Getting to Know Philip Larkin: The Life and Letters

Getting to Know Philip Larkin: The Life and Letters

T. J. Ross

Thwaite, Anthony, ed. Selected Letters of Philip Larkin. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1993.
Motion, Andrew. Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1993.

The publication in England of these two hefty volumes--Motion's Life and Larkin's Letters--roused a critical storm whose rumblings continue to this moment. Critics took turns in savaging Larkin for the sexist, racist, xenophobic, and--to round things off--hypochondriac mutterings that recur in the letters and that Motion also points to in the biography. One would have thought by this time the audience for poetry would have become inured to the blemished views of major writers. T. S. Eliot's leering anti-Semitism did little to impede the progress of his reputation and influence. Nor did Yeats's fascist blatherings block his standing as a poet.

The response to Larkin, in contrast, has been anything but tolerant as critics have lined up to bring him down. But while Eliot emerged in an age disenchanted with politics and politicians, ours is an age dominated by political concerns and sensibilities. That Larkin should have thumbed his nose at the party line and asserted instead reactionary views not far distant from those of Eliot or Yeats is now found intolerable. Yet Larkin's politics, no more than Eliot's, ever gets in the way of his astute literary views and judgments, and these provide some of the most rewarding passages in the letters. "To me he is what Shakespeare was to Keats," Larkin wrote of Lawrence, and Lawrence is referred to throughout the letters as a heroic ideal: In my opinion he is the greatest writer of the century and in many things the greatest writer of all time. He is so flexible, vivid, tender, and sharp that there is no one to reach him. But he had little more control over his writing than over his temper and the key of the matter is that he had more genius--more of God, if you like--than any man could be expected to handle. Of poetry Larkin notes: ". . . poetry consists in expressing . . . old and well worn ideas and emotions in new and exciting forms so that the emotion or idea emerges new again." And he prefers poems written in ". . . total explicit style. No obscurities." In a letter to John Betjeman, Larkin defines his criteria in selecting poems for the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse: "I have tried in the main to keep to poems that make me laugh, cry, or shiver and keep off the ones that make me feel I am at school or need a drink." This of course is the Housman line on true poems, making his beard bristle and, in this respect, is consistent with Larkin's literary reflexes.

As to his preferences among contemporaries, he writes to Kingsley Amis: ". . . You are the best living poet but two (guess who)." Larkin's views on matters other than literary also prove memorable: ". . . life is principally suffering unprovoked sorrow and joy." I wish that Motion had given us more than he does of Larkin's dealings with his literary peers like Amis, Robert Conquest, John Wain, with the views they shared, with what they promoted and what they resisted in the culture of their times. For the exceptional person in any field, nothing proves more personal than his professional interests and doings. To know the professional is to know the man. If he does not give us enough of the literary man, Motion gives us far more than enough of Larkin's romantic dealings, on where he lunched with Maeve or weekended with Monica. The most important woman in Larkin's life seems to me to have been his mother, about whom he often complains, yet to whom he remained devoted and attentive throughout her long life. Motion also treats fully Larkin's career as head librarian at the University of Hull, offering detailed accounts of the university politics and intrigues that Larkin was drawn into. In his librarian's role Larkin was respected and successful, and he took deep satisfaction in this work. From first to last, however, Motion's picture of Larkin remains curiously formal. He never gets beneath the surface, so that his account remains usefully informative without plumbing any revealing depths.