Philip Larkin

by James Booth

  11. DLN/2/2.

  12. Noel Hughes told Andrew Motion that Sydney entered into correspondence with Schacht, though I have been unable to find any confirmation of this. Motion, p. 12.

  13. DLN/1/34.

  14. 21 and 22 August 1927. DLN/1/1.

  15. 30 August 1929. DLN/1/1.

  16. 19 August 1930. DLN/1/1.

  17. 29 August 1931. DLN/1/1.

  18. 13 August 1932. DLN/1/1.

  19. James Booth, ‘“Snooker at the Seaside”: The Birthday Walk in Scarborough’, AL 16 (October 2003), pp. 29–31.

  20. DPL/2/3/63/11. See Sheila Woolf, ‘A Hearty Laugh? Philip Larkin at King Henry VIII School, Coventry’, AL 28 (October 2009), pp. 15–16, at p. 16.

  21. W. H. Rider, ‘Colin Gunner Recollected’, AL 13 (April 2002), p. 32.

  22. Introduction to Colin Gunner, Adventures with the Irish Brigade, FR, pp. 120–1.

  23. ‘These I have loved’. DLN/1/38.

  24. 1 August 1934. DLN/1/3.

  25. 17 August 1936. DLN/1/5.

  26. ‘An Interview with John Haffenden’, FR, p. 54.

  27. Ibid.

  28. Motion, p. 26.

  29. Interview with the Observer, RW, p. 47. He may be alluding to King George VI’s celebrated comment: ‘Abroad is bloody.’

  30. DLN/1/7 and DLN/1/8.

  31. DLN/1/8.

  32. Autobiographical fragment in Workbook 5. DPL/1/5/1.

  33. Interview with the Observer, RW, p. 47.

  34. ‘Not the Place’s Fault’, FR, p. 7.

  35. ‘The young Mr Larkin’, in Anthony Thwaite (ed.), Larkin at Sixty (London: Faber & Faber, 1982), p. 21.

  36. ‘Not the Place’s Fault’, FR, p. 9.

  37. SL, p. 416.

  38. To Sutton, 9 August 1939. Not in SL.

  39. ‘Not the Place’s Fault’, FR, p. 9.

  40. AWJ, p. 16.

  41. To Sutton, ‘Friday night’ (1939 or 1940). Not in SL.

  42. AWJ, p. 16.

  43. DLN/1/10–29. Sydney Larkin’s wartime diaries are closed to researchers until 2015.

  44. Motion, p. 12.

  45. Richard Bradford, First Boredom, Then Fear: The Life of Philip Larkin (London: Peter Owen, 2005), p. 25; The Odd Couple: The Curious Friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin (London: Robson Press, 2012), p. 7.

  46. James Booth, ‘Sydney Larkin’s Little Hitler’, AL 29 (April 2010), p. 27.

  47. Motion, pp. 492–3.

  48. Fred Holland, personal communication, 2011.

  49. Autobiographical fragment. DPL/1/5/1.

  50. To Sutton, 6 September 1939. Reproduced as the front endpaper of SL.

  51. To Sutton, 1 April 1942. Not in SL.

  52. To Sutton, 2 January 1943. SL, p. 53.

  53. To Sutton, ‘Friday night’ (1939 or 1940). Not in SL.

  54. To his family, 7 March 1943.

  55. ‘Not the Place’s Fault’, FR, pp. 10–11.

  56. One minor difference is that Sydney almost always spells ‘and’ in full, whereas Philip generally uses a plus sign.

  57. ‘Not the Place’s Fault’, FR, p. 10.

  58. Burnett gives the full official version. Complete Poems, p. 510.

  59. Philip Larkin, Incidents from Phippy’s Schooldays, ed. Brenda Allen and James Acheson, with illustrations by Rodney Fitzgerald (Edmonton, Canada: Juvenilia Press, 2002).

  60. James Booth, ‘Larkin’s Schoolboy Writings’, AL 13 (April 2002), pp. 21­–8.

  61. ‘Stanley en Musique’, ‘À un ami qui aime’, ‘Stanley et la Glace’.

  62. Jill, p. 78.

  63. Booth, ‘Larkin’s Schoolboy Writings’, pp. 21–8.

  64. 15 October 1940. James Booth, ‘“Dear Pop and Mop”: The Larkin Family Letters Arrive in Hull’, AL 25 (April 2008), pp. 16–17, at p. 16.

  65. Ibid.

  66. Jill, p. 12.

  67. 26 October 1940. Booth, ‘“Dear Pop and Mop”: The Larkin Family Letters Arrive in Hull’, p. 16.

  68. 17 November 1940. DLN/1/32.

  69. Jill, p. 214.

  70. Letter beginning ‘Dear fambly’, 18 November 1940.

  71. BD1, p. 10.

  72. For the Lichfield context see David Gerard, ‘Family Matters’, AL 12 (October 2001), p. 31.

  73. Motion, p. 41.

  74. BD1, p. 6.

  75. Kingsley Amis, ‘Oxford and After’, in Thwaite (ed.), Larkin at Sixty, p. 25.

  76. See Janice Rossen, ‘Larkin at Oxford: Chaucer, Langland and Bruce Montgomery’, Journal of Modern Literature 21.2 (Winter 1997), pp. 295–311.

  77. ‘Writing Poems’ (1964), RW, p. 84.

  78. Ibid.

  79. S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London: J. M. Dent, 1956), p. 167.

  80. T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Selected Essays 1917–1932 (London: Faber & Faber, 1932), p. 15.

  81. ‘A Conversation with Ian Hamilton’, FR, pp. 19–20.

  82. Interview with Paris Review, RW, p. 74.

  2: Exemption (1941–3)

  1. Kingsley Amis, Memoirs (London: Hutchinson, 1991), p. 55.

  2. Though Kitty’s name was Catherine, he addresses the envelope in florid copperplate ‘Miss Katherine Larkin’, mentioning the ‘elaborate envelope’ in which her own previous letter had arrived.

  3. DLN/3/2.

  4. To Sutton, 16 June 1941. Not in SL.

  5. ‘The Art of Jazz’ (1940), in Larkin’s Jazz: Essays and Reviews 1940–84, ed. Richard Palmer and John White (London and New York: Continuum, 2001), pp. 169–70.

  6. BD1, p. 5.

  7. To Sutton, 26 March 1941. Not in SL.

  8. Jill, Introduction, pp. 14–15.

  9. Motion, p. 54.

  10. Ibid., p. 55.

  11. Richard Bradford, The Odd Couple: The Curious Friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin (London: Robson Press, 2012), p. 65.

  12. See ibid., pp. 71–2.

  13. Amis, Memoirs, p. 54.

  14. Motion, p. 59.

  15. Jill, p. 17.

  16. BD1, p. 9.

  17. Ibid., p. 8.

  18. ‘Our Group’, London Magazine, December/January 1999/2000, pp. 26–7.

  19. ‘Story 1’, AL 10 (October 2000), pp. 4–20, at p. 19.

  20. ‘Peter’, AL 11 (April 2001), pp. 13–23, at p. 21. Two similar typed stories, as yet unpublished, are ‘The Eagles Are Gone’ and ‘Maurice’ (DPL/2/1/1/4 and DPL/2/1/1/6).

  21. Trevor Tolley and John White (eds), Larkin’s Jazz, Properbox 155 (four-CD set), disc 2 ‘Oxford’, track 6.

  22. ‘Peter’, p. 14.

  23. Ibid., pp. 14–16.

  24. Ibid., p. 19

  25. Ibid., p. 22.

  26. To Sutton, 9 July 1941. Not in SL.

  27. BD1, p. 7.

  28. Ibid.

  29. Ibid.

  30. DLN/3/2/2.

  31. BD2, p. 5.

  32. Ibid.

  33. Ibid., p. 6.

  34. 20 November 1941. SL, p. 28.

  35. BD2, p. 6.

  36. Ibid.

  37. To Sutton, 20 November 1941. SL, p. 28. Passage not in SL. See Don Lee, ‘Larkin attends a jam session at Abbey Road Studios (1941)’, AL 27 (April 2009), p. 14.

  38. Tolley and White (eds), Larkin’s Jazz, disc 2 ‘Oxford’, track 24.

  39. 20 November 1941. SL, p. 27.

  40. BD1, p. 9.

  41. Ibid.

  42. See David Gerard, ‘Oxford Roundabout: Or Currents Turned Awry’ (The Fourth Larkin Society Birthday Walk), AL 10 (October 2000), pp. 34–6, at p. 34.

  43. Motion, p. 65.

  44. Ibid., p. 74.

  45. BD1, p. 9.

  46. Ibid.

  47. ‘Larkin at Twenty: Warwick, August 1942’, ed. Don Lee and James Booth, AL 14 (October 2002), pp. 5–10, at p. 6.

  48. Presumably a reference to Alan Ross, author, publisher and editor, a contemporary of Larkin and Amis at Oxford. See LKA, p. 93.

  49. Ibid.

  50. Ibi
d., p. 7.

  51. Ibid. Larkin refers to D. H. Lawrence’s novel.

  52. Ibid.

  53. Ibid., p. 8.

  54. Ibid., p. 9. Parts of this letter appear in SL, pp. 42–4.

  55. Passage not in SL.

  56. Ibid.

  57. In SL (p. 43) Thwaite mistranscribed ‘scoffing’ as ‘slobbering’.

  58. Prince George, Duke of Kent, the fourth son of George V, was killed in a plane crash in 1942.

  59. ‘Larkin at Twenty’, pp. 9–10.

  60. Ibid., pp. 5–6.

  61. Bradford, The Odd Couple, p. 48.

  62. See ibid., pp. 51–2.

  63. Motion, p. 61.

  64. Nuala O’Faiolain, Are You Somebody? (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), p. 66.

  65. Motion, p. 78.

  66. In BD2, p. 5, I mistranscribed ‘gently’ as ‘greatly’. Penelope’s name was Scott Stokes, without the hyphen which Larkin has mistakenly inserted.

  67. Susannah Tarbush, ‘From Willow Gables to “Aubade”: Penelope Scott Stokes and Philip Larkin: Part 1’, AL 25 (April 2008), pp. 5–11, at p. 8.

  68. Ibid., p. 5.

  69. SL, p. 105.

  70. AGW, p. 173.

  71. DPL/2/2/39.

  72. DPL(2)/1/4/4. Tarbush, Part 1, pp. 10–11.

  73. Geoff Weston, ‘Sidney Keyes and Larkin: A Postscript’, AL 30 (October 2010), p. 15. See also David Wheatley, ‘Larkin and Sidney Keyes, or, The Case of the Mechanical Turd’, AL 28 (October 2009), pp. 17–19.

  74. Burnett (Complete Poems, pp. xix–xx) is mistaken in asserting that the lines following the asterisk are ‘not a continuation of the parody’. He also states incorrectly that the first two lines are in a ‘different metre’ from the rest. In fact a rough pentameter metre is maintained in all eleven lines. Burnett’s notion that the second and third sections are ‘disparate pieces of text’ is also misguided. They both refer to his parents, are woven together by rhymes and pararhymes and are clearly sequential.

  75. BD1, p. 10.

  76. BD2, p. 6.

  77. ‘Larkin’s Dream Diary 1942–3, Part 1’, ed. Don Lee, AL 27 (April 2009), pp. 5–13, and ‘Part 2’, AL 28 (October 2009), pp. 5–13.

  78. ‘Larkin’s Dream Diary, Part 2’, p. 6. Margaret Flannery appears in Trouble at Willow Gables, her name being subsequently altered to Margaret Tattenham.

  79. ‘Larkin’s Dream Diary, Part 1’ and ‘Part 2’.

  80. To Sutton, 7 January 1943. Not in SL.

  81. ‘Introduction to The North Ship’, RW, p. 29.

  82. ‘Vernon Watkins, an Encounter and a Re-encounter’, RW, p. 42.

  83. RW, pp. 43–4.

  3: Brunette Coleman (1943)

  1. To his parents, 20 June 1943.

  2. BD2, p. 8.

  3. Ibid., p. 6.

  4. Jill, Introduction, p. 19.

  5. David Gerard, ‘Oxford Roundabout: Or Currents Turned Awry’, AL 10 (October 2000), pp. 34–6. Diana Gollancz married Prince Leopold of Löwenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg (1903–74), who published a memoir following her untimely death in 1967, A Time to Live – A Time to Die (New York: Doubleday, 1971).

  6. BD2, p. 8.

  7. 6 July 1943. SL, p. 59.

  8. To Sutton, 28 July 1943. Not in SL.

  9. ‘An Incident in the English Camp’, AL 12 (October 2001), pp. 5–10.

  10. Ibid., p. 6.

  11. Letter beginning ‘Dear fambly’, 18 November 1940.

  12. ‘An Incident in the English Camp’, p. 6. The reading is confirmed by the original deleted version: ‘peanut shaped head’.

  13. ‘An Incident in the English Camp’, pp. 7–9.

  14. Ibid., p. 10.

  15. Ibid.

  16. BD2, p. 8.

  17. To Sutton, 14 May 1943. Not in SL.

  18. To his parents, 15 May 1943.

  19. During the war Blanche Coleman’s group performed at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, which had been converted into a dance hall for service personnel. She died in 2008. The Times, 6 May 2008.

  20. To Amis, 11 January 1947. Passage not in SL.

  21. Jill, p. 19.

  22. To his parents, 27 June 1943.

  23. SL, p. 60.

  24. Motion, p. 106. A fragmentary jeu d’esprit, ‘Ante Meridian: The Autobiography of Brunette Coleman’ interrupts the manuscript of Michaelmas Term at St. Bride’s for nine pages, but its broad farce and lack of girls’-school references set it apart from the main Brunette canon.

  25. To Amis, 24 October 1943. Not in SL. Motion wrote parts of his biography by dictation, which causes some mistakes. Vicary becomes ‘Vickery’, Breary becomes ‘Breany’, Burch becomes ‘Birch’, and Melibee becomes ‘Mellaby’ (Motion, pp. 100, 93, 184). ‘What Are We Writing For?’ becomes, inadvertently, ‘What We Are Writing For’ (pp. 100–1).

  26. Sue Sims, review of Trouble at Willow Gables and Other Fictions by Philip Larkin, AL 14 (October 2002), pp. 37–9, at p. 38.

  27. TWG, p. 12.

  28. Ibid., 49–50.

  29. Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, trans. R. and E. Powys Mathers (London: Folio Society, 1948), p. 17.

  30. Ibid., p. 266.

  31. TWG, p. 84.

  32. Ibid., p. 89.

  33. Vicary, Niece of the Headmistress, p. 119.

  34. TWG, p. 105.

  35. Ibid., p. 128.

  36. Motion, p. 62.

  37. 12 October 1943. SL, p. 75.

  38. To Amis, 24 October 1943. Not in SL.

  39. To Amis, 7 September 1943. Not in SL.

  40. Julian Hall, The Senior Commoner (London: Martin Secker, 1934). See TWG, p. xiv. At one point in Hall’s novel a visitor to the school recalls a particularly attractive pupil: ‘A brunette, isn’t he?’ (p. 373).

  41. ‘The Lesbianism of Philip Larkin’, The Movement Reconsidered, ed. Zachary Leader (Oxford: OUP, 2009), p. 96.

  42. http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/online/modern/montgomery/montgomery.html.

  43. 12 October 1943. SL, p. 75.

  44. See ‘A Catalogue of the Papers of Victor Gollancz’, University of Warwick, MSS.157/3/P/DOM/3/1–67.

  45. Bodleian, MS Eng. C.3894, fol. 132.

  46. Trevor Tolley and John White (eds), Larkin’s Jazz, Properbox 155 (four-CD set), disc 2 ‘Oxford’, track 8.

  47. LKA, p. 17.

  48. The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 12: 1940–1, ed. Peter Davison (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), pp. 57–79.

  49. The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 14: 1941–2, ed. Peter Davison (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), p. 65.

  50. Rosemary Auchmuty, The World of Girls (London: The Women’s Press, 1992), p. 205.

  51. TWG, p. 256.

  52. Ibid., p. 269.

  53. Larkin kept one of the four copies of Sugar and Spice himself (now in the University of Hull Collection, The History Centre, Hull, DPL(2)/1/11), gave one to Bruce Montgomery (now in the Bodleian), one to Kingsley Amis (now in the Huntington Library, California) and one to Miriam Plaut, a possible model for Katherine in A Girl in Winter (see SL, pp. 77–8).

  54. Fairlie Bruce’s poem forms the epigraph to Dimsie Moves Up Again, p. 6. See TWG, p. 266.

  55. ‘The hills in their recumbent postures’, Complete Poems, pp. 179, 542.

  56. BD2, p. 8.

  57. SL, p. 658.

  58. TWG, p. 243.

  59. SL, p. 66.

  60. TWG, pp. 247–8. In l.2 Burnett has, incorrectly, ‘whom I once knew’ (Complete Poems, p. 227)

  61. Charles Baudelaire, Les Épaves (1866).

  62. See Graham Chesters, ‘Larkin and Baudelaire’s Damned Women’, in James Dolamore (ed.), Making Connections: Essays in French Culture and Society in Honour of Philip Thody (Bern: Peter Lang, 1999), pp. 81–92.

  63. The original names of the characters remain unaltered in the second novella.

  64. TWG, pp. 168–75.

  65. BD2, p. 8.

  66. TWG, p. 181.

  67. Ibid., p. 1
84.

  68. Ibid.

  69. Ibid., p. 188.

  70. Ibid., p. 223.

  71. Ibid., pp. 229–30.

  72. To Amis, 7 September 1943. Not in SL.

  73. Interview with the Observer, RW, p. 51.

  4: Nothing So Glad (1943–5)

  1. Ruth Siverns, ‘Philip Larkin at Wellington 1943–1946’, AL 1 (April 1996), pp. 4–5, at p. 4.

  2. David Gerard, ‘Wellington Walkabout’, AL 8 (October 1999), pp. 27–30, at p. 30. ‘Glentworth’ still stands.

  3. SL, p. 85.

  4. To Sutton, 22 March 1944. Not in SL.

  5. RW, pp. 31–5.

  6. Ibid., p. 33.

  7. To Sutton, 22 March 1944.

  8. Maeve Brennan, ‘Philip Larkin: a biographical sketch’, in Brian Dyson (ed.), The Modern Academic Library: Essays in Memory of Philip Larkin (London: Library Association, 1988), pp. 1–19, at pp. 5–6.

  9. ‘Single-handed and Untrained’, RW, p. 34.

  10. Siverns, ‘Philip Larkin at Wellington’, p. 4.

  11. Ibid.

  12. Motion, p. 120.

  13. Gerard, ‘Wellington Walkabout’, p. 29.

  14. Motion, p. 122.

  15. Gerard, ‘Wellington Walkabout’, p. 29.

  16. To Sutton, 26 February 1944. SL, p. 87.

  17. For Caton (1897–1971) see Timothy D’Arch Smith, R. A. Caton and the Fortune Press: A Memoir and a Hand-List (revised edn, North Pomfret, Vermont: Asphodel Editions, 2004).

  18. The North Ship (London: Fortune Press, 1945; first Faber & Faber edn, 1966), Introduction, p. 9. The reprint in RW (p. 29) corrects the quotation to ‘cast out remorse’.

  19. Ibid., p. 7.

  20. This is the reading in William Bell (ed.), Poetry from Oxford in Wartime (London: Fortune Press, 1944), p. 77, and also in the 1945 Fortune Press edition of The North Ship (not noted by Burnett). The 1966 reissue of The North Ship has the more correct but less tremulous plural ‘seraphim’.

  21. Letter from Bruce Montgomery to Larkin, 20 October 1944. Bodleian MS Eng. C.2762.

  22. The North Ship, p. 8.

  23. Ibid.

  24. Ibid., p. 9.

  25. R. J. C. Watt, ‘“Scragged by embryo-Leavises”: Larkin reading his poems’, Critical Survey 1.2 (1989), pp. 172–5, at p. 175.

  26. ‘Ephemera’, l. 12: W. B. Yeats, Selected Poetry, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (London: Macmillan, 1962), p. 4.

  27. Ibid., p. 10.

  28. See Don Lee, ‘Coventry Godiva Festival Weekend: 4–6 May 1999’, AL 8 (October 1999), p. 19.

  29. Postcard to his parents, 29 October 1946.

  30. To Alan Pringle, 23 August 1946. SL, p. 123.