Philip Larkin (34 page)

Early in 1954 George MacBeth and Oscar Mellor, editors of the Fantasy Press, which had already published pamphlets of poems by Elizabeth Jennings and Geoffrey Hill, asked Larkin for a selection of his work, and in March five poems appeared in
Fantasy Press Poets, Philip Larkin
, No. 21: ‘Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album’, ‘Whatever Happened’, ‘If, My Darling’, ‘Arrivals, Departures’ and ‘At Grass’. At the same time ‘Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album’ and ‘Latest Face’ appeared in the
Spectator
. He sent the printed versions to Winifred, but she was too preoccupied with her wedding preparations to pay much attention. On April Fool’s Day 1954 she sent him a cool letter insisting that her life was not over as his poems implied. On 7 April he replied, saying that he was ‘glad, at long last, the two poems eventually got published and you saw them’. He continued: ‘frightful as marriage is, it’s worse if you don’t embrace it whole-heartedly. I shall put away my inconvenient emotions and wish you nothing but good.’
¹¹
Half a century later the muse was still arguing with the dead poet. After two marriages, with three children, three stepchildren and seventeen grandchildren, Winifred was, if anything, even more indignant about Philip’s misogamy. She gave a late retort in 2002, in ‘Photograph Albums Revisited’:

Husbands, children, stepchildren, grandchildren, friends,

Cousins, cats, cars, canals: a cornucopia of pleasures,

The brilliance of the world revealed in a dozen larger, newer albums.
¹²

For Winifred life had become clearer and larger with the passage of the years.

In one poem addressed to Winifred, ‘Long roots moor summer to our side of earth’, Larkin adopted a positive view of marriage. In this, his most deeply felt and personal epithalamium, dated the day of Winifred’s wedding, 12 June 1954, though drafted over a longer period, Larkin abjectly concedes his own sterility, renouncing wit and aestheticism to address her as a woman rather than as a muse. The imagery recalls the Lawrentian organicism of ‘Wedding-Wind’, and like that poem it is also an aubade. The poet awakes to find summer already taller than ‘the green / River-fresh castles of unresting leaf’. Procreative nature burgeons around him:

It unfolds upward a long breadth, a shine

Wherein all seeds and clouds and winged things

Employ the many-levelled acreage.

He turns away in despair from this epiphany of fertility, feeling ‘outdistanced, out-invented’. He is unable to make the only adequate response:

what

Reply can the vast flowering strike from us,

Unless it be the one

You make today in London: to be married?

A conviction of his failure to rise to the challenge of life is a persistent, tragic element in his sensibility. He left this painfully personal poem unpublished.

On 28 July, after a discontinuous drafting process of three months, Larkin completed what was to become a key work for his early reputation. He had already, in ‘At Grass’, set the pattern for the long stanzaic Horatian odes or reflective elegies which are a central feature of his middle and late periods. ‘Church Going’ has a more public theme than ‘At Grass’, and takes its place in the sequence which was to develop further with ‘An Arundel Tomb’ (1956), ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ (1958), ‘Here’ (1961) and ‘Dockery and Son’ (1963). Like Keats’s odes, each of these poems has a precisely conceptualized abstract theme, though this remains unstated. ‘Church Going’ is an ‘Ode on Faith’. At the time he did not foresee its later popularity, and was diffident about its value. He was dismayed and irritated when he realized it was destined to become a defining work in his public ‘Movement’ image.

He was aware, as he composed it, that its complex mixture of tones is not wholly coherent. It is easy to read the work as a less deceived retort to T. S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’, published thirteen years earlier in 1942. Like ‘A Stone Church Damaged by a Bomb’, ‘Church Going’ subverts Eliot’s patriotic belief in the ‘significant soil’ of English Anglicanism (‘You are here to kneel / Where prayer has been valid’).
¹³
The poet’s ‘awkward reverence’ as he removes his bicycle clips is half ironic. He disrespectfully apes the vicar at the lectern (‘Here endeth’), and is dismissive about ruin-bibbers who know what rood-lofts are. He donates an Irish sixpence, as he explained to Monica, ‘a comic compromise between giving NOTHING and giving REAL MONEY’.
¹⁴
The Church represents a moribund authority to which the poet sulkily refuses to defer. However, in writing to Monica, with her more conventional religious attitudes,
¹⁵
he stressed his distance as poet from the speaker: ‘do remember [. . .] that I write it partly to exhibit an attitude as well as to try to arouse an emotion – the attitude of the “young heathen” of whom there are plenty about these days – the first line, for instance, is designed both as sincere statement of fact & also as heavy irony.’
¹⁶

Thus his ironic disrespect in the phrase ‘ghostly silt’ mocks Eliot’s nostalgia for traditional faith. But it is tempered by more positive feelings. Towards the end the speaker himself adopts the tones of Anglican piety:

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognised, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete [. . .]

Is this, perhaps, the blather of some Reverend Flannel intoning with poetical inversion ‘A serious house on serious earth it is’, and speaking vacuously of ‘blent air’ and ‘robed destinies’? No. Dubious though the tone is, there is genuine emotion here. Writing to Monica, Larkin implied that ‘blent’ is intended as a genuinely moving poeticism.
¹⁷
His tone thus allows his pious readers to imagine that the poet himself shares their superstitious self-deception. Christian readers have from the beginning claimed that the poet is expressing here the sincere pensiveness of a fundamentally religious man: ‘under the pose he is
homo religiosus
, with an awareness of sacred time and sacred place’.
¹⁸

But it is not religion that prompts the poet’s churchgoing. Eliot may deceive himself; Larkin does not. Cultural Anglicanism exerted a powerful hold over him. Echoing A. E. Housman’s self-description as ‘a High-Church atheist’,
¹⁹
he termed himself an ‘anglican agnostic’, and later in ‘Aubade’ expressed a poignant affection for the ‘vast moth-eaten musical brocade’ of Christianity. But his atheism is never in doubt. He was disconcerted by religious misreadings of the poem. When Brenda Moon, Assistant Librarian in Hull, called it ‘wonderful’, Larkin ‘looked surprised and said: “If I’d known how popular it would be, I would have taken more trouble over it.”’
²⁰
He never quarrelled with sincere religious readers since the poem is not intended as a polemic. However, he objected to those who ingeniously perverted it into an assertion of faith. ‘I was a bit irritated by an American who insisted to me it was a religious poem. It isn’t religious at all. Religion surely means that the affairs of this world are under divine superveillance, and so on, and I go to some pains to point out that I don’t bother about that kind of thing, that I’m deliberately ignorant of it – “Up at the holy end”, for instance.’ He was even driven to sarcasm: ‘Ah no, it’s a great religious poem; he knows better than me – trust the tale and not the teller, and all that stuff.’
²¹
In fact there is no doubt that the House of God in the poem is empty. God is mentioned only in the calculatedly offhand, secular phrase ‘God knows’. And the reason the poet gravitates towards the churchyard is secular and conditional: ‘If only that so many dead lie round.’

During his final year or so in Belfast Larkin established a relationship with Judy Egerton, who was to become one of his most significant correspondents. He was detailed to show Judy, a teaching assistant in History and wife of the Economics lecturer, Ansell, round the library. As they went they worked on a
Times
crossword together and became immediate friends. Later she told him how much he had impressed her.
²²
The Egertons made a dashing, faintly glamorous addition to the cosmopolitan mix of Queen’s. They included him on a trip to Dublin where he visited Donald Davie. He wrote to Patsy on 9 October 1954: ‘I went & returned with some married Australians called Egerton, whose big Rover rushed from Davy Byrnes to 30 Elmwood Avenue, through patches of autumnal mist and sending nocturnal rats scuttling to the hedgerows, in two and a half hours flat.’
²³
Shortly afterwards he gave more detail:

They are a rich young Australian couple who’ve run out of things to say to each other, and are now sucking fresh life from Alec & myself. We play bridge there far too often, & eat good food, & drink good drink. Now they have started buying LP Bechets & giving me recipés, and muttering archly ‘I don’t know why you call yourself an indigestible sterility . . .’ out of the blue. In answer to your unspoken question, no, she isn’t attractive: just ‘well groomed’. He is about 6’6” and terrifically strong. Plays cricket, of course.
²⁴

Later Ansell secured him tickets for Test matches at Lords, and his friendship with the Egertons became a permanent strand in his life. He would visit them in London, and he and Judy were to exchange letters regularly for the rest of his life.

Larkin was beginning to feel that his sojourn in Ireland had run its course, particularly after his different adventures with Patsy Strang and Winifred Arnott had come to their ends. Central though it was to his poetic development, Belfast was essentially a diversion. In his next completed poem, ‘Places, Loved Ones’ (10 October 1954), the speaker meditates on rootlessness, expressing surprise at the way things have turned out: ‘No, I have never found / The place where I could say /
This is my proper ground, / Here I shall stay
.’ Nor has he found ‘that special one’ with whom he might share his name. There is no assertion here of artistic vocation. This speaker has happened to miss out on these things for no apparent reason. Larkin was once again beginning to question whether his rejection of the call to join the dance of life was the product of anything more than immaturity. As the second exemption of Belfast drew to an end, his choice of life opened up again. Once he returned to England these issues would confront him with new force.

His thoughts had been concentrated a few weeks earlier when Jack Graneek, the Librarian at Queen’s, feeling his abilities needed a new challenge, had encouraged him to apply for a post at Hull, whose Librarian, Agnes Cuming, was about to retire. In September 1954, Hull gained full University status, having until then been a university college awarding external London degrees. This was an opportunity which Larkin felt he could not pass up, though he was diffident of success, since he was still only thirty-two. ‘Of course it will be all up if any of the committee has read
Toads
–
Listen
is printed practically IN
Hull
.’
²⁵
He travelled across for the interview and on 23 November wrote to Monica to say that he had been offered the post. He was to start in March 1955. A few days later, on a chilly 28 November, he reviewed his situation. He was now definitely committed to a career in librarianship, which he depicted as his ‘mask’, the oppositional alter ego of Yeats’s poetic theory. Otherwise he was simply resuming his life where he had left it five years earlier: ‘What a hopeless character mine is. In 1950 I ran away from England & the problems it held, but really they’re still there unchanged & now I’m
going back
to them . . . Five years older, five years poorer, five years colder, five years . . . can’t think of a rhyme. Surer? Surer of what? Brrr.’
²⁶
Graneek commented that he had ‘never seen anyone so depressed by promotion’.
²⁷

Top of the list of the issues to be resolved was whether he would marry Monica. On 15 December, he responded to her hints: ‘You seem to suggest that I’ve yet to throw off my mother & grab myself primary emotional interest in a woman my own age. This may well be true – it sounds true – but it’s not a thing one can do by will power.’
²⁸
The relationship had gathered emotional momentum during five years of regular correspondence, visits and holidays. But it had its tensions. In the same letter in which he told Monica about the Hull vacancy in September, he was prompted to take issue with her conservatism. A ‘foul article’ by Ronald Duncan in the satirical magazine
Punch
had celebrated the advent of myxomatosis in the writer’s village: ‘when the first bulging-eyed creature was discovered . . . it was drinks all round at the pub that night’. Continuing what was clearly an ongoing debate between them he condemned the magazine: ‘it is this sort of thing that makes me look down on
Punch
(you remember you once scolded me for it). It may be the backbone of England, but the
New St.
wd never offend in that way, and I judge them accordingly.’
²⁹
In view of his reputation as a right-wing poet, it is remarkable how many of his occasionally published poems appeared in the
New Statesman
and other left-leaning journals.