Hartley Philip Larkin, the Marvell Press and Me

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-28757-4
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

First published in 1989 Philip Larkin, the Marvell Press, and Me is the story of how this small publishing company became a chapter in literary history when, in 1955, the then novice publishers, of which Jean Hartley was one, were entrusted with the manuscript of Larkin's The Less Deceived. The Less Deceived, Larkin's second collection, contained the mature Philip Larkin style - that of a detached observer of what Jean Hartley referred to as 'ordinary people doing ordinary things' - the virtues of which came to be associated with The Movement, the post-war generation of poets that used plain language and traditional forms to address everyday life in Britain. The themes of The Less Deceived resonated with readers and it became one of the most outstanding collections of 1955. Philip Larkin, the Marvell Press, and Me charts that progress and introduces the reader to the real Philip Larkin. 'Jean Hartley's story is a vital piece of evidence for anyone curious about Larkin's life.' Andrew Motion, Observer.

Jean Hartley

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hartley, Jean

Leseproben

One

I was born in the heart of Hull’s fishing community and my earliest recollection is of a grey, littered street swarming with children and noisy with the clamour of their street games: at dinner-time, and after school, they bowled bicycle-wheels, chalked out hopscotches on the pavements, played chasing games and some of the luckier kids staggered high on wooden stilts or sped up and down on roller skates. Terraces of twelve houses intersected the street at regular intervals: ours was called Ivy Terrace.

As soon as the men had gone to work in the mornings, the women in pinafores, with infants clinging to their legs, would appear in the terrace to shake mats, lean on brooms or stand with arms akimbo, and the morning gossip would begin. I would view this activity from my vantage point behind the front-room net curtains, for my mother, though she was neighbourly, was not one of the throng. She fancied herself a cut above the others, having been in service with a gentleman’s family before she married, and she tried to bring a measure of that gentility to her own mean household. When going out for even the briefest of shopping trips, she dressed in a smart two-piece suit and hat, both of which she had made. At the Alderman Cogan Charity School for Poor Girls she had received a good grounding in domestic economy, but she had picked up for herself the more sophisticated skills.

My dad, a stocky, bowlegged man with cauliflower ears, a broken nose (he had been a keen street-corner boxer in his teens) and piercingly honest blue eyes, was already ill by the time I was born. Proud of his strength and haunted by the spectre of unemployment, as a young man he had taken a labouring job in the foundry of the marine engineering firm of Charles D. Holmes. The regular wage kept the family afloat but working in the intense heat and fumes soon ruined his health; the most regular noise in our house was the sound of my father’s wheezing, coughing and spitting. Billy Holland was adored by everyone who knew him. Grindingly poor though we were, he would always spare a little money or buy a bag of groceries for a workmate who was worse off than we. Newly-wed friends received an expertly hand-crafted poker, shovel and brass nut-crackers moulded in the shape of a woman’s nether half (raw materials by unwitting courtesy of C. D. Holmes – as was most of our firewood, though the latter was more in my brother’s line). My father had ‘spoken for’ Harry, who was nine years older than me, and had got him an apprenticeship as a wood pattern-maker, the most skilled and prestigious job in the wood-working field. ‘Harry works to a thousandth of an inch’ was the proud boast in our family.

One day, coming back from shopping on the teeming main road, my mother and I noticed a knot of people gathered at the top of the terrace. On going nearer we saw a fisherman in wide-bottomed trousers – a great ape of a man – holding a red-haired neighbour of ours by the throat and banging her head against the wall. Her choking sobs could be heard over his foul imprecations and I clutched my mother’s arm and whispered, ‘Can’t somebody stop him?’ ‘No’, she said. ‘You can’t interfere between man and wife. He always knocks her about when he comes home from sea.’ This kind of public domestic violence and the after-closing-time street-fight outside the pub were commonplace in the 1930s.

For some months there had been a teasing preparation by my brother for my first day at school. Here it was, a warm May morning, sun on the dirty street, groups of unshaven, hard-eyed men standing about (this was 1938), and me in a new red velvet dress that mother had made.

I didn’t like school. It was an ugly, red-brick, Victorian monster with white tiled classrooms and smelly lavatories, but worst of all was the crowd in the playground. The noise was shrill and deafening and wherever you stood someone would rush past or bang into you. So I decided not to go to school any more. I told my mother at lunch time and she just pursed her lips. All seemed to be settled until she grabbed my arm and said ‘Come on, Milady, back you go.’

Of course I resisted and sobbed and sat down on the pavement and screamed. People ran out of their houses to see what the trouble was and shouted advice to my mother: ‘Give her a good hiding’, ‘Lock her in a dark cupboard’ and so on. After dragging me three hundred yards on my bottom, she won. I stood in the classroom, my face now dirty except for the tear channels and my lovely red dress dusty and smeared. All right, I said to myself as the other infants gawped at me in wonder. They’ve got me here but they can’t stop me hating it. School, for me, was a cornucopia of shame and humiliation. A year later I committed some minor misdemeanour, perhaps talking, and was called up to the teacher’s desk. After giving me a good rousting she ordered me to apologize. I looked at her blankly. ‘Apologize!’ she repeated over and over and, receiving no reply, she whacked my hand with a wooden ruler until the ruler broke in half. Smarting with pain and outrage, I ran home to my mother and asked, ‘What does apologize mean?’ How many working-class children, I wonder, are punished for being dumbly insolent when in fact they are simply too scared to show their ignorance?

My brother was, for a time, what I believe is called a shifted sinistral, though not from choice. When it was discovered that he was left-handed, Mr Peacock, his teacher, told him to change hands. Since the desks were double-barrelled, he claimed that Harry’s writing position hampered the calligraphy of his partner. Harry made efforts, became absorbed in his work, forgot, and changed back to doing what came naturally. The sharp-eyed Mr Peacock declared it was the school’s policy that all children should write with their right hands, so he forcibly tied Harry’s left one behind his back until the problem was cured.

My senior school was no better. The tortoise-faced maths teacher must have had secret yearnings to join the ATS for her clothes – even her underskirt and knee-length bloomers – were all khaki coloured. She wrote the sums on the backboard and then crept round the desks in her sandals. When she saw that I had made a mistake she thumped me on the back. The jolt shot the ink off the nib of my dip-pen and produced a blot. Next time she came round she thumped me again for having blotted my book. Four years with khaki Miss Clark ensured my hopelessness at maths. My only talent was for English, taught by the sweet-faced Miss Senior. She fostered my love of poetry and lent me books of her own to take home.

As soon as war was declared, I was evacuated to Filey, a small East Coast town about forty miles from Hull. For a six-year-old, going to live at the seaside should have been exciting but it was not. My visions of sand-castles, paddling and ice-cream cornets were quickly dispelled by the sight of the barbed-wire fence that cordoned off the beach. I cannot remember much about my months at Filey apart from feeling miserable, lonely and withdrawn. I had gone from being the much-cherished youngest member of a small family to being the unconsidered youngest member of a much-extended household. The fisherman and his wife that I was billeted with were stern, angular, hard-worked folk with two children of their own as well as three other billettees – a married woman from Hull with her two children. Consequently, I got short shrift.

At Christmas my parents sent me a selection box of chocolates which must have represented an enormous saving-up of sweet coupons. I saw the box arrive, was allowed to admire it and then it was put away, never to reappear. I was worried secretly about the luscious chocolate bars and brooded over the loss of them. Perhaps they would be brought out the next day, or the next week? But no. I had not the nerve to ask the forbidding adults what had happened to them. Instead I used my initiative and sent a postcard to my parents saying that I did not like being in Filey and that I wanted to come back to Hull. It seemed to my parents a good suggestion at the time; during those months of ‘the phoney war’, the expected bombardment had not come and all at home was peaceful.

Our house was a hive of industry. My mother baked twice a week (brown bread on Tuesdays, white on Fridays) and always made an extra half dozen small loaves which she and I took round in a basket covered with a clean tea-towel to various ‘poor persons’, one of whom was my father’s stepmother, a frail old lady who was lumbered with a number of middle-aged ne’er-do-well sons. They appeared half-dressed and bed-rumpled in socks, longjohns and unbuttoned grandad shirts in the middle of the afternoon, to pounce on the newly-baked bread. As young soldiers in the First World War the death and destruction they witnessed had turned them into hard boozers. Returning home, masters of no trade, to a town where the unemployment rate was always high, they had drifted into jobs as draymen and casual labourers.

Fecklessness was not encouraged in our house and, looking back, our existence was a miracle of make-do-and-mend and the sort of recycling that would gladden the heart of a present-day ecologist. The Daily Herald and John Bull (a bit shiny, this) were torn into neat squares and hung on a hook in the lavatory. Harry monopolized the kitchen table to make out of discarded...