Larkin's Lovers

Philip Larkin's lovers
Letters to Monica show the poet as a gentle lover with an unconscious callousness.

By Neil Tweedie
Published: 7:30AM BST 02 Oct 2010

In their letters, he was a seal and she a bunny rabbit. He was one of the greatest British poets of the 20th Century and she his muse. The relationship between Philip Larkin and Monica Jones lasted four decades. Conducted at a distance (they lived together for just four years before Larkin’s death) it was sustained by correspondence. Dearest Bun, he would call her with cuddly familiarity, before explaining why he found it necessary to sleep with another woman.

Larkin, lugubrious laureate of the prosaic, wrote 1400 letters and 500 postcards to Monica. At turns sensitive and mightily insensitive, guilt-ridden but not really so, he straddles the years between post-war austerity and Margaret Thatcher, expounding on everything from his own artistic worth (“He [Betjeman] is easily the best English poet today, except me”) to the perils of bachelor cuisine (“My potatoes unwreathed themselves like something at a seance”). Now 375 of those letters, never before seen, have been published in the volume Letters to Monica, edited by Larkin’s friend and literary executor Anthony Thwaite.

The correspondence casts Larkin in a different light from letters of his published in 1992, the worst of which, usually addressed to his friend Kingsley Amis, painted him as an unattractive reactionary. Here, there is more in the way of gentleness, but also an unconscious callousness in the conduct of his relationships. And through it all there is Monica: silent save for the odd rejoinder scribbled in a margin, her pain no less clear for being expressed through his sometimes clumsy responses.

“I hope that people who back in 1992 thought these were the letters of a misogynistic, racist man will see how very human Larkin was,” says Thwaite. “He was a human being. One other thing: the letters in which he talks to Monica about the poems he’s working on. It’s amazing to gaze into the workshop of such a good poet who is saying 'I can’t get this or that right’ during the act of creation.”

Larkin met Monica in 1946 when both were working at the University of Leicester, she as a lecturer in English and he in the library. They became lovers in 1950, just before he took up a position in Belfast. She, a formidable intellect in her own right, would be as doggedly faithful as he was unfaithful, somehow holding on despite the humiliations. By the early 1960s Larkin was librarian at Hull University, the position he would hold until his death in 1985. It was at this time that he confessed his affair with Maeve Brennan, one of his staff. A tortuous stream of self-flagellating letters followed. One, in April 1964, expressed regret that Monica had been made almost physically sick by the revelation.

“Dearest, 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.”

Helpfully for the devastated Monica, Larkin compares one of Maeve’s culinary disasters with one of hers: “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.”

No doubt cheered by her errant lover’s conversion to ethical omlettes, Monica is told: “ 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.”

Larkin’s insensitivity, at times bordering on the crass, continues as Maeve becomes a regular subject of the letters. “Sometimes I think Maeve is a kind of 40-ish aberration of mine,” he muses. “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!”

Instrospection often ends with a handbrake turn into another, less agonizing subject. May 1964: “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.”

And in June 1964: “You are a much nicer – well, more selfless – person, but is that any reason why I shd trade on it? Of course you are upset & it is I who am upsetting you. Blame me.”

“Betjeman is really very funny – a running monologue from the back seat in Yorkshire dialect........”

Monica, marooned in Leicester, an unconventional beauty admired by men but now slipping towards middle age, is glimpsed now and then. In one response she betrays her sense of inadequacy in failing to match his achievements.

“Oh, I wish I could do something to make you proud of me like that, it would make you love me more, just as in the dream: if 'my book’ were coming out or something. Dear, you have to put up with someone who will never distinguish herself.”

In October 1966 Maeve threatened to call off the affair if Larkin remained with Monica, but then backed down. Larkin took the trouble to tell Monica why he felt it was his duty to continue his infidelity. “You may wonder why I don’t end it, in my own interest as well as yours. Partly cowardice – I dread the scene. Partly kindness – if I’ve encouraged her to depend on me it seems cruel to turn her away.”

He went on: “I was ashamed on holiday when Maeve’s letter or letters came, not because there was anything especially amorous in them, but for seeming so careless of your feelings & so bloody bad mannered, even. It was incredibly stupid & vulgar of me to spoil our holiday in such a way. I could quite easily have said I didn’t want any letters.”

Throughout the correspondence there are endearments and doodles. She is “Dear White- and-gold” (because of her golden hair and taste for white clothes) or “Chere chatte sacree”. Larkin depicts himself as a seal and Monica as a rabbit. His little sketches of her are simple but sensuous.

The poet, says Thwaite, may have treated Monica wrongly but was no misogynist. “That assessment is based on shallow, undergraduate remarks made to Kingley Amis. They have been picked up and treated as though they constituted his considered view of women for the rest of his life. It’s ridiculous.”

The critic and academic John Sutherland, a student of Monica’s at Leicester, is less forgiving. “Larkin couldn’t let her go and couldn’t treat her well. He was just possessive by nature and a shit by nature, quite frankly. It seems to me some of the things he did were unforgivable. He says to her, 'I seem to find ingenious ways to make your life a torture’. He was just very selfish and people forgave him because he was a genius and a great poet. Despite the apologies and humiliations and self-lacerating remarks he was very unfeeling.”

Maeve was not the only one, even in Hull. In the early 1970s Larkin struck up an affair with his secretary, Betty Mackereth. In a rare interview, Betty told The Daily Telegraph, “I did not love him. I must make that very clear. We were not in love with each other but we enjoyed each other’s company. I worked for him for 28 years. I knew him well, he knew me well and we had a good partnership at work. He’d finished with Maeve. Monica was a long-standing affair but she didn’t live in Hull... so there you are.”

Larkin, she said, had a natural aversion to marriage, but was nevertheless devoted to Monica. “I have a doodle that Philip did when he went to one of the committees of the university. He was very good at doodling. There’s a cat in a box, a giraffe in the zoo, a bird caged, a condemned cell, the bridal suite, and at the bottom of the page it said 'The Librarian’s Office’. It was about being trapped, and he didn’t want to be trapped. His father and mother did not have a happy marriage, and I think it put him against marriage. But Monica was the one.”

But his infidelity - his serial infidelity? “He was just a typical man. This is the sort of thing they do! Nowadays it’s footballers and cricketers. Then, it was poets.”

In 1985 Larkin’s nightmare, the one inhabiting the darkest corners of his poetry, stepped out into reality. He was diagnosed with oesophagal cancer. At the end, it was Monica he wanted.

“I saw Philip at about 5 o’clock on the afternoon of the day he died - well, he died early the following morning,” says Betty. “ He was in the nursing home and I’d taken Monica because she didn’t drive a car. She was talking to the medics about him and I was alone in the room with him and he had a very far away look on his face. I think he was just waiting for death. And he said to me: 'Maeve came to see me. I didn’t want to see Maeve. I only wanted to see Monica to tell her I loved her. And those are his very words. I believe in soul-mates. That’s what Philip and Monica were: soul-mates.”

Monica, who had shared Larkin’s home in Hull since 1981, was too consumed by grief to attend the funeral. So retiring was she by then that few noticed her absence. She died in 2001.

Monica Jones was a footnote in English literature, but a necessary one.

“She was Larkin’s muse and took pleasure in that,” says Thwaite. “However much it hurt her, it created great poetry.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/philip-larkin/8037759/Philip-Larkins-lovers.html