Philip Larkin (30 page)

It was to Colin and Patsy together that Philip wrote to share his enthusiasm for Paris, when he and Bruce Montgomery made a brief trip there in May 1952: ‘The street is so noisy & the bed so warm I don’t seem to sleep till about 4 a.m. or
want to
. My heart beats in a new, queer way & I daren’t lie on my left side for fear of stopping it.’ His senses were overwhelmed:

On Friday night we drank till late, on Saturday we saw the Monet, drank what can only have been a bottle of champagne each in the Ritz bar & saw Benjamin Britten (this, to Bruce, was like being vouchsafed a vision of Martin Luther after years of devout Roman Catholicism), went up the Eiffel tower (never again for me!), & at night after a luxurious meal went to a night club where Bechet was reputed to be appearing. This proved fallacious in fact, but we did hear Claude Luter’s band, which I knew from records & was pretty exciting at times. To balance this we intend hearing
Salome
on Monday (
Mayol
tonight . . .) always assuming we have enough money.
⁷

When the Strangs returned to England for several months in the early summer of 1952, joint communication was replaced by more intimate letters addressed to Patsy alone. Ruth had been a cat; Monica was a rabbit; he addresses Patsy as ‘Dearest Honeybear’ or ‘Dear Honeyguzzler’ in reference to her sweet tooth.

Motion sees this as ‘the most happily erotic of all his affairs’.
⁸
But happy eroticism had no place in Larkin’s emotional repertoire. Nor was Patsy a happy person. Winifred relates that one of her standard topics of discussion with Philip was ‘why Patsy was so miserable’.
⁹
In July 1952 Patsy arranged to return secretly to Belfast so that they could spend a weekend together. The visit coincided with the Orange parades, and her diary records that he was alarmed at every sound in the street, in case they might be discovered. Afterwards he wrote to apologize for his ‘gibbering funk’ that had ‘come near to spoiling such a happy weekend, such as I’ve never had before’.
¹⁰
At the end of the month she wrote that she was pregnant by him. But before he could reply to her letter, she suffered a miscarriage. He had already begun an answer (‘After feeling sorry & alarmed & guilty, I find it rather thrilling’) when he received her second letter, and he continued in a somewhat brutal tone: ‘I fancy you should be thankful [. . .] you wd have got pretty tired of “a lifetime of deceit”, which really is what it would’ve turned out to be.’
¹¹
He assumes without question that neither of them would have revealed the child’s true paternity. He illustrates his letter with drawings of a seal smiling down on a baby seal, followed by a drawing of the seal waving goodbye to the baby. Perhaps his heartlessness was part of a strategy. By August he was already attempting to disentangle himself. Patsy proposed meeting when he returned to England to visit his mother. But he prevaricated.
¹²

Whatever the complexities of their relationship, Patsy made Monica seem insular by comparison. The ‘yearly frame’ of Philip’s and Monica’s future relationship was beginning to establish itself: he saw her regularly in Leicester whenever he visited his mother in nearby Loughborough, and they took regular holidays together, though never beyond the British Isles, nor in company with anybody else. But it was by no means inevitable that this would become the permanent pattern of his life. Edgy, defensive, loud and with little interest in other people, Monica was not an easy companion. Anthony Thwaite remembers being baffled, when he first met her a few years later, that the urbane Philip should have paired himself with so socially inept and ungracious a partner. After a holiday in the Lake District in 1952, during which they visited Beatrix Potter’s house at Sawrey, Philip allowed himself to express something of the exasperation she caused him. To soften the blow he told her to think of the advice as coming from the wise mother cat in Potter’s
The Pie and the Patty-Pan
:

in my view you would do much better to revise, drastically, the amount you say and the intensity with which you say it. You are vaguely aware of this already, aren’t you? You say you ‘chatter like a jay’ – do you remember saying that, standing on a corner of Clarendon Park Road, after closing time, before catching your bus? – and that you talk ‘tediously & unnecessarily’: I don’t say that exactly: what I do feel is that you’ve no idea of the
exhausting
quality of yourself in full voice. Perhaps I am unduly (morbidly?) sensitive, but it does affect me just in that way – I feel quite unable to answer, just that I want to go and be quiet somewhere. No doubt you can recall times when I seemed a bit grumpy at Grasmere!
¹³

He ventures so far as ‘to make 3 rules’, advising her to restrict herself to two or at the most three sentences at a time, to ‘abandon
altogether
your harsh didactic voice, & use
only
the soft musical one (except in special cases)’; and not to ‘do more than
glance
at your interlocutor (wrong word?) once or twice while speaking. You’re getting a habit of
boring
your face up or round into the features of your listener –
don’t
do it! It’s most trying.’ He realizes he has gone too far and tells her, ‘Please don’t
mind
what I say.’
¹⁴
But it is clear that he does hope she will mind what he says.

Despite the dissatisfactions, Philip remained loyal, and as time passed his developing routines with Monica assumed the aspect of a marriage in every sense except day-to-day cohabitation. In late October 1952, following a visit to Leicester, Monica suspected she might be pregnant. Having recently experienced the threat of Patsy’s pregnancy and confident of his own precautions, his response was relaxed: ‘
really
, I must say I think the chances are
extremely
slender & remote of there being anything in the air. To my certain knowledge I was never within a mile of endangering you.’ The alarm was soon over. A letter of the following day, 24 October, begins lightly: ‘Dearest Bun, I’m so glad you’re out of your worry! So now you can go about your lavender-drying with a cheerful heart.’
¹⁵

The contrast between Monica’s and Patsy’s personalities focused itself in terms of their attitudes towards animals. A year earlier, in November 1951 Larkin had been startled by a mouse creeping out from behind the fireplace while he was writing to Monica: ‘not very nice! First time I’ve seen him. He
scuttled
back on realizing he wasn’t alone.’ It is characteristic that he sees the situation from the animal’s point of view. But the experience made him sad: ‘This depresses me rather – Beatrix Potter’s all very well in print but . . .’
¹⁶
Now, on 29 November 1952, he wrote to Monica that Patsy had denounced his sentimentalism, condemning Beatrix Potter as ‘anthropomorphist’, and accusing him ‘of not liking animals at all, only Potter ones & ones on my mantelpiece’. Patsy’s attack disconcerted him, but he followed his instinct and refused to be consistent: ‘I was somewhat at a loss. I do sometimes feel ashamed of liking these sweet little bunnies, but the emotion is there & she [Potter] touches it [. . .] Of course I’m not going to
stop
reading Potter, because I can’t defend myself, & I don’t take my inability to do so very seriously anyway.’
¹⁷
It is notable that his serious animal poems avoid anthropomorphism in favour of detached empathy.

Philip’s friendship with Winifred Arnott had been resumed following her return from London in September 1952. She lived some of the time with her uncle and aunt in Lisburn, eight miles from Belfast, and he would visit her there and play with her two young cousins.
¹⁸
He was eager that she should share his literary world, and when she suffered a short illness he lent her a thoughtful selection of five books:
Les Jeunes Filles
by Montherlant,
At Swim-Two-Birds
by Flann O’Brien (both of which she found too masculine for her taste),
Antigua Penny Puce
by Robert Graves,
Dusty Answer
by Rosamond Lehmann and
The Real Charlotte
by Somerville and Ross.
¹⁹
Then at the beginning of 1953 she returned from the vacation with the news that she was engaged to be married. In a letter to his mother, he depicts his feelings, with some sincerity perhaps, as those of a disappointed suitor: ‘I am feeling a bit balked concerning her – my paw was raised to be brought down on her – and now she scuttles away into the shadow of a rock! Bah!’
²⁰

Winifred commented that at this point Philip ‘became a whole lot more affectionate’.
²¹
In ‘When she came on, you couldn’t keep your seat’, titled in the workbook ‘He Hears that his Beloved has become Engaged’, completed in February 1953, the poet reproaches his rival for appropriating his beloved’s perfection. He himself has refrained from spoiling her untouched beauty by forcing himself upon her. The successful suitor, in contrast, has blundered straight in and joined the woman in the dance: ‘
fancying you improve her
’. To the poet such ‘love’ is only ‘interference’. He complains in sulky italics, ‘You’ll only
change
her.’ Like ‘Latest Face’, this is a very literary poem: a playful exposition of purist aestheticism. And the poet acknowledges, with a bad grace, that he is out of step with society: ‘Still, I’m sure you’re right.’ The suitor is, after all, simply following the instincts of ‘the ordinary fellow’. And Winifred herself was only too eager to be changed by marriage. The muse did not share her poet’s aesthetic vision. He did not show this poem to her.

Meanwhile Patsy was vigorously acting out her own very different poetic myth, as the helpless victim of a doomed passion. On 16 December 1952 as she prepared to return to England at the end of term she wrote in her diary: ‘no post, no job, no child, no home – nothing to look forward to but a few doubtful hours of anxious, taut “pleasure”. Weeks of fretful, furtive planning for what, a long day’s waiting – and a short night’s panting and sobbing. Yet I shall do it all again – if possible.’
²²
She was painfully aware that she was more committed than he, and was hurt by his failure to pay any attention to her own writing, beyond polite praise. He flattered her by implying that she, as an experienced self-confident cosmopolitan, was testing his timid limits, but he was not prepared to play the role dictated by her emotional needs. Later Monica Jones told Andrew Motion that Patsy had offered to leave her husband and ‘look after Philip and do all the earning so that he could just write’.
²³
This was not an arrangement that a man of Larkin’s temperament could possibly have borne. His domestic bachelor routines were established, and in the letters to Monica he describes the prospect of tidying his own room with some relish.
²⁴

In a diary entry of 13 January 1953 Patsy anticipated her return to Belfast with melodramatic rhetoric: ‘Desire is a deadly disease. I want I want – the demands vary but have we no other cry? [. . .] Oh Belfast – City of Dreadful Night.’
²⁵
On 9 February she was driven to anguish by Larkin’s cold artistic detachment: ‘Man and Superman – the artist and the woman. Oh God – must it be as he says. Every natural impulse, then, must be twisted, concealed, mocked. Why? Why?’
²⁶
It is difficult not to contrast this with Geraint’s plea in ‘Round Another Point’: ‘I’m not going to bed with [. . .] somebody’s daughter who’ll tell me she’s “two people really” and demand a row and a reconciliation every week-end. I want to screw decent ordinary girls of my own sort without being made to feel a criminal about it.’
²⁷
Tension was high when in April 1953 Philip, Winifred and Patsy all made part of a group which Alec Dalgarno drove to Dublin in his car to hear, appropriately enough perhaps, Wagner’s
Tristan and Isolde
.
²⁸
At Easter 1953 Larkin returned to the mainland for a month to visit his mother and Monica, but did not even telephone Patsy in Oxford. Then, when he brought Winifred to her birthday celebration in Belfast in late May, she felt hurt and jealous. The chemistry between Philip and Winifred was clearly apparent: