Fast Fiction: Mainly Larkin
"The room was just off the hallway and there in front of me were Dickens, Henry James, Conrad, T S Eliot, Virginia Woolf and even Philip Larkin.'' Richard Mallinson's story goes on a literary flight of fancy.
Walking up a side street I saw a notice outside a house which said, ‘Come inside and meet the authors. Admission £1.’
I opened the door and gave my coin to a little old man who looked like Thomas Hardy. He said, ‘Thank you, sir, go right in.’
The room was just off the hallway and there in front of me were Dickens, Henry James, Conrad, T S Eliot, Virginia Woolf and even Philip Larkin.
A pert waitress, perhaps Katherine Mansfield, was keeping them all well supplied with drink, so Larkin couldn’t complain on that score.
‘Thank God you’re here,’ he said to me, ‘there’s nobody else I can talk to among this shower.’ Typical, I thought.
I went to introduce myself to Virginia Woolf but she abruptly turned away and began to confide in the morose, tilting Eliot.
‘Serves you bloody well right,’ said Larkin, who had followed me.
*
The next time I saw Larkin he pretended not to know me. We were seated opposite each other in a train heading south for London.
He was doing the crossword in The Daily Telegraph.
I leaned forward and said, ‘William Empson is fond of crosswords.’
He looked up, menacingly, through his thick glasses.
‘Empson, Emerson, Ellington, Eliot, who, who?’ he growled.
‘Surely you must know who I mean,’ I retorted. ‘Empson the poet and critic, he wrote Seven Types Of -’
‘Yes, yes, so what?’ he grunted irritably and went back to his crossword.
Years later when his Letters were published I was amused to read:
‘Yesterday I met a pillock on the train who tried to show off by mentioning Empson but I made the bugger sweat by pretending not to know who he was talking about. But he stuck at it, I’ll say that for him.’’
Well, thank you, Philip.
