Philip larkin letters to.., p.39
Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica, page 39
32 Pearson Park, Hull
Dearest,
Very late – don’t know what I do with my time; well, I do in a way: last evening I was out to a ghastly ‘at home’ in the country (took me 1¾ hrs to get there), tonight I went to the ponce’s after shopping, & it was about 9 before I’d suppered. After each I fell asleep, then prodded at a poem1 G.S.F.2 wd no doubt regard as displaying a disagreeable persona – pairsona, he wd say. The ponce gave me £99 in used notes: a year’s takings, or 50% of a year’s takings.3 This will pay for my clothes, almost. […]
1 ‘Wild Oats’, completed 12 May 1962.
2 G. S. Fraser.
3 L.’s share of the sales of The Less Deceived.
23 May 1962
32 Pearson Park, Hull
Dearest,
Feel a bit better tonight, less dowsed with utter fatigue, though I may have snoozed earlier. Have added about 2 lines to my long no-good poem1 – I really think it could have been good if I had the talent of, say, Swinburne, put to my own ends. As it is, it is just dull, like a mixture of John Holloway and bad Dylan Thomas. […]
I have finished Kennedy’s election,2 & am now concentrating on Stanley Spencer3 – an odd little bloke, resigning from the RA when they turned a couple of his pictures down, and now he has just started this incredibly short sighted wife-wangling. But I like his adherence to the commonplace and near-at-hand, and even his less appealing qualities are better than those of sods like – like – Well, I don’t know.
How pretty you looked on Sunday in your blue smock frock (funny word, like Hausfrau), or whatever you call it; ay, marry, and out of it (with a Pox) – it was a splendid meeting, day, encounter, & I hope you were as happy as I was. I had meant to say something about holidays, but never got round to it. What does the future matter when the present is so fine? I wish holidays didn’t need so much arranging. It is all right taking them, but arranging is the devil.
I forgot to say that Stanley Spencer always put his clothes on over his pyjamas, not a bad dodge for (a) warmth and (b) saving time at both ends of the day. Also that Kennedy’s desk in the White House is smaller than mine.
Thursday now, & a less agreeable evening – have crossed out all I wrote last night and more, cursing & bored and raging. I am no good, all washed up, can’t even write a bad poem, let alone a good one. Thank you for your Worcestershire card this morning: I am sure you are loving the hamster, it sounds heavenly.4 Where do you keep it when you are out? Is it in a box, or cage? Or do you find it in your slipper when you come in? What do you give it to eat? Do you think it misses the Craiks, or ‘knows’ you? […]
I’ve finished Stanley Spencer: a fascinating book, do read it if you have a chance: perhaps I’ll save it for ya. Although he was something of an ass in practical affairs, & wd have been hell to deal with, I find him very sympathetic with his genuine indifference to success and love of solitude & ‘low’ things like weeds and kitchen chairs. I never realised he went to China once! It had no effect on him. He wrote that after a session at Cliveden with Lord Astor, saying ‘Yes yes, very interesting, yes’ he was relieved to get back home where all his selves could reemerge ‘like children let out of school’. Don’t I know it! Don’t you! ‘Oh! What a good idea!’ Band of elastic. […]
– Rushed out to the kitchen to retrieve my white tie, boiling for nearly 3 hours! Luckily the water hadn’t boiled away, so I could rinse it and hang it up to dry. I last wore it on Queen Mother day – such bits of clothes must get a very exalted idea of one’s daily life. Ideas of one’s dancing-shoes, one’s black mourning tie, one’s swimming costume. Oh, curse this poem, I think I shall chuck it – I am no booldy good.
Friday Must get this in the post – dull day, bucked up by kind words in the Spr. Much love, darling. I kiss you from head to foot.
Philip
1 ‘Essential Beauty’, completed 26 June 1962.
2 Possibly James MacGregor Burns’s John F. Kennedy: a Political Profile (1961).
3 Maurice Collis: Stanley Spencer: a biography (1962).
4 Monica was looking after the Craik family’s pet hamster while they were on holiday (see About Larkin, No. 11, April 2001, for ‘Presents from Monica’ by Roger Craik).
6 August 1962
21 York Road, Loughborough, Leics.
[…] Isn’t it a sad shock about Marilyn Monroe?1 The People made her sound very dopey, but I was shocked all the same. The Mirror said her fan mail had shrunk from 8,000 to 80 a week! I’m sure Hollywood is a ghastly place to work in for anyone like her, everyone wanting to screw you and get a cut for doing it, nobody really helping you. Did you see, by the way, the story in Time about Cary Grant receiving a telegram from a paper asking ‘HOW OLD CARY GRANT’ to wch he replied ‘OLD CARY GRANT FINE HOW YOU’? Ogh ogh. How old Wm Gull. How old Dr Pussy.
I am reading my ‘home’ books, like S. Sassoon, Saki, & J.C.Powys’ Autobiography: also had a shot at G. Eliot’s Scenes from clerical life, but got bogged down in ‘Mr Gilfil’. I see the TLS review of Barnes was like mine in criticising the scholarship & production of the edition – they’ll think I cribbed it. The Listener will sit on my review till September (‘Autumn Books’) by wch time it will be thoroughly vieux jeu.2 […]
I can’t say I feel on top of the world here – Mother’s friends all seem to have just died, or had a stroke, or a fall, or been widowed, or be having ‘deep ray’ treatment, or in the mental hospital – no reason why they shouldn’t, in the driving rain of time that will bring us all down in the end. A few more years shall roll. Still, it is a sad atmosphere – don’t know what I should do if it weren’t for The Archers & other forms of unreality.
1 Died 5 August 1962.
2 The Listener published L.’s review of William Barnes: Poems, ed. Bernard Jones on 16 August 1962. It is reprinted in Required Writing.
12 August 1962
21 York Road, Loughborough, Leics.
Dearest Bun,
Just a few words before bed – I don’t know how it is, but I seem to have very little time here – it’s all eating or washing up. I must say that after a week of it I begin to feel for my father in his retirement – it is a dreadful life. I remember him holding up some implement or other at the sink and saying ‘That’s the third time today I’ve washed this!’ And it was, and I expect I’ve washed it three times a day myself, 15 years later. I wondered what he would have thought, to see me washing the same old colander, the same old saucepans, the same old cooking knives and forks – laughed, I should think. You may say there’s nothing very awful about all this, but all the same I think there is – I feel it as awful, anyway.
Home is a sad place, anyway: I find so much from the last 20 years, and before: your letters, other letters, back to the telegrams about my Schools results, letters about A Girl in Winter, school magazines – I feel I’ve done nothing with that fat fillet-steak part of life, 20 to 40, and now it’s gone. And I haven’t done anything with it because I’m too spiritless and cowardly and talentless. People live a lifetime a year compared with me.
We went to church tonight, wch was all right in a way – ‘the passionless Sundays after Trinity’. (What a lovely poem that is! The only good one in the book, I’m thankful to say, since the book is ungettable.)1 A sermon on ‘Beware false prophets’, but a dull one. I thought he was going to start on Bertrand Russell, or the Dean of C.2 […]
*
Tuesday Last day here – feel consumed with boredom and irritation. There is an Irish-Polish family moved in next door, with several toddling children who take it in turns to maul the kitten. Every time I look out of the window I see one of them pulling it about – I would forbid all pets by law, & all pet shops: licensed suppliers of torture-material. Why doesn’t it scratch their stupid little eyes out.
Oh dear, I really haven’t time to finish this, if I’m to get it off this morning – I think my life at Hull is almost totally unreal – playthings like telephones and committees, & of course I live alone – so any prolonged contact with things & people such as only home provides sends me into a frenzy of irritation. It was always so, especially when I lived at home – I was really only happy either out of it or in a dream world of cigarette cards, i.e. poetry. Of course, one may have to stick it, but should one embrace it? I don’t think other people embrace what they hate. […]
1 ‘The book’ was John Meade Falkner’s Poems, published posthumously (c.1933) and hard to find. Falkner (1858–1932) also published novels, including Moonfleet.
2 The Dean of Canterbury, Hewlett Johnson, known as the Red Dean.
29 September 1962
32 Pearson Park, Hull
[…] I wish you could see yourself in the centre of my mantelpiece, standing by the hydrangeas dressed for Bunny United, in your delinquent stockings and shoes, a handbag hanging from your hand. It has come up quite nicely. You look like a poster for an X film, but basically innocent all the same. I have put you-in-the-water into my album.
Well, of course, I do understand and agree with what you say, when you say how we are wasting our lives.1 When I say I wish we could talk more easily about ourselves, I mean just that; I mean it seems strange not to, and I think it’s something of a barrier between us, or a failure between us – it’s difficult to know precisely what I mean: I don’t say I want to bore you with my feelings, or be bored, so to speak, by yours, but I have a curious feeling that in some ways we are not in sympathy & this keeps us off any kind of discussion that might reveal the fact. I have the continual feeling that you either know me too well or don’t know me enough. Again, I suspect my own motives in ‘talking’: some holidays I have felt as they ended that I must get closer to you, that it was absurd, almost wrong, to be like this, but this time I felt it was that I simply wanted to get rid of my guilt feelings to enable me to carry on in the way I felt guilty about, which isn’t fair. Anyway, I feel you shrink from such talk, as from hens – indeed, I do myself unless I can feel a sympathy in you to encourage me. But then what is the point of talking if there isn’t anything you particularly want to say, or feel you can say? – by you, I mean either of us, of course.
I can’t say how badly I feel about the way we are wasting our lives: it terrifies me, and gets worse every day. […]
*
Sunday High wind during the night – woke me up, rather frightened. Today the Park is strewn with brown leaves. I see The Obs. hasn’t printed my poem,2 nor have they said anything about it – it’s not a particularly good poem, I suppose, but I am fond of it. Doubt if it will please El Al,3 who I understand does the picking, though. On the other hand the S.T. gives Triple Time a run – didn’t they include it before, years ago? Quite a nice poem – ‘the thought’s good.’ Expression less good.
My dear, I don’t think you are incompetent, or whatever you said you were in your letter: I think you are very good at knowing what should be done, very good at not being afraid of doing it, and pretty good at doing it. Big things, I mean. In little day to day things I don’t know – you seem to drag rather, represented by your unwillingness to have the right time anywhere about, but I do realise – fully, really & truly – and lovingly and sympathetically – that you have, at Leicester anyway, too much to do. I understand, in a way, about not wanting people despite being lonely, but of course I behave badly about people. While I was writing this page Binns4 rang up, compelling me to dinner on Thursday – now, earlier in the morning I was thinking how I had put the Binnses off, at last, by seven years of non-return of invitations, despite some open hints on their side. Seems I haven’t, quite. And I do think you dislike people more than I do, not that I like them enough to have them in the house, ogh ogh ogh.
After lunch, & getting on for post-time. I don’t seem to have said much. Of course I am grateful for your openness and assurances about Bill,5 but if you feel like that, the way you said at first, then it’s my fault rather than yours and I shouldn’t have any legitimate grumble, though plenty of illegitimate ones, probably. It gives me a queer disagreeable feeling to think of you with someone else: I don’t know how I shd feel if instead of Bill it was a 40 yr old professor with a sports car – well, I do know how I shd feel, the question is how strongly I should feel it. I am not, for the record, feeling attracted by Maeve again. […]
1 In a letter from Haydon Bridge dated 26/27 September 1962, Monica had written: ‘You know how you are often trying to talk to me about us, & I always start to cry so you can’t; I wish I didn’t, but it just makes me cry to think of it, so I try not to think of it – all the same, I’m sorry, because I think you ought to be able to say something without tears from me, & indeed I wish I could talk about it without tears. Nevertheless I do think abt it sometimes, and today is a day that has made me think of it – the summer going, unused, the beauty of the scenery, unused. It made me very conscious of what a short time we are here for, & how little of that time we have left, you & I; it isn’t much, and for all we know it might be very short, & I wish I could spend what is left with you, or more of what is left than I do spend. I can write this, just, but I’m sure I couldn’t say it – I am not in tears, but tears are behind my eyes, making eyes & head ache. If once I start thinking of reality, all the sad things lock to mind at once, & all the impossible difficulty of life, the way I just scrape along, never, never being in control of the situation, never doing anything properly, & I can hardly bear it. I live so foolishly, too; wasting hours in lazy inertia, doing nothing, or thinking sadly & pointlessly, always worried abt things undone & my inability to get on with them; and I do rely on drink more than I like, I really have to have my tipple, now, & sometimes I drink a lot, tho’ not, I think, as badly now as I did just after my parents died.’
2 ‘Send No Money’.
3 A. Alvarez, at the time poetry editor of and reviewer for the Observer.
4 A. L. Binns, Lecturer in English at Hull: see Appendix B.
5 Bill Ruddick: see Appendix B.
4 October 1962
32 Pearson Park, Hull
Dearest,
You must think me awful, as if I deliberately set out to upset you – I’m so sorry: it isn’t that.1 I am always oppressed by guilt-feelings about the mess I have got you in, and my own behaviour seems so bad anyway that almost anything else wd seem better, in the way of behaviour I mean.
I got your letter only this evening, & now I have to change & go to loony Binns right off – I’d sooner write to you. Oh, how tired term makes me! It was lovely talking to you last night, & made me feel happier. […]
You know, I expect you do want to be reassured, but I always fall into the habit of thinking you are more assured than I am: you have such a strong, seamless character – not vague, shifting and gullible like mine – and you have a – really, I wd swear it – stronger personality than mine: you aren’t given to bursts of temper or vindictiveness but are much more level and firm than I. For this reason I am always feeling I deserve a denunciation from you – I always feel morally inferior, not only relatively in the way I have behaved but absolutely in comparing ourselves. And of course I do feel terrible about our being 40 & unmarried. I fear we are to turn slowly into living reproaches of the way I have dallied and lingered with you, neither one thing or the other. This leads me to spells of wanting to explain & defend myself, wch appears like brutal & gratuitous attack to you, but wch are really products of miserable self accusation – I feel like Murry, always my bête noire, without your being KM. And then again I hope if only we could achieve, I don’t know, a kind of self-encouraging intimacy, it wd be so easy for us to marry. But this may be a fancy on my part – people are different, after all. […]
1 Monica had written in a letter dated 1 October 1962 from Haydon Bridge: ‘I wish I were better – I’d like to be able to talk more. I think I could have, when we began, perhaps; but I never know what you are thinking, and thinking of me – & you must admit, with some reason, you have been attracted to various people & haven’t told me. I don’t think I’m too much to be blamed for being so tiresome – I do not behave reasonably, I know, & I wish I did; but it is not an easy situation, as you know & wish to say, I suppose, & I think it can be understood that I am very easily upset abt it […] Anyway, I accept, don’t I, & without private reservation or grudge, that you don’t like me enough to marry me; then it seems rather unkind for you to want to tell me so, & perhaps tell me all the things that are wrong with me.’
7 October 1962
32 Pearson Park, Hull
[…] No poem by me in The Observer, but the Hoggart one in The Spectator.1 On reflection I find it gets into a long skid towards the end, but the last line seems to me to ‘stand’, as Vernon Watkins would say. J.C.Powys 90 tomorrow! Dear old chap! Think of him burning ‘Pray for the soul of John Cowper Powys’ on the beam of his room in Corpus in about 1890! And living on weak tea and Woodbines in Wales! He never worked …
1 ‘Essential Beauty’, Spectator, 5 October 1962.
23 October 1962
32 Pearson Park, Hull
Dearest rabbit,
The nights are fairly dark now, aren’t they! I am home in the dark, clutching my bottle of gin and my lemon. After drink, supper, & a bemused gassed doze I sit up and try to improve, or make less bad, my two current poems, Toads Revisited and Sunny Prestatyn, about the poster we saw at Tweedmouth. Neither is very good, or very elevating.
I did go out on Sunday, & for the brief time I was free of cars and motorbikes enjoyed myself a lot. The cottage gardens are all purple and red & gold, & the hedges full of hips & haws & elderberries, & now and again a pale pink wild rose. I stopped at Wawne & poked about in the churchyard, turning up chestnuts in the grass, & noting George Beulah, who had outlived two wives before dying in 1909. All three have identical tall stones. When I was there, a woman called that if I was going into the church, wd I be careful to shut the door, as the heating was on. I hadn’t really intended to, but thought I would, as the heating was on! I was glad I did, because it was all decorated for Harvest Home! Really very thrilling, & funny, the lines of cabbages and cauliflowers, piles of tomatoes in little stone niches, a box of dates (!) on the harmonium, celery up the aisle, chrysanthemums everywhere, a big sheaf of corn, then on the table a bunch of black grapes, a pot of honey (homemade), and a loaf, specially baked I should say. I don’t think I have seen a church so decorated for years, and the shock of it was tremendous – of course I thought of you, although rabbits would be unlikely to take part in such a ceremony, or at least not in the way intended. You would have liked it. I left them a pound, and shut the door carefully – all I harvest is money, but they were welcome to some of that. […]
