Philip Larkin (59 page)

Well, we have had our sit-in, our baptism of fire: I expect you saw it in the papers early last month. It was a disagreeable experience: I suppose revolutions always are. I wish I could describe it, or say something penetrating about it [. . .] The universities must now be changed to fit the kind of people we took in: exams made easier, place made like a factory, with plenty of shop-floor agitation and a real live strike.
⁶

The students’ demands were voiced by a Joint Politics and Sociology undergraduate, Tom Fawthrop, who had walked out of his examinations, calling on others to do the same. (No other student had followed him.) Fawthrop became an instant national celebrity, writing a book,
Education or Examination
, and speaking in support of sit-ins in other universities:

Exams are more a matter of luck than judgement [. . .] Actually doing a question in forty minutes – it’s not an intellectual exercise. If you can do it in 40 minutes the essay isn’t worth doing. In other words, can three years’ work be adequately assessed by twelve or fifteen hours of exams? Critics of the system argue that it does not allow for the possibility of creativity and originality which a genuine educational process should seek to encourage.
⁷

Larkin the bohemian poet might perhaps sympathize with Fawthrop’s idealism, but the University Librarian was outraged at his irresponsibility. ‘Did you see that poncing student of ours shooting off his mouth to the Press Association?’ he wrote to Conquest. ‘The guy who tore up his exam paper? What has actually happened is that he’s been treated exactly the same as if he had
failed
the exam (since our regulations don’t have any provision for people tearing up exam papers) –’.
⁸
In his poems at this time Larkin envies the freedom of the young; in his letters he resorts to the slogans of generational and class prejudice. In a letter to Monica he refers to students as a ‘filthy pack of commie bastards’.
⁹
He wrote to Barbara Pym more wittily: ‘It may sound snobbish, but I do think that now we are educating the children of the striking classes.’
¹⁰

The influx of a new generation of academic colleagues added to his sense of embattlement and alienation. When I arrived in the Hull English Department in 1968, having picked my way through a sit-down protest on the way to the interview, there were so many newly appointed lecturers that a special welcoming dinner was held in a packed staff refectory. The same ritual was necessary the following year. I soon discovered that one of my colleagues in the English Department was a charismatic apologist for Stalin’s purges. Towards the end of the year Larkin wrote to Monica:

a nasty little maths lecturer called Jarvis who sells treasonable literature
in the street
has been
in hospital
after selling it in ‘The Grapes’ in Clough Road: a man [. . .] asked him (Jarvis) if he remembered him telling him to ‘shove his
Newsletters
up his arse’ last week? Jarvis said he didn’t. The chap
waited outside
& beat him up. There’s a man to admire! While we sit with our cigarettes & our attitudes, here’s a sincere & conscientious man who puts aside comfort & pleasure &
does something about it
[. . .] Doesn’t it warm your heart? Just what the medico commanded.
¹¹

Larkin’s relish for this brutality is distinctly unpleasant. He enclosed a cutting from the student magazine
Torchlight
in which Trevor Jarvis described being kicked several times in the face: ‘I was taken to the Hospital where I had two stitches in my forehead and I couldn’t open my mouth and one eye for two days.’
¹²

Larkin’s relationships with his academic colleagues were formal and professional. In the 1950s and early 1960s several distinguished scholars had worked in the English Department. Richard Hoggart, Malcolm Bradbury, Barbara Everett and Rosemary Woolf all taught in Hull before moving on elsewhere. In 1959 Brian Cox, who had arrived shortly before Larkin, founded the influential Leavisite literary magazine
Critical Quarterly
, together with his former student friend A. E. Dyson, the pioneering campaigner for homosexual rights, who was at Bangor. The magazine became central to the development of English Studies, publishing the criticism of Raymond Williams, Frank Kermode and David Lodge, and the poetry of Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn and Sylvia Plath. During the 1960s Larkin gave Cox’s magazine a number of poems which focused on contemporary social mores: ‘A Study of Reading Habits’ (1960), ‘Breadfruit’ (1961), ‘Love’ (1966) and ‘High Windows’ (1968).
¹³

Cox, who moved to a Chair at Manchester in 1966, saw the 1968 student unrest as the symptom of mistaken educational theory, and conceived the idea of publishing ‘Black Papers’ on education attacking the ‘White Papers’ in which government policy was published. Eventually five appeared, attacking the excesses of ‘progressive education’ and the introduction of 11–18 ‘comprehensive’ education, which was replacing the socially divisive system of ‘grammar’ and ‘secondary modern’ schools. The Black Paper contributors deplored what they saw as a collapse of intellectual rigour resulting from the headlong expansion of the university sector. Kingsley Amis, a prominent contributor, was loud in disapproval of new university courses in Sociology and associated subjects, which he saw as cover for Marxist subversion. Uninhibited by the fact that he had failed his BLitt at Oxford, he deplored declining standards. His epigrammatic summary of the state of Higher Education, coined in 1961, was: ‘more will mean worse’.
¹⁴

Following the stir caused by the first Black Paper,
Fight for Education
, Larkin was persuaded to lend his celebrity to the second,
Crisis in Education
, published in March 1969. His contribution was a snappy trochaic quatrain, set out on the page in octameters instead of tetrameters to form an uncouth, loping couplet:

When the Russian tanks roll westward, what defence for you and me?

Colonel Sloman’s Essex Rifles? The Light Horse of L.S.E.?

Albert Sloman was Vice-Chancellor of Essex University, then a hotbed of radicalism, while students at the London School of Economics routinely disrupted meetings addressed by right-wing speakers. The implication of Larkin’s lines is that the fellow-travelling radicals of the British education system will offer scant defence against the Red Army’s advance across Europe.

But Larkin was not writing as one who had seriously considered education policy, any more than ‘Breadfruit’ or ‘High Windows’ embodied the Leavisite moral earnestness of
Critical Quarterly
.
A more personal insecurity lies behind his public attitudes at this time. Students, for instance, unsettled him on a more primitive level than ideology. As he wrote to Cox in October 1968: ‘Tomorrow I have to address the freshers [. . .] and feel as usual scared of it.’
¹⁵
This annual public exposure was an ordeal. And there is a tone of abject exhaustion in his comment to Pym a fortnight later: ‘Wretched term has started again, & the place is full of replicas of Che Guevara & John Lennon, muttering away and plotting treason. How wearisome it all is! I wish I didn’t have to work so hard: every day, all day . . . and about two evenings a week are snatched into the maw as well. How do you find time to write?’ Characteristically, he had found time, despite everything, to read a draft of Pym’s latest novel,
The Sweet Dove Died
, and in the same letter offered dispassionate and useful advice.
¹⁶

But the dominant tone of his letters at this time is of a man overworked and at the end of his tether. He let loose in a letter to Monica of 27 November 1968:

Dearest bun,

Morning, noon & bloody night,

Seven sodding days a week,

I slave at filthy
work
, that might

Be done by any book-drunk freak.

This goes on till I kick the bucket:

FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT

Nice to be a
pawet
, ya knaw, an express ya
feelins
. Eh? The last line should be
screamed
in a paroxysm of rage.
¹⁷

His personal unhappiness increasingly displaced itself in shallow political rant. His verdict on the Wilson government in a letter to Amis was intemperate: ‘Fuck the whole lot of them, I say, the decimal-loving, nigger-mad, army-cutting, abortion-promoting, murderer-pardoning, daylight-hating ponces, to hell with them, the worst government I can remember.’
¹⁸
It is difficult to believe that he was genuinely agitated about the decimalization of the currency or the adjustment of clocks to British Summer Time. In a letter to Monica of 3 March 1968 he broke off from such complaints to exclaim: ‘But isn’t it an
angry
time – how easily one gets cross, how when left to oneself irritation begins to ferment like some neglected juice! [. . .] Only drink releases me from this bondage.’
¹⁹

Inwardly Larkin may have shared the desperation of Guy the Gorilla in London Zoo, two photographs of whom he kept on his desk at work, but he remained all the while a highly professional university librarian. Trevor Jarvis recalls that the local Association of University Teachers always found him constructive in negotiation and scrupulous in carrying out agreed policy, unlike some other members of Hull University’s management.
²⁰
Larkin’s relations with John Saville, then Senior Lecturer in Economic History at Hull, whose promotion to professor was allegedly held back because of his radical views, show how complex Larkin’s politics really were. As the University’s Librarian, he gave Saville every assistance in what he jokingly called his ‘seditious’ projects, building up the Library’s Archive of Labour History into an essential reference collection. In particular he supported Saville’s acquisition of the early archive of the National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty) and the papers of the political cartoonist ‘Vicky’ (Victor Weisz). He was also instrumental in the acquisition of papers concerned with Jock Haston (1913–86), a Trotskyist merchant seaman who contested a seat in Parliament in the 1945 election as a member of the short-lived Revolutionary Communist Party.
²¹
Larkin would occasionally lunch with Saville and they would share their passion for jazz. After his death Saville commented that he was ‘an efficient librarian who really knew what he was about [. . .] his very conservative politics did not confuse his role as a librarian [. . .] I mourn him still.’
²²

Nevertheless during the angry time of 1968–9 Larkin came closer than before to becoming the conservative caricature he frequently impersonated. He wrote to Monica on 7 February 1968:

Listening to
My Word
over supper
²³
I heard them cite a bit of
Ver
’s song from
LLLost
, & this sent me tumbling to the bookcase for my New Temple – aren’t the 2 songs lovely together! My eyes fill with tears [. . .] ‘When turtles tread, and rooks, and daws, And maidens bleach their summer smocks’ – oh darling! I can hardly write for tears, & only you can share it with me. Isn’t it marvellous for there to be Shakespeare, & for him to be English! Or for
us
to be English!