They mucked him up, his mum and dad...
Yes, Philip Larkin was a brilliant poet. But his father admired the Nazis, his mother was a neurotic — and they filled him with contempt for women
PHILIP LARKIN: A WRITER’S LIFE by Andrew Motion (Faber £18.99, 640 pp)
SHORTLY after Philip Larkin died, in December 1985 at the age of 63, the biggest crime in literary history was committed. His 30-volume diary was destroyed by Betty Mackereth, his secretary (and lover) at the University of Hull.
Betty fed the manuscript, page by page, into a shredder, and then burnt the residue. It took her hours. She claimed she was only acting on Larkin’s explicit deathbed instructions — but he would have been off his head on morphine at the time.
As a man who had carefully kept everything, including his parents’ jam recipes and the telegram announcing his oxford degree, who had filed every letter he received in annotated shoeboxes, and who had actually made speeches on the importance of retaining famous authors’ drafts and fragments, Larkin, in his right mind, would never have countenanced destroying this archival treasure.
Apparently, from the sections Betty glimpsed as she did what she had believed was her duty, the material was fully reflective of a man who was ‘very unhappy. Desperate, really’. Sir Andrew Motion, in this superb biography, amplifies her view, saying Larkin’s journals functioned as ‘sexual log books and a gigantic repository for bile, envy and misanthropy’.
How can he know this for sure, if the diary was incinerated? on the other hand, how could Larkin’s private musings have been anything other than an epic of howling? He was a man who had concluded, early on, that ‘everything in life is either irritating, embarrassing or frightening’.
Larkin had been particularly terrified of death, the ‘black-sailed ship’: ‘So final. And so near.’
Sir Andrew Motion, who went on to become Poet Laureate, had first-hand experience of Larkin’s ‘furnace fear’ of terminal illness, particularly cancer, when, back in the Seventies, he was a lecturer at the University of Hull, where Larkin, since 1955, had been the librarian.
Larkin was famously unapproachable and grumpy. Indeed, he ‘disliked virtually everyone who worked for the university’. But Motion, as he tells us in the fascinating new preface included in this 25th anniversary reissue of his masterful biography, struck up an unlikely friendship with the old curmudgeon.
They would meet in the staff bar to judge local poetry competitions. Back at Larkin’s house, they’d listen to jazz records or recite favourite poets (Hardy and Wilfred owen). Motion found that Larkin was ‘drinking a great deal’, beginning to go profoundly deaf and seemed very lonely.
AFTER motion moved back to oxford and then London, where he became an important literary figure in his own right, he would return to Hull frequently, visiting Larkin in the Nuffield Hospital when he fell ill with ‘the oesophageal cancer that would swiftly kill him’.
Larkin made Motion his executor, and the hospital surroundings clearly had him ‘not just worried. Petrified’. It was as if, in some peculiar way, Larkin believed that even when he was eventually actually dead he would remain conscious of not being alive — an infinity of claustrophobia.
Larkin was the greatest poet of the 20th century — the greatest English poet since Tennyson.
‘What will survive of us is love,’ ‘Life is first boredom, then fear,’ ‘They muck you up your mum and dad (I’ve misspelt that one), ‘Nothing, like something, happens anywhere’ — in his works, notable for their lack of pretentiousness and obscurity, and their adherence to traditional formal skills, Larkin wrote about everyday emotions such as grief and loss, everyday scenes like doctors’ waiting rooms and cemeteries.
He drew out an exquisite poignancy, painting portraits of an abiding yet vanishing Englishness.
When he died, the initial tributes and obituaries were troubled by the revelation of Larkin’s fondness for pornography, his swearing and reactionary political views — as if great writers should all be right-on Guardian readers. None of that means a fig today.
What I found shocking, however, revisiting this ample biography, is Larkin’s breathtakingly cruel treatment of his many girlfriends. As Monica Jones, his chief paramour, told Motion: ‘I loved him, but I couldn’t make him love me enough.’
Larkin never fully gave of himself. He had a phobia about commitment in any of its manifestations. ‘To think of myself owning furniture gives me a sort of sinking feeling,’ he confessed. He was a total miser, accepting hospitality but never returning it — the favoured few might get a lettuce sandwich (‘a speciality’).
His preference was for frightful rented rooms with bare lightbulbs and linoleum floors. ‘Deprivation is for me what daffodils were to Wordsworth,’ he said wittily.
Motion goes into huge detail about Larkin’s behaviour with his numerous and overlapping lady friends. The pattern of seduction, mendacity and betrayal was always the same: courtship, discussion of a future together and then coldness as he backed out, moaning to Kingsley Amis in letters about the cost of having to pay for the drinks and meals. (‘Another bottle of Fleurie three-sodding -90-f***ing-five.’)
Perhaps it was sex itself he didn’t care for? Intercourse, he said, was ‘like asking someone else to blow your nose for you’.
Larkin kept women dangling for years, even decades. It makes for exhausting and painful reading, the way he played off Monica in Leicester against Maeve in Hull. Unknown to both, Larkin was cheating on them with Betty.
It ought to be funny, the entanglements — like a French farce. But everybody ended up wasting their lives. It was as if Larkin engineered this, devising and intensifying the feelings and emotional distress as inspiration for his poems. Monica put it very well when she said: ‘He cared a tenth as much about what happened around him as he did about what was happening inside him.’
Motion is correct to trace it all back to Larkin’s childhood. He was born in Coventry in 1922, where his father, the City Treasurer, was a ‘stickler for precision and correctness’ who much admired the ‘office methods’ of the Nazis. Only when war was declared did he reluctantly remove the swastikas from the wall in his office.
Larkin’s mother, Eva, who lived until 91, in contrast to her husband who had died of liver cancer in 1948, was a nervous wreck, ‘ scared almost into hysteria by thunderstorms’.
If she cooked lunch, with the aid of a maid, she had to lie down all afternoon. Larkin claimed to hate her passive aggression, yet he wrote to her daily, visited her weekly, and took her on holiday annually to exciting venues such as Minehead or Weymouth.
Eva was Larkin’s perverse muse. Her nagging and wheedling, her ‘helpless pettiness’, provoked his bad moods, stoked his misogyny and gave Larkin his subject matter.
Once Eva died, Larkin never wrote another poem. ‘I’m a chicken with no egg to lay,’ he told Motion.
Eva’s early ambition was to have been a librarian, and though her son had said, ‘I don’t give a zebra’s turd for any kind of job’, a librarian is what, after Oxford, he became. It suited his nature to have everything neat, ordered, catalogued.
at libraries in Leicester and Belfast, where Larkin worked in the late Forties and early Fifties, and where he was known as ‘a sexually disappointed Eeyore’, he continued to sabotage happiness, because ‘emptiness always swallowed fulfilment’, in his analysis.
Even when he was a famous published poet, and received innumerable honorary degrees, a CBE, the Order of the Companions of Honour and considerable riches, he still managed to complain about how ‘the grave yawns’. Offered the laureateship, he turned it down, which is how we ended up with Ted Hughes.
By the time Motion met him in Hull (‘It’s a bit chilly here and smells of fish . . . I like it because it’s so far away from everywhere else’), the gangly Larkin had become bald and bulky, ‘ sweaty and waxy-looking’, from heavy drinking. He had to buy his clothes in High & Mighty and his new suit resembled ‘a walrus’s maternity garment’.
If you think registering ‘regret, guilt, anger and disappointment’ are signs of a superior spiritual nature, Larkin is your man.
This biography judiciously explores its subject’s depths and complexities, the mix of yearning and retreat. I simply wish we had the diaries to back everything up.
During his research, however, Motion met Larkin’s hearing-aid specialist, who was psychic. apparently, Larkin now keeps busy ‘ tramping’ and is finding the afterlife, despite expectations, ‘very satisfactory’.