Philip larkin letters to.., p.29
Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica, page 29
George Allison, too.2 Would you remember his football commentaries, in the old square-4 days? He was the most exciting one I ever heard: his ‘It’s a goal!!!!’ was the most abandoned shriek-roar we shall ever know.
One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the same day as we do ourselves.
Proof of my engagement rot turned up today: it doesn’t look quite so infantile as it did in typescript, but is dull & elementary & confused. Do you bet that other more showy birds will expose the poverty of my maunder? I wonder who they will be. Not K. – I heard from him on my return. Surely not Colin Wilson? Everyone must be sick of him by now. Perhaps W. S. Graham! I was reading his well known Letter V on the way to work & thinking how good it was.
Well, it does display a remarkable ‘new tone’, & it wasn’t as hard to understand as it might be. I’m sure you felt it was a conseederable honour to be acquent with such a bonnie maker yowow whoop. Seems to have shut up now though. Like me.
*
Thursday Windy & rainy today. No news. I overslept & started the day badly in consequence. I seem to walk on a transparent surface and see beneath me all the bones and wrecks and tentacles that will eventually claim me: in other words, old age, incapacity, loneliness, death of others & myself … Wasn’t there a George Robey song with a refrain In other words? I’ve opened Hopkins to find fine simplicities to draw your attention to: but I admit they’re few and far between. Still, that makes them more effective.
Lovely the woods, waters, meadows, combes, vales, All the air things wear that build this world of Wales:
Sometimes a lantern moves along the night, That interests our eyes
Some candle clear burns somewhere I come by.
All life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life among strangers.
– I’ve just noticed in a letter that ‘My grandfather was a surgeon, a fellow-student of Keats’! Of those I list I admire 2 most, don’t you? I agree G.M.H. isn’t really like this, but he does it on occasion. […]
1 John Middleton Murry, 1889–1957.
2 George Allison, 1883–1957, radio sports commentator.
9 April 1957
32 Pearson Park, Hull
[…] Tonight I heard a few yowling settings of Hardy by some guy called Finzi,1 wch made me look at the poems again. I shan’t believe I am insensitive to poetry as long as Hardy can make me tingle all over like a man menaced by a revenant. But they sadden me as much as anything, sadden & frighten. I’m terrified of the thought of time passing (or whatever is meant by that phrase) whether I ‘do’ anything or not. In a way I may believe, deep down, that doing nothing acts as a brake on ‘time’ – it doesn’t of course. It merely adds the torment of having done nothing, when the time comes when it really doesn’t matter if you’ve done anything or not. Do you understand this? Perhaps you take more naturally to doing nothing than I do. […]
It’s cold and blustering here today. The MG wrote saying that they’d received an ‘intemperate’ letter from Dannie Abse grumbling about my review of Mavericks – it appeared last week. Apparently they gave the price & the page numbers wrongly, & I said there were 10 poets when there are only 9, & he characterised one of my remarks as ‘blatantly untrue’. The ‘engagement’ London Mag is out, my thing looking awful, worse than any except John Osborne. I can just see the ‘17/20 See me’ on the bottom of the faint-ruled page. Ugh. Literature. Still, I’m glad I chopped at them nastily. […]
I hardly know what I do in my evenings – doze, write letters, listen to the radio, think about you, or certain aspects of you, wonder if I could start reviewing a book or writing a poem. My cast of mind is very odd. I don’t want to learn anything: I have no interests: in fact I defend my mind against things: I just go from circumscribed sensation to circumscribed sensation. If anyone tried to turn his life into a womb, that’s me. It’s all very bad. I don’t feel a bit creative these days. Just go on hurling money away & eating hardly anything. […]
1 Gerald Finzi, English composer, 1901–56.
4 May 1957
32 Pearson Park, Hull
[…] I’ve spent some time reading Holloway’s book,1 for the first time, & find it not quite what I expected. The poems read like the work of 2 people, one with ‘something to say’ that could quite well go into prose, & the other ‘a poet’ who’s being dragooned into ‘saying’ it, but who manages to get a few of his own remarks in on the side. Metrically it’s all very rough, & no poem ever succeeds. (He has one line where ‘fire’ appears twice, once as a monosyllable & once as a disyllable.) However it’s not such a frightful book as I supposed. One day I’ll have to review it. […]
Ranging back to your earlier letter, it seems ironic that two such articulate beings shd understand each other so poorly. My remark that it seemed I was bound to hurt someone’s feelings was my comment on thinking that it was funny that by trying, perhaps unnecessarily, to save my mother’s feelings, I shd have hurt yours. Do you see? I was remarking on it, more surprised than anything else, or sardonically amused perhaps. It seemed to me that if I didn’t get it one way I got it another. Do realise that I hate causing people distress: you seemed to laugh at me for it not long ago, but there it is. I don’t claim any virtue for it: it’s rather like avoiding arguments. Have you never thought that my cultured-lacquered good fellowship is a positive version of your timid silence? I’m sure I hate conflict as much as you do. Still, begone dull care! Truth is so unattractive that I no longer wish to establish it.
I’ve got a copy of Bertie’s escapade,2 wch has joined my Potters after a reading. By rights I should back it up with the Shephard Willows,3 wch I have never possessed & hardly ever seen. Much as I like the Rackham, I think Shepherd (I expect he’s called Shephard or Sheppard really, isn’t he?) may be in better key with the homely & forthright note persistently struck throughout, except for the 2 chapters. Rackham could do the wayfaring Rat very well, & no doubt some huge shaggy vision of Pan, but for the atmosphere of River Bank, or Mole End, give me Shephard (can’t be bothered to extricate myself & look). […]
1 John Holloway, The Minute (Marvell Press, 1956).
2 Kenneth Grahame, Bertie’s Escapade.
3 The Wind in the Willows, edition illustrated by E. H. Shepard.
24 May 1957
32 Pearson Park, Hull
[…] I’ve been thinking about Keats rejecting Milton in favour of Shakespeare, & how Yeats and Hardy are the two comparable poles today, and how I at any rate reject Yeats. No doubt people wd say that you can have both, but they seem opposites to me, like Disraeli & Gladstone. Yeats seems to me an utterly artificial poet, dealing in make-believe, arid, ultimately stifling. And so dull! I doubt if another poet has ever had such dull subject-matter, often none at all.
Yeats Hardy
Abstract Concrete
Artificial Realistic
Two faced Sincere
Egotistic Modest
Celtic Saxon
Mad Sane
Boring Interesting
Literary ?can’t think of opposite
Worried about diction Not worried
Wrote slowly Wrote easily
Politician Lived quietly
etc etc
I look forward to the collapse of his reputation, into ‘utter non being’. Of course I agree with all you say about symbolism! How could I not? My mind is stodgy as usual tonight, but I know I’m with you there, like a rabbit huddled against a warm pipe outside the greenhouse on a frosty night. As soon as you start meaning one thing by saying another you open up a gap & the thing sounds hollow. Rabbits wouldn’t understand symbolism. [drawing of rabbit]
If I knew more about such things I dare say I shd find it lay at the heart of old Eliot’s ‘objective correlative’. It’s wrong, wrong, wrong – all modern thought & practice is wrong, except the general idea that D.H.L. was a good writer, & the general vilipension of people like Bridges & Chesterton. The ‘achievement’ I speak of is to set a solid set of works against it all, and it irks me that I can do nothing, & have done so little. I wanted to write such a lot – novels particularly – about ‘the way things turn out & the beauty of the natural world’; but it doesn’t look as if I shall: and I wanted to do it not for my sake but for its sake – responsibility is always to the thing & not to yourself or the filthy reader. I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you’re an artist, by children if you’re not. Otherwise it flies forgotten, as a dream Dies at the opening day.1 When I think of everything I’ve seen & felt, & how little of it I’ve managed to pin – about 3 days of my whole life – then I grind my teeth. Consider people like Trollope & how much they did. Of course all this is an idealistic & probably unreal conception of writing, but some people seem to have carried it out, or acted as if it were a fair statement of the facts. […]
1 cf. Isaac Watts, ‘O God Our Help in Ages Past’ (‘Time, like an ever-rolling stream, / Bears all its sons away; / They fly forgotten, as a dream / Dies at the opening day’).
6 July 1957
32 Pearson Park, Hull
My dear,
Saturday night, and a storm brewing – I’ve been round shutting the windows, and drawn my sitting room curtains so that I can’t see the sheet lightning blinking over the near-at-hand trees. Nearly 10. I’ve been in since shopping, listening to the endless cricket commentary, reading another wretched book, eating supper, snoozing. I went out & bought 2 bottles of wine & some sherry, for no very good reason except that since cutting down my smoking to 1 per day I feel a stronger craving for drink. I wish there were some really nice drink. After gin & Italian and gin & orange I’m trying sherry, but it’s not specially agreeable.
A very interesting day’s play, I thought, but how they do miss Lock. I can’t think what their intention was in leaving him out. I took my portable wireless in yesterday & had it muttering among the shelves as I checked art books. This is a fortnight when we all check. I don’t think Wood likes it, has to do some work for a change instead of the sort of thing that makes me want to batter his head in is that on Saturdays in vacation when there’s no coffee he goes & sits reading the papers for about 25 mins just the same. Slack little sod! World wd come to an end if he didn’t ‘cover’ The Times (4d), Manchester Guardian (3d) & Yorkshire Post (?) every morning. Little jumped-up sawn-off sod!
I think I can hear it raining, now, but it’s still rumbling in the distance. The storm last Sunday put the Guildings’ radio out of action – it was a terrific flash, right on top of Pearson Park.
One funny thing I’ve recently discovered is that there are some university rabbits! Apparently a family lives (appropriately) under the Sanctuary, a shed given over for religious purposes, & gambols about by night. You know the university site is quite large & still fairly wild in parts: I wish I could see them. I was told that one came & looked through the windows of the Union refectory at the graduates’ dinner last Saturday. Doesn’t it all sound preposterous?
I yielded to the temptation of buying an anti-perspiration atomiser today, partly for the fun of squirting it about, but whether it will be of any use or not I don’t know. They seem valuable dodges, & I’m surprised nobody markets them for men – I lingered longingly over ‘Body Mist’ but lacked the courage to buy it. Peeheeple sahay Ai have goald laights in my hyah.
Oh dear! Storm much nearer, crashing about overhead. – Some time later: I think it’s all quietened down now: it was really frightening for a time, like someone flicking a vast electric light on outside the house, and grinding pieces of coal together before chucking them down a 60-ft shaft on to the head of a tympanum. Anyway, now I’m settled down with a fresh glass of sherry & a stack of LPs on the player. Wouldn’t it be rather romantic to turn into an alcoholic? ‘About half way through 1957 he began to drink much more heavily …’ Appearing drunk at work – taking a poke at Wood … Kneeling on the table at lunch: ‘Oh, I know you think this is only a gesture…’ […]
*
Sunday night Stewed again: a bottle of Graves sec under my belt – I feel I ensconce myself behind successive lines of defence – drink first of all, then layers of microgroove platters on the player, then The Poetry of Experience (for review)1 on my lap, & what nasty thought can possibly reach me? I think of Hart Crane, his whiskey & his Victrola. Today was rather a splendid day. I went over the Park for a pint at 12.30, & afterwards walked round in a state of suspended ecstasy – the sun shone, the wind blew: I studied the statues of Victoria & Albert, and sang as I walked. After lunch I cycled to the university and played the huge Bechstein in the Assembly Hall. Then outside I met the space-man head of the Dept of Psychology, who asked me to tea, where I eventually met his Boxer, Mitzi, whose comprehension of me was slow in the extreme. Her grandfather was good enough to be in a book about the breed. Apparently they are a cross of bulldog & mastiff, wch I didn’t know before. In Germany they used to clip their ears, & may do so still, but yis Barbarous practice is illegal in England, good show. All day I felt that one just needs somewhere to be – my flat for instance – & one doesn’t want to be rushing off to Venice or somewhere.
Did I say that Miss Browne-Wilkinson had taken a job in W. Africa? She bobbed in for a week & has now gone. It all rather appals me – like a conventional symbol at the end of a Forster novel for BEING SNUFFED OUT. However, her Prof. will be M. Mahood – didju know that? – so I suppose it can’t be too Graham Greene. Anyway, she’s only got a second.
I am just about within an inch of finishing the Graves sec: I start it with a full tumbler to my spaghetti, then finish it off during the hours before bedtime. Only 9/6. When I said in a previous letter that monsterism arose from an inability to face life, I meant of course a sustained and unprejudiced contemplation of the passage of time, the inevitability of DEATH, the onset of incapacity and impotence. I think that as soon as – no, I mean that how one regards these facts settles one’s whole life: if they seem distant & almost irrelevant then you are O.K.: if they seem closer to you than the name stitched on yr underwear then you have had it, nothing else can possibly win yr concentration. Wch reminds me that recently I read Under the Net again – good, I thought: a charming, happy, virile book. I wanted to rewrite it, or ring her up & say I admired it. It really is awfully good. It gives the illusion of a talent strong enough to be careless & even incompetent. I could quite see what she meant by ‘Mr Mars’ even though it wasn’t over-well done. I’m sure she is a perfect fool. But I do like that particular book.
I seem to be building up a fine store of unanswered passages: mostly because they are so hard to answer. My dear, whatever I think or say, or however I behave, it isn’t because I think myself superior to you: I’m always aware how much more equable & just and intelligent you are (end of the Graves), & of how well you treat me: I mean, to be quite explicit, I notice and am thankful for the absence of the so-called ‘feminine’, i.e. bloody silly, qualities in you – at least, not b.silly, because men deserve them & anyway they frequently succeed – but anyway the absence of ‘tactics’ and that. If I am nasty to you, then just answer back, & you will see me collapse like a stoned fig. You must always remember that I have much more chance to get sated of, or irritable with, you than anyone else, because I see you & write to you much more often. And also of course I feel that people think ‘This is what he likes’ & am specially careful of you. Just conceit of course. But, of course, well, well, there are always sidelines, complications, conflicts. I feel my head sinking forward like a melonful of lead shot. The Murphys wrote (2 letters in 1 envelope) urging a visit – the older I get the odder people seem. Are they each other’s idea of the good life? Why? If not, why did they get married? Beats me.
*
Tuesday, is it? Red wine tonight, a 9/6 Beaujolais (Bow Joe Lay) exported by M. Lebeque, and really awfully good, fresh & flower tasting. ¾ of a bottle with my spaghetti, the remaining ¼ at my elbow.
My dear (this is a sort of Pecksniffian red flag before the guns go off, isn’t it), I quite see what you are getting at as regards our farcical, or non-farcical, efforts. It does rather put it back at me, I agree: I don’t mind, in that it seems reasonable enough in a way: what I can say I don’t know: if you feel you need ‘emotion’ in a ‘personal’ sense, I see what you mean, but it wd be faked emotion as far as I’m concerned: I just don’t feel personal at that time. I don’t want to be personal, to think of you or me as people. If I do we go off on to quite a different tack. God knows I don’t set myself up as a grand sexual columnist, like Marghanita Laski (why gh?): I should think I am as incompetent at sex as at algebra, dancing the galliard or talking the lingo in Roma. I don’t know if my not feeling ‘personal’, in the sense that this is the 6 o’clock news & this is Bruce Belfrage reading it, is my fault, your fault, or the fault of who or what we are. To be personal in sex is surely to be tender. To be tender is not to be lustful, or whatever one can call it. If you don’t feel non-personally lustful too, then clearly a large gap remains to be bridged, as by the M & B stag (Ansell’s?). I don’t say it doesn’t matter, but it’s all a question of luck, isn’t it?
I don’t reckon you’re inarticulate. I shall go to the grave thinking you talkative, just as you’ll go to the gr. thinking me dominant & careerist. […]
My late secretary’s engagement is off: I rang her up yesterday having just had a resignation, but I don’t imagine it wd be possible for her to return, either from her point of view or mine. People are so expensive at her age, NALGO scales etc. The whole thing is the hell of a confusion, really: and I can’t grumble for fear of upsetting the present incumbent, who is very nice really & seems to worship Trueman.2
One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the same day as we do ourselves.
Proof of my engagement rot turned up today: it doesn’t look quite so infantile as it did in typescript, but is dull & elementary & confused. Do you bet that other more showy birds will expose the poverty of my maunder? I wonder who they will be. Not K. – I heard from him on my return. Surely not Colin Wilson? Everyone must be sick of him by now. Perhaps W. S. Graham! I was reading his well known Letter V on the way to work & thinking how good it was.
Well, it does display a remarkable ‘new tone’, & it wasn’t as hard to understand as it might be. I’m sure you felt it was a conseederable honour to be acquent with such a bonnie maker yowow whoop. Seems to have shut up now though. Like me.
*
Thursday Windy & rainy today. No news. I overslept & started the day badly in consequence. I seem to walk on a transparent surface and see beneath me all the bones and wrecks and tentacles that will eventually claim me: in other words, old age, incapacity, loneliness, death of others & myself … Wasn’t there a George Robey song with a refrain In other words? I’ve opened Hopkins to find fine simplicities to draw your attention to: but I admit they’re few and far between. Still, that makes them more effective.
Lovely the woods, waters, meadows, combes, vales, All the air things wear that build this world of Wales:
Sometimes a lantern moves along the night, That interests our eyes
Some candle clear burns somewhere I come by.
All life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life among strangers.
– I’ve just noticed in a letter that ‘My grandfather was a surgeon, a fellow-student of Keats’! Of those I list I admire 2 most, don’t you? I agree G.M.H. isn’t really like this, but he does it on occasion. […]
1 John Middleton Murry, 1889–1957.
2 George Allison, 1883–1957, radio sports commentator.
9 April 1957
32 Pearson Park, Hull
[…] Tonight I heard a few yowling settings of Hardy by some guy called Finzi,1 wch made me look at the poems again. I shan’t believe I am insensitive to poetry as long as Hardy can make me tingle all over like a man menaced by a revenant. But they sadden me as much as anything, sadden & frighten. I’m terrified of the thought of time passing (or whatever is meant by that phrase) whether I ‘do’ anything or not. In a way I may believe, deep down, that doing nothing acts as a brake on ‘time’ – it doesn’t of course. It merely adds the torment of having done nothing, when the time comes when it really doesn’t matter if you’ve done anything or not. Do you understand this? Perhaps you take more naturally to doing nothing than I do. […]
It’s cold and blustering here today. The MG wrote saying that they’d received an ‘intemperate’ letter from Dannie Abse grumbling about my review of Mavericks – it appeared last week. Apparently they gave the price & the page numbers wrongly, & I said there were 10 poets when there are only 9, & he characterised one of my remarks as ‘blatantly untrue’. The ‘engagement’ London Mag is out, my thing looking awful, worse than any except John Osborne. I can just see the ‘17/20 See me’ on the bottom of the faint-ruled page. Ugh. Literature. Still, I’m glad I chopped at them nastily. […]
I hardly know what I do in my evenings – doze, write letters, listen to the radio, think about you, or certain aspects of you, wonder if I could start reviewing a book or writing a poem. My cast of mind is very odd. I don’t want to learn anything: I have no interests: in fact I defend my mind against things: I just go from circumscribed sensation to circumscribed sensation. If anyone tried to turn his life into a womb, that’s me. It’s all very bad. I don’t feel a bit creative these days. Just go on hurling money away & eating hardly anything. […]
1 Gerald Finzi, English composer, 1901–56.
4 May 1957
32 Pearson Park, Hull
[…] I’ve spent some time reading Holloway’s book,1 for the first time, & find it not quite what I expected. The poems read like the work of 2 people, one with ‘something to say’ that could quite well go into prose, & the other ‘a poet’ who’s being dragooned into ‘saying’ it, but who manages to get a few of his own remarks in on the side. Metrically it’s all very rough, & no poem ever succeeds. (He has one line where ‘fire’ appears twice, once as a monosyllable & once as a disyllable.) However it’s not such a frightful book as I supposed. One day I’ll have to review it. […]
Ranging back to your earlier letter, it seems ironic that two such articulate beings shd understand each other so poorly. My remark that it seemed I was bound to hurt someone’s feelings was my comment on thinking that it was funny that by trying, perhaps unnecessarily, to save my mother’s feelings, I shd have hurt yours. Do you see? I was remarking on it, more surprised than anything else, or sardonically amused perhaps. It seemed to me that if I didn’t get it one way I got it another. Do realise that I hate causing people distress: you seemed to laugh at me for it not long ago, but there it is. I don’t claim any virtue for it: it’s rather like avoiding arguments. Have you never thought that my cultured-lacquered good fellowship is a positive version of your timid silence? I’m sure I hate conflict as much as you do. Still, begone dull care! Truth is so unattractive that I no longer wish to establish it.
I’ve got a copy of Bertie’s escapade,2 wch has joined my Potters after a reading. By rights I should back it up with the Shephard Willows,3 wch I have never possessed & hardly ever seen. Much as I like the Rackham, I think Shepherd (I expect he’s called Shephard or Sheppard really, isn’t he?) may be in better key with the homely & forthright note persistently struck throughout, except for the 2 chapters. Rackham could do the wayfaring Rat very well, & no doubt some huge shaggy vision of Pan, but for the atmosphere of River Bank, or Mole End, give me Shephard (can’t be bothered to extricate myself & look). […]
1 John Holloway, The Minute (Marvell Press, 1956).
2 Kenneth Grahame, Bertie’s Escapade.
3 The Wind in the Willows, edition illustrated by E. H. Shepard.
24 May 1957
32 Pearson Park, Hull
[…] I’ve been thinking about Keats rejecting Milton in favour of Shakespeare, & how Yeats and Hardy are the two comparable poles today, and how I at any rate reject Yeats. No doubt people wd say that you can have both, but they seem opposites to me, like Disraeli & Gladstone. Yeats seems to me an utterly artificial poet, dealing in make-believe, arid, ultimately stifling. And so dull! I doubt if another poet has ever had such dull subject-matter, often none at all.
Yeats Hardy
Abstract Concrete
Artificial Realistic
Two faced Sincere
Egotistic Modest
Celtic Saxon
Mad Sane
Boring Interesting
Literary ?can’t think of opposite
Worried about diction Not worried
Wrote slowly Wrote easily
Politician Lived quietly
etc etc
I look forward to the collapse of his reputation, into ‘utter non being’. Of course I agree with all you say about symbolism! How could I not? My mind is stodgy as usual tonight, but I know I’m with you there, like a rabbit huddled against a warm pipe outside the greenhouse on a frosty night. As soon as you start meaning one thing by saying another you open up a gap & the thing sounds hollow. Rabbits wouldn’t understand symbolism. [drawing of rabbit]
If I knew more about such things I dare say I shd find it lay at the heart of old Eliot’s ‘objective correlative’. It’s wrong, wrong, wrong – all modern thought & practice is wrong, except the general idea that D.H.L. was a good writer, & the general vilipension of people like Bridges & Chesterton. The ‘achievement’ I speak of is to set a solid set of works against it all, and it irks me that I can do nothing, & have done so little. I wanted to write such a lot – novels particularly – about ‘the way things turn out & the beauty of the natural world’; but it doesn’t look as if I shall: and I wanted to do it not for my sake but for its sake – responsibility is always to the thing & not to yourself or the filthy reader. I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you’re an artist, by children if you’re not. Otherwise it flies forgotten, as a dream Dies at the opening day.1 When I think of everything I’ve seen & felt, & how little of it I’ve managed to pin – about 3 days of my whole life – then I grind my teeth. Consider people like Trollope & how much they did. Of course all this is an idealistic & probably unreal conception of writing, but some people seem to have carried it out, or acted as if it were a fair statement of the facts. […]
1 cf. Isaac Watts, ‘O God Our Help in Ages Past’ (‘Time, like an ever-rolling stream, / Bears all its sons away; / They fly forgotten, as a dream / Dies at the opening day’).
6 July 1957
32 Pearson Park, Hull
My dear,
Saturday night, and a storm brewing – I’ve been round shutting the windows, and drawn my sitting room curtains so that I can’t see the sheet lightning blinking over the near-at-hand trees. Nearly 10. I’ve been in since shopping, listening to the endless cricket commentary, reading another wretched book, eating supper, snoozing. I went out & bought 2 bottles of wine & some sherry, for no very good reason except that since cutting down my smoking to 1 per day I feel a stronger craving for drink. I wish there were some really nice drink. After gin & Italian and gin & orange I’m trying sherry, but it’s not specially agreeable.
A very interesting day’s play, I thought, but how they do miss Lock. I can’t think what their intention was in leaving him out. I took my portable wireless in yesterday & had it muttering among the shelves as I checked art books. This is a fortnight when we all check. I don’t think Wood likes it, has to do some work for a change instead of the sort of thing that makes me want to batter his head in is that on Saturdays in vacation when there’s no coffee he goes & sits reading the papers for about 25 mins just the same. Slack little sod! World wd come to an end if he didn’t ‘cover’ The Times (4d), Manchester Guardian (3d) & Yorkshire Post (?) every morning. Little jumped-up sawn-off sod!
I think I can hear it raining, now, but it’s still rumbling in the distance. The storm last Sunday put the Guildings’ radio out of action – it was a terrific flash, right on top of Pearson Park.
One funny thing I’ve recently discovered is that there are some university rabbits! Apparently a family lives (appropriately) under the Sanctuary, a shed given over for religious purposes, & gambols about by night. You know the university site is quite large & still fairly wild in parts: I wish I could see them. I was told that one came & looked through the windows of the Union refectory at the graduates’ dinner last Saturday. Doesn’t it all sound preposterous?
I yielded to the temptation of buying an anti-perspiration atomiser today, partly for the fun of squirting it about, but whether it will be of any use or not I don’t know. They seem valuable dodges, & I’m surprised nobody markets them for men – I lingered longingly over ‘Body Mist’ but lacked the courage to buy it. Peeheeple sahay Ai have goald laights in my hyah.
Oh dear! Storm much nearer, crashing about overhead. – Some time later: I think it’s all quietened down now: it was really frightening for a time, like someone flicking a vast electric light on outside the house, and grinding pieces of coal together before chucking them down a 60-ft shaft on to the head of a tympanum. Anyway, now I’m settled down with a fresh glass of sherry & a stack of LPs on the player. Wouldn’t it be rather romantic to turn into an alcoholic? ‘About half way through 1957 he began to drink much more heavily …’ Appearing drunk at work – taking a poke at Wood … Kneeling on the table at lunch: ‘Oh, I know you think this is only a gesture…’ […]
*
Sunday night Stewed again: a bottle of Graves sec under my belt – I feel I ensconce myself behind successive lines of defence – drink first of all, then layers of microgroove platters on the player, then The Poetry of Experience (for review)1 on my lap, & what nasty thought can possibly reach me? I think of Hart Crane, his whiskey & his Victrola. Today was rather a splendid day. I went over the Park for a pint at 12.30, & afterwards walked round in a state of suspended ecstasy – the sun shone, the wind blew: I studied the statues of Victoria & Albert, and sang as I walked. After lunch I cycled to the university and played the huge Bechstein in the Assembly Hall. Then outside I met the space-man head of the Dept of Psychology, who asked me to tea, where I eventually met his Boxer, Mitzi, whose comprehension of me was slow in the extreme. Her grandfather was good enough to be in a book about the breed. Apparently they are a cross of bulldog & mastiff, wch I didn’t know before. In Germany they used to clip their ears, & may do so still, but yis Barbarous practice is illegal in England, good show. All day I felt that one just needs somewhere to be – my flat for instance – & one doesn’t want to be rushing off to Venice or somewhere.
Did I say that Miss Browne-Wilkinson had taken a job in W. Africa? She bobbed in for a week & has now gone. It all rather appals me – like a conventional symbol at the end of a Forster novel for BEING SNUFFED OUT. However, her Prof. will be M. Mahood – didju know that? – so I suppose it can’t be too Graham Greene. Anyway, she’s only got a second.
I am just about within an inch of finishing the Graves sec: I start it with a full tumbler to my spaghetti, then finish it off during the hours before bedtime. Only 9/6. When I said in a previous letter that monsterism arose from an inability to face life, I meant of course a sustained and unprejudiced contemplation of the passage of time, the inevitability of DEATH, the onset of incapacity and impotence. I think that as soon as – no, I mean that how one regards these facts settles one’s whole life: if they seem distant & almost irrelevant then you are O.K.: if they seem closer to you than the name stitched on yr underwear then you have had it, nothing else can possibly win yr concentration. Wch reminds me that recently I read Under the Net again – good, I thought: a charming, happy, virile book. I wanted to rewrite it, or ring her up & say I admired it. It really is awfully good. It gives the illusion of a talent strong enough to be careless & even incompetent. I could quite see what she meant by ‘Mr Mars’ even though it wasn’t over-well done. I’m sure she is a perfect fool. But I do like that particular book.
I seem to be building up a fine store of unanswered passages: mostly because they are so hard to answer. My dear, whatever I think or say, or however I behave, it isn’t because I think myself superior to you: I’m always aware how much more equable & just and intelligent you are (end of the Graves), & of how well you treat me: I mean, to be quite explicit, I notice and am thankful for the absence of the so-called ‘feminine’, i.e. bloody silly, qualities in you – at least, not b.silly, because men deserve them & anyway they frequently succeed – but anyway the absence of ‘tactics’ and that. If I am nasty to you, then just answer back, & you will see me collapse like a stoned fig. You must always remember that I have much more chance to get sated of, or irritable with, you than anyone else, because I see you & write to you much more often. And also of course I feel that people think ‘This is what he likes’ & am specially careful of you. Just conceit of course. But, of course, well, well, there are always sidelines, complications, conflicts. I feel my head sinking forward like a melonful of lead shot. The Murphys wrote (2 letters in 1 envelope) urging a visit – the older I get the odder people seem. Are they each other’s idea of the good life? Why? If not, why did they get married? Beats me.
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Tuesday, is it? Red wine tonight, a 9/6 Beaujolais (Bow Joe Lay) exported by M. Lebeque, and really awfully good, fresh & flower tasting. ¾ of a bottle with my spaghetti, the remaining ¼ at my elbow.
My dear (this is a sort of Pecksniffian red flag before the guns go off, isn’t it), I quite see what you are getting at as regards our farcical, or non-farcical, efforts. It does rather put it back at me, I agree: I don’t mind, in that it seems reasonable enough in a way: what I can say I don’t know: if you feel you need ‘emotion’ in a ‘personal’ sense, I see what you mean, but it wd be faked emotion as far as I’m concerned: I just don’t feel personal at that time. I don’t want to be personal, to think of you or me as people. If I do we go off on to quite a different tack. God knows I don’t set myself up as a grand sexual columnist, like Marghanita Laski (why gh?): I should think I am as incompetent at sex as at algebra, dancing the galliard or talking the lingo in Roma. I don’t know if my not feeling ‘personal’, in the sense that this is the 6 o’clock news & this is Bruce Belfrage reading it, is my fault, your fault, or the fault of who or what we are. To be personal in sex is surely to be tender. To be tender is not to be lustful, or whatever one can call it. If you don’t feel non-personally lustful too, then clearly a large gap remains to be bridged, as by the M & B stag (Ansell’s?). I don’t say it doesn’t matter, but it’s all a question of luck, isn’t it?
I don’t reckon you’re inarticulate. I shall go to the grave thinking you talkative, just as you’ll go to the gr. thinking me dominant & careerist. […]
My late secretary’s engagement is off: I rang her up yesterday having just had a resignation, but I don’t imagine it wd be possible for her to return, either from her point of view or mine. People are so expensive at her age, NALGO scales etc. The whole thing is the hell of a confusion, really: and I can’t grumble for fear of upsetting the present incumbent, who is very nice really & seems to worship Trueman.2
