Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

Product Information

She accepted much else: his emotional sluggishness, and his morbid dread of effort in any sphere except poetry. The process was far advanced, if not complete, by 1982, when I spent a long evening in their company.

To lovers of the poetry, this selection of correspondence that lasted forty years is completely fascinating - not just for the inadvertent light it shines on the poetry but also for the elucidation of Larkin's own taste and his opinion of his own work and worth. 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 wrote in September 1959: "I do deeply feel 'somehow' there is a rabbit there too, doing the things you do; even lecturing on Hopkins. I found that this added depth to some of the poems I have studied, and I did enjoy finding out a bit more about Larkin himself, the man behind the poetry.He then adds, magnanimously, “At least your sacrifice of yourself to me was superior to frog-marching me or anyone to the altar rails. Philip Larkin met Monica Jones at University College Leicester in autumn 1946, when they were both twenty-four; he was the newly-appointed assistant librarian and she was an English lecturer.

In all his relationships, then or later, it was Larkin’s own interests that were, almost exclusively, uppermost in his mind: how far did Ruth, or Monica, or his mother, further or hinder his ideal of unencumbered freedom? From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer. It would have been intriguing, in an awful way, to find out what Philip’s unspoken thoughts about his “dearest bun” really were; but after his death Betty Mackereth, his faithful secretary to the end, shredded and then incinerated some thirty volumes of his diaries. This notion took something of a beating with the first selections from Larkin’s letters to be published, and Motion’s uncomfortably penetrating biography made short work of his worst self-exculpatory posturing. 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.

Not only are they funny, sad and true; they are also charmingly replete with 1950s detail, evoking a world of curry-powder concoctions, rasping gas fires, and long but civilised train journeys. Still, one way or another, Monica enabled Larkin to cherish his crucial essences – and to turn them into immortal poetry.