Chapter 5 And say why it never worked for me
‘Now you can’t ever ask her,’ Elena had said one morning out of the blue, in 2010.
It was a few days after Hilly’s death, so Martin could easily fill in the spaces: Now you can’t ever ask your mother if by any chance Philip Larkin knocked her up in December 1948.
‘That’s right,’ he said. And he was glad. It was the only solace he would ever get from his orphanhood. ‘Now I can’t ever ask her.’
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The book in your hands calls itself a novel – and it is a novel, I maintain.
So I want to assure the reader that everything that follows in this chapter is verifiably non-fiction.
The doll on the mantelpiece
1. ‘Germany will win this war like a dose of salts, and if that gets me into gaol, a bloody good job too.’ Philip Larkin, December 1940 (aged nineteen).
2. ‘If there is any new life in the world today, it is in Germany. True, it’s a vicious and blood-brutal kind of affair – the new shoots are rather like bayonets…Germany has revolted back too far, into the other extremes. But I think they have many valuable new habits. Otherwise how could D.H.L.*1 be called Fascist?’ July 1942.
3. ‘Externally, I believe we must “win the war”. I dislike Germans and I dislike Nazis, at least what I’ve heard of them. But I don’t think it will do any good.’ January 1943 (aged twenty-one).
These sentences, notable for their moral defeatism (disguised in the first quote as gruff immunity to illusion), their ignorance, and their incuriosity, come from the early pages of the Selected Letters of Philip Larkin (1991). So here we confront a youth turning twenty who ‘dislikes’ Nazis (or at least what he’s heard of them). By January 1943 he might have heard of what we now call the Holocaust (‘probably the greatest mass slaughter in history’, as the New York Times reported in June 1942). Did he hear of it later on? Neither in his correspondence nor in his public writings is there a single reference to the Holocaust – not one, in his entire life.*2
Philip’s father, Sydney Larkin, OBE, who somehow acquired a reputation for intellectual rigour, was a self-styled ‘Conservative Anarchist’; he was also a zealous Germanophile. He went on being pro-German even after September 1939 – and even after November 1940, and even after VE Day in May 1945…In November 1940 more than 400 German bombers descended on Sydney’s hometown of Coventry, destroying the city centre, where he worked (as a senior municipal accountant), the fifteenth-century cathedral, nine aircraft factories, and much else; the raid wounded 865 and killed 380. The Luftwaffe raids began in August 1940 and continued until August 1942 (with a final death toll of over 1,200). And Sydney went on being pro-German.
Before the war, in 1936 and again in 1937, Sydney took his only son along with him on one of his regular pilgrimages to the Reich: consecutive summer holidays, the first in Königswinter and Wernigerode, the second in Kreuznach (so both trips saw a rare omission for Syd: no Nuremberg Rally, with its 140,000 kindred souls). As Philip wrote, much later (in 1980), when the facts of Sydney’s affiliation were about to be drawn attention to in a PL Festschrift:
On the question of my father and so on, I do think it would be better to say ‘He was an admirer of contemporary Germany, not excluding its politics.’ In fact he was a lover of Germany, really batty about the place.
Nowhere is it written that Sydney was an anti-Semite.*3 But how could it have been otherwise, for an admirer of the politics of Nazi Germany?
One wonders what else he liked about the place. A serious and compulsive reader (with a particular affection for Thomas Hardy, on whom he once gave a public lecture), Sydney was not in any ordinary sense a philistine; and he would have felt the weight and glamour of German literature and German thought.
But the Third Reich immediately presented itself as a regime of book-burners. Old Syd lamely admired Germany’s ‘efficiency’ and its ‘office methods’ (in fact the Nazi administration was always drowning in chaos). Did these supposed pluses outweigh the Reichstag Fire terror, the Jewish boycott, the gangsterish purge of the Brownshirts, the Nuremberg Laws, the state-led pogrom known as Kristallnacht, the rapes of Czechoslovakia and Poland, and the Second World War?
Although the discriminatory legislation was already in place, the summer of 1936 – when père et fils paid their maiden visit – saw a brief intermission for Germany’s Jews. It was the year of the Berlin Olympics; and so the country Potemkinised itself for the occasion. Formerly there had been printed or painted signs, in hotels and restaurants and suchlike (NO JEWS OR DOGS) but also on the approach roads of various towns and villages, saying JEWS NOT WELCOME HERE. These were tastefully removed for the Games (the first ever to be televised). Afterwards, of course, the signs were re-emplaced.
It is said that Sydney had on his Coventry mantelpiece a moustachioed figurine which, at the touch of a button, gave the familiar salute. There was evidently nothing in the fascist spirit that Sydney didn’t warm to: the menacing pageantry, the sweaty togetherness (he
‘liked the jolly singing in the beer cellars’), the puerile kitsch of the doll in the living room.
A sense of danger, a queer, bristling feeling of uncanny danger
In a diary entry for October 1934 Thomas Mann praised the ‘admirably insightful letter by Lawrence, about Germany and its return to barbarism – [written] when Hitler was hardly even heard of…’ D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Letter from Germany’ was published, posthumously, in the New Statesman; but it was written six years earlier, in 1928, when the author was forty-two (and already dying).
Now Lawrence harboured many deplorable opinions and prejudices, including a cheaply unexamined strain of anti-Semitism: ‘I hate Jews,’ he wrote in a business letter; and even in the
