Philip larkin letters to.., p.42
Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica, page 42
1 Women’s Royal Naval (Service).
2 Character in Barbara Pym’s novel Excellent Women (1952).
20 February 1964
32 Pearson Park, Hull
[…] This has been a tiring week. I have gone back & read a classic Gladys Mitchell or two – how good she is when she knows her background, as in Laurels Are Poison. I’m on Death & the Maiden now, and remembering our freezing time in Winchester. Just now I am playing a delicious record, old ragtime of 1900–1916 era; I wish you could hear it. It’s not the piano rolls I did play you once, but band & banjo pieces as well as piano rolls. So gay & insouciant, & yet so sad under it all. It’s like the band playing on some pre 1914 prom or pier – sun, straw hats, sovereigns, the pubs wide open all day, and a heat haze – or is it a cloud? – over the German Ocean … I long to play it to you. Not at all jazzy – more the cakewalk, the syncopation of the plantation forcing its way through Gilbert & Sullivan. And so musical, tuneful, agreeable. […]
3 March 1964
32 Pearson Park, Hull
Had a good journey back – 2 people asked me to autograph TWW’s in the train – the Ringo Starr of contemporary verse.
Dearest,
Groogh, what a day. I get my first driving licence & my first car in it, six months less three days after I took my first lesson, creeping petrified round the Park in low gear. Now I creep petrified along the roads in no gear at all. Oogh, groogh, uuurghgh. Instead of the cross, the Singer Gazelle about his neck was hung.1 Oh dear, what have I done.
I think the most characteristic thing about it is the fearful reek of the upholstery (a blinding scarlet, anyway) wch tends to make me feel sick. I suppose it will wear off. It’s a horrible solidified-peardrop kind of smell. I am acutely aware of it shining, complicated, weighing over a ton, sitting out in the Park, & its incredible routine – every week do these, every 3,000 miles do those, etc. Money will flow away into its maw. I feel I ought to go out & see that I have locked the boot & that no one can steal my jack, spare tyre, etc. Oh dear! Isn’t it all untypical! I feel as if I had somehow slipped through into a different character. Phew. […]
1 Parodic reference to Coleridge’s ‘The Ancient Mariner’. L.’s first car was a Singer Gazelle.
29 March 1964
(Easter Sunday)
21 York Road, Loughborough, Leics.
[…] I’m awaiting the Critics’ onslaught at present – bet that Irish hoodlum Craig1 will lam me as unswaggering & unpassionate, with his ‘fillum’… Ogh ogh, hear Karl bashing the Oxford crap, good show. And talking of the older universities, good old Oxford distinguished themselves on the Thames all right, didn’t they. It’s always like that when I listen (or look!). I thought they were supposed to be favourites – strange favourites!
Kind notice for Jill in The Obs – very pleasant surprise. See K. is reduced to fill-in for Pen Gilliatt – twenty years ago he was borrowing from me – well, fifteen, – fifteen years hence he’ll be borrowing again, poor old hack.
Here we go … K.M. apologising in advance, isn’t he! God, he’s not leaving much anti for the rest to say, is he. I can see that Bechet line2 is going to be my albatross, like ‘sex, but what is sex’ from the other one. Well, old Craig comin’ down on my side – must think I’m Irish, mustn’t he? Good old Hobson – big poems about small things – hope my publishers are noting quotes for use in the unlikely event of their ever advertising … Craig mentioning Lambs! Good lad, I’ll send’m a crate of Guinness. And a coupla blawnds. Oh well, good on the whole, eh? Well, almost unreservedly good. I do feel defensive about that Bechet line: have they never heard the Beatles singing ‘She loves you – yeah, yeah, yeah—’? Or read the end of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy? Why is it so bad? I thought when I wrote it that it just ‘got’ love & Bechet & everything. Perhaps that’s what’s wrong with it! […]
1 H. A. L. Craig, Irish critic and broadcaster, taking part in the radio programme The Critics, in which each week a new play, film, art exhibition, radio or television programme and book was discussed by a panel. In this case, Craig appeared alongside Karl Miller, Harold Hobson and others, discussing The Whitsun Weddings.
2 ‘Like an enormous yes’, from L.’s poem ‘For Sidney Bechet’.
30 March 1964
21 York Road, Loughborough
Dearest,
I have done up your little gift – hope it reaches you. There is a poem inside1 wch I hope you won’t throw away with the wrapping. It is absolutely unique – I have burnt the draft & forgotten it already. I am reading KM’s letters to JM2 – she calls him ‘the Great Poet of our time … I whisper “Oh, my Wonder”…’ Awgh. You don’t say that to me. Ogh ogh. Shuold lock yuo in the Scurley if you did.
Now it’s Tuesday, and I suppose this can’t be any more than a note if it’s to go today. Awful weather, fit to make you cut your throat. Why do I at 41 have to spend my ‘holidays’ at home? Why can’t one stop being a son without becoming a father? Why is my life so devoid of active grape-bursting enjoyment? […]
1 Poem missing.
2 Katherine Mansfield to J. Middleton Murry.
22 April 1964
The Library, Hull
Enclosed is £5 for food – I meant to give it you.
Dearest,
It’s just about three o’clock, and I have absented myself from my visitors for a few minutes. I have really had little time to reflect since you left, but have felt extremely remorseful & upset & appalled at the situation I have created.
I can only say again that I didn’t want to hurt you because I thought it wasn’t ‘serious’ enough, but anyway I am ashamed of it all. Perhaps it was a good thing to bring the affair into the open1 – I certainly feel closer to you now than I have done for some time.
I was heartwrung by your sickness. Please take great care of yourself & see that you don’t get ill.
I hope the journey was tolerable & that you found things were all right on your return. I look forward to getting a word from you, and will write again very soon.
With dearest love
Philip
1 This short letter from L crossed with a 20-side letter from Monica to L., also dated 22 April 1964. Both letters followed a traumatic weekend in Hull, when Monica in her anguish over further revelations about L.’s affair with Maeve was physically sick. Monica’s letter, completed on 24 April, ends: ‘Well, I thought I was being very calm & sensible last night, but the letter gets more raving & hysterical, it seems, read today, as it goes on. Well, I will send it and believe that you will be able to forgive its faults of raving and of boring going on & on about the same thing; I think what it says is true, but the way it says it is tiresome, droning on and on.’
25 April 1964
32 Pearson Park, Hull
Dearest,
I do wish I could ring you up. It’s Saturday, about 8: I’ve had Judy’s Australian, rested, had a bath, & ought to have supper, but don’t want it at present. I’m not ‘not eating’, exactly, but I think of you alone & want to get in touch with you. I feel alone myself, of course! not that I’d mind normally, but the general shock & unhappiness weigh heavily. Oh, I do wish I could get in touch with you & cheer you, as I know I could, or at least comfort you.
I had your long letter this morning – it’s in the kitchen at present: I almost avoid it because of the pain it contains. Darling, I don’t think you’re mad or odd. I shd tell you if I did, no doubt giving you something more to swallow. I think when I first knew you you were (irritatingly) frighteningly sane. Now you are labouring under the burden of too much solitude & my cavalier treatment of you, & your domestic misfortune & unhappiness. But who thinks you’re mad, or odd? Only you, surely. I think you have, through no fault of your own, an unhappy life – I’m afraid it is through some fault of mine.
Anyway, put out of your head any thought that Maeve & I did that party note between us – now that is an odd thing to think. It makes me realise how you must be upsetting yourself by imagining things that aren’t so. No, it was her own innocent work, & I shouldn’t really have shown it to you to laugh at, but it was such a perfect & extraordinary example of that kind of language I felt you wd marvel at it. Dear, I can tell you are thinking Maeve is ‘better’ than you – I mean you are instinctively thinking ‘I’m awful, dull, mad, unsophisticated etc’ – but really that’s not so, & you know it isn’t. If you wonder how I can be attracted to someone who in all sincerity thinks like that, well, I suppose it’s just that she’s got other, nicer qualities. But it doesn’t blind me to her – well, I won’t say deficiencies, because there’s no law about calling jam jam. Differences. Well, hell, deficiencies of taste. Her ‘Whitstable oyster’ is serving home made cakes (by her) with cornflakes & grated coconut on top. And if you think I’m just pretending to denigrate her to comfort you, & am being insincere, well, I’m trying to preserve the balance, wch I think is in danger of being lost.
And I’m sorry about that oyster. I thought you were deliberately refusing to commit yourself in case I turned on you if I didn’t like it. I’ll never mention the incident again – I’m sorry, I do understand. In return, will you exonerate me from battery eggs? I was silly & ignorant in those days: I always (except when absolutely forced) buy fresh eggs now. I’ve found where the shops are, round about.
This is the end of a pad – I buy pads & pads, & lose them, either at work or here. Somewhere there are about a dozen pads. Ah, found one.
Judy’s Australian was bearded and a bit of a dope. He said he thought Judy was like a Henry James heroine. I don’t think I’ve seen the last of him.
I do hope you are better. No tears, no reproaches could have shamed me more than your being sick. I feel quite awful, as if I had, well, kicked something to death – I’m not, I hope, being melodramatic: kicked something & seen it vomit as a result, perhaps. You know I feel I ought to take care of you – I have always felt this since your parents died, and it has caused enormous conflict & worry in me, that from time to time I’ve tried to explain, in that I did not ask you to marry me – I think I am mad & odd too: sometimes I am tempted to say how much I’m affected by sex fear & auto-erotic fantasies, & how I feel normal emotional relations & responsibilities a terrible strain, I mean a big tiring strain. I don’t want to bore you with such things – only don’t assume that I’m wise & ‘mature’ compared with you: I’m infantile & cowardly & selfish, too frightened to make a will even. I’ve been afraid that my ‘support’ of you was in fact a covert weakening of you, a kind of paralysis, & a cheating you of a happy life. I engaged your emotions & refused to satisfy them – an action, as G.B.S. says, for which I know no polite name.
It’s ten past nine now – I ought to go & clear up the kitchen, anyway. Oh, I do wish I could get in touch with you. Not, I suppose, that I could say anything immediately comforting – I mean, the harm has been done, by hurting you.
Suppered. Have re-read your letter & also one from Bob wch arrived with it. (I think there is a poem to be made out of the letters that arrive together.) Do you know, he is spending his honeymoon in something called The International Cultural Center, in Tunis, FREE (‘free bed, board & sun’), & lecturing for his keep IN FRENCH – the place is empty at the moment, but there might have been other writers there – can you bloody well beat it? His honeymoon – even if he didn’t care by now, he might have thought of her. Her honeymoon! Among writers! In Tunis! I do frankly think this is amazing. Don’t you?
Your letter is sad and some of it is sensible – well, yes, it has been a relief, in a way, to behave like everyone else, bloody ass though you feel sometimes, but Maeve isn’t as young as all that. Thirty four, thirty five next autumn. About love, if I could have said last September ‘I’m in love with Maeve, goodbye’, I wd: as it was, I couldn’t – perhaps too fond of you, perhaps not fond enough of her, perhaps just too cowardly all round. So don’t go thinking I am skipping like a young ram in a rosy haze, ‘in love’ – I think I get some of the emotions with her. But I get some of them with you.
Oh God, burbling on—
More tomorrow, dear. I really do regret all this, and wish I could be there to console you. I’m glad you have Noggs & co. Do tell me people’s reactions – all people.
Had a Swedish cutting today with ‘Philip L. – ingen arg ung man’ under my picture. Sounds funny. Cheeky devil.
This page sounds a bit insensitive – I’m sorry.
*
Sunday, about 3. Dull day, not the weather which is painfully springlike. I got up, etc., wrote home, cleaned the car after a fashion, went for papers and a pint, had lunch – all rather like last Sunday, except that the sun is shining. Actually I keep falling asleep!
I thought I might add to this, but I feel a bit weary of my explanations today. I’m sure my letters were all right – I can always write. Doing’s what I’m bad at. Not that they were insincere – why should they be? I’m always very fond of you, and you are easier to write to than anyone.
I have been thinking I might come up to L’boro’ from Cambridge on Sunday, stay the night, see you a bit on Monday, & return to Hull on Tuesday – Tuesday is a non dies, Founders’ Day. The only trouble is that Monday isn’t a non dies! Otherwise I should be presumably coming home at Whitsun – I shall be in Reading on 15 May for their opening – I don’t know if anything is obstructing 9 May, but as you know I don’t like going away two weekends running. If I did manage to keep Monday 4 clear, wd you be able/willing to see me? I shouldn’t especially want to go ‘in’ – Simmons1 is eager for me & proposes coming here on 23 May for this purpose, & in consequence I’d sooner keep out of his way. I shd – I hope – like to see you: I mean I am afraid to, in that I am ashamed of the hurt I have caused you, & of my own frittering away of your life, but, well, I feel concerned for you and – I don’t feel able to face losing touch with you.
Getting on for post time. Gay, sunny Sunday: painful Spring. Those she has least use for see her best.2 I wish you were reachable at Leics.
Hope you are feeling better. Best love, Philip
1 Jack Simmons, Professor of History, Leicester.
2 Line from L.’s poem ‘Spring’, written in Leicester, May 1950.
27 April 1964
32 Pearson Park, Hull
[…] I asked Maeve about the time Broadcast was published, & she said that at that time we had quite given up seeing each other as she was trying to recapture Philip (her other chap was called this). This relieved me, as I didn’t like to think I’d said anything that wasn’t at least fairly true. Of course, I’d forgotten all about it – boiled as an owl when he wasn’t working. We then had a remote kind of year (1962) wch ended with a sort of resurgence of feelings on my part in about March 1963. I forget when Philip faded out – late in ’62, I think. […]
29 April 1964
32 Pearson Park, Hull
[…] I wish I were more open with you: we are now, but I’m rather like Sir John at the beginning of The Crooked Hinge,1 not knowing whether he is an impostor or not. Sometimes I think Maeve is a kind of 40-ish aberration of mine, and her family & religion & desire for marriage & children & all that wd scare me out of the country if I were left alone with them. At others I think we have – that’s you & I have – got into a sort of rut that will become increasingly ludicrous and painful as the years waste by. In a way you reflect what I am, she what I might have been – manager of a local insurance branch, I should guess. But you know how potent what one isn’t can become! You flatter her if you think she wd have heard of either Barnes, but she once told me that her previous chap had never heard of D.H.L. This gave me a ils-sont-dans-le-vrai feeling, silly swine. I mean, quite an achievement not to have heard of him. […]
1 Detective novel by John Dickson Carr (1938).
10 May 1964
32 Pearson Park, Hull
Dearest bun,
I’m sure you won’t be surprised if I say the card is the most beautiful I’ve ever seen – it’s almost like a rabbit Ingres. What a terrible shame it couldn’t come with a happier message – I’m very depressed to hear you had such a sad birthday, but surprised too, as I left feeling I had really assured you that I liked you better than Maeve & that if I felt I was cheating anyone it was her! Not of course that I feel happy about it all anyway: as I say, I think sometimes I am ultimately an auto-erotic writer case incapable of love for anyone but himself. (How my hand trembles! I’ve been cleaning the car.) […]
12 May 1964
32 Pearson Park, Hull
[…] Well, I was a bit saddened by your fat letter, but no need to apologise, no reason why I shouldn’t be saddened. I thought your letter quite sane & collected. I wish I could reply more fully, as you deserve, but I know I have only about 2 pages in me: in a way you make me sound more romantic & dramatic than I am, wch is almost more crushing than deflating abuse. My situation seems to me a little squalid, a little contemptible, more than a little infantile, on one side of it, & a bit pathetic & frightening on another – I suppose so much of life really has gone, the ‘young romances’ I never had at the proper time, the normal-age marriage, house, children, laying hold of life as you might say: I still don’t want them or am frightened of them or something, but they haunt me, the fact of their being irrevocably lost is unsettling and probably lies behind some of this. How silly it all sounds! But as I may have said, earlier, our great bond is at present the part of my life I am at times – just at times – not even most times – in revolt against. Or, if revolt is too strong a word, then a bit tired of. In theory, at any rate! Doesn’t sound very impressive, does it? It doesn’t impress me, anyway. I don’t know why I go on about it, when I feel so dispirited. And I do know that I am very lucky to have you & your patience instead of some less generous person, less funny & individual person.
