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We Met at the End of the Party’ APPENDIX: ‘Be my Valentine this Monday’ and ‘We met at the end of the party’ These poems came to light in 2002, as a result of a complicated sequence of events. Following Monica Jones’s death on 15 February 2001, the staff of the Brynmor Jones Library, Hull, cleared 105 Newland Avenue of Larkin’s remaining books and manuscripts. The Philip Larkin Society then purchased the remaining non-literary items: furniture, pictures and ornaments. These were removed in late 2001 and early 2002, and are now on long-term loan to the Hull Museums Service and the East Riding Museum Service. Both searches missed a small dark red ‘©ollins Ideal 468’ hard-backed manu- script notebook which had slipped behind the drawers of a bedside cabinet. This cabinet was removed by the house-clearer with the final debris, and subse- quently fell into the hands of a local man, Chris Jackson, who contacted the Larkin Society. I confirmed the authenticity of the book in a brief meeting with Mr Jackson in the Goose and Granite public house in Hull on 17.vii.2002. The notebook seems initially to have been intended for ‘Required Writing’, which Larkin wished to keep separate from the drafts in his workbooks proper. The first eleven sides are occupied by pencil drafts of ‘Bridge for the Living’, dated between 30 May 1975 and 27 July 1975. These are followed by notes on Thomas Hardy and other topics. Seven months later, however, Larkin used the book again, this time for more personal writing. The central pages were left blank but on the final five sides he wrote pencil drafts, dated between 7 February 1976 and 21 February 1976, of ‘Morning at last: there in the snow’, ‘Be my Valentine this Monday’ and ‘We met at the end of the party’. Mr Jackson subsequently took the notebook to Christie’s Auction House, one of whose employees leaked the details to a journalist, and on 22 October 2002 the Evening Standard printed the first stanza each of ‘We met at the end of the party’ and ‘Be my Valentine this Monday’ in the course of a news item: ‘“Lost” Larkin poems found in furniture bound for tip’. At this point Betty Mackereth was told of developments by James Orwin, a committee member of the Larkin Society who happened to be decorating her living-room. She allowed him to transcribe her own copy of ‘We met at the end of the party’, which was published in full in About Larkin 14, October 2002. Subsequently Betty allowed me to transcribe her copy of ‘Be my Valentine this Monday’, which appears here in full for the first time. The texts printed here are those which Philip sent to Betty Mackereth, and differ in details from the drafts in the notebook. The poems are reproduced by permission of the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Philip Larkin. Copyright © 2005 The Estate of Philip Larkin. 202 Appendix 203 ‘Be my Valentine this Monday’ Written in black ballpoint in a Valentine’s Day card showing a grinning alliga- tor and the legend ‘See you later alligator!’, continuing inside ‘You mouth- watering morsel! Happy Valentine’, after which Larkin has written ‘& love!’ Philip left the card on Betty’s desk on Saturday 14 February 1976 (addressed ‘Personal / Secretary to the Librarian / Brynmor Jones Library’), before departing for Oxford. She found it on her arrival at work on Monday 16 February. Be my Valentine this Monday, Even though we’re miles apart! Time will separate us one day – Till then, hyphen with my heart. You are fine as summer weather, May to August all in one, And the clocks, when we’re together, Count no shadows, only sun. ‘We met at the end of the party’ Written in black ink and sent from All Souls College, Oxford on 22 February 1976. In an accompanying letter Philip apologises for sending a handwritten poem, rather than a typescript: ‘again apologies. I know how embarrassing it all is.’ We met at the end of the party, When most of the drinks were dead And all the glasses dirty: ‘Have this that’s left,’ you said. We walked through the last of summer, When shadows reached long and blue Across days that were growing shorter: You said: ‘There’s autumn too.’ Always for you what’s finished Is nothing, and what survives Cancels the failed, the famished, As if we had fresh lives From that night on, and just living Could make me unaware Of June, and the guests arriving, And I not there. Notes Chapter 1: The Poet’s Plight 1 Thomas Gray, letter to Mason, 9.xi.1758, Poems, with a Selection of Letters and Essays (London: J. M. Dent and Sons), 215. 2 Gray, ‘Elegy’, Poems, 31. 3 A. E. Housman, ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’, Collected Poems and Selected Prose, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Penguin, 1989), 363. 4 T. S. Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays. London: Faber and Faber1969), 182. 5 Fleur Adcock, Introduction to The Faber Book of 20th Century Women’s Poetry, 1987, 1. 6 Letter to James Sutton, 28.xii.1940; in James Booth, Philip Larkin: Writer (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 15. 7 Letter to James Sutton, 12.vii.1943. Brynmor Jones Library, Hull, MS DPL/174/2. 8 ‘The View’. 9 ‘Aubade’. 10 Philip Larkin, Trouble at Willow Gables and Other Fictions, ed James Booth (London: Faber, 2002), 241. 11 T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems and Plays (London: Faber, 1969), 182. 12 Letter to Sutton, 12.vii.1943. 13 ‘This Be The Verse’, ‘An Arundel Tomb’. 14 Michael Hamburger. Philip Larkin: A Retrospect (London: Enitharmon Press, 2002), 21–2. 15 Derek Walcott, ‘The Master of the Ordinary’, New York Review of Books, 1 June 1989, 39. 16 London: Faber and Faber, 2005. 17 R .J. C. Watt, A Concordance to the Poetry of Philip Larkin (Hildesheim: Olms- Weidmann, 1995). 18 ‘Love Songs in Age’, ‘Talking in Bed’, ‘The Old Fools’, ‘Aubade’. 19 Seamus Heaney, ‘Englands of the Mind’, Preoccupations. Selected Prose 1968–1978 (London: Faber, 1980), 164–5. 20 Neil Powell, ‘A Postcard from Pearson Park’, PN Review 157 (2004), 6. 21 In the oeuvre as defined by the 1988 Collected Poems, counting the ‘Two Guitar Pieces’, ‘Oils’, ‘Dry-Point’, and the three ‘Livings’ poems as separate works. 22 ‘Dry-Point’, ‘First Sight’, ‘Triple Time’, ‘An Arundel Tomb’, ‘Broadcast’, ‘Solar’, ‘Sad Steps’. 23 ‘A slight relax of air where cold was’, ‘Home is so Sad’, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, ‘Talking in Bed’, ‘Ambulances’. 24 ‘Love Songs in Age’, ‘Faith Healing’, ‘Ambulances’. 25 ‘Church Going’, ‘An Arundel Tomb’, ‘Home is so Sad’, ‘’When first we faced, and touching showed’, ‘Morning at last: there in the snow’. 26 ‘Best Society’, ‘Ambulances’, ‘The Old Fools’. 204 Notes 205 27 ‘Home is so Sad’, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, ‘Send No Money’, ‘Wild Oats’, ‘This Be The Verse’, ‘High Windows’, ‘The Building’, ‘The Old Fools’, ‘Aubade’. 28 ‘Going’, ‘And the wave sings because it is moving’, ‘Guitar Piece I’, ‘The Dedicated’, ‘Thaw’, ‘Sinking like sediment through the day’, ‘Coming’, ‘Oils’, ‘Dry-Point’, ‘The Literary World’, ‘Arrival’, ‘Days’, ‘Autumn’, ‘Water’, ‘Age’, ‘Long roots moor summer to our side of earth’, ‘Afternoons’, ‘None of the books have time’, ‘Nothing To Be Said’, ‘Solar’, ‘The Explosion’, ‘How’, ‘Dublinesque’, ‘Forget What Did’, ‘I have started to say’, ‘Livings II’, ‘The Mower’. 29 Some poems of the late 1940s and early 1950s, such as ‘Waiting for breakfast while she brushed her hair’, ‘Guitar Piece II’ and ‘Born Yesterday’ break irreg- ularly into rhyme at points of climax or conclusion. 30 Five further sonnets remained unpublished: three early pieces in regular form, ‘To Failure’ (1949), ‘To My Wife’ (1951), ‘Autobiography at an Air- Station’ (1953), and two later, more inventive exercises in the form, ‘And now the leaves suddenly lose strength’ (1961) and ‘ A slight relax of air where cold was’ (1962). 31 Dust-jacket of the American edition of The Whitsun Weddings, quoted in David Timms, Philip Larkin (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1973), 62. 32 Imagist Poetry, ed Peter Jones (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 67. 33 Jacques Derrida, ‘The Law of Genre’, Critical Inquiry 7 (1980), 65. 34 Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry, ed W. N. Herbert and Matthew Hollis (Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2000), 150. 35 Anthony Thwaite, Introduction to Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1988), xv. 36 James Booth, Introduction to Trouble at Willow Gables and Other Fictions (London: Faber, 2002), xliii. 37 Thwaite, xxiii. 38 Walcott, 40. 39 Oliver Marshall, ‘Stories from the Doldrums’, The Irish Times, 18.v.2002, 8. 40 Adam Kirsch, ‘A Poet in Full’, at www.walrusmagazine.com/article.pl?sid =04/03/10/2221215&… (accessed 22.iii.2004). 41 Kirsch, loc.cit. 42 Written in a Kate Greenaway Valentine’s day card, sent to Betty Mackereth on 30.xii.1975 (unpublished). 43 Thwaite, xxii. 44 ‘The Dedicated’ (carried forward from In the Grip of Light), ‘Modesties’, ‘Oils’, ‘Who called love conquering’ and ‘ Arrival’. 45 Thwaite, xxiii. 46 I wrote to Stephen Page, Chief Executive of Faber, on 19 December 2002, sug- gesting that these poems should not be withdrawn from print: ‘Either you could keep the original 1988 Collected Poems available, alongside the new reduced version… Alternatively… you could add to the new volume, an appendix of “Poems Not Published during Larkin’s Lifetime” (in small print if you need to save space).’ He replied on 10 January 2003: ‘We understand the concerns you raise and hope you will be pleased that we are actively investi- gating ways in which we can make these unpublished poems available … I would ask you just to be a little patient.’ About Larkin 14, April 2003, 30–1.
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