Philip larkin letters to.., p.22
Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica, page 22
Well! having got that out of the way, let me ask your advice on one point – do you think ‘to provide an object’ wd express the sense better than ‘to create an object’ in the last verse of P of ds?6 It seems that people understand object to mean just a thing, an entity, not as an ambition as I intended. […]
1 The Less Deceived.
2 From W. B. Yeats, ‘To a Young Beauty’.
3 A. S. Collins: Professor of English, Leicester.
4 C. H. Horne: Lecturer in English, Leicester.
5 Molly Bateman: assistant at Leicester University College Library.
6 ‘Poetry of Departures’: ‘to create an object’ prevailed.
12 July 1955
200 Hallgate, Cottingham
[…] Had a letter from Jean Hartley this morning, reporting that 41 copies have been subscribed for so far – by Sunday. This doesn’t mean 41 people, as some will have taken more than one. First in the field was someone called Stanley Chapman, who subscribed before I’d sent the MS. She mentions as well Madge, Winter (2), Horne, Hoggart, Norman Nicholson, Leishman, Flew, J. D. Scott, Philip Oakes, & a few more – the Murphys, Japolsky, & one or two Belfast people along with people I’ve never heard of – John Cotton, Lawrence Clark!1 I think as a response it’s not too bad, but I hope it is followed up by others. Norman Nicholson is the big surprise as far as I’m concerned: I shall have to start being respectful about his bunk. I feel surprised and pleased by the thought of people bothering to answer & send money. How do you feel? And lo, Miss Rabbit’s name led all the rest. […]
For the last week or so I have been repeating Hardy’s lines in A bird-scene at a rural dwelling – it’s just like where I live here, at present. (p.665). Not that anyone comes out at five, but the garden is so close and agreeable. It is always a pleasure to walk down it to the gate, under the trellis-arch that goes all the way & has things growing round it. You’d like it, though it’s rather a wilderness. I think you’re right about T.H. when you say he isn’t a beginners’ poet. I think one has to attend closely to what he’s saying, because he’s very accurate and often his ‘awkwardness’ comes from choosing a particular word – now I have been trying to find an example, but have roved on reading for pleasure. I don’t remember seeing The faded face (420) before! And I am a reader in much the same style as you – don’t think of me as a Lerner, knowing ‘how to read a poem’. Hardy has his quirks – how about The conformers (213)? Nearly all express my feelings – except some of the ballads. How about The curate’s kindness (194)? […]
Mrs Squire gave me some strawberries tonight: she’s a rarely-kind old thing. Never a cross word. But I don’t know! this place won’t really do, if anything else offers itself – but of course things don’t offer themselves.
I’ve quite abandoned any head of dept dress; I loaf about in sandals, bow, carnation shirt. I’ve just got a new telephone system in the Library: great fun, in a way. Gives the illusion of things being done. If I press the buttons in a certain way we can all talk at once & hear what each other is saying – haven’t tried it yet. Scotland wd be gorgeous now, I agree. My hayfever isn’t too bad, I must admit – not so frightful as of yore. Just a great nuisance sometimes. I ride to work every morning, gradually learning every peculiarity of the road as I used to know the roads to school. I always had a gift for surfaces – Manor Road, Park Road, Station Road, Warwick Road, they were all differently-surfaced, or so I felt: well, they were, I suppose. […]
1 Stanley Chapman, poet, designer, ‘pataphysician’, who designed some of Listen’s covers; Charles Madge, poet, Professor of Sociology, Birmingham; Winter, unknown; C. H. Horne, Leicester University; Richard Hoggart, then Staff Tutor at Hull University; Norman Nicholson, poet; J. B. Leishman, Fellow of St John’s, Oxford; Antony Flew, philosopher, Reading University; J. D. Scott, literary editor, the Spectator; Philip Oakes, poet and journalist; Richard Murphy and Patsy; Leo Japolsky, lecturer in French, QUB; John Cotton, poet and schoolmaster; Lawrence Clark, unknown
22 July 1955
200 Hallgate, Cottingham, E. Yorks
My dear,
I sent a very dull letter today, & yet if I begin another it’s really only to anatomise my dullness. It’s so intense as to be a little frightening. I come ‘home’, eat a rough supper in my room so as to be away from the horribly-close noises of the household, & then sit … Nothing to do. The room seems airless. I don’t want to do anything, not to try writing poetry, not to write letters, not to go out – where is there to go? I just sit & shudder at the noises of the household. Reading doesn’t attract me. I’ve no friends. Really I feel like a plant in a pot that nobody waters. There’s a horrible piano jangling somewhere – sounds too faint to be in the house, but too loud to be outside it. I feel: ‘You’ve properly done for yourself, now.’ It’s all very horrible. The inhabitants of the house seem very close tonight: there is continual talking. Have they visitors? Someone to stay? I shrink in every fibre of my being. Some are upstairs, some down. They call to each other, in horrible flat voices, short unintelligible questions and answers: half of them are addressed to dogs. Another voice is rumbling, the piano is still going … altogether the house sounds as if in five minutes a large family is to leave for its summer holidays. Oh dear! I can’t disentangle my different strands of feeling: part nausea (only half accounted for), part boredom, part hatred of my surroundings, part terror of the future, and even of the present, part tiredness: all play their parts. I don’t know why I shd write it down for you. It’s not interesting, I know. But …
Pause to eject a horrible wriggling leggy thing with wings – lucky for it it fell on its back & couldn’t get up. This made it easy to throw it from the window. This is about the first action I’ve performed for several hours. I hope it won’t come back.
Another pause, this time to have a bath. The household seems to be ‘making for bed’ – I am living among the lower classes, I fancy. Lower, not lowest. It wouldn’t give Orwell a kick, & it doesn’t give me one, either. My object is to get out. But how? Abandon the ideal of Cottingham? I don’t care all that much about it, to be honest. But what’s the procedure – advertise? Oh god. Agents? double god. Oh hell. ‘Let us off & search, & find a place Where yours & mine can be natural lives …’1
It’s 11.15 p.m. Better to bed. One absurd thing I did when at home was order a tweed hat. I had gone in a shop that couldn’t give me anything I wanted so in despair I ordered a tweed hat. I bet I look a fool in it. I can wear it on Sark. Perhaps no one will notice there. [drawing of seal wearing hat]
*
Saturday God: the house seems full of people – this is the kind of ‘quaint’ life people have when they’re young and adventurous, not when they’ve got £1500 a year. Curse it all. Must dress now & go to work – that’s another evil thing.
*
After lunch. Ugh! That’s my reaction to life at present. The sun is shining brightly & it’s very hot, real heat-wave, but I am really nearer the state of mind I was in when I came here than I’ve ever been since … Horrible lunch alone, & back to this filthy hovel, which smells horribly of hot meat & god knows what else – & is over-populated: I don’t know who else is here but there is someone here … Oh God. Filthy lowerclass swine. Fool that I am. Ugh. I had meant to stay here till after the summer, but I wonder whether in fact I shouldn’t get moving right away, while I am relatively free to go round looking at places. I can’t come in the front door without my stomach contracting in disgust. What a fool I am. I think I ought to start ringing up agents, or something. My being shrinks from it, & I don’t know what I want anyway. O how stupid & hateful it all is, & how utterly fed up I am. There is some lower-class oaf singing on the stairs … dear bun, I feel quite hysterically frightened at my … of my circumstances, I must calm myself. I ought to go out, I suppose, but that’s only a palliative – my dear, I do feel absolutely sick at heart, my blankness has been goaded into revulsion & I am up in arms again, sufficiently fed up to start moving again, back at the point when not moving is worse than moving. And I can’t do anything, not now: I must endure the weekend, & all next week, & … This state of mind is different from my earlier howls: this is a kind of nausea, as if life were some milk-skin clinging to my lip. I don’t, at the moment, see how I’m going to endure it, it’s all so frightful – I really had better go out.
*
9.50 p.m. I went a long bike ride in boiling weather, enjoying it in snatches, but obssessed (oh, how do you spell that word?) with the contents of this letter and the circumstances that produced it. I went to Beverley in a roundabout way, had tea at the Beverley Arms, then went west in a long arc round the villages and wolds to Kirk Ella & Hessle, for the sake of calling on Jean Hartley to see what the position was now. But she was out & the filthy sluttish mother-in-law merely shouted at me through the window – why is my life in the hands of the workingclass? By the time I got back I must have done nearly 20 miles & felt tired. The house was quiet when I came in, but somebody came in after me & I don’t think things have altered. In Beverley I went into St Mary’s and found the rabbit (see enclosed leaflet). I like this church: I hope one day you’ll see it. The rabbit is not a very attractive one: I should say it is sneering rather, and some of it has broken away. Then again it might be a hare, I suppose. But it is certainly wearing a satchel. What evidence there is for the Lewis Carroll story I don’t know. The only guide I have says nothing about it – doesn’t even mention the rabbit. Still, it is there, a lone invader of a hated ecclesiastical stronghold. I expect the satchel contains carrots. Looking into a small papershop for cricket scores I found a pile of Beatrix Potters, & read Apply Dapply’s Nursery Rhymes – especially the present of carrots put down on the stair. It made me wish you were with me – or rather, it reinforced my wish that you were with me. I thought a lot about you as I rode, about your mosquitos (I don’t think I notice mosquitos as such) and your garden – glad you used the secateurs. You have a closer grip on things than I. My life is tourniquet’d at every point: I am too exhausted to wail about it – & the immediate stimulus to do so, mercifully, is lacking – but it is so, yes indeed. When you exhorted me not to sound so bored with everything in London I reflected that I probably do sound bored a lot of the time – I’m horribly lacking in ‘outgoing’ feeling.
About Norman N. – well, I don’t care for him, I must admit, from what I know. I find his poetry rather ‘smart’, & his regionalism & Christianity I’d sooner infer than have crammed down my throat. Still, I’m very glad to have his six bob & his name in the back.
This ride has tired me out, & I’d better prepare towards bed. At times my whole body was wet as I rode, as if I’d gone through a waterfall: the air was so hot. Even now the waistband of my trousers is damp. I felt most envious when I passed boys swimming in a river, most horrified when I passed a tannery, most pleased when I found the rabbit, most … oh! awyawyaw! More tomorrow, darling bun. Or is there some scoundrel in the bathroom? I never know how many people there are in this house.
*
Sunday. My uncertainty persists. Where is that music coming from? those voices? My Observer didn’t come this morning. What am I doing here? I agree last summer seems an impossible dream – Belfast does, altogether, though I had my depressions there. Oh hell, why can’t I stop being miserable and complaining? Why is the wireless so loud? Why does it seem to alter in volume from minute to minute? Who are all those people talking? I don’t know who the extra swine were, but I think they all went off yesterday afternoon to some wretched caravan-site: heaven alone knows when they will return or how many of them. Someone comes in to sleep, therefore, & numerous people throng in all day – curse the whole crowd.
Are you fed up with all this? Or does it seem no more than the murmuring of bees to you in your garden? Did you like the scarecrow I drew?
Had better go & have my horrible lunch – & it really will be horrible.
*
4.15 p.m. It wasn’t too bad. But this is an afternoon almost sinful in its dullness. Here am I, with nowhere to go & nothing to do. Outside the sun shines, the children shout … I’m lying on my bed. The room is airless. Oh my dear! My life is all wrong. I have to go out to awful people tonight – this afternoon is the only time I have. And I do nothing. Someone is sawing outside. I feel thoroughly down, & slightly sick. It would be such a beautiful day to be with you, and we’re miles and miles apart, separated by the filthy Humber & all the rest of it.
*
Monday. Evening. Cooler today. I was so pleased to get your letter this morning, & only sorry that the one you had from me was so spiritless. Not that this is much better. I am not sure what the position in the house is, but I think the usual swine are back & I believe the extra swine are here too, though I haven’t done more than hear them. They aren’t a nuisance, yet, though something queer is going on in the bathroom – talking, & a strange chemical smell, as if they were … well, what? Washing a dog? I don’t know. Anyway, I can’t get in.
It is a consolation to know you were thinking of me at 3 yesterday: I was thinking of you too, as you can guess, but not quite in the way indicated – I was trying to approach a poem for you. I didn’t succeed, but I didn’t try hard, as I didn’t feel in the mood quite, & I didn’t quite know what I wanted to say. – Ah! a strange man has gone down the garden, carrying a bag & wearing an overcoat. A good omen, though no more than that so far.
Your handwriting sometimes turns me into a boxer – I stare wonderingly round, trying to think why you should be reading The Aeroplane World, & why it shd remind you of me. Daimler Test New Goblin Jet at Farnsworth – eh? RAF Have Answer to Mig XII … Then I ‘twigged’. I had intended to bring it to Sark for you.
I managed to hear the close of play scores tonight – I do hope they stick it out tomorrow. One can hardly envisage a win, but I have a feeling that if they just try to stay there they’ll lose. I gathered May & Insole were doing well at the close. Compton is never any good when he tries to go safely, is he? How long is a day’s play – 6½ hours? A long time – 390 minutes, is it? and they want 366, is that right? No, they’ll never do it, not without the help of Jess-hop & Thumper [drawing of seated rabbit] no! hopeless. He is sitting down. Very bad – have altered it.
Library a little worrying today – I can’t seem to do any work, & a complaint has arisen from one girl about her salary, which I doubt my ability to put right. More & more I feel my position here a dangerous farce. The people I visited last night – the local Bishop & his French, separate-salad-serving wife – weren’t as bad as I feared, but full of yarns of doublecrossing & so on, wch sent shivers down my back. I am frightened, sweetheart, that’s the long & short of it … – do you know who wrote that? Applications have started to come in from people for this job I’ve created – real people, graduates, with degrees, as M. wd say. Brrr. Holy God. Larkin made a mess of Hull. Bad appointment, that.
Just eleven. I think the house is back to its normal population. Felt horribly tired today – I wake up at 6 a.m. & then feel tired all day. Wish I didn’t.
I’m sorry about your aunt – what an awful chain-reaction this visiting is. How long will she stay?
Must go to bed –
goodnight, aquarius rabbit!
*
Tuesday. No great improvement in morale. Letter from Jean Hartley, reporting another 17 subscribers (26 copies) – Bateson, Pinto, Enright, Lerner, Trypanis & co. Judy Egerton has opted out of the printed list – the only one to do so. I wonder if she thinks it’s the done thing? Or perhaps I’ve annoyed her by not going to Donegal.
I’m wondering if I should do any booking for our Sark trip. Certainly the position about the connection to Sark should be investigated, from Guernsey. Should I book 2 plane seats from London, if it is all right? Leave you to make yr way to London?
Good day, dear one. I’m sure I’ve no comfort at present except you.
All love
Philip.
1 Opening lines of Hardy’s ‘The Recalcitrants’.
3 August 1955
200 Hallgate, Cottingham, E. Yorks
My dear lonely rabbit,
‘They don’t mind getting in a hole’ (7) was a down clue in the Times this morning. ***B*T* … I got it eventually, after Flopsyish delay. Well, here I am, back. I ought just to bring you up to date – 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 & vociferous, seeing off couples to London.1 My literary pleasure in this was damped by missing the 4.8 connection at Grantham: however, by a stroke of luck I asked the way to the bus stop of a man who was about to drive to Melton Mowbray. He was a farmer & a little gruff – and with a horrifying habit of covering his face with his hand(s) when trying to remember something, the Rover leaping along at around 50 m.p.h. the while. Anyway, he put me down in M.M. about 5 – next bus to Loughborough 5.55 (the train would have got me in at 5.51), arriving 6.46. So I had quite a good tea at the Anne of Cleeves cafe & caught it in good (i.e. 20 mins wait) time. I thought what a nice place M.M. was. The bus journey, again, was awfully enjoyable, though I recognised nothing. I was marvellously free of hay fever, & looking forward to going home, so all presented its best aspect in gorgeous weather.
