Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

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It is some years since I studied Philip Larkin’s poetry with any care, and I decided at this point that the time had come to reread his entire output. In 1950 Larkin moved to Belfast, and thence to Hull, while Monica remained in Leicester, becoming by turns his correspondent, lover and closest confidante, in a relationship which lasted over forty years until the poet's death in 1985. Still, on the negative side, we register Larkin's solemn exasperation, and his suppressed hostility and contempt.

Philip Larkin and Monica Jones at the memorial service for Sir John Betjeman, Westminster Abbey, London, 1984. In fact, the photograph was taken in 1960, three years after Harold Macmillan declared that most Brits “had never had it so good. 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.I found myself watching out eagerly, as I read, for her next contribution to the exchange: ripping up Philip’s vague claims to socialism; pinpointing D. For Philip Larkin to display a talent for sexual intrigue would be roughly as surprising as someone getting work as a juggler without being able to tie his shoelaces. In his depressed Eeyorish way, he may have merely been announcing (as his second stanza suggests) his own failure to be born at the right time so as to embrace a sexual revolution that was both reasonably safe (pills, diaphragms, no AIDS yet, and so on) and not conditional on marriage; but in fact anyone could be forgiven for the assumption that, owing to earlier social pressures, he was portraying himself as a late developer who only came to the full joys of sex at the ripe old age of forty-one. Larkin could be frightening too (and without much provocation): "No, I really can't do anything at all – it really is disgusting, I feel tearful with rage – why must [the landlady] leave her door open so that her filthy radio floods the whole house? Thwaite quotes sparingly but tellingly from her letters (some of which were two or three times the length of this review), in which she also emerges as a tenacious literary critic, and an exceptionally close reader of Larkin's works in progress: it is startling to see how hard and how gingerly he struggled with poems that we now regard as etched in flint ("Church Going", say, or "The Whitsun Weddings").

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It's in discussing the responsibilities of those activities and those he came in contact with while living the life of an active poet and reviewer that some of his famous irritability becomes evident.

But these are turbid waters, thick with suspended matter, and go far deeper than Larkin's admittedly preternatural indolence. 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.But there was a Larkinian peculiarity that filled him with almost lifelong incredulity and dismay: Philip and the women. He frequently wrote her about the progress of what he was working on and about the activities involved in getting published and giving readings. In one quote from September of 1962, for instance, she displayed an overall sadness about life and what she expressed as a sense of futility.

In addition, as is well-known, Larkin acquiesced and indeed connived in Amis's merciless portrait of Monica (as Margaret Peel) in Lucky Jim (1954). There is something of Mass Observation about them - reflections on life, literature, domestic chores and personal feelings .If he was really all those ists, this book is a vivid demonstration of why such labels are meaningless rubbish. It was only about 1955, after he'd taken the head librarianship at Hull, that he began to grumble in letters to her.