Philip larkin letters to.., p.10
Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica, page 10
The sex boys are cut down to a very short ration this week, eh? Only divorce. Not very interesting. I don’t know about ‘morning sickness’, naturally; so much is said these days about the concomitants of pregnancy & child-birth being entirely unnecessary figments of the modern imagination that ignorant laymen no longer believe or disbelieve anything. I think – though of course I am all for free love, advanced schools, & so on – someone might do a little research on some of the inherent qualities of sex – its cruelty, its bullyingness, for instance. It seems to me that bending someone else to your will is the very stuff of sex, by force or neglect if you are male, by spitefulness or nagging or scenes if you are female. And what’s more, both sides would sooner have it that way than not at all. I wouldn’t. And I suspect that means not that I can enjoy sex in my own quiet way but that I can’t enjoy it at all. It’s like rugby football: either you like kicking & being kicked, or your soul cringes away from the whole affair. There’s no way of quietly enjoying rugby football. That is the kind of thing our panel of experts might have suggested. If we straightened out all the kinks caused by ignorance & superstition, would the resultant article be a shining paragon? And further, should we expect it to be, considering the enormous & dirty job it has to do – CARRYING ON THE RACE – any more than we can expect a front line soldier to be decorous & genteel? Now I expect you will pluck out yr fur-bound English Book of Common Prayer and repeat this entire passage from some ceremony I have never become acquainted with.
I’m not quite sure what you mean about Hilly,2 but nothing you said ruffles me – ’course not – what I remember saying was that Hilly must regret marrying Kingsley so early when she sees her sister married to a respectable husband who will (very likely) go far. Patsy’s reaction to this was simply ‘What’s the use of a respectable husband going far if you don’t like him?’ which is true enough, I suppose. If I did say that Hilly regretted ‘missing fun’ I expect every married woman does, and probably everyone else too.
There will be a library job advertised here soon – graduate £350–£500 – discourage Molly from applying! The successful candidate will be directly responsible to me & will be one of my numerous right hands: the Lord knows what kind of people we shall get. One wrote in this week from Antrim saying that she had no degree & no experience but had ‘intelligence & a conscience’: who does that sound like? The young Carlyle? Or had he a degree? Another one rang up this afternoon to try ‘the personal approach’. I want the ability of Henry Ford plus the docility of Cinderella & the social assets of Sydney Smith.
Yesterday I cleaned my room up. I think I’ll always do my sitting room on Wednesdays & my kitchen at the weekends, so you can imagine me scuffling round or hauling the Abhorrence (‘Nature abhors a vacuum’) after me (not an original joke, but I’ll leave you to find where it comes from). Cleaning I like. Cooking (so far) I don’t much like because the results are so disappointing. I had an awful experience with some pearl barley not long ago, that stuck to the pan and burnt. I nurse stews like a candidate nursing a constituency. […]
I had a frightful evening out last Saturday – paper games & charades, did I tell you? And tomorrow ‘Professor Boyd’s for coffee’ & on Saturday the Strangs to dinner, & on Sunday lunch with the Warden, & Miss Webster & Miss Leach to tea (stern daughters of the voice of God) … My 15 pages are so much waste paper. Dear, I can’t write, it’s all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession. I believe in inspiration. If I am not inspired, nothing will ever be done. If I am inspired it’s all as easy as running downhill. I know, I’ve never written anything it wasn’t a pleasure to work at. All this 500 words a day stuff is so much bilge. I feel full of blackest disappointment. Sort of, anyway. […]
1 Bruce Montgomery.
2 Hilly Amis.
12 November 1951
30 Elmwood Ave, Belfast NI
Dearest Monica,
At present half my attention is bent upon a reading of R. Graves new poems on the 3rd progr., but they will soon be over.
Now it is over: Graves I am always prepared to like – his ideas, his practices (except all this White Goddess stuff) – but I can’t stand his words, his images & properties. These were no change, except for one or two poems, The cordwainer & another one that might have been called The portrait: they sounded good, but the BBC have a habit of putting the women’s speeches into women’s voices, wch I don’t much like. It’s like having been changed suddenly to cider while you’re swallowing. […]
Yesterday I spent most of my time with the Strangs – a fearful Sunday, spent almost entirely in the seated position, smoking, drinking, eating off plates on our knees, & hearing the radio, except for a dash out in the car. (*to exercise the dogs) At the end of the day I feel I understand Patsy’s complaints about life in Belfast. She is (have you met her?) a large, pale, weak stomached girl, very nice, very charming, but a bit dependent on being with amusing people or in London, which means she spends a lot of time knitting & eating sweets which isn’t good for her. She’s a doctor. I mean if they go on like that when alone no wonder they hate Belfast. I only marvel that they don’t hate everywhere else too. But I don’t want to deride them as at least up to yesterday their presence has been a great help. I don’t care for their great boisterous dogs either, very much, at all, very much, much, as Kingsley wd say. […]
Kipling. Where I quarrel with him temperamentally is in his predilection for expressing public themes, common emotions in the sense of conventional newspaper ones; I am at odds with him in his role of ‘singer of the tribe’, laureate of the Empire. I dislike his subservient playing of Beetle to Kitchener’s Stalky & Lloyd George’s M’Turk (I know that’s a bit out!) It is entirely opposed to my conception of the poet. I feel that however sincere his emotions they can all be found in the leaders of the Daily Mail: that further they are ‘literary’ ideas in that (I’d say the same of Henry James) they are not real situations he has experienced but things he has heard about or thought about & thought exciting. I am not arguing, or despising him – what I’ve said goes for a great many writers after all – but I cannot like any writer who hunts with the pack like Kipling. To me in time of war one had better shut up. (There is nothing to be said of war as war, unless in the Owen way – ‘But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns’.) No, I feel about Kipling as I feel about many writers: they are not sensitive enough, their windows aren’t clean, they are yarn-spinners, Wide World magazine readers and writers, the club inkslinger, the school verse cobbler who circulates poems about the unpopular masters. I know Kipling is sensitive personally, but he belies it in his general persona.
While writing all that, I noticed a brown mouse creep out behind the fireplace & edge along the wainscoting – not very nice! First time I’ve seen him. He scuttled back on realising he wasn’t alone. This depresses me rather – Beatrix Potter’s all very well in print but … […]
I’m glad you like – or think well of – Ll. Powys.1 He is irritating – they all are – and frequently I catch myself wondering what I see in his Rationalist Press-John o’London attitudinising, but then I fall under the influence once more of his self-dramatising tricky honesty – awfully hard to pin down – his literary eye – and intensely literary humour, in a way, or at least my enjoyment of it is ‘literary’ (cf. R. Kipling). I always have a special liking for Letter 320 – did you notice that someone said recently that Ll. Powys’ Advice to a young poet was a darn sight more sensible than Rilke’s Letter to a young poet? I have a liking for 161 as well: Lulu laying down the law for the Yank society woman, or whoever she is. A little pompous, I agree, but my heart warms to him, doesn’t yours? Perhaps not.
I think I shall try to stuff up the mouse’s mode of ingress, & then to bed.
Yesterday Piggott lent me The well of l.2 which I’ve just finished. ‘Interesting’, but rather windy & hysterical. I’d never read it before. […]
1 L. published an introduction to Llewellyn Powys, Earth Memories, in a 1983 reissue. See Further Requirements (2002 edn).
2 Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (1928).
22 November 1951
30 Elmwood Ave, Belfast
Dearest Furry-Face,
‘If Shaw embeds his plums in such cake as this, then they must stay there. I cannot trouble to pick them out’ – G. K. Chesterton? Robert Bridges? Thomas Hardy? Samuel Butler! Yes, indeed. I’m just reading the new Selections from his notebooks, & enjoying them no end. You know, for all that I am hard to please, the things I do enjoy I feed on like a grub feeding on a leaf. There are some passages about his sisters, written in such a flat glancing way that they make one want to scratch: first chop.
Tomorrow night I am on a Queen’s Brains Trust – did I tell you about this? When they asked me to oblige I remembered Lang & his housekeeper: ‘What’s this?’ ‘Them’s brains – you ’aven’t ’ad any of them for a long time’ – and if I get half a chance I shall start off by telling it. […]
Regarding Enright, I thought he had chosen that one1 because it showed a bit of interest outside myself – a rare thing. I don’t think it well written: rather lumpy – it arose from reading Mayhew, of course, but also from a recurrent idea of Hardy’s ‘Tragedy is true guise, Comedy lies’ – in other words that the only comfort in misery is knowing that you’re not being kidded; that this is the truth. But I’d sooner he printed it than some of the others. There’ve been no letters from publishers.
You know more about Kipling and Dryden than I do, but it wouldn’t have occurred to me to compare them – or to liken them to each other – as public writers, because something seems to have changed between 1680 & 1880 – Dryden seems to be speaking only to his peers, the ruling gang, Kipling is – well, writing for the press, the penny (or halfpenny) press at that. A process of vulgarisation has set in & gone a long way. Therefore I find Dryden only dull, not outrageous as I sometimes do R.K. No, I haven’t read R & F2 – I was desperately trying to remember which one you’d recommended, but could only think of P of P’s H3 – which seemed to be out. As for the War, I always mark down Wells & James (among others) for their ridiculous burst of war hysteria in 1914 – have you ever read anything more sickeningly pompous than the anecdote about H.J. ringing up Marsh to enquire about British citizenship – ‘Eddie, how does one – ah – do it?’ I mean that was all he said. Eddie guessed what he meant, I suppose through knowing the old bore’s verbal tics. And all the people who thought Shaw was antiChrist for writing Common Sense About the War. […]
Did you say the Strangs have a much lonelier life or a much lovelier life? No, all right, I’m being deliberately exasperating: I suppose it was lonelier. Patsy gets v. depressed sitting indoors all day, & has to be taken to the cinema by Colin at night. She says she will have a baby in May, which in part explains it, I suppose. I hope it won’t mean they’ll go. But I expect they will. I didn’t make a very good job of hearing the news, but she didn’t seem to mind. I feel like a bald vulture sitting on a crag, while the broad tide of human life goes further & further out … […]
1 ‘Deceptions’, in Enright’s review of XX Poems.
2 Kipling, Rewards and Fairies.
3 Kipling, Puck of Pook’s Hill.
27 November 1951
30 Elmwood Ave, Belfast
Dearest,
Having extricated myself from a coffee evening (10.15) I patter back upstairs. I fancy one reason for the hasty quality of my letters recently is your very agreeable remark that even my short letters have character – fatal! now I fancy myself G.B.S. who could cram as much onto a postcard as most people into a letter. It is very wrong of me & I’ll stop it forthwith. No, of course your feelings don’t offend me: what an idea. If they affect me in any adverse way it is precisely in that I show such poor return: I reel onwards, day in day out, living entirely off the surface of my reactions, spending too long chattering & so on, immersed entirely in the present – then when I am at last alone, I rake about among the ashes of the day and find a very meagre personality left. You are nothing like this, & in contrast I feel myself superficial, insensitive, somewhat vulgar, somewhat even, well, I won’t say cruel, but inconsiderate. And as well – which takes away any sub-Byronic halo – self-deceiving in the sense that all this fine social gaiety & independence depends on not being ill, or not taking on any responsibilities material or emotional, or doing any real work, or being genuinely good to anyone at the definite expense of myself. This is all hard to describe, but true: I am cowardly, fleeing not only others but myself too. It’s not a question of tender snailhood – would that it were.
[drawing of snail]
About my literary criticism – rereading it I found it gruff & a bit overbearing: I meant don’t mind its being gr. & overb. Answer it by all means. I hate differences as much as you do, serious ones I mean of course.
No, stepping back to feeling for a moment, often I experience moments of violent feeling of I suppose a rather mawkish pitying sort, but instead of grappling with them as a real writer wd I avoid them, averting my eyes, thinking if anything that they are too awful to be written about: I couldn’t bear to stir them up or peg them out for investigation. If I think of certain aspects of my mother’s life, for instance, or of my father when he was ill, a sort of roman candle of anguish goes off in me & from which I hurry away as soon as I can. They are moments mixed with guilt at my own selfishness, and with horror because I feel they are true. (‘Suffering is exact’ – ‘Tragedy is true guise’.) I feel rather as K.M. felt when she heard of her father’s being robbed of his wallet – ‘I hope to God people don’t suffer as we think they do: if so, it’s not to be borne.’
If I had said: Mother, come & live with me in Belfast, or told my father the nature & hopelessness of his disease, this facing of the facts would surely have lessened what I feel at present. I don’t know. Of course it is no use worrying about these things, nor is it seemly to do the wrong thing & then claim credit for worrying about it – but that’s me all over. Well, something too much of this. […]
2 December 1951
30 Elmwood Avenue, Belfast
Dearest,
‘You in your sheep’s wool coat,
Buttons of bone,
And me in my furabout
On the warm hearthstone.’
Know this little verse, & whence it comes? W. de la M. I like furabout.
You have been much in my mind this evening for having laboriously cudgelled out 4 sides for Peter1 (don’t feel like writing today OR ANY OTHER DAY). I had to search for the address you gave me, & this entailed rereading all your November letters. Only when I’d reread them all twice & put the whole lot in order since June did I remember your Willie Winkie card propped on the mantelpiece. Of course it was on that.
The third thing to remind me of you is D. Wordsworth’s Journal which I was moved to look into tonight (do you hate the phrase ‘dip into’? Sheep dip. I never use it myself: if anyone from Desmond MacCarthy downwards says a book is good for ‘dipping into’ I know (1) the book is no good (2) the speaker is a fool (3) the speaker never reads the book. ‘Browse’ I’ll speak of some other time); I think it’s hard to read such things without being shamed by the observation and quickness of spirit. To my mind K.M. is right about her. If I have any wish in life it would be to ‘express’ or ‘render’ life as I have known it, but it is such an enormous task I admire more & more people who achieve the smallest success in that line. ‘[October] 17th, Friday. A very fine grey morning. The swan hunt. Sally working in the garden. I walked round the lake between ¾ past 12 and ¼ past one …’
I suppose I could express my day in similar terms, but it has not felt a very ‘holy’ day – I missed shaving and changing my sheets, but I wrote home, did my laundry, made lunch (macaroni cheese & cauliflower). In the afternoon I went out to the Strangs’ house to fetch my bicycle where it has been nearly all this term: they were out, but the garage was open & I cleaned my bike & rode it home. The air was chilly, growing misty, & the sun was setting about four in a great orange mass. Well-wrapped-up children tottered home clutching little hymnbooks. After coming in & having tea I cleaned the kitchen, wch tired me rather, even though I didn’t polish the floor, cleaning the stove instead. Then I fell asleep after hearing a Mozart symphony – the ‘Haffner’: good for once, I thought – scorching in front, freezing behind. The draught in this room is shocking! After waking I wrote to Peter, & here I am. I think I’ll stop now & make Horlicks – it’s 10.20, & there’s a programme containing some Handel at 10.30 p.m. – Heard it now. They announced it as Bach, but then played Handel. I really can’t say I noticed the mistake: I thought it was very ‘free’ for Bach, but I didn’t recognise the water of the pure fount as I ought to have done. Talking about music, I suppose you didn’t hear the 3rd art of the Am. negro progr. this week on the blues? I heard it twice. Very interesting. I expect McLeod heard it, & did not leave you unenlightened. Rereading all yr recent letters made me realise how many points I leave unanswered – really I should start a short-answer tailpiece to my letters when the highflown stuff is finished. But just now my eyes are starting to ache a bit & I think I had better let this lie till tomorrow, beastly Monday. My successor – no, I mean my right hand – will be either a rolling-stone Haileyburian or a Scotch girl. We interview them on Dec 12 I believe. The girl is favourite.
