Philip Larkin (19 page)

The novel ends on the brink of the post-humanist void. Like Kemp, Katherine burns all her boats in a humiliating confrontation with her boss, Mr Anstey, over a telegram which Robin has sent to her at the Library. (Larkin’s self-depreciation perhaps shows itself in the depiction of the librarian as a self-important bully.)
⁴⁸
She confirms her outsider status by addressing Anstey ‘with an exaggerated foreign accent she had learned annoyed people’.
⁴⁹
More practically she compounds her difficulties as a refugee by giving up her job. But Larkin makes nothing of her practical financial plight. Instead we follow her back to her attic, where her tenuous English dream of summer collides with wintry reality in the form of the real Robin, a provincial auctioneer, now a soldier, ‘rather drunk’ and importunate for sex. Wearily she succumbs, naming ‘a condition that he accepted’, presumably a contraceptive strategy such as avoidance of full penetration.
⁵⁰
United in their alienation the foreign woman and the Englishman drift together into sleep:

There was the snow, and her watch ticking. So many snowflakes, so many seconds. As time passed they seemed to mingle in their minds, heaping up into a vast shape that might be a burial mound, or the cliff of an iceberg whose summit is out of sight. Into its shadow dreams crowded, full of conceptions and stirrings of cold, as if icefloes were moving down a lightless channel of water [. . .] Unsatisfied dreams rose and fell about them, crying out against their implacability, but in the end glad that such order, such destiny, existed. Against this knowledge, the heart, the will, and all that made for protest, could at last sleep.
⁵¹

The writing is tenuous and insubstantial, imitating the drift into sleep. But it is also a touch forced and artificial.

Though Larkin later expressed a certain affection for
Jill
, recollecting his Oxford undergraduate days with nostalgia, he developed an active distaste for
A Girl in Winter
. He wrote to Barbara Pym in 1961: ‘I can’t
bear
to look at
A G. in W.
: it seems so knowing and smart.’
⁵²
There seems something painfully personal behind his feeling. Perhaps its association with his own early experiences in Germany, or with his failed relationship with Ruth, or with the miserable winter of 1944 in provincial Wellington, unduly coloured his judgement of this minor masterpiece of poetic prose. Or perhaps his dislike was simply a result of bitter disappointment that, despite all his efforts, he never succeeded in following it with a third novel.

6

The Grip of Light

1945–8

On his twenty-third birthday, 9 August 1945, Larkin gave Amis a gloomy account of his relationship with Ruth, ‘the school captain’, or ‘Misruth’ as they called her: ‘As long as she keeps on talking about me I am flattered. When she criticizes me, or speaks of herself, I am bored.’ He attempted to titillate his friend: ‘she has begun to write a novel about her school days, with a lot of lesbianism in it’.
¹
But in reality Ruth had no interest in his literary ‘lesbianism’. She expected straightforward commitment, and her ingenuous devotion put him off the idea of sex: ‘I really do not think it likely I shall ever get into the same bed as anyone again because it is so much trouble, almost as much trouble as standing for Parliament. I have formed a very low opinion of women [. . .]’ His phrasing is evasive. He was at this time effectively still a virgin. Amis was puzzled that his friend failed to follow through his pursuit of sexual satisfaction. But Larkin feared for his freedom. Earlier in this letter he mentioned a ‘brawny young man’ he knew in Wellington ‘who has just married and fucked his wife without a french letter so that she is now going to have a baby’.
²

Ruth was five years younger than Larkin, and suffered from an inherited condition which made her slightly lame. She shared with Penelope Scott Stokes a vein of victimhood, confiding to Philip: ‘When I was small if anything I ate had a peculiar flavour I immediately suspected that my mother had grown tired of me and was trying to poison me.’
³
Larkin felt protective towards her and wished to give her the affection for which she longed. He related a dream to Sutton in which, ‘at some richly-coloured wedding celebrations I met – or, as it almost seemed, remet – a beautiful lame girl, whom I gladly felt was mine for keeps. This cheered me up for a bit.’
⁴

In September 1945, now eighteen, Ruth was accepted to read English at King’s College London. Her imminent departure prompted their first sexual encounter. Shortly afterwards she wrote humbly from London: ‘The fact that you like me and have made love to me is the greatest source of pride and happiness in my life.’
⁵
There is something ominous in her past perfect tense – ‘and have made love to me’ – as though she were steeling herself for the end of the relationship. But Philip remained loyal. He travelled to London at weekends and sometimes met Ruth secretly in Wellington after the Library closed. They went on trips together to D. H. Lawrence’s Eastwood and Hardy’s Dorchester. The emotional quality of the relationship would be easier to imagine if we could read any of the ‘over four hundred letters’ which, as he recalls in his later poem, ‘Wild Oats’, he sent to her over seven years. But when the relationship ended her grandfather persuaded her to destroy them.
⁶
Today we see the relationship only as refracted through the scathing self-criticism of Larkin’s letters to Sutton and the ribaldry of his letters to Amis. September 1945 was also the month Amis was demobbed. But Philip at first avoided bringing Kingsley and Ruth together. They met for the first time only in January 1946. Ruth recalled that Kingsley ‘wanted to make Philip a “love ’em and lose ’em” type. He was possessive of Philip and tried to keep me separate from him.’
⁷

Shortly before he sent the typescript of
The North Ship
to Reginald Caton in October 1944, Larkin had begun to write the drafts of his poems in a substantial limp-bound manuscript workbook.
⁸
Of little apparent significance at the time, the move seems in retrospect momentous. This was the first of eight books in which Larkin would compose virtually all his mature poetry. By the time he moved on to the second workbook in 1950 he had become a great poet. As time went on, his drafting became increasingly consistent. He wrote in pencil, generally working on one stanza at a time and often inserting dates when he considered a work complete. From April 1959 onward he generally started a fresh page whenever he began a new session of drafting. In many cases he produced a separate typescript including final corrections. He thus made it possible, to a degree unknown in other poets, to follow the sequence of his poems, to see the relative ease or difficulty with which he brought, or failed to bring them to completion, and to relate them to the events of his life. His sense of the importance of this record of the creative process was shown by his donation, in 1964, of his first workbook, covering 1944–50, to the British Library. At that time he tore out several pages containing material too personal to be made public. Significantly, however, he did not destroy them, but kept them to await ultimate restoration after his death.
⁹
His sense of the integrity of his oeuvre is strong.

At first, however, his poetry showed little change. There is an eloquent epigrammatic bleakness in the five lines of ‘To S.L.’ in which the poet craves the ‘gift’ of his father’s ‘courage and indifference’ in the face of a hostile world.
¹⁰
However, the other poems completed during 1945 do not reach this level. ‘Coming at last to night’s most thankful springs’ is irritatingly obscure; ‘Plymouth’, a portrait of an aged seafarer, is clumsily phrased; ‘Lift through the breaking day’, ‘Portrait’ and ‘Past days of gales’ are elusively symbolist.
¹¹
However, ‘Who whistled for the wind’, written in December, has hidden surprises:

Who whistled for the wind, that it should break

Gently, on this air?

On what ground was it gathered, where

For the carrying, for its own sake,

Is night so gifted?

Montgomery no doubt easily found the answer to the poem’s riddle. This gently breaking, whistled-for wind, gathering and then ‘gifting’ the night, is a fart, a poetically appropriate, if unconventional reminder of the process of corruption and decay: ‘Mind never met / Image of death like this [. . .]’ Perhaps the poem is a disrespectful end-of-year farewell to the Yeatsian mode.
¹²

The following month, January 1946, Larkin moved into new lodgings at 7 Ladycroft, Wellington, the windows of which faced east.
¹³
As the days lengthened he was woken earlier and earlier in the morning by the sun. The impact of this insistent dawn light was powerful, long lasting and ambiguous. In numerous later poems light figures as a source of exaltation (‘Wedding-Wind’, ‘Here’, ‘Livings II’), or alternatively as the threatening agent of exposure (‘Deceptions’, ‘Aubade’). His light-enforced wakefulness coincided with a new literary influence: ‘It seemed too early to get up, so I used to read, and it happened that I had Hardy’s own selection of his poems, and I began to read them and was immediately struck by them. I was struck by their tunefulness and their feeling, and the sense that here was somebody writing about things I was beginning to feel myself.’
¹⁴
Here, it seemed, was a poet who had more direct relevance to Larkin’s life in Wellington than his previous models: ‘I was beginning to find out what life was about, and that’s precisely what I found in Hardy [. . .] He’s not a transcendental writer, he’s not a Yeats, he’s not an Eliot; his subjects are men, the life of men, time and the passing of time, love and the fading of love.’
¹⁵
Read in the hard light of dawn, Hardy offered Larkin a corrective to the metaphysics of Dylan Thomas and the twilight of Yeats. ‘When I came to Hardy it was with the sense of relief that I didn’t have to try and jack myself up to a concept of poetry that lay outside my own life – this is perhaps what I felt Yeats was trying to make me do. One could simply relapse back into one’s own life and write from it.’
¹⁶

The influence of Hardy on Larkin was all-pervasive. Some of his later writing echoes the earlier poet. The conclusion of ‘An Arundel Tomb’ has the same rhetorical turn as that of ‘The Darkling Thrush’, building poignant hope on transparently flimsy foundations. The jam in Larkin’s ‘An April Sunday brings the snow’ metonymically recalls his father’s life in the same way as the burning logs recall Hardy’s sister in ‘Logs on the Hearth’. ‘No Road’ is Larkin’s version of ‘Neutral Tones’. ‘Skin’ and ‘Send No Money’ may be compared with ‘I Look into My Glass’. ‘Nothing To Be Said’ seems to owe something to ‘The Dead Man Walking’. Less specifically there is something Hardyesque about such subjects as old-fashioned sheet music in a piano stool (‘Love Songs in Age’), an evangelical preacher (‘Faith Healing’), an empty church viewed with a sceptical eye (‘Church Going’), the picturesque muddle of provincial weddings (‘The Whitsun Weddings’). More generally, he shares Hardy’s empathy with marginalized or victimized women.

As Larkin’s sensibility matured, his poetry underwent an unobtrusive transformation. The fourteen poems completed in 1946 are all more clearly focused and assured than the 1945 works. Anthony Thwaite’s decision, in the 1988
Collected Poems
, to separate the ‘early poems’ from the mature poetry at the beginning of 1946 seems all but inevitable. ‘Going’, completed on 23 February 1946, and at first untitled, stands at the beginning of his mature phase. Like ‘Who whistled for the wind’ it is a primitive riddle, the answer being ‘Death’. Indeed it would not seem out of place in a collection of Anglo-Saxon riddles. But it is also a latter-day imagist poem. Its rhymelessness, its symbolist imagery, the abrupt sentences and final rhetorical question align it with such poems as ‘The Pool’ and ‘Sea Rose’, by HD. And the way the initial regular iambs disintegrate into unmetrical free verse imitates the darkening of dusk/death in the way recommended by Ezra Pound in his descriptions of the
‘image’
. The result is a memorable jewel of a poem. In 1947 in the typescript of
In the Grip of Light
he titled it ‘Dying Day’, eliding the dying of the light at sunset with the day of the speaker’s death. He also included it, untitled, in
XX Poems
(1951) and it became, with its final title, the earliest written of the works included in his first mature collection,
The Less Deceived
, in 1955.