Philip Larkin, holiday terrorist
Larkin wasn't just a racist, he was a shitty son and brother too!
Philip Larkin hates his childhood home. “We all hate home and having to be there,” says Larkin in “Poetry of Departures.” He laments “writing home… [as] if home existed” in “The Old Fools.” He declares, eponymously, in one of my personal all-time favourite poems, that “Home is so Sad.” Well, dear reader, if you’ve ever wondered what has caused Philip Larkin’s home to be so f*cking melancholy and distant, look no further than his letters, which will prove, I think you’ll find, that the problem is definitely him. Is it surprising? Larkin wound up being the basis for Amis’ Lucky Jim and I don’t know that many people walked away from that one thinking “boy does that man sound like good company.”
I know it’s hard to imagine that a man who once wrote about “kick[ing] out the n*****s” might have have been a dickhead, but in reading Phil’s Letters Home, a compilation of, um… Phil’s letters home to his parents, the man comes off as more than a little unlikeable. I remember when the book was first released reading a review in the London Review of Books about it and was struck by how f*cking funny this bit of one of his letters to his mother is, and it's just as funny the second time around:
The thought of Christmas depresses me. Please don’t go to trouble. Every year I swear I’ll never endure it again, & make you promise to be sensible, & now here you are talking about duck again, just as if I had never shouted and got drunk & broken the furniture out of sheer rage at it all.
Keep in mind: this is a man who is writing to his widowed mother as her only son. It was prescient for the reviewer in the LRB to name the review “Here you are talking about duck again” because of course this highlights the cycle of Phil’s home life: abuse his family again and again and have them hit the refresh button and painfully try it all again. It calls to mind images of Sisyphus rolling Phil’s fat head up a hill, or, perhaps more accurately, Philip Larkin as an eagle—no, try a dorkier bird, perhaps a shoebill—pecking his mother’s liver out every holiday.
Beyond being a bona fide holiday terrorist he’s also just sort of a brat. Sometimes he’s a needless snob (complaining, for instance, about his secretary saying “onvelope” (which he considers “low”) rather than “envelope”), other times he’s self-deprecatingly (?) bragging about being lazy and entitled (“I wonder if I can explain more clearly: I feel that I shall never take any job seriously enough to warrant any responsibility”), he just generally comes off like an unbearable person and a sh*tty son, no doubt enabled by his anxious/depressive mother. Notes in the book tell us Philip’s sister Kitty once said “Philip could do no wrong in his father’s eyes. Or his mother’s. They worshipped him.” In another note we’re told that Kitty destroyed most of Philip’s letters to her. Here we have Philip’s letter to his mother, reassuring her about upcoming holidays with the two of them, something which at this point must have been a perpetual waking nightmare:
I’m sorry you’ve been feeling worried about the prospect of holidays, and of things in general. I’m enclosing a copy of the letter I wrote to K & W, wch you can keep, about holidays: It hasn’t produced any reply yet. It does seem rather complicated – too hard for Kitty to grasp, I expect – but all the same it’s perfectly reasonable.
Who could stay mad at such a guy???
* * *
[This post is adapted from Jack Daniel Christie’s review of Philip Larkin’s Letters Home]