Philip Larkin Read online

  It is tempting to speculate on what might have happened had Eva’s life-span been shorter: if she had died, say, at the age of seventy-seven in 1963, when Philip was just forty and in the final throes of his marriage debate. Would he then have been able to resist marriage to Monica? Had he married at this point he would not have written ‘Dockery and Son’ and his whole story would be different. But instead Eva lived on until 1977, when she was ninety-one and her son’s debate with himself about marriage was long over.

  It is tempting, also, to search in this correspondence for an Oedipal rivalry with his father. But even in the 1950s Sydney is not so large a presence in the letters as one might have expected. On 9 October 1955, only seven years after his father’s death, Philip wrote to Eva on notepaper ‘from the old days’. ‘It’s the kind Pop would use isn’t it: it’s strange that I can never remember anything of the kind of letters he used to write. They were very short and dry, weren’t they? And slightly ironic.’ At some key points in his life Philip was pleased to compare his own career with Sydney’s. On 29 May 1959, he told his mother: ‘Great surprise – yesterday Who’s Who sent for my details! This pleased me mightily. Pop never got in Who’s Who.’ A decade later on 9 May 1968 he related, with a certain melodrama: ‘I delivered in person to No. 10 Downing Street a refusal of the O.B.E.!’ Does his exaggerated response suggest that he was holding out for a CBE, determined to go one better than Sydney, whose highest achievement had been an OBE? Perhaps; though he does compare his case with those of other possible literary candidates for the award, R. S. Thomas and Cecil Day Lewis. So other factors were at play.

  Without Sydney, Eva fell gradually into the habits and views to be expected of a widow of her class at the time. For a while she attempted to stay true to Sydney’s, and her son’s, exacting standards. She wrote on 15 May 1951: ‘I have been reading Daddy’s Diary (1947) this evening and have made a list of the books he was reading. I have asked the library here to get me Franz Kafka’s Diary, which you recommended.’ But Philip has to tell her to stop struggling with Dostoevsky’s The Possessed which she is finding unreadable, and over time her reading became more middlebrow. She began to attend lectures on psychology run by Dr Edith Folwell and, though Sydney had taught her a severe religious scepticism, she made several friends among the widows and unmarried older women of the ‘Circle of Silent Ministry’, and began to attend her local church: ‘Oh dear! Oh dear! I seem to be getting more and more involved with “the Church” and the Psychologists!’ (12 June 1951).43 Philip encouraged her to find a cure for her loneliness wherever she could: ‘I hope you found the visit to Dr Folwell lastingly beneficial: I am sure it is best to tell her anything that preys upon you […]’ (29 October 1950). Eva came to rely with abject hero-worship on the support of Dr Folwell: ‘She says she is my friend forever’ (15 May 1951).

  The only solution to her problems Eva could envisage was to find someone to live with her. But her attempts at employing a paid companion were doomed to failure, and the emotional pressure was clearly on Kitty or Philip to take her in. She dropped hints: ‘My new doctor, after reading my case sheet was very emphatic that I should not live with strangers, but with my own family. Some day I’ll tell you what he said’ (15 May 1951). As the 1950s progressed she became more and more dispirited. It is cruel that it was in 1955, at a time when Philip should have been enjoying his first national success as a poet with The Less Deceived, that Eva succumbed to clinical depression. Philip and Kitty coped as a team with her spell in Carlton Hayes Hospital over Christmas, including electric shock treatment. No upheaval or significant change followed and her life soon returned to its regular routines. She complained at one moment of being harassed and at the next of being lonely. Philip responded reasonably: ‘I can see that having other Circle members ring you up could be awfully interrupting, but surely it is comforting too’ (11 July 1965).

  What sustained Eva was her ‘work’. Their letters maintain the fiction that Eva is valiantly coping with a life of enforced domestic labour. On 6 January 1959, at the age of seventy-three, she cited pressure of housework as the excuse to give up writing her life story, having reached only as far as her childhood: ‘Perhaps when I am too old to work, I might have more time to spend on it.’ On 7 July 1959, she wrote ‘I have been very busy to-day until about 3 p.m. thoroughly overhauling the front bedroom in readiness for A. Nellie. I have rubbed down the walls and ceiling and had all the bundles off the top of the wardrobe and overhauled the bed.’ He would respond in kind, describing the chores of turning over his mattress or doing his washing and darning. When Philip described having to arbitrate in a complicated dispute between the cleaners at Hull Library, she responded with her own recollections: ‘I am not surprised that your cleaners worry you. I well remember the worries and misery I suffered over the women and maids. And the number of things they stole!’

  Most of the time Philip assents to this equivalence between his and her ‘work’. On a couple of occasions, however, he cannot help allowing the reality to show through. Overwhelmed by problems in the library he wrote on 10 March 1963: ‘It must be nice to be like you, nothing to do but shop, cook & eat!’; and again a week later: ‘Wish I had nothing to do all day, like some people!’ Aware that such comments struck at the heart of Eva’s sense of identity, he immediately ticked himself off for his impertinence, drawing one of his wittiest sketches in which the incensed old creature delivers a peremptory blow with a rolling pin to the top of the young creature’s head. On 26 March 1963 Eva wrote in an injured tone: ‘Yes, it is a hard job to get any spare time, although I know you will hoot at the idea of me not having any.’

  In fact all her time was ‘spare’. She was a wealthy widow without responsibilities, who, as her bank manager told her, could have made her whole life a holiday if her spirit had been so inclined. But her spirit was not so inclined. Philip’s diagnosis appears accurate. On 11 July 1965 he compared his own depression with hers: ‘I’ve felt fairly depressed recently for no very good reason. I think one is stamped with a particular kind of character, like a butter-pat having a cow or leaves stamped on it, and just has to struggle away with it.’ His mother’s condition was not a set of circumstances susceptible to change. It was a fixed state of mind.

  A more developed sense of humour would no doubt have helped Eva to take greater pleasure in life. She laughs ‘outright’ at one of his sketches (12 January 1964). But the moments of comedy in her letters are usually unintentional. He told her he had ‘howled with laughter’ at her account of discovering that she had a twelve-month-old tin of salmon. After looking up food poisoning in a medical dictionary she ‘took it out and buried it in the garden!’ (5 and 3 October 1967). Eva cooperated with her son’s Goon Show humour in collecting cuttings concerned with the village of Bunny, but it seems doubtful that she derived much pleasure from the ambiguities and puns he found in them. Nor would she have much appreciated the rare flashes of sharp literary wit in letters to her: the description of E. M. Forster as ‘A toothy little aged Billy Bunter’ (12 October 1952), or Cecil Day Lewis’s report on his reception as Compton Lecturer in Poetry at Hull: ‘the students had begun by treating him as a sacred cow, but ended by treating him as a cow’ (5 December 1968).

  More radically, Eva lacked the simple pleasure in existence which is the lifeblood of her son’s poetry. On 24 February 1952 he told her to stop worrying about the past: ‘it is, after all, past, and fades daily in our memory & in the memories of everyone else […] Every day’, he tells her, ‘comes to us like a newly cellophaned present, a chance for an entirely fresh start’, and in consequence ‘we are silly if we do not amble easily in the sun while we can, before time elbows us into everlasting night & frost.’ He added with a hint of hopelessness: ‘This is perhaps not very helpful, but I am so sorry for you, and feel you have no reason to worry yourself!’ She is at a loss as to how to respond, turning back to her obsessive anxieties: ‘It was kind of you to write a page full of advice to lessen my depression. Of co
urse I know it all, but the strange thing is it is so difficult to act upon, and one can never forgive oneself. […] I do wish I was a better and braver creature’ (26 February 1952). Eva was charmed by the birds nesting in her garden and by the toad she found in her cellar, but she was never overwhelmed by aesthetic jouissance as her son was. On 23 August 1953 he told her: ‘We must go again up that road to the wood where we found the scarlet toadstool and listen to the wind in the trees. I’m sure it’s beautiful at this time of year.’ On 14 April 1957 he wrote: ‘The view out of my bedroom window over a number of back gardens and allotments is lovely – all the trees and bushes opening their fans of fresh green in the sun. It makes one despair of ever saying how glad one is to be alive!’ But for Eva, he knew, such words were ‘not very helpful’.

  Generally the tone of his letters to Eva is as prosaic as hers to him. But there is a fundamental difference. Prosiness was her only option; Philip’s prosaic writing is self-aware: in invisible inverted commas as it were. Larkin is the master of unironic sincerity. When he buys some crockery his plain indicative tone is itself emotionally touching: ‘I love to hear the little details of your life. I bought a tea-set yesterday – 21 pieces, Wedgewood, fairly ordinary but quite nice.’ His mother is his muse of the everyday. ‘I love the commonplace, I lead a very commonplace life. Everyday things are lovely to me.’44 She is a muse in the time-honoured sense of being beyond the poet’s reach. Poetry is made of her, but she herself is unconscious of it.

  Directly or indirectly Eva gave occasion to a number of poems. She provided the inspiration for ‘Mother, Summer, I’ and ‘Reference Back’, with its dialogue between ‘unsatisfactory youth’ and ‘unsatisfactory age’. The mundane subjects of some of the letters are transformed into poems like ‘Coming’, ‘Ambulances’ and ‘Long Last’. But, though Eva appreciated her son’s most moving works, her own taste in poetry was undiscriminating. Philip expresses no impatience with her on this point. Among the poets of his generation Larkin is unusually tolerant of the middlebrow, the sincerely sentimental. Some of his greatest poems rely on the carefully contextualised cliché. Unless read within Larkin’s thunderously negative rhetorical context (‘Time has transfigured them into / Untruth’), ‘What will survive of us is love’ is a mere tag from a newspaper ‘In Memoriam’ column.45

  Though Eva never attended such a meeting, ‘Faith Healing’ gains emotional depth from the poet’s experience of her incurable loneliness. On 3 October 1967 she sent him a cutting:

  WHO LOVED IS – armoured is against all foes.

  All darts of Fate and spectres of the night:

  An one who in eternal sunshine goes

  Illumined by a shining inner light.

  He thanked her, deadpan, ‘for the nice poem about being loved’. But he must have been acutely aware of the contrast between this verbal slop and the poem he had created seven years earlier:

  In everyone there sleeps

  A sense of life lived according to love.

  To some it means the difference they could make

  By loving others, but across most it sweeps

  As all they might have done had they been loved.

  That nothing cures.

  In his relations with his mother Philip was prepared to disregard the rigour which makes his own poetry great and accept unmediated sentimentality. On 16 August 1966 he wrote to her: ‘I enclose a piece from Patience Strong – I thought it rather good advice for me & perhaps you too!’ Eva replied on 21 August thanking him for ‘the beautifully expressed advice on the Patience Strong cutting which I shall read every morning’.46

  One element in this correspondence which will inevitably give readers pause is race. On 7 April 1968, when riots were occurring in the USA, Philip wrote to Eva: ‘Aren’t you glad you don’t live there? I shouldn’t like a crowd of Negroes roaming around Pearson Park, or Loughborough,’ and sketched a couple of banner-wielding protestors. On 2 August 1971 he mentioned that he had ‘a pair of Africans to show round the Library – real fuzzy-wuzzies’. Disconcerted by this explicit racism, Larkin’s defenders stress that he never expresses such attitudes in any of his poems and note that such comments in his letters tend to reflect the prejudice of his particular correspondent (Amis, Conquest, Gunner, or his mother). There is, indeed, plenty in Larkin’s life and writing to contradict the charge of simple racial prejudice. Among his friends at Oxford, Diana Gollancz and Denis Frankel were Jewish, and he based the situation of Katherine in A Girl in Winter on the Jewish refugee Miriam Plaut. His jazz reviews show moral indignation at the humiliations of the colour bar in the USA, and he enthusiastically admired the music of Count Basie, Sidney Bechet, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. His comment that Louis Armstrong ‘was an artist of world stature, an American Negro slum child who spoke to the heart of Greenlander and Japanese alike’ is impeccably liberal in its universalism. In this context the flashes of crude racist language in his letters are all the more shocking. On 30 July 1967 he wrote to Eva that London is ‘full of foreigners – chinks, wops, wogs, frogs, huns, the lot – and yanks, of course. Awful, awful.’ Sometimes the contradictions in Larkin’s attitudes are simply irreconcilable.47

  In the correspondence surveyed in this volume the moment that causes, perhaps, most serious concern comes on 10 February 1963, when Philip told his mother that he was about to interview applicants for a post in the library, two of whom were from India, adding ‘I shan’t have the Indians.’ He was not at ease in the racially diverse society forming itself around him in the post-war period. ‘Integration! I just can’t get English people,’ he complained to her. On the other hand there is evidence in the letters that he assessed applicants for posts without prejudice, and indeed could show a sympathetic interest in the problems of immigrants:

  This week I had to interview an Indian – a Ceylonese, actually – for a job as porter, and have offered it him, though I don’t know if he’ll turn up. He seemed a nice chap but I couldn’t understand a word he said! He’d been in the Royal Navy as a steward and had good references. I hope he turns out a success. I’m also expecting to appoint a Ceylonese lady higher up the scale.

  (22 September 1968)

  Later Larkin sympathised with the awkward financial and cultural situation of this second appointee, Lila Wijayatileka, who became Senior Library Assistant: Inter-Library Loans. ‘Yes, I appointed a Ceylon girl, to match the Ceylon porter. I don’t know how she’ll be. She’s quite well qualified. If she takes my job she will have to pay back a grant she came to England on – in instalments, I hope! She says life is awkward for a single woman in Ceylon – can’t go anywhere.’

  On 22 June 1969, when Eva was eighty-three, Philip wrote: ‘But certainly you are wonderful for your age! It’s all this work that does it, though I wish you could do less. A little bungalow, or someone to look after you … I don’t know.’ She was becoming too frail to cope and he had been suggesting that she simplify her routines by keeping fewer rooms in occupation. Her mental capacity was also in decline. On 7 August 1969 Philip wrote to Monica from a holiday with his mother in Norwich: ‘If we are in a room, she doesn’t know which door she came in by … she is perpetually lost in the hotel.’48 That Christmas his anxiety about her growing senility caused one of his outbursts of irritation:

  I’m afraid I was not a very nice creature when at home. I wish I could explain the very real rage & irritation I feel: probably only a psychiatrist could do so. It may be something to do with never having got away from home. Or it may be my concern for you & blame for not doing more for you cloaking itself in anger. I do appreciate your courageous struggle to keep going in the old way, and am aware of your kindnesses – I did enjoy the duck, and all the other things – but I am worried about how long you can carry on without help.

  (5 April 1970)

  Anticipating the inevitable, Kitty and Philip persuaded their mother to spend a fortnight in a care home in Loughborough in July 1970, while the Hewetts were away on holiday.49 The following year, 1971,
they booked her in once again, in August. But she longed to be back at home: ‘I am finding time is hanging heavy on my hands and I don’t think I should like to live in a “home” for some things’ (24 August 1971). On the Hewetts’ return from holiday she went back to York Road.50 Once again she was to be in her own home for Christmas.

  He wrote on 5 December: ‘As regards “pegging on”, well, as you know, I have set out the alternatives often enough, but nobody pays any attention […] I think there’s a lot to be said for staying in one’s own house as long as possible, but equally I think we should face the fact that it will eventually not be possible, and make some plans.’ Yet again, despite his protests, she insisted on cooking a duck. But she had overreached herself. On 24 January 1972 she fell in her kitchen and broke her hip. She spent only a week in hospital before, on 1 February, Kitty delivered her to the care home which she and her brother had chosen, Berrystead, at Syston near Leicester. This was Eva’s final home, and from this point until her death nearly six years later Philip’s ‘letters home’ were directed there, either from 32 Pearson Park, or from 105 Newland Park, where he moved on 27 June 1974.

  On the day Eva arrived at Berrystead Philip sent her a greetings telegram of welcome. Thereafter he wrote a two-sided single sheet to her virtually every day, often including a drawing. This was still the same formal, ceremonious correspondence as before, and only very occasionally did he substitute a picture postcard for a letter, usually a photograph of a dog or kitten. On the day before his fiftieth birthday, 8 August, he thanked his mother for her letter: ‘I certainly feel the impudence of being 50 rather! I suppose it’s all right when you get used to it, but I feel the grave is uncomfortably near!’ He drew the creature looking over its shoulder, startled, at a black hole in the ground. It is a thoughtless letter to send to an 86-year-old woman in a nursing home. But their long-established intimacy was such that he failed to notice the irony. Her permanence was too well established, and, more subtly, he was aware that their biological clocks were set differently. She might be presumed indestructible; he was certain he would die at the same age as his father, sixty-three, as he did.