Philip Larkin (69 page)

At the time of his move from Pearson Park, Philip’s relationship with Maeve was in abeyance. Her impatience with his indecision had resulted in frequent brief estrangements. ‘I repeatedly dispatched him to sort himself out.’
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The longest break in their affair had begun in 1973 and lasted sixteen months. Now it was briefly broken when he presented her with a copy of his new volume, inscribed ‘For Maeve, with affectionate gratitude for so much – Philip’. She thanked him, a little puzzled, and, as she recalls, he responded: ‘Oh Maeve! You have taught me so much about the breadth and depth of human emotions, and more about my own than anyone has ever done.’
¹²
Though they remained on distant terms for several more months, his words impressed her.

His routines repeated themselves. In September 1974 he and Monica spent the customary holiday in Scotland, and the same month he attended the SCONUL conference, which was held once again in East Anglia. In November he broke his usual rule and agreed to give a reading of his own poetry at his old college, St John’s. In the haunts of his youth he relaxed, drank too much and ended the evening berating ‘that shit Yeats, farting out his histrionic rubbish’.
¹³
Back in Hull his evening routine had now settled into a pattern: gin and tonic first, food accompanied by wine, then a nap followed by a menthol cigarette and another drink before bed.
¹⁴
His health steadily deteriorated. Occasionally he would host record-playing sessions with his jazz friends including the Professor of History, John Kenyon, Mike Bowen of the University’s Audio-Visual Centre and John White from the American Studies Department. At the end of the year he edited the
Christmas Supplement
of the Poetry Book Society, and included ‘The Life with a Hole in It’. The turn of the year brought his usual attack of despair. He wrote to Judy Egerton on 2 January 1975, ‘What an absurd, empty life! And the grave yawns.’
¹⁵

The following year however saw an unexpected emotional and poetic flowering. Early in the year his estrangement from Maeve ended. Because the quarrel had lasted longer than usual, the reconciliation was particularly warm and, momentously, their relationship at last became fully physical. As she told Motion in 1992, she ‘yielded to temptation, but only on
very
rare and isolated occasions, and at a cost of grave violation to my conscience, since I never, in principle, abandoned my stand on pre-marital sex’.
¹⁶
It is difficult, and perhaps unnecessary, to be sure exactly what occurred between them. Feeling that she had been too confiding to Motion in the early 1990s, she was very reticent when writing her memoir in 2000–2. However, more than one informed source attests that, overweight and undermined by drink, Larkin was by this time descending into impotence. Perhaps his own perception of inadequacy, unsuspected by her, gave Maeve’s late access of passion a disorientating intensity for him. The statue of her beauty was walking, and he found himself wading in her wake. From Maeve’s innocent viewpoint ‘we embarked on the most serene phase of our relationship’.
¹⁷
Following this reconciliation, she wrote, ‘our friendship continued on this heady course until 1978’.
¹⁸
Her language is characteristically decorous. Friendship is not usually described as running a ‘heady course’. The tone of their relationship is illustrated by their innocent, chatty correspondence. Following his first encounter with Barbara Pym, whom he had finally arranged to meet on St George’s Day 1975, in the Randolph Hotel, Oxford, he wrote to her:

The day has turned into a really pleasant one as far as the sun is concerned – very warm & friendly. B. Pym was a bit like Joyce Grenfell, but very pleasant and accommodating.

She is still under care after her mastectomy (is it?) and of course she did have a sort of stroke recently, but she seemed quite normal.

How are you, dear? I hope the disagreeable impact of returning to work has worn off, and Brenda C. has come back. I dread the start of term [. . .]
¹⁹

There is a disingenuousness in his naive phrases: ‘mastectomy (is it?)’, ‘a sort of stroke’.

He now occupied a secure place in the canon; Alan Brownjohn published a pamphlet on his work in the British Council ‘Writers and their Work’ series. On 16 June Harold Pinter, Charles Osborne and Ian Hamilton participated in a celebratory
Evening without Philip Larkin
at the Mermaid Theatre in London. His public image was on display at the end of May 1975 during a visit to Hull by Ted Hughes. Larkin wrote to Charles Monteith: ‘He filled our hall and got a great reception. I was in the chair, providing a sophisticated, insincere, effete, and gold-watch-chained alternative to his primitive forthright virile leather-jacketed
persona
.’
²⁰
A fortnight later he let rip more maliciously in a letter to Conquest: ‘At Ilkley literature festival a woman shrieked and vomited during a Ted Hughes reading. I must say I’ve never felt like shrieking. We had the old crow over at Hull recently, looking like a Christmas present from Easter Island. He’s all right when not reading!’
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Larkin positioned a framed photograph taken on this occasion above the cistern of his downstairs toilet. It shows Hughes standing mid-stage, a sexually magnetic shaman, while Larkin, the poet-librarian, sits uncomfortably at a table to one side. Opposite this picture, high on the wall he hung an antique ceramic plate bearing the legend ‘Prepare to Meet thy God’ in ornate letters, a reminder perhaps that one should not be surprised to meet one’s maker with one’s trousers about one’s ankles. He was making his domestic environment into a self-parody.

He now turned to his second commissioned poem, in celebration of the Humber Bridge. After initial drafts in the eighth workbook between January and 3 April 1975, Larkin bought a small dark-red ‘Collins Ideal 468’ hard-backed manuscript book, in which he continued drafting between the end of May and the end of July.
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Was this perhaps because the poem was ‘required’ rather than ‘inspired’ writing? His heart was not in this celebration of community. Anthony Hedges recalls Larkin telling him that he ‘felt more like writing a threnody for the things he loved about the region which the bridge would put an end to’.
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Hedges estimated that 250 lines would be needed for a piece lasting forty minutes. In the event Larkin wrote forty lines, and when Hedges said he needed more, the poet regretted that there was nothing he could do. The composer recalls, ‘I produced a long slow introduction and lots of repetition.’ Larkin’s ambiguous feelings about the project inhibited him from giving the work a title. Hedges headed the manuscript ‘A Humberside Cantata’. But Sidney Hainsworth from Fenner, the company that had commissioned the work, insisted on the title ‘Bridge for the Living’. Hedges recalled: ‘Philip told me he thought it made it sound like a card game Instruction Manual for adults.’
²⁴

The words lend themselves well to a musical setting. The sections are clear and easily apprehended, beginning with an apostrophe to the ‘Isolate city’ by the sea, ‘Half-turned to Europe’, and continuing with contrasted word pictures of Holderness in summer and winter. The register is a pastiche of ‘Here’, diluted with dignified poetic diction (‘Isolate’, ‘parley’, ‘manifest’). Arresting phrases catch the ear above the music:

plain gulls stand,

Sharp fox and brilliant pheasant walk, and wide

Wind-muscled wheatfields wash round villages,

Their churches half-submerged in leaf.

Larkin also gave Hedges the opportunity for fugato chiming effects in the lines ‘Tall church-towers parley, airily audible, / Howden and Beverley, Hedon and Patrington’. The description of the suspended single span of the bridge, ‘A swallow-fall and rise of one plain line’, takes up, appropriately, one plain line. As the final four quatrains turn to the impact of the new bridge the first-person plural pronoun becomes prominent, asserting the new community created by the bridge: ‘our solitude’, ‘our dear landscape’, ‘our lives’, ‘we may give’, ‘we are’, ‘we live’. Descending briefly to vacuous blarney, the poet reviews the ‘Lost centuries of local lives’, which fell short ‘where they began’, but which now ‘reassemble and unclose’, having been ‘resurrected’ by the new connections provided by the bridge. ‘Here’ culminated in a vision of unfenced existence, out of reach; ‘Bridge for the Living’, in contrast, ends with the bridge ‘reaching’ grandiosely ‘for the world’. Nevertheless, it is a rhetorically effective work, with a memorable final line: ‘Always it is by bridges that we live.’
²⁵

The new ‘heady’ relationship with Maeve, delightful and fresh though it was, was not as simply ‘serene’ for him as it seemed to her. Indeed the poem which it inspired is anguished and despairing. Her ‘pre-marital sex’ was for him touched with the anxious intensity of pre-mortality sex. When she departed for Ireland in 1975, leaving him to take his regular holiday in Scotland with Monica, he felt unaccountably bereft. He wrote to her on 7 August: ‘I wish you hadn’t gone away just when you did: I miss you. A fearful boiling night was diversified by two dreams about you, both “losing dreams” – you going off with someone else – wch was all very silly, for how can one lose what one does not possess?’
²⁶
These dreams precipitated ‘Love Again’, on which he worked over the following months. Its title appears to be an ironic reference to the song made famous by Marlene Dietrich, ‘Falling in Love Again’.
²⁷
The poet’s beloved has left a party with another man and he has returned home for an unsatisfactory wank at ten past three in the morning. In genre the poem is a blues anti-aubade of the small hours. In a bitter echo of ‘Broadcast’ the woman is inaccessible and the poet contemplates his imagined picture of her. But in ‘Broadcast’ the vision was fresh and beautiful; here it is wilfully coarsened by obscene language (‘Someone else feeling her breasts and cunt’), the more shocking since Maeve was herself verbally innocent. When Motion showed her the poem after Philip’s death she thought that ‘wanking’ was ‘waking’ mistyped.
²⁸
These are the only appearances in Larkin’s poetry of ‘cunt’ and ‘wanking’. He seems to have been aware, at this last gasp of inspiration, that these key words, with the unique quality they would bring, remained to be used. Without them his oeuvre
would be incomplete.

On the hard-core, impersonal level the poem depicts sex as a simple biological imperative, the time-honoured irritant of ‘Dry-Point’, again subjecting the poet to humiliating desire (‘spilt like petrol’ as he puts it in an early draft),
²⁹
followed by the usual post-masturbatory pain, ‘like dysentery’. Worse, the familiar dreary and compulsive situation opens up the long perspective of his failed bachelor life. In ‘Round Another Point’ in 1951 Larkin’s persona, Miller, had painted a grim picture of Geraint’s unmarried future: ‘Well, I hope you enjoy yourself – that’s about all you will enjoy [. . .] when you’re sitting, a wanked-out seventy, in your third-floor bed-sitter in Bayswater staring at a hole in the carpet, waiting for the pubs to open [. . .]’
³⁰
Now, at fifty-three, the poet finds himself already in something like this situation.

The bedroom hot as a bakery,

The drink gone dead, without showing how

To meet tomorrow [. . .]

It seems likely that the title also has a more personal, private significance. In a letter of 8 January 1946 the young Larkin had organized the first meeting between Kingsley Amis and Ruth Bowman. He ended the letter to Kingsley in his customary jokey style: ‘love / philip footwarmer’. Then, apprehensive about the coming confrontation between his abrasive masculine and gentle feminine sides, he added a long, anxious postscript detailing train times and connections. He eventually signed off for a second time: ‘Love again (Don’t look like that.)’
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There seems little doubt that this casual phrase stayed with him, reminding him of this traumatic meeting, and the lifelong failure to ‘sort himself out’ which it symbolized.
³²

But the emotions of the poem did not affect the new ‘serenity’ of the relationship as it was perceived by Maeve. On 3 November, she wrote telling him not to be anxious about his forthcoming trip to London to receive the CBE: ‘you are bound to carry off the occasion with grace and great dignity’. She went on to wonder at the continuing freshness of their affection: