In 1984 I approached Philip Larkin to request permission to present an evening of his poetry read by Alan Bates. Though warned by his old friend Kingsley Amis, ‘Oh dear, no, Josephine, Philip won’t like this at all,’ I persevered. Mr Larkin said yes. I sent him roses after the reading. In his letter of thanks Philip Larkin described the arrival of the bouquet at reception in Hull Library, where he worked as ChiefLibrarian, its procession from department to department, the tentative smiles of hope that faded as, impervious to silent entreaties of‘Let it be me,’ the arrangement was eventually handed to him. In subject matter, that letter could easily have been a Larkin poem, illustrating as it did a key motif in his poetry: the significance of small events and their defining pressure on individual psychology, most particularly his own. An invitation to a drinks party, a visit to an empty church, a recently vacated room in a boarding house: such everyday events are transmuted by Larkin into poetry that gives weight to the ordinary dreams and fears of our daily lives, lived out as they are in the shadow of eternity. We recognize ourselves in his poems, as we do in a Chekhov play, and we smile and our smiles are rueful.
‘I like to read about people who have done nothing spectacular, aren’t beautiful or lucky; who try to behave well in a limited field of activity and who can see in the little autumnal moments of vision that the so called “big experiences of life” are going to miss them. I like to read about such things presented not with self-pity or despair or romanticism but with realistic firmness and even humour.’ This,Larkin wrote, was the ‘moral tone’ of Barbara Pym’s novels. It is also the moral tone of much of Larkin’s work. He believed art should help us either to ‘enjoy or endure’. Yet he himself seemed to find neither enjoyment nor endurance easy. Though he was an adored child from a secure middle-class background, tensions in his parents’ marriage and the hushed atmosphere in his house may have inspired the sad line, ‘What was the rock my gliding childhood struck?’
His parents, Sydney Larkin OBE, and his bookish wife, Eva, encouraged his literary interests and were in fact hugely proud of him. His life was crowned with success. He sailed into Oxford and sailed out again, a published poet, and to his delight, with a first-class honours degree. Shortly after Oxford he published two novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter, became a professional librarian, combining the roles of scholar, curator and administrator in an exemplary career. His Who’sWho entry states his occupation as Librarian: ‘A man is what he is paid for.’ His four collections of poetry, The Less Deceived, High Windows, The North Ship and The Whitsun Weddings, made him one of the most acclaimed English poets of the twentieth century. He won the Gold Medal for Poetry and was offered, but turned down, the poet laureateship; ‘Poetry, that rare bird, has flown out of the window.’ In his private life he was a much loved man. Andrew Motion in his biography, Philip Larkin, A Writer’s Life, charts a course with great elegance through not only the development of the poet but also the labyrinthine ways of Larkin and his women. He makes clear that two women – in particular, Monica Jones and Maeve Brennan – loved him for decades and that there were other, serious relationships. It would seem that Larkin inspired in women levels of self-sacrifice that would have done Byron proud. Ironically, one of his most quoted lines is: ‘What will survive of us is love.’
Was he, however, just ‘too clever to live’? The question is posed by A. L. Rowse, whose library edition of Larkin’s Required Writing I had the good luck to buy, containing, as it does, challenging, handwritten comments on virtually every page: ‘Kindly face, no kidding him’, ‘perverse psychology, Irish perhaps?’ But it wasn’t just cleverness that made Larkin ‘miss out on the big experiences of life’. The ‘deprivation’, which was to him ‘what daffodils were to Wordsworth’, was, in his case, elective. The ‘examined life’ led to a life at bay.
Why? For art’s sake? It would seem so. His long dialogue with self, ‘Self’s the Man’ (the title of one of his poems), is a battleground between art and life. ‘When I think of being in my twenties or even my thirties , my external surroundings have changed but inside I’ve been the same, trying to hold everything off in order to write.’ It wasn’t just Cyril Connolly’s enemy of promise, ‘the pram in the hall’, that Larkin feared; it was the hall, the kitchen, the sitting room, if they contained people with claims on the time in his life. No poet ever feared the end of his time more than Philip Larkin. In the brutal choice for all artists – and not only artists – of ‘perfection of the work rather than of the life’ (Yeats’s haunting phrase), Larkin came down firmly, knowingly, on the side of art. If at the end of her monologue Joyce’s Molly Bloom sounds the most emphatic yes in literature (and in plural), Larkin’s poems move inexorably to an emphatic no. In Christopher Ricks’s brilliant insight, ‘Just as a romantic swell of feeling rises’ it meets ‘a counter thrust of classical impersonality,’ we have the essence of that tension that makes Larkin’s poems so thrilling to read.
Larkin sets you down immediately, with almost cinematic exactitude, in the ‘scene’, and as Alan Bennett notes, ‘He still has you firmly by the hand as you cross the finishing line.’ And Larkin’s finishing lines are pure gold. Last lines are ‘the stamp’, as John Donne wrote, that authenticate what great poetry is – in itself ‘the beating out of a piece of gold’. With Larkin, the poetic journey may be short, the image fleeting; there may be stops along the way (interrupted journeys are a recurrent theme); but at the point of arrival we know the place. Perhaps we’ve been there before. Larkin’s round-life trips are more challenging than any round-the-world trip. He knows the great adventure is internal. The man whose voice, as Andrew Motion noted, is ‘one of the means by which his country recognises itself’, did not travel far, even in England. He was born in Coventry in 1922. He died in Hull in 1985. ‘I am going to the inevitable.’ No Kipling, he. His own divine comedy was not set in the middle of a dark wood ‘but in a railway tunnel, half way through England’ as Seamus Heaney said as he listened, as we all do, to Larkin’s ‘un-foolable mind . . . singing the melody of intelligence’.