Philip Larkin: Love and Death in Hull

dear Norman I'm glad you feel satisfied with your life no reason why you shouldn't when I look back on mine I think is changed very little since leaving Oxford I've worked in a library and tried to write in my spare time for our 16 years I've lived in the same small flat washing in the sink and not having central heating or double glazing or fitted carpets or the other things everyone has and of course I haven't any biblical things such as wife children house land cattle sheep etc to me I seem very much an outsider yet I suppose ninety-nine percent of people would say I'm very establishment and conventional funny isn't it of course I can't say I'm satisfied with it terrible waste of time Philip Larkin was one of Britain's greatest and best loved poets whose books are still bestsellers enjoyed by thousands of readers he affected people's lives by writing about the everyday world they knew in a language they understood while somehow managing to transform the mundane into something magnificent the poems are absolutely full of emotion and feeling yet Larkin who famously penned the line what will survive of us is love made himself almost willfully unlovable he was seen as a grumpy old bachelor and professional pessimist and his verse is often preoccupied with sorrow and death subjects that not only inspired him but colored his entire life the Filipino was bleedin dark his he was insistent upon a completely negative worldview being the right one he was absolutely insistent that there was no God no future life no hope for the planet it's no small thing to be one of the great English poets of the century but that was like everything else colored by death being remembered as the 30 years is good you know he would have said it going to be no bloody good to me because I'll be in my grave they've queue up your mum and dad they may not mean to but they do they fill you with the faults they had and add some extra just for you but they were hooked up in their turn by fools in old-style hats and coats who half the time were soppy Stern and half at one another's throats man hands on misery to man it deepens like a coastal shelf get out as early as you can and don't have any kids itself Philip Larkin was born in Coventry in 1922 he was a shy child with bad eyesight and a stammer he later described his early years as a forgotten boredom Larkins parents Sydney and Eva ran a gloomy household where little happened and hardly anyone visited not even relatives one of very few people who saw this claustrophobic scene at first hand was Larkins first girlfriend Ruth's Ivins who he met in Wellington Shropshire in 1943 he invited me to go to have tea and meet his mother and father I found a very repressive household my impression memory of it is darkness and I don't know whether that was the windows or the moon but we were neither of us at our best Philip was terribly self-conscious about having me there and it was immediately clear to me that Sidney Larkin was not impressed I was straightaway frightened and put off by him and struck by the extreme nervousness of his mother who was it was rather like being you know with the Barretts of Wimpole Street I felt Sidney Larkin was an ambitious self-made man rising from office junior to become Coventry City treasurer he was strict and cold with little time for life's niceties Larkin later observed that his father ignored his mother and treated his sister kitty as if she was subhuman but he doted on his son and gained his respect despite all his fatherly shortcomings it was clear where Philips admiration lay and it was his father and and his father's views which after all lasted the whole of his life he was incredibly right-wing and democratic and all the things his father was Sidney Larkin wasn't just right-wing he corresponded with Hitler's economics Minister sharked and was forced to remove a swastika from his office in Coventry even after war had finally broken out he took his son twice to Germany in the late 30s Larkin blamed these strips on his renowned hatred of everything foreign Sidney's strict authoritarian manner undoubtedly influenced Philips adult life but even more so the browbeaten treatment doled out to his mother Eva this is a caricature but there is something about it which is floppy whining clinging adhesive demanding because she is pitiable so I think that we can say without even looking very far away from saying those things themselves that she's likely to have had a very strong influence on the way that he reacted with other women and who a more or less his own age Philip Larkin described his mother as monotonous and self pitying recalling how she one slept up from the dinner table and said she was off to commit suicide he looked at his parents marriage and thought it drab loveless and hopeless there was no way he was going to repeat this himself I was shocked by some of his views and those were his views on love and marriage and children I can remember sitting on top of a tram with him in who's saying there's no such thing as true love it's just deprivation and ignorance and I think I was probably extremely shocked and people only get married so that you look after them in old age the Philip I knew is quite passionless I do not believe that Philip was capable of loving anybody if you love somebody you have got to surrender part of yourself to that person identity was capable of doing it the difficult part of love is being selfish enough is having the blind persistence to upsettin existence just for your own sake what cheek it must take and then the unselfish side how can you be satisfied putting someone else first so that you come off worst my life is for me as well ignore gravity still vicious or virtuous love suits most of us only the bleeder found selfishness from way round is ever holding the buffed and he can get stuffed Larkin did have one deep relationship that lasted his entire life admittedly one that was simply platonic while studying at Oxford University he met someone else with ambitions as a writer Kingsley Amis they became friends in an instant and it didn't take long for the young Larkin to realize he had found his soul mate it was a love at first sight that lasted till death in all the accounts they both felt for the first time that encountered someone more brilliant than themselves they both felt that funnier you know more exuberantly bright than themselves much of their rapport was through a lifetime of correspondence which Amos himself described as sheer childishness their letters were sexist and adolescent full of swearing in jokes and [ __ ] remarks and always ending with the word bum Amos shared much of Larkin cynicism and disdain of life these letters were an escape into their private little world if there was a letter from Larkin my father was you know that that marked a different kind of day than if there wasn't you know more high spirits more laughter more proud of you dear Kingsley don't you think it's absolutely shameful that men have to pay for women without being allowed to shag the women afterwards as a matter of course I do simply disgusting it makes me angry everything about the relationship between men and women makes me angry it's all of in balls-up it might have been planned by the army of a Ministry of Food Men Behaving Badly wasn't in it he wanted to impress Kingsley very much he wanted to impress Kingsley and therefore his behavior became I thought quite unbearable when they were together and what would you do about it mag I suppose in private do all the wrong things anyway confirmed Kingsley in his view of Mears not worth his attention and irritate Philip and make him feel both guilty and angry Ruth and Philip got engaged in 1947 but that didn't stop him calling her miss Ruth and the school captain in his letters to Amos their relationships at a pattern that Larkin would repeat for the rest of his life a phobia of being tied down it depended on whether he was in his I have got to get out of entanglements mood or not when he was really feeling trapped yeah trapped then he would be quite unkind and it was certainly clear how there would be no real future as man and wife if I was still wearing his ring and he didn't mind that I mean it kept things just ticking over as far as you his options were open but it just trailed off which is exactly what you'd expect to fill it somehow he wouldn't have liked a confrontation where though I threw the ring back and we never saw each other again it wasn't his way he was aware of the power of his writing and that he had hopes of being a great writer but things must not stand in his way nor people either in 1955 philip larkin moved to the city that would be home for the rest of his life hull in north yorkshire it seemed an odd move for such an ambitious writer with two novels jill and a girl in winter already in the book shops Larkin rubbished hull and his letters to friends a frightful dump chilly and smelling of fish but in many ways this bleak city on a remote corner of England made him the poet he was how was absolutely essential to it it was a place of perfect expatriation he made himself so much peculiarly both at home there and um at home somewhere from which you can feel in exile from the warm center of things I never thought about homes that I was here having got here it suits me in many ways it is a little under on the edge of things I think even its natives would say that I don't like being on the edge of things one doesn't really go anywhere by design you know you push it in for jobs and move about Larkin hadn't been earning as living as a writer but as a librarian a career he fell into by accident but which he liked and excelled at after stints in small libraries in Shropshire in Belfast his new job at the whole University library was a big step up the ladder he liked the concentration and quiet that being a librarian gave him but now he would be the boss of a large team to begin with he was very nervous he had a quite about stammer when he first came to Hull it was his first post as someone completely an authority and I think he was nervous of us and we were wary of him we knew that he'd written a couple of novels but we didn't know much about poetry at all and we certainly didn't know that you know he was in negotiation for the publication of the less deceived which came out six months later published in Hull in late 55 the less deceived was the real flowering of Larkins mature poetic voice the very first poem he wrote for the book going summed up his signature style moving effortlessly from a descriptive beginning to a weighty conclusion taking in Larkins familiar observations of the world around him while totally infused with sorrow and loss there is an evening coming in across the fields one never seen before that lights no lamps silk'n it seems at a distance yet when it is drawn up over the knees and breasts it brings no comfort where has the tree gone that locked earth to the sky what is under my hands that I cannot feel what loads my hands down from the off Larkin's poems were recognizable for their bleakness and hopelessness he once wrote depression is to me what daffodils were to Wordsworth and the last lines of going set the tone for not just his work but his mind set a prevailing mood a finality and death I find that when I come here on a wet Sunday afternoon in December or something like that when it isn't at all romantic it gets me into perspective it get my worries into perspective and everything I write I think has has a the consciousness of approaching death in the background I think Larkin was of a particular type there's probably a name for it you know early death awareness syndrome or something most people don't aren't aware of death and in fact feel invulnerable to it until their 40s in fact thinking you're not going to die that you're the clever exception could be a definition of youth and Larkin never had it terrified of death I couldn't believe that someone in his early 20s was so aware of death he was very much aware that life was transient that you had got to make the best of an inevitable end which led to nothing oblivion the less deceived made Larkins name it was well reviewed and sold beyond anyone's expectations but leaving Hull and going off to live it up in the literary world wasn't on the cards Larkin was absolutely committed to being a librarian it gave him a strange kind of satisfaction and he would stay there for 30 years it forces you to think about something other than yourself something other than your own terms and that is positively good for you I think even as a poet and secondly of course some in the home business releases you from that awful pressure that I imagine you must feel sometimes of just having to write something to carry on living his idea actually of life was probably one which he inherited from his father which was of a fairly strict work ethic but one which he could mock out at the same time and see the ambivalence of the toad work in fact that work was something which was a burden on your sick of it but if one didn't have it how was one gonna spend the rest of one's time why should I let the toad work squat on my life can't I use my wit as a pitchfork and drive the brute off six days of the week it soils with its sickening poison just for paying a few bills that's out of proportion he thought a day job was absolutely necessary and if you didn't have that you would turn into some freakish parasite what I went freelance when the very first on my very first day of being a freelance writer he turned up at my house just to make sure I wasn't swirling around like no card in the dressing-gown was cigarette holder and you know playing at being a writer that was actually at my desk Philip Larkin had been at the Brin Moore Jones library for five years when late in 1960 a junior librarian he'd been tutoring Maeve Brennan took him to dinner to thank him their professional relationship was about to become something much more we went to the Beverly Arms Beverly and we seem to have quite a romantic evening I was very giddy evening it was also extremely frosty and very treacherous underfoot and for some reason rather Philip didn't think of calling a taxi home from the hotel we walked right through the town and from that evening things took a different search and you know we were soon on the verge of falling in love we were very happy in each other's company and we behaved like teenagers in love for the first time and it went on like that for quite a long time I had a dress that he particularly liked an evening dress and he took a great number of photographs in the flat with me posing his dress which he called your my fair lady dress we'd been to see the film My Fair Labor II we went at least twice I think and the you know it captivated him and he thought that I looked like Audrey Hepburn this dress Larkin started his romance with mave full knowing that it would complicate their lives dramatically he already had a girlfriend Monica Jones a university lecturer in Leicester a hundred miles away they may not have lived together but their relationship went back nearly ten years and was very intense I think that Monica had the mental equipment the reading the interest in Englishness and the political alignments that were more sympathetic to him than any other person he may she managed to keep him in a sense on his toes and to surprise him more than anybody else and that made her especially lovable Monica Jones was Sparky opinionated and intelligent at first Larkin was intimidated by her they got to know each other best and spent most time together on typically lark in Escala days in remote dismal places the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man moniker accepted Philip was a bit self-absorbed but she couldn't have predicted how helpless he would become once there were two women competing for his attention dear Mallika I was much relieved to get your letter this morning and to know you felt less distress I slept very badly last night thinking about it all I didn't take any credit for this for really my thoughts were mostly selfish I suppose dread of being forced into action there isn't any need to make my situation any better sounding that it is a self-centered person conducting the fair containing almost no responsibilities with one girl getting mixed up with another heedless to the feelings of either well not heatless but not heedful enough to do anything about it anyway I suppose one reason I don't find it easy to talk about it all is that it doesn't bear talking about it if I'm to keep any self-respect I also find it painful I worked with Philip I saw him every day and you know I wasn't living with Philip or sleeping with him so um I don't know it I just thought well he's going to settle for one of us in the end and I hoped it would be me I remember him saying well there's one woman I ought to marry and there's another woman and I love her but she's a Catholic and so there's no sex before marriage although we come pretty close to it and I don't know what to do and I said well you know he should go where your heart dictates we used to have quarrels about Monica she was always there and really for the 18 years of our relationship it was a three-cornered relationship she I was felt monocles like a sword of Damocles hanging over my head if not physical ups as well for years to come Larkin would keep both women ticking along the relationships simply drifting in his usual fashion he was incapable of committing to either and was never fully able to confront within himself what he was up to talking in bed ought to be easiest lying together there goes back so far an emblem of two people being honest yet more and more time passes silently outside the winds in complete unrest bills and disperses clouds about the sky and dark towns heap up on the horizon none of this cares for us nothing shows why at this unique distance from isolation it becomes still more difficult to find words at once true and kind or not untrue and not unkind Philip Larkin was at his happiest during his whole years after all this time he'd finally organized his life to suit him to perfection for nearly 20 years he lived alone in a flat overlooking Pearson Park this flat was his sanctuary almost all his poems were written there in the evenings after work and he thrived on this bachelor life thinking in terms of one is easily done one room one bed one chair one person there makes perfect sense one set of wishes can be met one coffin filled but counting up to two is harder to do but one must be denied before it's tried his life of oneness in Pearson Park gave rise to Larkins greatest books the witson weddings and high windows but to achieve this he had to keep other people at a distance they got in the way of his writing I think that he had carved out for himself the sort of life that he wanted and could cope with and his excursions into other kinds of my family life were little moments of of pleasure but of a kind of pleasure that he didn't want to take part in for thee for the rest of his life they were there were holidays dear Judy moral leper will arrive King's Cross 7:32 Eldon rode second aitt I shall most likely have had dinner on train the trust children will be chloroformed by then real life cuz everyone knew it was philip larkin subject it was what he became famous for but though the mundane rituals of ordinary life were what he wrote about weddings children home ironically they were the things he himself wouldn't take part in he was of wire observing the world from a safe distance summer is fading the leaves fall in ones and twos from trees bordering the new recreation ground in the hollows of afternoons young mothers assemble its swing and Sampat setting free their children behind them at intervals stand husbands and skilled trades in a state full of washing and the album's lettered our wedding lying near the television before them the wind is ruining their courting places that are still courting places but the lovers are all in school and their children so intent on finding more unripe acorns expect to be taken home their beauty has thickened something is pushing them to the side of their own lives content in his isolation Larkin rarely left hull he was a highly established literary figure but he didn't play up to this fame it was an invasion of his highly guarded privacy if he was seen as a rather ordinary doer grumbly man the Bard of the north or as he himself put it a welfare state poet that was fine he didn't want to give too much of himself away well I think this business of this projection of himself as a person who did leave apparently life of deliberated ordinates was extraordinarily ordinary it's a kind of mask if you like and in the sense that it allows him to move around behind this a configuration of things that he presents to the world and have deeper stranger quieter or more vivid feelings in a protected State the truest part of Larkin was clearly in his poems that he was most himself in his poems and when he stepped out of his poems he brought with him from inside that private life of his a consciousness that you know he was lacking and he needed to be in some way Larkin asked and Larkin was always lacking ask he was at heart he or he was the master of taking that sort of gloomy ironic year if relish in the popped balloon and the empty jar of honey and if you brought Larkin a full jar of honey he soon made it an empty one this gloominess wasn't just a pose he seemed genuinely unable to appreciate success although Larkins life was now running exactly to plan it seemed as if nothing was ever quite good enough for him my dear Judy sometimes I think I shall never leave how I'm growing defeatist I spurn offers to fly me to Montreal or Rome wonderful girls called Shelly and Beverly right asking what mister blini is about and I instruct Betty to reply mr. dark in regrets I'm not even telling into a regional poet with his clay pipe and acknowledged corner in the snug of the cotton phuddle just an anonymous figure whom people will dimly remember seeing when the evening paper says how man dies there was one genuine source of exasperation for Larkin one he couldn't control like everything else he'd avoided the trappings of family life but he couldn't avoid his mother Eva long widowed and relentlessly dependent on him he wrote to her constantly usually about nothing much often on twe animal postcards but it was an obligation that tested his patience well you know what if analysis said about you and you were never so young you talked about him no he said that it would be no use telling you want to do because you'd always go your own way and he said he won't marry too late in life hmm doesn't it well I'm late in life now no to all that like me well Anthony I think you know 22:48 what you might call the village steak and blood and you're getting on to the poorer cut up there there's no question that he had a very very developed sense of um filial responsibilities to her and actually in those practical terms he was extremely good to her he saw her at least every fortnight if we want to talk about what's complicated and irritating to him about his relationship with his mother it's because her weaknesses it was a kind of strength she just as it were lay there or sat there and what was he to do walk away from her he couldn't do that so that did exhaust brace him I think Maeve dear this is almost certainly the last letter I shall write as an under 40 so treasure it put it in a glass case like a British Railways ham sandwich I haven't got around to writing to you before because I foolishly took my mother on a bus excursion into the Peak District which didn't end till nearly 10:00 gods never do such a mad thing again it was boring irritating hell I'm only just emerging from the black fury into which it cast me eva's need in a sea rotated Philip but something else about her nagged away at him her health was gradually fading the more frail she became the more she was a reminder of the dread of ageing and mortality that plagued his mind he was sitting in this Lebanese restaurant in Hull and I was quitting from him the famous lines in Dockery and some life is first boredom then fear whether or not we use it it goes and Larkin immediately jumped on me and said oh no no there's no boredom left for me I am afraid it's fear all the way what do they think has happened the old fools to make them like this do they somehow suppose it's more grown up on your mouth hangs open and drools and to keep on pissing yourself and can't remember who called this morning or that if they only chose they could alter things back to when they danced all night or went to their wedding or sloped arms some September wall do they fancy there's really been no change and they've always behaved as if they were crippled or tight or sat through days a thin continuous dreaming watching light move if they don't and they can't it's strange why aren't they screaming the old fools I remember being very horrified when I read that poem but I didn't feel I could ask him as I would have done in the past you know why how's your voice changed why has it gone so much harsher so much more cynical perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head and people in them acting people you know yet can't quite name each looms like a deep loss restored from known doors turning setting down a lamp smiling from a stare extracting a known book from the shelves or sometimes only the rooms themselves 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 that is where they live not here and now but where all happened once this is why they give an air of baffled absence trying to be there yet being here after years of illness Eva Larkin died in a nursing home in September 1977 it was the first in an intense series of events that would dramatically affect both Philips work and his mood he became very depressed melancholy and I remember being quite horrified when he said one day I drink half a bottle of sherry or more before coming to work Dustin able to enable me to get to work and you know I think he was drinking during the day as well aged only 55 Larkin would write very little poetry for the rest of his life but his mother's death spurred him to finish one final masterpiece he'd been struggling with for three years Oh bard his definitive statement on the demon that had haunted him since childhood I work all day and get half drunk at night waking at 4:00 to soundless dark I stare in time the curtain edges will grow light till then I see what's really always there unrest ting death the whole day nearer now making all thought impossible but how and where and when I shall myself die added interrogation yet the dread of dying and being dead flashes afresh to hold and horrify I do think that Oh bad is a kind of giant terrifying brilliant full stop I'm sure that there are other things to say about death and I'm sure that he would have agreed with that but I think that it brought into the end of a particular line of thought something happens to make the poems dry up is that prehension of what made-up life the kind of big building blocks in life simply got so harrowing ly clear that once he'd made his statements about the inevitability of death and the inevitability of decrepitude in old age once he'd said it he'd said it and that was that people's imaginations there was Larkin was by all accounts now feeling numb to life with poetry or but behind him his life spun out of control he started a clandestine affair with the woman he called his loaf head secretary Betty McGrath a few years later in 1978 Maeve Brennan confronted him about the future of their romance Larkins response was Kurt it had no future I don't know why it ended so abruptly but perhaps he was looking for an excuse to terminate the relationship because he felt you know Monica was going to become more dependent on him this is what he said to me by way of explanation but of course they didn't know about his relationship with Betty at the time proving he hurt women deliberately at all I think he just some got himself into a mess and couldn't help himself and didn't know how to extricate himself from this entanglement of relationships he had and towards the end of his life mourning at last there in the snow your small blunt footprints come and go night has left no more to show not the candle half-drunk wine or touching joy only this sign of your life walking into mine but when they vanished with the rain what morning woke to will remain whether as happiness or pain he did love me but he took the easy way out there he knew that Maeve would survive if he broke it off where is Monica wouldn't but he never really let her go I mean he saw her every day he went into a room at the end of of the library day and discussed what was happening and what they were doing and so on so he never really let anybody go Philip was also unhappy at home he'd been forced to move out of his private sanctuary high above Pearson Park almost without thinking he bought what he later called a drought suburban house in hulls new land park district the house was bigger than he was used to Monica Jones had recently fallen ill and then the unthinkable happened she moved in his solitary bachelor days were over they were now living as a couple and in a way you know he was happy about it because he he was incredibly lonely and light a lot of people who were addicts of one kind or another in the end those people gravitate not towards the person they find most interesting but towards the person who can absorb as much as they can of the same killer quantity the fact while she was a boozer on a heroic scale never known a woman who to drink so much where's women collapse they drink a whole bottle of ginger did easily drink a whole bottle of gin they went in for these appalling drinking sessions with sherry and first thing in the morning and in gin for lunch and then moving on to the cheapest possible whiskey Oh Philip to get through a whole bottle of that stuff and even and of course the drunker they both drop the more wildly extreme and sort of Nazi base in their views if one goes through the racism well one can one can see that there are things that a man born in 1922 in the Midlands could and did say in a way that's unthinkable in the early 21st century but Larkin among other things was a person of his times looking back I realize it was he was the last three or four years as though he was a very sick man but I can remember once making some pollyannaish Kiera Philip tight remark late in the evening when he were probably very drunk and he really replied well it towards me I mean I hate being fat I'm fat I'm tall I'm deaf I brought a stammer I hate you at all and he did I mean he was increasingly miserable the great sadness of the last part of his life was but he wasn't writing poems anymore that the this visionary gleam had been dimmed by one thing or another and I mean he describes it somewhere is a sorrow but not a crushing sorrow but actually I think that's rather understating it I think it was such a blow to his idea of himself and to his idea of what he was put on the earth to do um that it did diminish his pleasure in life a great deal Larkin's last years were full of disappointments he was honored with degrees and awards but had to turn down the biggest poet laureate because he knew his poetry days were behind him his health was fading in his last letter to his old friend Kingsley Amis he wrote I simply cannot imagine resuming normal life again whatever that is cancer which had started in his esophagus was spreading through his body he both looked forward to and dreaded death he thought the moment of death would be like orgasm IRB I'm saying it but he sat in it knew he was staring into nothingness which is what terrified him so much it was gentle with the loneliness of his own life made infinite as it were our world your loves your chances are beyond the stretch of any hand from here and so unreal a touching dream to which we all are lulled but wake from separately in it conceits and self-protecting ignorance congealed to carry life collapsing only when call to these corridors for now once more the nurse beckons each gets up and goes at last some will be out by lunch or for others not knowing it have come to join the unseen congregations whose White Rose lie set apart above women men old young crude facets of the only coin this place accepts all no they are going to die not yet perhaps not here but in the end and somewhere like this Philip Larkin died in the na field hospital on November the 30th 1985 he was poetic about mortality right up to the end his last words to the nurse by his side were I am going to the inevitable life his first boredom then fear whether or not we use it it goes and leaves what something hidden from us chose and age and then the only end of age sadly Maeve Brennan died shortly after this program was completed for more on the life love and labors of Philip Larkin is da website at channel 4 comm slash culture

Channel: gymnopedija

Views: 171,686

Rating: 4.9006772 out of 5

Keywords: Philip Larkin, documentary, poetry, love, death, Aubade, Martin Amis, Kinglsey Amis, Monica Jones, Maeve Brennan, Hull

Id: dqa6L22m0rY

Length: 49min 10sec (2950 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 17 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/adamanything]

One of my favorite poets. Thanks for the post, definitely saving this for later.

"Always too eager for the future, we pick up bad habits of expectancy" - Larkin