‘They finally found it and presented it to her, and she immediately went all smug and serene – at last a bit of sense…She curled up with it on an armchair, the yellowing, crackling relic of the Daily Mail. The headline was USSR LAUNCHES SPUTNIK III. And for half an hour Auntie Esme gurgled, exactly like Monica. And she gurgled gloatingly.’
‘…Mad but right.’
‘Vindicated, finally. Right all along. As if telling herself, “See? Some have said I’m a bore – but I’m not! I’m hugely entertaining!”…Ah well. There was a sweet moment early on. Nicolas spontaneously embraced his godfather, and Larkin embraced him back. For a moment he looked very fond and very gentle. And very happy. I could see what Dad meant when he called his manner “sunlit”.’
‘Sunlit. That’s a nice word to use,’ said Julia. ‘Come on, finish that and let’s go up.’
When he left the house the next morning a summery windstorm was in boisterous operation and having it all its own way – spelling the end of the spring blossoms, the cherry blossom, the apple blossom, for another year. And now the pink and the white buds and petals surged and swirled in reckless celebration, as if all the trees were suddenly getting married.
The fireside chat
In May 1982 I was thirty-two and Larkin was fifty-nine. In December 1985 I was thirty-six (with a wife and a son, and another child on the way) and Larkin was dead.
…Haemorrhoids, neck-ache, an enlarged liver, giddiness, and other familiar complaints; and then some difficulty in swallowing. A ‘barium meal’ disclosed a tumour in his alimentary canal. His oesophagus would have to come out.
The night before the operation he summoned Monica from the kitchen to the sitting room. She was very poorly too: acute inflammation of the nerve endings (shingles). Beyond in the hall their walking sticks hung side by side…
The two of them settled in front of the gas fire. He said,
‘Suppose I’ve got cancer. Suppose I’ve got this. How long would you give me?’
Monica felt that ‘she couldn’t lie to him’, not then. So she said, rightly or wrongly but very accurately,
‘Six months.’
Larkin said, ‘…Oh. Is that all?’
*1 This obscure unease – it felt like a sin of omission, as yet undisclosed but always on the point of revealing itself. And there was a spiritual edge to it. I imagined that the religiously inclined would know how it felt: a fear of falling short, of missing out on something transformative – the Resurrection, the Rapture…
*2 ‘Life is first boredom, then fear. / Whether or not we use it, it goes, / And leaves what something hidden from us chose, / And age, and then the only end of age.’
*3 Dating back to Russia’s Time of Troubles in the 1600s, the urkas or urki constituted a dynamic subculture of hereditary criminals. In the Bolshevik Gulag they were classified as Socially Friendly Elements and were given the status of trusties; the urkas were thus empowered and encouraged to torment the counters and the fascists – i.e., the intellectuals, very much including the poets.
*4 They had spent the day at Lord’s Cricket Ground in St John’s Wood, watching a Test match between England and Pakistan. Monica immediately started putting everyone right about the visiting team’s spin bowlers. ‘IT WASN’T ABDUL QADIR! IT WAS IQBAL QASIM!’
How to Write Impersonal Forces
Human beings are essentially social animals, and the anglophone novel is essentially a social form; it is in addition a rational form and a moral form. So one shouldn’t be surprised by the fact that, on the little planet called Fiction, social realism is the lone superpower. And although most modern writers, once or twice in their writing lives, will want to get out from under it and go off somewhere else, social realism still stands as their primary residence – their fixed address.
Literary experimentalists can do anything they want – indeed, they have already done just that by confronting you with a literary experiment. Literary social realists are temperamentally drawn the other way: they embrace solid conventions, and then work within and around them; and as they embark on a novel they reflexively accept that certain social norms will still apply. Readers are your guests, after all, and they come to your house as strangers; so you reassure them and make them feel at home, and then you start warming them up…
Now, if you ever paid a call on Anthony Trollope, the master social realist, I’m sure you’d be suavely received. Trollope was proud of his professional facility (he spent only three hours a day in his study, and produced over forty novels), and he would want to regale you with the fruits of his success (the house, the grounds, the dining room, the cellar, and other incidentals). Far more importantly, though, he would greet you with an alert and inquisitive eye, and would want to stimulate you into vividness…We now ask ourselves, What would James Joyce, the master experimentalist, be like to pay a call on?
The cryptic directions you were given lead you to a house that does not exist, or, rather, to a vast and gusty demolition site through whose soot and grit you can glimpse, in the middle distance, one unrazed building. And so you slither and hurdle your way down there and squelch through the mud and somehow
