Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (27 page)

Finding Stevie Smith's
Not Waving but Drowning
in a bookshop one Christmas some years ago, I was sufficiently impressed by it to buy a number of copies for random distribution among friends. The surprise this caused them was partly, no doubt, due to the reaction that before the war led us to amend the celebrated cigarette advertisement 'If So-and-So, usually a well-known theatrical personality, offered you a cigarette it would be a Kensitas' by substituting for the brand name the words 'bloody miracle'.

His feelings about money were complicated and pleas-ureless. He pronounced the word
bills
as if it were a violent obscenity. (He brooded deeply about his bills.) He always had enough money and, anyway, there was nothing he wanted to spend it on.

Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:

'Why do you let me lie here wastefully?

I am all you never had of goods and
SÇX,
You could get them still by writing a few cheques'. ..

... 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.

Money meant work, and there was a priestly stoicism in Larkin's devotion, or submission, to his job as University Librarian at Hull. He supervised a staff of over a hundred; typically he was a brilliant administrator, with a great talent for drudgery. Work was the 'toad' that he let 'squat on my life'. In the last decade he didn't need the job any longer, but he thought (with maximum lack of glamour), 'Well, I might as well get my pension, since I've gone so far.'

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.

He never married, naturally, and made a boast of his aversion to children. 'Children are very horrible, aren't they? Selfish, noisy, cruel, vulgar little brutes.' As a child himself, he has said, he thought he hated everybody: 'but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn't like.' His own childhood he repeatedly dismissed as 'a forgotten boredom' ('Nothing, like something, happens anywhere'). You feel that the very notion of childhood, with all its agitation and enchantment, was simply too sexy for Larkin. He regarded married life as a terrible mystery, something that other people did (and 'Other People are Hell'), a matter for appalled — and double-edged — ridicule:

He married a woman to Stop her getting away Now she's there all day, And the money he gets for wasting his life on work She takes as her perk To pay for the kiddies' clobber and the drier And the electric fire . ..

And so on, until the inexorable revenge:

So he and I are the same, Only I'm a better hand At knowing what I can stand Without them sending a van — Or I suppose I can.

The clinching paradox may be, however, that Larkin will survive as a romantic poet, an exponent of the ironic romance of exclusion, or inversion. One review of
High Windows
(his last book of poems, and his best by some distance) was headed 'Don Juan in Hull'; and this says a great deal, I think, about the currents of thwarted eroticism in his work. Of the shopping-centre, the motorway cafe, the old people's home, the madman-haunted park, the ambulance, the hospital, Larkin sang. Even his own inner ugliness ('monkey-brown, fish-grey') he made beautiful:

For something sufficiently toad-like Squats in me, too; Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck, And cold as snow ...

'Do you feel you could have had a much happier life?' an interviewer once asked. 'Not without being someone else.' What we are left with is the lyricism that Larkin seemed to be shedding or throwing away as he moved towards death.

From 'The Trees':

Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

It was in my capacity as a cruel and vulgar little brute that I first met Larkin - at the age of four or five. He was my elder brother's godfather and namesake, and, to my brother and me (true to type: indeed, it might have been us who put him off), visits from godfathers meant money.
My
godfather was rich, generous and seldom sober when he came to stay: half-crowns and ten-shilling notes dropped from his hand into ours. But it was always a solemn moment when it came for Larkin to 'tip the boys' — almost a religious experience, as I remember it. At first it was sixpence for Philip against threepence for Martin; years later it was tenpence against sixpence; later still it was a shilling against ninepence: always index-linked and carefully graded. Other poets I came across during that time - notably Robert Graves - tended to be ebullient, excitable, candidly bardic. Larkin was simply a melancholy man, prematurely bald and with the remains of a stutter. In my later dealings with him, he was always quietly amusing, doggedly honest and (in the widest sense) exceptionally well-mannered. Larkin may have written poetry, but he spent no time 'being a poet'.

The death was as comfortless as the life. And it had its element of ironic heroism. There was no real family, of course, and visits from friends were not encouraged. All his life he had girded himself for extinction; but when it came (and this is appropriate and consistent) he was quite unprepared, resolutely helpless, having closed no deal with death. He instructed his doctors to tell him nothing - to tell him lies. It is said that Evelyn Waugh died of snobbery. Philip Larkin died of shame: mortal, corporeal shame.

He made no effort to prolong matters, In the last year of his life he used to start the day with three glasses of supermarket port ('Well,' he explained to my father, 'you've got to have some fucking reason for getting up in the morning'). In the last week he was subsisting on 'gin, Complan and cheap red wine'. 'Couldn't you at least get some
expensive
red wine?' my mother suggested on the telephone, three days before his death. But no. Live out the comfortlessness, in fear and bafflement — that was the strategy. Although he was Larkin's best friend, my father saw him infrequently and now wonders if he ever really knew him.

Postscript:
This piece was written as an obituary. The (usually hostile) revaluation that attends a poet's death was postponed, in Larkin's case, until the recent publication of the
Letters
and the Life. A couple of years ago Larkin was still our best-loved postwar poet; now, for the time being, he is the most reviled. That revaluation has been unprecedentedly thorough. The Life and the
Letters
stand ready on my desk: I will be writing at length about them, and about him. Already I can trumpet the assurance that the present controversy will soon evaporate; nothing of importance will have been affected by it.

Vanity Fair, 1985

CANNES

This piece was written sixteen years ago and is included here as a curiosity. It is certainly a curiosity to me. I still can't understand how I was quite so thrown by the spectacle of topless sunbathing. On the other hand I have never known a woman who liked or approved of it. So the question is still vivid for me. Who are they all?

My first glimpse of the sea featured the middle-distant prospect of a girl sauntering topless along the water-line. She wore the smallest bikini-pants I had ever seriously seen on anyone, about the size of a dab of tissue with which one might staunch a shaving-cut. The girl mounted a small pier, at whose far end a fat motor-launch wallowed. No doubt some huge young filmstar stood waiting for her there on the deck (his shirt open to the last button, his restless legs planted well apart). My gaze returned to the sea, which dappled weakly in the midday sun.

When I looked again, the girl was naked. Either she had removed her bikini-pants, or they had simply been blown away in the salty wind. A man was jumping about taking photographs of her; accordingly, the girl swivelled and preened, raising her arms to flatter her breasts. I turned in alarm towards the three tyrannous gendarmes standing near by. I thought that they would at least kill her, like they do if you cross the road at the wrong moment, but they consulted one another with zestless shrugs.

I looked again. The pier now sagged with gesticulating journalists, kneeling, leaping lensmen (rolling on to their backs like puppies for the angle-shots) and random perverts and voyeurs, among whom the naked girl continued gamely to pirouette. Ten minutes later she forged her way back to shore — by this time about two hundred viewers lined the promenade — emerging from the crowd bashfully clothed in her triangular sequin.

Within seconds, the posse of photographers, torn-peepers, etc, had encircled another, hidden figure down on the beach. Must be a new superstarlet, I decided, moving down the steps to join them. This one wore bikini-pants — the lion's share of which, admittedly, seemed lost for good between her buttocks — and was moreover reclining primly on her stomach. But she
was
kissing a dirty pet terrier, and French-kissing it apparently, much to the guttural delight of the assembled newshounds. Every few seconds the newshounds urged the superstarlet to turn on to her back. Every few seconds the superstarlet took her tongue out of the dog's mouth and politely refused. Tickled, the newshounds snapped and gawped.

Why the bother? — I thought suddenly, scanning the beach with a blush. I had never seen so many breasts in my life, and all nonchalantly bared to the breeze — there were those two over there, and that pair there, and that row of them over there, and look at that lot over there, and . . . Compared to the other females on the beach, the harried superstarlet was an example of painful inhibition. Perhaps this was what had roused the hacks: Hold the front page — we've found a girl on the beach in Cannes who
isn't
showing everyone what her breasts look like.

I have never been to Cannes before, nor to any other Cote d'Azur resort, and I have never seen any girl over the age of ten half-naked on the sands. I was of course aware - first alerted, I suspect, by the vigilance of
Daily Mirror
cameramen - that there were topless beaches at Cannes. What I didn't know is that
every
beach is a topless beach at Cannes. They say it all began in the early Sixties, became a bore in the early Seventies, and has now been re-embraced quite unselfconsciously, the only way for women to dress for the shore, half-naked as nature intended.

Oh well, I said to myself, wringing my pinball-calloused hands - I'll just have to spend the entire week here racing up and down the strand. After all, the girls don't seem to mind you staring at them, and with as much puerile awe as you care to muster. Conscientious, album-minded perverts, indeed, wander along unhindered with their Brownies, pausing to snap at leisure while the girls stretch and yawn. Once, when I was seated comfortably on the shore, with my back to the water, a thoroughly topless girl abruptly addressed me in harsh French from her sun-couch. Now this is an
arrest,
I assumed - and high time too. But no: holding up her own camera, she asked if Monsieur would be kind enough to take a topless snap of her and her topless friend, so that, in the years to come, they could re-evoke the memory of this lost summer.

And up on La Croisette itself, the esplanade along which the jet-setters swank, aggressive pulchritude reigns. Here is Le Palais du Festival, the flat-topped, marble-foyered complex where, on the ground floor, all the principal entries are screened, where, on the first floor, the assorted movie-hawkers set up their lurid stalls, and where, on the second, the Press office swelters in a mess of fanned bulletins and discarded handouts.

In this warren the etiolated cineasts grope and blink about their business. Some of these men and women are seeing ten films a day, here and elsewhere. They look it. They are seeing films of the calibre of
Women Behind Bars, Dynamite Girls, Kiss Me Killer
and
Kidnapped Coed,
of
Savage in the City, Axe, Viol
and
Rattlers,
of
The Crater Lake Monster
and
Legend of the Dinosaurs
and
Monster Birds,
of
Fun Truckin, Symphony of Love
and
La Principessa Nuda,
of
Le lunghe notti della Gestapo, L'ultima orgia del III Reich
and
Elsa Fraulein — SS
(all postered in the first-floor booths). The cineasts' skin is numb and luminous. Their eyes are angry red holes. When they stumble late into the crowded Grande Salle, it takes them about twenty minutes to find a seat. The cinema isn't
that
crowded. It's just that their eyes can no longer acclimatise from the outside dazzle. Halfway through the film they are still tousling your hair and trying to sit on your lap.

Flanking the Palais, in festive contrast, are the two main see-and-be-seen cafes, the Bar Festival and, more fashionable still, the Blue Bar. It takes colossal stamina to fritter away your money in these places. Only occasionally, nowadays, do the harassed and contemptuous waiters simply promise to attend to you and then go away again. Seldom, even, do they claim that your table is the preserve of some mythical colleague. What they do now is pretend you're not there. When you rugby-tackle them, bring them crashing, tray and all, to the pavement, and yell Monsieur,
Monsieur,
MONSIEUR! in their ears, they pretend you're not there. An intelligent procedure. During Festival fortnight these places are going to be clotted with the rich anyway, no matter how negligent the waiters contrive to be. So why do we come?

We come to watch. The routine, quotidian viewing, while varied enough in itself, sticks to a predictable schedule. All day the lovelies and hugies thread past to the sands, as stooped cineasts trudge up the Palais steps. By late afternoon, spidery transvestites - who look remarkably like the Platonic ideal of a British tart - flit among the tables, chatting to the Japanese nabobs and bejeaned Swedish por-nographers who slump grumbling there. Minor thespians sometimes join us. A pretty French actress sat down next to me one evening. I wasn't very excited. I had already seen what her breasts looked like the day before, in
La Dentellière.