Philip Larkin (24 page)

My holiday was rather as I expected – my poor father grew steadily worse & died on Good Friday. Since then mother & I have been rather hopelessly looking at the stock in the house – this morning I shifted 100 lbs of jam – 1945, 1946, & 1947 years – and about 25 Kilner jars of bottled fruit [. . .] I don’t know what will happen to it all – I don’t like sweet things, you remember.
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The only poem Larkin had completed during the last sixteen months was ‘Waiting for breakfast’, the previous December. Now he composed what was to remain his only mourning elegy, ‘An April Sunday brings the snow’. In his letter he told Monica: ‘It is snowing here at the moment: this accords very well with mood and circumstance, both of which are Hardyish.’ In the poem mourner and mourned are reduced to a generic level of basic humanity. The speaker is uncharacterized and ungendered and the jam-maker could be a mother, a lover or a friend. The poet’s immediate consciousness, however, is intimately evoked as he moves from cupboard to cupboard storing the jam made by the lost loved one. Every object mentioned is metonymic of transience. The wintry snow will be gone in an ‘hour or two’; the blossom of spring will last a little longer. The autumn fruit from these same trees, temporarily preserved in jars, ‘Behind the glass, under the cellophane’, will be consumed at next summer’s teas. But the jam-maker will not be there to enjoy it.
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With poignant simplicity the jam contains:

your final summer-sweet,

And meaningless, and not to come again.

Reticence makes grief the more eloquent. Larkin was aware that this was one of his finest poems. This may be the poem which he had in mind when he said in an interview in 1973, ‘I wrote my first good poem when I was 26,’ though he did not reach this age until August 1948.
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It is an indication of the intensity of its personal grief that he did not publish it during his lifetime.

It seems that ‘An April Sunday brings the snow’ was drafted largely outside the workbook, since, unusually, the version in the book is a fair copy, occupying a single page, without corrections and more neatly written than surrounding drafts.
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Larkin followed this poem with another poem addressed to his father, ‘And yet – but after death there’s no “and yet”’. The speaker recalls the dead one’s casual words one day on the lawn: ‘Death doesn’t do you harm.’ All the poet can do, now we have ‘seen you die; and had you burned’, is to hope ‘that you were right’. Further lines at the end have been erased with an india-rubber, leaving the piece an incomplete sonnet with eleven lines. Nevertheless there is an eloquence in the broken-off sestet of three unrhymed lines and the work feels, and possibly is, complete.
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Around this time Larkin was also occupied with
No For An Answer
, one draft of which describes a visit by Sam Wagstaff to his dying father in hospital.

Then, six weeks after Sydney’s death, Philip attempted to choose prose over poetry in a literal way, by ‘becoming an adult’ and proposing to Ruth. She had just turned twenty-one. He wrote to Sutton:

To tell you the truth I have done something rather odd myself – got engaged to Ruth on Monday. You know I have known her since 1943 or 4; well, we have gone on seeing each other until the point seemed to arrive when we either had to start taking it seriously or else drop it. I can’t say I welcome the thought of marriage, as it appears to me from the safe side of it, but nor do I want to desert the only girl I have met who doesn’t instantly frighten me away [. . .] I suspect all my isolationist feelings as possibly harmful and certainly rather despicable. ‘Are you a bloody valuable vase, man, to be kept so carefully?’

He describes his engagement unpromisingly as ‘a sincere chance of “opening out” towards someone I do love a lot in a rather strangled way’.
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Responsibilities were multiplying. Eva Larkin was disorientated by widowhood and finding it difficult to cope, so Philip submitted to the ordeal of buying a house in Leicester where they could live together. They moved into 12 Dixon Drive in August 1948. He told Sutton dispiritedly, ‘It has all been a bother, though I suppose it will be all right in time.’
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However, it was not all right, and the two years which followed were among the most miserable of his life.

He later tore out a total of twenty-two pages from the workbook following ‘An April Sunday brings the snow’ (two batches of eight and fourteen pages), probably when he gave the book to the British Library in 1964. The rough violence with which they have been removed, leaving ragged edges and even clipping some words, suggests that he was still haunted by the trauma of these months.
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But since he preserved these pages, the sequence is not difficult to reconstruct.
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Following his father’s death his poetry failed to come right for nearly a year. After ‘And yet – but after death there’s no “and yet”’ he worked briefly on another poem addressed to his father and then on a seven-part work in free verse, ‘Now, without defences’, concerned with his inability to write (dated 26 January 1949). Then, in spring 1949, he broke the block with a distinctive group of poems with a traumatized, dispirited tone, ranging between cynicism and quiet humility. ‘I am washed upon a rock’ (18 March 1949) depicts life, in muted apocalyptic mode, as a moment of transient insecurity:

My heart is ticking like the sun:

A lonely cloud drifts in the sky.

I dread its indecision.

If once it block the light, I die.
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‘To Patients’, completed shortly afterwards, and renamed ‘Neurotics’ in the final typescript, is a grim self-admonitory reflection on mental illness.
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The minds of the neurotics are ‘rusted, stiff [. . .] / Like slot-machines only bent pennies fit’.

The next poem, ‘Sinking like sediment through the day’, is a surrealist evocation of blockage and frustration, while ‘On Being Twenty-six’ is a self-pitying lament over lost promise whose glumness is barely leavened by a wan, self-mocking rhyme:

What caught alight

Quickly consumed in me,

As I foresaw.

Talent, felicity –

These things withdraw,

And are succeeded by a dingier crop

That come to stop [. . .]

In the middle of work on this poem, Larkin broke off to draft a moving declaration of poetic vocation, ‘Once I believed in you’, dated 1 May 1949, and titled in the undated typescript ‘The Spirit Wooed’.
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The poet humbly addresses his elusive muse:

Once I believed in you,

And then you came,

Unquestionably new [. . .]

You launched no argument,

Yet I obeyed [. . .]

The spirit has withdrawn, it seems, because he was overeager, and he resigns himself with the humility of a courtly lover, to a ‘pause’, ‘Longer than life, if you decide it so’. ‘Modesties’, the only poem of this group that he himself saw into print (in his self-published volume
XX Poems
, 1951), is similarly muted in tone, taking the form of a concise manifesto for a poetry of reticence and sincerity: ‘Words as plain as hen-birds’ wings / Do not lie, / Do not over-broider things – / Are too shy.’

In sharp contrast, a few days later, on 18 May, he composed ‘To Failure’, which has something of the wry ironic gusto associated with his later ‘Movement’ persona. The imagery boldly confuses motifs from different kinds of B movie. Failure, we are told, does not arrive

with dragons

That rear up with my life between their paws

And dash me butchered down beside the wagons,

The horses panicking [. . .]

Reality is less colourful than fantasies of monsters and the Wild West. As he looks out of the window at the chestnut trees ‘caked with silence’, the poet notices that Failure, personified in didactic eighteenth-century mode, has installed himself unobtrusively at his elbow, ‘like a bore’. The poem ends with a lugubrious parenthesis: ‘(You have been here some time.)’
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Despite its theme the poem’s sulkiness is enjoyable and funny. As he wrote later: ‘A good poem about failure is a success.’
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It is surprising that he never published this work. After this burst of poetic activity between March and May 1949, Larkin completed no other poem for the remainder of the year. He was also making little progress with his fiction. On 24 March 1949 he wrote to Sutton: ‘I have given up my novel & Ruth has given up me, not seeing, as you might say, any future in it. Nor do I!’
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He turned from the complications of the real schoolgirl to unreal but readily available auto-eroticism. Encouraged by her husband, Hilly even agreed to feature in Philip’s pornographic fantasies. Kingsley wrote on 9 May: ‘I have asked Hilly about your dirty-picture proposal, and obtained a modified assent. She is prepared to do corset-and-black-stocking or holding-up-a-towel stuff, and bare-bosom stuff (‘[. . .] they’ll be bigger when I’m feeding the new baby’), but is a bit hesitant about being quite undraped, “though I’ll probably get bolder when I start.” Does this give you the hron? It does me, slightly, oddly. Do you want “some of us together”? (“Why you narcissistic —”).’
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Meanwhile the relationship with Ruth stumbled on, neither Philip nor she having the will or ability to put an end to it. In July Larkin wrote with grim drollery to Sutton: ‘Ruth returned and demanded that we continue being friends, so that is what we are continuing being.’
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But, around this time, for no obvious reason, Larkin started to recover his self-possession. His spirits began to rise. His letters become more vigorous and a distinctive Larkinesque tone of contrarian
jouissance
emerges: ‘life seems to have pushed a steamroller up against the door & nailed the windows & stuffed something down the chimney. It is now dancing up & down outside the glass shouting: “Live dangerously!” I turn round and show it my bum.’
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It is from this point that we can date the masculine, bloody-minded assertiveness which is to figure centrally in Larkin’s ‘vernacular’ voice. In a letter to Sutton written on 30 October 1949 he tells himself to take control of his own life:

Most people, I’m convinced, don’t think about life at all. They grab what they think they want and the subsequent consequences keep them busy in an endless chain till they’re carried out feet first [. . .]
Take what you want – and pay for it [. . .] or you’ll get what you don’t want, & pay for that too.
My advice to anybody is:
Find out what you want. Then get it.
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He was more certain than ever that what he, Philip Larkin, wanted was not marriage: ‘women don’t just sit still & back you up. They want children: they like scenes: they want a chance of parading all the emotional haberdashery they are stocked with. Above all they like feeling they “own” you – or that you “own” them – a thing I hate.’
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In March 1950 he visited the Amises in Swansea, where Kingsley was now a lecturer at the University College, and found this glimpse of married life decidedly uninviting. He began to lay practical plans to escape from his mother and from Ruth: ‘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.’
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