Philip Larkin (10 page)

‘Sonnet: Penelope, August, 1942’,
⁷¹
to which he refers, became Poem XXX in
The North Ship
. It begins with an Audenesque evocation of an ungendered victim enduring the bitterness of ‘that unripe day’, cruelly tested before his/her time by some undefined ordeal. It then shifts abruptly to the poet’s perspective:

Instead,

It was your severed image that grew sweeter,

That floated, wing-stiff, focused in the sun

Along uncertainty and gales of shame

Blown out before I slept.

Despite his obscure uncertainty and ‘shame’, the poet cherishes his beautiful recollection, which floats in his imagination like a stiff-winged butterfly. She is now ‘Long since embedded in the static past’:

Summer broke and drained. Now we are safe.

The days lose confidence, and can be faced

Indoors. This is your last, meticulous hour,

Cut, gummed; pastime of a provincial winter.

The delicate promise of summer has sunk into the safe Eliotic sterility of winter. As he had predicted in the poem, Penelope was unable to take the strain, and left Oxford to be married. In accordance with tradition the muse is distant, unattainable. Significantly, however, in the poem the speaker also sympathizes with the real suffering girl. Watching Penelope’s performance as Viola, he had intuited her nervous, vulnerable temperament, and felt protective towards her.

The very different ‘Poem for Penelope abt. the Mechanical Turd’, written in anticipation of his return to Oxford in autumn 1942, seems to dramatize an intimate birthday stocktaking.
⁷²
It survives only in holograph on a single sheet torn from a manuscript book, and shows a number of draft changes. Archie Burnett considers it merely three separate fragments. However, the text arises from a single mood and a continuous, finished text can be inferred. Larkin has drawn a large cross over the second and third sections, but he did not destroy the page. This is a more private poem than ‘So through that unripe day’, with a mix of elements unprecedented in Larkin’s previous poetry. The title parodies a poem by Sidney Keyes, addressed to his girlfriend, ‘Poem for Milein about the Mechanical Bird’, which had been published in Keyes’s first collection
The Iron Laurel
, in 1942.
⁷³
The opening line, however, echoes Keyes’s ‘Elegy’ on his grandfather, which includes the lines: ‘It is a year again since they poured / The dumb ground into your mouth.’ These eloquent lines, it seems, roused Larkin’s competitive envy. His pastiche insults Keyes (presumably the ‘mechanical turd’), with gratuitous obscenity: ‘August again, and it is a year again / Since I poured the hot toss into your arse’ (‘arse’ replaces the earlier drafted ‘mouth’). The image of buggery or oral sex may perhaps express self-disgust at his clumsy advance to Penelope a year earlier.

After an asterisk the poem continues its retrospective on the past year, but in a different register, focusing, with a further echo of Keyes, on the poet’s current claustrophobia at home with his parents:

Choking, I pull open a door. It is evening out there.

But the house is building still behind my back

Room over room, cells of a great mad brain,

And all are threaded on my parents’ voices

Crossing like scissors in the stale air.

The bright road crawls with placid faces.

And I leave tomorrow eager to have done

With the sandwiches they are cutting for me to take

– For they love me – but I turn again in despair.

The reference to his parents’ home as the ‘cells of a great mad brain’ elaborates the surrealist imagery of Keyes’s ‘Elegy’: ‘Your brain / Lives in the bank-book, and your eyes look up / Laughing from the carpet on the floor.’
⁷⁴
The speaker acknowledges his parents’ affection without irony; but, as the long vacation comes to an end, he is eager ‘to have done’ with their love and sandwiches. Larkin anticipated his final year at Oxford with contradictory feelings. ‘One by one my friends left: Nick, Jimmy, and David and David West to the Navy, Norman, Mervyn Brown, Kingsley, to the Army: Hilary was due for the R.A.C. [Royal Armoured Corps] [. . .] Now there would be one more posthumous year.’
⁷⁵
It was to be one of the most momentous years in his life.

In October 1942 John Layard returned to Oxford to deliver a lecture about the symbolism of dreams. Shortly afterwards, a friend of Brown’s, Karl Lehmann, a keen Jungian, came and stayed in Walton Street. Larkin recalls: ‘We each began a recording of our dreams, and up to the present [‘Dec 19th 1942’ penned in the margin] I have amassed nearly seventy. Karl gave us indications as to how to interpret them, and we began searching for “problems”. I don’t believe Philip had one. I had.’
⁷⁶
Between 26 October 1942 and 4 January 1943, Larkin typed out ninety-five numbered dreams, painstakingly illustrated with diagrams showing the relations between ‘myself’ or ‘my path’ and people, animals, buildings and streets. In one simple realistic dream he pulls Philip Brown out of the path of an unlighted car as they ‘whizz’ on their bicycles out of Hertford Street into Greyfriar’s Lane in Coventry. Less realistically, in another dream he is singing a hymn, resigned to marrying ‘a girl called “Helen Rose” whom I disliked’. He consoles himself that ‘anyway I can get divorced immediately afterwards, and then I shall be even more sophisticated’. Another dream resembles a thriller film. He is ‘a member of a secret service in some eastern town’ where, ambushed in a conference room, he kills two hostile agents by firing his revolver repeatedly at their advancing bodies. Another dream is a brief moral fable: ‘Someone was playing with a cat that obviously wanted to escape. When it at last did so, it had shat all over his hands. I regarded this as just.’

Other dreams are surreal. In one, headed ‘A visit to the home of Christopher Isherwood’, he sneaks away from Isherwood and his mother to try out a piano in a ‘wonderful room’ with bookshelves ascending out of sight under an ‘immensely high ceiling’. But he becomes lost in the dark and, hearing two women laughing in the next room, runs away. In another he has volunteered to commit suicide by putting his name on a list posted up in the gym, and is annoyed to find that the shoes he is to wear when he jumps off the roof have not been laid out ready for him. Other dreams are purely absurd, such as one concerning ‘an extremely savage rabbit that I made kill someone’. In a dream recorded on Christmas Day he is driving a car that grows smaller and smaller until he can push it along with his foot.
⁷⁷

Some of the dreams have obvious ‘Freudian’ interpretations: ‘someone took the lid off a hamper, which was filled with a huge snake. It began uncoiling and I fled in horror.’ In a dream of sexual self-doubt he finds himself ‘in the custody of four girls’, including Margaret Flannery, an Oxford acquaintance:

It seemed that I was going to bed with her. We two went back to the first room and she lay on the floor. She was wearing a flame coloured skirt and brilliant yellow knickers. I began fucking her and she talked dreamily about copulation. After a while I stopped fucking, not feeling I was getting anywhere, and we both stood up. She maintained her dreamy indifference.
⁷⁸

In another he is kissing a male friend on a sofa near Carfax in the centre of Oxford. ‘I disliked this intensely but remained polite.’

Other dreams feature encounters with ‘negroes’. In one he strangles and drowns a ‘great tiger’ which threatens to stop him reaching Lil Armstrong (Louis’s second wife) and a ‘negro band’ performing on the far bank of a river. In a more delicate psychological wish-fulfilment dream he meets ‘a most beautiful negress’ as he walks through a symbolist landscape ‘along a path between several rivers and canals’. ‘We remained together for some time, and I was going to ask to meet her again. Someone called her “a new Billie Holiday”.’ In another dream comedy takes charge: ‘I was making a violent speech against Louis Armstrong, the President of the United States. I said “The only merit of this buffoon is that he has not had the effrontery to submit any laws to Congress.” Voices called out from other bedrooms, telling me to shut up, because it was assumed I was talking in my sleep. One voice was my Father’s.’
⁷⁹

Though his imagination throws up some colourful psychological and subliterary material, Larkin’s dream diary failed in its primary psychoanalytical purpose of defining his ‘problem’. He wrote wryly to Sutton on 7 January: ‘I have dropped my dream-business, (where? into the Thames?): presumably I am the individuated man.’
⁸⁰
A more focused stimulus to his literary development was provided the following month, February 1943, when the poet Vernon Watkins spoke at the Oxford English Club about W. B. Yeats. Larkin’s early poems already show Yeatsian influence, but now Watkins’s crusading enthusiasm for Yeats’s elliptical symbolism overwhelmed his sceptical defences. As he later recorded, ‘I spent the next three years trying to write like Yeats, not because I liked his personality or understood his ideas but out of infatuation with his music (to use the word I think Vernon used).’
⁸¹
Larkin abruptly ditched his knowing Audenesque detachment in favour of loud Yeatsian self-dramatization. Watkins’s own impact on Larkin was ambiguous. Though he inspired his enthusiasm for Yeats’s music, in himself he presented a poetic example quite different from either Yeats or Thomas. In peacetime he had been a bank clerk. He did not adopt a poetic pose ‘as an artful protection’. He seemed to Larkin ‘a genuinely modest, genuinely dedicated person, who had chosen, in Yeats’s phraseology, perfection of the work rather than of the life. To anyone who, like myself, was on the edge of the world of employment his example was significant. Indeed, it was almost encouraging.’
⁸²
Watkins ‘made it clear how one could, in fact, “live by poetry”; it was a vocation, at once difficult as sainthood and easy as breathing’.
⁸³

Three poems which Larkin wrote at this time show the impact of the various new influences on him. ‘I dreamed of an out-thrust arm of land’ ends with a glamorous Yeatsian dramatization of the poet as rejected lover:

Till your voice forsook my ear

Till your two hands withdrew

And I was empty of tears,

On the edge of a bricked and streeted sea

And a cold hill of stars.

In contrast, ‘Mythological Introduction’ is an entry from his dream diary turned into poetry. A ‘white girl’ sings in Blakean mode, ‘I am your senses’ crossroads, / Where the four seasons lie’, but then:

She rose up in the middle of the lawn

And spread her arms wide;

And the webbed earth where she had lain

Had eaten away her side.

Eros and Thanatos are juxtaposed in a visually exact image (‘webbed earth’) reminiscent of paintings by Salvador Dalí. These two poems were published in
Arabesque
(Hilary Term 1943). The third poem, ‘A Stone Church Damaged by a Bomb’, shows the influence of the Thomas of ‘A Centenarian Killed in an Air Raid’. The Dylanesque contortion of thought sits uneasily with the poem’s simple religious scepticism. With ‘metaphysical’ wit the poet finds ‘magnificence’ in the bomb’s destructive work in contrast with the Church’s feeble spell against death. When Ian Davie accepted all three poems to appear alongside works by Drummond Allison, Sidney Keyes, Michael Meyer, Michael Hamburger and John Heath-Stubbs in the volume
Oxford Poetry 1942–3
, Larkin could feel that he was beginning to make some progress as a poet. The volume appeared in June 1943, by which time he had already embarked on a quite different literary adventure, as a ‘lesbian’ writer of girls’-school stories.