The loss of nerve, the withdrawal: it gives us the flavour of the Larkin frustration and the Larkin thwartedness. With lowered head he slips out of the dark sex shop (the bachelors’ bazaar) and into the rain, leaving that copy of Swish unmolested on its shelf as he creeps away, hugging to himself the familiar failure…
Invidia
In July 1959 Kingsley returned from an extended teaching job in America, and wrote to PL about his hyperactive success with the women of Princeton, New Jersey. A few months later Philip completed ‘Letter to a Friend About Girls’ (which he never published). The ‘friend’ of the title is only approximately Kingsley, just as the narrator of the poem is only approximately Philip; but approximation can come very close. The poem begins:
After comparing lives with you for years
I see how I’ve been losing: all the while
I’ve met a different gauge of girl from yours.
Grant that, and all the rest makes sense as well:
My mortification at your pushovers,
Your mystification at my fecklessness –
Everything proves we play in separate leagues.
More than once Kingsley said to Philip: it wasn’t that they met different grades of girl; it was that they met all girls differently. They both had charm, but Kingsley’s was the charm of confidence, and Philip’s the charm of uncertainty; and it remains a maddening truth that both sexual success and sexual failure are steeply self-perpetuating. Philip knew all this, but in the poem the ‘I’ feigns ingenuousness, and evades the really embittering recognition: it wasn’t a case of ‘a different gauge of girl’; as Larkin acknowledged to Anthony Thwaite, it was a case of a different gauge of man. Still, the wretchedness he backs away from is quietly evoked.
Having listed some of the addressee’s ‘staggering skirmishes’ with wives, students, and (it seems) passers-by, Philip goes on: ‘And all the rest who beckon from that world…where to want / Is straightway to be wanted…A world where all nonsense is annulled, // And beauty is accepted slang for yes.’ In honing that last line Larkin must have wondered what it was in himself that qualified as accepted slang for no.
There was another reason why Philip kept ‘Letter to a Friend’ in his bottom drawer. As he very reasonably wrote (again to Thwaite), ‘it would hurt too many feelings’; ‘If it were simply a marvellous poem, perhaps I might be callous, but it’s not sufficiently good to be worth causing pain.’ So it was only in 1988, with the publication of the rather overamplified – and of course posthumous – Collected Poems, that Ruth, Monica, Maeve, and Betty came to read the following (note the resignedly slow rhythms of lines two to five), as the poet summons his women:
But equally, haven’t you noticed mine?
They have their world, not much compared with yours,
Where they work, and age, and put off men
By being unattractive, or too shy,
Or having morals – anyhow, none give in:
Some of them go quite rigid with disgust
At anything but marriage…
you mine away
For months, both of you, till the collapse comes
Into remorse, tears, and wondering why
You ever start such boring barren games…
We can see why Philip was reduced to thinking that sex was too good to share with anyone else. Autoeroticism, for Larkin, wasn’t just a stopgap, an improvised faute de mieux. It answered something fundamental not only in his life but also in the workings of his art. ‘I don’t want to take a girl out, and spend circa £5 when I can toss off in five minutes, free, and have the rest of the evening to myself.’ And, as he wrote to his parents as early as 1947 (when Sydney was still alive), ‘tonight I shall stay in and write. How beautiful life becomes when one’s left alone!’
Something that might be described as ‘positive’ happened to Kingsley a year before he left for America. In response to it Philip wrote (to Patsy):
[It] has had the obvious effect on me. I am a corpse eaten out with envy, impotence, failure, envy, boredom, sloth, snobbery, envy, incompetence, inefficiency, laziness, lechery, envy, fear, baldness, bad circulation, bitterness, bittiness, envy…
And what was this supposed coup of KA’s? His ‘appearance on Network 3 on jazz’ – ‘the first of six programmes’, as Philip moodily adds.
If he felt that way about Network 3 (a radio subchannel devoted to hobbies), how would he feel about this? Just back from Princeton and his lucrative professorship in creative writing (July 1959), Kingsley writes to Philip and apologises for his year-long silence:
…I can plead that I wrote no more than four personal letters the whole time I was away…[and] that for the first half of my time there I was boozing and working harder than I have ever done since the Army, and that for the second half I was boozing and fucking harder than at any time at all. On the second count I found myself at it practically full-time.
By December of that year Philip had completed ‘Letter to a Friend About Girls’.
‘Empathy’ is not as slimy a word as ‘closure’, but it still comes mincingly off the tongue. Even so, Kingsley, here, shows lack of empathy to an almost vicious degree; erotic success is a kind of wealth, after all, and here he is, fanning his wad at a pauper…As we turn to Philip we may say that envy is an offshoot of empathy: from L. invidia, from invidere, from in- ‘into’ and videre ‘to see’. See into. Envy is negative empathy, it is empathy in the wrong place at the wrong time. Satisfyingly, too, ‘envy’ also derives from invidere, ‘regard maliciously’. It is not surprising that PL, much of the time, hated KA.
By all means empathise with the less fortunate, and do so with every consideration. But be careful. Don’t feel your
