Philip Larkin (35 page)

The fact that Monica was, in the sentimental language of their letters, ‘Ears’, ‘Paws’ or ‘Bun’, gave the onset of myxomatosis a painful personal significance, and though he finished his poem on the subject on 28 September, he delayed sending it to her until 14 November. He explained awkwardly: ‘I’m not keeping “the rabbit one” from you: it’s only that in it I kill the rabbit, which makes it totally out of character & rather like a piece of journalism.’
³⁰
There is no hint of anthropomorphism in the poem; the title, ‘Myxomatosis’, is chillingly clinical. Assuming no more than shared animal sentience, he guesses at what is going on in the animal’s consciousness:

You may have thought things would come right again

If you could only keep quite still and wait.

‘It’s not much of a poem,’ he wrote to Monica. ‘But of course I
felt
strongly enough about it. I hardly dare ask what you think of it. I strove (queer word) to give the essential pathos of the situation without getting involved in argument.’ He is anxious about the morality of treating this highly emotive topic at all: ‘Oh dear. Is this “using” the rabbits?’
³¹
The contrast with Ted Hughes is intriguing. Larkin respects the non-human otherness of animals while Hughes endows his birds and rodents with human pride, guilt and deviousness. The world of ‘Crow’ is far closer to Beatrix Potter than are the horses and rabbit of Larkin’s poems.
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Outside the poem, however, Larkin reverts to the consoling artifice of anthropomorphism. Later in this same letter to Monica he inserts a drawing of a rabbit, her skirt flying in a sprightly dance, accompanied on a rustic shawm by a seal beneath a tree. There is moving pathos in the juxtaposition of the rigorous realism of the poem with the sophisticated sentimentalism of their playful animal personae.

Larkin was aware of the quality of his poetic achievement, and becoming impatient for recognition. In September he sent ‘Church Going’ and ‘Myxomatosis’ to the
Spectator
, where they were mislaid, though he did not discover this until a year later. He felt disappointed, writing on 2 October 1954 to Monica, ‘No word from the
Spr
about my deathless verse.’
³³
Then on 10 October, after the trip to Dublin with the Egertons, he told her that, though Donald Davie had been in favour of the Dolmen Press publishing twelve of his recent poems, Davie’s two young Irish co-editors, Thomas Kinsella and Liam Miller, had outvoted him. They thought the poems ‘“too self-pitying” (I offered Davie this phrase & he gladly accepted it) and “too sexy” (his own words). He was very apologetic, but I think the collection hadn’t pleased him as much as he had expected.’ Davie had found ‘Wires’ ‘very feeble’, though he liked ‘Latest Face’ enough to set it as an analytical exercise for his classes in Trinity College. Larkin affected indifference: ‘So there you are. I was disappointed at the time, but not now.’
³⁴
Despite his show of unconcern, there can be little doubt that he was angered by these blundering criticisms.

‘Maiden Name’ (January 1955), the last poem Larkin completed in Belfast, returns for the final time to Winifred Arnott and the muse theme. The five light sounds of the maiden name preserve, like the photographs, an innocent perfection now for ever lost. The ‘disused’ name no longer ‘means’ her face nor her ‘variants of grace’. By marriage she has fallen from grace. There is an ominous undertone in the poet’s congratulation to her on being ‘thankfully confused / By law with someone else’. The name now survives only in old lists and letters tied with tartan ribbon. Then with a sudden intimate address the poet speaks directly to her: ‘Try whispering it slowly. / No, it means you.’ But he immediately draws back. This is too intimate a tone to adopt to a married woman. So he re-presents his feeling in the form of a politely circumlocuitous ‘what’ noun phrase: ‘Or, since you’re past and gone, // It means what we feel now about you then.’ The poem becomes an elegy, mourning her youth:

How beautiful you were, and near, and young,

So vivid, you might still be there among

Those first few days, unfingermarked again [. . .]

Her perfection is spoiled by fingering. There is an unsettling emotional complexity in the story which Amis related years later: ‘He had a picture of her in his room. He came back one night full of beer and wrote to say he’d noticed more than usual how it brought out her resemblance to Stan Laurel. “In a hearty way,” he said, “I let a bit of beer fall on it and now I can’t get it off. I can’t get the shine back.”’
³⁵
It is likely that Amis’s summary lacks nuances present in Larkin’s original version. However, the pattern is true to his dialectical sensibility. Whenever he felt a powerful emotion he was impelled to answer it with scepticism or desecration; and vice versa.

On 20 December 1954 George Hartley wrote from Hull that, following the success of the first three issues of
Listen
, he and his wife Jean had decided to venture on a book. Their imprint was to be called the Marvell Press, after Hull’s great seventeenth-century poet, with the implication also that it would be a bloody marvel if the plan was a success.
³⁶
They asked him to be their first author. He hesitated, still feeling that it was his destiny to be published by Faber. ‘If only he lived in any other city!’ he wrote to Monica.
³⁷
But inertia prevailed, and rather than risk a repeat of the traumatic rejection of seven years earlier, he agreed. Nervous about what his new employer and colleagues might think of ‘Toads’ and ‘If, My Darling’, he asked the Hartleys not to advertise or distribute the volume around Hull. He was somewhat reassured to learn that neither of the Hartleys had any connection with the University. Remembering his experience with
XX Poems
, he secured assurances that he would not have to pay for anything himself, and that the volume would be printed on good paper.

He made a list of twenty-three possible inclusions, writing to Monica on 8 January 1955: ‘I can’t decide about
Churchgoing
– it’s one of the 23, but I’m not sure. What do you think? [. . .] I should like it for its length!’ The title for the volume caused him difficulty: ‘I’d
like
to call it
Such Absences
, to draw attention to my favourite poem! Only it doesn’t make sense, since my poems aren’t
really
“attics cleared of me”.’
³⁸
As we have seen, he had omitted ‘Absences’ from
XX Poems
. Perhaps its sublime theme seemed inappropriate in a collection dedicated to Amis. But his feelings about his friend were now less warm; Amis did not reply to letters nor remember birthdays, and their correspondence was becoming irregular. He was, Larkin told Monica, like a ‘fourth form friend’ he had outgrown: ‘The idea of Kingsley
loving
a book – or a book “feeding” him, as K.M. wd say – is quite absurd. He doesn’t
like
books. He doesn’t like
reading
. And I wouldn’t take his opinion on
anything
, books, people, places, anything. Probably he has been mistaken, to himself, about me.’
³⁹
Other titles Larkin toyed with were:
23 Poems
,
Poems 1946–1955
,
In the same breath
and
True to life
. In the end he sent the typescript to the Hartleys with the title
Various Poems
.
⁴⁰

Monica, meanwhile, was doing her best to persuade him to marry her, by the well-calculated strategy of sympathizing with his misogamy. On 22 January 1955 she conceded: ‘Well, for one thing, a first thing, you can’t marry just because you think it’s a sort of moral duty & a nasty one, a punishment that you ought to take.’ On the other hand she suggested reasonably: ‘One thing that does make me feel we are “suited” is that you can discuss such an idea with me, & that I can hear it without the least offence, & even with understanding – I do see what you mean. But being “suited” & actually wanting to marry is another thing again, too.’
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It is painful to read her careful angling. He responded, after a week, tantalizing her with arguments in favour of commitment: ‘It seemed to me that if we were going to get married this would be a good point to do so. I have a living wage, you want to pack up your job, we both want – or think we want – the same kind of life, we know each other well enough, etc. And we are ageing!’ But he continued with a cruel candour which must have put Monica through the emotional mangle: ‘The sort of thing that gives me pause (paws) is wondering whether I do more than just like you very, very much and find it flattering and easy to stay with you.’
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Two weeks later (10 February) he assumed that it was agreed between them that marriage was impossible: ‘Really you couldn’t say anything more to my way of feeling than that you don’t like the idea of
getting
married. I dare say I could go through with it, but [. . .]’ He concluded with a crushing Larkinesque aphorism: ‘what frightens me most about marriage is the passing-a-law-never-to-be-alone-again side of it’.
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Monica could be in no doubt where she stood.

Various Poems
was a thoughtful choice of title. The volume’s range of styles, forms and emotions is more diverse than that of any other poet of the century. The title also has the advantage of avoiding any hint of an ideological programme. The blurb which Larkin wrote at George Hartley’s request, but which was never used, is disarming: ‘the poems of Philip Larkin have been increasingly well-known for their unusual combination of deep personal feeling and exact, almost sophisticated choice of words’. While ‘no less witty and intelligent than his contemporaries’, he ‘deals with emotion more simply and intensely than is common today’.
⁴⁴
But, accurate though it was, the title lacked distinctiveness and, following discussion with Hartley, Larkin transferred the intended title of the poem ‘The Less Deceived’ to the volume, and renamed that poem ‘Deceptions’. After a ceremonious request the collection was dedicated to Monica.

It is intriguing to speculate how different the whole period might seem had Larkin’s first mature volume been called
Such Absences
. But the abstract noun phrase ‘the less deceived’ has an authentic Larkinesque quality, and in retrospect the title seems inevitable. With its comparative grammar it stresses the dynamic relativities which Larkin had been exploring in his recent work. The raped girl in ‘Deceptions’ is less deceived than her rapist. The visitor in ‘Church Going’ is less deceived than the religious believer. The aestheticist speaker of ‘Latest Face’ is less deceived than
l’homme moyen
sensuel
wading after the statue in untidy air. The speaker of ‘If, My Darling’ is less deceived than the woman he addresses; or at least so he claims, though with his internal attic full of selfish clutter he is perhaps more deceived than the poet of ‘Absences’ whose attics are sublimely empty. To be less deceived means to transcend sex or self as often as it means to be disillusioned in the usual sense. Rather than dictating a consistent downbeat tone the title opens up conditional or comparative calculations: ‘Whatever happened?’; ‘If no one has misjudged himself’; ‘Nothing [. . .] happens anywhere’; ‘Such attics cleared of me!’; ‘what since is found / Only in separation’.

When the volume was published in November 1955 (the title page has ‘October’), nine months after Larkin’s arrival in Hull, it consisted of twenty-nine poems: thirteen from
XX Poems
,
⁴⁵
the five poems from the Fantasy Press volume and eleven other recent works: ‘Absences’, ‘Reasons for Attendance’, ‘I Remember, I Remember’, ‘Poetry of Departures’, ‘Toads’, ‘Skin’, ‘Age’, ‘Church Going’, ‘Places, Loved Ones’, ‘Myxomatosis’ and ‘Maiden Name’. Since the Hartleys could not afford to cover the initial production costs, it had been decided to revive the archaic practice of advance subscription. One hundred and twenty subscribers were recruited from the literary world and from among Larkin’s and the Hartleys’ acquaintances. Larkin called it the ‘sucker list’.
⁴⁶
Anxious about the exact terms of the contract Larkin stipulated a time limit on the option clause for his next volume (this ran out well before the completion of
The Whitsun Weddings
). He agreed that Hartley should have anthology rights following publication, and that, instead of a 10 per cent royalty for the author, the proceeds should be divided according to a ‘profit-sharing’ arrangement. He commented to Monica, ‘this
should
mean 50% of the profits: hope it does’.
⁴⁷
(A year later he calculated that the result had been similar to that of a 12½ per cent royalty.)
⁴⁸
Seven hundred copies were printed, but to avoid unnecessary expense if the volume failed to sell, only 400 of these were bound up.