Philip Larkin (67 page)

Larkin was by now a national figure. In early April 1973 he and Monica were invited to a Garden Party at Buckingham Palace. He commented to Judy Egerton: ‘Queen was pleasant enough, but I didn’t have enough of her to lose my nervousness [. . .] I got on well enough with the Keeper of the Royal Stamps.’
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In May, Faber published a paperback edition of
The North Ship
. However his professional life was becoming more stressful. With the oil crisis of 1973 the quinquennial grant, the government’s funding mechanism for universities, was suddenly reduced. Nevertheless it remained national policy for higher education to expand. Student numbers at Hull grew inexorably while staffing was reduced. The elitist replica of Oxbridge which Larkin had entered in 1955 was under pressure to turn itself into an institution of mass education.
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Between 1974 and 1977 there was a net loss of 13.5 full-time equivalent posts in the Library.
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Despite this contraction the work was becoming more complex and technologically more complicated. A full-time archivist was appointed, and the first experiments in computerization were made. Larkin was never comfortable with the new technology, which he delegated to Brenda Moon, Deputy Librarian from 1962 until 1980. By the beginning of 1974 he listed among ‘Crises at Hull’: ‘New Computer to be stuffed into vital Library area, because they’ve nowhere to put it, me going down fighting’.
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His mother was now eighty-seven and in the midst of all his activities he found time to keep her supplied with an unbroken flow of news and reassurance. In a one-page letter of Thursday 3 May 1973 he tells her, ‘It’s a grey day here, windy and rather chilly.’ He describes an interview with the local radio station about the Oxford anthology. ‘I had a nice letter from you this morning – thank you for taking the trouble to write. I don’t expect you have got your
new
spectacles yet, but I know they have been ordered. It will be nicer when they come, you’ll be able to read more easily.’ He inserts a charming cartoon of a seal in a mob-cap reading a newspaper, and ends, ‘Have you had any of Brenda’s cake?’ There is something deeply moving about this lifelong correspondence: intimate, polite and interminable.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Larkin had succeeded in making for himself the private creative space for the poems which he was still able to write. But he was aware that his inspiration was failing. Now, in June 1973, having completed two new reflective elegies (‘The Building’ and ‘The Old Fools’), and despairing of being able to produce a collection of the extent of
The Less Deceived
(twenty-nine poems) or
The Whitsun Weddings
(thirty-two), he assembled a volume of twenty-five poems (counting the ‘Livings’ sequence as three), including the uneasy ‘Homage to a Government’ and the commissioned ‘Going, Going’.
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He sent it to Faber with an apologetic letter: ‘if I thought I were likely to write five more poems in the space of a few months I should hold back until I had done so. Unfortunately I don’t feel this.’
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He knew that this would be his final volume. At the age of fifty he had all but fulfilled his literary potential, and was burnt out.

His valedictory mood was intensified by the death, in September, of his boyhood idol W. H. Auden. He wrote to Anthony Thwaite: ‘So Auden is no more. I felt terribly shocked when I saw the news. I imagined he would knock on another ten years, he seemed to have life taped.’ He added dispassionately: ‘At the same time I still don’t think he’d written much worth reading since 1939, and in some respects (“Graffiti”) he’d become a positive embarrassment.’
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A memorial service was held at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, on 27 October 1973. After the ceremony Betjeman confided that he was considering resigning the Laureateship and asked Larkin if he might be prepared to take it on.
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Larkin evaded the question. It was already too late.

His next poem, the poignantly lacklustre ‘Show Saturday’, reflects the valedictory gloom of this time. For many years Philip and Monica had made regular visits to the Autumn Fair in Bellingham, Northumberland. Now as winter 1973 came on, he clung for stability to this fixed ritual. He dated a near-final draft in the workbook ‘3.12.73’, and a week later wrote to Anthony Thwaite: ‘I don’t know whether to shove it into HIGH WINDOWS, of which I have now had the proofs and which they want back by January 4th. It would add bulk and roughage, I suppose – both much needed qualities.’
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There is more here, perhaps, than his customary self-critical reflex. Though ‘Show Saturday’ has the form and extent of one of his major reflective odes, its impact is moody and subdued in comparison with ‘The Building’ and ‘The Old Fools’.

It is by far the most crowdedly ‘literal’ of Larkin’s works, reading at times like jotted directions to the director of a documentary film: ‘Grey day for the Show, but cars jam the narrow lanes. / Inside, on the field, judging has started: dogs / (Set their legs back, hold out their tails) [. . .]’ The visual details catch exactly the mix of business-deals and homespun holiday pleasure of such country fairs (‘Bead-stalls, balloon-men, a Bank; a beer-marquee that / Half-screens a canvas Gents’). But there is little sense of charm or enjoyment. The poet seems listless and bemused, willing himself into enthusiasm for these quaint rituals: ‘The jumping’s on next [. . .] There’s more than just animals [. . .]’ However, a contrasting undercurrent of surrealist abstraction makes the proceedings seem weird and enigmatic:

Folks sit about on bales,

Like great straw dice. For each scene is linked by spaces

Not given to anything much, where kids scrap, freed,

While their owners stare different ways with incurious faces.

The kids have ‘owners’ rather than parents. This depersonalization continues in the slow-motion gymnopedic description of the wrestlers: ‘One falls: they shake hands, / [. . .] They’re not so much fights / As long immobile strainings that end in unbalance / With one on his back, unharmed, while the other stands / Smoothing his hair.’ The Harrington Brothers were a fixture in the Bellingham programme and Larkin photographed them on more than one visit. But this description has no familiarity or affection about it. It is formal and abstracted: Seurat or Satie rather than Surtees.

The poet’s attention turns to the ‘tent of growing and making’. There is a hint of boredom in the listing of the categories to be judged:

four brown eggs, four white eggs,

Four plain scones, four dropped scones, pure excellences that enclose

A recession of skills. And after them, lambing-sticks, rugs,

Needlework, knitted caps, baskets, all worthy, all well done [. . .]

The bald prosiness is hardly redeemed by the makeshift poetic waffle of ‘pure excellences that enclose / A recession of skills’. Is the speaker perhaps irritated at being required to feign an interest in these trivialities (‘all worthy, all well done’)? Can we read a subtext of refracted dialogue here, as the poet and his companion roam about the show, she holding the programme of events, directing his attention to the next attraction, while he, unable to snap out of his depression, pays listless attention? It seems painfully obvious that the poet has no real interest in knitted caps or lambing-sticks. Andrew Motion suggests that ‘Show Saturday’ is in some sense a love poem to Monica.
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And this may account for the way it sometimes reads like a conversation with a shadowy companion who comes between poet and reader.

It is in the final three stanzas that the work realizes its poetic potential; but in a strangely indirect way. The car-park thins as the community breaks up into its constituent families, returning to private addresses ‘In high stone one-street villages, empty at dusk’. There is a wan echo here of the affirmation of social community of ‘The Whitsun Weddings’. Common humanity is embodied in stereotypes, though with less warmth than in the earlier work: ‘dog-breeding wool-defined women, / Children all saddle-swank, mugfaced middleaged wives / Glaring at jellies [. . .]’ The humour lacks élan. Moreover ‘one-street villages, empty at dusk’, make an ambiguous image of continuing life. The poet’s valediction implies an ending more conclusive than seems justified by the subject. They all return: ‘To winter coming, as the dismantled Show / Itself dies back into the area of work’. With its private subtextual reference to Laforgue’s poem, this is more self-elegy than celebration of communal solidarity. Like the architecture of the hospital in ‘The Building’, the Show is an elaborate displacement activity, ‘something people do’ to keep the thought of death at bay:

Let it stay hidden there like strength, below

Sale-bills and swindling; something people do,

Not noticing how time’s rolling smithy-smoke

Shadows much greater gestures; something they share

That breaks ancestrally each year into

Regenerate union. Let it always be there.

The incantatory language, with its ceremonious conservative rhetoric (‘ancestrally [. . .] Regenerate union’) only underlines the feebleness of the command: ‘Let it always be there.’

It is difficult to detect in any of this the nationalistic celebration which some critics have found in the poem. Motion calls it ‘a huge hymn to old England’. Neil Corcoran feels that the final lines ‘witness to a genuine religious feeling’ attached to ‘an enduring Englishness’. In a characteristic misreading Seamus Heaney misquotes the final phrase to give it more ideological fervour, ‘Let it always be so,’ and asserts that the conclusion ‘beautifully expresses a nostalgic patriotism which is also an important part of this poet’s make-up’.
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On 8 January 1974 Larkin wrote to Anthony Thwaite thanking him for his positive verdict on ‘Show Saturday’. His final collection was complete and he took the opportunity to take stock of his achievement:

you know I am a self-deprecating sort of character – I don’t think I write well – just better than anyone else – No, seriously, this book does seem a ragbag, and I
do
think that the word will go forth ‘Donnez la côtelette à Larquin!’ (‘Give Larkin the chop’) – in a way it’s a compliment (only big trees get the axe) but in another it’s melancholy [. . .]

Talking about la côtelette, I had a
French
translation of ‘Livings’ sent me today. Bloody funny. The first line is

Je fais des affaires avec les fermiers, dans le genre bains anti-parasites et

                        aliments pour bestiaux

Quite Whitmanesque, isn’t it? ‘Our butler, Starveling’ comes out as ‘Notre maître d’hotel, Laffamé’.
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His comment that he doesn’t write well, ‘just better than anyone else’, would be vanity from any other poet. But he does genuinely doubt the quality of even his best work. And he is right that, in comparison with the earlier mature volumes,
High Windows
is something of a ‘ragbag’. The inspiration of many of the poems is heavily mediated and secondary, and the style elusive and elliptical: the work of ‘Larquin’ rather than Larkin. In this final volume however we find the most unpredictably beautiful colours in his oeuvre. ‘Strangeness’ always made more sense to him than his own familiar ‘establishments’, and poems like ‘The Card-Players’, ‘The Old Fools’, ‘Livings II’ and ‘Money’ have the strangeness of unique originality.

Larkin’s final collection was named after the high-windowed room in which he had lived for most of the last two decades. Now, shortly after Christmas, he learnt that this room was no longer to be his. The University intended to sell off some of its ‘worst properties’, including 32 Pearson Park. In a letter to Anthony Thwaite of 30 December he anticipated his rehousing with grim gusto:

This was Mr Bleaney’s bungalow,

Standing in the concrete jungle, o-

ver-looking an arterial road –

Here I live with old Toad.
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