Philip Larkin (75 page)

On 12 May 1982 Larkin attended a reception in Downing Street and met the Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher. She misquoted a line from ‘Deceptions’ – ‘Her mind was full of knives’ – which persuaded him that she really had read his work: ‘I took
that
as a great compliment – I thought if it weren’t spontaneous, she’d have got it right. But I am a child in these things.’
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The poetry scene in Hull was highly active at this time, and Douglas Dunn, who after graduating from Hull in 1969 had been for two years an Assistant Librarian under Larkin, assembled an anthology for publication by Bloodaxe Books under the title
A Rumoured City: New Poets from Hull
. Larkin agreed to write a short foreword, and in mellow, retrospective mood produced a glowing prose poem celebrating the city in which he had now spent the best part of three decades. He evoked the ‘sudden elegancies’ of Hull’s city centre, and ended with a recasting of the conclusion of ‘Here’:

People are slow to leave it, quick to return. And there are others who come, as they think, for a year or two, and stay a lifetime, sensing that they have found a city that is in the world, yet sufficiently on the edge of it to have a different resonance. Behind Hull is the plain of Holderness, lonelier and lonelier, and after that the birds and lights of Spurn Head, and then the sea. One can go ten years without seeing these things, yet they are always there, giving Hull the air of having its face half-turned towards distance and silence, and what lies beyond them.
²⁶

His private comments on the poets in the volume were not, however, favourable. Only the local poet Frank Redpath, whose well-crafted works are heavily influenced by his own, gained his approval.
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He was reading little of the poetry of others by this time, and was even reluctant, initially, to write a review for the
Observer
of Andrew Motion and Blake Morrison’s
Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry
.
²⁸

As his birthday approached, Anthony Thwaite sent him the pieces to be included in the Festschrift
Larkin at Sixty
which he was editing for Faber and Faber. Larkin was offended by the essay by his schoolfriend Noel Hughes which referred to the Larkin house in Manor Road as ‘joyless’ and claimed that Sydney Larkin had been a member of the Link group of Nazi sympathizers. Larkin accused Hughes of writing a piece that ‘read like a posthumous article, to be published when I was no longer around to mind’.
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Hughes made changes but Larkin retained his sense of injury: ‘I and my sister continue to regard [him] as a reptile spitting venom hoarded for forty years.’
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Early in June the
South Bank Show
feature was broadcast. The chemistry between Bragg and the poet had not been good, and his verdict, in a letter to Judy Egerton, was that the programme was ‘inoffensive’, but ‘lacked subtlety and intelligence’; ‘there was rather too much of four-letter Larkin for my liking’.
³¹

In January 1982 Larkin had read an article on his work by the Canadian academic Terry Whalen, ‘Philip Larkin’s Imagist bias’.
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On 24 July he completed his first true poem for three years, a concentrated imagist lyric in two- or three-stress couplet lines, evoking a hot summer day. It is a welcome breath of celebratory lyricism:

Long lion days

Start with white haze.

By midday you meet

A hammer of heat –

Whatever was sown

Now fully grown;

Whatever conceived

Now fully leaved,

Abounding, ablaze –

O long lion days!

The poet was not quite dead. As if to highlight its isolated, belated position in his output he titled it ‘1982’. Of less poetic interest are the thirty-seven lines of tetrameter couplets he contributed to
Poems for Charles Causley
:

Dear CHARLES, My Muse, asleep or dead,

Offers this doggerel instead

To carry from the frozen North

Warm greetings for the twenty-fourth

Of lucky August [. . .]

It seems significant that of the poems he wrote in his final years, two were celebrations of sixty-fifth birthdays (Ewart’s and Causley’s). Was he, on some level, attempting to persuade himself that he might himself reach this improbable goal?

A month after his sixtieth birthday, on 10 September 1982, he responded to a letter from his Oxford contemporary Michael Hamburger:

Many thanks for your kind wishes [. . .] Yes, it is a pity that the ability to write poems dies away as one goes down the vale, but I don’t think there is much one can do about it. Silence is preferable to publishing rubbish, and better for one’s reputation. However, it would indeed be lovely if we both had sudden Indian summers, and there is no harm in hoping; is there?
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Wordsworth and Auden also exhausted their inspiration well before their deaths. They fell into empty prolixity; Larkin fell into silence.

On 26 October Larkin was invited by Hugh Thomas, head of the Centre for Policy Studies, to a dinner at his home in Ladbroke Grove, arranged to allow Mrs Thatcher to meet Tory-sympathising artists and academics. His fellow guests were Stephen Spender, Anthony Quinton, Al Alvarez, Anthony Powell, Isaiah Berlin, J. H. Plumb, Dan Jacobson, V. S. Pritchett, V. S. Naipaul, Tom Stoppard, Nicholas Mosley and Mario Vargas Llosa. In a letter to the Thomases following the dinner, Mrs Thatcher wrote that she was ‘a little worried that Philip Larkin was so silent’. Not hearing much because of his deafness, he had felt out of his depth among all the talk about foreign policy. Characteristically, his only significant contribution seems to have been a condemnation of the ‘hypocrisy’ of those who (like Mrs Thatcher) complained about the Berlin Wall while at the same time not wanting to see a united Germany.
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The remaining three years of Larkin’s life were darkened by accident and illness. In October 1982 Monica fell and cut her head in Haydon Bridge. He wrote to her in hospital: ‘Dear bun, I know how utterly alien hospitals are, but I hope this one is kind and friendly [. . .] Think if you would like to come here to convalesce when you “come out”. I could fetch you away.’
The following day, 14 October, he wrote again, distressed that his deafness had prevented him from hearing what the nurse had said over the phone: ‘Feel worried and cross with myself. I shd
say
I am deaf. How wonderful it will be to talk to you again!’
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Five months later, in March 1983, Monica developed shingles, and Philip drove her down from Haydon Bridge to Hull Royal Infirmary.
³⁶
When she left hospital to convalesce in Newland Park he found himself for the first time since 1950 living day to day with another person. She was suffering from lethargy and double vision, but on 9 July was sufficiently recovered to allow him to make a quick visit to Coleraine to receive an Honorary DLitt from the New University of Ulster.
³⁷
Then in August a spell of sneezing dispelled her double vision. The lease on Monica’s Leicester flat had expired in July and the plan was that as soon as she was well enough she would move permanently to Haydon Bridge. Betty recollects calling at the Newland Park house at this time with a bottle of champagne for Philip’s birthday. Monica asserted her precedence by raising the toast (in Betty’s champagne) ‘To Oxford Firsts!’
³⁸

When, in October 1983, Vikram Seth renewed their brief correspondence of five years earlier, asking for advice over his second collection,
The Humble Administrator’s Garden
, Larkin was impressed enough to respond. He paid Seth the compliment of hard-hitting but helpful criticism, writing that though he liked Seth’s ‘clear, moving, funny’ writing and the skilful way he handled metre and rhyme, he did not feel his poems were ‘world-beaters’. ‘Sometimes they were too long (for me), sometimes they had a kind of flaccidity.’ He asked Seth to forgive his ‘candour’ and advised him to cut down the number of poems in the volume. After ‘the initial cold shock’, Seth took the advice to heart. Candour, Seth wrote, ‘never harmed anyone’.
³⁹

In October 1983 Larkin contributed two couplets on Hull’s Library, ‘A lifted study-storehouse’, to the celebrations for Sir Brynmor Jones’s eightieth birthday. Urged on by Anthony Thwaite and Blake Morrison, he had made a selection of the best of his prose, and on 7 November Faber published
Required Writing
. The volume collected together various autobiographical pieces, the interviews with the
Observer
and
Paris Review
, a number of general essays and many of his reviews, including insightful pieces on Housman, Auden, Hardy, Owen, Betjeman, Pym and Plath. It concluded with the Introduction to
All What Jazz
and a selection of his jazz writings. He dedicated it to his friend Anthony Thwaite, who had commissioned many of the reviews as Literary Editor of the
Listener
, the
New Statesman
and
Encounter
. In his Foreword Larkin claimed that the volume had ‘little coherence’, and in a letter to Colin Gunner he referred to it as ‘a collection of hack journalism. I wanted to call it THE BOTTOM OF THE BARREL, but they wouldn’t play.’
⁴⁰
In fact it makes a unified and impressive impact, and it is not surprising that it won the W. H. Smith Award.
⁴¹
When I thanked him for his signature at the launch in Hull, he responded in character: ‘
I
should be doing the thanking,’ he said, and mentioned the number of pence he received ‘for every one of these they sell’.

When in January 1984
Poetry Review
published a special issue on ‘Poetry and Drink’, Larkin was persuaded to provide a contribution, ‘Party Politics’. The speaker depicts himself in the corner of a room of forks and faces, his glass never full:

You may get drunk, or dry half-hours may pass.

It seems to turn on where you are. Or who.

The political metaphor of the title fails to grow wings. There is little conviction in the poet’s grumbling about the arbitrariness of social rewards, and he is all too literally intent on his next drink. In contrast, in a short interview with A. N. Wilson broadcast on Radio 4 on 29 March 1984 his funny side was to the fore: ‘I haven’t given poetry up, but I rather think poetry has given me up, which is a great sorrow to me. But not an enormous crushing sorrow. It’s a bit like going bald.’ Asked what he intended to do with the £4,000 tax-free W. H. Smith Award, he quipped, ‘Well I think I shall buy a new suit. I need one and I gather they cost about that nowadays.’
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Early in 1984 Monica was prescribed antibiotics for another infection. Then in February Larkin himself was diagnosed with phlebitic thrombosis and took a week off from the Library. The following month Monica was well enough for him to drive her back to Haydon Bridge, though only for a fortnight to see whether she could cope. He wrote to her on 2 April as soon as he arrived back in Hull: ‘I can’t imagine you’ll be any less
feeble
but I hope you find some satisfaction in being among your own things, and your own boss again. Be careful, dear, of
stairs
&
road
crossings
, and be sensible about eating & drinking.’
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But she was unable to fend for herself and later in April he brought her back to Newland Park, where she was to stay for the rest of her life. She cut a startling figure around the University in her flamboyant cape, elaborate spectacles and strange hats. One of the young Library staff at the time recalls: ‘You couldn’t miss her bright colours.’
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