Philip Larkin (28 page)

‘Wires’, based on the familiar saying ‘the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence’, was drafted to completion on a single page of the workbook, on 4 November 1950. Clearly pleased with the feat, he told Monica that it was written ‘straight off before breakfast, in pyjamas’.
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On the surface it shows little sign of rhetorical ambition. But it is in fact a verbal device of polished artifice. It has the wittily patterned form of a seventeenth-century ‘emblem’, like the poems by George Herbert in the shape of wings or an altar. Larkin’s pattern is more discreet. In the first quatrain the cattle approach the electrified wire apparently without the constraint of rhyme (abcd). They then rebound in the second quatrain, which recoils from the middle repeated word ‘wires’ (representing a two-strand fence?) as a hidden rhyme scheme makes itself heard (dcba), reversing the first quatrain. The young steers end where they started, except that their encounter with the wires has now made them into old cattle. The fences are now incorporated into their senses.

Larkin commented on ‘Wires’ to Monica, ‘well, just a little verse: no wings’.
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‘Absences’, in contrast, all but completed at the end of the same month, is one of his most sublime works. The first page of drafting beautifully evokes a deserted seascape in delicate phrases which were to undergo much rewriting before the final version:

Rain patters on the sea, water to waters,

A small sound in a giant afternoon,

A sighing floor provoked to tiny craters

And rough winds rub the gloss off water-dunes

Running like walls, floundering into hollows [. . .]
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But he hesitated to take poetic wing. Compelled to answer every mood and gesture with its extreme opposite he devoted the following page, headed at the top left
Verlaine
, to a translation of that author’s ‘À Mademoiselle ***’ (
Parallèlement
,
1889):

Country beauty

That one has in corners,

You relish the harvests,

Flesh and the summer [. . .]

Your swaggering calves,

Your tempting shoulders –

And, high-spirited, cheeky,

Your firm fat bum,

They set in our blood

A soft stupid fire

That drives us crazy

Arse, balls and belly [. . .]
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The seven dimeter quatrains of Verlaine’s original are translated virtually word for word, reproducing faithfully the studied French ‘vernacular’ of the original.
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Larkin’s new demotic register, it seems, has French as well as English origins. The work occupies a single page (the final stanza being in a second column), suggesting that it may have been dashed off in one sitting. Though there is no attempt to reproduce Verlaine’s abba rhyme-scheme, the translation is all but complete; only one word in the penultimate stanza defeated him.
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Having, as it were, given himself licence for sublimity by this straight talking, he resumed work on the poem which was to become ‘Absences’.
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It seems that it could have taken a very different direction from the final version. In the workbook the description of the sea, ‘tirelessly at play / Where there are no ships and no shallows’, is conceived as a consoling daydream of escape from a Kafkaesque courtroom of humiliation. This reassertion of anxious reality was still part of his conception when he briefly revisited the drafting in early 1951. What was to become the resounding final line features as the first line of a
terza rima
stanza:

Such attics cleared of me! Such absences!

Such courtroom consolations in a case

Made up of stale inaudibilities

With somewhere guilt. The thought of any place

Uncheapened by this vague drawn out disgrace
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Ultimately, however, Larkin’s symbolist instincts won the day and the courtroom context and the sonnet form were dropped. Three sumptuously pararhymed
terza rima
stanzas and a final isolated line make up a miniature, ten-line sublime ode in the tradition of Coleridge’s ‘Hymn before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamoni’ or Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’. The poet is rapt out of himself by the idea of a place beyond human observation. As Larkin commented, ‘I am always thrilled by the thought of what places look like when I am not there.’
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Graham Chesters has speculated that the final exclamation may have been suggested by Gautier’s ‘Sublime aveuglement! magnifique défaut!’ in his poem ‘Terza Rima’,
³³
a more elevated example of Gallic lyricism than Verlaine’s ‘À Mademoiselle ***’. Baudelaire’s celebrated ‘L’Homme et la Mer’ has a similar rhetorical climax: ‘Ô lutteurs éternels, ô frères implacables!’ Larkin later joked that his poem ‘sounds like a slightly unconvincing translation from a French symbolist’, adding, ‘I wish I could write like this more often.’
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Though in other poems of the period he jealously guards his selfhood, here he contemplates a selfless nirvana. The accusing, ‘unanswerable’ light of ‘Deceptions’ loses its human, moral quality to become an impersonal ‘shoreless day’. And instead of bursting into a sordid attic of fulfilment we are left contemplating sublime attics of emptiness. The violated ‘attic’ of ‘Deceptions’ was squalid and humiliating; the uninhabited ‘attics’ of ‘Absences’ are exhilarating. The two appearances of the word mark the furthest extremes of emotion which the concept evoked in Larkin, and it was a sure instinct that told him not to use ‘attic’ again in any subsequent published poem.
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It seems that he felt doubtful at first about the poem’s unabashed transcendence. He omitted ‘Absences’ from
XX Poems
, though he did include the sulkily argumentative ‘Since the majority of me’, on which he worked immediately afterwards. ‘Absences’ certainly did not show the gloomy pessimism which had become a private joke in his letters to Monica: ‘we are all on a one way trip to the grave, etc. etc. etc. My usual style.’
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Monica was the touchstone of his deepest gloom: ‘I was struck again by the genuine quality of your pessimism: I play at pessimism but you really are a pessimist.’
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In ‘Next, Please’, on which he worked in January and early February 1951, Larkin plays the pessimist with some gusto.
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Life, the poet tells us with mock-heroic didacticism, is like queuing:

Always too eager for the future, we

Pick up bad habits of expectancy.

The singsong chiming of ‘we / expectancy’ has a facile self-mockery about it. Cinema clichés embody the ersatz inauthenticity of our dreams. We imagine that a ‘Sparkling armada of promises’ is headed our way. One day our ship will surely come in, its figurehead gleaming ‘with golden tits’, as in a Hollywood romance starring Errol Flynn. But in a witty contrast of mediated images, archetype trumps stereotype, and we are sought out by an altogether more sombre metaphorical ship: ‘a black- / Sailed unfamiliar’, towing behind it a ‘huge and birdless silence’. It is a most original and enjoyable exercise on a familiar theme.

A similar proverbial tag underlies ‘To My Wife’, completed on 19 March 1951. The husband has preferred the fulfilment of a bird in the hand to contemplation of the numerous tease-birds flapping in the bushes. He has given up the Yeatsian ‘mask-and-magic-man’s regalia’ of poetry in return for the wife, who has become, in an excruciatingly sardonic rhyme, ‘my boredom and my failure’. The poet feels grim empathy with the woman who shares the disappointment of marriage with him: ‘No future now. I and you now, alone.’ Larkin did not include this poem in
XX Poems
, perhaps considering it a touch contrived.

‘Latest Face’, drafted in February 1951, adopts a more elevated tone. Shortly after his arrival in Belfast, Larkin’s eye was caught by Winifred Arnott, a twenty-one-year-old Library Assistant who had arrived a month before him. Their relationship was never to develop beyond a romantic friendship, but for this very reason this is one of the most poetically productive of all his liaisons. Winifred indeed became the second of Larkin’s muses. ‘Latest Face’ gives a classic exposition of aestheticist philosophy:

Admirer and admired embrace

On a useless level, where

I contain your current grace,

You my judgement [. . .]

Like the ‘angled beauty’ of the Polish airgirl in ‘Like the train’s beat’ this depersonalized, ungendered face dispels ‘all humanity of interest’. It does not belong to a ‘wife’, nor to a ‘darling’. It is a Platonic Form, or more romantically a ‘precious vagrant’: ‘useless’. It imposes no demands or obligations. The poet has no desire to possess this bird in the bush. Indeed, he fears what might ensue should ‘The statue of your beauty walk’, not wishing to wade behind the woman into the ‘real untidy air’ of ‘Bargains, suffering, and love’. There is an ambiguity, however. Winifred’s name appears over and over again on the last page of the draft, and though the poet wishes to avoid bargains and suffering there is a hint of warm mutuality in the poem’s tone.

In the ‘real’ world outside the muse-relationship of the poems, this was a friendship bordering on courtship. In retrospect, Winifred played down the suggestion of a romantic attachment: ‘He was a working colleague, seven years older than me, already balding. I was 21. I didn’t think of him like that.’
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They would meet over coffee, gossip about mutual friends, and at the weekends she would join him on long bicycle rides in the countryside. ‘I think he liked me because I was cheerful.’
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‘I don’t remember him
ever
being sad,’ she commented, and added, ‘when he expressed melancholy I think everyone took it to be a pose’.
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The decisive factor for her was his negative attitude towards marriage: ‘I never did regard him as a candidate for my husband and the father of my children. I felt our relationship was of a different sort. We never went to bed together though I cheered him up, I think. I was very fond of him.’
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On the other hand she remembers several conversations in spring 1951 beginning ‘If you were married to me . . .’
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The development of their relationship was, however, suspended when Winifred left for London in August 1951 to take a year’s postgraduate diploma course in Librarianship at University College. Philip immediately initiated a correspondence with her, and they met twice during his visits to London.

Within the closed academic world of the University, Larkin was becoming comfortably settled. In a letter to Monica of 13 June 1951 he accepted her envious perception of his ‘effortless popularity’, and listed his cynical strategies for being liked: ‘Never contradict. Be pliable [. . .] Be funny.’
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By all accounts he was a witty and entertaining companion, imitating the Belfast accent perfectly and always ready with amusing anecdotes. Though he remained essentially an outsider, the Protestant culture of the Province provided him with new experiences and images. In ‘March Past’, he appropriated the Ulster marching tradition to his own poetic purposes, excluding any mention of politics.
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Indeed the benign, mock-heroic tone suggests that he might be recalling a Salvation Army march in Coventry. The march is presented in innocent, festive terms, as in an operetta: