Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
"I
have a funny fotograph of myself, enlarged from a cow-over-the-gate self
portrait, & this now looks as if it should be surrounded by 'SELF MASTERY:
let RAM JAM SINGH teach you how to CONQUER YOUR FEARS by SELF HYPNOSIS'
'Dr Ram Jam Singh has made a special study of traditional practices of
the MYSTICS OF THE EAST and offers you the WISDOM OF CENTURIES to help
conquer blushing, shyness, lack of concentration, stammering, tobacco-smoking,
nail-biting etc.' 'Send no money except a P.O. for 6d and
s.a.e. for first FREE lesson to Dr Ram Jam Singh, 213 Corporation Road,
Burnley, Lancs.' I'll show it to you one day: it's too big for an envelope.
Not sure I shan't make it my official picture."
(letter to Judy Egerton, 5 May 1959)
On this page, you can find a number of poems by Philip Larkin. I have
started by inserting those poems which I already had on file. I hope to
add more poems later on. However, you can read all poems in the Collected
Poems (Ed. Anthony Thwaite), of course. I strongly recommend it. I
have also added a section with some excerpts from letters by Larkin (1941-1950).
It had been my intention to anthologize, as it were, the most memorable
quotes from the Selected Letters of Philip Larkin: 1940-1985 (Ed.
Anthony Thwaite), but there is simply too much material to be included.
If I ever do continue, I will update the online version as well.
Index:
Sad Steps
Groping back to bed after a piss
I part thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon's cleanliness.
Four o'clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie
Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.
There's something laughable about this,
The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow
Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart
(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)
High and preposterous and separate -
Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!
O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,
One shivers slightly, looking up there.
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare
Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can't come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.
24 April 1968
This Be The Verse
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one anothers throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And dont have any kids yourself.
April ? 1971
The Building
Higher than the handsomest hotel
The lucent comb shows up for miles, but see,
All round it close-ribbed streets rise and fall
Like a great sigh out of the last century.
The porters are scruffy; what keep drawing up
At the entrance are not taxis; and in the hall
As well as creepers hangs a frightening smell.
There are paperbacks, and tea at so much a cup,
Like an airport lounge, but those who tamely sit
On rows of steel chairs turning the ripped mags
Haven't come far. More like a local bus.
These outdoor clothes and half-filled shopping-bags
And faces restless and resigned, although
Every few minutes comes a kind of nurse
To fetch someone away: the rest refit
Cups back to saucers, cough, or glance below
Seats for dropped gloves or cards. Humans, caught
On ground curiously neutral, homes and names
Suddenly in abeyance; some are young,
Some old, but most at that vague age that claims
The end of choice, the last of hope; and all
Here to confess that something has gone wrong.
It must be error of a serious sort,
For see how many floors it needs, how tall
It's grown by now, and how much money goes
In trying to correct it. See the time,
Half-past eleven on a working day,
And these picked out of it; see, as they c1imb
To their appointed levels, how their eyes
Go to each other, guessing; on the way
Someone's wheeled past, in washed-to-rags ward clothes:
They see him, too. They're quiet. To realise
This new thing held in common makes them quiet,
For past these doors are rooms, and rooms past those,
And more rooms yet, each one further off
And harder to return from; and who knows
Which he will see, and when? For the moment, wait,
Look down at the yard. Outside seems old enough:
Red brick, lagged pipes, and someone walking by it
Out to the car park, free. Then, past the gate,
Traffic; a locked church; short terraced streets
Where kids chalk games, and girls with hair-dos fetch
Their separates from the cleaners - O world,
Your loves, your chances, are beyond the stretch
Of any hand from here! And so, unreal
A touching dream to which we all are lulled
But wake from separately. In it, conceits
And self-protecting ignorance congeal
To carry life, collapsing only when
Called to these corridors (for now once more
The nurse beckons -). Each gets up and goes
At last. Some will be out by lunch, or four;
Others, not knowing it, have come to join
The unseen congregations whose white rows
Lie set apart above - women, men;
Old, young; crude facets of the only coin
This place accepts. All know they are going to die.
Not yet, perhaps not here, but in the end,
And somewhere like this. That is what it means,
This clean-sliced cliff; a struggle to transcend
The thought of dying, for unless its powers
Outbuild cathedrals nothing contravenes
The coming dark, though crowds each evening try
With wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers.
9 February 1972
Letters 1941-1950: excerpts
Taken from the warmly recommended
Larkin, Philip. Selected Letters of Philip Larkin: 1940-1985.
Ed. Anthony Thwaite. London/Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992.
Note: As Thwaite points out in his introduction, "spellings and
abbreviations have been faithfully transcribed" (e.g. its for it's, wch
for which).
[To J.B. Sutton, 31 Dec 41]
I have just farted with the sound of an iron ruler twanging in a desk-lid
and the smell of a west wind over a decaying patch of red cabbages.
[To J.B. Sutton, 4 April 43]
My poetry my thin trickle of cindery shit has changed too. I write
about big things nowadays quite unaudenish, I'm afraid.
[To J.B. Sutton, 4 April 43]
More & more I believe in a central pavilion of mystery, whose various
sides are emblazoned with different emblems. To some it's God, or Reason,
or Beauty, or even Science or Life or Passion. But the centre is the same.
Everything in its finest form is the same. Eh?
[To Norman Iles, 7 April 43]
There's so much to be learnt & of course the best thing to have
is a 'genuine love of literature'. I haven't got one, & I don't know
a shop where they sell them.
[To Norman Iles, 7 April 43]
Somewhere, somewhere, there must be a woman of combined intelligence
& attraction. And money.
[To Kingsley Amis, 20 August 43]
I must say, that any woman who called me 'a funny, silly creature'
would find herself lying on her back before she knew where she was preparatory
to, and not as a result of, action. 'The whole business of sex' annoys
me. As far as I can see, all women are stupid beings. What is more, marriage
seems a revolting institution, unless the parties have enough money to
keep reasonably distant from each other imagine sharing a bedroom with
a withered old woman! (
) No, sir. A lonely bachelorhood interspersed with
buggery and strictly-monetary fornication seems to me preferable. Still,
I don't want to be a bore. I know perfectly well I shall get married
probably by someone who'll call me a 'funny, silly creature'.
[To Kingsley Amis, 20 August 43]
I haven't started work yet. I must say, I don't want to go into a room
where I have got to do things all day for people who will give me some
money. I would rather not spend 8 hours of every day doing things I would
rather not do.
[To Kingsley Amis, 25 August 43]
Now I must stop putting words down on this piece of paper and sit at
another table to put pieces of food into a hole in my head and swallow
them down to my stomach.
[To J.B. Sutton, 17 October 44]
I think the Germans are fools and bastards and that nothing will stop
them starting another war sooner or later. My infallibe panacea for the
world is food. Give everyone plenty of it. Give them too much of it. Give
them so much that they have to stagger across the room and prop it up against
the wall. And drink too, of course. If a man is well-fed he does not want
to be bothered with insurrectionist political speeches, he wants drink
and a woman and some degree of art, such as the music hall, the cinema,
or the music of the American negro. If it is a choice between a world of
bovine benevolent rabbits and starved fanged rats I am on the side of the
rabbits everytime. England's mistake was to become rabbit-like while keeping
Germany ratlike.
(Conclusion of extract from Larkin's Political Economy.)
[To J.B. Sutton, 7 June 45]
I think men of the philosophic genius can do absolutely nothing in
this world: I refuse to believe that the sum of human goodness, patience,
tolerance and kindness is one ounce more in AD 1945 than in BC one.
[To J.B. Sutton, 7 June 45, on D.H. Lawrence]
In my opinion he is the greatest writer of this century, and in many
things the greatest writer of all times. He is so flexible, vivid, tender,
and sharp that there is no one to touch him.
[To Kingsley Amis, 9 August 45, on Ruth Bowman, the 'school captain']
The heart of my relationship with her is not perversion at all (I wish
it were) but boredom and flattery. As long as she keeps on talking about
me I am flattered. When she criticises me, or speaks of herself, I am bored.
(
) I really do not think it likely that I shall ever get into the same
bed as anyone again because it is so much trouble, almost as much trouble
as standing for Parliament. I have formed a very low opinion of women and
the idea of having one perpetually following me abait is wearisome.
[To Kingsley Amis, 9 August 45, on The Kingdom of Winter, eventually
A Girl in Winter]
I think that the man who orders other men to make ink-words into type-words
will think more than once before he says they must do that to the book
I have written. The Fortune Press maintain an inexcusable, irritating,
infuriating, imbecile, impossible, indestructible SILENCE. I should like
to put honey on the balls of the man who owns it, and tie him to an anthill.
[To J.B. Sutton, 15 Jan 46]
I haven't been drunk for years now, not really drunk, and the girl
I know, Ruth, shattered my self-esteem by saying 'You don't drink much'
in a puzzled voice when I had been out with her once or twice.
[To J.B. Sutton, 10 March 46]
All that matters is that we've only got fifty years, at the outside,
to look around. So let us be as eager and meticulous as a Boston Vice Squad
on a mixed bathing-beach, and if we should produce art, so much the better,
but the only quality that makes art durable & famous is the quality
of generating delight in the state of living. It is the peculiar function
of art to do this. A book concerning the most vital social and political
problems may be quite dead except for a description of a man eating a steak
pudding.
[To J.B. Sutton, 15 May 46]
And if I think of myself married it is always during the stage when
I have managed to get my wife out of the picture and am myself again.
[To Kingsley Amis, 17 July 46]
I haven't a lot of news. Miss Isobel has come for a bit. I don't care
much about that, as it means I have to PAY for TWO women at the PUB and
the FLICKS instead of ONE and I DON'T get my COCK into EITHER of them,
EVER.
[To Kingsley Amis, 17 July 46]
I am getting to the stage when I HATE anybody who does anything UNUSUAL
at ALL, whether its make a lot of MONEY or dress in silly CLOTHES or read
books of foreign WORDS or know a lot about anything or play any musical
INSTRUMENT (menstruin) or pretend that they believe, anything out of the
ordinary, that requires, a lot of courage, or a lot of generosity, or a
lot of self-cunt-roll, to believe it BECAUSE THEY ARE USUALLY SUCH SODDING
NASTY PEOPLE THAT I KNOW IT IS 1000-1 THAT THEY ARE SHOWING OFF. and
they don't KNOW it but I know it.
[To Kingsley Amis, 24 Sept 46]
I have had a tiring day today, cataloguing ROTTEN OLD BOOKS. you get
BLOODY TIRED of writing the same things over and over again. For example,
I had a book in the Rolls series (BOG ROLLS) containing three medieval
lives of Edward the Confessor (he confessed to raping 16 sheep in one day)
edited by Jack Peebed. Nay, you (or rather I had) have to write out a full
entry-card under Peebed, under 942E (English history-sources), under Edward
the Cuntpresser, under EACH life making THREE, and under ROLLS SERIES,
so that anybody coming to the catalogue with even the vaguest ideas abeight
it will eventually find it.
[To J.B. Sutton, 29 Sept 46]
Life is a queer business. I see it mainly composed of sex, death, and
art, perhaps art as an acrobat going round the ring with his left foot
on a black horse, death, and his right on sex, a white one. But this isn't
quite true because I feel sex and death are perpetually opposed to each
other. Still, I distrust theorising about life like this: the only worthwile
theories, or statements of belief, are works of art. All else is just farting
Annie Laurie through a keyhole as Gulley Jimson says.
[To Kingsley Amis, 30 Sept 46]
Ruth's letter this morning said that 'the boy next door' had proposed
honourable marriage to Jane Exall. God knows how old he is. Old enough
to want to FUCK HER UP TO HER NECK. ('Here, I say, old boy
'). Incidentally
my sister is going to make a human being in April.
[To J.B. Sutton, 16 Oct 46, commenting his poem 'Many famous feet have
trod']
Total knowledge (i.e. what we know)
What I feel is that death can ballock life. It does. But life can ballock
death by means of sex (creating new life) or (less certainly) art. BUT
as it is no consolation (I imagine) when the Reaper is knocking on your
door to reflect that you have fine sons & daughters, I postulate that
life can only ballock death impersonally, while death ballocks you personally.
FURTHER, that the emotion of being ballocked by death personally is sorrow,
and the emotion of ballocking death impersonally is joy.
[To J.B. Sutton, 28 Jan 48]
But life is rather dim at present anyway. I have gone on fuddling my
head with psychology books and now figure myself as every kind of neurotic
to be found in the early poems of Auden, wrongly perhaps, but some of these
psychologists list almost every activity as a neurotic symptom. Leaving
them aside, though, my predominant sensation these days is one of blockage
I feel somewhere I am not functioning I long for some metaphysical
big bad wolf to come & huff & puff & blow the obstruction away
as one blows a foul clot out of a pipe stem.
[To J.B. Sutton, 24 Feb 48, on his father who was to die on 26 March]
There's little to say, of course, but in addition to sorrow I can't
get used to the fact of death & am trying hard to accept it in a spirit
of faith. But really, what has one any faith in? I feel that I have got
to make a big mental jump to stop being a child & become an adult
but it isn't easy for me, though I keep trying. I shall have to learn
the technique right from the start. (
) The worst moments, or some of them,
are when I feel that I am irrevocably marked out as a failure a coward
in these things. As I say, I just try to improve. But, if there is a
God, have mercy on my soul, if I have a soul.
[To J.B. Sutton, 13 July 49]
It's hard to say whether I improve or not with keeping on living: the
one thing I feel overwhelmingly at the moment is that literature is a great
farce & any literature in one's being should be scourged out with Keatinge's
[an anti-flea powder] you can guess nearly all my being is Keatinge's now,
wch may explain my acidity. I search myself for illusions like a monkey
looking for fleas. But the process of removing an endless series of false
bottoms from one's personality is wearying & I often find myself relaxing
into triviality, drinking or tennis-playing or worse, chit-chatting among
the younger staff here. What I mean is that any ideas about life are almost
certain to be wrong. Every idea that I have imbibed I hereby eject, such
as that confusion is succeeded by unity, that immaturity is succeeded by
maturity, pain by pleasure, failure by success, poverty by riches, celibacy
by marriage, atheism by belief, clean shavenness by whiskers, or ignorance
by knowledge. I refuse to believe that there is a thing called life, that
one can be in or out of touch with. There is only an endless series of
events, of which our birth is one & our death another. Everything called
good is what we like, envy, admire, want, thrill to. A great book, a great
man, are things a great many people greatly admire. And the reason for
people's admiration are fishy enough to fill the North Sea, and certainly
not ethical or even respectable. Life is chiefly an affair of 'life-force':
we are all varyingly charged with it and that represents our energy and
nothing we do or say will alter our voltage or wattage. Who by taking thought
can add a cubit to his stature? Eh? And great men have great energy, whether
at generalship or industry or painting: they are those lucky beings in
whom a horny sheath of egoism protects their energy, not allowing it to
be dissipated or turned against itself. How else can one reconcile Dickens's
lachrymose demoniacal writings with his cold unfeeling treatment of his
wife & family?
You may think this sounds Lawrencian: but where I differ from Lawrence
is that to me this energy is quite amoral, not particularly 'pure', &
entirely selfish. Nevertheless I shall never abandon D.H.L. we are too
similar for that, and besides no one who has really thrilled to Lawrence
can even give him up.
[To J.B. Sutton, 30 Oct 49]
Well, at least you find life miraculous: which is more than I can say
I do. My views are very simple and childish: I think we are born, grow
up, & die. I think our view of life is formed before the age of 5 &
any subsequent major alteration is partial & unsatisfying. Everything
we do is done with the motive of pleasure & if we are unhappy it is
because we are such silly bastards for thinking we should like whatever
it is we find we don't like, or because events run counter to our plans,
or because of the inevitable inroads of illness, death & time. Imagination
& sensitivity are also great bringers of distress & are capacities
for which no adequate function seems to have been provided. If we seriously
contemplate life it appears an agony too great to be supported, but for
the most part our minds gloss such things over & until the ice finally
lets us through we skate about merrily enough. Most people, I'm convinced,
don't think about life at all. They grab what they think they want and
the subsequent consequences keep them busy in an endless chain till they're
carried out feet first. As for how one should spend one's time, that's
usually decided for you by circumstances & habit. If you have any choice,
remember the Spanish proverb Take what you want and pay for it, not forgetting
the English tailpiece added by a young English writer who (by an oversight,
doubtless) failed to produce any books, or you'll get what you don't want,
& pay for that too. My advice to anybody is: Find out what you want.
Then get it. Neither operation is at all easy, not in my experience, &
will certainly take a lifetime.
[To J.B. Sutton, 30 Oct 49]
My ideal writer wd be a mixture of D.H.L., Thomas Hardy, & George
Eliot.
[To J.B. Sutton, 26 Jan 50]
My dear Jim,
Sitting en pleine famille by a good fire I try to marshal my thoughts
to send you a letter. I had been wondering what you were doing & am
sorry to hear life has had you by the balls. It is a grim business, &
I do sympathise: it is also a business that appears differently to every
man. To me it appears like the floor of some huge Stock Exchange, full
of men quarreling & fighting & shouting & fucking & drinking
& making plans and scheming to carry them out, experiencing desires
& contriving to gratify them, and in general acting & being acted
upon; I sit shuddering at the side, out of the fray, too much of a funk
to fight or contrive, imagining I am living a full life when I pick up
an old bottle & toss it back into the mêlée. But let a
whizzing tomato spread over my face & I yelp for the complete &
utter solitude so necessary for any worthwhile artistic creation &c.
My relations with women are governed by a shrinking sensitivity, a morbid
sense of sin, a furtive lechery & a deplorable flirtatiousness all
of which are menaced by the clear knowledge that I should find marriage
a trial. 'One hates the person one lives with.' So much for me. But I don't
know about you. I fancy you have desires all right, but are too shy to
contrive for them. It has always seemed to me fatally easy to get carried
along on the surface of life, & though I agree one would probably do
as well that way as any other you do not catch me giving in & being
carried. I resist the current, even if it means staying in the same spot
all one's life. 'Never accept what you don't want. Keep refusing, &
in time you may get what you do want. On the other hand you may end up
with FUCK ALL.' Lawrence remarked 'Thank God I'm not free, any more than
a rooted tree is free' but it's hard to see how he could have been less
encumbered in the affairs of life. Put him down in salaried employment
or with a growing family or an ageing one why, he didn't even own a house
& furniture! No, I'm afraid we all find ourselves steering upstream,
if our power is strong enough to carry us, despite our protestations that
spiritual health lies only downstream with the bloodties of family &
race.