Philip Larkin by James Booth Page B

enough work for a volume. The Fortune Press’s fiction list included, as Larkin joked, many ‘masterpieces’ for ‘students of intersex’: Boys in their Ruin , A Brute of a Boy , Bachelor’s Hall . Caton had been prosecuted in 1934 for ‘obscene libel’. 17 But the Press’s poetry list was, in contrast, impressive, including Dylan Thomas, Gavin Ewart, Roy Fuller, Tambimuttu, Drummond Allison and Vernon Scannell. Surprisingly Larkin did not respond immediately to Caton’s approach. He was by this time engaged on his second novel, then entitled The Kingdom of Winter , which probably seemed a more important priority. But he may also have felt that his poetic voice was not yet secure enough to justify a volume. Montgomery, his stalwart ally when it came to fiction, was derisive of his enthusiasm for Yeats: ‘I remember Bruce Montgomery snapping, as I droned for the third or fourth time that evening When such as I cast off remorse, So great a sweetness flows into the breast . . ., “It’s not his job to cast off remorse, but to earn forgiveness.”’ 18
    Nevertheless, when Caton repeated his inquiry in October Larkin cast doubt aside and assembled a collection of thirty-one pieces, The North Ship . The fact that he headed each poem with a roman numeral, only eight of the poems being given titles, imitates Part One of Auden’s Another Time , which also runs from I to XXXI, but it may also betray a certain haste. He included the ten poems from Poetry from Oxford in Wartime , but most of the volume was made up of Yeatsian works written in the early months of 1944. Caton was notorious for not paying royalties to his authors, and when Larkin wrote asking about terms, Caton assured him ‘that no agreement was necessary’. 19 A publication date of February 1945 was mentioned, and when proofs did not arrive until March Larkin was consumed with impatience. Nevertheless, their final arrival prompted him to send Caton the typescript of Jill , despairing of finding a more respectable publisher. The novel was, after all, in its way, a work of ‘intersex’. Caton accepted it at once, though again no financial terms were mentioned.
    Larkin’s first published volume, The North Ship , finally appeared on 31 July 1945, six months later than had originally been promised. The evocative, symbolist manner of The North Ship is at an opposite extreme from the witty demotic of Brunette (‘I’m very cross: I think you’ve been a beast’):
 
I put my mouth
Close to running water:
Flow north, flow south,
It will not matter,
It is not love you will find.
     
    Here, as in the later mature poem ‘Solar’, the elements of nature are dispassionate, immutable, clear of the human element. The running water and the wind are beyond love, beyond death:
 
You have no limbs
Crying for stillness, you have no mind
Trembling with seraphims,
You have no death to come. (XIII)
     
    The phrasing shows a refined ear for the music of vowels and consonants: ‘Trembling with seraphims’. 20 Even more exquisite is the jewel-like miniature, ‘This is the first thing’ (XXVI):
 
This is the first thing
I have understood:
Time is the echo of an axe
Within a wood.
     
    This lyric, in plain indicative mood, elusive in literal meaning but immediately emotionally comprehensible, would be perfectly in place in one of Ezra Pound’s anthologies of imagist poetry.
    One major strand of the volume is an aestheticist celebration of beauty for its own sake in a tone of secular worship or awe. In ‘Like the train’s beat’ (XII), the poet glimpses transcendent beauty in the eyelashes and ‘sharp vivacity of bone’ of a Polish airgirl in a corner seat, lit through the window of the swaying train by the ‘swinging and narrowing sun’:
 
all humanity of interest
Before her angled beauty falls [. . .]
     
    Her beauty has an abstract precision, as loveless and deathless as the running water and wind in ‘I put my mouth’. Her fluttering foreign words are as