Philip Larkin (50 page)

Larkin worked on ‘The Dance’, single-mindedly, for ten months, from 30 June 1963 until 12 May 1964. The last forty pages of Workbook 6 show him returning purposefully to the text, dating each new phase of drafting at the top left. In a contradiction of his usual practice he seems to have drafted no other poems during this period. By the time he abandoned it, ‘The Dance’ had become, at 140 lines, by far the longest poem he ever attempted. It took its origin from a University Staff Sports Club dance in May 1963, at which Philip’s jealousy had been inflamed by Maeve’s flirtation with another man. It is a bold attempt at a new genre
for him: a serio-comic narrative poem, a ‘Love Song of P. Arthur Larkin’, dramatizing the inability of a middle-aged social misfit to ask the overwhelming question. In order to sharpen his fictional narrative he makes two omissions from his own actual situation. Firstly the poem’s protagonist claims no poetic vocation to excuse his antisocial attitudes. Secondly, and crucially, his dilemma is not complicated by other attachments. There is no equivalent of Monica in the poem.

The speaker opens with a sulky monologue in which he prefers the unadulterated pleasures of ‘Drink, sex and jazz’ to the ‘muddled middle-class pretence’ which dilutes these things into a public ‘dance’. He has nothing but contempt for himself, dressed up in ‘The shame of evening trousers, evening-tie’. He departs for his ordeal, leaving behind his private world with its brief epiphany of chestnut blooms and sunset: ‘White candles stir within the chestnut trees. / The sun is low.’ In contrast as he arrives at the dance the parked cars, the strident music, the brightly lit windows all signal to him ‘
Alien territory . . .
’ The first sight of his beloved comes as a shock, ‘
Not you, not here
’. He isolates her by perverse syntax from her unworthy company: ‘with some people at some table, you’. Dancing with her takes on the aspect of a hostile encounter: ‘I face you on the floor.’ The emotion intensifies as the protagonist feels a challenge in the ‘whole consenting language’ of the woman’s body. He is hit by ‘The impact, open, raw, / Of a tremendous answer banging back // As if I’d asked a question’. In prosaic terms he guesses that she expects a proposal. In an uncomfortably clumsy archaism he finds himself ‘descrying love’:

Something acutely local, me

As I am now, and you as you are now,

And now; something acutely transitory

The slightest impulse could deflect to how

We act eternally.

Why not snatch it? Your fingers tighten, tug.

Can he provide the question to her answer and achieve the transcendence, or at least the permanence, of marriage (‘how / We act eternally’)? Ominously there is more apprehension than epiphany in his words (‘tighten, tug’).

The narrative modulates into comedy as he is buttonholed by a shoptalking shit and his ‘bearded wife’. Bemused he drinks coffee and listens to small talk while inwardly ‘rent’ by speculation on ‘who has got you now’. As he escapes back to the bar, he catches sight of her, ‘Loose to the music’ with a ‘weed from Plant Psychology’. She is apparently giving the same signals to this man as she had earlier given out to him (‘So you looked at me, / As if about to whistle [. . .]’).
⁴⁹
The tone lurches from anguished sexual jealousy to the caricature comedy of a versified
Lucky Jim
. His ‘tense elation’ dissipates. Her shabby provincial world, he concludes, is not his. She dances in ‘innocent-guilty-innocent’ ignorance of his anguish, crudely teasing him by switching partners in her own ‘sad set’. More embarrassingly, it is useless at his age to invite ‘The sickened breathlessness of being young’ back into his life. He decides to call a taxi and leave. But making for the bar to get pennies for the telephone, ‘I see your lot are waving [. . .]’ With an awful
déjà vu
‘The evening starts again’ with ‘omen-laden music’. By now the worse for drink he sits and beams about him, patiently listening to the ‘Weed’ explaining how to make wine from beetroot.

As the poem approaches its climax he finds himself again on the dance floor. The reader may doubt whether his anticipations of epiphany are the product of poetic insight or of gin-sodden inebriation. ‘Something in me starts toppling.’ Is he about to propose after all? Would this be a positive conclusion to the poem? Ten years earlier in ‘Long roots moor summer to our side of earth’ a vision of burgeoning nature had left the poet with no other reply than ‘to be married’. Here in ‘The Dance’ he attempts to persuade himself not with images of leaves and sun-drenched fields, but with a vision of the blowsy rituals of a degraded ‘Whitsun Weddings’. He sees behind his partner’s half shut hazel eyes ‘Endless receding Saturdays, their dense / And spot-light-fingered glut / Of never-resting hair-dos’.
⁵⁰
Then, with an anticipatory anacrusis, he brings himself to the moment of truth, announcing that he has finally come to

understand
⁵¹

How the flash palaces fill up like caves

With tidal hush of dresses, and the sharp

And secretive excitement running through

Their open ritual, that can alter to

Anguish so easily against the carp

Of too-explicit music [. . .]

In a
poesis interruptus
, the revelation falters into cloying descriptive detail (‘spot-light-fingered glut’, ‘flash palaces’). Nevertheless, he remains determined to force an epiphany:

       till

I see for the first time as something whole

What earlier seemed safely divisible
⁵²

At this point the draft breaks off, eight lines into an eleven-line stanza, without punctuation. The ‘something whole’, which the poet sees for the first time, remains unwritten. The final page in Workbook 6 shows a virtually immaculate draft of this final incomplete stanza, with the date at the top left: ‘12 May 1964’. ‘The Dance’ seems to belong to that unusual Romantic poetic form, the purposefully incomplete ‘fragment’. Its irresolvable theme demanded that it remain unfinished. The final words seem contrived to leave the reader on a forever suspended cliffhanger. The poet could no more marry his muse than the poet of ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ could leave his train and join in the festivities.

Even as he wrestled with this epiphany of commitment, Philip was more headily embroiled with Monica than ever. In April 1964, tormented by the fear that he was about to abandon her for Maeve, she suffered a nervous collapse:

No tears, no reproaches could have shamed me more than your being sick. I feel quite awful, as if I had, well, kicked something to death – I’m not, I hope, being melodramatic: kicked something & seen it vomit as a result, perhaps. You know I feel I ought to take care of you – I have always felt this since your parents died, and it has caused enormous conflict & worry in me, that from time to time I’ve tried to explain, in that I did not ask you to marry me – I think I am mad & odd too: sometimes I am tempted to say how much I’m affected by sex fear & auto-erotic fantasies [. . .]
⁵³

He apologized for having left the situation unresolved, but his language was cold and analytical: ‘if I could have said last September “I’m in love with Maeve, goodbye”, I wd: as it was, I couldn’t – perhaps too fond of you, perhaps not fond enough of her, perhaps just too cowardly all round’.
⁵⁴
But, despite the cruel home truths, he submitted to Monica’s emotional blackmail, attempting to persuade her that his relationship with Maeve was all but over:

Sometimes I think Maeve is a kind of 40-ish aberration of mine, and her family & religion & desire for marriage and children & all that wd scare me out of the country if I were left alone with them. At others I think we have – that’s you & I have – got into a sort of rut that will become increasingly ludicrous and painful as the years waste by. In a way you reflect what I am, she what I might have been – manager of a local insurance branch, I should guess. But you know how potent what one isn’t can become!
⁵⁵

His relationships with both women, he felt, suffered from his addiction to unreal dreams: erotic, but also social. He wrote to Monica the day after his birthday: ‘I wonder if there
is
a “situation” – do I
really
want an RC wedding with Maeve and a “reception somewhere in Hull” etc. – I don’t, of course, not really or even unreally.’
⁵⁶
The implication is that the very ‘unreality’ of his dream makes it attractive to him.

To Maeve he painted a different picture, showing her drafts of the poem and telling her meaningfully on 27 December 1963, ‘this is a great obstacle in my creative life: shan’t write anything till it’s out of the way’.
⁵⁷
After its abandonment the poem still haunted him. In a letter of 29 July 1965 he told Maeve, ‘I should really like to write a
winter
poem about you – not a Christmas one exactly [. . .] even with a bit of “The Dance” in it’, and in January 1967 he copied out the initial encounter with the beloved and most of the final stanza in his seventh workbook.
⁵⁸
In the early 1970s, when his relationship with Maeve was coming to a temporary halt, he gave her a typed copy, inscribed ‘given to Maeve by Philip long afterwards with undimmed memories’.
⁵⁹
Among his effects he left a tape recording of himself reciting the poem against a quiet background of dance music.

When
The Whitsun Weddings
was published, on 28 February 1964, it had at its centre not this personal poem, but the earlier collective epithalamium after which the volume is named. He could not dedicate the volume to Maeve without offending Monica, but he told Maeve that
The Whitsun Weddings
was ‘her book’, inscribing her copy: ‘To Maeve, who can read between the lines’.
⁶⁰
Within two months the volume had sold 4,000 copies; 3,000 more were sold over the next year. Days after its publication he could tell Monica with pride that ‘2 people asked me to autograph TWW’s in the train – the Ringo Starr of contemporary verse.’
⁶¹
Two reprints were required before the end of the decade. The success of the volume lies, as Motion exactly puts it, in the way it transcends biography, diversifying the personal origins of poems, ‘until they become exemplary’.
⁶²
It is also impressively coherent in its impact, the poetic sequences being calculated to make the volume itself a larger poem. As Larkin said, with deceptive levity, its poems are arranged, ‘like a music-hall bill: you know, contrast, difference in length, the comic, the Irish tenor, bring on the girls’.
⁶³
Readers can remind themselves of its ‘score’, as it were, by running their eyes down the table of contents.
⁶⁴

These modulations, however, bear no relation to the time and circumstance in which each poem was written. The volume begins in October 1961 (‘Here’), and ends in February 1956 (‘An Arundel Tomb’). The earliest-written poems, ‘Days’ (August 1953), ‘For Sidney Bechet’ (January 1954) and ‘Water’ (April 1954), were composed before the
Less Deceived
poems ‘Church Going’, ‘Myxomatosis’ and ‘Maiden Name’. And they predate the last-written poems in
The Whitsun Weddings
by almost a decade. In the published sequence, ‘The Importance of Elsewhere’ is followed by ‘Sunny Prestatyn’, then ‘First Sight’, ‘Dockery and Son’ and ‘Ignorance’. The reader is taken from meditative philosophizing through ‘Georgian’ pastoral to disillusioned dramatic monologue and pithy epigram. In terms of their composition, however, these poems move forward and backward in time from 1955 to 1962 to 1956 to 1963 to 1955.

To read the poems, instead, in the order in which they were written is to see the poet reaching fulfilment, then leaving his youth behind to embark on a troubled middle age. The anxieties of Larkin’s return to England which lie behind ‘Mr Bleaney’ and ‘The Importance of Elsewhere’ thaw into the emotional well-being of ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, ‘Here’ and ‘Broadcast’. Then bleak self-questioning sets in in ‘Send No Money’ and ‘Dockery and Son’. The three journey poems in the collection tell an eloquent story. First, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ (1958) celebrates a composed, open-hearted progress out into the world through a busy social landscape. ‘Here’ (1961) offers an intimate celebration of the poet’s proper ground, culminating in serene stasis and a glimpse of transcendence. Finally ‘Dockery and Son’ (1963) traces a journey home in a mood of antisocial self-examination and disillusion. The spinning top had made its first stumble. Larkin’s ‘prime’ had bloomed and faded within the period of the
Whitsun Weddings
poems.