Philip Larkin (39 page)

Larkin spent Easter 1956 with his mother, now quite recovered. The ten-page letter he wrote to Monica from Loughborough on 31 March is crammed with moment-by-moment experiences. He nearly fell downstairs on Sheffield station, knocking a woman with his case. He has mown his mother’s lawn and installed roof-felt on the lean-to over the mower. He is surprised to be enjoying a recently bought record of ‘progressive’ jazz by Dave Brubeck. He has come upon some early letters that Monica wrote to him ‘in 1947 or so’. ‘They made very strange reading. You were still a lady.’ There was also a letter from Colin Gunner, ‘about
Winter
’, written when he had been ‘mining near Bulawayo’, advising that he give the heroine of his next novel ‘a love affair with an oran outang [. . .] that’ll send up your S. African circulation’. The letter continues the following day, evoking the ‘maelstrom of boredom, irritation, pathos, anger, fear, remorse, nostalgia, & all the rest’ aroused in him by his mother and sister. He has told Eva about Monica’s latest fashion accessory, pop beads, and Eva ‘thinks she’ll buy a lemon twin set for the summer’. He listens to
Macbeth
on the radio and describes a toad he has disturbed in the garden: ‘not a very good-looking fellow’. The letter concludes with a Larkinesque aphorism: ‘I can’t imagine anyone is really happy unless they’re old enough to have utterly escaped from home, & young enough not to be thinking about death.’
⁴⁴
As often in Larkin’s correspondence, a bitter conclusion contradicts, or is contradicted by, omnivorous involvement with his surroundings.

Back in Cottingham towards the end of April, he rejoices that he will soon be leaving 200 Hallgate, escaping the ‘elderly nephew’ of the household, who sings Italian opera as he flushes the outside lavatory. He had intended to take a trip across the estuary that afternoon on the New Holland Ferry. But he arrived too late at Victoria Pier and, after a visit to the public lavatory there (‘fantastically clean, like the inside of a ship: I complimented the attendant – probably an old sailor’),
⁴⁵
he ate a lunch of beer and biscuits in the Minerva Hotel. ‘After that I cycled round the dock area a good bit, then eventually got out on the west side of Hull, and tried to find Tranby Croft, to photograph it for you.
⁴⁶
But I got lost, & tried to photograph lambs instead: but as soon as I approached two a sheep lifted its head and said something, & they ran away to her.’
⁴⁷
On his return he fell asleep in his chair while listening to the radio. ‘It’s delightful to doze when the wireless is on, it becomes a sort of hallucination, part of one’s dreams.’ Under the heading ‘Nearly bed time’ he turns to ‘visions of you [. . .] that had better remain untranscribed. Not for the sake of decency so much as because such things always look so silly written down! Or would you like eulogies of your breasts and hips, and the tiny creases your pink shoes make by squeezing your toes together?’ He becomes lascivious: ‘you’ve been cavorting round my mind dressed in pink shoes & pink pop-beads and nothing else [. . .] All much to the detriment of my typing.’ The next day finds him reading
Dylan Thomas in America
,
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appalled by the Welsh poet’s squandering of his talent, and feeling a ‘
hatred
of Caitlin – “Is there no man in America worthy of me?” – My God. Had a letter from Kingsley today – repeating that his prof is trying to hold him at the [promotion] bar.’
⁴⁹
Amis was to remain a lecturer at Swansea until 1961.

Between April and October 1956 Larkin lived at 192a Hallgate, Cottingham, a short distance from his previous lodging. In September he took the opportunity of a conference on librarianship in Liverpool to make a detour to Wellington, where he stayed overnight at the Charlton Arms and saw Ruth. His account of the visit in a letter to his mother is retrospective and mellow. Ruth, he wrote cryptically, was ‘much the same as usual. I haven’t seen anyone else I know, thank God. It’s a curious little town, ugly & graceful all mixed up together. The Library was shut when I arrived, but I could see they have altered it a good deal.’
⁵⁰
But he was more preoccupied with the new accommodation in Hull into which he was shortly to move. He noted that the cooker and gas fire were the same as those he had had in Belfast: ‘the whole thing will be like a superior Belfast – I hope!’
⁵¹
On 27 October he moved into a high-windowed, top-floor flat at 32 Pearson Park, a Victorian house belonging to the University overlooking a picturesque but at that time somewhat run-down park, between the University and the city.

As a colleague who lived temporarily in the same building in 1963 recollected, these flats were reserved as transitory lodgings for new University staff while they searched for something better. But Larkin was unwilling to make another move and ‘somehow negotiated continued residence there long after he had ceased to be in any sense a new member of staff’.
⁵²
As he settled in he grumbled amiably to Monica about the cold and the noise: ‘The fire has been on full since about 5, but sitting by it I can still feel
a cold breath from the door
[. . .] Funnily enough a Yank mag with Mr Bleaney in it came today. I hope he has receded for a bit.’
⁵³
He names the draught ‘Daisy Mae’, as if it were an American hurricane, and gives comic descriptions of his attempts to keep it out with newspaper and draft excluders. He complains also about the noise from the flat below, but concedes that he is as noisy as his neighbours, and hopes they are not getting into a competition to drown each other out.
⁵⁴
In this ‘temporary’ lodging he was to spend some of the happiest and most creative years of his life. He had found his ‘proper ground’. Here he would stay.

Hull, an economically depressed, unpretentious city, with a hinterland of empty vistas and vast skies, had turned out to be more welcoming to him than he cared to acknowledge to his correspondents. One of his early letters to Judy Egerton, of 28 May 1957, suddenly modulates into a self-conscious paean to Hull’s seclusion:

this institution totters along, a cloister of mediocrities isolated by the bleak reaches of the East Riding, doomed to remain a small cottage-university of arts-and-science while the rest of the world zooms into the Age of Technology. The corn waves, the sun shines on faded dusty streets, the level-crossings clank, bills are made out for 1957 under billheads designed in 1926, and the adjacent water shifts and glitters, hinting at Scandinavia . . . That’s a nice piece of evocation for you.
⁵⁵

He had happened upon the ideal solution for a man like him. He needed to submit himself again to his own ‘customs and establishments’. But rather than resume where he had left off, in Leicester, Oxford or London, he had stranded himself in an English elsewhere, not dissimilar to the Irish elsewhere of Belfast. Like Belfast, Hull made him feel welcome by insisting on difference. The ‘salt rebuff’ of the Northern Irish accent was replicated by the local Hull dialect which makes ‘phone’ into ‘fern’ and ‘road’ into ‘rerd’.
⁵⁶
Belfast had been a ferry journey away, but Hull was almost equally secluded, at the end of the railway line with the North Sea beyond. The language he uses about the two port cities is similar: in Belfast ‘the faint / Archaic smell of dockland, like a stable, / The herring-hawker’s cry, dwindling’; in Hull ‘spires and cranes [. . .] / Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water’. As he put it in 1979: ‘As for Hull, I like it because it’s so far away from everywhere else. On the way to nowhere, as somebody put it [. . .] Makes it harder for people to get at you. I think it’s very sensible not to let people know what you’re like. And Hull is an unpretentious place. There’s not so much crap around as there would be in London, at least as I imagine it, or in some other university cities.’
⁵⁷

Almost all his remaining poetry was to be written in his rented attic on the edge of things. His public literary and professional career developed in visits to London or Oxford. Otherwise he became ‘the hermit of Hull’. In the early days glimpses of Kingsley Amis’s literary success gave him a shallow discontent with his lot. After a visit to Amis in January 1956 he wrote to Monica: ‘It’s not his
success
I mind so much as his immunity from worry and hard work, though I mind the success as well.’
⁵⁸
But his friendship with Amis was now less cordial. After a meeting in August he wrote to Monica: ‘he is really not interested in much more than showing off, and [. . .] once he’s shown off sufficiently to oneself he’s ready to discard one in favour of the most dreary second-raters’.
⁵⁹
To increase his jealousy, a film of
Lucky Jim
starring Ian Carmichael was released in 1957. However, as Larkin’s own reputation grew, this envy subsided. It is significant that, during his thirty years in Hull, he only once invited Kingsley Amis to visit him. Amis was forced to call off the trip at the last minute, and in the event never visited Hull, coming for Larkin’s funeral only as far as the church and cemetery at Cottingham.
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13

Poet-Librarian

1956–60

Larkin was increasingly comfortable in his professional role. He appointed Betty Mackereth to the post of his secretary in 1957, commenting to his mother that she seemed ‘all right in a way: no doubt she will learn. She’ll probably stay all her life [. . .] now.’
¹
Betty comments: ‘He was a very good boss. He took an interest in people; he spoke to people.’
²
He impressed Library Assistant Maeve Brennan by his combination of shyness and bohemian style: ‘At 32 Larkin was tall and slim, with a diffident manner and an embarrassing stammer. By contrast, his dress was unconventional by the standards of the day: sports jacket, corduroy trousers, socks in vivid plain colours, and often a pink shirt, which we considered very daring.’ Like his father he wore silk bow-ties, and his clothes marked him off from the only other two men on the Library staff, both of whom wore ‘the customary dark, pin-striped suits’.
³
Maeve remembers that the nine women library assistants ‘invariably wore regulation pale-blue serge fitted overalls which showed off good figures to advantage!’
⁴
For a time he was called ‘Sir’, but with joking ironic reference to the novel
To Sir, With Love
(1959), by the Guyanese writer E. R. Braithwaite, which he recommended to them.
⁵
He was in his element.

The campus was in post-war disarray, with makeshift huts dotted between the 1920s redbrick buildings of the original University College. The Library was inconveniently housed on the ground and second (top) floor of one of the main 1920s blocks fronting the Cottingham Road. As Betty Mackereth remembers, ‘Some of the shelving stacks were fifteen feet high, and required skilful ladder climbing. (No talk then about “Health and Safety at Work”.)’ At first she was shocked at the contrast with her previous job in the Hull Transport Department, where she had had schedules to prepare and many letters to type:

In the University it was all hanging around chatting: chat-chat-chat; chat-chat-chat. I found myself asking ‘what am I to do now?’ And Philip would be evasive. In the early months he found a book in the Institute of Education that was not in the Library. So he borrowed it and told me: ‘Copy this book and I’ll have it bound.’ So I typed it. But doubt whether he really did ever have it bound. It was just something to keep me occupied.
⁶

The Librarian’s office was on the ground floor overlooking a huge sunken lawn known as the ‘soup-plate’. Betty recalls that in the summer Larkin would hold a lens in each hand and adjust them at different distances from his eye to view the women students lying around in the sun. Playing astutely on his youth he allowed his own romantic affections to become the subject of collective interest among his staff, and dramatized his lusts for particular students. One such student, Maeve remembers, ‘was of Amazonian build – Philip entertained a fantasy about well-proportioned women – and he named a tiny room in the new Library after her, where, the idea was, he would be able to seduce her’. For a time this was known as ‘Miss Porter’s room’.
⁷

He inherited from Agnes Cuming, his predecessor, a Deputy Librarian, Arthur Wood, who, Betty recollects, was an amiable character not highly regarded by his colleagues. In his letters to Monica Larkin elaborated a running gag of merciless antipathy towards this rotund, cheerful ‘pop-eyed little deputy’. ‘I should like to feed him into a haychopper’, ‘little jumped-up sawn-off sod!’ ‘I saw a van in Newland Avenue called Mobile Butchery Service today: felt like giving them a ring to come and deal with Wood.’
⁸
But within the Library he was careful to maintain the proprieties.