Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  52. Burnett’s rigorous editorial principles led him to print Larkin’s shorter typescript version of the poem, adding subsequent lines from the 1967 fragment in Workbook 7 (see below). This fragment breaks off two lines earlier than the 1964 text, at ‘Of an explicit music; then’. Burnett confusingly relegates the uncancelled final two lines of the substantive 1964 workbook version to his notes, as ‘Additional lines’. Complete Poems, p. 637.

  53. 25 April 1964. LM, p. 330.

  54. LM, p. 331.

  55. 29 April 1964. LM, p. 333.

  56. To Monica Jones, 10 August 1964. Not in LM.

  57. Brennan, p. 58.

  58. DPL/1/7/16.

  59. Brennan, p. 59; Motion, p. 423.

  60. Brennan, p. 7.

  61. 3 March 1964. LM, p. 326.

  62. Motion, p. 343.

  63. ‘An Interview with John Haffenden’, FR, p. 55.

  64. In his selection of Larkin’s poems, Martin Amis preserves the order of poems within the volumes, despite the fact that his omissions dispel Larkin’s original sequence. Thus ‘Here’, completed in October 1961, and ‘Dockery and Son’, completed in March 1963, both come before the much earlier ‘An Arundel Tomb’, completed in February 1956. This is puzzling since Amis argues that Larkin’s ‘volumes of verse [. . .] get stronger and stronger by a factor of ten’, a contentious point which would surely be better illustrated by arranging the individual poems in chronological order. Introduction to Philip Larkin: Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 2011), pp. xxii–xxiii.

  16: Living for Others (1964–8)

  1. Bibliography, G14.

  2. 22 May 1964. LM, p. 335.

  3. 8 June 1964. LM, p. 337.

  4. 3 March 1964. LM, p. 326.

  5. Motion, pp. 340, 345.

  6. Ibid., p. 350.

  7. Ibid., p. 362.

  8. Brennan, p. 30.

  9. A Law student working in the Library at the time rushed down to the entrance, fearing that someone had really committed suicide. Alan Marshall, interview with the author, 16 April 2013.

  10. Card to Eva Larkin, 28 January 1965.

  11. To Eva Larkin, 21 March 1965.

  12. 15 August 1965. SL, pp. 375–6.

  13. SL, p. 376.

  14. Hazel Holt, A Lot to Ask: A Life of Barbara Pym (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 202.

  15. Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury.

  16. 3 October 1967. SL, p. 397.

  17. ‘The World of Barbara Pym’, RW, pp. 240–1.

  18. 26 November 1966. LM, p. 371.

  19. Holt, A Lot to Ask, p. 49.

  20. Motion, p. 362.

  21. 20 January 1966. SL, p. 380.

  22. To Eva Larkin, 24 October 1965.

  23. 12 October 1961. Complete Poems, p. 301.

  24. Motion, p. 302.

  25. Brennan, pp. 170–1.

  26. Ibid., p. 178.

  27. LM, p. 339.

  28. Ibid., p. 340 and n.

  29. Ibid., p. 350.

  30. Ibid., p. 352n.

  31. SL, p. 369.

  32. DPL/1/7/1.

  33. Larkin made slight changes of wording before it was published in Queen, 25 May 1966.

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

  35. 13 October 1964. LM, p. 342.

  36. In the 1988 Collected Poems Thwaite adopted Larkin’s second title, added in pencil to the typescript (DPL/1/7/76). Breaking his editorial principles Burnett prefers the first title (Complete Poems, p. 634).

  37. For the possible background to this poem, see Gary Kriewald, ‘Wasteful, weak, propitiatory poems: Larkin apologizes to the animals’, AL 28 (October 2009), pp. 29–33.

  38. Margaret Hersom, unpublished recollection. Burnett prints a version of ‘Administration’ sent in a letter to Gavin Ewart in 1977 (Complete Poems, p. 655).

  39. Now the Mercure Hull Royal Hotel. It was burnt out in 1990, but was deliberately restored in the same traditional style in order to recall the poem, with high clustered lights and differently coloured chairs.

  40. To Maeve Brennan, 6 August 1966. Motion, p. 365.

  41. SL, p. 387.

  42. LM, p. 369.

  43. Not in LM.

  44. To Monica Jones, 8 October 1966. LM, p. 364.

  45. Motion, p. 310.

  46. 8 October 1966. LM, p. 364.

  47. LM, p. 365.

  48. SL, p. 381.

  49. Ibid., p. 382.

  50. Brennan, p. 49.

  51. James Booth, ‘“Snooker” at the Seaside: The Birthday Walk in Scarborough’, AL 16 (October 2003), p. 29.

  52. He would never take her advice, being ‘very determined about what he liked and what he didn’t’. Judy Egerton, interview with the author, 17 December 2010.

  53. 3 June 1967. SL, p. 396.

  54. Professor Raymond Brett, personal communication, 1969.

  55. Edna Longley, ‘Poète Maudit Manqué’, in George Hartley (ed.), Philip Larkin – A Tribute: 1922–1985 (London: Marvell Press, 1988), p. 230.

  56. 23 May 1968. Not in LM.

  57. This line was changed in the typescript from the workbook’s ‘The sunlight pouring through glass’.

  58. DPL/1/7/18.

  59. Motion, p. 371.

  60. In Susannah Tarbush, ‘From Willow Gables to “Aubade”: Penelope Scott Stokes and Philip Larkin: Part 2’, AL 26 (October 2008), pp. 5–10, at p. 7.

  61. 10 May 1967. LM, p. 375. A selection of Penelope’s verse and drawings, ‘Poems by Pen Evans’, is to be found in AL 27 (April 2009), pp. 15–21.

  62. Tarbush, ‘From Willow Gables to “Aubade”’, p. 7.

  63. 24 April 1968. Passage not in LM.

  64. Motion, p. 374.

  65. 27 March 1967. Motion, p. 369.

  66. Jean Hartley and James Booth, ‘Jean Hartley DLitt’, AL 31 (April 2011), p. 10.

  67. 23 August 1967. LM, p. 377.

  68. Hartley, p. 134.

  69. Published in the New Statesman on 18 May 1968.

  70. 24 April 1968. Passage not in LM.

  71. Workbook 7, 1/7/20.

  72. The date in the 1988 Collected Poems, ‘16 June’, is inaccurate. This was the date the poem was begun.

  73. Émaux et Camées (1852).

  74. ‘A Conversation with Ian Hamilton’, FR, p. 25.

  75. ‘Poet’s Choice’, FR, p. 17.

  76. DPL/1/7/78.

  77. The word appears elsewhere in his work only in the juvenile ‘Last Will and Testament’ (1940).

  78. It is difficult also not to hear a horrible gauche pun here. ‘White Major’ evokes a Kiplingesque officer in the British army, the kind of person who would use the phrase ‘a white man’ to indicate decent, upright values. In a letter to an inquirer, however, Larkin denied that he intended this pun: ‘you don’t mention that “Sympathy in White Major” is an echo of “Symphonie en Blanc Majeure” (Gautier). Nothing about white majors!’ Complete Poems, p. 444.

  79. When Kemp in Jill allowed his room-mate to plagiarize his tutorial essay, Warner declared: ‘That’s awfully white of you, old man.’ Jill, p. 119.

  80. Oliver Marshall, ‘A Letter from Loughborough’, AL 15 (April 2003), pp. 18–19. Larkin had written a four-line squib with this title in Workbook 5 in 1959. Complete Poems, p. 298.

  81. Les Complaintes (1885) and L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886).

  82. Robert Giroux of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the American publisher of High Windows, objected to this poem on the grounds of anti-Semitism. Without engaging in any argument Larkin directed that the poem either be included, or omitted with a note indicating that the omission had been made. Motion, p. 436.

  83. To Monica Jones, 12 September 1968. LM, p. 391. Hartley, pp. 133–5.

  84. Hartley, p. 194.

  85. 4 October 1968. SL, p. 405.

  86. 2 November 1968. SL, p. 407.

  87. 24 November 1968. Not in LM.

  88. 26 December 1968. Not in LM.

  17: Jazz, Race and Modernism (196
1–71)

  1. 20 November 1968. SL, p. 408.

  2. This may have been at the suggestion of John Kenyon, Hull Professor of History. John White, personal communication, 24 October 2010.

  3. An anthology of Larkin’s own favourite jazz recordings is available. Trevor Tolley and John White (eds), Larkin’s Jazz, Properbox 155 (four-CD set), in association with the Philip Larkin Society. www.propermusic.com.

  4. AWJ, p. 45.

  5. Larkin’s LP collection is held in the University Collection at the Hull History Centre.

  6. AWJ, p. 106.

  7. Ibid., p. 116.

  8. FR, pp. 112–16.

  9. Hartley, p. 139.

  10. James Booth, ‘Glimpses’ (interview with Monica Jones), AL 12 (October 2001), p. 23.

  11. AWJ, pp. 47, 36.

  12. Ibid., p. 65.

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

  14. To Sutton, 23 June 1941. SL, p. 18.

  15. AWJ, p. 35.

  16. B. J. Leggett notes the parallel in relation to ‘Aubade’. Larkin’s Blues: Jazz, Popular Music and Poetry (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), p. 14.

  17. AWJ, p. 36.

  18. Ibid., p. 60.

  19. Interview with Paris Review, RW, p. 61.

  20. AWJ, p. 167.

  21. Ibid., p. 47.

  22. Ibid., p. 156.

  23. Ibid., p. 243.

  24. Ibid., pp. 86, 85.

  25. Ibid., p. 119.

  26. Ibid., p. 19.

  27. Ibid., p. 40.

  28. Ibid., p. 41.

  29. Ibid., pp. 41–2.

  30. Ibid., p. 78.

  31. ‘Requiem for Jazz’, Weekend Telegraph, 23 April 1965; in Larkin’s Jazz: Essays and Reviews 1940–1984, ed. Richard Palmer and John White (London and New York: Continuum, 2001), p. 140.

  32. AWJ, p. 112.

  33. Ibid., p. 44.

  34. Ibid., pp. 39, 43.

  35. Ibid., p. 63.

  36. Ibid., p. 211.

  37. Ibid., 28. Trevor Tolley gives an account of Larkin’s jazz tastes in the chapter on All What Jazz in My Proper Ground: A Study of the Work of Philip Larkin and its Development (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991).

  38. AWJ, pp. 96–7.

  39. Ibid., p. 126.

  40. Ibid., p. 150.

  41. Ibid., pp. 218–19. The Paston Letters were written by members of the Paston family between the years 1422 and 1509.

  42. Ibid., p. 161.

  43. Ibid., p. 46.

  44. Ibid., p. 188.

  45. Ibid., p. 187. The text has ‘remembering’ in error for ‘remember’.

  46. Ibid., p. 188.

  47. Ibid., p. 201.

  48. Ibid., p. 209.

  49. Ibid., p. 282.

  50. Ibid., p. 62.

  51. Ibid., p. 187. Stokely Carmichael (1941–98) was a Trinidadian-American activist associated with the Black Power and Black Panther movements.

  52. Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007); cited in ‘Ugly on Purpose’, review of Richard Palmer, Such Deliberate Disguises: The Art of Philip Larkin (London and New York: Continuum, 2008). http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/january-2009-larkin-coltrane/ (accessed 14 November 2011).

  53. To Sutton, ‘Friday Night’, 1939? Not in SL.

  54. AWJ, p. 234.

  55. Ibid., p. 68.

  56. Ibid., pp. 117–18.

  57. Ibid., p. 87.

  58. ‘Requiem for Jazz’, in Larkin’s Jazz, ed. Palmer and White, p. 141.

  59. AWJ, p. 87.

  60. Ibid. John Osborne refers to ‘the radicalism and cosmopolitanism’ of Larkin’s racial ideology in his jazz writings. Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence: A Case of Wrongful Conviction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 45.

  61. AWJ, p. 24.

  62. Ibid., p. 20,

  63. Ibid., pp. 21, 24.

  64. Ibid., p. 97.

  65. Ibid., p. 55.

  66. Ibid., p. 283.

  67. 3 August 1971. SL, p. 443.

  68. SL, p. 444.

  69. Ibid., p. 445.

  70. To Donald Mitchell, 9 December 1968. Motion, p. 386.

  71. Lisa Jardine, ‘Saxon Violence’, Guardian, 8 December 1992, Section 2, p. 4. For good measure Jardine adds: ‘and an easy misogynist’.

  72. The Noctes Ambrosianae, a series of seventy-one witty and humorous discussions set in Ambrose’s Tavern, Edinburgh, appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine between 1822 and 1835.

  73. To Monica Jones, 16 November 1968. Not in LM.

  74. 19 June 1970. SL, p. 432.

  75. 19 November 1973. SL, p. 493.

  76. 21 August 1971. AWJ, p. 284.

  77. To Judy Egerton, 15 November 1969. SL, p. 421.

  78. 15 September 1984. SL, p. 719.

  79. sl, p. 445.

  80. DPL(2)/2/15/44.

  81. 14 October 1980. SL, p. 629.

  82. To Conquest, 12 November 1973. SL, pp. 492–3.

  83. SL, p. 456.

  84. See also John Osborne, ‘Diasporic identities’, in Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence, pp. 229–45. Osborne sees Larkin’s enthusiasm for jazz as an aspect of his modernity.

  85. To John White, cited in Tolley and White (eds), Larkin’s Jazz, CD liner notes, p. 13.

  86. 20 November 1968. SL, p. 408.

  87. 27 November 1968. Motion, p. 386.

  88. To Peter Crawley, 19 June 1969. SL, p. 416.

  89. 13 January 1970. SL, p. 425.

  90. To Peter Crawley. SL, p. 417.

  91. AWJ, pp. 17–18.

  92. Ibid., p. 19.

  93. Ibid., pp. 22–3.

  94. Ibid., p. 25.

  95. Ibid., p. 27.

  96. Ibid., p. 23.

  97. Ibid.

  98. The ‘novel in gibberish’ is not immediately identifiable. Probably Larkin had in mind James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which still remains problematic for most readers.

  99. Motion, p. 386. Richard Palmer devotes a chapter to ‘Larkin’s Most Expensive Mistake’, analysing the ‘determined perversity’ of the Introduction to All What Jazz. Such Deliberate Disguises, pp. 13–33.

  100. ‘The Art of Jazz’ (1940), in Larkin’s Jazz, ed. Palmer and White, p. 169.

  101. AWJ, p. 27.

  102. Ibid., p. 15.

  103. Palmer, Such Deliberate Disguises, p. 57.

  104. AWJ, pp. 15–16.

  105. Larkin’s Jazz, ed. Palmer and White, pp. 6–7.

  106. AWJ, p. 22.

  107. Ibid., pp. 28–9.

  18: Politics and Literary Politics (1968–73)

  1. 10 March 1946. SL, p. 115

  2. LM, p. 381.

  3. Hartley, p. 159.

  4. To Monica Jones, 14 September 1964. Passage not in LM.

  5. SL, p. 403.

  6. Ibid., p. 402.

  7. http://senatehouseoccupation.wordpress.com/1968/07/02/are-examinations-really-necessary/ (accessed 10 December 2010).

  8. 19 August 1968. SL, pp. 403–4.

  9. 16 November 1968. Not in LM.

  10. 24 March 1973. SL, p. 473.

  11. 16 November 1968. Not in LM.

  12. Ibid. (insertion).

  13. Critical Quarterly 2.4 (Winter 1960), p. 351; 3.4 (Winter 1961), p. 309; 8.2 (Summer 1966), p. 173; 10.1–2 (Spring–Summer 1968), p. 55. Larkin also published in Critical Quarterly a review, ‘Mrs Hardy’s memories’, 4.1 (Spring 1962), pp. 75–9, and his essay, ‘Wanted: Good Hardy Critic’, 8.2 (Summer 1966), pp. 174–9.

  14. http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj70/amis.htm.

  15. 4 October 1968. SL, pp. 404–5.

  16. 17 October 1968. SL, p. 406.

  17. LM, p. 394.

  18. To Kingsley Amis, 8 April 1969. Not in SL.

  19. LM, p. 385.

  20. Trevor Jarvis, personal communication, 2010.

  21. University of Hull Collection, The History Centre, Hull: U DJH.

  22. John Saville, Memoirs
from the Left (London: Merlin Press, 2003), pp. 138, 139, 145.

  23. A BBC radio quiz, based on literary quotations, starring Frank Muir and Denis Norden. It ran from 1956 until 1990.

  24. In LM (384) the phrases ‘aren’t the 2 songs lovely together! My eyes fill with tears’ are inadvertently omitted.

  25. Ibid.

  26. Ibid., p. 387.

  27. To Monica Jones, 15 January 1969. Complete Poems, p. 461.

  28. See http://www.britannica.com/bps/additionalcontent/18/23072911/The-Decline-of-the-AngloAmerican-Middle-East-19611969 (accessed 12 April 2011).

  29. Mitchell left the army later in the year and unlike officers of similar rank was not awarded an OBE. The final evacuation of troops from Aden took place on 8 November 1967. Mitchell capitalized on the glamour of this exploit in a populist campaign to become a Conservative MP.

  30. To Monica Jones. 5 August 1953. LM, p. 104.

  31. Interview with the Observer, RW, p. 52.

  32. Blake Morrison, The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s (London: Methuen, 1980), p. 256.

  33. Trevor Jarvis, personal communication, 2010.

  34. Motion, p. 381.

  35. To Conquest, 7 April 1969. SL, p. 413.

  36. Motion, p. 380.

  37. To the Revd A. H. Quinn, 3 February 1969. Complete Poems, p. 641.

  38. 8 October 1969. SL, p. 420.

  39. To Maeve Brennan, 4 September 1969. Motion, p. 393.

  40. Motion, p. 390. The official opening by the University Chancellor, Lord Cohen of Birkenhead, took place on 12 December 1970.

  41. To Eva Larkin, 5 October 1969.

  42. Betty Mackereth, personal communication, 7 January 2014.

  43. SL, p. 427.

  44. Motion, p. 404.

  45. Oxford University Rugby Football Club.

  46. To Barbara Pym, 29 May 1971. SL, pp. 438–9.

  47. Anthony Thwaite, personal communication, 2010.

  48. 20 January 1966. SL, p. 380.

  49. W. B. Yeats (ed.), The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), pp. xxxiv, xv.

  50. 4 June 1966. LM, p. 361.

  51. ‘“A great parade of single poems” – Philip Larkin, poet, librarian and anthologist, discusses his Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse with Anthony Thwaite’, Listener, 12 April 1973, p. 472.

  52. Motion (p. 431) reaches different conclusions by counting numbers of poems rather than numbers of lines.

  53. 22 November 1951. LM, pp. 71–2.

  54. SL, p. 401.

  55. 5 August 1953. LM, p. 104.

  56. OBTCEV, p. v.

  57. Yeats (ed.), The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, p. xlii.

  58. The Republic of Ireland was also a member of the Commonwealth until 1949.