Philip Larkin Read online

  Philip explores ideas in his letters to Kitty, echoing her enthusiasm for the liberal educationalist Homer Lane. In a long letter of 15 May 1941 he takes her into his confidence about the Jungian philosophy he is imbibing at the lectures of John Layard, adding elaborate diagrams: ‘Could tell you lots more but I haven’t time. But it was like an evening spent with truth.’ In a particularly affectionate letter he breaks off from his Anglo-Saxon revision to respond to her account of her latest educational challenge, ‘teaching a whole secondary school in Art’. He draws a brilliant sketch of his sister as a cat holding her own among the clamouring pupils. It is to his sister that he writes his most lyrical descriptions of Oxford:

  […] south-east down St. Aldates, gusts of snow blow past Big Tom and away onto the Meadows, where are no footprints; and south-west by the river flakes fall in the quadrangles of Magdalen. And in hundreds of brightly lit rooms, or solitary by reading-lamps, hundreds of undergraduates smoke, read, talk and laugh, oblivious of the outer dark but part of it, forgetful of all but a tiny section of living but influenced by life and its implications, as am I, sprawled on a sofa in St. John’s College, a pad on my knees and my feet on the fireplace, writing to you.

  It is unfortunate that so few of these early letters survive, and that only one formal letter concerning holiday arrangements exists from the twenty-five years between 1947 and 1972 (20 April 1969). Following her marriage in 1944, when she was living in close proximity to Eva, it seems that Philip saw no reason to communicate with her separately. As he wrote on 1 October 1944 ‘I expect all my general news is passed on to you by bush-telegraph.’ But Rosemary also explains that Kitty was ‘a very private person’ who did not wish her correspondence to be read by others. In particular she ‘didn’t want any attention paid to her as Philip’s sister’.33 It is irresistible to conclude that the malign early family dynamic played a part in this self-effacement. In his letter of 31 October 1940 Philip indirectly points out two spelling mistakes she has made: ‘By the way, what is “contempory”? (“Tradition v. Contempory”) Perhaps, too, you might enlighten me on “psycology”?’ One can imagine the exasperation such solecisms would have caused their father. Such considerations may explain why Kitty wanted to erase herself from her famous literary brother’s story.

  Equally regrettable is the fact that only two letters survive from Kitty to Philip.34 (They were preserved in the family envelopes along with letters from his parents.) In one (23 October 1944) she shows herself taking great pains to satisfy his request for her to decorate a cigarette case with his initials, locating an appropriate letter font and gold paint. Why are all the other letters from Kitty lost, when Philip so religiously preserved the letters from his father and mother? For Philip to have routinely destroyed them would have contradicted his usual principle: ‘To destroy letters is repugnant to me – it’s like destroying a bit of life’ (24 June 1963). Nonetheless a casual reference in a letter to Eva of 9 September 1956 suggests that he might have done this in the case of Kitty. He had asked her for a particular book for his birthday (9 August), and this had arrived rather late with a comment that she ‘had read it but didn’t think it much good’. Her comment induced a sudden irritation on his part, and he continued spitefully: ‘Tearing up one of her letters recently I found I’d torn up some pictures of Rosemary that were inside – ssh!’

  But it would be a mistake to read much into this self-dramatising comment. The sibling relationship is always a particularly sensitive one. He quite often wrote slightingly of Kitty, implying that she was over-talkative or slow-witted, and when she failed to write to thank him for a present in August 1958 he called her ‘mean bitch of hell, if you’ll excuse the expression’. A recurrent source of tension was the necessity for one of them to be on hand to care for Eva at all times, which made for regular disputes about holiday timings (particularly in 1964 and 1969). But such quarrels were transient and were always amicably resolved with apologies on his part. On 26 November 1954 he wrote: ‘I wonder if you wd tell Kitty that I’m sorry to have been awkward about Xmas – I felt v. bad on Monday morning: but I did appreciate seeing her new suit.’ When he first took up his job at Leicester in 1946 he stayed with Kitty and her husband for three weeks, writing on 11 September: ‘Kitty says (and Walter seems to agree) she doesn’t mind how long I stop here.’ Their relationship was essentially warm and affectionate.

  He took charming photographs of Kitty with her daughter, and in the Larkin family tradition he always sent her carefully chosen presents on her birthday and at Christmas. One file in the archive consists of twenty-two Christmas and birthday cards to ‘dear Kitty’ and/or to Rosemary.35 Philip frequently asks Eva to pass on points of interest in matters of design and artistic taste to his sister. On 9 January 1955 he writes: ‘Please show Kitty the stamp on this envelope & ask her if she doesn’t think the lettering vile!’ A repeated refrain is: ‘Remember me to Kitty’, ‘Give my regards to Kitty’, or to Kitty and Walter, or to the Hewett family. When the direct correspondence resumes briefly in 1972, it shows a familiar co-operative relationship in caring for their mother (if with Larkin’s customary brusqueness in discussing money matters, inherited from his father). And his letter to his sister of 4 April 1977 following Rosemary’s wedding shows the same warm empathy as the earliest letters of the 1940s. Kitty’s feelings for her brother are shown in her response to the typescript of Andrew Motion’s 1993 biography, which she read in 1992, weeks before she died: ‘There’s no love in it.’36 Philip’s feelings for her are clear from his letter to Eva of 5 June 1966, in which he echoes the colour imagery of the earliest correspondence: ‘I dreamed about Kitty the other night, but have forgotten what. Fancy her saying we were utterly unlike each other! Only as one red is utterly unlike another red, I shd have thought.’

  The death of Sydney Larkin in 1948 hit Philip hard. The grief of ‘An April Sunday brings the snow’, the only mourning elegy he addressed to a human being, is made intimately personal by the image of the ‘sweet and meaningless’ jam which his father had made in such unnecessary quantities. He completed no poems after this for nearly a year. As he explained to Sutton, he felt he was required to ‘become an adult’.37 Six weeks after Sydney’s death he proposed marriage to Ruth Bowman, his girlfriend from Wellington. But rather than setting up his own establishment he was to end up living with his mother. Eva was incapable of coping on her own and expected her children to sort out her life for her. Kitty, married in 1944, had recently given birth to Rosemary (28 April 1947) and could scarcely be imposed upon. So Philip took on the burden and bought Eva a house close to his work in Leicester where they could live together.

  Mother and son moved into 12 Dixon Drive in August 1948. Here they lived for two years until September 1950. The arrangement suited Eva and they got on well enough together. But it was a frustrating situation for a man of his age. By 1950, the year in which he turned twenty-eight, he was desperate to escape, not only from his mother but also from Ruth. Haunted by the example of his parents’ union, he could not bring himself to marry. He wrote to Sutton on 4 May 1950 ‘My chief handicap at present is this bloody set up here, Christ knows how it will all end. But it can only be broken up by a good excuse like a new job, you see […] I do realize that my mother must live with someone – only I’d rather prefer it not to be me.’38 Eva’s dependency can be judged from the fact that the few cards Philip sent to her in 1948–50 from trips away are addressed not to Dixon Drive but to the home of his sister and her husband, Walter Hewett, at 53 York Road, Loughborough.

  Philip made his escape at the end of September 1950 by taking up a sub-librarianship at Queen’s University Belfast, across the Irish Sea, thereby throwing the immediate responsibility for their mother back on his sister. He had proposed afresh to Ruth in June, only to take back the offer after three days amid acrimony and bitter self-reproaches. This was the signal to cement the relationship with Monica Jones, a lecturer at Leicester, who shared his Oxford background and who was to become his
wife in all but name, albeit at a distance. They became lovers weeks after the break with Ruth, and weeks before he moved to Belfast. It suited him that this new relationship would be conducted largely by letter, physical relations being confined to his visits to the mainland. The proximity of Monica in Leicester to his mother in Loughborough meant that he could visit both in the same trip, and such visits became a fixed feature of his life for many years.

  As time passed Eva abandoned the hope that Philip would bring her across to join him in Belfast. Just over a year after his departure Kitty and she found a suitable house at 21 York Road, a hundred yards or so from her daughter. Eva moved in in December 1951, and was to live here for the next two decades. For many years, terrified of loneliness, and more immediately of thunderstorms, she could not sleep in the house on her own. A bedroom at the back of the Hewetts’ home became ‘her’ room. Kitty, it was understood, was grateful for her mother’s company since Walter was often away from home for long periods.39 It was a minor triumph when Eva wrote to Philip from her own house on 24 November 1956: ‘I have slept here last night and shall do so to-night, for I think it is more comfortable not having to turn out in the cold, and there is really no need when Walter is at 53.’ Philip was delighted to hear that ‘you had been sleeping in your own basket for once’ (28 November 1956). Eva remained apprehensive that her son-in law, a management consultant with Urwick, Orr & Partners, would take a job elsewhere and she would be abandoned. Eventually, after fourteen years, in 1965, Walter did buy a new, larger house, ‘Oddstones’, in Forest Road, Loughborough, and Eva was compelled to live more on her own. However, the Hewetts’ new home was only one and a half miles from York Road.

  Even before she had found a house Eva was exploring the possibility of a paid live-in companion to occupy it with her. She placed an advertisement in the newspaper, and over the months discussed the various applicants in letters to Philip. But, unsurprisingly, none satisfied her requirements. The one person with whom she might have been able to share her life comfortably was her great friend Auntie Nellie, widow of her brother Arthur Day (d. 1943). But Nellie lived in Hyde, Cheshire (now Greater Manchester) and had a son and daughter of her own, and eventually also several grandchildren. She never considered uprooting herself and joining her sister-in law. Eva would go to stay with Nellie, Nellie frequently visited Loughborough, and the sisters-in-law shared summer holidays together by the sea.

  Eva lived at 21 York Road, Loughborough for two decades, from December 1951, when she was 65 and Philip was 29, until January 1972, when she was 86 and he was 49. Their exchange of letters was unaffected by Philip’s moves between lodgings in Belfast,40 and continued without significant change when in 1955 he returned to the mainland. He made sure at this point not to be drawn back into the domestic trammels of 1948–50 by taking up the post of Librarian in the University of Hull, far enough away from his mother and Monica to keep both versions of the domestic trap at a distance. Finally, after eighteen months in temporary lodgings around Hull and in the village-suburb of Cottingham,41 he found the place he could stay, moving into his high-windowed flat at 32 Pearson Park in October 1956. Here he was to live until 1974, three years before Eva’s death.

  The second phase of Larkin’s writing home began exactly ten years later than his first letters from Oxford. The early letters from Belfast were frequent and could be very long. His relief at escaping the domestic proximity of the previous two years led to an outpouring of affection. On 29 September 1950 and on 3, 5 and 11 October he sent Eva six pages, on 18 October he sent eight densely packed pages, on 20 October four pages, on 28 October eight pages, on 31 October ten pages. This is the more remarkable since he was, at the same time, writing even longer letters to Monica Jones. The drawings of himself as a ‘creature’ with which he had enlivened his letters from 1943 onwards became more refined. Eva commented: ‘I think it is really wonderful how you can make your creatures say so many different things just by placing the eye in different positions’ (23 January 1951). During 1950 he experimented with various depictions of his mother with different hairstyles or wearing a hat. Sometimes he drew her as a straggly ‘mop’. In response, on 21 November 1950, she made one of her own rare ventures into drawing. He responded enthusiastically: ‘How I did laugh at your “wild Mop” a really skilful & comic drawing’ (26 November 1950). Then, on the last day of 1950, he hit upon the image of Eva that was to become fixed for the remainder of the correspondence: an ‘old creature’ distinguished from the ‘young creature’ by a neat mob cap. Her new epistolary identity was confirmed in 1951–2 when Philip abandoned the former ‘Dear Mop’, ‘My dear Mop’ or ‘Dearest Old Mop’ in favour of ‘Dear old creature’ or ‘My very dear old creature’.

  From the beginning the routine was fixed. His time at weekends had to be organised to ensure his letter reached Eva on Monday: ‘I’m writing to you on Saturday evening this week-end, because tomorrow I shall be occupied all day, and of course old creature must have its letter! Anything can be missed rather than that’ (2 May 1953). He also wrote a second letter or two, or a card, during the week. Betty Mackereth, Larkin’s secretary at Hull from 1957 until 1984, recollects that on arriving back in his office after a meeting he would at once sit down to dash off a letter, taking it himself to the postbox on Cottingham Road outside the university in time for the afternoon collection. Her replies were equally regular. A missed letter would cause a minor crisis and generate elaborate displays of affection. On Friday 24 October 1952 Philip sent his mother a postcard with a drawing of the ‘creature’ peering disconsolately under the doormat: ‘No letter! Are you all right?’ Two days later in his regular Sunday letter he thanked her for the ‘pretty telegram’ which she had immediately sent to reassure him. It had arrived on Saturday along with the delayed letter: ‘how kind of you to send a greetings one!’

  Their letters always methodically address the other’s concerns as well as conveying their own ‘news’. The formal considerateness of tone is unbroken except on the few occasions when Philip berates himself for exploding with irritation at her: ‘I have behaved wretchedly – I don’t know what gets into me. I humbly apologise’ (10 January 1968). She would immediately accept his apologies with a dismissive comment or an admission of a fault on her own side. Both correspondents make a point of filling up all the space on their pages. Philip regrets that he might not have time to fill the sheet he has begun before he has to catch the post. On another occasion he sends ‘an extra page for you, because I think my 2 pages this morning were a bit thin – I was hurrying slightly’ (24 October 1954). He thanks his mother for an ‘extra’ letter which he could not have ‘legitimately’ expected. On 29 April 1952 he exclaims: ‘Yesterday I received three letters from you! Never been such a day.’ As time went on Eva tended towards the ends of longer letters to write smaller and with lines closer together, in order to squeeze everything in. Her spelling, grammar and punctuation are perfect except that she uses tentative dots for commas, and sometimes misplaces the apostrophe in ‘it’s’ and ‘haven’t’. When he gently corrected this fault she became over-anxious, and he had to reassure her that the matter was of no importance. True to Sydney’s memory, she not infrequently had recourse to a dictionary. On 12 February 1967 Philip concluded: ‘You are a better writer than I.’ There is no sign of constraint or duty in his letters. On a card of 11 November 1956 he suddenly bursts out in a gush of ingenuous emotion ‘I wonder what you have cooking in the oven? Dear old creature, I do love you. I am now going to make a list of draughts!’

  It is inevitable to speculate on the impact of Philip’s lifelong love for Eva on his attitudes towards other women. Both Maeve, with whom he contemplated marriage in the early 1960s, and Monica, his lifetime lover, believed Eva to be a rival for his affections. On 16 October 1957 Philip wrote a letter of contorted self analysis to Monica:

  I am simply terrified at the prospect of us going on year after year & not getting married – so terrified that it may almost be something else
I’m terrified of but don’t recognise […] if I don’t want to marry you then I don’t see why I should mind not doing so, & if I do then I don’t see why I don’t. You’ll say Mum is at the bottom of all this. Well, if she is, I don’t know what to do about it, though I wish I did.42