1 October (1950): Philip Larkin to Monica Jones

Philip Larkin met Monica Jones while they were twentysomething students at Leicester University College, and the pair would continue a friendship / romance / correspondence for the forty years to follow. While Jones was working as an assistant librarian at the college, Larkin—early in his poetry career—moved to Belfast for a teaching post. In this letter, he airs some increasingly crass complaints about his new city, betraying a homesickness for native England.

1 October 1950

The evening star rises in front of my window!
Queen’s Chambers, Queen’s University, Belfast

My dear Monica,

Well, here I all too indubitably am—the first day in Ireland. My reactions? B to B—, the whole shoot. But best start from the beginning.

My train dashed through the weeping quarries of Derbyshire to the most dusk-ridden ruinous vision of Manchester imaginable. There I had tea & ham rolls (not real ham). Train to Liverpool, ‘bus to docks, walking through endless warehouses to find the Ulster Duke, which left at 9.30. In the meantime I had eaten fish & chips and 2 hyosin tablets, cowled in my duffle coat. I let them fight it out while I sat on deck, watching the long bare quays move slowly backwards. It took a good hour to get out of L’pool. Then I went to bed. Waking at 4.30 am. I looked out of my window & saw seas running swiftly but not high: I never felt at all queasy, for which God be praised. Before I went to bed I finished August folly (very good reading).

This morning I came here by car, to find Queen’s Chambers is 3 large Dutch fronted houses (red brick) knocked into one.

            Q. You are pleased with your room?
A. Frankly, no. It is large enough, & has a nice view, but there’s no carpet, nothing but that horrible rubbery green lino the whole place is floored with.
Q. At least the paint is fresh?
A. Fresh grass-green. My candles will clash. The whole place reminds me of certain 12/6 hotels I have stayed at in London.
Q. The food is surely not too bad?
A. Surely not too good, either. The roast beef at lunch was as pedestrian as a centipede. And I don’t like the admitted absence of any kind of food after about 7 pm. I’m going to be hungry.
  Q. The Warden, however, would seem—?
A. The Warden’s all right if you like dried-up little historians who have a Jane Austen cult & play chess. No, heark’ ee, cully, this room is grossly underfurnished, the lampshade is made of brown paper, the bulbs are too weak, the noise from the trans tiresome, the sixpenny meter for heat will prove expensive, the students ubiquitous, the servants iniquitous (where’s the strap from my suitcase?). Michael Innes speaks somewhere of the combination of refined luxury and barbarous discomfort that is the Oxford don’s life: it is the Belfast don’s life, too, except for the refined luxury.
  Q. There is hot water.
A. Yes, there is that. (Curtain.)

A brief walk into Belfast this afternoon (after milkless Nescafe with the Warden) confirmed my memory of it as a wide and cobble-streeted town, lined with frowning buildings in the late Victorian manner & some indifferent shops. I’m already fed up with anything called Ulster, Northern, Victoria, etc., also with the Irish male face (craggy, drink-flushed, with greasy black curls & a too tight collar) & the Irish female face (plump, bad-teethed, pinkly powdered, with a diamante lizard on the lapel).

However, despite all this I’m calling all my native artistic insensitivity to my aid & I suppose I shall endure. But Digby! But Beaumont! Really, dear, what I had in mind was much nearer the truth than your arts & crafts stuff. This armchair has wooden arms, by the way. There are 3 large Presbyterian churches in this square mile. Ah, quelle horreur! But I might also add that but for a blunder on the part of the porters I should be in No. 18, a worse room, & not No. 25. A Mr. Graham should be in his room by rights.

How nasty my writing looks.

Well, I’m afraid you won’t have had the distraction of novelty to take your mind off our parting.

This will be meeting you on your return & I hope it will take the edge off seeing your old colleagues again: I hope too your room doesn’t look sad & lonely now my lethargic cadging figure isn’t in it. Truly I shall always remember the fireplace & the cricket-bin & all the battery of things on the mantelpiece, Fifi & blue Neddy & the flowered lamp. Your life there has come into extremely sharp focus for me now: heating milk, singing in the kitchen, drying stockings, etc. You make it seem quite unusual and fascinating. (‘Huh’—’at the whiskey again’). I loved every time I visited you, & do want to thank you again & again for being so kind, so gracious & so generous. All three of you.

In a short while now I have to go to dinner with Graneek, so I will try to do something about my shoes & my hair & post this. Work tomorrow, ha ha ha. Grow old along with me, the worst is yet to be. The adjective I shd choose so far is ‘drab.’

Goodbye, dear Taurus. Tell me what has been happening, & what you are doing. What of your Flanagan & Allen turn with A.S.C.?

Affectionately yours,
Philip

An honour to be in this place, Christ! It’s like a prison & Rugby in 1840. The town smells of horse dung.

From Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica. Edited by Anthony Thwaite. New York: Faber and Faber, 2010.

FURTHER READING