Philip Larkin (9 page)

This evening is purely beautiful – a whitish sky near the sun, sweeping over to deep blue in the east. The stone wall is yellow. Shadows of poplars are very translucent at the tips. Dogs run through the stream. People wheel bicycles between the flowerbeds. The river runs between green, rounded banks and is lined with trees. A woman wheeling a pram, and a soldier, have come up to this seat. The soldier has his thumbs in his pockets and is quite at his ease. Planes crawl like lice over the sky. I’m afraid I’m not much good at description.

The park is full of soldiers. The baby is crying uneasily, waving tiny paws over the wool coverlet.
⁵⁰

As dusk descends Philip wishes Jim many happy returns on his twenty-first birthday and reflects seriously on their future: ‘At no point can one say “Now I am this, or that”. One discovers it slowly [. . .] The sun has sunk and shows a great, cloud-paced sky, etched and whorl[ed]. It is a bit colder. Yesterday I rode 30 miles and feel fine. If we had peace and a bit of money we could live damned well. Also read “The Rainbow” again.’
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Next day he picks up his account as he listens to jazz. He compliments Jim on his letters (‘They express something firm and unshaken’), and tells him that the previous evening he wrote a poem: ‘My poytry is all to buggery at present. The pure wine of Auden has been shamefully adulterated by Spender’s still lemonade and Dylan’s Welsh whiskey.’ He suddenly dramatizes his immediate writing process: ‘I rather like this paper I am writing on. Large and opulent [. . .] Fuck this bastiobating pen.’
⁵²
He brings the letter to an end with a reflection that all his friends, with the exception of Philip Brown, are in the army or navy. He, in contrast, is on the edge of events, lonely but safe. He signs off with verve: ‘Well, I’ll cock off. Whenever you read this, in darkness or sea-dingle, I hope you’ll be well & happy. I will write again shortly. Yours ever,
Philip
.’ The enclosed poem shifts borrowed tones between the yearning Yeats (‘I stand at the kerb, and hear / The day of shops break over my feet’), the ‘modern’ Auden (‘the crowd / Wave in the cinema like weed’), and the ‘metaphysical’ Dylan Thomas (‘the navigating worm’). Nevertheless it conveys real emotion:

I hear you are at sea, and at once

In my head the anonymous ship

Swings like a lamp;

I think of equipment and meals, and the long

Sane hours of a funnel

Against the birdless, interleaving plain.
⁵³

The letter to Amis, written two days later on 20 August 1942, is more edgy and argumentative. After complimenting his friend on his latest letter (‘I read it on the way to the office, cackling liberally’), he resumes an ongoing disagreement with a show of finger-wagging pomposity: ‘Might I remind you that the greatest artists and philosophers did not enjoy the benefits of heterosexuality. If I were not too lazy, I would get up a few references for you.’ Then, apprehending that his tone might antagonize his friend, he humours Kingsley’s homophobic prejudices: ‘(NB This is
not
serious – do you catch the note of hysteria.) I put my mental age as fifteen; and likely to remain so many moons, I should imagine.’
⁵⁴
Amis has sent him a blues lyric which he found ‘highly entertaining’, and he promises to enclose his own ‘Fuel Form Blues composed & illuminated at the office’. He has just been listening on the radio to ‘the History of Jazz, Ch 16’: ‘Very good – after each programme I make frenzied notes of records to buy when I go back to Oxf., if I do [. . .] I have a great admiration for Armstrong – “he hath outsoared the shadow of our night” etc.’
⁵⁵

With calculated abruptness he shifts to more personal matters: ‘2.3 was the reading on my flogging chart. I’m not quite sure what it
signifies
: it’s either times per day, or days per time. The former, I rather fancy. Present reading is 2.2.’ After this masturbatory calculation he abruptly turns to a set-piece description of his fellow workers at the Fuel Office, displaying his skill in characterization for his aspiring novelist friend. Mr Turner, ‘an enormous comic ex-policeman’, ‘thrusts a pile of papers on my desk & says “You might just check that, Mistah – er –” I remain Mister Er, although he knows my name
perfectly
well [. . .] His favourite phrase is “I think we’ve done enough, for today” said in monumental simplicity & sincerity.’
⁵⁶
Larkin has, it seems, developed a more interesting relationship with his closest office colleague:

After cautious fencing, Mrs Glencross & I have begun to swear. I say sod, bugger, bloody, and balls. She says bugger, bloody, and bum. The latter amuses me intensely. I have an awful moral compulsion to say fuck & shit as well, but haven’t dared to yet. It might horrify you that such things become important. They do. This morning, after she had been scoffing
⁵⁷
abt Prince George,
⁵⁸
I made a flippant remark like ‘One less to shoot when the Revolution comes’ which, before I knew where I was, had developed into the kind of conversation ‘Well, I always say to people who run England down, if you know a better,
go
to it!’ However, we compromised by agreeing that Hitler could have made Germany ‘the finest country in the world’.
⁵⁹

To preserve masculine solidarity with Amis, Larkin presents this verbal brinkmanship as a skirmish in the battle of the sexes, omitting the facts which he records in a separate biographical fragment, that Mrs Glencross’s husband was a prisoner of war and she had recently given birth.
⁶⁰
By referring to her always as ‘Mrs Glencross’ he also obscures the fact that she was only twenty-seven. There is more friendship and fellow feeling in this relationship than he reveals to Amis.

Richard Bradford attributes the difference between the levels of Larkin’s and Amis’s sexual activity at this period to Larkin’s lack of attractiveness: ‘he did not have Amis’s enviable combination of charm, wit and looks’.
⁶¹
However, Amis was certainly no more charming and witty than Larkin, and Larkin’s empathy with and respect for women made him less aggressive than Amis in the pursuit of sexual conquest.
⁶²
Philip Brown remembered that Larkin was popular with the women in the Oxford English Club: ‘most of the officers of the Club were girls, and they used to lionize Philip a bit, asking him to tea and so on [. . .] he was charismatic, you see. Girls wanted to find out about him.’
⁶³
At this time Larkin still had the silky fair hair seen in early photographs; though not for much longer. Nuala O’Faolain was later to comment on Larkin’s subtle sexual magnetism. She found him ‘a most attractive man, sending out both a nonthreatening message and a message about being more threatening than his nonthreatening image made him appear’.
⁶⁴

Larkin’s letter to Amis comes to an abrupt close on the pretext that ‘there’s no more of this paper left’. He ends with a suggestive compliment on his correspondent’s sexual adventures:

 . . . God I want to piss. How’s Lizzie?

Busy?                                (don’t misinterpret.)

Wishes –

Here, in embryo, is the caricature relationship between the two men seen later in ‘Letter to a Friend about Girls’: Larkin the timid, unadventurous wimp, Amis the rampant sexual adventurer. The promised lyric, ‘Fuel Form Blues’, is enclosed as a separate typescript.

Oh see that Fuel Form comin’ through the post

Oh
see
that Fuel Form comin’ through the post

It’s five weeks late and worse filled up than most.

[. . .]

I’d rather be a commando, or drive a railway train,

I’d rather be a commando, Lord! drive a railway train,

Than sort dem Fuel Forms into streets again.

[. . .]

Fuckin’ Fuel Forms, gonna carry me to my grave, carry me to my grave.

He adds a vigorous pen sketch of a seven-piece band: piano, double bass, saxophone, guitar, drummer, trumpeter and clarinettist, all jamming away in angular enthusiasm. Motion’s description of Larkin’s mood at this period seems unduly negative: ‘Reading the letters he wrote at the time, it is impossible not to be impressed by the ferocity of his misery. It is also hard not to suspect [. . .] a degree of complacency.’
⁶⁵

These letters to Sutton and Amis show Larkin’s already highly developed literary sense. Texture and tone are calculated to suit the correspondent. To have written to Amis with the earnest sincerity of his letters to Sutton would have incurred sceptical derision; while Sutton would not have appreciated the crude sexual references and sharp caricatures of the letters to Amis. Significantly Larkin scarcely mentions Sutton in his letters to Amis, or Amis in his letters to Sutton; they feed quite different, contradictory aspects of his sensibility. What both letters have in common, however, is their omnivorous, magnanimous appetite for experience of all kinds. It is easy to see why Larkin’s friends so looked forward to receiving his letters, with their vivid interest in the correspondent, evocative epiphanies, quirky self-ironic euphoria and manifest enjoyment of the process of writing itself.

At the end of the first section of the ‘Biographical Details’ typescript, completed on 9 September 1942, Larkin added a brief list of omissions in pen. Then, in different handwriting and at a slant he inserted the name ‘Penelope’. The second section, describing his final year, begins with his fire-watching duties and reading of Dryden and Pope. He then continues: ‘I soon found out that Penelope Scott-Stokes, a girl resembling an Eton boy and whom I had been gently attracted to the term previously had left Somerville and been married. So a sonnet, So through that unripe day . . ., was proved correct.’
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These enigmatic references hint at a private subtext. Penelope, already lost when he first mentions her, was his first muse, and her ambiguous image haunts his work for the next two years. In the winter term of 1941 Larkin had attended a performance of
Twelfth Night
in Somerville College, where he was struck by the first-year student playing Viola. Penelope Scott Stokes’s father ‘had wanted her to be a boy and thus had her hair cut short and dressed her in boy’s clothes’.
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Decades later she herself recalled their failed encounter: ‘He invited me to tea, but I evaded that, making some paltry excuse. We’re talking about
1941
when probably tea was just that. No bed glimpsed through carefully half-opened door. Just a bright fire, toast and cakes fetched from Oliver & Gurden [. . .] One way and another, perhaps at 18 I was wise! The girl-boy in me (Viola well chosen) he found provocative.’
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Penelope appealed to the young poet’s intense literary eroticism. He found himself ‘gently’ attracted by her slight figure, ‘gently’ meaning ‘overwhelmingly’.

It seems a plausible speculation that there was also some more substantial incident which they both later suppressed. In a letter to Amis written on his birthday three years later, in 1945, Larkin recalls: ‘the only advance I ever made to a woman was productive of such scorching embarrassment that the wound is still rawly open. (In response to your unspoken question it wasn’t anyone you knew.) That was over two years ago and if I forget it in ten I shall be agreeably surprised.’
⁶⁹
Robin’s abrupt embrace of Katherine on the punt in his 1947 novel
A Girl in Winter
may perhaps be a version of this incident.
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It is not impossible that he is referring to a different woman, but it seems likely that he made a clumsy physical advance to Penelope, eliciting a vulnerable response which filled him with shame.