How lastingly extraordinary it is. Larkin’s fastidious soul was shaken by the Patsy visitation: ‘it seemed a glimpse’, he informed Monica, ‘of another, more horrible world.’ That world was bohemia, whose (sloppy but pacifistic) ethos repelled him all his life. As for the ethos of Bavaria and the Brown House and the Beer Hall Putsch – Larkin never seemed to mind that his father was a votary of the most organised and mechanised cult of violence the world has yet known…
‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad, / They may not mean to, but they do.’ Well, whether or not this dad meant to, here is a clear case of Mission Accomplished. As Philip’s sister Kitty said after the cremation, ‘We’re nobody now. He did it all.’
—————
Goodbye to the patriarchs, the little overlords, the goosers and gropers, the disseminators of disquiet, the wife crushers and daughter torturers, the fathers that everyone fears, the enemies of ease, the domestic totalitarians of the mid-twentieth century.
*1 D. H. Lawrence. What if anything does PL mean by this sentence? He means, I suppose, that if Lawrence (‘so good I daren’t really read him’) can be called a fascist, then fascism must have its points. Was Lawrence a fascist? See below.
*2 There is a lone mention of Stalinism. It was forced out of him when that ‘old bore’ Robert Conquest sent him his ‘whacking great book on Stalin’s purges’ (this is an allusion to its size). Conquest’s book was the seminal, consciousness-shifting study, The Great Terror (1968). In his thankyou letter for the free copy, PL managed the following (this is an allusion to the Kremlin leadership): ‘Grim crowd they sound…’ And that was all – ever.
*3 Or not until recently – with the publication in 2018 of Larkin’s Letters Home, edited and introduced at illuminating length by James Booth. Here we learn that Sydney was indeed ‘crudely anti-Semitic’. During the post-war revelations he never ‘acknowledged Nazi barbarism’, turning his guns, rather, on the Nuremberg Trials.
*4 His workplace in City Hall was adorned with Nazi regalia – until the town clerk ordered him to get rid of it. We can just about imagine the scene: Sydney’s bottom-pinching and nipple-twisting against a backdrop of swastikas and lightning bolts.
*5 Christopher’s essay on Letters to Monica had duly appeared in the Atlantic that May…This would be my last trip to the US as a visitor; thereafter I would be a resident. My friend was re-established at the Wyoming, and girding himself for the after-effects of his month in the synchrotron.
*6 Or six, if you’re inclined, as I was for a while, to believe Phoebe Phelps (whose candidate, my mother, would have come between Ruth and Monica). Phoebe can be doubted on optical grounds: if what she said was true, it would be as if Diana Dors had come bustling in on a singletons’ knitting circle in somewhere like Nailsea. Anyway, the Hilly possibility is hereby dismissed.
PART IV
PENULTIMATE
Preamble: The Fire on New Year’s Eve
Now I suspect you wouldn’t mind hearing a bit more about the fire, and of course I’ll be glad to oblige. Not for the only time in these pages, a clear calamity leads to a relatively happy ending, one laid on by life, which moves in mysterious ways…22 Strong Place didn’t burn down – it burnt up. It was what they call a chimney fire.
A chimney fire? I thought chimneys were where fires were meant to be at home. Anyway, ours leaked. It had been leaking sparks for months…
It happened on New Year’s Eve, remember, and it was all over by twelve. So – the fire was the farewell party thrown by 2016. First Brexit, then Trump, then no house and out on the street at midnight in midwinter.
Inez and I were there at the time, whereas…Hang on – some background. We have a small house in West Palm Beach. I can never say that without thinking of a cameo in Evelyn Waugh. Having introduced himself, a stranger on a train starts up a conversation with something like, I have a small house in Antibes. Friends have been kind enough to say I have made it comfortable. The cook there, in his simple seaside way, is one of the best I have.
There is no cook in West Palm, or anywhere else, but the fact remains that we have a small house in West Palm. And Nat and Gus were there for Christmas and it was great – reading by the pool all day and then noisy dinners in the soft warm air. Oh and most mornings Nat cycled off to Mar-a-Lago, to observe…
My wife and Eliza stayed on, but I came back to Brooklyn with Inez on December 31. We joined my younger brother, Jaime, my much younger half-brother, a whole generation younger, and his wife Isa. She’s Spanish and he’s bilingual – he was born there. They’d spent the holiday in Thugz Mansion, and it was their first time in New York. And they’d had a thrilling week…
So the four of us, me and Inez, Jaime and Isa, were making a festive night of it. New Year’s Eve. Drinks round the crackling hearth. And we were well into dinner when the doorbell rang.
It was a local posse. ‘Look!’ they said, pointing upwards. Cinders were streaming out of the cracked fifth-floor window. 911 had already been called.
There’s a fleet of fire trucks pulling up outside the house, I told Elena on the phone. She seemed to be holding herself together, but poor Eliza was frantic, because it was happening in her room
