Philip Larkin (8 page)

In ‘Biographical Details’ his imagination is fired by the topic of living rooms. He is entranced by the stylish decadence of a new freshman, Hilary, who had ‘a childish mane of fairish flopping hair, and pouting lips’. Hilary’s room boasts ‘two silky cushions – if not more – of green and orange, peculiar pictures (one seemed like a Japanese print), and a white, voluptuous lambskin on the floor’:

I might digress on the subject of rooms. Norman’s was redolent of a smashed culture [. . .] Kingsley’s was also squalid and untidy, but without the debauched culture [. . .] His room, which grew to be our centre, was gradually made chaotic: records, papers, teacups and plates, books borrowed and not returned – all were thrown about the room in astonishing confusion. Nor would his fire ever burn. Nor would his cupboard shut. The scouts had a horror of our rooms. I don’t wonder. Philip’s, on the same staircase as Hilary’s, betrayed no character. It had a picture or two, a few books and a microscope, and mice: it could be very draughty in the winter [. . .] My own room was a mixture of natural chaos and neurotic tidiness – it
looked
untidy, but everything was actually in its place.
²⁸

Then he makes an unexpected poetic leap:

I learnt something about untidiness when visiting an empty set of rooms in New [College] for some money. Needless to say, the owner was out, but the room was
expensively
untidy, with dozens of delicious books jumbled everywhere, mixed with letters, bottles, invitations, rackets, records, more books, and to top it all a chessboard with men neatly arranged to suggest a game or problem still in progress, ledged on the corner of a trunk.
²⁹

He is entranced by a glimpse of the deserted room of someone he will never meet. The inscrutable chessboard on the trunk has the air of a poetic symbol.

His determination to be in the literary swim was intense. He told his sister in a letter of 24 January 1941 that he was about to pay 2s 6d to join the Ark, a Christian association, ‘just to hear and see’ T. S. Eliot. ‘I want to confirm my opinion that he really is an unpleasant guy.’
³⁰
He became Treasurer of the University English Club, and over the next two years was involved in entertaining a wide variety of speakers, including Stephen Spender, R. H. Wilenski and Lord Berners. On 3 March 1943 he wrote to his parents: ‘Met George Orwell, who is very nice, though not quite Pop’s political line.’ The visit which made the greatest impact was that of Dylan Thomas in the winter of 1941. Larkin was eager to put the image in Augustus John’s celebrated portrait to the test: ‘To my mind, his face was smaller and more triangular than John made it, and his hair (composed of beautiful curls seeming to range in colour from lemon to prussian blue) more luxuriant. His lips were more loose, and were perpetually holding an out-thrust cigarette.’
³¹
Larkin records every gesture and mannerism, noting that he ‘did not drink as much sherry as I expected’. They talked about the documentary films Thomas had made for the Ministry of Information. ‘I told him I sincerely admired “Balloon Site”, which he seemed to find incredible [. . .] He smoked perpetually, lighting fresh cigarettes from the stubs of old ones.’
³²
As they waited ‘in some girl’s room’ in St Hilda’s College, the ambitious young undergraduate attempted to make an impact on his distinguished guest: ‘I said I had been reading “Contemporary Poetry and Prose”, a little surrealist magazine in which D.T. had published stories and poems. He gave a brief biography of Roger Roughton the editor, commenting on his suicide “Bloody little fool”.’
³³

During the reading Thomas, still in his coat, sat near the fire, hunched over ‘a great wad of typescript, dogeared and scribbled’. After ‘a little pyrotechnic introduction, full of bad puns and spoonerisms (“pillars of the Swiss”)’ and ‘a topical poem of which all I can remember is “As I tossed off on Pembroke Bridge”’, Thomas read two passages from a draft novel and ‘about four poems: “Paper and sticks and shovel and match”, A Centenarian Killed in an Air Raid, and two others I don’t recall. These too seemed wonderful to me. He read very slowly, lingering on the vowels.’ Larkin’s past tense is deliberately chosen. By the time he records his enthusiasm for this ‘wonderful’ reading it has already faded. In a letter to Sutton, written the week following the visit, he had given a brisker, upbeat account, mentioning that Thomas (‘Hell of a fine man: little, snubby, hopelessly pissed bloke’) had read ‘a parody of Spender entitled “The Parachutist” which had people rolling on the floor’.
³⁴

In view of Thomas’s extravagant bardic image it is notable that what particularly impressed Larkin was his refusal of pretension: ‘One girl questioned the phrase “innocent as strawberries”; DT admitted he had no sinful desires about strawberries [. . .] a long discussion of his Poem in October ensued, DT saying that he’d merely gone for a walk along a seashore in October and felt a bit queer, and wanted to make the reader feel queer also.’
³⁵
Larkin carefully assesses his own shifting reactions. His final, dismissive judgement comes as a slight surprise: ‘On the whole, he was rather a pathetic figure. It was difficult to connect the man and his poetry. I felt impatient because of his social manner, which I thought assumed. He seemed to use it as an artful protection.’
³⁶

On 16 November Larkin attended a very different performance. He wrote to Sutton that ‘McCready and I shagged up to London to attend a Jam session at HMV Studios in S. John’s Wood.’ He was filled with excitement at being present at an historic occasion, the first jam session, indeed, to be recorded in England. He conceded that the quality of the music was not high, but criticism was disarmed:

the audience was in front, behind, underneath, hanging from the lights, and so on. There was a beautifully informal atmosphere as they shat about at first, all dropping one by one into ‘My Blue Heaven’ as practice. Then the engineer asked them to play something to test the recording apparatus. ‘Honeysuckle Rose’ was then bashed out for 10 minutes [. . .] we left at 5.30 and just caught our ’bus. The outstanding player on the session was Carl Barriteau, a negro clarinet player who sounded wonderful in the flesh. Played hellish loud, as Bechet would.
³⁷

The experience made him aware that ‘an
American
session would be colossal’. ‘Barriteau was amazingly good: every one of his sides ended with a terrific cheer from the audience, which I hope goes on the record. It deserves it.’ The listener today can hear Barriteau playing in ‘Tea for Two’ at this very recording session on the CD set of
Larkin’s Jazz
.
³⁸

The young poet was enjoying his new experiences. He was popular and happy. He wrote to Sutton with shocking candour: ‘Perhaps you think I am being a bit selfish but I just don’t want to go into the Army. I want to pretend it isn’t there; that there’s no war on.’
³⁹
But the shadows were gathering, and on 16 December he was called for his medical examination. He was told that if his eyesight was graded at 4 or below he would be exempt. As term came to an end he sold all his books and burnt his lecture notes. He would, it seemed, be in uniform within a matter of weeks. ‘So it all came to an end,’ he wrote portentously in ‘Biographical Details’:

Everybody – that is, Norman, Philip, Nick, and Kingsley – gave me a Bessie Smith record each, which touched me more deeply than I showed. I was staying on till Christmas, firewatching, and I saw Philip and Norman off [. . .] The parting was one of the most harrowing things I had to go through, and I returned blindly to college in the December gloom, to play a record or two before dinner.
⁴⁰

This valedictory diminuendo is followed by a dramatic reversal: ‘On New Year’s Day I received my hideous letter marked O.H.M.S. in bed. It informed me that my medical category was IV. Never have I, except at the news of the Munich agreement, felt so relieved.’
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The equation of his personal exemption with the national relief of 1939 is rich with comic euphoria. The Munich agreement had of course turned out to be a temporary delusion.

For the time being his dearest wish was fulfilled. He was exempt and could pretend there was no war on. At the beginning of 1942 he returned to his beloved Oxford free of the shadow which had haunted him. He moved with Philip Brown, who as a medical student was in an exempt category, into 125 Walton Street, not quite an attic, but a large, first-floor room with a piano,
⁴²
and they became a homosocial couple, ‘the two Philips’ or ‘big Philip and little Philip’. Brown gave Larkin a copy of Housman’s
A Shropshire Lad
. He recalled in 1991: ‘Philip may have been in love with me [. . .] there were a few messy encounters between us, yes. Nothing much. Philip’s sexuality was so obscured by his manner of approach and his general diffidence that frankly I would be surprised to hear that he ever had sex with anyone.’
⁴³
Larkin’s ‘crush’ on him, he recalled, did not lead to ‘any serious action. Besides, I was extremely interested in girls. And so was he.’
⁴⁴
Larkin wrote in ‘Biographical Details’: ‘We were all still very childish about sex.’ But though Larkin lacked experience he adopted an assured attitude towards sexual matters in his writing. In a letter of 16 May 1942 he wrote to his mother: ‘Tell Pop that a friend has found an unexpurgated version of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” behind the bookcases in his digs. I am impatiently waiting for him (and his wife) to finish it.’ It is difficult to imagine many other nineteen-year-olds making such a joke to their parents at this period.

Around this time both Larkin and Amis were paying court to a Czech student. Kingsley, Philip wrote, was attempting ‘to ensnare Chitra by a reformed-pervert appeal’. He goes on to describe her: ‘striking, with a comical head of black hair and scarlet lips. One couldn’t call her beautiful – anyway she would probably regard beauty as being slightly bourgeois – but she had a good figure and was decidedly attractive. She was, however, a full time party-line girl. She was known to interrupt kisses to say: Remember, the party comes first.’
⁴⁵
While Amis invented strategies to cajole Chitra into bed, Larkin explored his feelings for her: ‘In a drunken fit of bravado I asked her to tea, and she came. We ate toast and marmalade and she told me I was decadent. Nothing else happened. My ventures with women had up to this time been continually depressing, but I liked her and I still do – not that I ever did anything about it. She did not ask me back.’
⁴⁶
Without ‘doing anything about it’ he finds that he ‘likes’ her, and attributes her lack of response to his own inadequacies rather than to any failure on her part.

Towards the end of the following term Larkin found himself further isolated in his exemption when Amis followed Sutton into the army, being commissioned into the Signals. Larkin’s mood during the summer vacation in 1942 is vividly evoked in parallel letters to Sutton and Amis written from his new Warwick family home shortly after his twentieth birthday. He begins his letter to Sutton on 17 August in a mood of pure
jouissance
: ‘I have gone for a walk in the Park. I have seen a man & six white puppies. The paddling-pool is full of children [. . .] There is a light, withy, breeze.’ His ebullience overflows into surreal inner music: ‘I am hearing an audible voice singing “Arseholes cheap today, cheaper than yesterday.” etc.’
⁴⁷
Since their letters have been crossing in the wartime post, he decides that ‘general meandering is the best way to write at present’. ‘I enjoyed your letter by the way – pissed myself over Ross & a few other bits.’
⁴⁸
He briefly mentions the ‘buggering silly’ war work in which he is engaged in the Warwick Fuel Office, sorting letters and forms, and then turns to his writing: ‘I am still undecided as to whether I am a poyte or a writah. At present I am writing a story about a mad woman in an air-raid, much influenced by Dylan Thomas, whom I very much admire [. . .] The novel has expired – bricks without straw. You remember Auden in “Letters from Iceland” said that novels were much harder than poetry. I agree!’
⁴⁹

Later he resumes the letter with a different topic: ‘My favourite jazz record at present is Condon’s “Friar’s Point Shuffle” in the 1940 Chic. Album. It is sodding fine [. . .] Bessie is still huge and monumental.’ He then shifts time and scene again. He is back in the park: