THE UNIVERSITY OF HULL Philip Larkin’s Textual Identities being a Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of Hull by James Underwood, BA (Hons) (Dunelm), MA (Hull) September 2015 Contents List of Abbreviations 2 Introduction 3 Part I – The Letters 30 1 Introduction: Letters and Letter-Writing 31 2 James Ballard Sutton 48 3 Colin Gunner 63 4 Monica Jones 80 5 Conclusion: Will the Real Philip Larkin Please Stand Up? 102 Part II – The Brunette Coleman Heteronym 106 6 Introduction: What To Do With Brunette Coleman? 107 7 Genre 117 8 Gender 134 9 Camp 160 10 Conclusion: Why Brunette Disappears 169 Part III – The Poems 179 11 Introduction: History, Identity and Interpretation in ‘An Arundel Tomb’ 180 12 Down Cemetery Road: The Public Larkin Persona 198 13 Larkin’s Persona Poems 218 14 Larkin’s Impersonal Poems 267 Conclusion 310 Bibliography 317 1 List of Abbreviations References to the works of Philip Larkin are incorporated in the text using the following abbreviations: AGW A Girl in Winter AWJ All What Jazz CP Collected Poems (1988) EPJ Early Poems and Juvenilia FR Further Requirements J Jill LM Letters to Monica OBTCEV The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse RW Required Writing SL Selected Letters TCP The Complete Poems (including Archie Burnett’s commentary) TWG Trouble at Willow Gables and Other Fictions References to archived correspondences held by the University of Hull in the Larkin Estate Collection at the Hull History Centre are incorporated in the text as individual letters’ dates. The relevant reference numbers from this collection are: U DP/174 Letters from Philip Larkin to James Ballard Sutton U DP/179 Correspondence between Colin Gunner and Philip Larkin U DX/341 Photocopied letters from Philip Larkin to Monica Jones All unabbreviated references are given in full at their first appearance, and in short thereafter. Insertions in square brackets are mine unless indicated otherwise. All web addresses were last accessed on 3 September 2015. 2 Introduction 3 Three days after the death of Philip Larkin, the Sunday Telegraph published an obituary tribute by the Oxford Professor of Poetry, Peter Levi: Philip Larkin, until his death on 2nd December 1985, was the funniest and most intelligent English writer of his day, and the greatest living poet in our language. It is possible to feel about him, as people felt about Eliot, that he was the last great poet. […] No new poet in English will be so well remembered for a long time to come.1 In 2015, Geoffrey Hill used his valedictory lecture as Professor of Poetry to severely criticise Larkin: Let me become a little aggressive towards you […] by the easy expedient of introducing the name of Larkin. […] The Complete Poems […] contains fine poems, fine poems, and poems that are average, and poems that are even below average. His work is rated so highly across the literary board, because a large consensus has been persuaded by critical opinion that certain mediocre poems are outstanding.2 1 Peter Levi, ‘The English Wisdom Of A Master Poet’, Sunday Telegraph, 8 December 1985; reprinted in An Enormous Yes: in memoriam Philip Larkin (1922-1985), ed. Harry Chambers (Calstock: Peterloo Poets, 1986) 33-5. 2 Geoffrey Hill, ‘I know thee not, old man, fall to thy prayers’, Professor of Poetry Lecture, University of Oxford, 5 May 2015. A podcast of this lecture is available at: <http://media.podcasts.ox.ac.uk/engfac/poetry/2015-05-05_engfac_hill.mp3>. 4 On the subject of Larkin’s popularity, Hill had this to say: If it is permitted to make some general technical-ethical comment that sets aside biographical implications, I would wish to say that if you find it very, very gratifying indeed when quite ordinary people – i.e. not reviewers – tell you ‘that’s just what I felt’, I think you would be far better employed, you would be bringing far more delight to a far wider variety of audiences, you would obtain far greater job satisfaction, if you were to sign up to appear as a regular expert on the Antiques Roadshow. Except in a very specific sub-genre known by such descriptive titles as comic and curious verse, I cannot see that poetry has any obligation to cheer people up; or even to depress them in the particular ways they enjoy being depressed, which is what I suggest that many people found appealing in Larkin.3 Notwithstanding individual differences of taste and temperament, or critical and creative practice, the gulf of opinion between these two Professors of Poetry neatly bookends Larkin’s fall – perhaps the greatest in twentieth-century British literature. ‘During his lifetime Larkin was granted endless credit by the bank of Opinion’, Hill has written elsewhere; this is untrue, but the bank’s withdrawal of credit in the thirty years since Larkin’s death affected the reception of his work as well as his personal reputation.4 That is a scandal which this study addresses, not by presenting Larkin’s superior moral qualities, but by re-focusing critical attention onto the very basis for judgements about any writer’s reputation: the texts. More specifically, this study sets out to respect and protect the integrity and autonomy of Larkin’s writings, so that the 3 Ibid. 4 Geoffrey Hill, Style and Faith (New York: Counterpoint, 2003) 204. 5 man himself becomes almost irrelevant, except for the unavoidable fact of his authorship. The central idea is to approach Larkin’s texts as texts: to read them as products of a conscious verbal artistry, rather than as expressions of personality, or preserved life experiences. All further concerns – biographical, theoretical, socio- cultural – surface only where they are prompted by the texts themselves. For Hill, Larkin represented ‘a narrow English possessiveness, with regard to “good sense” and “generous common humanity”. […] The notion of accessibility in his work acknowledged the ease with which readers could overlay it with transparencies of their own preference’.5 His objection is to Larkin’s simplicity and lack of ambition; other detractors have targeted Larkin’s identity politics. Of course, the two are closely related. Consequently, this study analyses the diverse and complex textual identities constructed by Larkin’s various writings. The first task, however, is to sketch the critical and cultural context behind the shift from Levi’s warmth in 1985 to Hill’s severity in 2015. Complete Balokowsky? Literature and biography Jake Balokowsky, the fictive biographer in Larkin’s poem ‘Posterity’, describes his subject as ‘One of those old-type natural fouled-up guys’, but Martin Amis has argued that such details are unimportant (TCP, 86). Introducing his selection of Larkin’s verse, Amis writes with straightforward conviction: although ‘what rivets us [is] the mystery story of Larkin’s soul’, there is a ‘simple truth that writers’ private lives don’t matter; only the work matters’. Nonetheless, as he admits, ‘Every serious devotee’ will have read not just the Collected Poems, but also the Selected Letters and Andrew Motion’s biography. The reaction to those publications was, he writes, ‘prodigiously ugly and violent’, a ‘bovine’ ideological stampede led by Tom Paulin. Yet Amis seems confident 5 Ibid., 204. 6 that Larkin’s reputation has now been restored. There was an ‘historical explanation’, namely the zeitgeist of the 1990s, ‘the high noon, the manly pomp, of the social ideology we call PC’. But with that chapter of Western history having been closed, Larkin is ‘back to being what he was Before: Britain’s best-loved poet since World War II’.6 Amis’s essay has the feel of a case being closed, but even as recently as 2011 his thinking was more wishful than truthful. Writing in the Guardian, Sean O’Brien criticised the easy distinction between the life and the work: This kind of thing may not ‘matter’ to some presumed eternity of true judgment, but it propagates itself. Amis’s own distinction between what we attend to (the work) and should set aside (the private life) is not one that he himself is able to observe: see the absorbing and chilling biographical sketch with which he concludes his introduction.7 O’Brien is right: Amis introduces that sketch as ‘a personal assessment of Larkin’s character, and one that reflects a preoccupation that can fairly be described as lifelong’.8 In this fleeting dispute between Amis and O’Brien, one finds the essence of a debate which now divides scholarship on Larkin. Even more recently, in 2014, Blake Morrison argued ‘there’s no doubt that a corrective is needed before the myth of Larkin as monster (misogynist, racist, porn addict, gin-swilling Thatcherite bigot) hardens into 6 Martin Amis, ed. and introd., Philip Larkin: Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2011) xvi-ii. 7 Sean O’Brien, ‘Philip Larkin: Poems selected by Martin Amis – review’, Guardian, 16 September 2011, at <http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/16/philip-larkin-poems-review>. 8 Amis, xvii-xviii. 7 fact’.9 This study does not concern itself with Larkin’s gin and porn consumption – why should it? – but it is concerned with what Morrison calls ‘the myth of Larkin as monster’; more precisely, with how mainstream interpretive practices have falsified Larkin’s work, and then branded it ‘rancid’, ‘insidious’, and ‘minor’, to quote Peter Ackroyd.10 Amis’s identification of three key publications between 1988 and 1993 helps to explain much of this. When Anthony Thwaite’s edition of the Collected Poems appeared three years after Larkin’s death, bad feeling could already be detected. For some critics, the 83 previously unpublished poems were simply underwhelming.