by James Booth
39. 6 October 1951. LM, p. 63.
40. DPL/1/4/24.
41. 21 February 1956. LM, p. 196.
42. Motion, p. 275. He had asked her, in crossword-mode, for ‘something meaning a sign, two syllables’.
43. 4 December 1956. LM, p. 210.
44. To Monica Jones, 31 March 1956. Not in LM.
45. This public lavatory has received awards, and is to this day something of a tourist attraction.
46. Tranby Croft is a Grade II-listed country house at Anlaby, just outside Hull.
47. To Monica Jones, 22–23 April 1956. Not in LM.
48. John Malcom Brinnin, Dylan Thomas in America: An Intimate Journal (Boston: Little, Brown, 1955).
49. To Monica Jones, 22–23 April 1956.
50. To Eva Larkin, 23 September 1956.
51. Ibid.
52. Moira Phillips, ‘Larkin Recollected’, AL 33 (April 2012), p. 11.
53. To Monica Jones, 27 October 1956. Not in LM.
54. To Monica Jones, 18 November 1956. Not in LM.
55. SL, p. 276.
56. At a Larkin Society dinner held in 2010 to raise money for the statue by Martin Jennings now at Paragon Station, Maureen Lipman, standing beside a fibre-glass toad in the form of Philip Larkin, declared, in her best Hull accent, that this was the first time she had shared the stage with a ‘turd’. Jackie Sewell, ‘An Evening with Maureen Lipman CBE’, AL 30 (October 2010), p .26.
57. Interview with the Observer, RW, pp. 54–5.
58. 7 January 1956. LM, p. 193.
59. 26 August 1956. LM, p. 204.
60. Motion, p. 259.
13: Poet-Librarian (1956–60)
1. To Eva Larkin, 26 May 1957.
2. Betty Mackereth, interview with the author, 4 August 2003.
3. Brennan, p. 23.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., p. 24. In 1967 the novel was made into a film starring Sidney Poitier.
6. Betty Mackereth, interview with the author, 9 February 2013.
7. Brennan, p. 28.
8. LM, pp. 173, 223, 256.
9. Brennan, pp. 25–6.
10. To Eva Larkin, 19 May 1957.
11. Mary Judd (née Wrench), interview with the author, 28 June 2011.
12. Brennan, pp. 29–30.
13. Ibid., p. 23.
14. Mary Judd (née Wrench), interview with the author, 28 June 2011.
15. Verso of p. 286 of diary no. 12, 1954–7 (DPL4/1/4). He gave the names of the writers on a separate inserted list: Miss Cuming (Agnes Cuming, his predecessor as Librarian at Hull), J. B. Sutton, Jill McIver, Joan Loughlin, John Wain, Ruth Bowman, Robert Conquest, E. E. Larkin (his mother), Molly Terry, Judy Egerton, Patricia Murphy, Miriam Plaut, Hilly Amis, Margaret Sutton, Jane Exall, Vernon Watkins, Charles Madge, Bruce Montgomery, Philip Brown, Karl Lehmann, Peter Rose, Colin Gunner, Madeleine Boyall, Winifred Arnott, Kingsley Amis, John Betjeman, Philip Oakes, Harry Hoff, Pamela Hansford Johnson, C. P. Snow, Edward Du Cann, Eric Ashby, Janet Murphy, Elizabeth Jennings, Linda Murphy.
16. Letter to Monica Jones, 28 July 1956. Not in LM.
17. See Joan Redford, Jean Watson, Jean Humphries, Ann Connolly, John Yates and Margaret Austin, ‘Monica at Leicester’, AL 12 (October 2001), pp. 17–18; and Yvonne Rowland, ‘Remembering Monica Jones in Leicester’, AL 30 (October 2010), pp. 18–19.
18. 16 October 1957. LM, p. 229.
19. LM, p. 245. See Peter Keating, ‘Monica’, in Autobiographical Tales (Priskus: Edinburgh, 2013), for an account of Monica in Leicester.
20. 4 May 1957. LM, p. 221.
21. 8 December 1956. LM, p. 212.
22. LM, pp. 225–6.
23. To Monica Jones, 7 and 8 August 1957. Not in LM.
24. Letter from Mary Judd (née Wrench) to Maeve Brennan and Betty Mackereth, 15 April 1986.
25. Ibid. Mary married in 1960 and Philip and Betty Mackereth acted as godparents to her daughter. She left Hull in 1964.
26. 16 October 1957. LM, p. 229.
27. 29 January 1958. LM, p. 235.
28. To Eva Larkin, 6 May 1956.
29. LM, pp. 209–10.
30. Larkin dated the last complete draft in the workbook ‘1 Jan 57’; only minor adjustments followed. Complete Poems, pp. 397–8.
31. LM, p. 170.
32. Unpublished interview, South Bank Show, 16 April 1981. Motion, pp. 287–8.
33. ‘An Interview with John Haffenden’, FR, p. 53.
34. Ibid., p. 57.
35. To Thwaite, 17 March 1959. SL, p. 301.
36. The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. James Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976), p. 135.
37. Larkin perhaps recalls the biblical phrase ‘all flesh is grass’. He may also have had in mind Auden’s ‘The crowds upon the pavement / Were fields of harvest wheat’ in ‘As I walked out one evening’. W. H. Auden, Another Time (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), p. 43.
38. Hartley, p. 125.
39. David Lodge, ‘Philip Larkin: The Metonymic Muse’, in Stephen Regan (ed.), Philip Larkin: Contemporary Critical Essays (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 71–82, at p. 77.
40. Ibid., p. 78.
41. In Christopher Ricks, ‘The Pursuit of Metaphor’, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 248.
42. Lodge, ‘Philip Larkin: The Metonymic Muse’, p. 76.
43. Motion, p. 280. Judy Egerton always received Larkin’s letters with great pleasure. Interview, 17 December 2010.
44. 3 November 1958. LM, p. 245.
45. Motion, p. 284.
46. Anthony Thwaite, personal communication, 14 August 2011.
47. Jean Hartley, ‘Larkin, Love and Sex’, AL 30 (October 2010), p. 6.
48. Larkin, indeed, had played the same prank on his sister Catherine during the war, sending her a typewritten letter in an envelope with an official ‘On His Majesty’s Service’ cover, informing her that she had been ‘drafted to the Colliery at Pwllycracrach. Mon., for light duties at the shafthead’. Unlike Conquest, however, he revealed the joke in the PS: ‘Well, I hope [. . .] that this didn’t give you too much of a turn.’ 8 September 1943. DLN/3/2/11.
49. Motion, p. 267.
50. LM, p. 256.
51. Hartley, p. 100.
52. 17 December 1958. SL, p. 297.
53. To Judy Egerton, 19 January 1959. SL, p. 298.
54. Motion, p. 294.
55. Greenwich Mean Time. He is alluding to Mary’s poor time-keeping. Betty recalls Larkin standing at the issue desk, watch in hand in pantomimic censure, as Mary arrived late yet again.
56. Betty still has Mary’s letter.
57. Betty Mackereth, interview with the author, 20 June 2011.
58. Passage not in LM.
59. 14 April 1959. LM, p. 248.
60. LM, p. 254.
61. To Monica Jones, 9 October 1959. Not in LM.
62. LM, pp. 259–60.
63. LM, p. 261.
64. 25 August 1959. LM, p. 256.
65. Motion, pp. 296–7.
66. Betty Mackereth, interview with the author, 20 June 2011.
67. To Eva Larkin, 20 March 1960.
68. Jean Hartley, ‘Larkin, Love and Sex’, AL 30 (October 2010), p. 8.
69. Motion, p. 297.
14: Here (1960–1)
1. The drawing and poem are reproduced in facsimile as the back endpaper of SL. Motion records that he stayed with Bruce Montgomery before the interview. Motion, p. 302.
2. LM, p. 265.
3. 16 March 1960. LM, p. 266.
4. Archie Burnett, ‘Biography and Poetry: Philip Larkin’ AL 36 (October 2013), pp. 7–14, at p.13. Jean Hartley recalled seeing the film with Larkin. John Osborne, ‘Larkin and the Visual Arts’, AL 36 (October 2013), pp. 15–17, at p. 15.
5. Thomas Gray, Poems, Letters and Essays (London: Dent, 1963), p. 6.
6. He had begun drafting it in late 1956, and had returned to it several times. Complete Poems, p. 417.
7. 4 July 1959. LM, p. 252.
9. Hartley, p. 119.
10. Brennan, p. 36.
11. Ibid., p. 26. Betty Mackereth recalls that during the royal visit the Librarian’s office served as the Queen Mother’s ‘retiring room’, and was fitted with a set of net curtains. These were still incongruously in place when I arrived in Hull in 1968, and survived for many years afterwards.
12. 15 August 1960. LM, p. 270.
13. 4 August 1960. LM, p. 268.
14. He had been drafting it intermittently since the summer of 1959. Complete Poems, p. 419.
15. Brennan, p. 37.
16. Ibid., p. 28.
17. Ibid., pp. 33–4.
18. Ibid., p. 38.
19. Jean Hartley, ‘Larkin, Love and Sex’, AL 30 (October 2010), pp. 6–8, at p. 7.
20. Jean Hartley, personal communication, 4 March 2011.
21. Margaret Fowler, ‘Larkin’s Library Recollected’, AL 32 (October 2011), p. 11.
22. 9 August 1959. LM, p. 239.
23. SL, p. 319.
24. 10 November 1960, LM, p. 275.
25. Richard Bradford, The Odd Couple: The Curious Friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin (London: Robson Press, 2012), pp. 222–4.
26. LM, p. 273.
27. Ibid., p. 275.
28. To Eva Larkin, 6 November 1960.
29. Motion cites this comment from a letter to Eva Larkin of 1 January 1961 (Motion, p. 310 n. 12). However these words are not present in the letter of that date. The correspondence is not yet fully catalogued and it may be that the letter containing this sentence has been misplaced, perhaps before the correspondence came to Hull. Richard Bradford (The Odd Couple, p. 223) repeats the quotation (presumably from Motion), but mistakenly applies it to Maeve rather than Monica.
30. To Monica Jones, 1 January 1961. Not in LM.
31. LM, p. 276.
32. Complete Poems, p. 423.
33. Larkin cannot resist the bad pun ‘born / dead’.
34. She adds an arch parenthesis: ‘(why he didn’t call [a taxi] from the hotel, I cannot think)’.
35. Brennan, p. 38–9.
36. Ibid., pp. 8–10.
37. SL, p. 323.
38. 5 March 1961. SL, p. 325.
39. Hazel Holt, A Lot to Ask: A Life of Barbara Pym (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 89.
40. Philip Larkin Reads and Comments on The Whitsun Weddings, Listen Records, LPV 6 (Hull: Marvell Press, 1965).
41. 11 July 1961. SL, p. 330.
42. ‘A Conversation with Ian Hamilton’, FR, p. 25.
43. To Monica Jones, 13 November 1960. Not in LM.
44. FR, p. 25.
45. ‘W. H. Auden’, FR, p. 40; ‘The Life under the Laurels’, FR, p. 296.
46. ‘On the Circuit’, in W. H. Auden, About the House (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), p. 63.
47. Interview with Paris Review, RW, p. 73.
48. 11 February 1961. LM, p. 276.
49. 11 June 1961. LM, p. 283.
50. Motion, p. 311.
51. Motion (p. 311) and LM (p. 283n) give the date as 5 March, which was a Sunday. The letters to Eva show that it was Monday 6 March.
52. Colin Vize, ‘Larkin’s Refraction’, AL 35 (April 2013), p. 23. Vize concluded that ‘less than 1% of the population exhibit short-sightedness of the magnitude experienced by Larkin’.
53. Bradford, p. 224.
54. 11 March 1961. LM, p. 278.
55. LM, p. 279.
56. Ibid., p. 280.
57. Ibid., p. 281.
58. Brennan, p. 41.
59. To Monica Jones, 13 March 1961. Not in LM.
60. Larkin was hurt when Amis failed to follow up this hospital visit. On 11 July, following his recovery, he remarked to Conquest that he had received no letter from Kingsley: ‘His joy at learning I was discharged without any discoverable defect must have rendered his right hand useless: give him my sympathy. It must be hell not being able to toss off’ (SL, p. 331).
61. Motion, p. 313.
62. Larkin Society. DNX, box 1.
63. SL, p. 327.
64. Brennan, p. 42.
65. To Betty Mackereth, 13 April 1961 (unpublished).
66. Brennan, p. 42.
67. Ibid., p. 29.
68. Ibid., p. 39.
69. Hartley, ‘Larkin, Love and Sex’, p. 7.
70. Motion, p. 305. Maeve was offended by Alan Bennett’s review of Motion’s biography which depicted her as a northern ‘lass’ deceived by a sophisticated seducer. All Larkin ‘really wants’, Bennett concluded, ‘is just to get his end away on a regular basis and without obligation’. Alan Bennett, ‘Alas! Deceived’, in Stephen Regan (ed.), Philip Larkin: Contemporary Critical Essays (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 243.
71. 10 April 1961. Brennan, p. 75.
72. Brennan, p. 43.
73. LM, p. 283.
74. Philip Larkin Reads and Comments on The Whitsun Weddings, Listen Records.
75. Brennan, pp. 56–7.
76. Mademoiselle de Maupin, trans. R. and E. Powys Mathers (London: Folio Society, 1948), p. 133.
77. 5 August 1961. SL, p. 331.
78. 9 August 1961. LM, p. 284 and n.
79. 17 August 1961. LM, p. 285.
80. It was published at once in the New Statesman, on 24 October 1961.
81. 21 September 1962. SL, p. 346.
82. Philip Larkin Reads and Comments on The Whitsun Weddings, Listen Records.
83. Shakespeare’s anti-Petrarchan sonnet, no. 130 (‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’), is an ironic example of the genre, and its conventions feature in Marvell’s ‘To his Coy Mistress’: ‘An hundred years should go to praise / Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze [. . .]’.
84. Brennan, pp. 57–8.
85. Ibid., p. 57.
86. Motion, p. 46.
87. Brennan, p. 57.
88. Among the books which Maeve left at her death was Linda O’Keeffe’s lavishly illustrated Shoes: A Celebration of Pumps, Sandals, Slippers and More (New York: Workman Publishing; special edition for Past Times, Oxford, 1996).
89. Brennan, p. 50.
90. Ibid., pp. 174, 184, 209.
91. Ibid., p. 73.
92. Ibid., p. 43.
93. Ibid.
94. LM, p. 289.
95. Judy Egerton, interview with the author, 17 December 2010.
96. SL, pp. 339–40.
15: Sitting It Out (1961–4)
1. Critical Quarterly 3.4 (Winter 1961), p. 309.
2. 9 December 1961. SL, p. 335.
3. Critical Quarterly misprinted ‘bribes’ in line 2 as ‘brides’, a mistake carried forward into the 1988 Collected Poems. The correct reading was restored in a reprint of Collected Poems later in 1988.
4. To Conquest, 9 December 1961. SL, p. 335.
5. SL, p. 336.
6. 23 January 1962. LM, p. 292.
7. 30 April 1962. SL, p. 342.
8. LM, p. 292.
9. SL, p. 335.
10. To Conquest. SL, p. 341.
11. SL, p. 342.
12. ‘The Living Poet’, FR, p. 81.
13. He finished the poem on 21 August and it was published in the Observer on 18 November 1962.
14. LM, p. 302.
15. DX/329, inventory p. 119.
16. Motion, p. 319. Iris Murdoch, The Flight from the Enchanter (London: Chatto & Windus, 1956). Copy in the University Collection, History Centre, Hull: MJ/B1/491, inscribed ‘M. M. B. Jones’ in Monica’s hand, with ‘& Dr Larkin’ beneath in his.
17. Hull copy of Murdoch, The Flight from the Enchanter, pp. 3, 78, 81.
18. Ibid., pp. 79, 308.
19. Ibid., pp. 5, 23, 79.
20. Anthony Thwaite, personal communication, 14 August 2011.
21. Anthony Thwaite (ed.), Larkin at Sixty (London: Faber & Faber, 1982), opposite p. 60.
22. LM, p
. 304n.
23. Ibid., pp. 303–4.
24. Ibid., p. 306n.
25. 4 October 1962. LM, p. 305.
26. Ibid., p. 304.
27. Published in the Spectator, 23 November 1962.
28. Philip Larkin Reads and Comments on The Whitsun Weddings, Listen Records, LPV 6 (Hull: Marvell Press, 1965).
29. See for example paintings by Hans Baldung Grien (1484/5–1545) in the Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland.
30. LM, pp. 306–7.
31. Published in Critical Quarterly 8.2 (Summer 1966), p. 173.
32. To Eva Larkin, 16 December 1962.
33. To Monica Jones, 7 August 1966. Not in LM.
34. Brennan, p. 43.
35. Ibid., p. 23.
36. DPL/10/3.
37. To Monica Jones, 17 August 1963. Motion, p. 339.
38. LKA, pp. 204–5.
39. DX/329, inventory 68. These cameras took self-developing film, avoiding the involvement of a chemist or photographic laboratory.
40. Lord Byron: Selected Prose, ed. Peter Gunn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 357.
41. SL, p. 257.
42. See http://www.harrison-marks.com/hub.htm (accessed 27 April 2011).
43. Motion, p. 266.
44. Jean Hartley, ‘Larkin, Love and Sex’, AL 30 (October 2010), p. 6.
45. Richard Bradford, The Odd Couple: The Curious Friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin (London: Robson Press, 2012), pp. 209, 237.
46. DX/329, inventory 600 i–ix. There were also ‘Super 8’ cine-reels such as were used for Marks’s films: inventory 72a–d.
47. Sophia Dawn appeared in Kamera, issue 56 (1963). She was the principal model in Harrison Marks’s Byronically titled hardback She Walks in Beauty, and appeared in two 8mm home movies, The Bare Truth and Nature’s Intended. See http://www.harrison-marks.com/models_1.htm (accessed 27 April 2011).
48. DX/329, inventory 73 a–j. Ten ring-binders were found in the box room of 105 Newland Park. They were empty, but one showed the torn remnants of two black-and-white glamour photographs pasted to the inner front and back covers. Seven were Staff Handbooks. James Booth, ‘Glimpses’ (interview with Monica Jones), AL 12 (October 2001), pp. 25–6.
49. Presumably a jokey reference to the famous ‘You know how to whistle?’ scene from the film To Have and Have Not (1944), starring Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart.
50. Thwaite inadvertently omitted the final stanza in the workbook draft from the 1988 Collected Poems.
51. Burnett omits the stanza break after ‘understand’. Complete Poems, p. 309.