'Till Then, Hyphen With My Heart'

The memorial service for Philip Larkin in Westminster Abbey was held on St. Valentine’s Day in 1986, two months after his death at age sixty-three. His biographer James Booth describes the timing as “not inappropriate.” Larkin has a reputation among common readers for being a rather gloomy fellow with an energetically eclectic love life – and an accessibly superb poet.

In 2002, a notebook was discovered containing several previously unknown poems by Larkin, including one written on Valentine’s Day 1976 and included in a card to his secretary at Hull University, Betty Mackereth. She had held the job since 1957 and commenced an affair with Larkin in 1975. The card, Booth writes, “depicts[s] a grinning alligator with the caption ‘See you later alligator!’ and continuing inside, ‘You tasty morsel!’” The posthumously published poem:

“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.”

Booth’s gloss on the poem: “There is a hint of menace perhaps in this extraordinary image. Ever since he moved into the east-facing room in Wellington at the beginning of 1946, inescapable light had been for him an image of both euphoric epiphany and threatening exposure. Here, in a weird twist, the sundials stop the passage of time by ‘casting sun’ rather than shadow. Her sunny vitality leaves him no place to hide.”

 

As usual, Larkin’s word choice is unexpected, as when he uses “hyphen” as a verb. Comparing a woman to sunny summer weather is not unprecedented.  There’s something vaguely apocalyptic about those final lines, though I wouldn’t want to be judged by the inscriptions I’ve written across a lifetime in St. Valentine’s Day cards. When it comes to love, we fret and fumble. I remember buying a dozen roses for a girl my freshman year. I prefer yellow to red roses, so that’s what I gave her. She was peeved.

 

It’s easy and fashionable to take potshots at Larkin’s “female troubles,” though Booth’s biography goes a long way toward giving us a balanced understanding of the conflicted poet and man. He quotes Monica Jones as saying, “He lied to me, the bugger, but I loved him.” It was Joseph Epstein who noted that readers scandalized by Larkin’s political-correctness deficit were “people who, along with being impressed with their own virtue, cannot stand too much complication in human nature (“Mr. Larkin Gets a Life,” Life Sentences: Literary Essays, 1997).” The scolds are the gloomy ones, not Larkin.