Writing Home (61 page)

That Hull was the back of beyond in the fifties wasn’t simply a London opinion: it prevailed in Hull itself. In 1959 I tentatively applied there for a lectureship in medieval history, and the professor kicked off the interview by emphasizing that train services were now so good that Hull was scarcely four hours from King’s Cross. It wasn’t that he’d sensed in me someone who’d feel cut off from the vivifying currents of capital chic, rather that my field of study was the medieval exchequer, the records of which were then at Chancery Lane. Still, there was a definite sense that a slow and stopping train southwards was some kind of lifeline and that come a free moment, there one was going to be aimed. Even Larkin himself was aimed there from time to time, and though his social life was hardly a hectic round, he put himself about more than he liked to think.

Until I read Motion’s book I had imagined that Larkin was someone who had largely opted out of the rituals of literary and academic life, that he didn’t subscribe to them and wasn’t taken in by them. Not a bit of it. There are umpteen formal functions, the poet dutifully getting on the train to London for the annual
dinner of the Royal Academy, which involves a visit to Moss Bros (‘and untold expense’); there’s at least one party at Buckingham Palace, a Foyle’s Literary Luncheon at which he has to give a speech, there are dinners at his old college and at All Souls, and while he does not quite go to a dinner up a yak’s arse he does trundle along to the annual festivities of the Hull Magic Circle. Well, the chairman of the library committee was an enthusiastic conjuror, Larkin lamely explains. When Motion says that Larkin had reluctantly to accept that his emergence as a public man would involve more public duties it’s the ‘reluctantly’ one quibbles with. Of course there’s no harm in any of these occasions if you’re going to enjoy yourself. But Larkin seemingly never does, or never admits that he does. But if he didn’t, why did he go? Because they are not difficult to duck. Amis has recorded how much pleasanter life became when he realized he could refuse invitations simply by saying ‘don’t do dinners’ − a revelation comparable to Larkin’s at Oxford when it dawned on him he could walk out of a play at the interval and not come back. But Larkin did do dinners, and not just dinners. He did the Booker Prize, he did the Royal Society of Literature, he did the Shakespeare Prize; he even did a dinner for the Coventry Award of Merit. Hermit of Hull or not, he dutifully turns up to collect whatever is offered to him, including a sackful of honours and seven honorary degrees. He was going to call a halt at six only Oxford then came through with ‘the big one’, the letter getting him seriously over-excited. ‘He actually ran upstairs,’ says Monica. And this is a recluse. Fame-seeking, reputation-hugging, he’s about as big a recluse as the late Bubbles Rothermere.

Motion says that institutional rewards for his work annoyed him, but there’s not much evidence of it. Still, to parade in a silly hat, then stand on a platform to hear your virtues recited followed by at least one formal dinner is no fun at all, as Larkin is
at pains to point out, particularly when you’ve got sweaty palms and are frightened you’re going to pass out. His account of the Oxford ceremony makes it fun, of course. His new suit looks like ‘a walrus maternity garment’, and the Public Orator’s speech was ‘a bit like a review in
Poetry Tyneside
’, so he gets by, as ever, on jokes. But if to be celebrated is such a burden why does he bother with it while still managing to suggest that his life is a kind of Grand Refusal? Because he’s a public figure is Motion’s kindly explanation. Because he’s a man is nearer the point. A crucial text here is ‘The Life with a Hole in it’ (1974):

It’s a set-up, though, that repeats itself so regularly in Larkin’s life − Larkin wanting his cake but not wanting it to be thought he enjoys eating it − that it’s hard to go on sympathizing as Monica and Maeve (and indeed Motion) are expected to do, as well as any woman who would listen. Not the men, of course. Larkin knows that kind of stuff just bores the chaps, so they are fed the jokes, the good ladies his dizziness and sweaty palms, thus endearing him to them because it counts as Opening up’.

About the only thing Larkin consistently didn’t do were poetry readings (‘I don’t like going about pretending to be myself’) and television. On the 1982
South Bank Show
he allowed his voice to be recorded but refused to appear in person, and it’s to Patrick Garland’s credit that he managed to persuade the then virtually unknown Larkin to take part in a 1965
Monitor
film, which happily survives. He was interviewed, or at any rate was talked at, by Betjeman, and typically, of course, it’s Larkin who comes out of it as the better performer. Like other figures on the right − Paul Johnson, Michael Wharton and the
Spectator
crowd − Larkin regarded television as the work of the devil, or at any rate the Labour Party, and was as reluctant to be pictured as any primitive tribesman. Silly, I suppose I think this is, and also self-regarding. Hughes has done as little TV as Larkin and not made such a song and dance about it. There is always the danger for a writer of becoming a pundit, or turning into a character, putting on a performance of oneself as Betjeman did. But there was little danger of that with Larkin. He claimed he was nervous of TV because he didn’t want to be recognized, but one appearance on the
South Bank Show
doesn’t start a stampede in Safeways, as other authors could regretfully have told him.

If sticking in Hull seemed a deprivation but wasn’t quite, so were the circumstances in which Larkin chose to live, a top-floor flat in Pearson Park rented from the university and then an ‘utterly undistinguished modern house’ he bought in 1974, ‘not quite the bungalow on the by-pass’ but ‘not the kind of dwelling that is eloquent of the nobility of the human spirit’. It’s tempting to think Larkin sought out these uninspiring places because for him they weren’t uninspiring but settings appropriate to the kind of poems he wrote. But he seems never to have taken much pleasure in the look of things − furniture, pictures and so on. His quarters weren’t particularly spartan or even Wittgenstein-minimalist (deck-chairs and porridge), just dull. The implication of living like this is that a choice has been made, another of life’s pleasures foregone in the cause of Art, part of Larkin’s strategy for a stripped-down sort of life, a traveller without luggage.

‘I do believe’, he wrote to Maeve Brennan, ‘that the happiest
way to get through life is to want things and get them; now I don’t believe I’ve ever wanted anything in the sense of a … Jaguar Mark IX … I mean, although there’s always plenty of things I couldn’t do with, there’s never been anything I couldn’t do without and in consequence I “have” very little.’ But the truth is, surely, he wasn’t all that interested, and if he kept his flat like a dentist’s waiting-room it was because he preferred it that way. He wanted his jazz records, after all, and he ‘had’ those. In one’s own choosier circumstances it may be that reading of a life like this one feels by implication criticized and got at. And there is with Larkin an air of virtue about it, a sense that a sacrifice has been made. After all, Auden’s idea of the cosy was other people’s idea of the squalid but he never implied that living in a shit-heap was a precondition of his writing poetry; it just happened to be the way he liked it.

Still, Larkin never wanted to be one of those people with ‘specially-chosen junk,/The good books, the good bed,/And my life, in perfect order’ or indeed to live, as he said practically everyone he knew did, in something called The Old Mill or The Old Forge or The Old Rectory. All of them, I imagine, with prams in the hall. Cyril Connolly’s strictures on this point may have been one of the reasons Larkin claimed
The Condemned
Playground
as his sacred book and which led him, meeting Connolly, uncharacteristically to blurt out, ‘You formed me.’ But if his definition of possessions seems a narrow one (hard to see how he could feel encumbered by a house, say, but not by half a dozen honorary degrees), his version of his life, which is to some extent Motion’s also, was that if he had lived a more cluttered life then Art, ‘that lifted rough tongued bell’, would cease to chime. When it did cease to chime, rather earlier than he’d thought, ten years or so before he died, he went on living as he’d always lived, saying it was all he knew.

Striding down the library in the
Monitor
film Larkin thought
he looked like a rapist. Garland reassured him, but walking by the canal in the same film there is no reassurance; he definitely does. Clad in his doleful raincoat with pebble glasses, cycle-clips and oceanic feet, he bears more than a passing resemblance to Reginald Halliday Christie. Haunting his cemeteries and churchyards he could be on the verge of exposing himself, and whether it’s to a grim, head-scarved wife from Hessle or in a slim volume from Faber and Faber seems a bit of a toss-up. Had his diary survived, that ‘sexual log-book’, one might have learned whether this shy, tormented man ever came close to the dock, the poetry even a safety valve. As it was, lovers on the grass in Pearson Park would catch among the threshing chestnut trees the dull glint of binoculars, and on campus errant borrowers, interviewed by the Librarian, found themselves eyed up as well as dressed down.

Motion’s hardest task undoubtedly has been to cover, to understand and somehow enlist sympathy for Larkin and his women. Chief among them were his mother, whose joyless marriage put him off the institution long before poetry provided him with the excuse; Monica Jones, lecturer in English at Leicester, whom he first met in 1946 and who was living with him when he died: Maeve Brennan, an assistant librarian at Hull with whom he had a seventeen-year fling which overlapped with another, begun in 1975, with his long-time secretary at the library, Betty Mackereth. All of them (mother excepted) he clubbed with sex, though Maeve was for a long time reluctant to join the clubbed and Betty escaped his notice until, after
seventeen years as his secretary, there was presumably one of those When-you-take-off-your-glasses-you’re-actually-quite-pretty’ moments. Though the library was the setting for so much of this heavy breathing, propriety seems to have been maintained and there was no slipping down to the stack for a spot of beef jerky.

Of the three, Monica, one feels, could look after herself, and though Larkin gave her the runaround over many years she was never in any doubt about the score. ‘He cared’, she told Motion, ‘a tenth as much about what happened around him as what was happening inside him.’ Betty, too, had him taped and besides had several other strings to her bow, including some spot-welding which she’d picked up in Leeds. It’s only Maeve Brennan, among his later ladies anyway, for whom one feels sorry. Maeve knew nothing of the darker side of his nature − the porn, for instance, coming as a posthumous revelation, as did his affair with Betty. If only for her sake one should be thankful the diaries did not survive. A simpler woman than the other two, she was Larkin’s sweetheart, her love for him romantic and innocent, his for her companionable and protective. Dull you might even say,

A fervent Catholic (trust his luck), Maeve took a long time before she would sleep with him, keeping the poet-librarian at arm’s length. Her arms were actually quite hairy − this, Motion says, adding to her attraction. Quite what she will feel when reading this is hard to figure, and she’s perhaps even now belting down to Hull’s Tao Clinic While Maeve held him off the romance flourished, but as soon as she does start to sleep with
him on a regular basis her days are numbered. Larkin, having made sure of his options with Betty, drops Maeve, who is desolate, and though he sees her every day in the library and they evolve ‘a distant but friendly relationship’ no proper explanation is ever offered.

There is, though, a lot of other explanation on the way − far too much for this reader − with Monica being pacified about Maeve, Maeve reassured about Monica, and Mother given edited versions of them both. And so much of it in letters. When the
Selected Letters
came out there was general gratitude that Larkin was old-fashioned enough still to write letters, but there’s not much to be thankful for in his correspondence with Maeve and Monica. ‘One could say’, wrote Kafka,’ that all the misfortunes in my life stem from letters … I have hardly ever been deceived by people, but letters have deceived me without fail … not other people’s letters, but my own.’ So it is with Larkin, who as a young man took the piss out of all the twaddle he now in middle age writes about ree-lay-shun-ships.

The pity is that these three women never got together to compare notes on their lover, preferably in one of those siderooms in the library Mrs T.’s cuts meant had to be hived off. But then women never do get together, except in French comedies. Besides, the conference would have had to include the now senile Eva Larkin, whose spectre Larkin detected in all the women he had anything to do with, or had sex to do with. Motion identifies Larkin’s mother as his muse, which I suppose one must take on trust if only out of gratitude to Motion for ploughing through all their correspondence.

What makes one impatient with a lot of the stuff Larkin writes to Monica and Maeve is that it’s plain that what he really wants is just to get his end away on a regular basis and without obligation. ‘Sex is so difficult,’ he complained to Jean Hartley.
‘You ought to be able to get it and pay for it monthly like a laundry bill.’ The impression the public had from the poems was that Larkin had missed out on sex, and this was corroborated by occasional interviews (‘Sexual recreation was a socially remote thing, like baccarat or clog-dancing’). But though Motion calls him ‘a sexually disappointed Eeyore’, in fact he seems to have had a pretty average time, comparing lives with Amis (‘staggering skirmishes/in train, tutorial and telephone booth’) the cause of much of his dissatisfaction. He needed someone to plug him into the fleshpots of Hull, the ‘sensitive and worldly-wise Conquest’ the likeliest candidate, except that Larkin didn’t want Conquest coming to Hull, partly because he was conscious of the homeliness of Maeve. On the other hand, there must have been plenty of ladies who would have been willing to oblige, even in Hull; ready to drop everything and pop up to Pearson Park, sucking off the great poet at least a change from gutting herrings.