Philip Larkin (77 page)

Betty has no qualms about her action: ‘He was very sure that that’s what he wanted to happen. He told Monica and he told me.’
⁵
However, she still feels uncomfortable about a second, unauthorized interference with Larkin’s property. Before the destruction of the diaries, Larkin’s solicitor Terry Wheldon visited the Newland Park house with her and removed the pornography in two large cardboard boxes. ‘In later years I would have stopped that,’ she says. ‘But I just went along with it. He said to me: “I always do this, because leaving things like this upsets the bereaved.”’ But, Betty says, ‘It wouldn’t have upset Monica in the least. She would have loved it. Wouldn’t she? She probably knew anyway.’ Later Betty wrote to the University Archivist, Brian Dyson, questioning this interference with Larkin’s estate.
⁶

Fortunately, Larkin’s will was self-contradictory. It had been altered during his first spell in Nuffield Hospital in 1985, at a time when his judgement may well have been damaged by his collapse following the episode of the smuggled whisky. One clause required his executors to destroy his unpublished work ‘unread’. Another clause gave them full permission to publish what they wished from his papers. His executors, Anthony Thwaite and Andrew Motion, took advice from a Queen’s Counsel and the will was declared to be ‘repugnant’, allowing them a free hand to do what they felt best. They earned the gratitude of succeeding generations by destroying nothing.
⁷
Given Larkin’s own instinct to preserve and archive every twist and turn of his life and writing, including his gift of the first workbook to the British Library, and given also his fascination with the posthumous papers of Thomas Hardy and Wilfred Owen, this seems right. Anthony Thwaite records that Larkin ‘often referred [. . .] to work which would have to be left for “the posthumous volume” of his poems’.
⁸

Larkin had failed to become a novelist in the 1940s. However, as if his creativity could not be contained by his death, its aftermath shows a vivid abundance of novelistic character and event. During his researches for his official biography Andrew Motion concluded that the unpublished ‘When first we faced, and touching showed’ must be the product of a secret relationship of which neither Monica nor Maeve was aware. Though Philip had never shown her the poem Maeve felt at first that it must be addressed to her. Otherwise she was baffled as to who the ‘third woman’ could be. At one point she visited Betty for coffee and asked if she could help with the mystery. Had Philip, perhaps, Maeve inquired, had an affair with Joanna Motion, Andrew’s first wife? Later, on learning the truth, and discovering much else about Philip she had not suspected, such as his habitual use of four-letter words, Maeve became disillusioned. She ‘regretted his selfishness’, telling Motion that he had taken ‘the best years’ of her life and ‘given little in return’. She quoted Byron, an odd choice in the circumstances: ‘Were I to meet him again, that’s how I should greet him, “with silence and tears”.’
⁹
Her moral judgement was characteristically decisive: ‘He had feet of clay, didn’t he? Huge feet of clay.’
¹⁰
Later, however, her attitude mellowed and she enjoyed the celebrity of a famous poet’s muse. She became Vice-Chairman of the Philip Larkin Society, and put together, with my help, an affectionate memoir,
The Philip Larkin I Knew
(2002).
¹¹
At the time of her death in 2003 she was organizing a Society excursion to Scarborough to explore the site of her shopping trips with the poet in the 1960s. The excursion took place after her death.
¹²

Monica retired into seclusion, leaving most of the house she had briefly shared with Philip exactly as it had been when he died. So it stayed for the remaining fifteen years of her life. Uniquely among his loves and muses she understood poetry, and took it as seriously as he did. Unlike the others also, she had a capacity for tragedy. She had never been deceived about the complexity of Philip’s life: ‘I didn’t think he was straightforward.’
¹³
Whatever Philip’s faults, she could not bear to be without him. ‘He lied to me, the bugger, but I loved him.’
¹⁴
Money from the Larkin Estate maintained and redecorated the rooms where she slept and in which she spent her days reading the
Daily Telegraph
, tracing her lover’s growing reputation in literary magazines, and watching boxing and cricket on television. Elsewhere his clothes and shoes remained in their cupboards, his books and records on their shelves. Unfortunately, however, no one was at hand to prevent her falling prey to a cold-caller and commissioning the construction of an expensive plastic and glass conservatory, which she left bare and empty.

I met Monica briefly in 1999 two years before she died, barging in with academic questions at the end of an event. She was bedridden but as firm and opinionated as ever. At one point, her carer came in for a chat, no doubt concerned that my questions were overtaxing her frail charge. She had, she said, taken Monica into the front bedroom recently ‘for a change of scene’. ‘We found Philip’s old scarf and some of the dresses you used to wear when you went out together. It’s happy memories isn’t it?’ Monica drove her fists into the bed on each side of her and strained forward from the pillow: ‘I found it
terribly
boring
actually.’ The nurse laughed ruefully: ‘I don’t give up, Mr Booth.’ Later she told me how she had to fight Monica in order to wash her hair: ‘she was so stiffened against it. It’s very long, and it’s really beautiful when it’s washed.’
¹⁵
At Monica’s funeral two years later, a very Anglican affair with much mumbling and a brightly encouraging organ, the officiating priest commented that he was wearing the same robes as at Larkin’s funeral. He remembered because they had been noticed on television, and he’d received admiring letters about them.

After Monica’s papers had gone to the Bodleian, according to her wish, and Larkin’s remaining books, records and letters had been taken to the Brynmor Jones Library, the Larkin Society bought the residual contents of the house: pictures, ornaments, furniture, cameras, blank workbooks. At first we thought there might be manuscripts hidden under the upstairs carpets, but the promising unevennesses were only accumulated piles of dust. Again, life imitated fiction, when, despite the most rigorous search, we failed to locate the manuscript book in which Larkin had drafted ‘Morning at last, there in the snow’, ‘Be my Valentine this Monday’ and ‘We met at the end of the party’. This had fallen down the back of a small bedside cabinet and only came to light when the house-clearer whom we paid to take away the last debris heard it rattling on the way to the tip.
¹⁶
More movingly, in one drawer we found a small translucent envelope containing petals of a pressed dog rose, now brown, together with a lock of pubic hair.
¹⁷
Though the moment of passion it preserves is lost to memory, this poignant metonym of the spring of life preserves its emotional charge. Like the rose and hair, Larkin’s poems have, also, with accumulating deaths, outlived their occasions.

Larkin’s grave is in the cemetery in Eppleworth Road, Cottingham. The small plain white headstone bears the simple wording decided upon by Monica:

Philip Larkin

1922–1985

Writer

The stonemason initially placed inappropriate full-stops at the ends of the lines, and these had to be clumsily filled in: a homely touch which Larkin would have appreciated. The grave stands mid-row, and attracts tributes of flowers. For a time a weatherbeaten copy of the
Collected Poems
was placed there, and someone planted a small
Laurus nobilis
, or bay, close to one side. But the roots would have unsettled the surrounding stones and the Council removed it. However, the grave is picturesque, and looks much as the final resting place of a well-loved poet should look. By the time of Monica’s death in 2001 mortality had completed Philip’s row and filled three more. So, looking over Larkin’s grave a little to the right one can see Monica’s grave about twenty yards away. A stone of exactly the same form as Philip’s was eventually erected over her, giving simply her full name:

Margaret Monica Beale Jones

7th May 1922 – 15th February 2001

It is quite untended.

Maeve Brennan’s relationship with David Bassett lasted until his death. They did not marry, though they were effectively a couple. He died four years after Larkin in 1989 and, since he had no surviving close relatives, it fell to Maeve to wind up his affairs and make arrangements for his burial. His gravestone of purple marble, larger and more ornamental than Philip’s, in accordance with Maeve’s Catholic taste, is located at the very end of the same row as Larkin’s. In due course, in 2003, when Maeve herself died, she was interred in the same plot. Thus, the visitor today encounters a densely worded gravestone giving David Bassett’s details and ending: ‘A very dear friend’. Below, without explanation, is engraved: ‘also Maeve Brennan, devoted sister of Dermot and Moira’. The inscription concludes with Maeve’s favourite words of poetry: ‘What will survive of us is love.’ She had always been earnest that ‘Philip really did mean’ what he had written, insisting that there was no irony in the line. One can hear the ghostly less deceived snort across the grass from Monica’s grave: ‘Love isn’t stronger than death just because two statues hold hands for six hundred years.’
¹⁸
What the ghost of David Bassett makes of the situation is a question perhaps for Larkin’s favourite celebrator of life’s little ironies, Thomas Hardy. At Maeve’s funeral Betty commented wickedly: ‘Now nobody can contradict me.’ And during the third Hull International Conference on the Work of Philip Larkin, held in the nearby Lawns Centre in summer 2007, she stood beside Larkin’s grave in the drizzle and recited ‘An Arundel Tomb’ to the assembled delegates.

One distinctive aspect of Larkin’s poems concerning death is the absence of any reference to those who will remain to grieve his passing. He would never have written a poem like Hardy’s ‘Afterwards’ in which the poet imagines his own afterlife in the memories of others (‘He was a man who noticed such things’). Nor does Larkin imagine his body decaying physically after death. There is nothing in his work similar to Betjeman’s elegy on his father: ‘In Highgate now his finger-bones / Stick through his finger-ends.’
¹⁹
For Larkin beyond death there is simply nothing. In the words of Auden’s elegy on Yeats, he has become his admirers. What will survive of him is poetry. But the thought of his literary afterlife was never of any consolation to him.
²⁰
‘We must never die. No one must ever die.’
²¹

Notes

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