Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

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One unexpected result of all this is to reveal Larkin as not so much underhanded in his dealings with his lovers (though that he was) as quite colossally imperceptive. Doing’s what I’m bad at,” he remarks at one point, and the painful accounts of his attempts to find digs or flats confirm this. Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica, edited by Anthony Thwaite, is remarkable collection of letters that reveals the unseen life of Philip Larkin.

As for Monica – well, despite her clothes (brown trousers of crushed velvet, wifebeater blouse, plus earrings the size of hula hoops), she resembled an all-in wrestler renowned for an indifference to the norms of fair play. We had a fine large cavalier time, though, and I look back on it with delight…" The next letter amplifies the mystery: "I'm sorry too that our encounter had such unhappy results for you! She won him over by offering him, for the first time, an undisturbed secret retreat, a private rabbit-hole where, as Motion explains, “they lazed, drank, read, pottered round the village and amused themselves with private games. I was girding myself for the nasty, racist, homophobic Larkin that was revealed when his first correspondence was published but in this respect found him mild.He organized every aspect of its planning and its building, acquiring for the purpose a vast amount of technical and architectural knowledge. He also wrote two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947), and his journalism is collected in two volumes, All What Jazz: A Record Diary and Required Writing: Miscellaneous Prose.

When Monica was deeply upset, he played his top trump in this game of misère: "I've always tried to get you to see me as unlikeable, and now I must be getting near success.long-winded, inessential man she'd go for; if she can see beauty in a derelict shit-house, she must have more [sensibility] than you. As unsatisfactory it was for both of them, they stayed together, vacationed together, and, at the end lived together. This is from an Amis-Larkin letter of the same period: "It doesn't surprise me in the least that Monica is [studying George Crabbe, 1754-1832, poet and parson]; he's exactly the sort of priggish, boring, featureless (especially that; there isn't anything about him, is there? Larkin sometimes dissents from this, feeling that they are as odd as each other, and that Monica likes people at large even less than he does. The wrangle with Ruth lasted eight years; the wrangle with Monica would last for 35, leading to the same outcome.

In accordance with conventional judgment, I saw his talent as peaking in 1964 with The Whitsun Weddings, and declining bleakly thereafter, with too many poems essaying, not always convincingly, variations on the same old personal obsessions that he had lived with since childhood. On the front side, facing right, is Philip Larkin: tall, slim, balding, elegantly dressed in sports jacket and tan pants, with sandals as a concession to the holiday season, and unencumbered except for what looks like a pair of binoculars.They liked Beatrix Potter even when she strayed beyond bunnies, with Larkin declaring that he would sacrifice Joyce, Proust and Mann (foreigners all, admittedly, and he had become scrupulously xenophobic) for The Tailor of Gloucester. The process was far advanced, if not complete, by 1982, when I spent a long evening in their company. On the positive side we register an urgent warmth, a snug intimacy of jokes and whimsies, and Monica's courageous acceptance of Larkin's intense melancholia – melancholia not as a mood or a susceptibility, but as a besetting Jonsonian humour ("black bile"). For me, the most illuminating but most difficult to read section of the book concerned the fallout of Larkin including the poem "Broadcast" in his collection "The Whitsun Weddings" - a poem he wrote about Maeve Brennan, a young fellow librarian at Hull.

Still, one way or another, Monica enabled Larkin to cherish his crucial essences – and to turn them into immortal poetry. Ovid’s dictum— Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor, “I see the better and approve it, but follow the worse”—might have been written with Larkin as its prize example. When in 1982 Monica fell downstairs in her Haydon Bridge cottage, he took her in and looked after her. In these letters, no less than in his poems, he stands rather nakedly before us only this time with a damp dish towel over his wrist, the room gone a bit too cold, thinking about listening to the radio from bed. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions.Yet Larkin can also respond with rapt delight to a Dickensian Christmas landscape, to early summer flowers (may, hawthorn, chestnut candles, cowparsley), or to birdsong at dawn—though early deafness was soon to isolate him. Yesterday I listened, in a cold chill, to Larkin himself reading “Aubade,” as no one else could, and now from outre-tombe: an unforgettable, and scary, experience. Against this, Larkin’s claim that the engagement was “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” sounds embarrassingly self-justificatory. The truth is that sexual intercourse began for him as early as the spring of 1945, when he was in charge of the public library at Wellington, a small town in Housman’s Shropshire.