In his office Sydney was always keen for a ‘cuddle’ with female subordinates, ‘not missing an opportunity to put an arm round a secretary’, as an assistant reminisced.*4 He was in addition the kind of patriarch, dourly typical of mid-century England, who set the emotional barometer for those around him – for all those within range.
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As a child I had several friends with this kind of father. They were the mood tyrants. Brooding, frustrated, rancorous, intransigent, their will to power reduced to the mere furtherance of domestic unease. And these household gods all held sway over the same kind of household – the prized but intimidated sons, the warily self-effacing daughters, the mutely tiptoeing spouses, the cringeing, flinching pets…
Aged thirteen, after a weekend spent in the rain-lashed bungalow of just such a mood tyrant (the father of my best friend Robin), I cycled home to Madingley Road, Cambridge, parked my bike in one of the two outbuildings that housed our Alsatian, Nancy, and her recent litter, and our donkey, Debbie, then entered by the back door, stepping over one of our eldest cats, Minnie. Going in, I felt – I now suppose – like PL going out:
When I try to tune into my childhood, the dominant emotions I pick up are, overwhelmingly, fear and boredom…I never left the house without the sense of walking into a cooler, cleaner, saner and pleasanter atmosphere.
But a happy child is no better than a gerbil or a goldfish when it comes to counting its blessings, and as I sauntered into the convivial kitchen I experienced no rush of gratitude towards my warmly humorous and high-spirited parents. I was home: that was all. I was in the place where – while it lasted – I was unthinkingly happy.
‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’ This is the most famous line in Larkin’s corpus – partly, no doubt, because it was a near-universal tenet of the time (and seemed to be the starting point of all psychiatry). In principle Philip agreed that ‘blaming one’s parents’ led nowhere, or rather led everywhere (‘If one starts blaming one’s parents, well, one never stops!’); but he went on:
[Samuel] Butler said that anyone who was still worrying about his parents at 35 was a fool, but he certainly didn’t forget them himself, and I think the influence they exert is enormous…What one doesn’t learn from one’s parents one never learns, or learns awkwardly, like a mining MP taking lessons in table manners or the middle aged Arnold Bennett learning to dance…I never remember my parents making a single spontaneous gesture of affection towards each other…
With PL, in any event, fondness failed to flow. ‘I never got the hang of sex anyway,’ he gauntly clarified in another letter to Monica Jones. ‘If it were announced that all sex wd cease as from midnight on 31 December, my way of life wouldn’t change at all.’ That was written on December 15, 1954. ‘Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three,’ runs Larkin’s most famous couplet; but for him and Monica it was already withering away – in their early thirties. And yet they trundled on until 1985, when Philip died, aged sixty-three: his final hommage to Sydney.
PL never saw his parents hug and kiss. I and my siblings often saw our parents hug and kiss (and we responded with a mid-century version of what my younger daughters now say when they see their parents hug and kiss: ‘Get a room’). But as I tittered, and blushed (blushed hotly and richly), a necessary transfusion was somehow taking place; I was seeing my mother and father as autonomous individuals, going through the rituals of their own affinity – their own affair. A child axiomatically needs to be the recipient of love; and a child also needs to witness it.
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‘I read your Larkin piece. Twice,’ I said on the phone (New York–Washington, in the spring of 2011).*5 ‘Full of good things.’ And I listed some of them. ‘God, though, he’s an impenetrable case, don’t you find?’
‘Oh, yeah. The poems, they’re as clear as day, they’re…pellucid, but humanly he’s a labyrinth. You get lost in him.’
‘That famous aside of his, you quote it – deprivation is for me what daffodils were to Wordsworth. So he liked deprivation because it stirred his muse.’
‘Yes, and sometimes making you wonder whether he went looking for it.’
‘But he means romantic deprivation. And how d’you go looking for that?’
‘Especially when you’ve already got it. No one’s that dedicated. And anyway, in this instance I’d say deprivation came from within.’
‘You quote that other line he…Here it is. Sex is always disappointing and often repulsive, like asking someone else to blow your own nose for you. Blow your nose?’
‘Blow your nose? Now there he shows real prowess of perversity.’
‘You know, I get surer and surer that that’s a big part of the Larkin fascination. The purity of the poems. And then the mystery story, the whodunnit of his – of his murk.’
‘It’s all Sydney, don’t you think? That Komodo dragon in the living room.’
‘Mm…Brother, we’ll talk. Now. When are you getting here?’
‘I’m aiming for Friday afternoon. Around drinks time.’
‘What could be more agreeable?’
‘Oh, tell me something. You miss the old country, I know. I don’t expect to miss England but I’m sure I’ll miss the English. It’s that tone, that tone of humorous sympathy. Americans are nice too, individually, but you couldn’t call them droll.’
‘No. Tocqueville said that humour would be bred out of them by sheer diversity. Anything witty was bound to offend someone. He thought they’d reach the point where nobody’d dare say anything at all.’
…This could wait for the weekend, but the Hitch was in
