Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  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 Unpublished interview, South Bank Show, 16 April 1981.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 Unpublished interview, South Bank Show.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.

  46. Burnett uses as copy-text a typescript enclosed with a letter to Monica Jones of 15 October 1951. In the 1988 Collected Poems Thwaite reproduced an earlier typescript with different wording.

  47. Tom Paulin, ‘She Did Not Change: Philip Larkin’, Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), p. 236.

  48. Motion, p. 210.

  49. LM, pp. 48–9.

  50. To Eva Larkin, 15 July 1951.

  51. TWG, pp. 485–6.

  52. Ibid., p. 487.

  53. Ibid., p. 493.

  54. Ibid., p. 495.

  55. Ibid., pp. 496–7.

  56. LM, p. 58.

  57. Ibid.

  58. To Winifred Arnott, 22 October 1951. Motion, p. 218.

  59. To Eva Larkin (‘My dear Mop-Moust-Haugh’), 29 April 1951.

  60. DPL/1/2/49. James Sutton became a pharmacist, married and had two children. He died in 1997. See Maeve Brennan, ‘James Ballard Sutton 1921–1997’, AL 5 (April 1998), pp. 24–7.

  61. 14 October 1951. Not in SL.

  62. SL, pp. 179–80.

  10: Single in Belfast (1952–3)

  1. Motion, p. 217.

  2. Ibid., p. 211.

  3. LM, pp. 69–70.

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

  5. Motion, p. 221.

  6. George Gilpin, ‘Patricia Avis and Philip Larkin’, in James Booth (ed.), New Larkins for Old (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 66–78, at p. 68.

  7. SL, p. 183.

  8. Motion, p. 222.

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

  10. Gilpin, ‘Patricia Avis and Philip Larkin’, p. 70; SL, p. 184.

  11. Gilpin, ‘Patricia Avis and Philip Larkin’, pp. 70–1. Not in SL.

  12. Ibid., p. 71.

  13. LM, p. 86.

  14. Ibid., pp. 86–7.

  15. Ibid., p. 90.

  16. 12 November 1951. LM, p. 70.

  17. LM, p. 94.

  18. Winifred Dawson, ‘The Day I Met Monica’, AL 31 (April 2011), p. 6.

  19. Winifred Dawson (née Arnott), personal communication, 10 June 2011. In return she lent him the very feminine Ordinary Families by E. Arnot Robertson.

  20. To Eva Larkin (‘My dear old creature’), 18 January 1953.

  21. Winifred Dawson (née Arnott), interview with the author, 21 October 2003. Motion (p. 223) misdates the engagement to July 1952.

  22. Gilpin, ‘Patricia Avis and Philip Larkin’, p. 72.

  23. Motion, p. 220.

  24. For example 1 November 1951. LM, p. 68.

  25. Gilpin, ‘Patricia Avis and Philip Larkin’, p. 72. Patsy refers to the recasting of Dante’s Inferno by James Thomson, published in 1874.

  26. Gilpin, ‘Patricia Avis and Philip Larkin’, p. 74.

  27. TWG, p. 492.

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

  29. Gilpin, ‘Patricia Avis and Philip Larkin’, p. 75.

  30. Winifred Dawson (née Arnott), personal communication, 6 February 2011.

  31. Gilpin, ‘Patricia Avis and Philip Larkin’, p. 75.

  32. Ibid., p. 74.

  33. Motion, p. 230.

  34. Colin and Patsy divorced shortly afterwards.

  35. SL, p. 208.

  36. LM, p. 105.

  37. Ibid., pp. 104 and 105n.

  38. 7 August 1953. The passage and drawing are not in LM.

  39. RW, p. 52.

  40. Burnett notes this, but includes the work in Complete Poems without further explanation.

  41. To Eva Larkin, 23 August 1953.

  42. 25 October 1953.

  43. Havelock Ellis, British doctor, and author of early academic works on sexuality.

  44. Dawson, ‘The Day I Met Monica’, pp. 6–7.

  45. It appeared in The Fantasy Poets 21 in 1954, and subsequently in The Less Deceived. In 1993 Motion (p. 235) related the poem to the relationship with Winifred Arnott.

  46. SL, p. 216.

  47. Ibid., pp. 215–17.

  48. The poem is mistakenly dated ‘1951?’ in the 1988 Collected Poems. See Complete Poems, p. 607.

  49. Published, posthumously, under her maiden name, Patricia Avis (London: Virago, 1996
).

  50. SL, p. 232.

  51. LM, pp. 60–1.

  52. LKA, p. 273.

  53. 11 August 1951. LM, p. 51.

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

  55. 24 July 1952. LKA, p. 288.

  56. 8 September 1952. LKA, p. 292.

  57. 11 September 1952. LM, p. 84.

  58. Zachary Leader, ‘Making Lucky Jim’, in The Life of Kingsley Amis (New York: Pantheon, 2006). See also Ross Gresham, ‘Larkin on the Lucky Jim Manuscript’, AL 26 (October 2008), pp. 11–13.

  59. Gresham, ‘Larkin on the Lucky Jim Manuscript’, p. 12.

  60. Ibid.

  61. Ibid.

  62. Ibid., p. 13.

  63. LKA, p. 292.

  64. Richard Bradford, The Odd Couple: The Curious Friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin (London: Robson Press, 2012), pp. 106–7.

  65. Motion, p. 169.

  66. Bradford., p. 107.

  67. LM, 110.

  68. 3 April 1953. SL, p. 195.

  69. SL, pp. 201–2.

  70. DPL/4/4; Motion, p. 240.

  71. SL, pp. 221–2.

  11: Various Poems (1953–6)

  1. Hartley, p. 64.

  2. 3 February 1954. SL, p. 222.

  3. A Conversation with Neil Powell, FR, p. 31. Larkin was pleased that Auden noticed this complication.

  4. Interview with Paris Review, RW, p. 70.

  5. Robert Conquest, ‘New Lines, Movements, and Modernisms’, in Zachary Leader (ed.), The Movement Reconsidered: Essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie, and their Contemporaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 310.

  6. ‘Born Yesterday’ was a late inclusion in The Less Deceived. ‘Philip felt that although it was slight, Kingsley might be annoyed if he left it out, especially as he intended to dedicate his book not to Kingsley but to Monica Jones. He thought Kingsley might have been expecting him to make a reciprocal gesture as he had dedicated Lucky Jim to Philip, thereby taking his name into a million households.’ Hartley, p. 85.

  7. DPL/4/1/4.

  8. LM, p. 416.

  9. SL, p. 225.

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

  11. SL, p. 225.

  12. Winifred Dawson, ‘Photograph Albums Revisited’, AL 13 (April 2002), p. 4.

  13. Raphaël Ingelbien, ‘The Uses of Symbolism: Larkin and Eliot’, in James Booth (ed.), New Larkins for Old (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 134.

  14. LM, p. 210.

  15. ‘Would you call yourself an Anglican? Half way there. God? Well, half way.’ James Booth, ‘Glimpses’ (interview with Monica Jones), AL 12 (October 2001), p. 23.

  16. 3 August 1954. LM, p. 112.

  17. Ibid.

  18. J. R. Watson, ‘The Other Larkin’, Critical Quarterly 17.4 (Winter 1975), p. 358. See also R. N. Parkinson, ‘To keep our metaphysics warm: A study of “Church Going” by Philip Larkin’, Critical Survey 5 (Winter 1971), pp. 224–33.

  19. Richard Perceval Graves, A. E. Housman: The Scholar-Poet (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 187.

  20. Brenda Moon, ‘Working with Philip Larkin’, AL 8 (October 1999), p. 11.

  21. ‘A Conversation with Ian Hamilton’, FR, p. 22.

  22. See SL, p. 289 (21 October 1958).

  23. Ibid., pp. 229–30.

  24. To Patsy Strang, 28 October 1954. SL, p. 231.

  25. 18 October 1954. LM, p. 120.

  26. LM, pp. 130–1.

  27. To Eva Larkin, 28 November 1954.

  28. LM, p. 133.

  29. 23 September 1954. LM, p. 116.

  30. LM, p. 128.

  31. Ibid.

  32. See James Booth, ‘Competing Pulses: Secular and Sacred in Hughes, Larkin and Plath’, Critical Survey 12.3 (2000), pp. 4–27; and ‘Larkin as Animal Poet’, AL 22 (October 2006), pp. 5–9.

  33. LM, p. 119.

  34. Ibid., pp. 119–20.

  35. Motion, p. 224.

  36. Hartley, p. 64.

  37. 20 December 1954. LM, p. 134.

  38. LM, p. 137.

  39. 15 February 1955. LM, p. 147.

  40. 8 and 16 January 1955. LM, pp. 138–9.

  41. LM, pp. 143–4n.

  42. 29 January 1955. LM, p. 142.

  43. LM, p. 145.

  44. Motion, p. 262.

  45. ‘The Dedicated’, ‘Waiting for breakfast’, ‘Modesties’, ‘Oils’, ‘Who called Love conquering’, ‘Since the majority of me’ and ‘Arrival’. The Hartleys persuaded him to include ‘Spring’ and ‘No Road’, which he had initially excluded. LM, p. 143.

  46. 8 April 1955. LM, p. 150. In a letter of 22 July 1955 Larkin told Monica that Jean Hartley had reported to him that ‘Judy Egerton has opted out of the printed list – the only one to do so’ (LM, p. 170). This was not the case. Judy Egerton’s name appears in the list of subscribers, and in a letter of 10 February 1956 Larkin refers to the Egertons’ copies as ‘true bibliographical firsts’ (SL, p. 257).

  47. 26 October 1955. LM, p. 188.

  48. 12 May 1956. LM, p. 203.

  49. LM, p. 192.

  50. Blake Morrison, The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s (London: Methuen, 1980), p. 2.

  51. Letter to the Spectator (8 October 1954). Anthony Thwaite, ‘How It Seemed Then: An Autobiographical, Anecdotal Essay’, in Leader (ed.), The Movement Reconsidered, pp. 247–54.

  52. ‘Statement’, RW, p. 79.

  53. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873), ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 152.

  54. ‘Statement’, RW, p. 79.

  55. Motion, p. 265.

  56. ‘Maiden Name’, ‘Church Going’, ‘I Remember, I Remember’, ‘Skin’, ‘Born Yesterday’, ‘Triple Time’, ‘Toads’ and ‘Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album’.

  57. Introduction to Robert Conquest (ed.), New Lines: An Anthology (London: Macmillan, 1962), p. xv.

  58. Letter to Conquest. Motion, p. 269.

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

  60. Al Alvarez (ed.), The New Poetry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), pp. 20–1.

  61. Interview with the Observer, RW, pp. 53–4.

  62. Amis was unable to place this set of parodies in Encounter or the London Magazine (see Leader (ed.), The Movement Reconsidered, pp 5–6). Zachary Leader published them in LKA, pp. 1141–4.

  63. The poem is misdated ‘1951’ in the 1988 Collected Poems.

  64. 27 September 1956. LM, p. 207.

  65. David Lodge, ‘Philip Larkin: The Metonymic Muse’, in Stephen Regan (ed.), Philip Larkin: Contemporary Critical Essays (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 72.

  66. Morrison, The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s.

  67. Blake Morrison, ‘“Still Going On, All of It”: The Movement in the 1950s and the Movement Today’, in Leader (ed.), The Movement Reconsidered, p. 33.

  68. Conquest, ‘New Lines, Movements, and Modernisms’, p. 307.

  69. Letter to William Van O’Connor, 2 April 1958. Motion, p. 243.

  70. ‘A Conversation with Ian Hamilton’, FR, p. 20.

  12: Hull (1955–7)

  1. 27 April 1955. LM, p. 155.

  2. Originally titled ‘Lodgers’, and focused on ‘Mr Gridley’. W. I. Bleaney was one of the successful School Certificate candidates listed in the King Henry VIII school magazine, the Coventrian, in 1936.

  3. Larkin is thinking not of Hull, but of Coventry or Oxford, with their vehicle-assembly plants.

  4. In a sign of his working-class taste Bleaney prefers sauce from a bottle to properly prepared gravy. His ‘plugging at the four aways’ is an allusion to the ‘pools’, which, for a penny or halfpenny stake, gave punters the chance of winning hundreds of thousands of pounds by guessing the
draws or away wins in Football League matches.

  5. Published in the Grapevine (University of Durham Institute of Education), 4 February 1957.

  6. ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’, W. B. Yeats, Selected Poetry, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (London: Macmillan, 1962), p. 202.

  7. Hartley, p. 59.

  8. Ibid., p. 74.

  9. Ibid.

  10. 16 April 1955. LM, p. 152.

  11. 1 May 1955. LM, p. 157.

  12. LM, p. 167.

  13. Alison Hartley, personal communication, 2012.

  14. LM, p. 167. The hare is in fact wearing the garb of a medieval pilgrim, but characteristically Larkin does not ‘bother’ with such antiquarianism.

  15. SL, p. 246.

  16. Judy Egerton, interview with the author, 17 December 2010. Ansell later became City Editor of The Times, 1962–7.

  17. 9 November 1955. SL, p. 268.

  18. Hartley, p. 177.

  19. LM, p. 171.

  20. R. J. C. Watt, A Concordance to the Poetry of Philip Larkin (Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann, 1995), p. 521.

  21. To Eva Larkin, 25 January 1956.

  22. Martin Amis, Introduction to Philip Larkin: Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 2011), p. x.

  23. To Eva Larkin, 25 January 1956.

  24. To Ansell and Judy Egerton, 31 May 1955. SL, p. 243.

  25. Hartley, p. 67.

  26. To Conquest, 24 July 1955. SL, p. 245.

  27. LM, pp. 182–3.

  28. Ibid., p. 178n.

  29. Ibid., p. 192n.

  30. 11 March 1956. LM, 201.

  31. Letters and cards to Eva Larkin, 4, 11, 14, 16 and 20 December 1955.

  32. To Eva Larkin, 9 September 1956.

  33. To Eva Larkin, 8 January 1956.

  34. To Eva Larkin, 14 February 1956.

  35. He made minor adjustments to the text before publication. Complete Poems, pp. 435–6.

  36. There may be a buried echo of Book 9 of Milton’s Paradise Lost, ll. 385–6: ‘Thus saying, from her Husband’s hand her hand / Soft she withdrew.’

  37. Simon Blackburn makes this point in his survey of the clasped-hands motif in medieval monuments and brasses, ‘English Tombs and Larkin’, AL 36 (October 2013), pp. 7–11.

  38. Larkin was wryly amused when it was suggested that the clasped hands might be a Victorian restorer’s addition. Trevor Brighton, ‘An Arundel Tomb: The Monument’, in Paul Foster, Trevor Brighton and Patrick Garland, An Arundel Tomb, Otter Memorial Paper 1 (Chichester: Chichester Institute, 1987), pp. 14–22. It is now thought that this feature was indeed original.