Maybe nobody really knew him. Except Margaret Monica Beale Jones. She knew what he was as a man (she was tough enough to sustain that) and she knew what he was as a poet.
My father’s aversion to Monica survived Larkin’s death – largely because she fell into the habit of ringing him up, most nights, to reminisce drunkenly and interminably about the love of her life. ‘Grief?’ said Kingsley after an eighty-minute session. ‘No. She’s glorying in it.’
But in truth Monica had little else to glory in, and less and less as the years went by. In 1988 she had the Collected Poems and ‘Letter to a Friend About Girls’ (in which she and the others ‘have their world…where they work, and age, and put off men / By being unattractive’), and in 1992 she had the Selected Letters, where she saw the most elaborate belittlement of all.* Monica lived on in Newland Park, alone and semi-bedridden, until 2001. ‘Oh, he was a bugger,’ she told Andrew Motion. ‘He lied to me, the bugger, but I loved him.’
During a stay in hospital (one of many in his final year), he was visited by Monica, of course, and also by Maeve and also by Betty (his ‘loaf-haired secretary’). ‘I didn’t want to see Maeve,’ he told Betty. ‘I wanted to see Monica to tell her I love her’…Is it merely sentimental to fantasise about a deathbed wedding (perhaps the only kind of wedding he could honestly respect)? In which case Monica would have passed her remaining sixteen years as Larkin’s widow, and not just as one of the spinsters he left behind.
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‘When I was young’, he said in an interview, ‘I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realised it was just children I didn’t like…Children are very horrible, aren’t they? Selfish, noisy, cruel, vulgar little brutes.’
As he got older Kingsley, too, devoted some leisure to the defamation of children. ‘This anti-child routine of yours,’ I once said to him (as a freshly smitten parent). ‘It’s very occasionally quite funny. And I know it’s intentionally mean-spirited. But is it meant to be fatuous?’ Asked by his tightened lips to elaborate, I said, ‘Well – hark at the pot calling the kettle black. What d’you think you were until you were twelve?’
And this at least gave him pause. Larkin, though, would have had his answer ready. ‘You know I was never a child,’ he announced in a letter of 1980. Was this a prelude to some paedophobic refinement, perhaps? No. He soberly continued: ‘my life began at 21, or 31 more likely. Say with the publication of The Less Deceived’…That is, November 1955, when he was thirty-three. But actually February 1948, when he was twenty-five, has greater explanatory power: ‘I am in bad spirits because of my father’ – who had only weeks to live. ‘I feel I have got to make a big mental jump – to stop being a child and become an adult…’
This was a serious recognition, and one that might have led to some serious thought about that adult known as Sydney Larkin. Instead, Philip responded to the death as follows: he underwent religious instruction; he got himself engaged to Ruth (an avowedly ‘provisional’ engagement, though one solemnised with a ring); and he moved in with his widowed mother for a ‘frightful’ twenty-five months. He didn’t jump into adulthood. During this time his romantic life sagged and his artistic life ceased.
And yet: ‘Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.’ I find this epigram fishy on more than one level. Alliterative and ‘eminently quotable’, it was clearly long premeditated; but in retrospect it sounds like a (failing) attempt to glory in gloom. That vein of stubborn persistence was instantly identified by Wystan Auden (they met just once, at a dinner party given by Stephen Spender, in 1972).
Auden: ‘How do you like living in Hull?’
Larkin: ‘I’m no unhappier there than I should be anywhere else.’
Auden: ‘Naughty naughty! Mother wouldn’t like it!’
Telling the story years later (in the Paris Review), Larkin said he found the remark ‘very funny’, which it is; but it is alarmingly salient, too. What Auden saw was a defensive façade – and one so obvious that he could greet it only with amicable satire.
The façade was shakily defending Larkin’s failure to construct so much as a remotely and minimally convincing life. And he knew it, he ‘viewed it clear’: this deciding truth, like death itself, stays ‘on the edge of vision, / A small unfocused blur, a standing chill’, but a blur that regularly ‘flashes afresh to hold and horrify’. And as we know, it was a fate that he had prearranged (with some loftiness of spirit) in his early twenties; prompted by Yeats, he bowed to a transparently false opposition between ‘the life’ and ‘the work’ (as if the two were somehow mutually exclusive). And when the work, the poems, duly retreated from him (the date he gives is 1974), he found himself helplessly marooned in ‘a fucked up life’. ‘My life seems stuffed full of nothing’; ‘What an absurd, empty life!’; ‘I suddenly see myself as a freak and a failure, & my way of life as a farce.’
Together with its almost sinister memorability, and its unique combination of the lapidary and the colloquial, the key distinction of Larkin’s corpus is its humour: he is by many magnitudes the funniest poet in English (and I include all exponents of light verse). Nor, needless to say, is his comedy just a pleasant additive; it is foundational…Was he helped in this – was he somehow ‘swayed on’ – by living a hollow life, ‘a farce’, ‘absurd’, and ‘stuffed full of nothing’? Well, not nothing; his life was stuffed full of the kind of repetitive indignities that make us say, If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry. Yes, and if you didn’t cry, you’d laugh. This is the
