Larkin’s last collection takes its title from one of its major poems, ‘High Windows’, which begins: ‘When I see a couple of kids/And guess he’s fucking her and she’s/Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,/I know this is paradise…’ He thinks of his own childhood, of ‘sweating in the dark’ and minding what you have to say to the priest, and then arrives at an unexpected, mystical resolution: ‘Rather than words comes the thought of high windows…’But high windows where? In a cathedral perhaps? A skyscraper? What do the high windows represent?
From 1956 to 1974, during his stint as head librarian at the Brynmor Jones library at Hull University, Larkin lived in a flat overlooking Pearson Park, Hull. (I too lived in Hull briefly in the 1980s and once met Larkin; he told me to stop eating my sandwiches in the reference section.) It was a top floor flat, giving him a good view of the park and surrounding streets. It was here that he wrote High Windows. These Pearson Park windows were, in part, the high windows he refers to, where (as he puts it in 'Vers de Société' in the same collection) he could sit ‘under a lamp,/hearing the noise of wind,/ and looking out to see the moon thinned/ To an air-sharpened blade.’ The ‘high windows’ seem to stand for poetry, the solitary life, and the alternative to envy and bitterness.
Except... Larkin’s offices at the Brynmor Jones Library had another commanding view, this time over the concourse where the students would walk in from the main road to the lecture halls and student union. According to his secretary, one of Mr Larkin’s favourite recreations was to observe from this office, through ever-warm binoculars, the female students as they walked beneath him (‘When I see a couple of kids…’) He called the attractive ones his ‘honeys’.
Consulted:
Motion, Andrew: Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life
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Thanks for that Tom...you're probably right. in defence I will only say that I used the words 'in part' (useful preemptive tactic), and in general in this blog I try to give concrete things and experiences that generated titles. Another probable influence is Raymond Chandler, who published 'The High Window' in 1942, just when Larkin was beginning to feel it was all too late. Another important way of looking at the poem is to look at the first drafts - they are surprising, I seem to remember (Motion gives them).
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