1963 Philip Larkin’s opening lines from ‘Annus Mirabilis’ are (along with ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’) his most quoted:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
The chronology is both precise and vague. And, for all its ubiquity in dictionaries of quotation, ultimately meaningless – at least historically.
D.H. Lawrence’s novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, banned in the UK ever since its first (offshore) publication in 1928, was acquitted at the Old Bailey on 2 November 1960. The Beatles’ first LP – Love, Love Me Do – was released on 22 March 1963 (Larkin was jazz critic of the Daily Telegraph between 1961 and 1967, and was up with discography).
The title, ‘Annus Mirabilis’, signals the ‘wonderful year’ (not three-year ‘era’), 1963, to be when sexual intercourse began. And given the precise terminal date of the Beatles’ LP, it must be the first three months of 1963. Or, more likely, these months were when a number of trends crested.
One trend was the pill. The contraceptive Enovid was licensed in the UK in 1961. For women, it meant that they – not their untrustworthily condomed partner – controlled their fertility. This ‘empowerment’ coincided with the birth of the women’s movement, whose primal moment was 19 February 1963, when Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published and, immediately after, NOW (the National Organisation of Women) was formed.
For men, the pill meant sex without fear – or, more often, responsibility. The result was an orgiastic release of pre- and extra-marital sex. What Larkin expresses in ‘Annus Mirabilis’ (published in 1967) is something akin to Lear’s disgusted:
The wren goes to ’t, and the small gilded fly
Does lecher in my sight. Let copulation thrive.
The mournful parenthesis, ‘(Which was rather late for me)’, could be read as suggesting that Larkin himself had missed the boat sexually, having been born in 1922, and was now too old to swing along with the swinging sixties. It would be a misreading.
Larkin had his first serious sexual relationship with seventeen-year-old student Ruth Bowman, in 1945 (he was some seven years older, and already embarked on his career as a librarian). The relationship lasted three years. In 1950, he began what was to be the longest relationship of his life, with Monica Jones (a lecturer at Leicester University). While involved with her, he had a string of other sexual relationships, sometimes conducting three at the same time. Philip Larkin is, it is worth noting, the only major poet in the English language whom we know (from eyewitness report) to have had a large penis.