And his destined mood? The road outside the house (194 Newland Park, Hull, Yorks) was not much travelled, and in its spare time served as a bike track for local children; they sorely irritated Larkin, who objected not to their cries and chatter so much as their ‘presence’. He wrote to a very old friend about them, the ever-gruff Colin Gunner (now a misanthropic old swine – and Catholic convert – living in a caravan). ‘I had the pleasure’, he regaled Gunner, ‘of seeing one fall off his new tricycle, and set up a howl.’ I find I’m unwilling to imagine that pleasure taking facial form; anyway, he wasn’t pleased for long. ‘Instead of cuffing him about the ears the father walked him up and down in his arms. Grrr.’ Cheered to see a child in distress, enraged to see a sympathetic parent: Larkin’s destined mood was a candid and (slightly) playful inversion of the human norms.
In less than a week it would be New Year’s Day. ‘Happy ’85 – hope we stay alive,’ he said in a note to Conquest. Bob (b. 1917) had thirty years yet to come; Philip had eleven months.
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The poet’s familiar, steady-state ailments – insomnia, hay fever, piles, constipation, pre-thrombotic leg, pre-arthritic neck – were joined by ‘cardio-spasms’, confirmed by a Dr Aber, who also thought it worth noting that Larkin had ‘cancer phobia and fear of dying’. The most ominous development, it turned out, was ‘a funny feeling’ in the back of the throat. Sydney Larkin – he of the golden eagle and the paired lightning shafts – died at sixty-three (cancer). This portent now became a fixed idea. Philip was sixty-two.
His oesophagus was removed on June 11, 1985; it contained ‘a great deal of unpleasant stagnant material’, according to a Dr Royston; it was cancerous (and there were secondary tumours). Monica’s pre-operative forecast – ‘six months’ – was thus confirmed. She decided Larkin should not be told; and he never asked (‘felt I had enough to worry about’, he meekly informed a penpal).
In the post-operative period a never-identified visitor to the ICU at the Nuffield gave Larkin a bottle of Scotch. On June 19 he drank ‘most of it’ and flooded his lungs; he was unconscious for five days. Three weeks later a friend drove him back to Newland Park. At the end of August he fell backwards down the stairs.
By November he was ‘deathly thin’, and of course ‘intensely depressed’. He told Monica, in what she called his ‘lugubrious’ mode, that he felt he was ‘spiralling down towards extinction’. ‘He said it with a fascinated horror’ – looking as though he ‘was about to burst into tears’. After completing what he called ‘a wasted life’, he had ‘nothing to live for’. Now he was bearing the full weight of the closing sentence of ‘The View’ (1972), whose third and last stanza runs:
Where has it gone, the lifetime?
Search me. What’s left is drear.
Unchilded and unwifed, I’m Able to view that clear:
So final. And so near.
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‘I’ve been telling him this for – for forty years,’ said Kingsley. ‘Listen, you bloody fool, we all fear death, you bloody fool. But what we fear is dying. And you, you bloody fool, you fear being dead. You bloody fool.’
I said, ‘I bet he fears dying too. He says so. “…yet the dread / Of dying, and being dead, / Flashes afresh to hold and horrify”.’
‘Yes, but once you’ve got the dying out of the way, what’s wrong with being dead?’
Jane, who was leaving the kitchen (for her lie-down), paused at the doorway. ‘Did he mind it – all those centuries before he was born?’
‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘That’s what’s wrong with the poem. He can’t make not being alive sound horrifying. Or even irksome.’
It was mid-afternoon on Christmas Day, 1977, and on December 23 ‘Aubade’ had appeared, with some fanfare, in the TLS (we had an open copy on the table, staked out with wine bottles and chutney jars). I was twenty-eight and Kingsley, as ever, was the same age as Larkin.
‘He’s answering you here, Dad. “And specious stuff that says No rational being / Can fear a thing it will not feel…” Specious. Attractive but suspect.’
‘I know what it means.’
‘So he’s…he’s finding rationality suspect. And trusting in his superstition.’
‘Which is de-universalising, don’t you find? I mean, how many readers are bloody fools about being dead…Look. Even his technique wanders off. “…Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing / That this is what we fear – no sight, no sound, / No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, / Nothing to love or link with…” Listen, mate. If there’s nothing to think with, you won’t know or care if there’s nothing to link with, you bloody fool. Pitiful rhyme, that.’
‘Pitiful. And two fears, and two nots in one line…Quite a poem, though. You used to be like that, Dad, didn’t you. Jelly-kneed and pant-wetting about being dead?’
‘Balls,’ he said, not lifting his eyes from the page. ‘Only about dying. I never gave a toss about being dead.’
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In his early thirties Larkin tried – in my view with considerable success – to imagine ‘the moment of death’. And I’m bearing in mind that he was already an admirer of Wilfred Owen (and would go on to write two essays on him, in 1963 and 1975). That final moment, he imagined, ‘must be a little choppy, a fribbling [stammering] as the currents of life fray against the currents of death’.
But then too the moment of death takes more than a
