Every man is an island
During his time at Oxford (1940–3) Larkin briefly kept a dream journal, whose contents are summed up by Motion:
Dreams in which he is in bed with men (friends in St John’s [his college], a ‘negro’) outnumber dreams in which he is trying to seduce a woman, but the world in which these encounters occur is uniformly drab and disagreeable. Nazis, black dogs, excrement and underground rooms appear time and time again, and so do the figures of parents, aloof but omnipresent.
Excrement, black dogs – and Nazis…But as it happens Larkin’s sexuality, seen from a safe distance, managed a reasonable imitation of normality. After a slow start, and many snubs and hurts, there was always a proven partner nearby, and we know a fair bit about what he got up to and with whom. All the same, the eros in him is still mysterious and very hard to infiltrate. It is indeed a maze, or a marshland with a few slippery handholds. And yet, as we wade through it all, we gratefully bear in mind that this – somehow or other – was Larkin’s path to the poems.
To repeat: as a young man Larkin was intrigued, or better say fatally mesmerised, by the Yeatsian line about choosing between ‘perfection of the life’ and perfection ‘of the work’. But that was a line in a poem (‘The Choice’), not in a manifesto; no one was supposed to act on it (and Yeats certainly didn’t). Larkin seized on the either/or notion, I think, as a highminded clearance for simply not bothering with the life, and settling instead for an unalloyed devotion to solitude and self. As he put it in ‘Love’ (1966): ‘My life is for me. / As well ignore gravity.’ Most crucially, the quest for artistic perfection coincided with his transcendent worldly goal – that of staying single.
‘Sex is too good to share with anyone else,’ Larkin half-joked, early on. Yet he found that the DIY approach to romance was always overcome by a prosaic need for female affection and support. And so there were lovers, five of them: Ruth, Monica, Patsy, Maeve, and Betty.*6 Larkin’s affairs were not evenly spaced out over the thirty-odd years of his ‘active life’. They came in two clusters: Monica overlapped with Ruth and Patsy, in the early 1950s, and she overlapped with Maeve and Betty, in the mid-1970s. This pair of triads represented the twin peaks of Larkin’s libido, which was otherwise conveniently docile (‘I am not a highly sexed person,’ as he kept having to remind Monica).
Ruth was sixteen when he met her in 1945, ‘a prim little small town girl’, as she phrased it; two years later they became lovers and were briefly engaged. Monica, the mainstay, was an English don at Leicester (and we’ll be spending an evening with her later on). Patsy was the only red squirrel in this clutch of grey Middle-Englanders; a highly educated poet and rather too thoroughgoing free spirit, Patsy died when she was forty-nine (‘literally dead drunk’, as PL noted). Maeve, a quasi-virgin of a certain age, a faux naïf, and a true Believer (who, post mortem, tried to enlist PL’s godless spectre for the Catholic Church), was on the clerical staff at Hull. As was Betty, who, until Larkin made his sudden move, had been his wholly unpropositioned and unharassed secretary for the previous seventeen years.
Of the five, Betty had the considerable virtue of being ‘always cheerful and tolerant’: i.e., she was a good sport. Ruth, Patsy, Maeve, and overarchingly Monica were not good sports. According to my mother (and nothing in the ancillary literature contradicts her), these women were alike curiously unrelaxed and unrelaxing, oppressed – most likely – by class anxieties and inhibitions that we would now find merely arcane. In addition they all gave off a pulse of entitled yet obscurely injured merit, of vague and tetchy superiority – a superiority quite unconfirmed by achievement; Monica, a noisily opinionated academic all her adult life (but also a close reader, and now and then a trusted editor of Larkin’s verse), never published a word…
Ruth Bowman
Monica Jones
Patsy Strang
Maeve Brennan
Betty Mackereth
Hilly Bardwell
As well as being rich and worldly (she studied at the Sorbonne) Patsy was artistic, and her prickliness took more highbrow form (Kingsley said she was ‘the most uninterestingly unstable woman’ he had ever met). Philip’s liaison with her was manageable and brief (and he was touchingly grateful to have had it). But she scared the life out of him a decade later, drunkenly materialising in Hull – muzzy, weepy, utterly disorganised (wanting to stay the night and accusing him of ‘not being continental’)…As PL admitted, his women inclined towards the ‘neurotic’ and the ‘difficult’, and also the ‘unattractive’. He summed them up himself, in four lines of wearily illusionless verse (quoted below).
Ruth, Patsy, Maeve, Betty – and Monica. His triangulations involved dramas, tears, scenes, twenty-page letters, and decathlons of guilt and reproach – more than enough grief, you’d have thought, to fuel a typical marriage. When Monica was told about Maeve she was physically sick, and soon lapsed into near-clinical depression. The best proof of how much his girlfriends meant to Larkin was his willingness to shoulder – or at least outwait – their episodes of suffering while he had his way.
All this was interspersed with a great deal of yearning, brooding, coveting, fuming, and dreaming, not to mention a great deal of ‘wanking in digs’ (as he put it to a ladyfriend). Larkin had an extra-strong passion for pornography and kept a cache of it in his office (‘to wank to, or with, or at’, as he put it to another ladyfriend). But he was far less blithe or
