A few weeks after Philip Larkin's death in the winter of 1985, his colleague
Betty Mackereth fulfilled one of his last requests. Taking his diaries —
some 30 volumes — into his office at the university library in Hull, she fed
them into a shredder, keeping only the covers, before sending the looped and
tangled remains to be incinerated. By nightfall, history's best chance of
reconstructing the life and thoughts of the most acclaimed English post-war
poet had vanished (to borrow one of Larkin's own phrases) in slow, suspended
skeins of smoke.
What only one person knew was that an archive existed that, to a large extent,
duplicated those diaries. It consisted of more than 1,400 letters — as well
as 500 cards and telegrams, and scores of photographs — sent over 40 years
to Larkin's longest-standing girlfriend and closest confidante, Monica
Jones. Written in his small, neat hand, they chronicle — often day by day,
and sometimes hour by hour — every aspect of his life, from the pork chops
that he reheated for supper to the experiences that shaped his poems.
That the collection has remained a secret for so long is due to the sad
decline Monica Jones suffered in the years following Larkin's death. Living
on in the house that the two had shared, she was too confused to remember
how much of his correspondence she had hoarded. Only now has their existence
become public knowledge, following her death in 2001 and the recent decision
of her executors to put the letters up for sale. Although Larkin left other
notable correspondences, none of them are anything like as extensive, or as
intimate. "His letters to friends like Kingsley Amis and John Wain were
more about things like jazz," says Joan Winterkorn of the bookseller
Bernard Quaritch, which is handling the sale. "Whereas with these,
because he and Monica knew each other so well, you get a sense of him
talking to himself."
"From a biographical and literary point of view, it is exceptional,"
says Tim Rogers, deputy keeper of western manuscripts at the Bodleian
Library in Oxford. "It's very unusual to get such a long run of
letters, and I can't think of a larger collection by a major contemporary
writer." The asking price is £200,000, which the Bodleian is determined
to raise, by public appeal if necessary. If it fails, the danger is that the
letters will go abroad, though everyone concerned is doing their utmost to
ensure this does not happen.
The discovery has come as a surprise even to those closest to Larkin. Anthony
Thwaite, a friend of the poet's since 1958, had little luck with Monica when
he edited Larkin's Selected Letters 1940-1985, 10 years ago. "Monica
was in a pretty poor, disorganised state," he remembers. "She
scrabbled around and found 20 letters, of which I used 15 in the book."
Andrew Motion uncovered a larger cache while researching his official
biography of Larkin, but when Joan Winterkorn came to inspect the dusty
envelopes and cardboard boxes containing the archive, it was clear to her
that the great majority had lain undisturbed for many years. Motion, who is
one of Larkin's literary executors, is now hoping to edit the newly
discovered letters for publication.
For anyone whose idea of Larkin is the lonely, curmudgeonly, elegiac narrator
of his poems, the biggest surprise in the letters is their sense of fun —
often directed at himself. Among the cartoons sprinkled through the pages is
one of himself as the Ancient Mariner with the albatross around his neck,
ostracised by his university colleagues; another, illustrating the
difficulty of buying clothes when you have short legs but a long body, has
him exchanging glances with a basset hound.
Then there are the rabbits: card after sentimental card featuring nursery
pictures of rabbits dancing, playing cricket, queuing for roast chestnuts
(one of his favourite childhood possessions was a toy rabbit, and he
remained devoted to the animals). "Dearest bun" is his favourite
way of addressing Monica, and though such endearments are common among
lovers, he brings to them an unusual depth of feeling. A Valentine's Day
verse sent in 1959 ends as follows:
Knowledge comes but wisdom lingers
Years sweep by us like the wind
What is closed in Fortune's fingers
Year by year for us to find?
When the rabbit's shanks grow leaner
Time bites keener, life looks meaner
Come rose [sine?] spina —
Petals flutter to the floor,
Though the thought & Time's unnerving
Shall we swear to have no swerving?
O in 1984
Still retain the sordid habit of consorting with a rabbit.
Let me always call you mine, still remain my Valentine.
Larkin met the most important woman in his life at University College,
Leicester, in the autumn of 1946. Both were 24; he was the newly appointed
assistant librarian, she an English lecturer. Although they had been
students at Oxford at the same time, they had never noticed each other —
surprising, given the larger-than-life character Monica turned out to be.
Photographs show her as deceptively demure, in a twinset or full-length
summer dress, with black-rimmed spectacles and her shoulder-length blonde
hair pulled tightly back. In reality, says Anthony Thwaite, "She was
quite striking, in a noisy way: she had a very loud voice and strong
opinions, and wore bright lipstick. When I first met her, my immediate
reaction was that she was rather an unlikely person for Philip to be
involved with, though I got to like her later on. She was very kind, with a
fine sense of humour and wonderful energy. In some ways she was an actress
manquée."
So striking was she that two of the leading novelists of the day based
characters on her. In Eating People Is Wrong, Malcolm Bradbury — another of
her pupils — presents her as Dr Viola Masefield, "always full of
protest"; in Lucky Jim, Larkin's friend Kingsley Amis portrays her as
the neurotic Margaret Peel. It was, says Thwaite, "rather an unfair
portrait. Kingsley didn't take to her, and she didn't take to Kingsley".
This explains why — as we shall see — Larkin felt free to pour out to her
his jealousy of Amis's success.
At this stage, Larkin was hoping to make his living as a novelist: his reason
for taking a job as a librarian was that it offered the security and quiet
life he needed in order to write. Since he had grown up in Coventry,
Leicester seemed the kind of city where he would feel at home. By the time
he arrived there, his first collection of poems, The North Ship, had been
published, and two novels — Jill, and A Girl in Winter — were about to
appear. This gave him an air of glamour, and though Monica was not
immediately attracted to him (his looks, she later told Andrew Motion, "were
against him"), she enjoyed his company and seems to have been the one
who initiated their correspondence. Larkin's first letter to her is dated
December 21,1946, and begins:
"Dear Monica,
What a very pleasant surprise your letter was.
I was alone in the library and feeling very sour and disinclined to work &
your letter removed the first condition though the second is a mountain no
faith can move."
It was to be three years before they became lovers. For one thing, Larkin was
involved with another girl, Ruth Bowman, to whom he would become briefly
engaged. Nevertheless, there is a strong sense in the early letters of him
and Monica growing more intimate. His eccentric choice of stationery sets
the tone — from pink to searing lemon, and even black-bordered mourning
paper, with which he pokes fun at his own glumness ("No, no one's dead,
not quite anyway. But this paper must be used up, and by who better than
myself?").
By the end of 1949, he and Monica were close enough for her to send him a "rich
and lavish" Christmas present — possibly a cravat. He, meanwhile, sends
her a voucher "To be used for cancelling tutorials, refusing dinner
parties, postponing lectures and declining invitations to rambles,
discussion-groups, coffee circles..." More significant, perhaps, is
something Monica didn't send: a piece of university notepaper, preserved
among the letters, covered with bright-pink lipstick kisses.
In other ways, his life had become frustrating. He was unsure whether to marry
Ruth or break up with her; he felt suffocated by the demands of his widowed
mother; he was bored by his work, and had got bogged down in his third,
never-to-be-completed novel. Looking for a way out, he applied for a job at
Queen's University in Belfast, and was accepted. Although he and Monica
finally slept together in the summer of 1950, it wasn't enough to change his
mind. In September he moved to Northern Ireland, and their correspondence
began in earnest.
Monica certainly didn't consider these letters sacrosanct. The fact that the
envelopes are often scribbled over with shopping lists, lecture notes or
cricket scores is one of the things that makes the letters seem so
immediate; another is Larkin's fondness for setting the scene. "At
present I'm in the Common Room," he writes in the snowy January of
1951, "...an apple tart and a bottle of milk within reach... nearly all
the students back now, & they clatter, whistle, shout, bawl, sing,
stamp, stumble and prance about the stairs. Meals have restarted, but
they're 200 yards off in the same dingy union, which is just as nasty as it
sounds... I am wearing as many clothes as I can remember. Are you short of
fuel? I bet your college & yr cells are monstrously cold..."
Sometimes he gives an impressionistic sketch ("Sunday night — a
plum-coloured dusk — houses and trees in silhouette — a new moon — a star
below it"). If he is listening to the radio, he tells Monica what's on,
wondering if she is tuned into the same programme: The Archers, a test
match, or a news bulletin ("Whoops! Just heard that Princess M. isn't
going to marry Group Captain Fiddlesticks — well, what a frost!").
The letters deal extensively with other writers, dead and alive. Larkin's
enthusiasms range from
D H Lawrence and Thomas Hardy to Katherine Mansfield and Dodie Smith; his
b�tes noires include Kipling, Dickens and, above all, Kingsley Amis. At the
start of the correspondence, "my college friend Amis" is also a
struggling writer, whose lack of money is exacerbated by having a young
family to support. ("Philip Nicol Amis has been joined by a brother,
Martin Louis Amis," he writes in August 1949, "— all doing well,
though where he got the first name from, I don't know.")
All this changed with the publication of Lucky Jim in 1954. Amis's sudden
fame, at a time when Larkin was facing his own shortcomings as a novelist,
inspired bitter envy — particularly as Larkin had given him a good deal of
help with the book. "I came up from London this morning, feeling pretty
tired and fed up after another glimpse of the rich life of the Amis
household," runs a letter of January 1955. "It's not his success I
mind so much as his immunity from worry and hard work, though I mind his
success as well."
The next month he reports that Amis's new novel has been sent to the
publishers: "oh please God, make them return it, with a suggestion that
he Ôrewrites certain passages'. Nothing would delight me more. And I refuse
to believe that he can write a book on his own — or at least a good book...
I sought his company because it gave me a wonderful sense of relief — I've
always needed this 'fourth form friend', with whom I can pretend things are
not as I know they are — and pretended I was like him. Now I don't feel like
pretending any longer... He doesn't like books. He doesn't like reading. And
I wouldn't take his opinion on anything, books, people, places..."
Larkin did remain friendly with Amis, though the letters continue to criticise
his work, and the news that he has left his wife Hilary for Elizabeth Jane
Howard is reported with prurient glee — as are other fragments of gossip. ("Bob
Conquest tells me that John [Wain] is sleeping with Doris Lessing,"
Larkin writes in December 1957.)
Amis is not the only literary figure to attract Larkin's bile. Edith Sitwell
is a "ranting, pretentious old bitch", R S Thomas a "canting,
Welsh Bible-punching never-was", Christopher Isherwood "a swine".
He criticises "the old crook" Robert Graves for recycling "his
rotten tripe" from one book to another, and imagines T H White "swaggering
about in Ireland or Alderney (anywhere to escape tax) with his beard &
filthy sadistic hawks & guns and boring Ôscholarship' & tedious
fantasies. God what a shit." Ted Hughes escapes relatively lightly as a "pretentious
professional Yank" whom Larkin does his best to avoid ("Ted Hughes
tomorrah — Sodom and Gomorrah"). Anthony Powell impresses him
more as a writer than a person: "just a bit under-size, but
pleasant-faced, rather jowly, and grey haired. He talked and laughed a lot,
so that you had the impression that he was funny; in fact, he seemed rather
boyish, recounting cricketing & house-party games..."
But rude as Larkin is about other people, he never imagines that he is above
criticism.
"When I sit among them I feel jokes being poked at me," he writes of
his colleagues at Queen's. "...I am a kind of gaunt schoolmaster type
they simultaneously deride and fear."
Despite this, life in Belfast suited Larkin well. He made friends at the
university, and when not going to dinner parties, bridge evenings, pubs or
jazz clubs, he found plenty of time to work on his poetry. And although he
was writing to Monica five or six times a week, he was happy just to see her
in holidays. Apart from anything else, this left him free to get emotionally
involved with one of his colleagues, Winifred Arnott (the "sweet girl
graduate" for whom he wrote Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album),
and sexually involved with a married woman, Patsy Strang.
Part of Monica's attraction for Larkin was that she was an independent woman
who didn't make too many emotional demands. But when, at the start of 1955,
he prepared to return to England to take charge of the library at Hull, the
question of whether they should marry could hardly be avoided. In a January
29 letter he acknowledges that "this would be a good point to do so. I
have a living wage, you want to pack up your job, we both want — or think we
want — the same kind of life... And we are ageing! I would sooner marry you
than anyone else I know, and in any case I don't want to lose you. The sort
of thing that gives me pause (paws) is wondering whether I do more than just
like you very, very much and find it flattering and easy to stay with you...
Is it right to marry without feeling 'quite sure'? But am I the kind of
person ever to feel 'quite sure'?"
A fortnight later he writes with relief: "Really you couldn't say
anything more to my way of feeling than that you don't like the idea of
getting married... I think what frightens me most about marriage is the
passing-a-law-never-to-be-alone side of it." But the question refuses
to go away.
In June he exclaims: "Oh my dear, how can you believe I love you if I
don't marry you? And yet I do love you, really..." Two years later he
is still agonising: "I feel all too painfully how inadequately I treat
you. I see quite clearly your worth and niceness to me: I see also how
unlikely I am to find anyone more fitted for me... it's only a blend of
relentless selfishness and dropsical romanticism that prevents me facing the
fact."
Monica was to remain at Leicester for the rest of her career, making the most
of occasional weekends and holidays with Larkin. When staying with her he
could also visit his mother, who had moved to Loughborough to be with his
sister — though these trips reminded Larkin how much he hated family life.
Christmas and Easter he found especially purgatorial: "I think it is a
hideous tradition that compels you, through your adult life, to continue
seeing people you have nothing in common with & do not even like... My
sister, in particular, I shd like to see the last of..."
A "Little Easter poem" is how he describes This Be the Verse ("They
f*** you up, your mum and dad...") when sending Monica the typescript.
Looking back on his childhood, he recalls:
"I never remember my parents making a single spontaneous gesture of
affection towards each other."
There are other important clues to the genesis of his poems. One of the jewels
of the collection is a letter from 1957 in which he describes the journey
that was to inspire his masterpiece, The Whitsun Weddings: "I went home
on Saturday afternoon, 1.30 to Grantham — a lovely run, the scorched land
misty with heat, like a kind of bloom of heat — and at every station, Goole,
Doncaster, Retford, Newark, importunate wedding parties, gawky and
vociferous, seeing off couples to London."
Another highlight is a typescript of An Arundel Tomb (inspired by a visit the
two had made to Chichester) with its famous last line — "What
will survive of us is love" — still unresolved. In the accompanying
letter, he refers to a story about Thomas Hardy wanting to be buried near
his first wife: "This leads naturally onto love being stronger than
death: I expect I'm being rather silly, but it is a sentiment that does seem
to me only justifiable if love can stop people from dying, which I don't
think it can... Some bright lad (E.M. F[orster]?) said the opposite of love
isn't hate but individuality (personality, egotism) and I've been feeling
increasingly that it is this that keeps me from love... [which is] a
definite acceptance of the fact that you're not the most important person in
the world."
But there was another obstacle to their settling together, and that was to do
with sex: something he writes about with unusual candour. He talks of his
erotic daydreams — "you've been cavorting around in my mind
dressed in pink shoes and pink pop-beads and nothing else... All much to the
detriment of my typing" — and his fantasies: "You must look
a wonderful sight in fur hat & boots — nothing else? Holding a rawhide
whip? (You see how naturally my mind composes aesthetic montages for you)."
He sends her a "saucy" catalogue ("I don't know whether rabbits
wd look proper in any of them, but you'll enjoy a squint into the underworld")
and makes no secret of his interest in pornography: he tells her that his
friend Robert Conquest has sent him a magazine called Swish, and records
visits to the cinema to see films with names like Girl in a Bikini, and
Nudes of the World. He is also frank about his shortcomings in bed:
"I'm sorry that our lovemaking fizzled out in Devon, as you rightly
noticed. I felt so tired each night through the relaxing air &, I
suppose being on holiday that the grasshopper became a burden very easily.
And of course, qualify it how I may, I am not a highly-sexed person, or, if
I am, it's not in a way that demands constant physical intercourse with
other people... I think sex is a curious thing... A kind of double symbol
that we aren't alone & that we aren't selfish whereas of course we are
alone & we are selfish... Anyway, I'm sorry to have failed with you!
That is always what depresses me: the enormous harvest-homes you deserve,
the few stale shabby crumbs you get."
But his problems were not just to do with tiredness. In another letter, he is "tempted
to say how much I'm affected by sex fear & auto erotic fantasies &
how I feel normal emotional relations & responsibilities a terrible
strain". And writing in 1963, he acknowledges that his fantasies are an
obstruction rather than a stimulus to their sex life:
"As you once said, I dwell in my own imagination. I spend too much time
in erethistic visions — and honestly 95% are about you — to be effective
when I confront you in reality... I feel... remorse for the sort of
stalemate I have brought into your life — & mine. I mean, to put
it more simply, that it seems inconsistent to feel as I do about your lovely
body (& you're quite right, you're absolutely luscious these days) &
yet not get the sort of guiding pleasure from it that one can found one's
life on... Oh hell! It's you talking about elastoplast on your nipples &
sending me into a sort of trance all day."
There are, however, plenty of good times too ("Glad you enjoyed your stay
— I think a lot about our luxurious times in bed, & your nightdress"),
and Larkin's agonising must always be taken with at least a small pinch of
salt. While he certainly suffered from depression, he also indulged
shamelessly in self-pity, and to an objective eye his life had never been
better than in the mid-1950s. Although he didn't immediately take to Hull,
comparing it to Orwell's 1984 ("The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and
old rag mats"), he was finally earning enough money to live
comfortably, and the publication of his poetry collection The Less Deceived
marked, in Andrew Motion's words, "the decisive turning point" of
his career. He and Monica had happy holidays in Sark and Ireland (never on
the Continent: "I do think foreign countries look vulgar & ruined"),
and would rush through their academic duties to attend test matches
together.
But in the 1960s, things took a turn for the worse. The immediate cause was
the death of Monica's mother and father within two months of each other. She
was suddenly dependent on Larkin as never before; but if she hoped he would
ask her to move to Hull, or even marry him, she was to be disappointed.
Instead, he started an affair with one of his colleagues from the library,
Maeve Brennan. The affair was to last, on and off, for 17 years; but
throughout it he continued to be involved with Monica, who knew about Maeve
almost from the start. His letters from this time are full of
self-recrimination. "You must think me quite awful," he writes in
October 1962, "as if I deliberately set out to upset you — I'm so
sorry: it isn't that. I am always oppressed by guilt feelings about the mess
I have got you in... And of course I feel awful about our being 40 and
unmarried, I fear we are to turn into living reproaches of the way I dallied
and lingered with you."
In April 1964 he tells her that he feels "as if I had, well, kicked
something to death. You know I feel I ought to take care of you — I always
felt this since your parents died, and it has caused enormous conflict &
worry in me, that from time to time I've tried to explain, in that I did not
ask you to marry me... I engaged your emotions & refused to satisfy them
— an action, as G.B.S. [George Bernard Shaw] says, for which I know no
polite name". A few days later he adds: "Sometimes I think Maeve
is a kind of 40-ish aberration of mine... At others I think that we have —
you and I have — got into a kind of rut that will become increasingly
ludicrous and painful as the years waste by."
In August of that year, Monica seems suddenly to have won through, as Larkin
reports that he and Maeve have agreed to part: "I felt bound to say
that I had not finished with you, nor did I seem likely to, & she just
said, well that doesn't give me much alternative, does it... we are quite
friendly & have to see each other daily — the real breach &
dismay is yet to come, I feel. And I suppose it will come. This is like the
interval between Sept 3 1939 & the first air raid."
But the break was only temporary. Unusually, these last two sentences are
underlined in pencil, with a bitter annotation, presumably by Monica: "Note
the style, the corny style & no intention of doing what is said. &
both of you had my sympathy — what a good giggle for both of you... I
learned a good deal more later."
Though Larkin does eventually acknowledge his duplicity, he protests that for
him it is simply a way of "making life livable":
"I'm not so confident about telling the truth as you are: not so sure I
can, not so sure I want to. I cling to pretence like the bathing steps at
the deep end."
The correspondence grows sour in other ways. Despite his rise to fame with the
success of The Whitsun Weddings (published in 1964), he is increasingly
misanthropic, with a new, political edge: he fulminates against protesting
students, immigrants and Irish republicans, expressing his support for Enoch
Powell and even Oswald Mosley. He finds the creative process slow and
depressing ("Empty page-turning again tonight") and feels he has
frittered his life away: "People live a lifetime a year compared to me."
Both he and Monica are overweight and drinking too much: "You sounded
so drunk on the telephone," he writes, and his holiday snapshots show
her as dumpy and unsmiling.
Yet for all their problems, the couple managed to establish a modus vivendi.
According to Anthony Thwaite, "When Philip came to stay with us in
Norfolk, the first thing he'd do was say, 'May I use the telephone?' And
he'd ring Monica to tell her he'd arrived safely. It was just like a
marriage." Sending Monica a card for her 50th birthday — of a cartoon
blonde in a baby-doll nightie — Larkin tells her: "don't let's
make a thing of these two half-centuries — let us be Hobbs &
Sutcliff [sic] — just a nod & a lift of the bat as the applause
ripples — there is better to come."
Mysteriously, the large cardboard boxes at Bernard Quaritch yield only
handfuls of letters for the years after 1972. There is nothing to tell us of
Larkin taking a third lover in the mid-1970s — Betty Mackereth, the
colleague who was to destroy his diaries — or making his final break from
Maeve. There are, however, enough letters from the early 1980s to sketch the
last phase of Larkin and Monica's relationship. They are concerned mainly
with her declining health: in late 1982, now 60, she is admitted to hospital
after a bad fall (Larkin sketches her as a rabbit in bed doing the
crossword), and a few months later he finally does the unthinkable: arranges
for her to come and live with him in Hull. When she rallies sufficiently to
visit her cottage in Northumberland for two weeks in April 1984, he writes
to her with extraordinary tenderness:
"It was strange being alone in the house — so unfamiliar — rather
unsettling.
"Of course I have missed you. Found myself putting the butter out for
your breakfast! I do hope you have felt a little more at home and able to do
things. I look forward to hearing what you feel like: it's awful being cut
off like this, quite the last straw... Dear bun, I wish my concern for you
could lend you strength."
In the end, ironically, it was Larkin whose strength gave out first. He died
of cancer in December 1985, leaving Monica to linger on for another 16
years, a recluse surrounded by the possessions of the man she had loved so
long, and lived with for so short a time.
It is to be hoped that the Bodleian will succeed in buying the letters, not
only because Larkin was an early champion of the campaign to keep British
manuscripts from going abroad, but because the library holds the other half
of the jigsaw: Monica's equally numerous letters to Larkin, to which
researchers have so far been denied access. If the two sides of the
correspondence are finally brought together, they will constitute a
remarkable, unintended testament to the couple's convoluted love, chosen by
the vagaries of time — like the clasped hands on that Arundel tomb glimpsed
50 years ago — to be their final blazon.
Philip Larkin material © 2004 The Estate of Philip Larkin. Reproduced by
permission of the Society of Authors
