Philip Larkin (51 page)

16

Living for Others

1964–8

Following the acclaim which greeted
The Whitsun Weddings
, the television director Patrick Garland persuaded Larkin to appear in a BBC
Monitor
television feature with John Betjeman as his interviewer. Filming took place in Hull between 3 and 10 June 1964, and the resulting programme,
Down Cemetery Road
, gave visual form to his popular image.
¹
Larkin manages his public persona with care. He is seen in his flat, a cigarette between long fingers, in faintly stilted conversation with Betjeman. They sit among the gravestones in Spring Bank Cemetery, reflecting on death in brilliant sunshine. Then, on the ferry in mid-Humber, the poet becomes a gauche tourist-guide with an enthusiasm for cloud formations. He cycles self-consciously up the path to a church, re-enacting the removal of his cycle clips ‘in awkward reverence’. He wanders about the fish-docks, at a loss. He strides into the Library and up the stairs to leer with pantomimic sinisterness over a book in a dark corner. He had written to Monica: ‘I shall be typed as just another Betjeman.’
²
But, in the event, there was no danger that he would be eclipsed by his media-savvy interviewer. However, the self-impersonation was a strain. On 8 June he wrote to Monica that it was ‘nice’ to have his favourite places filmed, but ‘they seem less mine now. In fact
I
feel less mine now, if you follow me. I shall be glad when I see the whole caravan of sound, lights & cameras disappearing up the road towards London.’
³
Not owning a television, he drove with Maeve to the house of the Professor of History, John Kenyon, to watch the broadcast on 12 December 1964.

The bicycle had already fallen into the past. He had begun taking driving lessons in early 1964, and with sad symbolism bought his first car on the day
The Whitsun Weddings
was published, 28 February 1964. Until now he had avoided the accumulation of possessions and, apart from the houses which he bought for himself and his mother in 1948 and 1950, this was his first ever purchase of a major item of property. ‘I feel I ought to go out and see that I have locked the boot & that no one can steal my jack, spare tyre, etc. Oh dear! Isn’t it all
untypical 
! I feel as if I had somehow slipped through into a different character.’
⁴
In the mid-1960s a large shift was taking place in Larkin’s life. Public and professional activities came to the fore, and his poetry retreated into a more private space. In 1963 he had been instrumental in setting up an Arts Council Manuscripts Committee, to acquire the papers of living British poets for the National Collection, and in May 1964 he gave his weight to the programme by donating his first workbook to the British Library. He was to act as Committee Chairman from 1967 until 1979. In March 1964 he agreed to serve on the Board of the Poetry Book Society. In April he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
⁵
In the autumn he made a ‘Listen’ LP of
The Whitsun Weddings
.
⁶
In 1965, he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry. In 1966 he agreed to be on the Committee dispensing Gregory Awards for young poets.
⁷

With its ever-growing staff the Library was losing its ingenuous, family atmosphere. But this was slow to fade. Larkin appeared in two of the three silent slapstick films made after working hours by the University photographer Alan Marshall and shown at staff parties in the early 1960s.
⁸
In the first, in black and white, Marshall scratched numerous crosses and ticks on the frames of the film to make the Librarian materialize in a shower of sparks. (He had the reputation of appearing out of nowhere just when members of staff thought they were safely out of view.) In the second film, in colour, Marshall directed Larkin to look out of his window, clapping his hand to his head in horror. He recalls that Larkin roared with laughter when the film was finally shown, and the splicing of shots made it appear that he was watching precious bound volumes of
The Times
falling past his office, dropped gleefully by a Library Assistant from the window of the Map Room above. (These volumes were so heavy that there was real concern over the strain on the joists above his desk.) In another sequence, engineered by means of a makeshift dummy and reversal of the film, Arthur Wood jumped off the Library roof and bounced before cheerfully walking away.
⁹
Brenda Moon, who joined the staff as chief cataloguer in 1962, entered into the fun. She was shown searching efficiently through the drawers of the card-catalogue. Horrified at a spoof index card reading
Mickey Mouse Times
she was soon dementedly tearing up card after card and tossing them about her head in a paper blizzard.

In letters to his proud mother casual references to Larkin’s new status are mixed with the trivialities of his domestic life. On Thursday 28 January 1965, some days after her seventy-ninth birthday, he sent her a notecard relating how he had driven his car in for a service, taking the opportunity to ‘collect my new dress suit, and to take back a pair of trousers for further alteration’. Then a photographer arrived from
Time
magazine ‘& I had to go through the usual mill’. He told her about his new cooker and carpet: ‘much browner than I remember. The doors will just about open, but are very stiff [. . .] How lovely about the azalea – you will be pleased.’ He inserted a drawing of a large-eyed seal in a frilled mob-cap bending solicitously over a pot-plant on a small table, and ended: ‘I’ll write again on Sunday – in the meantime, do please keep warm & dry. Tell Kitty I’m sorry about her cough.’
¹⁰

His stamina for chat and affectionate concern was inexhaustible. In a four-page Sunday letter of 21 March 1965 he told Eva about a trip to Leeds to preside at a meeting of the Standing Committee of National and University Libraries (SCONUL): ‘what Daddy wd call “The Branch”’. ‘[I]t rained, & near Leeds began to snow! and I couldn’t find the hotel where we were lunching with the speaker.’ He had also been to London to meet the Library architects and ‘the Editress of Vogue’, followed by drinks with ‘the Features Editress (“a fat Belfast girl [. . .] far less glamorous than, for instance, Kitty . . .”)’. The following day he had sat on a board ‘for giving money to young poets to encourage them’. He tells Eva that he fears ‘great West Indian & Pakistani germs hopping on me in the tubes [. . .]’. He devotes much space to her concerns: ‘A pity I didn’t get your letter on Thursday in view of the misunderstanding about Auntie Nellie’s visit.’ A brief touch of irritation, in his father’s voice, interrupts the anodyne flow: ‘You must stop putting the apostrophe in the wrong place in words like “isn’t”. It indicates that the “o” of “not” has been left out, & should go in its place. You are writing “is’nt”.’ Then he returns to the flow: ‘How nice that your azalea is still flowering. There are a few green shoots in the garden here.’ He mentions changes in the rules for the Old Age Pension, and reflects on how elderly ‘boyish figures of the Thirties’ such as Anthony Eden and the Duke of Windsor now look, and ends: ‘Am thinking of you a lot – do take care – Much love. Philip’.
¹¹

In 1963, Barbara Pym, with whom he had been corresponding since 1961, had suffered a rejection at the hands of her publisher, Jonathan Cape. The publisher’s readers, William Plomer and Daniel George, concluded that her seventh novel,
An Unsuitable Attachment
, would not sell enough copies to be commercially viable. Larkin praised the typescript and made some minor suggestions for improvement. She was as self-critical as he, and it was only after extensive rewriting that she sent it to Faber and Faber. Now, in August 1965, Larkin wrote twice to Charles Monteith at Faber, pressing him to accept it: ‘This is in the tradition of Jane Austen & Trollope, and I refuse to believe that no one wants its successors today. Why shd I have to choose between spy rubbish, science fiction rubbish, Negro-homosexual rubbish, or dope taking nervous-breakdown rubbish?’
¹²
But his repeated ‘rubbish’ sounds strident. Larkin knew that the novels of Graham Greene, James Baldwin and Sylvia Plath were not rubbish. Indeed Pym herself was impressed by Baldwin’s writing, despite its difference from her own. Moreover Larkin seems in danger of selling Pym short, ignoring her subversive wit and depicting her in moralistic terms as a writer of dogged respectable conservatism: ‘I like to read about people who have done nothing spectacular, who aren’t beautiful or lucky, who try to behave well in the limited field of activity they command [. . .]’
¹³
Unsurprisingly, Faber were not persuaded by his arguments. Pym’s next novel did not see print for fourteen years, and
An Unsuitable Attachment
appeared only after her death.

Their friendship became warmer. From December 1963 onwards they addressed each other as ‘Barbara’ and ‘Philip’ rather than ‘Miss Pym’ and ‘Mr Larkin’. He offered her crucial support during the years of rejection which followed. As Hazel Holt writes, she ‘badly needed the sort of intelligent, perceptive and affectionate criticism and advice that he gave her. He also cheered her up by sending her lively, funny letters, which told her
just
the sort of ordinary, frivolous things she liked to know about people.’
¹⁴
His letters to Pym are full of domestic practicalities, with an occasional self-conscious conservative, ‘English’ touch:

I had a few quite pleasant days in Shropshire & Herefordshire, looking at eccentric decaying churches, then to Salcombe for a week, which I didn’t really care for [. . .] I was consoled slightly by passing Michael Cantuar
¹⁵
in a narrow lane one day. I finished with a visit to some friends who now have a ‘country’ house near Newbury: he is turning into a farmer, & most of the meals came out of a ‘deep freeze’ [. . .] The meat was fantastically tough, like some sort of well-tested plastic floor covering.

He entertains her with details of his University routines: ‘On Tuesday I have to address the freshers on “Books” (“How to Kill, Skin & Stuff Them”).’
¹⁶

Larkin remained a champion of Pym’s work, appreciating her ‘gay, confident gift’ for subtle verbal comedy and her ‘ironic perception of life’s absurdities’, tempered by ‘a keen awareness of its ability to bruise’.
¹⁷
But he was not an uncritical admirer. In 1966 he wrote to Monica of
Jane and Prudence
: ‘there is a sort of woman’s magazine quality there – a kind of cosyness – surely the best novels aren’t cosy – reassuring, perhaps, but in BP all characters seem potbound, nobody’s ever going to
do
anything, Harry isn’t going to screw Wilmet, Prudence isn’t
really
having an affair with Fabian, do you think, even, that Piers buggers Keith?’
¹⁸
Larkin puts his finger here on an element of Pym’s writing that causes problems even for her greatest admirers. As her first love and lifelong friend Henry Harvey commented: ‘She was without sensuality. Her passions, in so far as they were not kept back to being pretend play passions, stayed in her head and heart.’
¹⁹

A larger opportunity for Larkin to make his mark on the culture of the age came in January 1966 when, following Louis MacNeice’s sudden death, Oxford University Press invited him to take over as editor of the new
Oxford Book of Modern Verse
. Andrew Motion expresses surprise at his acceptance of this task, since it ‘involved a great deal of work which he, an efficient but a lazy man, was bound to resent’.
²⁰
This is a puzzling comment. Laziness was not one of Larkin’s qualities. He saw his task of updating Yeats’s 1936 volume as one of restoring balance to the canon, requesting a change in title to
The
Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse
, dissociating it from the ‘modern poetry’ of Yeats’s volume. He wrote to Dan Davin of OUP: ‘I am interested in the Georgians, and how far they represented an “English tradition” that was submerged by the double impact of the Great War and the Irish-American-continental properties of Yeats and Eliot.’
²¹
He intended, he said, to select good poems rather than deferring to the big names. His programme sounds persuasive, and not overly polemical or subjective. But he felt defensive and insecure, fearing that he would caricature himself as a philistine traditionalist.