Philip Larkin (60 page)

It is dispiriting to see his spontaneous sense of the beauty of the poetry being reduced to a narrow defensive nationalism: ‘only you can share it with me’. He congratulates Monica on not being ‘a Czech, ceaselessly grumbling’, and himself on not being ‘a Yank, writing a thesis on water-imagery in Ezra Pound’.
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But later in the same letter his reflection on literary nationality grows more complex. He describes being shown round the Oxford University Press Printers and seeing ‘a queer thing called
Dictionary for Advanced Readers of English
– “What’s that,” I said. “Oh, that’s a dictionary for ‘emergent nations’,” he said, giving the inverted commas.’ The reprints, Larkin was told, were never fewer than a quarter of a million, most of which went to Africa. He was moved: ‘I must confess I felt touched to think of them all winging their way there. Troops out, books in. I don’t know.’
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The diffident phrasing (‘I must confess’, ‘I don’t know’) deflects any possible explosion to the right by Monica against this soft liberalism.

On 30 June 1968 he described ‘Posterity’ to her:

It gets in Yanks, Yids, wives, kids, Coca Cola, Protest, & the Theatre – pretty good list of hates, eh? I long to write a political poem – the withdrawal of troops east of Suez started me, now I see someone boasting that in a few years’ time we shall be spending ‘more on Education than “Defence”’ – this shocks me
to the core
, & I seriously feel that
within our lifetime
we shall see England under the heel of the conqueror – or what
used
to be England, but is now a bunch of bearded layabout traitors & National Assistant ‘Black Englishmen’ – if I had the courage I wd emigrate – terrible –
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Several months later, in January 1969, he completed his only substantial poem directly concerned with topical politics, ‘Homage to a Government’. He was more than usually hesitant about this particular poem, though he did send it to the
Sunday Times
: ‘if they print it I’ll say why it fails. But they may send it back. Probably the kindest thing.’
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It appeared on 19 January. His motive was fundamentally literary. Determined to explore every available form and genre at some point in his career, he intended this deliberately as ‘a political poem’. The topic he chose, the withdrawal of British troops from the outpost of Aden on the Persian Gulf, was indeed a promising one for a right-wing polemicist. The Labour government stood accused of bungling the troop withdrawal because of its ideological commitment to pell-mell ‘decolonization’ at all costs.
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It was also alleged that domestic finance played a greater role in the decision than foreign policy, a sore point in view of the current union agitation for higher pay.

Larkin made a poem out of this situation, not by forthright satire, as in the Black Paper epigram. Instead he aimed to rouse the reader’s moral indignation through Swiftian indirection, adopting the
faux naïf
persona of an honest citizen attempting to justify to himself the corrupt motives of his government:

Next year we are to bring the soldiers home

For lack of money, and it is all right.

Places they guarded, or kept orderly,

Must guard themselves, and keep themselves orderly.

We want the money for ourselves at home

Instead of working. And this is all right.

The repetition ‘it/this is all right’ conveys the speaker’s lack of conviction, while the rhyme scheme, abccab, listlessly repeats exactly the same words in each stanza (‘home, right, orderly, orderly, home, right’, etc.). As a dramatization of disillusion this is effective. But the tone is insecure. Is the persona meant to be genuinely naive, or is he speaking with heavy irony? Sarcasm certainly breaks the surface in the crude point-scoring phrase ‘Instead of working’, which seems interpolated from a more vigorously polemical poem.

The poem’s attitude towards the specific military incident which had brought Aden into the news is also problematic. Opinion had been polarized by Lieutenant Colonel Colin Campbell Mitchell, ‘Mad Mitch’, who in 1967 led the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in reoccupying a district of Aden taken over by local nationalists in anticipation of the troop withdrawal. To many at the time the bloodshed of what was dubbed by the press ‘the Last Battle of the British Empire’ seemed gratuitous. The Labour MP Tam Dalyell asked in Parliament whether Mitchell had ‘disobeyed operational and administrative orders of his senior officers’,
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and Mitchell’s men were accused of brutality. Larkin’s reference to this scandal in the poem is oddly oblique and mild. He concedes to his left-wing readers that ‘from what we hear / The soldiers there only made trouble happen’. If the satire is to work effectively the phrase ‘from what we hear’ should strike the reader with heavy irony (‘from what we hear from communist subversives’). But it does not. Indeed the tone seems to imply real doubt. Larkin’s poetic integrity prevents him from simplifying the situation. He could not stop himself exploding (or at least fizzling momentarily) ‘to the left’.

Crucially the poem fails to address the larger issue of imperialism itself, though this is central to its ideological context. Larkin’s new-found interest in the British Empire fails to convince. He had shown not the slightest interest in the decolonization of Africa and the Middle East during the previous decades. Harold Macmillan’s ‘Wind of Change’ had passed him by. ‘You know I don’t care at all for politics, intelligently.’
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He quickly realized that this was not, after all, a ‘political poem’ in any true sense of the phrase. In a later interview, he clumsily denied that he had intended to take a political stand at all: ‘Well, that’s really history rather than politics [. . .] I don’t mind troops being brought home if we’d decided this was the best thing all round, but to bring them home simply because we couldn’t afford to keep them there seemed a dreadful humiliation.’
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He does not mention the poem’s allegation that the withdrawal served to line the pockets of workshy strikers. He was uneasily aware that decolonization was considered ‘the best thing all round’ by politicians of the right as well as the left. And as Blake Morrison comments: ‘financial motives are as involved in the posting of troops to colonies as they are in the withdrawal of them’.
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In everyday life, however, Larkin was less circumspect, acting out the stereotype of a Tory loyalist. When Mitchell later headed a national campaign against the dissolution of his regiment, Larkin’s car sported a ‘Save the Argylls’ bumper sticker.
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His attempt to unite his University and poetic roles by involvement with the Compton Lectureship in poetry brought him disappointment of a more personal kind. In 1968 he was co-opted on to the Arts Council committee administering a bequest by the philanthropist Joseph Compton. He proposed that some of the money be used to set up a fellowship, installing a writer in a university for a year. He hoped that students and staff from across the disciplines would take advantage of this opportunity: ‘both music and poetry tend to be thought of in terms of the departments that teach them [. . .] This seems to me quite wrong. Both are forms of art, and art is universal, not simply a subject to be taught.’
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His proposal of Hull as a suitable place for the Fellowship was accepted. He had recently inaugurated a ‘Poetry Room’ in the Library, complete with records and audio-tapes. He approached Betjeman as a possible first Fellow, but he declined. His next choice, Cecil Day-Lewis, accepted, and gave his inaugural lecture on 17 January 1969. The arrangement was for Day-Lewis to be available for consultation in the University once a fortnight, and to deliver a lecture once a term. Larkin congratulated himself on his coup when Day-Lewis was appointed Poet Laureate late in 1968, shortly before taking up the Fellowship. However the literary politics of the time were not propitious. The generation gap was too wide and students were apathetic towards such official initiatives. Moreover, Day-Lewis was not a charismatic personality, and his poetic reputation was fading (Larkin himself called his poetry ‘
harshit
’, horse-shit).
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On the first day Day-Lewis and Larkin waited, but no one came. His subsequent visits to the University were only slightly more successful. The Fellowship was continued over the following four years. Richard Murphy, Peter Porter, Ian Hamilton and Douglas Dunn all served as Compton Fellows. But the initiative met with only modest success. The paper concerning the Fellowship which Larkin delivered later at a meeting of SCONUL was entitled, with litotes, ‘A Faint Sense of Failure’.
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Early in 1969, as if to confirm the loss of his youth, he heard that he was to be awarded an Honorary DLitt by Queen’s University Belfast, which he had left fourteen years earlier. His supposed Orange sympathies did not extend to admiration for Loyalist politicians, and he hoped that the ceremony would not ‘involve writing an ode to the Reverend Ian Paisley’. He could not, however, resist penning a suitable quatrain:

See the Pope of Ulster stand,

Spiked shillelagh in each hand,

Vowing to uphold the Border,

Father, Son, and Orange Order.

He added: ‘I had better make sure of getting my Doctorate first.’
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The established routines of his life continued. In August he snatched a week’s holiday in Norwich with his mother in ‘marvellous weather’, followed by a touring holiday in Ireland with Monica in his new car, an ‘enormous 4-litre Vanden Plas Princess,
with a Rolls Royce engine 
. . . 2nd, or even 3rd, hand’. It was ‘love at first sight’, he told Barbara Pym.
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He wrote to Maeve about the number of Brennans they had encountered, including one Maeve Brennan: ‘I can’t forget you, even if I had any inclination to, which I haven’t. Accept a big kiss and some spectral maulings – are you wearing tights? Or stockings?’
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Stage 2 of the new Library building had been opened in spring 1969, and he took pride in the imposing seven-storey tower which won awards from the Civic Trust and the Royal Institute of British Architects.
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However, by the beginning of the academic year in autumn 1969, he already felt displaced within it: ‘There are so many new members of staff that I feel like a stranger in my own building.’ He was relying increasingly on Betty Mackereth, who had now been his secretary for twelve years. As he told his mother in October 1969: ‘My mainstay is Betty: boundless energy, always cheerful & tolerant, and if she doesn’t do half my work she sort of chews it up to make it easier for me to swallow. I’d be lost without her.’
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Betty had learned to cope with his volatile moods. One morning she might receive a phone call shortly after nine in the accent of a Yorkshire pub landlord: ‘We’ve got a geezer ’ere. Been under t’table all night, dead to t’world. And ’e says ’is name’s Philip Larkin.’ On another day he would sit at his desk staring at nothing, and she would flit silently in and out to collect the necessary papers.
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Increasingly deaf, overworked and alienated, Larkin was being pushed to the side of his own professional life. His response was to engineer an escape from Hull, if only a temporary one. Since early 1966 he had been giving occasional attention to his OUP
Twentieth-Century Verse
anthology. He could now reasonably request leave in Oxford, where he would have access to the Bodleian copyright Library and could finish work on the project. He wrote to Barbara Pym on 3 February 1970:

I am hoping to go to All Souls for 6 months in the autumn – a ‘Visiting Fellow’. I went there recently: it’s rather like an academic nursing-home. ‘We don’t want you to have
any
worries while you’re here.’ My excuse is to finish off this wretched Oxford Book – or let it finish
me
off. I have dreams of reliving my youth – of doing all the things I never did – going to Bach choir concerts – the Playhouse – having coffee at Elliston’s – walking to those places I’ve never seen, like
Bagley Wood
& all that Scholar-(Gipsy/Gypsy) jazz. Bet I don’t.
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