But that articulacy, that penetration, could sometimes approach the miraculous. Lawrence spoke German and was married to a German (Frieda von Richthofen); and he had a real grasp of the central divide in German modernity: the divide between the tug to the west and the tug to the east, between ‘civilisation’ and ‘culture’, between progressivism and reaction, between democracy and dictatorship (for a retrospective, see Michael Burleigh’s Germany Turns Eastwards). Sydney went there in the late 1930s and had no sense that anything was wrong – at a time when most visitors found its militarised somnambulism ‘terrifying’. Lawrence went there in 1928 and showed us what the human antennae are capable of:
It is as if the life had retreated eastward. As if the German life were slowly ebbing away from contact with western Europe, ebbing to the deserts of the east…The moment you are in Germany, you know. It feels empty, and, somehow menacing…
[Germany] is very different from what it was two and a half years ago [1926], when I was here. Then it was still open to Europe. Then it still looked to Europe, for a sort of reconciliation. Now that is over. The inevitable, mysterious barrier, and the great leaning of the German spirit is once more eastward, towards Tartary.
…Returning yet again to the destructive East, that produced Atilla…But at night you feel strange things stirring in the darkness, strange feelings stirring out of their still-unconquered Black Forest. You stiffen your backbone and listen to the night. There is a sense of danger…Out of the very air comes a sense of danger, a queer, bristling feeling of uncanny danger.
1928, not 1933. Not 1939, and not 1940 – by which time the exiled historian Sebastian Haffner was writing Germany: Jekyll and Hyde, where he came to the following conclusion:
This point must be grasped because otherwise nothing can be understood. And all partial acquaintance is worthless and misleading unless it is thoroughly digested and absorbed. It is this: Nazism is no ideology but a magic formula which attracts a definite type of men. It is a form of ‘characterology’ not ideology. To be a Nazi means to be a type of human being.
And the National Socialist Weltanschauung ‘has no other aim than to collect and rear this species’: ‘Those who, without pretext, can torture and beat, hunt and murder, are expected to gather together and be bound by the iron chain of common crime…’
And this is the ethos Sydney Larkin ‘admired’ or was ‘really batty about’; this is the ethos his son cautiously ‘disliked’.
And yet Philip Larkin, despite the crash in his reputation when the Letters and the Life came out (‘racism’, ‘misogyny’), would deservedly – and inevitably – emerge as ‘Britain’s best-loved poet since the war’. It was a war, by the way, in which he played no part. In December 1941 PL was summoned to his medical. According to Andrew Motion, he ‘made no secret of his hopes that he would fail’. And he did fail. Eyesight.
The PL of this period – a flashy dresser and a charismatic talent who for a while felt socially bold – was trying to sound insouciant; but he was at all other times a sincere patriot, and so he felt humbled and unmanned and above all confused. Floundering and posturing to the last, showing every attribute of youth except physical courage (and now seeking safety in numbers), PL wrote, ‘I was fundamentally – like the rest of my friends – uninterested in the war.’
Eva, Philip, Sydney, Kitty
Like the rest of his friends? Did he mean the ones who were in the army? Kingsley, for instance, who passed through France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany (in 1944–5), was interested in the war. For one thing he was interested in surviving it; and as a Communist as well as a Britisher, he would have been ideologically and emotionally interested in winning it. (Kingsley was trained as an infantryman, but he was destined for the Signals and he never fired a shot.) In his version of Machtpolitik, KA hoped for the shoring up of Stalin. Now reread the three quotes with which this section began, and then try to evade the likelihood that PL hoped for the shoring up of Hitler.
Q: What could have steered the tremulous undergraduate into this morbid and forsaken cul-de-sac? A: Having a father like Sydney (and being very young).
When it was all so obvious. Even the most reactionary writer in the English canon, Evelyn Waugh, saw the elementary simplicity of September 1939. As Guy Crouchback, the hero of the WW2 trilogy Sword of Honour, puts it:
He expected his country to go to war in a panic, for the wrong reasons or for no reason at all, with the wrong allies, in pitiful weakness. But now, splendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off…Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle.
This much had long been clear to everybody: Naziism meant war (and for its enemies a just war par excellence). And, when war came, what type of young man would scorn a place in it – any place whatever?
Tyrants of mood don’t hug and kiss
Sydney Larkin was ‘unrepentant’ about many things, including his views on women. ‘Women are often dull, sometimes dangerous and always dishonourable’ was a personal aphorism he cherrypicked for his diary. And this was another set of attitudes that his son, as a tyro adult, found himself dutifully echoing: ‘All women are stupid beings’; they ‘repel me inconceivably. They are shits.’
Larkin Sr made his daughter’s ‘life a misery’, and over the years reduced his wife, Eva, to a martyred drizzle of anxiety and timorousness. ‘My
