The speaker was Monica Beale Jones (whose mouth was perhaps a centimetre away from mine): Monica, a burly sixty-year-old in gunmetal satin tank top, thick brown trousers (my memory vacillates between crushed velvet and leatherette), and slablike black shoes with steel buckles; she also sported horn-rimmed glasses, earrings the size of horseshoes, and cropped tufty hair…In early photographs, from the late 1940s, her face is intelligent and shapely, and expresses a touching, striven-for self-possession. By May 1982 that face was fuller and squarer and naturally coarser. And it wasn’t just masculine; it was male. Rowdily, pugnaciously male, like her voice. When I visualise her now, I see an urka out on the razzle.*3 At this point Larkin had been with Monica for over thirty years.
And let’s have a look at him while we’re at it. I said that at Oxford he dressed with some flamboyance, but the cravats and the crimson flannels were put aside soon after graduation. And that evening in London he simply passed for what he’d eventually become – a fairly senior provincial archivist and administrator (who, most counterintuitively, also happened to be the widely beloved national poet). From the moment they entered the house,*4 PL exuded not benevolence so much as utter harmlessness, prim, timorous, and demure, as if content to hope that nothing would go too gravely awry. His demeanour, in short, was that of the politely longsuffering wife of a notoriously impossible husband.
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In the early 1980s I knew nothing much about Philip and Monica. I know a lot about them now. And nothing stands out as starkly as the letter quoted below.
They met in September 1946; by the summer of 1950 PL ‘had come to me’, as Monica quaintly put it; and in October 1952 he wrote to her with this advice:
Dear, I must sound very pompous…It’s simply that in my view you would do much better to revise, drastically, the amount you say and the intensity with which you say it…I do want to urge you with all love and kindness…I’d even go so far as to make 3 rules.
One. Never say more than two sentences, or very rarely three, without waiting for an answer or comment from whoever you’re speaking to; Two, abandon altogether your harsh didactic voice, & use only the soft musical one (except in special cases); & Three, don’t do more than glance at your interlocutor (wrong word?) once or twice while speaking. You’re getting a habit of boring your face up or round into the features of your listener – don’t do it! It’s most trying.
Now this is the kind of therapeutic routine that would need to be rehearsed at least twice a week. Rehearsed with all love and kindness, and also high moral energy (a smattering of sexual legitimacy would have been useful too – they were both about thirty). But it was an effort never made by him, and never made by her. In the early 1980s the Monica idiolect was just as PL described it in the early 1950s.
So they had their world, with its cosy jokes and whimsies, its pet names and imagined menageries, its confidences and indulgences, its childlike attempts at the physical (‘I’m sorry to have failed you!’). That was their own business. But when they mingled with others Philip was inflicting on the company what he had somehow managed to inflict on himself: unignorable proximity to a deafening windbag. And she wasn’t his weird sister or his crazy cousin: she was the woman you would have to call the love of his life.
A female observer of Saul Bellow’s amatory ups and downs remarked that he ‘was the kind of man who thought he could change women…And he couldn’t. I mean who can? You don’t.’ That’s right, you don’t: they don’t change you and you don’t change them. But it is surely a sacred obligation – to go on trying to impede, or at least retard, your lover’s journey into monstrousness.
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I said my goodbyes and then steered the black Mini to the significant house on the street off Ladbroke Grove, a street quite thickly flanked by trees of cherry blossom and apple blossom…
‘After she told the very long story about the rector,’ I said with my face in my hands, ‘she told a very long story about an alderman. A remarkably similar story. From which she also emerged with obscure credit.’ I looked up, blinking. ‘And you know, I sort of warmed to Monica at least to start with. I told myself, Relax – it’s only another boho evening. But she isn’t at all boho, and neither is he. No, they’re anti-boho. They’re bourgeois fogeys, the pair of them.’
Julia said, ‘Now sit back and have a big whisky. Is she mentally ill d’you think? I hate mad people.’
‘So do I. I couldn’t decide. Dad says she is. What’s the word, Asperger’s.’
‘It can’t be that. Asperger’s is meant to be mild.’
‘Well. She thoroughly enjoyed herself – she thought she was in wonderful form…That’s what I couldn’t get over. The gurgling.’
‘What gurgling?’
‘Are you very tired?’
‘No, not very. Go on. And have another big whisky. And talk. Talk now, or you’ll never sleep a wink.’
…Well, Julia, at dinner, in the intervals between one dumbfounding soliloquy and another dumbfounding soliloquy (a soliloquy, in which a stage character gives vent to thoughts ‘when alone or regardless of hearers’), Monica took little breaks or breathers; and during these she audibly gurgled, a continuous series of breathy gulps and grunts and swallows. What did this sound express? I was on Monica’s left, and it sounded to me like a stupor of self-satisfaction…
‘And I’d heard that same gurgling before. You know Robinson. He’s got a demented aunt who lives in a small manor house in Sussex. Surrounded by hopeful young relatives like Robinson – more or less patiently awaiting her death. And Aunt Esme, she seems all right, but she has this fatal flaw. She refuses to believe it isn’t May 16, 1958. Every day.
‘Rob told
