WITH 2010 being the 25th anniversary of Philip Larkin's death and many making plans to celebrate the life of this remarkable poet it seemed an opportune time to read about the kind of person he was and the life he led. Andrew Motion's account is just one of several biographies written in the period since his passing.
Larkin was a man of conflicting emotional needs who sought solitude to write while at the same time being desperate to surround himself with a number of close friends onto whom he could offload his life's frustrations. This fact, in itself, was a source of annoyance to him and probably lay at the root of why, as an adult, he cultivated two distinctly separate personas: the melancholy, insecure, sexually frustrated, complaining private one and the public one in which he displayed the self-mocking wit and quiet charm which many knew him for.
He was born in Coventry in 1922 to Sidney, a city treasurer and admirer of Hitler and Eva who, by all accounts, was rather ill-equipped to deal with life and a source of irritation to her husband as well as her children. Philip's sister Catherine, known as Kitty, some ten years older than her brother gets relatively little mention in this book.
Apart from his time at university and the five years when he worked as librarian at Queens University, Belfast Larkin spent all his life in the Midlands. He attended first King Henry VIII School in Coventry before going up to St. John's College, Oxford where his friends and contemporaries included Kingsley Amis and Bruce Montgomery. He was able to complete his degree uninterrupted by the War, having failed his army medical due to poor eyesight. He graduated in 1943 with First Class Honours in English.
Larkin's first volume of poems The North Ship was published in 1945, but he had initially intended becoming a novelist and after graduating had returned to his parental home and spent the next few months working on his first. Jill was published in 1946, followed a year later by his second novel, A Girl in Winter. When the Ministry of Labour wrote to him enquiring what he was doing to find work he picked up the day's edition of the Birmingham Post and successfully applied for the position of librarian in Wellington, Shropshire, which he saw advertised there. Although he found that particular post as well as the town itself dull and uninspiring, at least to begin with, it was to set him on the career path, besides writing, which he followed for the rest of his life and came to have a great aptitude for.
After three years at Wellington Larkin went on to become assistant librarian at the University College of Leicester. It was here that he studied for his professional librarianship examinations becoming an Associate of the Library Association in 1949. Thus qualified he was able to apply for the post of sub-librarian at Queen's in Belfast. It turned out to be a wise move, both professionally and personally. He made a number of good friends there and perhaps because he was having to fend for himself for the first time, gained greater confidence in himself. Although he would always find social situations difficult he became more adept at handling them and also learnt how to control his stammer better. In Belfast, too, he was able to establish a writing routine which he later described as having been the most satisfactory of his life.
"They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They don't mean to, but they do", is one of Philip Larkin's most quoted lines, but the same poet who wrote those words also penned An Arundel Tomb, one of the most moving poems in the English language. W.H. Auden, Yeats and Baudelaire were influences on Larkin's early work. His true lightning moment came, however, when he read the Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy. He instantly knew this was the type of poet he wanted to be: purveyor of moments from ordinary, everyday life, unadorned and free of fancy imaginary. For the popularity he now enjoys it is surprising to realise that his output was fairly small, amounting only to seven volumes of poetry. His rise to eminence came in 1955 with the publication of The Less Deceived. There followed numerous awards and honorary doctorates, but his shyness made the duties which came with these honours a burden and Larkin resented the amount of time they took up. His passion for jazz had begun early on and he'd been able to share it with some his university chums. In 1961 Donald Mitchell, the music critic of The Daily Telegraph, offered him the position of jazz critic on the paper and over the next decade Larkin's monthly columns reviewing new releases and trends were an ideal outlet for his musical interests. In the autumn of 1968 he collected the articles he'd written thus far into a book, published two years later as All What Jazz by St. Martin's Press. An updated edition by Faber and Faber, which included the remaining essays, appeared in 1985.
Larkin never married, saying "two people can live as stupidly as one", but he did have several relationships. The first, begun in Wellington, was with Ruth Bowman who, several years his junior, was still at school when they met. Their affair ended in 1948 when it became clear to both of them that Philip would never marry her. In 1955 he became chief librarian at Hull University. It was his achievement here and his success in rebuilding and developing the library that he became best known for in professional terms. His second relationship with Maeve Brennan, a librarian at the University began in 1960 after he had helped her with her studies towards the librarianship examinations. Theirs was the liaison that came closest to culminating in marriage, but in the end it was his relationship with Monica Jones, whom he met at the age of twenty four while at Leicester, that was to be the most enduring of all. For many years they took annual holidays together, usually to the Isle of Sark or Scotland, but they continued to keep separate homes. In September 1961 Monica bought a cottage at Haydon Bridge in Northumberland where Larkin would occasionally visit her. Only towards the end of his life when Monica became ill and increasingly frail did he invite her to move in with him in order that he might be better able to look after her. His own health was rapidly deteriorating by now, but doctors took some time to find the cause of his condition. He died of cancer of the oesophagus on 2nd December 1985.
On the face of it Andrew Motion's portayal appears honest enough, but as well as being one of three executers of Larkin's literary estate (Anthony Thwaite and Monica Jones being the others) Motion was also a close friend. One has to wonder, therefore, how objective he really is since others, while not denying his talent as a writer, have described Larkin in rather less sympathetic terms. I look forward, over the coming months, to reading one or two of the other biographies currently available in order that I may be able to compare and hopefully gain a realistic picture of the man who, in a recent poll, was voted the nation's most popular poet.
REF. Philip Larkin : A Writer's Life, a biography by Andrew Motion
Publisher: Faber and Faber (May 1993), 570 pages, hb
01/01/10
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