Hello and welcome. This week’s post is part of my series about writers and their mothers, and focuses on the lifelong correspondence between Eva Larkin and her son, the poet Philip Larkin. Scroll down for results of my recent survey, plus an update on ‘Golden Age’ Cambridge novels. Thank you for reading, and as ever, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
‘My very dear old creature, once again I am sitting in my bedroom in a patch of sunlight embarking on my weekly task of “writing home”. I suppose I have been doing this now for 24 years! on and off, you know: well, I am happy to be able to do so, and I only hope my effusions are of some interest to you on all the different Monday mornings when they have arrived.’
So wrote the English poet Philip Larkin to his mother Eva Larkin (1866-1977) on Sunday 13 September 1964.1 There were thousands of similar letters exchanged between Philip and Eva; so many, in fact, that when his friend and literary executor, the poet Anthony Thwaite, was compiling his edition of Larkin’s letters he decided to include none at all from or to Eva. In his introduction to Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940-1985 (1992) Thwaite explains that to have included any of Larkin’s correspondence with his mother ‘would have swelled the book to unmanageable proportions’. Still, it’s a shame that no space could be found for one or two of the letters that were so important to them both.
Biographers of Larkin have a tendency to focus on his domineering father Sydney (he takes up most of the first chapter of James Booth’s recent biography of the poet). The first-hand voice of Eva Larkin herself is largely absent from accounts of Larkin’s life, as Philip Pullen writes in ‘No Villainous Mother - The Life of Eva Larkin’ in Dale Salwak’s book Writers and their Mothers (2019). Pullen has trawled through the huge Philip Larkin Archive at the Hull History Centre, carefully reading thousands of letters and diaries in order to throw new light on Eva’s relationship with her son and, as far as possible, ‘to tell her story in her own words’.
In another excellent essay published in Thanks for Typing: Remembering Forgotten Women in History2 Pullen quotes from Clive James, who observed that the correspondence between mother and son acted as a means of continually ‘restoring [Larkin's] supply of the precious ordinariness that she represented’ and a way of catching ‘the more nuanced tones of everyday life’.3 Pullen emphasizes Eva’s literary influence too. From the 1940s onwards she was quoting Thomas Hardy’s poetry in her correspondence, in ways that showed how much she saw the links between Hardy’s poetry and his own. ‘I hope, you too, will feel the benefit of the little change’, she wrote in 1944, ‘and will have like Thomas Hardy in his poem, “In The Seventies”, a certain inward vision that will cast a magic light on your goings to and fro - do you know this one? I think it is a marvellous one and not usually quoted.’
After her husband Sydney died of cancer in 1948, Eva moved to Loughborough to live close to her daughter Kitty and her young family. Her letters to Philip were often droll and observant, and reveal her broad reading tastes: in 1950 she tells him that she felt like a ‘fish out of water’ when she requested D.H. Lawrence, Dostoevsky and books on psychology from the Loughborough public library. No one else had ever asked for such books before. But the early years of widowhood were difficult for her at times, and she underwent psychiatric treatment in the early 1950s.
Perhaps it was because of this that Eva understood her son’s struggles with loneliness and sadness when Larkin was working as a librarian at Queen’s University in Belfast. ‘I cannot help thinking that you would benefit from a course in psychology’ she told him confidently in 1951. ‘When one has reached the very depths of depression, psychology and religion are the last remaining props.’ When Larkin returned to England he had to fend off his mother’s frequently expressed hopes that they would live together, a ‘wheedling’, as he called it, that persisted after he began working as a librarian at the University of Hull in 1955. ‘[M]y mother seems to be resuming her normal whining panicky grumbling maddening manner,’ he writes.
Visiting Eva regularly, and writing to her often, was Larkin’s way of maintaining their close connection while also keeping at a safe distance. The lifelong duty of care that he felt towards her doubtless restricted his relationships with other women. In 1954 Larkin’s on-off girlfriend Monica Jones pleaded with him not to be pressured into living with his mother: ‘Don’t be robbed! Don’t be robbed of your soul!’ However, Larkin’s close bond to Eva, combined with his refusal to live with her, also gave him a useful way of avoiding the disrupting effect of marriage on his creative life. Monica Jones accepted this, and remained, according to Martin Amis, ‘a tenacious literary critic, and an exceptionally close reader of Larkin's works in progress’.4
Her only son’s weekly letters were a vital part of Eva’s existence. But the letters she wrote in return were equally important to Larkin: ‘I love to see your blue envelope in the wire basket’ he told her, touchingly, in 1967. The letters of mother and son mirror one another in language (‘Dear Creature’/ ‘Dearest Old Creature’) and in style and content, featuring what Pullen calls ‘an ocean of commonplace trivia and day-to-day detail’ and the sense of comfort that both drew from a similar outlook on life. Their postal conversation kept alive what James Booth describes as ‘the poet’s sense of the loveliness of everyday things, so essential to such poems as ‘Love Songs in Age’ and ‘Faith Healing’.’
As in any close personal relationship, there were difficulties, as Andrew Motion writes in Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (1993).
‘Her tenacious clinging to routines made him feel that the smallest departure from normal practice was alarming. In the process, it made him look upon the ordinary as something potentially extraordinary. Her conviction that “the Larkins were superior”, and her insistence that their vision of the world was adequate, led him to his version of the egotistical sublime.’
There can be little doubt that Eva’s love was demanding, and that Larkin often wrote to his mother out of pity and a sense of duty. But the benefits he gained from the correspondence were substantial, and her idiosyncratic way of looking at the world sustained and inspired him.
By the 1970s Eva’s health and intellectual capacity had declined, and in 1972 she was admitted to a nursing home near Leicester. Larkin continued to pay her regular visits, making the long journey from Hull about once a fortnight to spend an afternoon there. Even after she became incapable of writing to him, Philip Larkin kept up his side of the correspondence, sending her short letters almost daily. Later, when she could no longer understand his words - and he suspected that she no longer remembered who he was - he sent her picture postcards of animals and members of the Royal Family instead.
In October 1977 Larkin wrote, with caustic black humour, to his old friend Kingsley Amis. ‘My mother, not content with being motionless, deaf and speechless, is now going blind. That’s what you get for not dying, you see.’ Less than a month later, on 17 November 1977, Eva died peacefully in her sleep, aged ninety-one. Although she had long been unable to read or understand his letters, Larkin had never stopped writing to her. ‘My thoughts keep turning to an empty space’, he wrote shortly afterwards, even though he told himself that she had lived a long life and had been well cared for.
Now that he could no longer write to his mother, he turned instead to finishing a poem that he had begun composing in 1974. ‘Aubade’ was published in the Times Literary Supplement on 23 December 1977. It was, as Motion says, Eva’s ‘parting gift’ to him, and one of the last published poems that Larkin wrote. The final stanza of ‘Aubade’, written soon after his mother’s death, describes a cold dawn breaking on a world that has become meaningless: ‘The sky is white as clay, with no sun./ Work has to be done./ Postmen like doctors go from house to house.’
Now that his mother was gone, there would be no more comfort in the form of letters written and received; Eva and Philip’s lifelong conversation had ended. But as Anthony Thwaite writes in his introduction to the Selected Letters, the last line of ‘Aubade’ that compares the work of postmen to that of doctors, ‘is one of healing, of renewal, of the diurnal comfort of letters through the post’.
My thanks to Philip Pullen for all his generous help (any remaining errors are my own). The Philip Larkin Society provides a forum for the discussion of all aspects of Philip Larkin’s work as a poet, novelist, jazz critic and librarian. There’s an interesting post about Larkin and the Brynmoor Jones Library at Hull University here. Below is my previous post about another writer and his mother, when I wrote about Samuel Beckett’s 1935 road trip with his mother May.
In other news…
Thank you to everyone who took part in my recent mini-survey. A nicely rounded 100 readers of this publication kindly clicked on one of three options: 15% wanted extra helpings of literature; 12% would like more stories of extraordinary Cambridge women and 73% appear to enjoy Lost in the Archives being ‘extra-well balanced’ between my literary posts and others about women’s lives. Over thirty more people also got in touch in the comments, or via email, with more detailed and very generous responses, eg: ‘I enjoy the focus on unknown ordinary women in Cambridge, memorable because of being extraordinary.’ I treasure such comments and all your feedback, which seems to favour biographical posts about women in Cambridge (and requests for more about Bletchley ‘graduates’).
This week I’ve been thrilled to have received many more readers’ suggestions for novels set in Cambridge - see below. I’ve now expanded and updated my previous post, thanks to your contributions, and added a few irresistible cover snaps. Do have a look.
Last but not least, here are a few Substack articles I’ve enjoyed reading recently. With a punning title Larkin might have approved of, ‘Bill Ismay's Feat of Clay’ by
is a beautiful account of one dedicated Yorkshireman and his pots. Ismay’s extensive collection of over 3,600 ceramics led to a new wing being established at York Art Gallery. ‘Had he not spent those solitary years of the 1950s, 60s and 70s accumulating his astonishing collection there would have been no Centre of Ceramic Art at York.’ ’s Picos Gêmeos despatches from the Mantiqueira mountain range in Brazil are always intriguing. His publication’s name means Twin Peaks, he tells us, ‘a reference to the TV Show from the 90s. Sometimes, it feels like my small town has as many strange going ons as David Lynch’s creation.’ ’s post ‘What makes us fall for a book?’ has sparked a rich conversation with her readers; like falling in love, it seems that there are strong emotions involved when it comes to the books we buy or borrow. (See also Larkin’s A Study Of Reading Habits.)Now over to you! Do you still write or receive letters, or save longer, letter-like emails from friends and family? I love writing and receiving those emails…
Quoted by James Booth, ‘Philip Larkin’s unpublished letters to his mother prove she was the poet’s muse – and his millstone’ (accessed 27.04.24)
Philip Pullen, “You'll Say that Mum is at the Bottom of All This”: the Untold Story of Eva Larkin’, in Thanks for Typing: Remembering Forgotten Women in History (Bloomsbury, 2021), ed. Julia Dresvina. ‘As the #ThanksforTyping movement has shown,’ the editors write, ‘anonymous women working to support the work of their male relations and colleagues has been, and often still is, a universal phenomenon. These essays show just how long intelligent and determined women have been sidelined, ignored or forgotten throughout history.’
Clive James, ‘Philip Larkin: Letters Home 1936 -1977’, in Somewhere Becoming Rain - Collected Writings on Philip Larkin (2019), pp. 89-90.
Martin Amis, ‘Philip Larkin's women’, The Guardian, 23.10.2010 (accessed 27.4.2024).
Ann: brilliant as always, and deeply moving. Another great, intimate portrait of a forgotten woman. (Larkin had a mother? Who knew?) One more layer of meaning to the postmen in “Aubade,” and their role in healing. I learn so much from your posts.
Sadly I no longer write letters, except ones of complaint...but my Dad did and I have been reading some my mother saved from when he was in the Royal Signals during WW2 and attached to the Press Corps at the International Military Tribunal - commonly known as the war trials. His letters make anything I ever wrote in a letter seem very mundane. Dad wasn't a journalist - his role was transmitting the lengthy trial reports back to Fleet Street by teleprinter. He had been loaned by the army to the Daily Express. He worked at the Hamburg U-Boat trials and then the Belsen trials in Luneberg. Before landing in Normandy after D-Day he had been a Post Office clerk and he then travelled through France, Belgium and Germany in the HQ communications unit as the Nazi regime collapsed. At the trials, when off-duty, he was allowed in the courtroom as the horrific evidence of the concentration camps unfolded. "I had an excellent view of the "Beast" [Joseph Kramer]
and the "Beastess" [Irma Grese] and all the other thugs," he wrote in one letter home "If I were trying them I should bring convictions on their faces alone! Irma Grese was the least bestial-looking of the bunch, in fact she is quite pretty in a hard, expressionless way". After the trial Grese and 8 others were hanged in the yard of Hamelin gaol in December 1945. Dad was moved on to Nuremburg and the trials of 1946 before returning to his Post Office counter in January 1947. Thanks to some yellowing letters my mother kept, I am able to understand what he never actually discussed in any detail. In the post-letter world, how will be understand our own histories??