Larkin’s Mum

Letters Home 1936-1977, Philip Larkin (ed. James Booth), Faber & Faber, 2018, 688pp, £40.00 (hardback)

‘You’ll say Mum is at the bottom of all this. Well, if she is, I don’t know what to do about it, though I wish I did.’ With these words in a letter from October 1957, Philip Larkin anticipated his lover Monica Jones’s response to his saying that he feels ‘terrified’ about not marrying her, but also that ‘there is something missing in me,’ which prevents him doing so. The volume Letters to Monica, from which these sentences are taken, appeared in 2010. Such passages in that book gave ample gloss to the anguish behind characteristic Larkin poems like ‘Places, Loved Ones,’ with its persona’s regretful inability to stop ‘thinking’ that one day he might find someone ‘to bear / you off irrevocably’ into a life-long marriage, despite also seeming complacent in the acknowledgement that it’s not happened.

Now, with the arrival of another selection of letters from the Larkin archives, Letters Home edited by James Booth, we are given copious opportunity, if so inclined, to weigh how far ‘Mum’ was responsible for the man, if not entirely the poet, that Larkin became. The final four hundred pages of Letters Home are mostly derived from the hundreds of letters and postcards sent by Larkin to his mother Eva, from the time of her husband Sydney’s death in March 1948 to her own death in November 1977. An Appendix to the volume gives just over twenty pages of letters from Sydney, Eva, and from Larkin’s older sister Kitty, to Larkin – whilst Booth’s often extensive footnotes in the main part of the book provide substantial quotations from many more. It was Larkin’s routine, between his fairly frequent visits with his mother, to write to her on most Sunday mornings. This meant that, such was the British postal system in the earlier years of the correspondence, she received a letter from him most Mondays. On both sides, there was worry if a letter did not arrive on time, a worry often alleviated by the use of telegrams, examples of which are also given here.

Eva Larkin was thereby kept up to date with many facets of her son’s life – his minor illnesses, frets about his lack of literary productivity, his likes and dislikes of the people around him; and, surprisingly, with aspects of his complex relationships with Ruth Bowman, Monica, Maeve Brennan, and Betty Mackereth. Many of his letters seem to presume as much about this last point. Larkin died only eight years after Eva, years increasingly spent with an ailing Monica. He had a relatively small portion of his life, therefore, without the steady emotional stay provided through this correspondence. Whilst mother and son inevitably irked each other at times, there are clear moments in Letters Home where Larkin can be seen depending on ‘home’ to enable him to display his strongest inclinations and behaviours. In October 1955, for instance, one month before publication of his first mature collection The Less Deceived, the thirty-three year old poet wrote apologising to Eva for the ‘silly “performance”’ he had put on as he was leaving on his latest visit: ‘I am bitterly ashamed of leaving my breakfast’. Annoyed by his life and job in Hull, Larkin had obviously thrown a tantrum, since ‘Really, it is not easy to leave home with equanimity’.

Eva’s patient response, cited by Booth in a footnote, seems emblematic. ‘I do sympathise with you very much, and I am sure there is no need for you to flay yourself.’ However immature Larkin could be, about the ‘toad work,’ or about his relationships, even to the extent of abandoning his nice breakfast (there is too much tedious stuff about meals here, as in Letters to Monica), Eva was there to forgive. Those turns in Larkin’s poetry, those reconsidering, ‘judicious’, ‘Buts’ and ‘Yets’ like that at the start of the last stanza of ‘Places, Loved Ones,’ find their haven here: ‘Yet…you’re / Bound, none the less, to act / As if what you settled for /Mashed you’. The Oxford Dictionary gives ‘mashed’ as an archaic word in this form, meaning to ‘excite sentimental admiration in (person of opposite sex)’. This speaker’s self-address (‘you’re /Bound’) has a weird double-resonance of self-preening towards a female auditor, mother or lover. Whatever the ‘act,’ the ‘performance,’ in or of Larkin’s best work, he could depend for most of his life upon one absolutely understanding hearer – ‘I do sympathise with you very much.’ Any outbursts of penitence on his part are anticipated and made an ‘act’ by her love.

These letters keep up a glinting pretence about the intimacy and confusions of some of Larkin’s relations with his lovers – mentions of separate rooms, or of lodging in nearby hotels are carefully made to Eva. However it was Monica Jones, as Letters to Monica showed, who was shocked to find the poem ‘Talking in Bed’ included in The Whitsun Weddings, not just because people might gossip about her, but ‘what do you think yr Mother and relatives will make of it?’ Yet there seems a relaxed openness between Larkin and Eva around such matters. Whilst Letters Home is less helpful than Letters to Monica in terms of literary reference points, it is notable that Larkin can write in shared familiarity about the works (including letters) of Katherine Mansfield and D.H. Lawrence, as well as the Powys brothers. Indeed, under Sydney’s stewardship, it seems that the Larkin family had an extensive collection of Lawrence. Larkin reports proudly to his sister Kitty that he’s found ‘2 we haven’t got’, including Studies in Classic American Literature, at reduced price in an Oxford bookshop.

And Larkin pursued the most notorious of Lawrence’s writings. A futile attempt to reserve Lady Chatterley’s Lover at the Bodleian brings the first of several outbursts in Letters Home against academic literary criticism – Larkin had been refused access to the book since he was not ‘studying’ Lawrence on his Oxford degree course (as he reported later, though, he soon managed to get hold of a privately-owned copy of the novel). ‘Studying’ is glossed by Larkin here as ‘a longdrawnout effort to reduce Lawrence to my own size…motivated at bottom by an envious and snivelling hate.’ Larkin across the Oxford years develops increasing impatience with a critical ‘attitude’ to literature (‘I can read a whole author without having an attitude towards him. I do not want to know where he got his vocabulary from,’ he writes in 1942). Such sentiments, adamantly addressed to his parents, perhaps underwrite Larkin’s later dogged directness in the poems, as well as the strenuous efforts on display in his unpublished poetry notebooks towards creating as perfect and definitive a body of work as was possible to him. Nonetheless, in these letters Larkin is strikingly self-critical and dismissive towards his oeuvre throughout, seeing the poems in The Whitsun Weddings, for instance, in a 1964 letter to Eva as ‘on the whole… an unimpressive lot’.

Larkin’s fascination with, and defensiveness towards, Lawrence, was lifelong. The skirmish in the Bodleian predicts the later exhibition Larkin staged at Hull University Library around Lady Chatterley’s Lover at the time of the Penguin trial. It remains slightly unclear, however, as to whether his mother Eva merely condoned Sydney’s and his son’s excitement around challenging modern literature and picked something up of its atmosphere, or whether she actively participated. As late as 1971, Eva has clearly reported struggles with reading The Rainbow; predictably, and surely selfconsciously at some level, Larkin assures her that ‘ Sons & Lovers is much better.’

Andrew Motion’s 1993 biography unleashed much scandal and holier than thou chatter. Not least of the provocations was the revelation about Sydney Larkin’s Hitler-admiration, that statue of the dictator on the Larkin family mantelpiece. In Booth’s careful selection around Sydney in Letters Home, despite the moustachioed picture of the father who stares boldly out from centre cover of the book, Larkin’s father emerges as what he was, a highly efficient local government servant. From the moment he gained some responsibility for staff at Wellington Library in 1943, it is evident that Philip Larkin enjoyed and benefitted from the discussions he had with Sydney about day-to-day management, work flows and budgets. His father was a generous administrator around Larkin’s life, sending out job applications on his son’s behalf, and even drawing up person specifications when his son needed to recruit new staff, as each of his librarianships duly produced greater local library usage.

What comes across here also are the various kinds of parsimoniousness passed on from father to son. Sydney Larkin knew the fair and right price for everything, including books. As the few letters from Sydney printed in the Appendix indicate, he could drive a bargain. A collected letters of Goldsmith has been obtained by Sydney in Leicester for 7/6, ‘but, as books go nowadays, that is cheap.’ He offers the bookseller 2/6 for both volumes of Jeremy Taylor, ‘which he accepted. I wished then I had offered 1 shilling.’ Such attention to the price of things runs fulsomely and tediously through his son’s correspondence, in this volume as elsewhere. It brings a

kind of sociological interest (but not much more) to many of these letters. If you want to know the price of a shirt from M&S in the 1960s, and how it’s a deal that beats Austin Reed, look no further. Larkin’s rueful 1973 poem ‘Money’ shows his later ability to reflect about the virtues of economic carefulness, with the revelatory ‘Clearly money has something to do with life’; ‘it is intensely sad.’ These family letters, however, show no such selfawareness; everything is too expensive, unremittingly and endlessly so.

More notable, though, is Sydney Larkin’s parsimony with words. He ends a 1943 letter ‘I have been to London today and just got back.’ Encouraged by his wife to write to his son, his opening sentence is ‘There is little to say.’ It is all very functional, and about professional function: ‘I should not advise anyone to go in for my job, but publishers are always necessary as well as finance officers.’ One librarianship course his son might take is more expensive than another, ‘but probably no more useful for municipal purposes.’ The directness and sparseness is something Larkin carried over to his limited life’s output and to the individual poems, their plain words and depths of possibility hidden in plain sight. True beauty and permanence lies behind and between the words, in what is reserved from them. In ‘The Trees,’ for example, the annual return of Spring, the reappearance of leaves, is ‘Like something almost being said’; ‘a kind of grief’ is on show in their greenness, not in what they articulate to us. The emotional bonds between these correspondents are evident, but only expressible in the most coy and sentimental fashion.

Do we need the over 600 pages of this edition, with its huge repetitions and boredoms, its spare revelations? Its editor, James Booth, is to be admired for the patient advocacy he has made for Larkin across the decades since the Motion biography/ Selected Letters furore. Booth’s approach is very much an equivocally ‘warts ‘n all’ one. He has previously edited the eyebrowraising lesbian schoolgirl fiction young Larkin wrote under the pseudonym ‘Brunette Coleman’: Booth dubiously presented Trouble at Willow Gables as a risky, gender-exploring, even proto-feminist piece of work. Booth’s 2014 biography, Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love, takes a similar tack, seemingly ignoring no politically or personally difficult aspect of Larkin’s

world, whilst also seeking to excuse him at every moment. Letters Home has the same tenor; it includes some ripe racism from Larkin, but, again, the several pages of Booth’s (extremely long) Introduction on this matter contain a fine piece of specious reasoning which strives to exculpate the writer. A paraphrase of these and similar pages in earlier Booth would run something like ‘Yes, Larkin wrote racist sentences at some points in his life. But they came at moments of racial tension in the country or internationally. And anyhow, Larkin was not racist towards all races. He was always ready to hire more “Ceylonese”, even if he would never take on “Indians”’.

Comparison of Letters Home with Letters to Monica, edited by Anthony Thwaite, is instructive. The latter is well over one hundred pages shorter than this new selection; its editorial matter is scant, its Introduction brief. Largely, we make of it what we can. Booth curtly corrects factual mistakes by earlier Larkin editors in his footnotes to Letters Home, but much of the quotation and discussion he makes in them – and some are very long – is unhelpful. It is hard to participate enthusiastically in the endless debates about what will be eaten at any particular Christmas dinner, or who will be present. Other footnotes are irrelevant, such as the eight line one on the history of Pullman trains, there simply because Larkin happened to mention he’d travelled on one. Letters to Monica reproduces few of the myriad drawings that Larkin included in his letters, although it notes their presence textually as appropriate. Letters Home seems to reproduce nearly every damn image where Larkin sketches himself as a junior animal, for the most part a seal, together with the maternal ‘dear old creature,’ for the most part represented by a seal wearing a mop cap like a Victorian maidservant. A few of these sketches are very funny; most are just boring; a few are nausea-inducing. This aspect of the volume is surely an error by editor and publisher; it is around this that I was most embarrassed in looking at material that was inevitably meant to be seen only by the letters’ sender and recipients. To be Sydney Larkin-esque about it, it would not be hard to imagine a briefer, more pointed and illuminating, but primarily less expensive (in all senses), book carved out of this archival material.

As with the previous volumes of Larkin’s letters, the primary feeling after the long trudge through is puzzlement as to how the man they capture is also the poet that his contemporaries saw as the cultural spokesperson for Britain from the 1950s to the 1980s – that ‘unofficial laureate’ that Donald Davie wrote about, whilst adding the rider to his own claim, ‘for good or ill.’ To his deep admirers, amongst whom I include myself, Larkin has very little actually to say about his creation of the works; more importantly, in terms of his role as spokesperson, he says little of value about his country or times. Instead, ‘I love to hear the little details of your life,’ as he writes to his mother in 1956. These letters are the details. The acres of correspondence, the weekly letters to ‘Mum,’ provide a backdrop, a kind of grinding meagreness of outlook, from which the poetry at some point thankfully turns away. Laying aside the letters, we become ever the more grateful for those moments when the final verses of each poem deliver their ‘Yets,’ their ‘Buts,’ their ‘And immediately / Rather than’s. This last in ‘High Windows’, when scope happens – ‘The sun-comprehending glass, / And beyond it, the deep blue air’.