Philip Larkin Read online

  In 1971 he had congratulated her on her immaculate writing: ‘Your letter came second post today […] How beautifully written it is for an old creature of 85! Your writing is smaller than mine. Truly you are a marvel.’ Her fall at first dispelled this neatness. For a month and more, though she continued to write regularly, her handwriting was spidery, the lines heavily slanted and far apart, and paragraphs often only a sentence long. But by May she had staged a recovery, and for a year or so the letters regained something of their previous orderliness and control, though they were now shorter: like his, a single page of two sides.

  Eva’s final prolonged struggle with death is intimately tracked in Larkin’s last great reflective elegies, and increasingly dominates his mood. In January 1972, just before Eva’s fall, Philip had gone to hospital on his own account with a crick in his neck (Eva had one too). The visit inspired ‘The Building’. Beginning as an impersonal contemplation of the pathetic attempt of the new Hull Royal Infirmary to ‘outbuild’ death, it develops at the end an intense elegiac tone which must owe something to the ‘many dreary visits to the hospital’ which his mother’s fall had necessitated:51

  nothing contravenes

  The coming dark, though crowds each evening try

  With wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers.

  It was published in the New Statesman on 17 March 1972.

  Larkin’s exposure to the geriatric patients in the ward to which Eva was taken in late February unsettled him and led to one of the most original developments in his poetic oeuvre. A new tone is heard in the brief poem ‘Heads in the Women’s Ward’, drafted on a single workbook page on 6 March 1972. In contrast to ‘The Building’, this is a poem of direct reportage, describing in the nursery-rhyme couplets of second childhood the staring eyes, taut tendons and bearded mouths of the inhabitants of the women’s ward:

  Smiles are for youth. For old age come

  Death’s terror and delirium.

  He gave this poem to the crusading atheist journal New Humanist (May 1972).

  Later in the year he built on this new brutalism in his most moving and original poetic response to his mother’s plight. ‘The Old Fools’ was written in a long drafting process between October 1972 and 12 January 1973, at the time when Eva was writing her last coherent letters to him. It expresses in poetry a sentiment frequently heard in his letters. As he explained to Brian Cox: ‘It’s rather an angry poem, but the anger is ambivalent – we are angry at the humiliation of age, but we are also angry at old people for reminding us of death, and I suppose for making us feel bad about doing nothing for them.’52

  What do they think has happened, the old fools,

  To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose

  It’s more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,

  And you keep on pissing yourself, and can’t remember

  Who called this morning?

  Senility is a rare topic in poetry. It is customary to confront it with heroic defiance, as in Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’, Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ or Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’. Larkin’s approach is disconcertingly incorrect, making this a unique masterpiece. Few poets could have achieved such a wide poetic range in one poem, from crude jeering at the old fools’ ‘hideous inverted childhood’ to the aching beauty of the evocation of dementia: ‘thin continuous dreaming / Watching light move’:

  Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms

  Inside your head, and people in them, acting.

  People you know, yet can’t quite name; each looms

  Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning,

  Setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair, extracting

  A known book from the shelves […]

  It was published in the Listener on 1 February 1973.

  Eva’s letters continued to arrive every few days until 25 April 1973. At this point, unless some letters are lost, her condition deteriorated. There is a coherent letter dated 26 June (‘If you like I could mend a sock or two for you if you wanted […] I think of you lovingly every day’); then another dated four months later in October. After this there are numerous undateable fragments and partially finished letters which Philip must have collected from Berrystead on his visits. The last letter from Eva to have been stamped and sent comes after a long gap and is dated 17 May 1974. It barely maintains coherence. Touchingly, however, Eva attempts to satisfy her son’s exacting standards by using hypercorrect spelling. She writes: ‘The birds are flying to and fro’’ with an apostrophe to indicate the omission of the m in ‘from’. She was to live for a further forty months, but at this point her voice falls silent.

  At first Philip continued to write his letters in the same tone as before, gradually making the content and style simpler. On 23 May 1974 he tells her that he is to have lunch at Fabers but does not bother to mention that his new volume, High Windows is about to be published. He kept up the formal appearance of the correspondence. Only from mid-1975 are there as many picture postcards as letters. But then in the final months, in 1976–7, colour postcards take over entirely, featuring kittens, horses, the royal family or the TV puppet Basil Brush. Forty-seven of the cards from these last months were collected by Eva or those caring for her into an album. It seems most likely that Philip continued to send cards regularly to the end. The latest to survive are creased or stained, and it is probable that some were destroyed. As Larkin wrote later to Winifred Dawson, ‘the last few months of her life were scarcely livable’.53 No card in the archive is dateable to June or July 1977. There are two dated August and then four dated September, two months before Eva’s death.

  By the early 1970s Larkin was aware that his oeuvre was all but complete and his poetic inspiration was failing. He began writing ‘Aubade’ in April 1974, at about the time of his mother’s last dated letter. The poem underwent a more prolonged drafting process than even ‘The Old Fools’. Having written the first two of the eventual five stanzas, and drafted the beginning of the third, he abandoned the poem on 7 June 1974.54 Was he perhaps reluctant to signal his poetic demise by completing this, in a real sense, his ‘last’ poem? It was not until Eva’s final months that he resumed work on the last three stanzas. Between May and August 1977 he filled nine pages with drafts and redrafts. On 24 October, less than a month before Eva died, he wrote to Kingsley Amis:

  My mother, not content with being motionless, deaf and speechless, is now going blind. That’s what you get for not dying, you see. ‘Well, all I can say is, I hope when my time comes I don’t linger on, a pest to myself and everyone else’ – oh no my dear fellow, that’s just who I do hope lingers on. Well in a way. Well, anyway. Even now I can’t believe it’s going to happen, not too far off now too.55

  By the end of the paragraph he is talking about his own death as much as his mother’s: ‘not too far off’. Larkin’s emotional logic is sometimes breathtakingly ingenuous. During the drafting of ‘The Building’ he wrote at the bottom of a page: ‘We must never die. No one must ever die.’56 Now, it seems, the fact of extinction needed to be demonstrated to him by his mother’s death before he could fully ‘believe’ it, and complete his own self-elegy. ‘Aubade’ is both a great philosophical poem with an impressive atheist gravity and his ‘in-a-funk-about-death poem’,57 an abject elegy on himself. Also, on some level, it is an elegy on his mother, his muse of prose. Eva died on 17 November 1977, and days later, on 28–29 November, he returned to the draft and completed the final stanzas.

  In the poem the thought of death drains life of meaning; but nevertheless life is all we have and, however reduced, we cannot willingly relinquish it. The poem’s most original feature is the way it conjures poetry from the most prosaic material. The force of the most moving passages is generated not by inventive imagery but by plain indicative eloquence:

  the total emptiness for ever,

  The sure extinction that we travel to

  And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,


  Not to be anywhere,

  And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

  The poem’s only fully developed metaphor is its comparison of religion to a ‘vast, moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die’. But this elaborate, decorative phrase is not the most telling image in the poem. The epiphany to which it builds is the wardrobe in the poet’s bedroom, emerging in the growing light of dawn. ‘It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know’. Like the jam Larkin’s father made thirty years earlier, the wardrobe is a metonym of ‘sweet and meaningless’ life, now not so unambiguously sweet. Like another similar wooden box, it defines our limits. It tells us ‘what we know’: that we live in an ‘intricate rented world’ and that the lease will run out. Until then ‘Work has to be done.’ Librarians have to answer telephones in offices, and old creatures have to rub down the walls and ceiling of the front bedroom and have ‘all the bundles off the top of the wardrobe’. Meanwhile postmen go from house to house, like doctors, keeping it all going. But now his mother has died and he will soon follow. There would be no more letters to or from home.

  Home for Larkin was ambiguous. In his lugubrious poem ‘Friday Night at the Royal Station Hotel’ he plays symbolist games with the concept. A disembodied speaker takes us through the public rooms and ‘shoeless’ lit corridors of a surreal hotel to confront us with ‘The headed paper, made for writing home / (If home existed) letters of exile’. His experience taught him the fragility of home. A month after he left it for the first time, the city in which he had been brought up was blitzed. The death of his father seven years later reduced his ‘home’, for the remaining three decades of his life, to a single needy parent. From the age of twenty-six to twenty-eight he shared a house with her and was determined thereafter to keep his distance. He lived almost his entire life in rented attics, never setting up a permanent establishment of his own where his mother, or another, might claim a place. The Pearson Park flat in Hull was designated by the university for the temporary accommodation of new lecturers. He lived there for eighteen years, a vagrant of no fixed abode. ‘I don’t really notice where I live.’58 The protagonist of his poems is forever in transit: in ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, in ‘Here’, in ‘Dockery and Son’. On the other hand in 1964 he still feels that every Sunday he is ‘writing home’. Poems such as ‘Home is So Sad’, ‘Love Songs in Age’ and ‘Talking in Bed’ speak poignantly of home. Larkin is a great poet of domestic joys and sorrows. Eva haunts his poetry, as theme and muse. He continued to return from exile every few weeks throughout his life, and wrote to her every few days. In 1970 he guessed that the ‘very real rage & irritation’ he felt with his situation ‘may be something to do with never having got away from home’. He had left home but he never ‘got away’ from it. This paradox is one key to the greatness of his poetry.

  1 The others were with James Sutton, Kingsley Amis, Monica Jones, Judy Egerton, Robert Conquest, Anthony Thwaite, Maeve Brennan and Barbara Pym.

  2 Hull History Centre, U DLN/6 and 7, deposited by Rosemary Parry (Hewett) in 2008.

  3 The name was derived from the names of the house’s builder, Percy Vernon Venables.

  4 Philip’s letter of 26 October 1940. Over Christmas 1940 Sydney moved Eva away from the bombing to his brother Alfred’s house at 33 Cherry Orchard, Lichfield, and after Christmas she lived at Wear Giffard, Cliff Hill, Warwick.

  5 Hull History Centre, U DPL/1/5/1.

  6 He lived first in St John’s College. Then, from January 1942 until his graduation in July 1943, he shared lodgings in 125 Walton Street with his friend Philip Brown, a medical student.

  7 Philip Larkin, ‘An Interview with the Observer’, Required Writing (London: Faber, 1983), 51.

  8 In Wellington he stayed in three successive lodgings: first Alexander House, New Church Road, then for two years (January 1944–January 1946) at ‘Glentworth’, King Street, and finally at 7 Ladycroft (January–September 1946).

  9 Over his first two years at Leicester he occupied three temporary lodgings. During the first month he stayed with his sister Kitty and her husband Walter Hewett at their home at 53 York Road, Loughborough, travelling the ten miles to work by bus. In October 1946 he moved into rented rooms at 172 London Road, moving again in 1948 when his landlady required his room, to 6 College Street, Leicester.

  10 It seems that virtually all his letters to Sydney and Eva have been preserved, and a large proportion of the letters from Eva and Sydney to their son, though their letters from the first three years, when Philip was at Oxford, are lost.

  11 Autobiographical fragment, Workbook 5, Hull History Centre, U DPL/1/5/1.

  12 Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (London: Faber, 1993), 8.

  13 Philip Larkin, ‘Not the Place’s Fault’, Further Requirements (London: Faber, paperback edn 2002), 10.

  14 The Listener, November 1940.

  15 Autobiographical fragment, Workbook 5, Hull History Centre, U DPL/1/5/1. Motion, Philip Larkin, 11, mistranscribes this, substituting for Larkin’s explanation: ‘but what that means I don’t know’.

  16 Hull History Centre, U DLN/1/10–29. It was embargoed until 2015, thirty years after Larkin’s death.

  17 Hull History Centre, U DLN/1/11.

  18 1 October 1946; Hull History Centre, U DLN/1/19.

  19 1 April 1942; in James Booth, Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 25.

  20 Reproduced as the endpaper of Anthony Thwaite’s edition of Philip Larkin, Selected Letters (London: Faber, 1993).

  21 ‘The Fools’ War’. Hull History Centre, U DLN/1/16.

  22 Hull History Centre, U DPL/1/5/1.

  23 A significant proportion of the socks recovered from 105 Newland Park by the Philip Larkin Society in 2004 following the death of Monica Jones have been carefully darned, some with non-matching wool or in two colours. See Plate 5A.

  24 ‘I was shocked on Wednesday on returning from York to find a cutting saying Diana Gollancz had died. […] It was for her that I drew my first “creatures” – she used to call everyone “dear creature”’ (to Eva, 6 April 1967).

  25 To Sutton, 12–14 April 1943. In Booth, Philip Larkin, 15–16.

  26 A letter survives from Kitty to Eva from 25 March 1943, addressed to ‘My dear Mother Cat’. Kitty, describes a visit to Leicester with Walter Hewett, whom she was to marry in 1944. After a visit to the bookshop, and tea, they had seen a comedy at the Repertory Theatre, which ended early, at 7.00; ‘so we had time to wander round and then go dancing at a lovely hotel “the Bell Hotel” it really was a lovely floor and quite select, not like the usual palais-de-danse. Of course I hadn’t gone intending to dance but didn’t feel out of place in my black dress and snow-white collar. We came back on a late train – 10.27 and were such tired cats having to walk from the L.M.S. station which is miles away.’ She ends the letter with anxieties about some ‘mauve-flecked green material’ she has bought ‘which rather worries me as it is so loosely woven. I keep on peeping at it to see if it is as bad as I think it is.’

  27 Kitty was hurt by this and always remembered it. Rosemary Parry, email, 7 December 2017.

  28 Hull History Centre, U DPL/1/5/1.

  29 Rosemary remembers that to the end of his life he and Kitty would share private jokes from his early years. ‘My grandmother always had a maid and one evening when Sydney and Eva were out she asked Philip “Do you want a knife with your supper?” in a sinister tone. This phrase became a regular joke between them.’ Rosemary Parry, email, 17 December 2016.

  30 Autobiographical fragment, Hull History Centre, U DPL/1/5/1.

  31 There is a holiday postcard from 1936 (Hull History Centre, U DLN/1/31). Fourteen letters are preserved among the main family correspondence in U DLN/6. Eleven more letters and a telegram are preserved in U DLN/3/2–3. There is a picture postcard, showing Philip himself, sent on 20 August 1946 (U DLN/4/5). The 1947 letter survives along with later letters and cards from 1972–82 in U DLN/3/8.

/>   32 Rosemary remembers that ‘She got annoyed with other people who called her “Katherine” or “Kathleen”’ (email, 3 January 2017).

  33 Email, 17 December 2016. Rosemary records, however, that Kitty did not seek out and destroy letters addressed to her when the family correspondence came to her following Philip’s death. She is certain that her mother never even looked into the envelopes.

  34 See Appendix, 17 April and 23 October 1944. It is conceivable that Kitty asked her brother to destroy her letters to him.

  35 Hull History Centre, U DLN/3/1. He also wrote occasionally to his god-daughter, Rosemary. He attended her confirmation in December 1960, and followed up with a sententious letter on the importance of Christianity in British culture. In a charming letter of 25 April 1962 he writes: ‘one of the nice things about being a girl is that you can wear all the nicest colours & smell of the most beautiful flowers – you are much luckier than men who go about in perpetual camouflage smelling of Tweed & Gorse & Oldspice, not very inspiring smells’ (About Larkin 1, April 1996, 8). He included ‘creature’ drawings in letters to Rosemary written in 1966 when he visited her at Warwick University. Rosemary preserved fifteen letters and eight picture postcards from her uncle dating from 1960 to 1983. Hull History Centre, U DLN/3/5–7.

  36 Rosemary Parry, email, 3 January 2017.

  37 Larkin, 24 February 1948. Selected Letters, 144–5.

  38 Larkin, Selected Letters, 161.

  39 Rosemary Parry, email, 3 January 2017.