Arguably: Selected Essays (53 page)

Writing to his mistress Catherine Walston in 1956, Greene told her that
Our Man in Havana
was potentially a “very funny plot which if it comes off will make a footnote to history.” I feel almost as if I owe an apology for having taken so long to illustrate his elementary point.

(2007)

*
I completed this essay on the day before Fidel Castro fell ill and handed over power to the Cuban armed forces, in the shape of his brother Raúl, in August 2006.

Loving Philip Larkin
²⁸

I
N MAY 1941, Philip Larkin was the treasurer of the Oxford University English Club and in that capacity had to take the visiting speaker George Orwell out to dinner after he had addressed the membership on the subject of “Literature and Totalitarianism.” Larkin’s main recollection of the evening was that the meal was an indifferent one at a “not-so-good hotel,” the club’s hospitality funds having been hopelessly depleted by an incautious earlier invitation to Dylan Thomas.

Nudged and intrigued by this near-miss of a potential meeting of minds, I once attempted a comparison and contrast between Larkin and Orwell, as exemplars of a certain style of “Englishness.” Both men had an abiding love for the English countryside and a haunting fear of its obliteration at the hands of “developers.” (Here I would cite Larkin’s poem
Going, Going
and Orwell’s novel
Coming Up for Air
.) Both were openly scornful of Christianity but maintained a profound respect for the scripture and the Anglican liturgy, as well as for the masterpieces of English ecclesiastical architecture. (See Larkin’s poem
Church Going
and the same Orwell novel, as well as numberless of his letters and reviews.) They each cherished the famous English affection for animals and were revolted by any instances of human cruelty to them. (Here consult Larkin’s poem
Myxamatosis
, about the extirpation of the country’s rabbit population, as well as at least one Orwell source that’s too obvious to require mentioning.)

In somewhat different ways, Orwell and Larkin were phlegmatically pessimistic and at times almost misanthropic, not to say misogynistic. Both also originated from dire family backgrounds that inculcated prejudice against Jews, the colored subjects of the British Empire, and the working class. Orwell’s detested father was a servant of the Empire who specialized in the exceptionally nasty sub-division that traded opium between India and China, and Larkin’s detested father was a professional civil servant who came to admire the “New Germany” of the 1930s and supported the British Union of Fascists. But these similarities in trait and background produced radically different conclusions. Orwell educated himself, not without difficulty, out of racial prejudice and took a stalwart position on the side of the workers. Larkin energetically hated the Labour movement and was appalled at the arrival of emigrants from the Caribbean and Asia. Orwell traveled as widely as his health permitted and learned several foreign languages, while Larkin’s insularity and loathing for “abroad” was almost parodic. In consequence, Orwell has left us a memory which gets English decency rated as one of humanity’s versions of grace under pressure, whereas the publication of his
Selected Letters
in 1992, and a biography by Andrew Motion in 1993, posthumously drenched Larkin in a tide of cloacal filth and petty bigotry that was at least somewhat self-generated.

I now wish I had understood enough to push my earlier comparison a little further. For there is another aspect of “Englishness,” netted in discrepant ways by Harold Pinter and Monty Python, in which both men had a share. This is the world of wretched, tasteless food and watery drinks, dreary and crowded lodgings, outrageous plumbing, surly cynicism, long queues, shocking hygiene and dismal, rain-lashed holidays, continually punctuated by rudeness and philistinism. Orwell’s
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
is the most graphic distillation of all this in his early fiction, but it is an essential element of the texture of
Nineteen Eighty-four
, and was quarried from the “down and out” journalism of which he produced so much. A neglected aspect of the general misery, but very central once you come to notice it, is this: We are in a mean and chilly and cheerless place, where it is extraordinarily difficult to have sex, let alone to feel yourself in love. Orwell’s best shorthand for it was “the WC and dirty-handkerchief side of life.”

Philip Larkin’s own summary was if anything even more dank: He once described the sexual act as a futile attempt to “get someone else to blow your nose for you.” These collected letters reflect his contribution to a distraught and barren four-decade relationship with Monica Jones, an evidently insufferable yet gifted woman who was a constant friend and intermittent partner (one can barely rise to saying “mistress” let alone “lover”) until Larkin’s death in 1985. During that time, he strove to keep her to himself while denying her the marriage that she so anxiously wanted, betrayed her with other women sexually, and eagerly helped Kingsley Amis to employ her as the model for the frigid, drab and hysterical Margaret Peel in
Lucky Jim
.

On an initial scrutiny,
Letters to Monica
struck me as rather thickening the squalid atmosphere of some of the preceding accounts. But so unalleviated—I almost wrote “artless”—is its tone that the material takes on a certain integrity and consistency. Not unlike Larkin’s paradoxical infatuation with jazz, also, it helps furnish a key to his muse. The key in both cases—which is why “artless” would be such a mistake—is that about suffering he was seldom wrong. The dismal paltriness of the suffering doesn’t really qualify this verdict.

One of his ways of keeping Monica while keeping her at bay—they did not co-habit until very near the end, forced into mutual dependence by decrepitude on his part and dementia on hers: perhaps the least romantic story ever told—was to make an over-full confession of his own inadequacies as a male. “I’m sorry our lovemaking fizzled out,” he writes after a disappointing provincial vacation in 1958. “I am
not
a highly-sexed person.” This comes just after a letter in which he invites her to consider their affair in the light of “a kind of homosexual relation, disguised: it wdn’t surprise me at all if someone else said so.” And even earlier—it is not as if this is the record of a hot thing cooling—he writes in December 1954 that “if it were announced that all sex would cease on 31 December, my way of life wouldn’t change at all.” This naturally prompts one to review one of his best-known poems,
Annus Mirabilis:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me)
Between the end of the
Chatterley
ban,
And the Beatles’ first LP.

The lines can easily be read as a non-literal satire on the exuberant 1960s in general. The less-quoted succeeding verse is arguably more revealing:

Up till then there’d only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for a ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.

In Larkin’s mind, marriage was invariably a trap set by females; a ring in exchange for some perfunctory sex and then a lifetime of domestic servitude and—even more appalling—the rearing of children. Once again the poetry is unambiguous.
The Life with a Hole in It
conveys the cringe with greater complexity, but
Self’s the Man
is not unrepresentative:

He married a woman to stop her getting away.
Now she’s here all day.
And the money he gets for wasting his life on work
She takes as her perk
To pay for the kiddies’ clobber and the drier.…

Even
The Whitsun Weddings
, in which he manages to write with some
tendresse
about a famous northern English nuptial tradition, closes with an extremely melancholy metaphor of energy mutated into futility, or possibly potency into liquefaction: “A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower / Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.” And as for the thought of parenthood, not just by or from oneself, but even
of
oneself, we need look no further than the celebrated poem that probably convinced his admirer Margaret Thatcher that he wasn’t the family-values type.
This Be The Verse
opens by saying “They fuck you up, your mum and dad / They may not mean to, but they do,” and closes by advising “Get out as early as you can / And don’t have any kids yourself.” There are virtually no references to children in Larkin that are not vivid with revulsion, the word “kiddies” being the customary form which the automatic shudder took.

No keen analyst is required to unravel this. Not only did Larkin have a bombastic fascist for a father, but he also had a simpering weakling for a mother. Sydney Larkin had the grace to die early but his widow Eva lingered on, querulous, demanding and hypochondriac (as well as extremely unwell) for decades. She may not have meant to make her son’s life a nightmare of guilt and annoyance, but she did. This resulted in Monica Jones winning at least one round. On no account, she told her man, should he be blackmailed into living with Eva. “Don’t be robbed!” she beseeched him. “Don’t be robbed of your soul.” If she couldn’t have him, she at least wouldn’t surrender him to that form of “the other woman.”

To have read Larkin’s
Letters
and Motion’s biography is to be “in” on a rather dirty joke that surreptitiously permeates these pages. Larkin may not have been highly-sexed in the conventional sense, but he was a heroic consumer of pornography and amateur composer of sado-masochistic reveries, which he often shared with his worldly friends Robert Conquest and Kingsley Amis. He didn’t much like the capital city but would never pass through London without spending good money, or paying through the nose as one might say, on the vendors of semi-licit glossies in the Soho quarter. Why Andrew Motion maintains that he didn’t have specialized tastes I cannot think: On those dark and costly visits he was in constant search of material featuring schoolgirls, flagellation, and sodomy. (In 1958 to Conquest: “I agree
Bamboo
&
Frolic
are the tops, or rather bottoms: do pass on any that have ceased to stimulate.”) This celebrated fixation, too, is thought by some to be “quintessentially English.” At his death, along with many other private papers, the vast library of a hectically devoted masturbator had to be hastily burned. (He obviously had not mistaken his calling as an archivist.) Once one “knows” this, many of the letters to Monica become instantly intelligible. He comments slyly but learnedly on the buggery implications of the D. H. Lawrence novel that was then on trial in the courts.
“You and your bottom”
he elsewhere writes fervently. “I lay in bed one morning last week remembering one after-breakfast time when you were looking out of my kitchen window … You were wearing the black nylon panties with the small hole in!” Or “You must look a wonderful sight in fur hat and boots—nothing else? Holding a rawhide whip? (You see how naturally my imagination composes aesthetic
montages
for you.)” On and on his plaintively suggestive appeals recur and—this is somehow impressive—
she never seems to take the hint
. What Larkin wanted was a Nora Barnicle and what he got was—Margaret Peel. The sole exception seems to prove my rule: In late 1958 he plumbs the depth of abjectness by writing to her in apology for what clearly must have been a bungled episode of anal penetration. (“I am sorry too that our encounter had such unhappy results for you! I really didn’t expect such a thing, though I suppose it might have been predicted. I am sorry. It does rather spoil the incident, even at best, which was very exciting for me anyway. Let’s hope all rights itself soon.”)

Not since Hemingway so overdid the lapine pillow-talk in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
has any man referred to a woman as a rabbit with such regularity and intensity. Most of the letters are addressed to either “Bun” or “Bunny” and not a few are illustrated with drawings of rabbits, references to rabbits in literature, or condemnations of British government policy toward rabbits. The obsession did yield the fine poem
Myxamatosis
that I mentioned earlier, but Larkin’s attempt to make a Beatrix Potter nursery story out of the standoff is often in jarring contrast to the content. The sad grovel I quoted from above is concluded by the sentence: “You sound as if you want comforting Fat rabbit lovely pretty rabbit,” which is a lot to bear for those of us who respect Larkin for his lack of sentimentality. And rabbits are above all philoprogenitive … Incidentally all resemblances to Orwell break off at this point: The author of
Animal Farm
had a tough enough time with women but was eager for marriage and anxious for children, preferring to adopt rather than go without.