Philip Larkin Abroad

Abstract

A fascinating aspect of Larkin’s poetic treatment of England is his attitude towards what is not England: that is, Abroad. This vast uncharted territory strikes terror into his heart, or so he confesses to be the case: ‘I hate being abroad’, he declared in an interview. ‘Generally speaking, the further one gets from home the greater the misery.’¹ His manifest hatred of what was ‘not home’ took various and increasingly humorous forms. Letters and postcards to friends while on holiday (invariably in the British Isles) bear occasional resentful and witty exhortations to eschew travel. Letters to novelist Barbara Pym occasionally find Larkin furious at his hotel. He waxes eloquent on the subject of appalling food and accommodation: ‘why are single rooms so much worse than double ones? Fewer, further, frowstier? Damper, darker, dingier? Noisier, narrower, nastier?’² At times he despairs of holidays in general, which comprise a modern counterpart of medieval pilgrimages in that they are ‘essentially a kind of penance for being so happy and comfortable in one’s daily life’.³