

Of being young; that it can’t come again,

But is for others undiminished somewhere.

‘High Windows’ ended in a suspect escape into an absolving ‘nowhere’ of clear blue air. ‘Sad Steps’, daring to impart the rose tint of human pathos, contemplates a ‘somewhere’ where youth still exists undiminished: but not for him. Larkin did not feel the need to add any disparaging comment to the draft of this more profound poem.

In ‘Sympathy in White Major’ Larkin had reviewed his achievement through a grotesque combination of French symbolism and British clubbability. In ‘Posterity’ (dated in the workbook ‘17.6.68’) he delivered another scathing verdict on himself, this time in the trans-Atlantic tones of his own future biographer, Jake Balokowsky. The poem is a point-by-point variation on ‘Naturally the Foundation will Bear Your Expenses’, written more than seven years earlier. Both poems are monologues by professionals in the literary business: one a blithe British freeloader, the other a dissatisfied American on the academic treadmill. Both poems show a dynamic ambiguity in their attitude towards the speaker. Instead of teaching school in Tel Aviv as he would prefer, Jake has to bend to the demands of his wife’s family and achieve tenure. Consequently he is stuck with ‘this old fart’ (Larkin) for ‘at least a year’. ‘Just let me put this bastard on the skids, / I’ll get a couple of semesters leave // To work on Protest Theater.’ The poem is satire only on the surface. Jake may represent the cynicism of the academic racket but, more profoundly, he is a victim of the system. Like the poet whose work he is studying he is fouled up by the gulf between his dreams and hard reality. He also submits himself with a bad grace to living for others. Different though he appears from Larkin, Jake is the poet’s intimate alter ego. His description of his subject conveys the poet’s self-judgement: ‘Not out of kicks or something happening – / One of those old-type
natural
fouled-up guys’. Jake’s boring task is to write the biography of the author of ‘Toads’. The toad with whom Jake is walking down Cemetery Road is Larkin.
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By 1968 the downward direction of Larkin’s life was firmly established. His poetry had become a widely spaced series of ever more subtly successful poems about failure. As if to mark the loss of his past, in September the Hartleys, his first friends in Hull, split up, and Jean left Hull Road, Hessle, with her daughters.
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He remained friends with Jean after George left Hull, but kept ‘very much on the sidelines’, unwilling to complicate his already difficult relations with his publisher.
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His health was in steep decline. He told Brian Cox that, after a party for
Critical Quarterly
in October, he woke up feeling so terrible that he went ‘on the wagon for a month’.
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He was aware of being full of shallow anger, often out of proportion to any cause. In November he complained to Robert Conquest that the University was licking ‘the blacking off the boots of all students in sight’.
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Later in the month he broke into a heartfelt lament in a letter to Monica over the lost simplicity of his years in Belfast and the early time in Hull:

Oh dear, it’s such a nice day. I wish I could go out on my bike as in my youth, instead of taking the car to the Library,
for work
. As I said in an earlier letter, I spend my days in meetings, & then there’s all the post stuff to be fitted in somewhere. I’d fit it into the lavatory pan & no error. And then the evening will be all bed changing & eating & bill paying & washing up. No time for anything.
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