'The More Accurate Notion of Life You Have'

“I do love the past. Anything more than 20 years back begins to breathe a luminous fascination for me: it starts my imagination working. Why? Because it is past, I suppose, & leaves my feelings free to get to work on it.” 

It’s not that the past was better, the usual objection to such thoughts. That would be foolish, and in the important things Philip Larkin was no fool. Rather, the past is more interesting, more compellingly rich than the present, and the future, of course, is a mirage. The past is a reliable source of imaginative fodder. It permitted a poet like Larkin “to get to work on it.”

 

Above, Larkin is writing in 1953 to Monica Jones about “Deceptions” (The Less Deceived, 1955), the poem he completed on this date, February 20, in 1950. He prefaces it with a passage from one of the great books of the nineteenth century, Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor:

 

“Of course I was drugged, and so heavily I did not regain consciousness until the next morning.  I was horrified to discover that I had been ruined, and for some days I was inconsolable, and cried like a child to be killed or sent back to my aunt."

 

The woman is the daughter of a tenant farmer from Dorsetshire. She came to London at age sixteen to visit an aunt and was lured into a house by a man feigning illness. He drugged and raped her and persuaded her to become his mistress. After a few months he deserted her and she turned to prostitution. When Mayhew interviews her she is in her early forties. He quotes her as saying, “You folks as have honour, and character, and feelings, and such can’t understand how all that’s been beaten out of people like me. I don’t feel. I’M USED TO IT [upper case added by Mayhew].”

 

“Deceptions” is Larkin at his most empathetic. He possessed deep reserves of compassion and was able to project himself like a novelist into the sensibilities of others, never advertising his virtuousness; in fact, denying it, often playing the coarse cynical philistine (“books are a load of crap”). Soft-headed poets seeking admiration go on and on about their bottomless wells of compassion. They resemble Mayhew’s procurer with his phony pitch. Larkin told John Haffenden in a 1984 interview (Further Requirements, 2001):

 

“The more sensitive you are to suffering the nicer person you are and the more accurate notion of life you have. Hardy had it right from the start: His early poems are wonderful – ‘She, to Him,’ for example. As I tried to say in ‘Deceptions,’ the inflicter of suffering may be fooled, but the sufferer never is.”

 

When Larkin met Margaret Thatcher in 1982, the prime minister recited lines from “Deceptions” and committed a small misquotation. Here are the eighth and ninth lines as written by Larkin: “All the unhurried day, / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.” It’s a memorable image, so it’s easy to understand why Thatcher remembered it, even though she substituted “Her mind was full of knives.”

Three years later, in a letter to Julian Barnes, Larkin noted: “She might think a mind full of knives was rather along her own lines,” adding, “not that I don’t kiss the ground she treads.” Anti-Thatcherites used the episode as evidence that the prime minister was a philistine and had been briefed on the poem by her handlers moments before the meeting. Larkin would have none of it: “I took that as a great compliment—I thought that if it weren’t spontaneous, she’d have got it right. But I am a child in these things.” As usual, Larkin was a shrewder judge of character than his (and her) critics.