Philip Larkin (48 page)

they rise

Serenely to proclaim pure crust, pure foam,

Pure coldness to our live imperfect eyes

That stare beyond this world, where nothing’s made

As new or washed quite clean [. . .]

The poem’s title is quite unironic. There may be anger in the portrayal of the dying smoker’s glimpse of the perfect girl of the advertisements, ‘Smiling, and recognising, and going dark’. But it is not the fault of advertisers that she is beyond reach; it is the fault of the human condition. The indignation of a cheated consumer is lost in sorrow over mortality.

 On 10 August, prompted no doubt by his birthday the previous day, he returned to the drafts of what was to become ‘Send No Money’, originally begun nearly two years earlier under the title ‘What Goes On’.
¹³
It is a howl of tragi-comic bitterness. As he had hoped, his dedication to his artistic vocation has given him a clear sight of the truth. But this truth has been of no more use to him than a ‘truss-advertisement’, proving ‘Sod all’. He does not reproach himself for having made the wrong decision. He had been well aware from the beginning that the rough-tongued bell of art offered nothing in return for his service. But in his youth the pleasures of creativity had amply outweighed this bleak knowledge. Even now the poet still derives cathartic satisfaction from writing a good poem about failure. But now that ‘Half life is over’ he can no longer sustain his self-congratulation at having sat life out rather than having ‘a bash’ at marriage and procreation. Two days later he lamented to Monica that he had ‘done nothing with that fat fillet-steak part of life, 20 to 40’.
¹⁴
But, even if he had made different choices, his face would still be this ‘bestial visor, bent in / By the blows of what happened to happen’. Among Larkin’s effects, bought by the Philip Larkin Society after Monica Jones’s death, was a circular swivel-mirror on a metal stand, one side of which is concave, reflecting a hugely magnified image of every pore and blemish.
¹⁵

Compared with Monica’s, however, his life was full of satisfaction and interest. She felt unfulfilled and longed for their lives to be united. But his visits to Haydon Bridge, and their regular holidays
à deux
can only have convinced him that living together would have been a challenge. It is to this period that Motion dates their defacing of Monica’s hardback first edition of Iris Murdoch’s 1956 novel
The Flight from the Enchanter
, though this might have been done earlier.
¹⁶
Few pages are unmarked and it is dismaying to contemplate the many hours of sterile boredom represented by their trivial, repetitive graffiti. It is not always possible to distinguish which of the two has made a change, but it is clear that Monica is as foul-mouthed as he. The title is altered, probably in her handwriting, to
The Shite from the Non-Enchanter
, and he changes the publisher’s details to ‘Shatto and Break-Windus Shit-shovellers to Greater London Council “You Write It – We’ll Shift It”’. Most of the alterations are grossly lavatorial or sexual. ‘Rosa sat up abruptly’ becomes ‘Rosa shat abruptly’; ‘She swung her arms about a lot’ becomes ‘She swung her tits about a lot.’
¹⁷
‘Sit’ and ‘sat’ are mechanically altered to ‘shit’ and ‘shat’; ‘uncurling their long legs’ becomes ‘uncurling their long pricks’; ‘made as if to kiss Rosa’s hand’ becomes ‘made as if to kiss Rosa’s cunt’.
¹⁸
And so it goes on, page after page, a total of about 1,300 alterations. To return after a spell of this kind of thing to Maeve’s innocent propriety must have been a great relief.

One or two of the marginalia show a nasty xenophobia. Murdoch’s dedication to Elias Canetti, with whom she had had an affair, is elaborated in Philip’s handwriting: ‘To a Wop Tool – Peelias Canetti (Eytie for ‘‘little cunt’’) (he shagged me)’. The chapter heading ‘Three’ becomes ‘Any Greek’s Breath reeks’. The character Jan is described, in Monica’s handwriting, as ‘a dirty scrounging sex-mad foreigner’.
¹⁹
Her anti-Semitism, which was an undercurrent in
A New World Symphony
, is also in evidence. Once, when Philip and Monica were staying with the Thwaites in the 1960s or 1970s, she shocked everyone by declaring in the middle of a casual conversation: ‘Well. What can you expect when they’re
Jews
!’
²⁰
Her insecurities drew Philip into a narrow, defensive intimacy. When she took the well-known photograph of him sitting on an ‘ENGLAND’ road-marker, after their holiday in Scotland in 1962, Monica was confirming what she saw as one of the sure foundations of their relationship.
²¹
Like Amis, she demanded that he reduce himself to her version of him.

It was a version he was determined should not become permanent. At the end of September 1962 Monica wrote an abject letter pleading for him to share his life with her. She was ‘very conscious of what a short time we are here for, & how little of that time we have left, you & I; it isn’t much, and for all we know it might be very short, & I wish I could spend what is left with you, or more of what is left than I do spend’. She continued: ‘tears are behind my eyes, making eyes & head ache’.
²²
In reply he rebukes her emotional blackmail: ‘I don’t say I want to bore you with my feelings, or be bored, so to speak, by yours, but I have a curious feeling that in some ways we are not in sympathy [. . .] you either know me too well or don’t know me enough.’ After criticizing his own antisocial tendency, he concluded: ‘I do think you dislike people more than I do.’
²³
Philip was committed to Monica but, except for short periods, a woman with her limitations could not but disappoint and bore him. On 1 October, she ruthlessly spelled out the truth at which he hinted, ‘you don’t like me enough to marry me’, adding bitterly: ‘it seems rather unkind for you to want to
tell
me so, & perhaps tell me all the things that are wrong with me’.
²⁴
He responded characteristically by taking all the blame on himself: ‘I do feel terrible about our being 40 & unmarried. I fear we are to turn slowly into living reproaches of the way I have dallied and lingered with you [. . .]’
²⁵
She was socializing a good deal with one of her students, Bill Ruddick, and Philip experienced a certain jealousy: ‘It gives me a queer disagreeable feeling to think of you with someone else.’
²⁶
But he made no active intervention.

Later, on 10 October, in more cheerful mood, Larkin completed a genial riposte to ‘Send No Money’. In ‘Toads Revisited’ the Librarian’s voice replaces that of the
poète maudit
.
²⁷
Instead of a lonely romantic artist dissociating himself from his contemporaries of middling sensuality, the speaker is now a bourgeois conformist, distancing himself from those too stupid or too weak to hold down a job. He expresses
faux naïf
puzzlement that his idle stroll in the park does not feel ‘better than work’. The park’s inhabitants, the palsied elderly, the jittery neurotics and tramps, have, after all, succeeded in dodging work, as he had longed to do in ‘Toads’. But the price they have paid for their exemption is too high. At first he exclaims with distaste: ‘Think of being them!’ Then, having given the idea some thought, he repeats the phrase without the exclamation mark and in a more pensive tone. He is no heartless Norman Tebbit berating the workshy. Indeed their detachment from the flux of getting and spending gives their lives a hint of lyrical beauty:

Watching the bread delivered,

The sun by clouds covered,

The children going home;

Think of being them,

Turning over their failures

By some bed of lobelias [. . .]

But the comic misrhyme ‘failures / lobelias’ unsettles the brief epiphany. The poet is still thankful for his secure pensionable life. He even pieces together an alternative epiphany of his own out of the prosaic material of work itself: his in-tray, his loaf-haired secretary and the importunate telephone:

What else can I answer,

When the lights come on at four

At the end of another year?

Give me your arm, old toad;

Help me down Cemetery Road.

A week or so later in ‘Sunny Prestatyn’ Larkin gave a new turn to the meditation on Platonic perfection of ‘The Large Cool Store’ and ‘Essential Beauty’. The image on the holiday poster depicts what Larkin calls on the ‘Listen’ recording ‘the universal symbol of happiness, a pretty girl’. Innocent though she is, however, she inevitably offers erotic invitation. Behind her a ‘hunk’ of coast and a hotel ‘with palms / Seemed to expand from her thighs and / Spread breast-lifting arms’. The ‘hunk’ and ‘palms’ hint, through crude sexual puns, at the male viewer wanting to get his hands on her thighs and breasts. And the sexual message has indeed hit home, as is shown by the response of the vandals, who make the subtext brutally explicit by giving her ‘Huge tits and a fissured crotch’. Larkin has been accused of misogynistic enjoyment of this degradation. On the ‘Listen’ record he acknowledges that ‘some people think’ the poem was intended to be ‘funny’, others that it is ‘horrific’. He, the poet, thinks it was ‘intended to be both’.
²⁸

The vandals’ response is ambiguous. On one level they reinforce the satirical theme. They are not deceived by the advertiser’s trick. Like the feminists who object to airbrushed photographs, they know that real girls in real places do not have perfect teeth and may squint. But more crudely they simply lust after her:

                 the space

Between her legs held scrawls

That set her fairly astride

A tuberous cock and balls [. . .]

However, there is more here than an impulse to rape. The cock and balls are ‘Autographed
Titch Thomas
’. This diminutive vandal seems ironically aware of his own sexual inadequacy. More sombre, even sinister, is the ferocity with which another anonymous vandal has ‘used a knife / Or something to stab right through / The moustached lips of her smile’. There is despair in this violence. The girl’s image taunts the vandals not only with beauty but also with happiness (‘her smile’). Their desecration may be seen as the thwarted expression of a yearning for perfection. It is a sad, self-hating impulse. Again, the poem is not satire or social analysis, but elegy. The perfect girl is ‘too good for this life’.

The poem has complex genre associations. It is an ‘ekphrastic’ poem, a description of a work of visual art, albeit a stereotypical poster rather than an archetypal painting by Bruegel as in Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ and Berryman’s ‘Hunters in the Snow’. It is also an Eros-Thanatos elegy, juxtaposing sex and death in the contrasting posters with which it begins and ends. Its theme is a version of the ‘death and the maiden’ motif of Western art, the girl’s violated image recalling those medieval and Renaissance paintings in which amorous skeletons drag their buxom victims by the hair into yawning graves as they struggle to cover their modesty with a winding-sheet.
²⁹
Larkin’s version lacks the moralizing sexism of the traditional version. Instead, more simply and sadly, a vision of beauty is vicariously dismembered and subjected to the humiliation of disease. ‘Very soon, a great transverse tear / Left only a hand and some blue. / Now
Fight Cancer
is there.’ In the ‘Listen’ reading Larkin stammers momentarily at the word ‘cancer’.

Larkin’s moods always ran to extremes, and three days after he completed ‘Sunny Prestatyn’ he experienced an exalted epiphany during one of his solitary cycle rides in the country. He wrote to Monica on 23 October that he had stopped at the small village of Wawne, to the north of Hull, where he had ‘poked about in the churchyard, turning up chestnuts in the grass, & noting George Beulah, who had outlived two wives before dying in 1909’: