'Arid Interrogation'

As boys, in our imaginations we tested ourselves. Would we prove courageous in combat? Our fathers had, so we believed, during World War II. Could we withstand torture? These virtues, touched with Hollywood melodrama, seemed essential aspects of maturity. We wanted to be adults and part of that was being brave. We never tested ourselves against likelier threats -- heart disease, bipolar disorder, cancer.

In March 1985, Philip Larkin, the death-haunted poet, wrote in a letter to a friend: “For my own part, I fully expect to be on the operating table before you—they are longing to get at my oesophagus [sic], which has misbehaved for years but isn’t in any sense serious as I understand it.” That month, a doctor in Hull had diagnosed him with “acute depression and hypochondria” and concluded the poet suffered from “a cancer phobia and fear of dying” – none of which is news to his readers. The doctor ordered a barium-meal x-ray which revealed a tumor in his esophagus – the same as my brother’s first diagnosis a month ago. Ken started smoking cigarettes at age twelve, and now the cancer has metastasized to his liver, lungs and cerebellum. When Larkin's tumor was removed on June 11, another malignancy was discovered, this one too advanced for surgery.

 

While in the hospital’s intensive care unit, a friend smuggled in a bottle of whiskey. He drank most of it, nearly died and had to be resuscitated. Another friend reported that Larkin admitted he had been “a callous bastard over other people’s illnesses” – an admission most of us can make. In July he wrote a friend that he was “very depressed – never be the same again, old age here, death round the corner etc.” Released from the hospital, he became housebound. He died early on the morning on December 2, 1985, four months after his sixty-third birthday. The nurse present at Larkin’s death reported his final words were “I am going to the inevitable.” For a man like Larkin, there is no hope for consolation.  Eight years earlier, in one of the last century’s greatest poems, Larkin had written:

 

“Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,  

Making all thought impossible but how  

And where and when I shall myself die.  

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.”

 

[Most details in this post are drawn from James Booth’s Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love (Bloomsbury Press, 2014).]