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We began with three snippets about politics; let’s start winding up with three snippets about sex. The first comes from a letter to Monica, the second from a letter to Kingsley. To which of the two is the third letter addressed, would you say?
I think – though of course I am all for free love, advanced schools, & so on – someone might do a little research on some of the inherent qualities of sex – its cruelty, its bullyingness, for instance. It seems to me that bending someone else to your will is the very stuff of sex…And what’s more, both sides would sooner have it that way than not at all. I wouldn’t. And I suspect that means not that I can enjoy sex in my own quiet way but that I can’t enjoy it at all. It’s like rugby football: either you like kicking & being kicked, or your soul cringes away from the whole affair. There’s no way of quietly enjoying rugby football. (1951)
Where’s all this porn they talk about?…[In Hull] it’s all been stamped out by the police with nothing better to do. It’s like this permissive society they talk about: never permitted me anything as far as I recall. I mean like WATCHING SCHOOLGIRLS SUCK EACH OTHER OFF WHILE YOU WHIP THEM, or You know the trouble with old Phil is that he’s never really grown up – just goes along the same old lines. Bit of a bore really. (1979)
It seems to me that what we have is a kind of homosexual relationship, disguised. Don’t you think yourself there’s something fishy about it? (1958)
In the first quote PL declares himself a sexual pacifist or vegan, and seems rather proud of his hypersensitivity (well ‘I wouldn’t’). In the second quote he gives a middleaged (and clearly very drunken) airing to his fantasy about caning schoolgirls, which dates back to his youth. The third quote appears in a letter to Monica. I’ve tried often, but I still don’t understand it. What can it mean? That he, PL, wasn’t very masculine and that she, MJ, wasn’t very feminine? And that they were in-betweeners of the same gender?
Anyway, peculiar, eccentric, innovatory, without any known analogues – you might even call it sui generis.
In a late letter PL observed of the poetry critic Clive James, ‘Just now and again he says something really penetrating: “originality is not an ingredient of poetry, it is poetry” – I’ve been feeling that for years.’
When poets go into their studies, they seek – or more exactly hope to receive – the original. Be original in your study. But not in your bedroom. It is like sanity: your hope, in these two departments, is to be derivative. You don’t want to be out there all on your own.
Violence a long way back
In only one (very late) poem did Philip attempt an explanation of what we may call his erotic misalignment. It comes in the alarmingly gloves-off ‘Love Again’ (1979), which begins as a lyric of violent sexual jealousy – not sexual envy, sexual jealousy:
Love again, wanking at ten past three
(Surely he’s taken her home by now?),
The bedroom hot as a bakery…
Someone else feeling her breasts…
But then just over halfway through this eighteen-liner the poet turns pointedly inward. ‘Isolate rather this element’, he soliloquises,
That spreads through other lives like a tree
And sways them on in a sort of sense
And say why it never worked for me.
Something to do with violence
A long way back, and wrong rewards,
And arrogant eternity.
The last three lines at first feel unyieldingly condensed. ‘Arrogant eternity’, we suppose, refers to the demands of art and to the brevity of the human span; ‘wrong rewards’, we suppose, refers to the haphazard allocation of luck, talent, sex, happiness, and (perhaps) literary recognition. But ‘violence / A long way back’? Motion persuasively argues that PL is not referring to actual abuse but to the ‘smothering nullity’ of his parents’ marriage: ‘they showed him a universe of frustration [and] suppressed fury…which threatened him all his life, and which was indispensable to his genius.’ All true; but I think we can go a little further than that.
In La Tomate off Dupont Circle I said (April 2011), ‘You refer to Syd as Larkin’s “detested father”. Would it were so, O Hitch. That would’ve made for a much simpler story. But Philip loved him.’
‘…Mart, you stagger me. That old cunt?’
‘He loved and honoured that old cunt. It’s all very fresh in my mind I’m afraid.’
‘Mm, I suppose you know more about it than you want to know. Thanks to Phoebe.’
I sighed and said, ‘I was having to think of Syd as my…’
‘Christ, I do see…But there’s nothing about Syd in Letters to Monica.’
‘Just this – “O frigid inarticulate man!” So don’t reproach yourself. It’s all in the Selected Letters and the Life – twenty years ago. Get this. When Syd died Larkin was so cut up he turned to the Church. Quote. “I am being instructed in the technique of religion”! And he describes his sessions with a twinkly old party called Leon.’
‘When was this? How old was he?’
‘Twenty-five. Quote, from Motion. He had always looked up to his father, and they grew steadily closer. To lose him, Larkin thought, would be to lose part of himself.’
‘Christ. Well it was the part of himself he should’ve stomped into the gutter. Couldn’t he see, couldn’t he tell?’
‘The day after the funeral he wrote, I felt very proud of him. Proud. And he started to write a fucking elegy for the old cunt.’
‘Oh, where are they now, the great men of yore? Where the riding whip, where the jackboot?…Well all I can say is, It’s amazing that the poems got out alive.’
The food came, and for the next hour we tried, with only partial success, to recite ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ (eighty lines); we did a little better with ‘An Arundel Tomb’ (forty-two).
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‘Something to do
