In the latter months of 1984, the year before his body went over the waterfall, Philip Larkin was unprecedentedly overweight (sixteen stone), ‘terribly deaf’, and ‘drinking like a fish’. He would start the day with a glass or two of port – though he was disciplined enough to keep the bottle elsewhere, ‘so I have to get out of bed’. Within a few months he was subsisting on ‘cheap red wine’ and Complan (while Monica – recovered from shingles but recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s – relied on tomato sandwiches and gin). On the phone my mother made a suggestion: ‘Why don’t you try some nice red wine?’ But Philip persisted with cheap.
And his destined mood? The road outside the house (194 Newland Park, Hull, Yorks) was not much travelled, and in its spare time served as a bike track for local children; they sorely irritated Larkin, who objected not to their cries and chatter so much as their ‘presence’. He wrote to a very old friend about them, the ever-gruff Colin Gunner (now a misanthropic old swine – and Catholic convert – living in a caravan). ‘I had the pleasure’, he regaled Gunner, ‘of seeing one fall off his new tricycle, and set up a howl.’ I find I’m unwilling to imagine that pleasure taking facial form; anyway, he wasn’t pleased for long. ‘Instead of cuffing him about the ears the father walked him up and down in his arms. Grrr.’ Cheered to see a child in distress, enraged to see a sympathetic parent: Larkin’s destined mood was a candid and (slightly) playful inversion of the human norms.
In less than a week it would be New Year’s Day. ‘Happy ’85 – hope we stay alive,’ he said in a note to Conquest. Bob (b. 1917) had thirty years yet to come; Philip had eleven months.
The poet’s familiar, steady-state ailments – insomnia, hay fever, piles, constipation, pre-thrombotic leg, pre-arthritic neck – were joined by ‘cardio-spasms’, confirmed by a Dr Aber, who also thought it worth noting that Larkin had ‘cancer phobia and fear of dying’. The most ominous development, it turned out, was ‘a funny feeling’ in the back of the throat. Sydney Larkin – he of the golden eagle and the paired lightning shafts – died at sixty-three (cancer). This portent now became a fixed idea. Philip was sixty-two.
His oesophagus was removed on June 11, 1985; it contained ‘a great deal of unpleasant stagnant material’, according to a Dr Royston; it was cancerous (and there were secondary tumours). Monica’s pre-operative forecast – ‘six months’ – was thus confirmed. She decided Larkin should not be told; and he never asked (‘felt I had enough to worry about’, he meekly informed a penpal).
In the post-operative period a never-identified visitor to the ICU at the Nuffield gave Larkin a bottle of Scotch. On June 19 he drank ‘most of it’ and flooded his lungs; he was unconscious for five days. Three weeks later a friend drove him back to Newland Park. At the end of August he fell backwards down the stairs.
By November he was ‘deathly thin’, and of course ‘intensely depressed’. He told Monica, in what she called his ‘lugubrious’ mode, that he felt he was ‘spiralling down towards extinction’. ‘He said it with a fascinated horror’ – looking as though he ‘was about to burst into tears’. After completing what he called ‘a wasted life’, he had ‘nothing to live for’. Now he was bearing the full weight of the closing sentence of ‘The View’ (1972), whose third and last stanza runs:
Where has it gone, the lifetime?
Search me. What’s left is drear.
Unchilded and unwifed, I’m Able to view that clear:
So final. And so near.
‘I’ve been telling him this for – for forty years,’ said Kingsley. ‘Listen, you bloody fool, we all fear death, you bloody fool. But what we fear is dying. And you, you bloody fool, you fear being dead. You bloody fool.’
I said, ‘I bet he fears dying too. He says so. “…yet the dread / Of dying, and being dead, / Flashes afresh to hold and horrify”.’
‘Yes, but once you’ve got the dying out of the way, what’s wrong with being dead?’
Jane, who was leaving the kitchen (for her lie-down), paused at the doorway. ‘Did he mind it – all those centuries before he was born?’
‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘That’s what’s wrong with the poem. He can’t make not being alive sound horrifying. Or even irksome.’
It was mid-afternoon on Christmas Day, 1977, and on December 23 ‘Aubade’ had appeared, with some fanfare, in the TLS (we had an open copy on the table, staked out with wine bottles and chutney jars). I was twenty-eight and Kingsley, as ever, was the same age as Larkin.
‘He’s answering you here, Dad. “And specious stuff that says No rational being / Can fear a thing it will not feel…” Specious. Attractive but suspect.’
‘I know what it means.’
‘So he’s…he’s finding rationality suspect. And trusting in his superstition.’
‘Which is de-universalising, don’t you find? I mean, how many readers are bloody fools about being dead…Look. Even his technique wanders off. “…Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing / That this is what we fear – no sight, no sound, / No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, / Nothing to love or link with…” Listen, mate. If there’s nothing to think with, you won’t know or care if there’s nothing to link with, you bloody fool. Pitiful rhyme, that.’
‘Pitiful. And two fears, and two nots in one line…Quite a poem, though. You used to be like that, Dad, didn’t you. Jelly-kneed and pant-wetting about being dead?’
‘Balls,’ he said, not lifting his eyes from the page. ‘Only about dying. I never gave a toss about being dead.’
In his early thirties Larkin tried – in my view with considerable success – to imagine ‘the moment of death’. And I’m bearing in mind that he was already an admirer of Wilfred Owen (and would go on to write two essays on him, in 1963 and 1975). That final moment, he imagined, ‘must be a little choppy, a fribbling [stammering] as the currents of life fray against the currents of death’.
But then too the moment of death takes more than a moment; a full-grown human being is among other things a great fait accompli of aggregation; and all those experiences and memories need a while to disperse.
Still, in Larkin’s case…‘The Life with a Hole in it’ is the title of a poem of 1972; Larkin’s was a hole with a life in it. He kept it very thin, lenten, and gaunt, with nothing ‘worth looking back on’. So maybe the scattering, the fraying of the currents, was quickly over.
June 20, 1985. At this time (following the episode with the whisky) the Guardian was publishing daily bulletins on PL’s health. I called my father and said, ‘Are you going up there?’
‘I offered. With Hilly. But he…Anyway, they’re saying he’s out of danger.’
‘You offered. And he what, he didn’t fancy it?’ Kingsley wasn’t really inclined to talk but I pressed him. ‘Why, do you think?’
‘…Because he might lose his nerve and he doesn’t want us to see him gibbering.’
October 5. ‘And you still read him every night,’ I asked. ‘Really every night?’
‘Yeah, one or two. Last thing. As the other half of my nightcap.’
‘Any good stuff in that?’ I meant the letter on the kitchen table. ‘Is he still off solids?’
‘Uh…I can’t fuckin eat fuck all. It really is scaring…Three months ago my doctors said I should slowly get better. To my mind I am slowly getting worse. Here’s a quite funny bit. The GP listens to all this sympathetically, but rather as if he were the next door neighbour – without suggesting that it has any special relevance to his own knowledge or responsibilities. He signs off by saying he’s “not long for this world”. But he’s been saying that since he was twenty. Nothing about Monica.’
‘Christ,’ I said wonderingly. ‘How is Monica?…I mean to live with.’
‘Christ. How d’you think?’
December 3. ‘When are you going up there?’ Philip had done the dying. Now he was being dead (and awaiting burial). ‘Are you expected to speak?’
‘It’s on the ninth. Yes.’
The dying took place on December 2 – on a Monday, in the small hours.
On November 29, at home, he collapsed twice, in the sitting room, and then in the downstairs toilet, wedging the door shut with his feet. This is Motion:
Monica was unable to force the door open. She couldn’t even make him hear her – he had left his hearing aid behind – but she could hear him. ‘Hot! Hot!’ he was whispering piteously. He had fallen with his face pressed to one of the central heating pipes that ran round the lavatory wall.
She enlisted a neighbour and managed to haul Philip into the kitchen. He asked for some Complan; while she prepared it she rang for an ambulance. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Bun,’ he said as he was being stretchered back to the Nuffield…And he did see her on Saturday, and again on Sunday, but he was too thoroughly tranquillised to make any sense. On Sunday evening she went home to wait for the phone call, which came at half past one.
Michael Bowen, a recent addition to the circle (a fellow jazz buff and one of life’s willing hands), ferried Monica back and forth on that last weekend. ‘If Philip hadn’t been drugged, he would have been raving,’ Bowen told Motion (in 1991): ‘He was that frightened.’ Well, maybe the drugs neutralised what there was of his courage, too, as well as much of his fear; and the fact remains that he wasn’t raving. ‘Why aren’t I screaming?’ he said in a letter, back in January – picking up on a line in ‘The Old Fools’ (1973): ‘Why aren’t they screaming?’
Yes, why aren’t they screaming? Because one doesn’t, because people don’t. His middle-class inhibitions saw him through, along with his middle-class conscientiousness. Like a good boy he amended his will and turned up for all his appointments (including one with his dentist); he left clear instructions on the disposal – the shredding – of his voluminous (and reportedly ‘desperate’) diaries and notebooks; and he wrote, or rather dictated, a lengthy, calm, generous, and conspicuously graceful letter to Kingsley, the only male friend who excited in him anything that resembled love.
His last letter was in due course followed by his last words. At the very end he was sufficiently composed to deliver them, faintly, to the nurse who was holding his hand. He said, ‘I am going to the inevitable.’
December 9. ‘How was it up there?’
‘It was all right, I suppose.’
Kingsley poured a huge glass of Macallan’s and took it off to bed. That was one part of his nightcap. Would he be reaching for the other half?…To him it was more than the loss of a poet, as he told Conquest in a letter – the loss of a presence.
I sat on with my mother.
‘How was that Monica?’
‘She didn’t come. Too shattered, apparently. Poor old thing. What’s she going to do now?…Your father can’t stand her of course.’
‘Gaw, his women. Mum, you used to say he was scared of girls.’
‘I always respected Philip very much. He was the nicest of Kings’s friends. But think. He had a stutter, and then early baldness…’
‘And early deafness, and inch-thick specs since childhood. But what I mean is, if he was frightened of girls, why were his girls so frightening – in themselves?’
‘They were all frightening, the ones I knew. Even little Ruth. Very proud…You know, don’t you, that he dreaded the thought of imposing himself. And probably the girls who were drawn to him thought, Well it’s up to me to do the imposing.’
I tried to weigh this. Then I said, ‘A long day in Hull. Mum, you must be exhausted. Did it smell of fish?’
‘Not particularly. It was far too cold to smell of anything. They say it smells of fish just before it rains…Your father was very lowered by it all.’
‘Well Dad did love him.’
‘On the train there he kept saying, “Why have I never been here before? Why’ve I never been to his house?” And on the train back he said, all disappointed like a child, “It’s very strange. I feel I never really knew him.” ’
Maybe nobody really knew him. Except Margaret Monica Beale Jones. She knew what he was as a man (she was tough enough to sustain that) and she knew what he was as a poet.
My father’s aversion to Monica survived Larkin’s death – largely because she fell into the habit of ringing him up, most nights, to reminisce drunkenly and interminably about the love of her life. ‘Grief?’ said Kingsley after an eighty-minute session. ‘No. She’s glorying in it.’
But in truth Monica had little else to glory in, and less and less as the years went by. In 1988 she had the Collected Poems and ‘Letter to a Friend About Girls’ (in which she and the others ‘have their world…where they work, and age, and put off men / By being unattractive’), and in 1992 she had the Selected Letters, where she saw the most elaborate belittlement of all.* Monica lived on in Newland Park, alone and semi-bedridden, until 2001. ‘Oh, he was a bugger,’ she told Andrew Motion. ‘He lied to me, the bugger, but I loved him.’
During a stay in hospital (one of many in his final year), he was visited by Monica, of course, and also by Maeve and also by Betty (his ‘loaf-haired secretary’). ‘I didn’t want to see Maeve,’ he told Betty. ‘I wanted to see Monica to tell her I love her’…Is it merely sentimental to fantasise about a deathbed wedding (perhaps the only kind of wedding he could honestly respect)? In which case Monica would have passed her remaining sixteen years as Larkin’s widow, and not just as one of the spinsters he left behind.
‘When I was young’, he said in an interview, ‘I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realised it was just children I didn’t like…Children are very horrible, aren’t they? Selfish, noisy, cruel, vulgar little brutes.’
As he got older Kingsley, too, devoted some leisure to the defamation of children. ‘This anti-child routine of yours,’ I once said to him (as a freshly smitten parent). ‘It’s very occasionally quite funny. And I know it’s intentionally mean-spirited. But is it meant to be fatuous?’ Asked by his tightened lips to elaborate, I said, ‘Well – hark at the pot calling the kettle black. What d’you think you were until you were twelve?’
And this at least gave him pause. Larkin, though, would have had his answer ready. ‘You know I was never a child,’ he announced in a letter of 1980. Was this a prelude to some paedophobic refinement, perhaps? No. He soberly continued: ‘my life began at 21, or 31 more likely. Say with the publication of The Less Deceived’…That is, November 1955, when he was thirty-three. But actually February 1948, when he was twenty-five, has greater explanatory power: ‘I am in bad spirits because of my father’ – who had only weeks to live. ‘I feel I have got to make a big mental jump – to stop being a child and become an adult…’
This was a serious recognition, and one that might have led to some serious thought about that adult known as Sydney Larkin. Instead, Philip responded to the death as follows: he underwent religious instruction; he got himself engaged to Ruth (an avowedly ‘provisional’ engagement, though one solemnised with a ring); and he moved in with his widowed mother for a ‘frightful’ twenty-five months. He didn’t jump into adulthood. During this time his romantic life sagged and his artistic life ceased.
And yet: ‘Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.’ I find this epigram fishy on more than one level. Alliterative and ‘eminently quotable’, it was clearly long premeditated; but in retrospect it sounds like a (failing) attempt to glory in gloom. That vein of stubborn persistence was instantly identified by Wystan Auden (they met just once, at a dinner party given by Stephen Spender, in 1972).
Auden: ‘How do you like living in Hull?’
Larkin: ‘I’m no unhappier there than I should be anywhere else.’
Auden: ‘Naughty naughty! Mother wouldn’t like it!’
Telling the story years later (in the Paris Review), Larkin said he found the remark ‘very funny’, which it is; but it is alarmingly salient, too. What Auden saw was a defensive façade – and one so obvious that he could greet it only with amicable satire.
The façade was shakily defending Larkin’s failure to construct so much as a remotely and minimally convincing life. And he knew it, he ‘viewed it clear’: this deciding truth, like death itself, stays ‘on the edge of vision, / A small unfocused blur, a standing chill’, but a blur that regularly ‘flashes afresh to hold and horrify’. And as we know, it was a fate that he had prearranged (with some loftiness of spirit) in his early twenties; prompted by Yeats, he bowed to a transparently false opposition between ‘the life’ and ‘the work’ (as if the two were somehow mutually exclusive). And when the work, the poems, duly retreated from him (the date he gives is 1974), he found himself helplessly marooned in ‘a fucked up life’. ‘My life seems stuffed full of nothing’; ‘What an absurd, empty life!’; ‘I suddenly see myself as a freak and a failure, & my way of life as a farce.’
Together with its almost sinister memorability, and its unique combination of the lapidary and the colloquial, the key distinction of Larkin’s corpus is its humour: he is by many magnitudes the funniest poet in English (and I include all exponents of light verse). Nor, needless to say, is his comedy just a pleasant additive; it is foundational…Was he helped in this – was he somehow ‘swayed on’ – by living a hollow life, ‘a farce’, ‘absurd’, and ‘stuffed full of nothing’? Well, not nothing; his life was stuffed full of the kind of repetitive indignities that make us say, If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry. Yes, and if you didn’t cry, you’d laugh. This is the axis on which the poems rotate. His indignities were his daffodils.
As we take our leave let us recall a very late poem (1979) that captures some of his personal pathos, his muted benignity, and his exquisitely tentative tenderness. One day he was mowing the lawn and ran over a hedgehog in the taller grass. ‘When it happened,’ said Monica, ‘he came in from the garden howling. He was very upset. He’d been feeding the hedgehog, you see – he looked out for it…He started writing about it soon afterwards.’ The result was ‘The Mower’ (closely related, here, to the Reaper), which ends:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
* Of his (never-finished) third novel Larkin wrote to Patsy in 1953: ‘You know, I can’t write this book: if it is to be written at all it should be largely an attack on Monica, & I can’t do that, not while we are still on friendly terms, and I’m not sure it even interests me sufficiently to go on.’