Philip Larkin (66 page)

Where has it gone, the lifetime?

Search me. What’s left is drear.

Unchilded and unwifed, I’m

Able to view that clear:

So final. And so near.

With an elliptical virtuosity characteristic of Larkin’s late style the poem modulates at the last minute into pensive self-elegy. Puzzlingly he did not publish it. Eight years later in 1980 he sent it to his friend Anthony Thwaite on his fiftieth birthday with the compliment ‘But it would have been far worse without you.’
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Perhaps he would not have objected had Thwaite offered to publish it in one of the journals with which he was associated. In the event it did not appear until the publication of
Collected Poems
in 1988.

In August 1972 the BBC Third Programme broadcast a radio feature,
Larkin at Fifty
, prompting his Belfast muse, Winifred Arnott, now Bradshaw, long ago married, divorced and remarried, to write to him. They resumed an intermittent correspondence which lasted until the poet’s death. This year Philip holidayed with Monica in Wester Ross. He wrote in their joint diary with disconcerting candour:

My specs are splashed with lobster.

My lobster’s splashed with snot,

No woman makes my knob stir –

A bloody cold I’ve got.
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On top of his other reasons for depression his unhealthy lifestyle and heavy drinking were causing a loss of sexual vigour. In November Patsy Strang wrote to him from a nursing home for alcoholics. He replied regretting that they had lost touch with each other and sorry that she was in ‘“Clinholme” – word of fear’. Concerned as ever about his mother he told Patsy: ‘I now go & see her every other weekend, which is a little wearing, but of course one does what one can, which isn’t much.’
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As another augury that he was becoming ‘historical’, he was approached by Barry Bloomfield, who had recently completed a bibliography of Auden, with a proposal to make him his next subject. He wrote that this would be ‘wonderful’, and speculated on whether he would be ethically justified in hiding from Bloomfield any ‘terrible poem’ tucked away in a magazine.
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At the beginning of December 1972 Larkin heard that Ansell and Judy Egerton were to separate. He had been writing to the Egertons, first as a couple, then regularly to Judy, since their first meeting in Belfast in 1954. He visited with the Egertons once or twice a year, and for many years he and Monica would take them out annually to dinner during the Lord’s Test match. In 1974, together with Harold Pinter, Ansell Egerton sponsored Larkin for membership of the MCC. Judy Egerton was at this time developing her career as an art historian, and in 1974 was to become Assistant Keeper of the British Collection at the Tate Gallery. The news of the separation came as ‘a great shock’. In a tactful letter of 5 December 1972, Philip expressed his sympathy (‘I can guess the loneliness isn’t easy [. . .] no, it’s sad. I do feel that’). He went on to thank her for her advice on muesli for breakfast and congratulate her on the recent purchase of a watercolour, in a bidding competition against ‘these grabbing Yanks’. He boasted that the Ferens Gallery in Hull had bought its Atkinson Grimshaw ‘
in 1950 for £10
ARRGHGH. It’s lovely: so delicate’, and went on to discuss the progress of the Egertons’ younger daughter Fabia, then studying English at Cambridge.
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In January 1973 he wrote to Judy that he had ‘finished a long dreary poem that had been dragging on since September’.
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His great Ode to Senility, ‘The Old Fools’, completed on 12 January, again breaks new expressive ground. The meditative authority of his extended reflective elegies is here, uniquely, inflected into a series of blunt questions: ‘What do they think has happened [. . .]?’; ‘Do they somehow suppose [. . .]?’; ‘do they fancy [. . .]?’ One might see this as an example of Larkin’s characteristic
faux naïf
technique. The poet already knows the answers to his rhetorical questions. But the effect is actually less strategic than this. The questions sound genuine, and bitterly reproachful: ‘Do they somehow suppose / It’s more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools, / And you keep on pissing yourself [. . .]?’ He shockingly refuses to displace this familiar anger into our usual patronizing sentimentalism towards ‘the old dears’. He goes on to answer his questions by evoking their absent minds. They sit ‘through days of thin continuous dreaming / Watching light move’. The last phrase cruelly parodies a typical Larkin epiphany: the wind tousling the clouds in ‘Mr Bleaney’, the luminously peopled air in ‘Here’. In the curt two-stress line with which the stanza ends, the poet asks: ‘Why aren’t they screaming?’ He seems genuinely puzzled. As he wrote to Brian Cox the following month: ‘I felt I had to write it. It’s rather an angry poem, but the anger is ambivalent – we are angry at the humiliation of age, but we are also angry at old people for reminding us of death, and I suppose for making us feel bad about doing nothing for them.’
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The second stanza shifts to composed philosophical meditation. In an atheist trope familiar from Hardy and Housman the poet contemplates our (or rather ‘your’) physical atoms ‘speeding away’ from each other in dissolution. He rationalizes that you are merely returning to the oblivion from which you emerged at birth. But there is no emotional consolation in this. After all, ‘then it was going to end’. When our mothers gave us birth we became part of a ‘unique endeavour / To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower / Of being here’. When oblivion resumes ‘you can’t pretend / There’ll be anything else’. This thought unsettles the poet’s philosophical composure and he reverts to awed jeering, mimicking the old fools’ witlessness: ‘Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power / Of choosing gone’ (‘Oh, ow, eeh, oo, ow, oo’). The final short line in this stanza returns with a mocking rhyme to the raucous disrespect of the opening: ‘they’re for it; / [. . .] How can they ignore it?’ Georges Bataille wrote: ‘Obscenity is our name for the uneasiness which upsets the physical state associated with self-possession, with the possession of a recognized and stable individuality.’
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There is something radically obscene about ‘The Old Fools’; and about old fools.

In the third stanza the familiar gibe ‘the lights are on, but nobody’s at home’, generates one of the most poignantly beautiful effects in Larkin’s work. The rooms they inhabit are no longer the literal rooms of homes or hospitals. They have retreated in their senile confusion into archetypal living rooms inside their heads:

chairs and a fire burning,

The blown bush at the window, or the sun’s

Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely

Rain-ceased midsummer evening.

They achieve transcendence by living ‘Not here and now, but where all happened once’. The effect is unbearably moving. As a materialist Larkin sees the fading rooms as ‘Inside your head’ rather than inside your mind, and so at the mercy of physical decline. They ‘grow farther, leaving / Incompetent cold, the constant wear and tear / Of taken breath’. Riskily, Larkin changes metaphor at this point, shifting to the mountain climbing of ‘The View’. The old fools are perhaps so near to the icy peak of ‘Extinction’s alp’ that they can perceive only the ‘rising ground’ of day-by-day existence. Since the 1940s Larkin had been writing about the approach of death, but his internal verbal censor had stopped him from using the key word ‘extinction’ until the context arrived when it would exert its full 1,000-watt force. He uses the word only here in ‘The Old Fools’ and once again in ‘Aubade’ (‘the sure extinction that we travel to’), in unforgettable phrases differentiated from each other in grammar and idiom. As the poem draws to a close the rhetorical questions return (‘Can they never tell / What is dragging them back [. . .] Not at night?’) to be ‘answered’ in the chilling final short line:

Well,

We shall find out.

For many readers this commonplace phrase has become a quotation from Larkin.

Three days after the completion of ‘The Old Fools’, and shortly before the publication of
The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse
, Charles Monteith wrote proposing that he and Auden nominate Larkin for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry. Larkin found the offer ‘immensely flattering’: ‘the biggest compliment I have been paid for many years’. However, he declined: ‘I have really very little interest in poetry in the abstract; I have never lectured about it, or even written about it to any extent, and I know that I could never produce anything worthy of such a distinguished office and audience.’
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His instinct was sound. He could not have written the kind of sustained reflection on the poetic craft which Auden produced in his Oxford lectures,
The Dyer’s Hand
. In the event he supported the candidacy of his friend John Wain. He wrote to Judy Egerton on 11 June 1973: ‘I went to Oxford for the poetry election, & got very drunk.’ Wain was elected.
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In February 1973 the business of poetry had penetrated to Hull in a different form when Robert Lowell gave a poetry reading at the invitation of the Professor of American Studies, Geoffrey Moore. Though Larkin was uncomfortable with Lowell’s ‘confessional’ mode, Lowell’s admiration for his work, and capacity for hard drinking, created a short-lived friendship. They corresponded, and later, in 1974, Larkin visited Lowell at his home in Kent.
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The Oxford anthology appeared on 29 March 1973 in an edition of 29,300. A reprint of 13,550 copies followed in June. Whatever damage the volume might do to his reputation, it would certainly make him money. As he commented later, ‘I was over fifty before I could have “lived by my writing” – and then only because I had edited a big anthology.’
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He was by now already a man of substance, an uncomfortable thought for so purely lyric a poet. As Wordsworth wrote: ‘Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.’
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His response was the late masterpiece ‘Money’ completed on 19 February 1973, a month or so before the anthology was published. The poet reviews his quarterly accumulation of dividends and interest payments and finds himself at a loss. It is eloquent of the gulf between man and poet at this point that while in the letters he complains about the bills he has to pay, in the poems it is the accumulation of wealth that oppresses him. He is, it seems, making a good living, but without living. With so much money why does he not feel fulfilled? Money, a medium of exchange with no intrinsic use, is Larkin’s most thought-provoking metonym of life. It is the metaphorical abstraction of all our dreams of happiness and fulfilment; or, as he reductively puts it, ‘goods and sex’. It reproaches him: ‘You could get them still by writing a few cheques.’ His friends and neighbours have used their money, he slyly observes, to obtain ‘a second house and car and wife’. But a poet’s life cannot be measured in houses, cars or wives. For him the reflection that ‘money has something to do with life’ is deeply puzzling. He reflects on its lyric elusiveness: it exists only in being used. Like life, money is ours by leasehold. It will in the end buy us only the final shave given to the corpse before it lies in the chapel of rest.

So far the poem, with its briskly rhymed couplets (set out capriciously with indentations appropriate to alternate rhyme) might seem to be light and playful. But at this point Larkin springs a beautiful surprise. If money is a metonym of life, it is equally a metonym of poetry, as Wallace Stevens perceived: ‘Money is a kind of poetry.’
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In the final stanza Larkin pulls out the symbolist throttle and gives expression to this insight in one of the least anticipated epiphanies in his work:

I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down

From long french windows at a provincial town,

The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad

In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

This is a coup worthy of Verlaine or Rimbaud. Yet two years earlier he had written to Douglas Dunn while at work on the Oxford anthology: ‘my own mind is so shallow that I can only respond to lighter poems, written in total explicit style. No obscurities!’
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Significantly, however, he held back from contradicting Barbara Everett’s appreciative analysis of his symbolist mode (1980),
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and when Andrew Motion published his short monograph on Larkin’s work in 1982,
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he commented non-committally in a letter to Anthony Thwaite: ‘his line on the poems is rather école d’Everett – Larkin as Mallarmé, and so on. Well, it makes a change.’
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