Philip Larkin

by James Booth

  5: The Novels (1943–5)

  1. John Banville, review of Complete Poems, Guardian, 25 January 2012.

  2. Interview with Paris Review, RW, p. 63.

  3. To Sutton, 10 August 1943. SL, pp. 61–2.

  4. RW, p. 63.

  5. Jill, Introduction, p. 13.

  6. To Sutton, 28 December 1940. Not in SL.

  7. Jill, p. 97.

  8. To Sutton, 30 September 1943. Not in SL.

  9. To Sutton, 16 August 1943. Not in SL.

  10. To Sutton, 29 December 1943. Not in SL.

  11. Jill, pp. 131–2.

  12. Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, trans. R. and E. Powys Mathers (London: Folio Society, 1948), p. 87.

  13. Jill, p. 149.

  14. Ibid., p. 152.

  15. Ibid., p. 186.

  16. Ibid., p. 188.

  17. Ibid., p. 211.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Ibid., p. 212.

  20. Ibid., p. 215.

  21. Ibid., p. 218.

  22. Ibid.

  23. Ibid., p. 219.

  24. Ibid., p. 124.

  25. Ibid., p. 230.

  26. Larkin must have in mind Earlsdon Library in Coventry, rather than the small, one-man library in Wellington.

  27. DPL/4/4, 1.

  28. To Sutton, 10 December 1944. Not in SL.

  29. To Sutton, 14 September 1944. Not in SL.

  30. To Sutton, 10 December 1944.

  31. AGW, p. 27.

  32. Ibid., p. 44.

  33. Ibid., p. 48.

  34. Ibid., p. 69.

  35. Ibid., p. 142.

  36. DPL/4/4, inside cover opposite p. 1; DPL/4/4, p. 4.

  37. DPL/4/4, inside cover opposite p. 1.

  38. To Amis, 30 June 1981. See LKA, p. 925n.

  39. See Birte Wiemann, ‘Larkin’s Englishness: A German Perspective’, AL 29 (April 2010), pp. 25–6.

  40. AGW, pp. 87–8.

  41. Ibid., p. 113.

  42. Ibid., p. 130.

  43. Ibid., p. 69; Carol Rumens, ‘“I don’t understand cream cakes, but I eat them”: Distance and difference in A Girl in Winter’, AL 29 (April 2010), pp. 7–12, at pp. 8–9.

  44. AGW, pp. 158­–9, 166–9.

  45. To Amis, 13 September 1945. Not in SL.

  46. TWG, p. 474.

  47. Thomas Hardy, 'In Tenebris II', l. 14.

  48. Motion suggests that the name is based on Astley-Jones, Chief Clerk of Wellington UDC, who had misspelled Larkin’s name (‘Larking’) in the letter offering him the Wellington post. Motion, p. 159.

  49. AGW, p. 210.

  50. Ibid., p. 243.

  51. Ibid., p. 248.

  52. To Barbara Pym, 18 November 1961. SL, p. 334.

  6: The Grip of Light (1945–8)

  1. SL, p. 104.

  2. Ibid., pp. 104–5.

  3. From Ruth Bowman to Larkin, 12 April 1947. Motion, p. 170.

  4. To Sutton, 9 March 1945. Not in SL.

  5. From Ruth Bowman to Larkin, 27 October 1945. Motion, p. 135.

  6. Ruth Siverns (née Bowman), personal communication, 2 April 1999. Philip preserved Ruth’s letters to him, and directed that they be returned to her after his death.

  7. Motion, p. 122.

  8. The first completed draft in the new workbook was of ‘If grief could burn out’, dated 5 October 1944. DPL/1/1/3.

  9. All except pp. 2–10 (which seem to be lost) are preserved in the University of Hull collection in the History Centre, Hull, DPL/2/1/14 and DPL/1/2/50. See Trevor Tolley, ‘Lost Pages’, AL 11 (April 2001), pp. 24–7.

  10. The title is from a typescript in the Bodleian. In the workbook it was titled ‘For my Father’. See Complete Poems, p. 577. The workbook page on which it is written was one of those later torn out.

  11. ‘Plymouth’ and ‘Portrait’ were published in Mandrake, May 1946. In the typescript of In the Grip of Light, ‘Portrait’ was retitled ‘The quiet one’. Complete Poems, p. 486.

  12. Jean Hartley recalled Larkin’s disconcerting lack of inhibition about farting in company. At the age of nineteen he had written to Sutton: ‘I have just farted with the sound of an iron ruler twanging in a desk-lid and the smell of a west wind over a decaying patch of red cabbages.’ 31 December 1941, SL, p. 30.

  13. The house has been demolished. See David Gerard, ‘Wellington Walkabout’, AL 8 (October 1999), p. 30.

  14. ‘The Poetry of Hardy’, RW, p. 175.

  15. Ibid.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Philip Larkin, Early Poems and Juvenilia, ed. A. T. Tolley (London: Faber & Faber, 2005).

  18. Counting ‘Two Guitar Pieces’ and ‘Two Portraits of Sex’ as two poems each, and ‘Livings’ as three.

  19. Completed by 23 February 1946. The date given in the 1988 Collected Poems is incorrect. Complete Poems, p. 587.

  20. 1 April 1946. LKA, p. 54.

  21. 7 April 1946. SL, p. 116.

  22. 24 June and 15 July 1946. LKA, pp. 76 and 79.

  23. To Sutton, 28 July 1946. Not in SL.

  24. To Sutton, 26 June 1946. Not in SL.

  25. Postcard to his parents, 7 February 1945.

  26. Letter to his parents, 31 March 1946.

  27. To his parents, 24 June 1945.

  28. To his parents, 30 June 1946.

  29. To his parents, 7 July 1946.

  30. While awaiting Jill’s visit, John Kemp imagines that he knows ‘for one curious transient second [. . .] how a bride feels on the morning of her wedding’. Jill, p. 185.

  31. Burnett (Complete Poems, p. 358) claims that it is almost certainly this poem to which Larkin was referring in his 1973 comment that he had written his first ‘good poem’ when he was twenty-six. However, the poet had only just turned twenty-four in September 1946. Larkin may perhaps have meant ‘An April Sunday brings the snow’, written a few months before his twenty-sixth birthday, or ‘At Grass’, written when he was twenty-seven.

  32. Motion, p. 153.

  33. The Poems of Andrew Marvell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), p. 53.

  34. DPL/2/3/63.

  35. ‘The Poetry of Hardy’, RW, p. 176.

  36. ‘Larkin’s Dream Diary 1942–3, Part 2’, ed. Don Lee, AL 28 (October 2009), p. 12.

  37. Only a single detached page of this second dream diary survives, loosely inserted into the second workbook (DPL/1/2/51). It is misdated 1942 in the catalogue on the assumption that it is part of the earlier dream diary. But the reference to Gillian Evans dates it to 1946. See James Booth, ‘Larkin’s Second Dream Diary’, AL 32 (October 2011), pp. 6–7.

  38. DPL/1/2/51.

  39. 26 February 1947. SL, p. 135.

  40. DPL/1/2/51.

  41. 2 December 1946. LKA, p. 103.

  42. 26 March 1947. LKA, p. 124.

  43. From Kingsley Amis, 5 May 1947. Passage not in LKA.

  44. 26 February 1947. SL, p. 136.

  45. Anthony Thwaite, personal communication, 7 June 2013. Not in Complete Poems.

  46. Motion, p. 119.

  47. 15 March 1947. LKA, p. 117.

  48. 21 December 1946. LM, p. 3.

  49. Motion, p. 170.

  50. Postcard to Sydney Larkin, addressed to ‘Ward 2, Warwick Hospital’, 24 February 1948. ‘Nottingham have taken up my references.’

  51. 14 January 1948. SL, p. 143.

  52. 28 January 1948. SL, p. 144.

  53. ‘Going’, ‘Deep Analysis’, ‘Come then to prayers’, ‘And the wave sings because it is moving’, ‘Two Guitar Pieces’, ‘The Dedicated’, ‘Wedding-Wind’, ‘Träumerei’, ‘To a Very Slow Air’, ‘At the chiming of light upon sleep’, ‘Many famous feet have trod’, ‘Thaw’.

  7: Just Too Hard for Me (1945–50)

  1. A Conversation with Neil Powell, FR, p. 32.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Interview with the Observer, RW, p. 49.

  4. 20 September 1945. SL, pp. 109–10.

  5. To Sutton, 5 March 1942. Not in SL.

  6. W. H. Auden, The Engl
ish Auden, ed. Edward Mandelson (London: Faber & Faber, 1977), p. 238.

  7. A Conversation with Ian Hamilton, FR, p. 24.

  8. Ibid.

  9. 12 October 1943. SL, p. 75.

  10. Richard Bradford, The Odd Couple: The Curious Friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin (London: Robson Press, 2012), pp. 91–2.

  11. TWG, pp. 279–80.

  12. See ibid., pp. xxxiii–xxxv.

  13. Ibid., p. 313.

  14. Bradford, The Odd Couple, pp. 91–2.

  15. TWG, p. 324n.

  16. Ibid., p. 324.

  17. Personal communication, Ruth Siverns (née Bowman), 2 April 1999.

  18. TWG, p. 356.

  19. Interview with the Observer, RW, p. 49.

  20. A Conversation with Ian Hamilton, FR, p. 24.

  21. Pamela Hanley, personal communication, 18 October 2000. For reminiscences of Monica in Leicester see AL 12 (October 2001), pp. 14–20. For a sample of Monica’s essay-marking style see James Booth, Philip Larkin: Writer (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 26–7.

  22. TWG, p. 371.

  23. None of Larkin’s contemporaries at Leicester is able to identify a model for Mrs Klein. There was a refugee from Germany at the University College, but she was nothing like Larkin’s character. Monica Jones commented: ‘There may have been someone Philip knew, but I didn’t.’ James Booth, ‘Glimpses’ (interview with Monica Jones), AL 12 (October 2001), p. 22.

  24. TWG, pp. 371–2.

  25. Ibid., p. 370.

  26. Ibid., p. 463.

  27. Ibid., pp. 450, 463.

  28. 8 September 1948. LKA, p. 186.

  29. LKA, p. 209.

  30. The name is, appropriately, that of the minor society poet Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802–39).

  31. TWG, pp. 422–42.

  32. Monica Jones, personal communication, 26 January 1999.

  33. ‘An Interview with John Haffenden’, FR, p. 49.

  8: Crisis and Escape (1947–50)

  1. 6 December 1947. LKA, p. 145.

  2. Motion (p. 180) misdates the marriage in August.

  3. Letter to his parents, 27 May 1947.

  4. SL, p. 143.

  5. Ibid., p. 144.

  6. Ibid., pp. 144–5.

  7. LM, p. 5.

  8. The last of these plum trees succumbed in 2012. See also David Gerard and Graham Landon, ‘Plum, in the Middle: The Sixth Annual Birthday Walk’, AL 14 (October 2002), pp. 20–4.

  9. Radio Times, 16 August 1973, p. 11. Burnett (Complete Poems, p. 358) believes this poem was ‘Wedding-Wind’, but Larkin was only twenty-four when he wrote that poem.

  10. DPL/1/1/72.

  11. DPL/2/1/1/14. A.T. Tolley, ‘Lost Pages’, AL 11 (April 2001), p. 26. Burnett includes the lines in Complete Poems ‘on the chance that they may constitute a complete poem’ (p. 592).

  12. 18 May 1948. SL, p. 147.

  13. 11 August 1948. SL, p. 148.

  14. When Trevor Tolley asked him about the torn-out pages in the early 1980s Larkin replied with evasive casualness: ‘Some missing pages contained material I did not wish to make public, and probably still have somewhere; others were torn out simply when I wanted a sheet of blank paper, for any reason.’ Tolley, ‘Lost Pages’, p. 26.

  15. He even kept one half-page which is quite blank. Ibid.

  16. Burnett corrects ‘blocks’ in Thwaite’s Collected Poems of 1988.

  17. Burnett (Complete Poems, p. 593) does not mention the original title. See Tolley, ‘Lost Pages’, p. 24.

  18. Burnett mentions only the typescript and follows the 1988 Collected Poems in dating the poem ‘?1950’.

  19. Burnett restores the parentheses omitted by Thwaite in the Collected Poems.

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

  21. SL, p. 152.

  22. LKA, pp. 204–5.

  23. 13 July 1949. SL, p. 153.

  24. To Sutton, 3 October 1949. Not in SL.

  25. SL, p. 156.

  26. To Sutton, 26 January 1950. SL, p. 158.

  27. To Sutton, 4 May 1950. SL, p. 161.

  28. The workbook shows that in the final version Larkin excluded some explicit moralizing over the exploitation of the horses in the interests of human greed: ‘They lived in terms of men, hedged in / By bet and bid’; ‘money rode them, led them in’. DPL/1/1/82. See also Philip Larkin, ‘Worksheets of “At Grass”’, Phoenix 11/12 (1973/4), pp. 93–8.

  29. He made further adjustments to the second stanza in November 1950 (DPL/1/2/24) and before its publication in XX Poems. Complete Poems, p. 381.

  30. Hartley, p. 76.

  31. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor IV (1862; London: Frank Cass, 1967), p. 240.

  32. Janice Rossen, Philip Larkin: His Life’s Work (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), p. 89; Joseph Bristow, ‘The Obscenity of Philip Larkin’, Critical Inquiry 21 (Autumn 1994), pp. 176–7. See also James Booth, Philip Larkin: Writer (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 108–12.

  33. Richard Bradford, The Odd Couple: The Curious Friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin (London: Robson Press, 2012), p. 87.

  34. DPL/3/1/3.

  35. DPL/1/2/1.

  36. DPL/1/2/6.

  37. See for instance the photograph in AL 12 (October 2001), p. 17.

  38. A deleted draft passage is even more metaphorically tangled:

  And the vertiginous wedge, would, would stick in her throat

  Like a half-chewed bandage, till she fell on her knees,

  An endless recession of motives patterning the light [. . .] (DPL/1/2/9)

  39. Larkin considered ‘unprintable’, but took Amis’s advice that this ‘would just mean cunt, whereas unpriceable probably meant cunt but could mean all sorts of other things too’. ‘An Interview with John Haffenden’, FR, p. 55.

  40. James Booth, ‘Glimpses’ (interview with Monica Jones), AL 12 (October 2001), p. 22.

  41. SL, p. 165.

  42. To Sutton, 18 June 1950. Not in SL.

  43. To Sutton, 3 July 1950. Not in SL. My impression of Larkin’s correspondence differs from Motion’s: ‘Larkin seldom hesitated to complain about whatever was bothering him to anyone who would listen.’ Motion, p. 182.

  44. To Sutton, 26 July 1950. Not in SL.

  45. SL, p. 166.

  46. To Sutton, 26 January 1950. SL, p. 157.

  47. LKA, pp. 228–9.

  48. TWG, p. 473.

  49. Ibid., p. 476.

  50. Ibid., p. 479.

  51. Ibid., p. 482.

  52. DPL/1/2/20. It is omitted as incomplete from the Collected Poems and the Complete Poems. Motion gives an edited version (pp. 196–7). Motion (p. 195) gives the date of Larkin’s departure, incorrectly, as 16 September.

  9: The Best Writing Conditions (1950–2)

  1. Michael Innes was the pen-name of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart (1906–94), Scottish academic and author of crime fiction.

  2. LM, pp. 9–10.

  3. Ibid., p. 10.

  4. Misdated 25 November in LM. Larkin writes on the first page ‘Tuesday 28th Nov.’ In 1950 25 November fell on Saturday.

  5. LM, p. 23. The cartoon and dialogue are omitted in LM.

  6. Not in LM.

  7. LM, p. 42.

  8. 23 May 1951. LM, p. 38.

  9. 15 September 1951. LM, p. 58.

  10. James Booth, ‘Glimpses’ (interview with Monica Jones), AL 12 (October 2001), pp. 21–6, at p. 21.

  11. 21 November 1950. LM, p. 21n.

  12. LM, pp. 45–6 and n.

  13. Winifred Dawson (née Arnott), personal communication, 21 November 2011.

  14. Motion, p. 202. Motion relates this comment to Larkin’s reading of H. E. Berthon’s Nine French Poets 1820–1880 (London: Macmillan, 1930, with later reprints). But Laforgue (whose first volume was published in 1885) is not included in the volume.

  15. Interview with Paris Review, RW, p. 58.

  16. LM, p. 35. LM omits �
�or the implied-conceit kind (Moments of Vision)’.

  17. Ibid.

  18. To Monica Jones, 14 February 1951. Not in LM.

  19. Larkin to Barry Bloomfield, 1977. Motion, p. 215.

  20. ‘Going’, ‘Wedding-Wind’, ‘At Grass’, ‘Deceptions’, ‘Coming’, ‘Dry-Point’, ‘Spring’, ‘If, My Darling’, ‘Wants’, ‘No Road’, ‘Wires’, ‘Next, Please’, ‘Latest Face’.

  21. Unpublished interview, South Bank Show, 16 April 1981. Motion, p. 216.

  22. LM, p. 55.

  23. Unpublished interview, South Bank Show. Motion, p. 215.

  24. 26 November 1951. LM, p. 25.

  25. Ibid.

  26. DPL/1/2/28.

  27. DPL/1/2/29. Not in Complete Poems.

  28. ‘Tes mollets farauds, / Ton buste tentant, / – Gai, comme impudent, / Ton cul ferme et gros, // Nous boutent au sang / Un feu bête et doux / Qui nous rend tout fous, / Croupe, rein et flanc.’

  29. He did not recognize Verlaine’s demotic form ‘gas’ for ‘gars’ (‘lads’). It is excluded as incomplete from the Collected Poems and the Complete Poems. For a facsimile of the workbook page and a transcription of the poem see AL 36 (October 2013), pp. 4–5.

  30. DPL/1/2/30.

  31. DPL/1/2/34.

  32. ‘Poet’s Choice’, FR, p. 17.

  33. Graham Chesters, ‘Tireless Play: Speculations on Larkin’s “Absences”’, in Richard Bales (ed.), Challenges of Translation in French Literature: Studies and Poems in Honour of Peter Broome (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 47–60.

  34. ‘Poet’s Choice’, FR, p. 17.

  35. The word occurs a third time in ‘Unfinished Poem’ (October 1953), in which the poet hides away from Death in a squalid ‘emaciate attic’. It seems likely that Larkin held back this poem from publication to avoid diluting the effect of the word. The odd form ‘attic’d’ appears as a self-parodic joke in the late light-verse exercise, ‘Good for you, Gavin’, written in 1981.

  36. 13 January 1951. Passage not in LM.

  37. 6 October 1951. LM, p. 63.

  38. One draft has the title ‘Tenth Days’. The final title was added in The Less Deceived. Complete Poems, p. 362.

  39. Winifred Dawson (née Arnott), interview with the author, 21 October 2003.

  40. Motion, p. 209.

  41. Ibid., p. 212.

  42. Ibid., p. 213.

  43. Winifred Dawson (née Arnott), personal communication, 14 February 2011.

  44. To Monica Jones, 13 July 1951. Not in SL.

  45. The march took place on Sunday 20 May 1951 (LM, 41), and Larkin all but completed the poem by 25 May or shortly afterwards. Complete Poems, p. 602.