Still, in Larkin’s case…‘The Life with a Hole in it’ is the title of a poem of 1972; Larkin’s was a hole with a life in it. He kept it very thin, lenten, and gaunt, with nothing ‘worth looking back on’. So maybe the scattering, the fraying of the currents, was quickly over.
—————
June 20, 1985. At this time (following the episode with the whisky) the Guardian was publishing daily bulletins on PL’s health. I called my father and said, ‘Are you going up there?’
‘I offered. With Hilly. But he…Anyway, they’re saying he’s out of danger.’
‘You offered. And he what, he didn’t fancy it?’ Kingsley wasn’t really inclined to talk but I pressed him. ‘Why, do you think?’
‘…Because he might lose his nerve and he doesn’t want us to see him gibbering.’
October 5. ‘And you still read him every night,’ I asked. ‘Really every night?’
‘Yeah, one or two. Last thing. As the other half of my nightcap.’
‘Any good stuff in that?’ I meant the letter on the kitchen table. ‘Is he still off solids?’
‘Uh…I can’t fuckin eat fuck all. It really is scaring…Three months ago my doctors said I should slowly get better. To my mind I am slowly getting worse. Here’s a quite funny bit. The GP listens to all this sympathetically, but rather as if he were the next door neighbour – without suggesting that it has any special relevance to his own knowledge or responsibilities. He signs off by saying he’s “not long for this world”. But he’s been saying that since he was twenty. Nothing about Monica.’
‘Christ,’ I said wonderingly. ‘How is Monica?…I mean to live with.’
‘Christ. How d’you think?’
December 3. ‘When are you going up there?’ Philip had done the dying. Now he was being dead (and awaiting burial). ‘Are you expected to speak?’
‘It’s on the ninth. Yes.’
The dying took place on December 2 – on a Monday, in the small hours.
On November 29, at home, he collapsed twice, in the sitting room, and then in the downstairs toilet, wedging the door shut with his feet. This is Motion:
Monica was unable to force the door open. She couldn’t even make him hear her – he had left his hearing aid behind – but she could hear him. ‘Hot! Hot!’ he was whispering piteously. He had fallen with his face pressed to one of the central heating pipes that ran round the lavatory wall.
She enlisted a neighbour and managed to haul Philip into the kitchen. He asked for some Complan; while she prepared it she rang for an ambulance. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Bun,’ he said as he was being stretchered back to the Nuffield…And he did see her on Saturday, and again on Sunday, but he was too thoroughly tranquillised to make any sense. On Sunday evening she went home to wait for the phone call, which came at half past one.
Michael Bowen, a recent addition to the circle (a fellow jazz buff and one of life’s willing hands), ferried Monica back and forth on that last weekend. ‘If Philip hadn’t been drugged, he would have been raving,’ Bowen told Motion (in 1991): ‘He was that frightened.’ Well, maybe the drugs neutralised what there was of his courage, too, as well as much of his fear; and the fact remains that he wasn’t raving. ‘Why aren’t I screaming?’ he said in a letter, back in January – picking up on a line in ‘The Old Fools’ (1973): ‘Why aren’t they screaming?’
Yes, why aren’t they screaming? Because one doesn’t, because people don’t. His middle-class inhibitions saw him through, along with his middle-class conscientiousness. Like a good boy he amended his will and turned up for all his appointments (including one with his dentist); he left clear instructions on the disposal – the shredding – of his voluminous (and reportedly ‘desperate’) diaries and notebooks; and he wrote, or rather dictated, a lengthy, calm, generous, and conspicuously graceful letter to Kingsley, the only male friend who excited in him anything that resembled love.
His last letter was in due course followed by his last words. At the very end he was sufficiently composed to deliver them, faintly, to the nurse who was holding his hand. He said, ‘I am going to the inevitable.’
December 9. ‘How was it up there?’
‘It was all right, I suppose.’
Kingsley poured a huge glass of Macallan’s and took it off to bed. That was one part of his nightcap. Would he be reaching for the other half?…To him it was more than the loss of a poet, as he told Conquest in a letter – the loss of a presence.
I sat on with my mother.
‘How was that Monica?’
‘She didn’t come. Too shattered, apparently. Poor old thing. What’s she going to do now?…Your father can’t stand her of course.’
‘Gaw, his women. Mum, you used to say he was scared of girls.’
‘I always respected Philip very much. He was the nicest of Kings’s friends. But think. He had a stutter, and then early baldness…’
‘And early deafness, and inch-thick specs since childhood. But what I mean is, if he was frightened of girls, why were his girls so frightening – in themselves?’
‘They were all frightening, the ones I knew. Even little Ruth. Very proud…You know, don’t you, that he dreaded the thought of imposing himself. And probably the girls who were drawn to him thought, Well it’s up to me to do the imposing.’
I tried to weigh this. Then I said, ‘A long day in Hull. Mum, you must be exhausted. Did it smell of fish?’
‘Not particularly. It was far too cold to smell of anything. They say it smells of fish just before it rains…Your father was very lowered by it all.’
‘Well Dad did love him.’
‘On the train there he kept saying, “Why have I never been here before? Why’ve I never been to his house?” And on the train back he
