He was terrified of marriage, living a life of tangled relationships with women who became his muses. Poet Philip Larkin’s view of marriage may partly have been coloured by his mother’s warnings of its disadvantages, previously unpublished letters reveal.
In 1952, Eva Larkin told her son: “Marriage would be no certain guarantee as to socks being always mended, or meals ready when they are wanted. Neither would it be wise to marry just for those comforts. There are other things just as important.”
The following year, she quoted from a George Bernard Shaw novel in offering further relationship advice: “I have just finished reading Love Among the Artists … in which occurs this passage ‘No: it is marriage that kills the heart and keeps it dead. Better starve the heart than overfeed it. Better still to feed it only on fine food, like music’. In a way, I agree with him... Better to have lived a full life, I think.”
The correspondence will feature in a forthcoming book, titled Writers and Their Mothers, exploring the maternal influence on literary offspring from Shakespeare onwards.
A chapter on Larkin, one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, is written by Philip Pullen, who has drawn on thousands of largely unpublished letters held by the University of Hull, where Larkin worked as librarian from 1955.
Larkin biographer James Booth will be publishing a selection of the correspondence in a major book, titled Letters Home, for Faber & Faber in November.
Larkin’s best-loved poems include This Be the Verse, with its oft-quoted opening line: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”, but Booth told the Guardian: “There is a lazy assumption by a lot of people that he did have a negative attitude to his parents.”
He described the previously unpublished material as “very significant”, noting that passages chosen by Pullen show that “the relationship was deeper and more valuable to Larkin than anybody might have thought”: “It’s rather surprising to hear Eva trying to put her son off marriage.”
Mother and son wrote to each other twice weekly for about 35 years from 1940, when Larkin went to Oxford University. Pullen notes that no other collection of a writer’s dialogue with his mother contains such intimate and minute detail of each other’s day-to-day life.
In 1951, Eva confronted Larkin over his “clay-cold depression” brought on by his loneliness while in Belfast: “I cannot help thinking that you would benefit from a course in psychology … When one has reached the very depths of depression, psychology and religion are the last remaining props.”
Pullen writes that, in biographical terms, it is Larkin’s father, Sydney, who has taken centre stage, notably “his ardour for National Socialism during the 1930s and the impact that his adventurous admiration for English literature had on his son”: “Eva has been portrayed as a shadowy, background figure – subservient to her husband, nervous, continually whining, and contributing significantly to their unhappy pairing.”
Larkin’s long-standing relationships included Monica Jones, an English lecturer, but he shied from tying the knot and strayed. “To me it was dilution”, he wrote of marriage in his poem Dockery and Son.
Booth said: “He couldn’t marry anyone because he was so involved with his mother. Writing to her twice a week, he also visited her every fortnight or so. He would come down from Hull to Loughborough, and then he would visit Monica in Leicester. But he was living in Hull, which is where he got involved with Maeve Brennan in the library… You’ve got this really tangled emotional situation. The mother is the key element. People have always half recognised that, but never been able to see it properly.”
He added: “Philip scarcely needed Eva’s advice against entering into marriage for the sake of domestic comfort… So much was he his mother’s son that he always darned his own socks and cooked for himself. Each coped with their depressive pessimism in their own way: Eva underwent psychiatric treatment…; he wrote poems. Most important of all, their postal conversation kept alive the poet’s sense of the loveliness of ‘everyday things’, so essential to such poems as ‘Love Songs in Age’ and ‘Faith Healing’.”
Writers and Their Mothers will be published on 1 March, before Mother’s Day. Its editor, Prof Dale Salwak, whose books include Philip Larkin: The Man and His Work, said: “We now have a profounder understanding of just what an influence Eva was on Larkin as a man and therefore on his poetry.”