by James Booth
25. In New Humanist, 86.8 (August 1971), p. 253.
26. SL, p. 437.
27. Complete Poems, p. 463. Motion writes (p. 373) that Larkin began the poem on ‘the same evening that he wrote Annus Mirabilis’ (16 June 1967). But there is no sign of this in the workbook. DPL/1/7/21. (Burnett p. 38) prints the poem without indents.
28. DPL/1/7/42.
29. 1 August 1971. LM, p. 423.
30. 26 June 1971. SL, p. 440.
31. This was a short-term arrangement, while Philip and Kitty were both on holiday, not as Motion implies, a semi-permanent move (p. 414).
32. See Marion Lomax, ‘Larkin with Women’, in Michael Baron (ed.), Larkin with Poetry: English Association Conference Papers (Leicester: English Association, 1997), pp. 39–40.
33. Introduction to Adventures with the Irish Brigade, FR, p. 119.
34. To Colin Gunner, 26 October 1971. SL, p. 449.
35. SL, p. 487.
36. Ibid., p. 450.
37. 14 November, 1971.
38. SL, p. 453.
39. 13 July 1959. SL, p. 305.
40. Burnett (Complete Poems, p. 448) points out Motion’s mistake in connecting this incident with the first line of ‘Livings I’ rather than ‘Livings III’. Motion, p. 415.
41. 31 May 1972. SL, p. 459.
42. SL, p. 452.
43. Letter to Robert Jackson. DPL/2/2/10. Motion, p. 418.
20: Winter Coming (1972–4)
1. Motion, p. 419.
2. DPL/1/8/2.
3. Compare ‘his hand, holding her hand’ in ‘An Arundel Tomb’.
4. Burnett (Complete Poems, p. 458), citing R. J. C. Watt, misidentifies the hospital as Kingston General, a Victorian building, now demolished, which bore no resemblance to a clean-sliced cliff.
5. The singular noun ‘human’ never occurs in Larkin’s poetry. The plural occurs again only in the light verse ‘Dear CHARLES, My Muse, asleep or dead’. ‘Human’ occurs as an adjective only in the juvenile ‘After Dinner Remarks’, and then, substantively, in ‘Sympathy in White Major’. ‘Humanity’ occurs only once, in relation to the Polish airgirl in ‘Like the train’s beat’. R. J. C. Watt (ed.), A Concordance to the Poetry of Philip Larkin (Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann, 1995), pp. 223–4.
6. There is an echo of Shelley’s ‘O world! O life! O time!’ in ‘A Lament’. The Poems of Shelley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 643.
7. James Booth, Philip Larkin: The Poet’s Plight (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 169.
8. 22 March 1972. SL, p. 454.
9. To Conquest, 31 May 1972. SL, p. 458.
10. Brennan, pp. 86–7.
11. 13 June 1972. SL, pp. 459–60.
12. There may be a wry echo of ‘That lone lane does not exist’ in Hardy’s ‘Beyond the Last Lamp’.
13. Anthony Thwaite, personal communication, 22 April 2011. He also sent a handwritten copy to Anthony’s wife Ann, for inclusion in a book of manuscript poems she was assembling at the time, offering to rewrite it if he had gone too close to the left-hand edge of the paper.
14. Motion, p. 424. Not in Complete Poems.
15. 25 November 1972. SL, pp. 465–6.
16. 29 November 1972. SL, p. 466. Bloomfield’s Philip Larkin: A Bibliography 1933–1976 was published by Faber in 1979.
17. SL, p. 467.
18. 18 January 1973. SL, p. 471.
19. 10 February. SL, p. 473.
20. Georges Bataille, Death and Sexuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo (New York: Ballantine Books, 1969), p. 12.
21. 15 January 1973. SL, p. 470.
22. SL, p. 483.
23. Motion, p. 430.
24. Interview with Paris Review, RW, p. 62.
25. The Poetical Works of Wordsworth (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 206.
26. ‘Adagia’, in Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous, ed. Samuel French Morse (London: Faber & Faber, 1959), p. 165. Larkin follows Stevens rather than Robert Graves, who expresses the more conventional view: ‘If there’s no money in poetry neither is there poetry in money.’ Robert Graves, Mammon and the Black Goddess (London: Cassell, 1965), p. 3.
27. 16 January 1971. SL, p. 435.
28. Barbara Everett, ‘After Symbolism’, first published in Essays in Criticism in 1980; reprinted in Barbara Everett, Poets in their Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 230–44.
29. Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin (London: Methuen, 1982).
30. 17 October 1981. SL, p. 658.
31. SL, pp. 476–7.
32. The first two tutorial groups I taught on my arrival in the English Department in 1968 consisted of a single student and three students. By the mid-seventies tutorial sizes were up to seven and later increased to sixteen.
33. Motion, p. 391.
34. To Judy Egerton, 11 January 1974. SL, p. 498.
35. The tally was to rise to twenty-six with the addition of ‘Show Saturday’.
36. Motion, p. 435.
37. 4 October 1973. SL, p. 489.
38. Motion, p. 438.
39. SL, pp. 494–5.
40. Motion, pp. 437–8.
41. Motion, p. 437; Neil Corcoran, English Poetry Since 1940 (Harlow: Longman, 1993), p. 93; Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue (London: Faber, 1988), pp. 19–20.
42. SL, p. 497.
43. Ibid., p. 496.
44. The present owner, Miriam Porter, has transformed and improved the house out of all recognition, and installed a blue plaque recording Larkin’s ownership. See ‘Newland Park Garden Party’, AL 20 (October 2005), pp. 54–7.
45. DPL/2/3/39.
46. Britten lived nearly three years longer and resumed composition. When he died at the end of 1976 he was composing a work for voices and orchestra, ‘Praise We Great Men’, to words by Edith Sitwell.
47. SL, p. 502.
48. Ibid., p. 503.
49. DPL/1/8/18, pp. 55–64. Motion (p. 442) writes that he started ‘Aubade’ ‘on 11 March’. But there is no evidence for this. See Complete Poems, pp. 494–5.
50. In the then unpublished ‘Long roots moor summer to this side of earth’ (1954), ‘unresting’ had appeared in the gorgeous phrase ‘River-castles of unresting leaf’. Otherwise both words appear in Larkin’s poetry only in ‘The Trees’ and ‘Aubade’. R.J.C. Watt, Concordance, pp. 6–7, p. 521. Some readers may hear an echo of ‘the wind’s incomplete unrest’ in ‘Talking in Bed’.
51. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, l. p. 298.
52. Motion, pp. 443–5.
21: The End of the Party (1974–6)
1. Letter to Sutton, 26 July 1950. Not in SL.
2. To Thwaite, 11 July 1974. SL, pp. 511–12.
3. Judy Egerton, interview with the author, 17 December 2010.
4. 5 June 1974. SL, p. 509.
5. Motion, p. 448.
6. Motion, p. 443.
7. SL, p. 512.
8. Ibid., p. 704.
9. See Terry Kelly, ‘The Black Album: Review of Philip Larkin: Poems’, AL 32 (October 2011), pp. 33–4.
10. To Barry Bloomfield, 4 December 1974. SL, p. 515.
11. Brennan, p. 89.
12. Ibid., p. 141.
13. R. J. C. Watt, ‘“Scragged by embryo Leavises”: Larkin reading his poems’, Critical Survey 1.2 (1989), pp. 172–5.
14. Motion, p. 449.
15. Ibid., p. 446.
16. Ibid., p. 447.
17. Ibid.
18. Brennan, p. 51.
19. Ibid., p. 219.
20. 2 June 1975. SL, p. 525.
21. 15 June 1975. SL, p. 526.
22. See James Booth, Philip Larkin: The Poet’s Plight (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), Appendix, pp. 202–3. This book is now in Emory University Library, Atlanta, Georgia.
23. Motion, p. 487.
24. Ibid.
25. Burnett hears an echo of Kingsley Amis’s poem ‘Masters’, from A Case of Samples (1946), pp. 22–3: ‘For it is by surrender that we
live, / And we are taken if we wish to give.’ Complete Poems, p. 506.
26. Brennan, pp. 67–8.
27. Written originally to German lyrics by Friedrich Hollaender and sung by Dietrich in the film The Blue Angel (1930). The English lyrics were by Sammy Lerner: ‘Falling in love again. / Never wanted to. / What am I to do? / Can’t help it.’
28. Motion, p. 319.
29. 25 November 1975. DPL/1/8/22, at p. 73.
30. TWG, p. 497.
31. Ibid., p. xixn.
32. Larkin’s verbal memory was hypersensitive. In a letter to Monteith of 16 April 1974 he asked for the word ‘with’ to be reinstated in the paperback reprint of A Girl in Winter, in a sentence ending ‘you would have to deal with.’ The word was, he writes, ‘cut out by your super-efficient editors in 1946’. He had however intended it as ‘a deliberate grammatical mistake [. . .] to show the muddle-headedness of the speaker’; ‘it has irked me for over a quarter of a century’. SL, pp. 503–4.
33. Brennan, p. 221.
34. Motion, p. 451.
35. Mary Judd (née Wrench), interview with the author, 28 June 2011.
36. Betty Mackereth, interview with the author, 20 June 2011.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., 4 August 2003.
39. Philip Larkin: The Third Woman, BBC4 television feature, 7 December 2010.
40. Betty Mackereth, interview with the author, 20 June 2011.
41. Ibid.
42. Motion, p. 282.
43. Betty Mackereth, interview with the author, 4 August 2003.
44. Betty Mackereth, interview with the author, 20 June 2011.
45. See R. J. C. Watt, A Concordance to the Poetry of Philip Larkin (Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann, 1995).
46. I am grateful to Suzanne Uniacke for this observation.
47. Motion, p. 453.
48. Kate Greenaway Valentine’s Day card, dated 30 December 1975.
49. The noun ‘singularity’ occurs in ‘Marriages’ (1951).
50. A typescript inserted into Workbook 8 is dated ‘1/2/76’. Complete Poems, p. 651.
51. ‘The Booker Prize 1977’, RW, p. 95.
52. Larkin may have recalled the ending of Hardy’s ‘Beyond the Last Lamp’: ‘they seem brooding on their pain, / And will, while such a lane remain’. Thomas Hardy, Complete Poems (London: Macmillan 1976), p. 315.
53. The surviving drafts, dated between 7 and 21 February, are in the Collins manuscript book, now at Emory University, and the text as he sent it to Betty is in holograph. It is possible that Larkin never made a typescript.
54. To Conquest, 9 December 1961. SL, p. 335.
55. Larkin uses the word ‘dirty’ three times in his mature poems, each time with a different idiomatic nuance. In ‘Success Story’ (1954) the speaker celebrates having dodged the metaphorical ‘dirty feeding’ of domestic compromise. In ‘A Study of Reading Habits’ (1960) the word appears in a demotic cliché, as the speaker fights ‘dirty dogs’. In contrast, in ‘We met at the end of the party’ the word has a simple physical application.
56. Betty Mackereth, interview with the author, 4 August 2003.
22: Death-Throes of a Talent (1976–9)
1. Motion, p. 457. Toepfer had indeed had Nazi connections, but the Foundation denied them.
2. ‘Subsidising Poetry’, RW, p. 90.
3. 26 April 1976. SL, p. 539.
4. To Eva Larkin, 30 May 1976.
5. To Conquest, 26 May 1976. SL, p. 541.
6. SL, p. 546.
7. 21 September 1976. SL, pp. 546–7.
8. Motion, pp. 460 and 221.
9. 17 October 1968. SL, p. 406.
10. Hazel Holt, A Lot to Ask: A Life of Barbara Pym (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 247.
11. SL, pp. 547–8.
12. 28 November 1976. SL, p. 552.
13. Times Literary Supplement, 21 January 1977, p. 66.
14. Motion, p. 464.
15. 24 October 1977. SL, p. 571.
16. Motion, p. 466.
17. Martin Amis, Introduction to Philip Larkin: Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 2011), p. xxi.
18. ‘So death . . . is nothing to us, since so long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist. It does not then concern either the living or the dead.’ Epicurus, The Extant Remains, trans. Cyril Bailey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), p. 85.
19. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 23.
20. Letter to Barbara Pym, 14 December 1977. SL, p. 574.
21. Ibid.
22. Auden, ‘As I walked out one evening’, in The English Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber & Faber, 1977), p. 228.
23. We may also recall that ‘clothes make the man’. Mark Twain, More Maxims of Mark, ed. Merle Johnson (privately printed, 1927).
24. ‘Senecas Troas Act 2d Chor’, in The Poems of John Wilmot Earl of Rochester, ed. Keith Walker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), p. 51.
25. He commented to one correspondent: ‘I can see the justice of your objection to the last line, and yet I do not know how else to say what I mean, namely that postmen, by going from house to house and bringing welcome distraction in the shape of letters, cure those awful waking thoughts as if they were a kind of doctor.’ To B. Z. Paulshock, 16 August 1978. DPL(2)/2/15/51.
26. Motion, p. 466.
27. In ‘The Winter Palace’ (1978), ‘The Mower’ (1979), the concluding lines of ‘Love Again’ (1979, begun in 1975), ‘1982’ (1982) and ‘Party Politics’ (1984).
28. DPL(2)/2/15/85.
29. SL, pp. 580–1.
30. Ibid., p. 581.
31. Hughes’s lines assert a right-wing organicist concept of nationhood:
A Nation’s a Soul;
A Soul is a Wheel
With a Crown for a Hub
To keep it whole.
Ted Hughes, Collected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 2003), p. 381. For a discussion of the poems see Neil Roberts, ‘Hughes, the Laureateship and National Identity’, Q/W/E/R/T/Y 9 (October 1999), pp. 203–9.
32. Motion, p. 471.
33. Brennan, pp. 88–9.
34. Motion, p. 472.
35. SL, p. 577.
36. ‘The Changing Face of Andrew Marvell’, RW, pp. 245–53.
37. DPL(2)/2/14/44.
38. Motion, p. 469.
39. SL, p. 589.
40. DPL/1/8/50. See Burnett, Complete Poems, p. xix. For a facsimile of the typescript see AL 33 (April 2012), cover.
41. Between pp. 96 and 97 of M. V. Hughes, A London Girl of the 1880s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).
42. The card is reproduced in AL 30 (October 2010), p. 4.
43. SL, p. 601.
44. Betty Mackereth, interview with the author, 20 June 2011.
45. DPL/1/8/32 and DPL/1/8/47.
46. In ‘Larkin as Animal Poet’ (AL 22, October 2006, pp. 5–9) I suggested that the hedgehog might have been diseased or already dead, since it was out on the lawn in the daytime. However, Larkin says that he mowed the lawn ‘last night’, and hedgehogs are active in the dusk. I am grateful to Peter James for pointing out my mistake.
47. http://www.amarc.org.uk/Newsletter02.pdf (accessed 14 December 2010).
48. Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, ed. Christopher Reid (London: Faber & Faber, 2007), p. 404.
49. 23 August 1979. SL, p. 603.
50. DPL/1/8/22.
51. DPL/1/8/26 and 1/8/28.
52. DPL/1/8/30.
53. For a facsimile and transcription see AL 34 (October 2012), pp. 5–9.
54. Interview with the Observer, RW, pp. 47–56.
23: Extinction (1980–5)
1. To Amis, 26 April 1980. SL, p. 619.
2. Ruth Siverns, Barlow Dale’s Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1981).
3. In her last years Ruth Siverns became friends with Winifred Dawson (née Arnott), who happened to live in nearby Winchester. She died on 31 December 2012. Obituaries appeared, by
myself (www.guardian.co.uk/books) and by Win Dawson, AL 35 (April 2013), pp. 5–6.
4. DPL/2/3/91.
5. ‘Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album’, ‘MCMXIV’, ‘Toads’, ‘The Explosion’, ‘A Study of Reading Habits’, ‘Home is so Sad’, ‘Within the dream you said’, ‘Afternoons’, ‘The Old Fools’, ‘For Sidney Bechet’, ‘So through that unripe day you bore your head’, ‘Next, Please’, ‘The Trees’, ‘Church Going’, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, ‘Days’, ‘Wires’, ‘An Arundel Tomb’, ‘Cut Grass’, ‘Vers de Société’, ‘I put my mouth’, ‘At Grass’, ‘Mr Bleaney’, ‘Coming’, ‘Toads Revisited’, ‘The Building’.
6. James Orwin, ‘Serious Earth: Philip Larkin’s American Tapes’, AL 25 (April 2008), pp. 20–4, at p. 22.
7. Ibid.
8. The recording was omitted from Bloomfield’s Bibliography. The readings were released commercially by Faber in 2009 under the title The Sunday Sessions: Philip Larkin Reading his Poetry. Orwin, ‘Serious Earth: Philip Larkin’s American Tapes’, p. 23.
9. Motion, p. 483.
10. SL, p. 624.
11. Motion, p. 482.
12. Ibid., p. 484.
13. SL, p. 632.
14. 13 January 1981. SL, p. 637.
15. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article4718715.ece (accessed 14 December 2010). Bragg gives a highly coloured account of a meeting at a restaurant at which Larkin became drunk, refused to leave and, according to Bragg, ‘had to be forcibly ejected by policemen with dogs’.
16. Motion, p. 489.
17. Ibid., p. 486.
18. SL, p. 662.
19. 23 February 1982. SL, p. 665.The reference is to Salman Rushdie.
20. Interview with Paris Review, RW, p. 65.
21. RW, pp. 62, 68.
22. Ibid., p. 60.
23. Ibid., pp. 69, 58.
24. Jane Thomas, Philip Larkin Society website: ‘Poem of the Month’, June 2011 (‘Love’): http://www.philiplarkin.com/histpom/proposer/thomas_j.htm (accessed 1 September 2012).
25. Motion, p. 497.
26. Douglas Dunn (ed.), A Rumoured City: New Poets from Hull (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1982), p. 9.
27. Hartley, p. 202.
28. Motion, p. 496.
29. Ibid., p. 492.
30. To Thwaite, 17 May 1982. SL, p. 671.
31. 6 June 1982. SL, p. 674.
32. To Virginia Peace. SL, p. 663. Whalen later wrote Philip Larkin and English Poetry (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990).
