As we take our leave let us recall a very late poem (1979) that captures some of his personal pathos, his muted benignity, and his exquisitely tentative tenderness. One day he was mowing the lawn and ran over a hedgehog in the taller grass. ‘When it happened,’ said Monica, ‘he came in from the garden howling. He was very upset. He’d been feeding the hedgehog, you see – he looked out for it…He started writing about it soon afterwards.’ The result was ‘The Mower’ (closely related, here, to the Reaper), which ends:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
* Of his (never-finished) third novel Larkin wrote to Patsy in 1953: ‘You know, I can’t write this book: if it is to be written at all it should be largely an attack on Monica, & I can’t do that, not while we are still on friendly terms, and I’m not sure it even interests me sufficiently to go on.’
The Novelist April 2005
On June 10, 1995, I rang him in Vermont and said,
‘Happy birthday. And congratulations.’
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘But what exactly are the congratulations for?’
‘You’re eighty – you’ve made old bones. You should be feeling very proud and grand. Old bones is a great thing. A very great thing.’
I said it more or less unreflectingly, just to buck him up and give him heart, and I was pleased to hear him laughing (‘Uh – uh – uh’); but a little reflection informs me that old bones is indeed a very great thing.
‘Strange Meeting’, the last poem written by Wilfred Owen (1893–1918), proceeds:
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
‘Strange friend,’ I said, ‘here is no cause to mourn.’
‘None,’ said that other, ‘save the undone years…’
Old bones will give you plenty of causes to mourn, naturally, but you wouldn’t linger long on the undone years. Old bones has the power to enervate death, depriving it of its tragic complexity. Dying two months short of your ninetieth birthday: this may call for any number of adjectives, but not tragic.
—————
I was at my desk in the coastal village of José Ignacio, in the province of Maldonado, in the country of Uruguay: Uruguay: civically, socially, and humanly the princess of the nether America.
When we were down there – and we were down there, with intermissions, from 2003 to 2006 – I worked in a separate building a hundred yards from the house (it had a bedroom and a bathroom, and would in fact soon serve as the self-contained cabana of the Hitch, who was coming south for a long weekend). To get to my study, Elena would climb down the external steps from the balcony and walk past the swimming pool, which in April was in my opinion already unusably cold. Because in Latin America, below the latitude of Equador, April is the beginning of fall. Elena was coming by to tell me something.
This study of mine was glass-fronted and gave you a horizon-wide vista of the sea, which surged about us on all three fronts of the peninsula – the South Atlantic Ocean, with its occasional whales and daily cloud-shadows (and the cloud-shadows always looked like whales idling or basking just beneath the foam); the distinctively pale blue sky issued its weather forecasts, redder than fire when the sun went down, or else racked at dawn by portents of coming tormentas – thunderstorms – that were prehistoric in their power…A human shape now encroached on the stillness, and I knew by her tread and her blank face exactly what she had come to tell me.*1 Elena stood there outside the window slowly shaking her head.
‘How did you hear?’ I said as I stepped out into the air.
‘It was on the news. The funeral’s tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?’ I said. ‘Well that’s that. There’s nothing I can do.’ I waved an uncommunicative and even accusatory arm at her and went back inside.
…Saul, then, had desisted, desisted from living, stopped being alive. So I went back inside and tasted the ancient flavours of desistence and defeat. And helplessness. Also a kind of terrestrial disaffection: the paradise around me didn’t become infernal or purgatorial; it just became ordinary…
An hour later I was still muttering it – There’s nothing I can do – when Elena reappeared on the far side of the glass. You see, Elena, as well as being Elena, was an American, and unresigned. She was smiling now and the red-foiled ticket she was holding streamed and palpitated in the wind.
…So Carrasco Airport in Montevideo, then Ministro Pistarini Airport (known as Ezeiza) in Buenos Aires, then (eleven hours and five minutes later) Kennedy Airport in New York, then Logan Airport in Boston; and I got to Crowninshield Road just as the first of the towncars was leaving for the cemetery in Brattleboro, Vermont – a distance of a hundred miles, to add to my five and a half thousand; and meanwhile, here, winter was stepping aside for spring.
—————
In the little reception area of the local synagogue there was a cardboard box full of beanies – black skullcaps, yarmulkes. Rosamund took one, and when she saw me hesitate she said,
‘You needn’t bother.’
‘I don’t mind. And I’m married to a Jew.’
‘Well take it, but you won’t have to put it on.’
Just as the two of us settled in our seats (while the rabbi ululated) an elderly woman turned and with a stiffly and rapidly jutting hand pointed to the crown of her head.
Rosamund whispered, ‘She wants you to put it on.’
I put it on.
…Earlier that day, in the Jewish section of Morningside Cemetery, a black cloth with a white Star of David
