Philip Larkin

by James Booth

  Lomax, Marion, ‘Larkin with Women’, in Michael Baron (ed.), Larkin with Poetry: English Association Conference Papers (Leicester: English Association, 1997), pp. 31–46.

  Longley, Edna, ‘Poète Maudit Manqué’, in George Hartley (ed.), Philip Larkin – A Tribute: 1922–1985 (London: Marvell Press, 1988), pp. 220–31.

  Lowe, N. F., ‘Bruce Montgomery and Philip Larkin: Evidence of a ruptured relationship’, About Larkin 6 (October 1998), pp. 11–12.

  Marshall, Oliver, ‘A Letter from Loughborough’, About Larkin 15 (April 2003), pp. 18–19.

  Morrison, Blake, The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s (London: Methuen, 1980).

  ——, ‘“Still Going On, All of It”: The Movement in the 1950s and the Movement Today’, in Zachary Leader (ed.), The Movement Reconsidered: Essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie, and their Contemporaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 16–33.

  Orwin, James, ‘Serious Earth: Philip Larkin’s American Tapes’, About Larkin 25 (April 2008), pp. 20–4.

  Osborne, John, ‘Larkin and the Visual Arts’, About Larkin 36 (October 2013), pp. 19–21.

  ——, Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence: A Case of Wrongful Conviction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

  Palmer, Richard, Such Deliberate Disguises: The Art of Philip Larkin (London and New York: Continuum, 2008).

  Parkinson, R. N., ‘To keep our metaphysics warm: A study of “Church Going” by Philip Larkin’, Critical Survey 5 (Winter 1971), pp. 224–33.

  Paulin, Tom, ‘She Did Not Change: Philip Larkin’, Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), pp. 233–51.

  Pelizzon, V. Penelope, ‘Native Carnival: Philip Larkin’s Puppet-Theatre of Ritual’, in James Booth (ed.), New Larkins for Old (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 213–23.

  Regan, Stephen (ed.), Philip Larkin: Contemporary Critical Essays (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997).

  Roberts, Neil, ‘Hughes, the Laureateship and National Identity’, Q/W/E/R/T/Y 9 (October 1999), pp. 203–9.

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

  ——, ‘Philip Larkin and Lucky Jim’, Journal of Modern Literature 22.1 (Fall 1998), pp. 147–64.

  ——, Philip Larkin: His Life’s Work (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989).

  Rumens, Carol, ‘“I don’t understand cream cakes, but I eat them”: Distance and difference in A Girl in Winter’, About Larkin 29 (April 2010), pp. 7–12.

  Thwaite, Anthony, ‘How It Seemed Then: An Autobiographical, Anecdotal Essay’, in Zachary Leader (ed.), The Movement Reconsidered: Essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie, and their Contemporaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 247–54.

  Tolley, Trevor, Larkin at Work: A Study of Larkin’s Mode of Composition as seen in his Workbooks (Hull: Hull University Press, 1997).

  ——, ‘Lost Pages’, About Larkin 11 (April 2001), pp. 24–7.

  ——, My Proper Ground: A Study of the Work of Philip Larkin and its Development (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991).

  —— and John White (eds), Larkin’s Jazz, Properbox 155 (four-CD set), in association with the Philip Larkin Society. www.propermusic.com.

  Tomlinson, Charles, ‘The Middlebrow Muse’, Essays in Criticism 7.2 (April 1957), pp. 208–17.

  Vize, Colin, ‘Larkin’s Refraction’, About Larkin 36 (April 2013), p. 23.

  Watson, J. R., ‘The Other Larkin’, Critical Quarterly 17.4 (Winter 1975), pp. 347–60.

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

  Woolf, Sheila, ‘A Hearty Laugh? Philip Larkin at King Henry VIII School, Coventry’, About Larkin 28 (October 2009), pp. 15–16.

  ‘Really, Philip could do no wrong in his father’s eyes. Or his mother’s. They worshipped him,’ Larkin’s elder sister Kitty recalled.

  On holiday in Germany, aged fourteen, in 1936: ‘frightening notices that you felt you should understand and couldn’t.’

  Rhöndorf bathing beach, 1934. Eva and Sydney Larkin flanked by a German mother and daughter. Presumably the photograph was taken by the father.

  At 73 Coten End, Warwick in the early 1940s. The jam which his father made from plums from this garden features in Larkin’s elegy ‘An April Sunday brings the snow’ (1948).

  Larkin’s closest school friend, the aspiring painter, James Sutton. They shared a Lawrentian idealism and a passion for jazz.

  Sketch in a letter to Kingsley Amis, 1942.

  Larkin and Kingsley Amis were inseparable from May 1941 until Amis was called up just over a year later. Amis insisted that his friend be ‘savagely uninterested’ in all the things he was ‘savagely uninterested in’.

  In his final year at Oxford (1942–3) Larkin became friends with Bruce Montgomery, who wrote crime fiction under the pseudonym ‘Edmund Crispin’. ‘Bruce’s irresponsibility and self-confidence were exactly what I needed at the time,’ Larkin later recalled.

  Penelope Scott Stokes (centre). Larkin’s sonnet ‘So through that unripe day’ was inspired by this ‘girl resembling an Eton boy’.

  ‘Dora is bullied’ and ‘At the top of her form’: illustrations from Niece of the Headmistress by Dorothy Vicary (1939), one of the girls’-school stories to which Larkin paid homage in his ‘Brunette Coleman’ writings.

  Philip proposed to Ruth Bowman in 1948. ‘The engagement, to me anyway, is to give myself a sincere chance of “opening out” towards someone I do love a lot in a rather strangled way, and to help her take her Finals.’ The engagement ended when Larkin left for Belfast in 1950.

  ‘Pop’ and ‘Mop’. Sydney Larkin O.B.E. and Eva Larkin, newly widowed, in 1949. In May 1947 Philip wrote: ‘How young you both are […] young in keen response to things […] It makes home a very nice place to come to.’

  ‘Beautiful handsome girl!’ Monica Jones was a Lecturer at Leicester University College when Larkin arrived in 1946. He took this photograph in the early 1950s in his top-floor flat in Elmwood Avenue, Belfast.

  Kingsley and Hilly Amis in 1948, the year of their marriage. Kingsley encouraged the flirtation between Hilly and Philip.

  Larkin was responsible for the Library Issue Desk at Queen’s University, Belfast (1950–55).

  Larkin’s more intimate letters are interspersed with doodles and sketches in which he depicts himself as a seal (from a childhood pun on ‘sealing’ a letter). His most elaborate drawings come in the early letters to Monica Jones, nicknamed ‘Rabbit’ or ‘Bun’.

  Winifred Arnott in Belfast in the early 1950s. Philip’s unconsummated courtship with Winifred inspired ‘Latest Face’ and ‘Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album’.

  Patsy Strang, 1953. Their affair, evoked in the poem ‘Whatever Happened?’, lasted from spring 1952 to summer 1953. Patsy had lived in Paris and was eager to fall in love with a poet.

  A draft page of ‘If, My Darling’, May 1950 (Workbook 2). Larkin’s feelings for Monica Jones make this one of his most dynamically reworked drafts.

  George and Jean Hartley printed Larkin’s poems ‘Spring’, ‘Dry-Point’ and ‘Toads’ in their magazine Listen (1954). In 1955 they founded the Marvell Press and published The Less Deceived.

  Maeve Brennan was a Library Assistant when Larkin arrived in Hull in 1955. She recalled: ‘On Monday mornings he would ask: “Well, any more engagements this weekend; or better still, any disengagements?”’

  Larkin’s first University of Hull library staff portrait, 1957, taken by delayed-action shutter release. Front row: Maeve Brennan, Arthur Wood (Arnold in ‘Self ’s the Man’), Larkin, John Farrell, Mary Wrench. Back row, second from left: Larkin’s newly appointed secretary, Betty Mackereth; Middle row, second from left: Wendy Mann.

  Larkin met Judy Egerton in Belfast in 1951, and they corresponded regularly. She became Assistant Keeper of the British Collection at
the Tate Gallery from 1974.

  Anthony Powell, Hilly Amis, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin in London.

  Extract and drawings from a letter to Judy Egerton’s six-year old daughter, Bridget, 4 January 1956. Larkin has modified his handwriting to make it more legible.

  Pearson Park, Hull: the lake, and the poet at the Venetian window of no. 32. Philip Larkin moved into his top-floor flat in October 1956, and this self-portrait is dated 1958, the year he completed his poem ‘The Whitsun Weddings’.

  In 1957 Larkin shared a discreet intimacy with Library Assistant Mary Wrench (later Judd). She recalled his ‘innocent natural sense of fun’; ‘he called me and miaowed and when I turned round he had put on a cat mask’. Mary married in 1960 and Larkin and Betty Mackereth were godparents of her first child.

  Maeve Brennan, c.1960. Jean Hartley commented: ‘Whenever he spoke of Maeve or looked at her, it was with a sense of having won first prize.’

  Monica Jones in tights given to her by Eva Larkin. Philip wrote to his mother in January 1960: ‘Monica liked the striped tights, but they don’t fit exactly – the feet are too big, and the ankles too large.’

  The new University of Hull library under construction, October 1958. Larkin’s shadow here shows his flair for photography.

  ‘The Main Undergraduate Reading Room’, from the booklet commemorating the opening of the library.

  Larkin with the Queen Mother and the Vice-Chancellor, Sir Brynmor Jones, at the official opening of the new University of Hull library, 20 June 1960. This was the high point of Larkin’s career as a librarian.

  The view of the Humber estuary from the train inspired Larkin’s lines ‘Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet’ (‘The Whitsun Weddings’), and ‘the widening river’s slow presence, / The piled gold clouds, the shining gullmarked mud’ (‘Here’).

  Inside the poet’s head: X-ray, 19 July 1969. Larkin commissioned a number of X-rays during his various health scares.

  Spurn Point, with remains of wartime defences: the ‘beach / Of shapes and shingle’ in ‘Here’.

  The final page of ‘Here’ in Workbook 6. On the tenth page of drafting Larkin wrote out a near immaculate version of the first three stanzas. Continuing on to this eleventh page he was so sure of his corrections that he did not make a fair copy of the final stanza, leaving the remainder of the page blank. Before the poem was published he changed ‘unforced’ to ‘unfenced’.

  The solitary bachelor hesitating on the brink of conformity and marriage, in ‘The shame of evening trousers, evening tie’ (‘The Dance’, 1963–4).

  Larkin’s pornography. Left: a characteristic ‘nude study’ of the model Sophia Dawn by the founder of Kamera magazine, Harrison Marks. Right: a naughty schoolgirl photograph.

  Philip and Monica in the flat at 32 Pearson Park. Larkin used the imagery of his later poem ‘The Card-Players’ in looking forward to a visit from Monica in 1967: ‘We shall be two Hogspewers together’.

  The view from the Pearson Park flat remained unaltered from October 1956, when he moved in, until June 1974, when he left for Newland Park.

  ‘Veronica’, Larkin’s wicker rabbit, sat beside his chair during his interview with Betjeman in the BBC Monitor television feature of 1964.

  The cube of light which dominates ‘Stage 2’ of the Brynmor Jones Library, opened in 1969. Larkin wrote to his mother: ‘There are so many new members of staff that I feel like a stranger in my own building.’

  Librarian and Secretary: Betty and Philip in 1972. ‘I’d be lost without her.’

  Extract from a letter to Betty Mackereth, 18 January 1969. He describes a stop-over in Bawtry on his drive down from Hull and encloses documents for Betty to type. At the end he stipples a Texas library stamp, anticipating the time when his papers might be acquired by the Harry Ransom Center.

  Maeve Brennan, 1970. Maeve’s caption for this photograph in her memoir The Philip Larkin I Knew is ‘Shades of D. H. Lawrence’.

  Monica Jones on Jura or Mull, 1971. Philip and Monica’s holidays in the remoter parts of Scotland or on Sark became an annual routine.

  From a letter to Maeve Brennan, 19 October 1970, written from All Souls, Oxford, where Larkin was working on The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse. Maeve is ‘Miss Bianca Mouse’.

  Anthony Thwaite in 1972. Larkin chose the poet and former Literary Editor of the Listener, New Statesman and Encounter as his literary executor. At Anthony’s suggestion, he also recruited the young Andrew Motion.

  Eva Larkin in the garden of 21 York Road, Loughborough, 1970. Larkin returned regularly to mow this lawn until the house was finally sold after Eva’s death in 1977.

  Larkin wrote to his mother twice a week from the late 1940s to the 1970s. In this note of Thursday 28 January 1965 she appears as a seal in a mob-cap.

  Eva (left, 1970; right, 1972) moved into Berrystead Nursing Home in February 1972 and died there five years later. ‘Smiles are for youth. For old age come / Death’s terror and delirium.’ (‘Heads in the Women’s Ward’).

  During the 1960s and 1970s Monica and Philip frequently visited Bellingham Show, Northumberland. Larkin was intrigued by the wrestling of the Harrington Brothers: ‘long immobile strainings that end in unbalance’. (‘Show Saturday’, 1974).

  Self-portrait, 1974, the year in which Larkin moved to Newland Park, and began ‘Aubade’. The first draft began: ‘I work all day, and hit the jug at night’.

  Hedgehog in the garden of 105 Newland Park, March 1979. On 11 June Larkin killed a hedgehog while mowing his lawn, prompting him to write ‘The Mower’.

  With Betty Mackereth, 1981. In 1975 Larkin ‘seduced’ his secretary of eighteen years. His poems ‘Dear Jake’ and ‘We met at the end of the party’ were inspired by her. During the following years they would escape to the North York Moors around Kirkbymoorside

  The final page of ‘Love Again’ in Workbook 8. It is a sign of Larkin’s faltering inspiration that he returned to the page after nearly a year to complete the poem.

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks are due to Larkin’s literary executors, Sir Andrew Motion and Anthony Thwaite, for their ready cooperation and help. I am also grateful to Jeremy Crow at the Society of Authors, administrator of Larkin’s estate, for his unfailing assistance.

  Any biography of Larkin must acknowledge a huge debt to Andrew Motion’s Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (1993). Many times I have found myself strategizing how best to deploy some primary material, only to find that Motion has already anticipated what I was intending to say. There has, however, been an accumulation of documentation in the two decades since the publication of his biography. Also I have, where possible, returned to original sources, both human and written. My interpretation of Larkin’s character differs from Motion’s in some crucial respects.

  Though I was for seventeen years a colleague of Larkin in the University of Hull, our encounters were limited to formal contexts. He avoided the English Department, and never gave readings. However, since his death I have come to know several of those who were closest to him personally or professionally, and have interviewed others. I owe particular debts to Anthony and Ann Thwaite, the late Ruth Siverns (Bowman), the late Monica Jones, the late Judy Egerton, Winifred Dawson (Arnott), Mary Judd (Wrench), Professor Eddie Dawes, the late Jean Hartley, the late Maeve Brennan, the late Father Anthony Storey, Betty Mackereth, John White, Alan Marshall, Bridget Mason (Egerton) and Angela Leighton, all of whom have shared with me their insights into the Larkin they knew. Anthony and Ann Thwaite gave invaluable advice throughout, and Ruth Siverns, Judy Egerton, Winifred Dawson, Jean Hartley, Betty Mackereth, Rosemary Parry and John White read and commented on particular chapters.

  A great deal of the new material in this book has been gathered as a result of the activities of the Philip Larkin Society, founded in Hull in 1995. I am grateful for the scholarly work of all those who have attended the three Hull international conferences which took place under the Society’s aegis in 1997,
2002 and 2007, and others who have given lectures and talks to the Society, in particular Barbara Everett, John Carey, Archie Burnett, Janice Rossen, Judith Priestman, Edna Longley, Raphaël Ingelbien, István Rácz, Graham Chesters, John Osborne and Jim Orwin. The help of Ivor Maw and Philip Pullen, who are currently cataloguing the Larkin family letters in the University of Hull archive, has been invaluable.

  For twelve of the seventeen years since the Society’s foundation I have been editor or co-editor (with Janet Brennan) of the Society’s journal, About Larkin, which has published much new documentary information and contextual research. I owe an immense debt to the officers and members of the Society. Significant new biographical perspectives have been opened up by Susannah Tarbush, Geoff Weston and particularly Don Lee, who with his partner Gloria Gaffney has been indefatigable in tracking the geography and associations of Larkin’s early life. When, after the death of Monica Jones in 2001, the Society bought the non-literary effects left in 105 Newland Park, a team consisting of Eddie Dawes, the Society’s Chairman, Maeve Brennan, Carole Collinson and David Pattison helped to catalogue Larkin’s pictures, ornaments, cameras, spectacles, hearing aids, ties, etc., all still in place sixteen years after his death.