Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

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In an unpublished memoir (quoted in Motion's biography), Larkin wrote: "When I try to tune into my childhood, the dominant emotions I pick up are, overwhelmingly, fear and boredom . This has elements of both happy ending and nemesis – the belated commitment coming without dignity or real freedom of choice.

I had never been as enthusiastic about him as most of my friends: in particular, I had never seen how the author of sour or bloody-minded squibs such as “The Life With a Hole in It,” “The View,” “This Be the Verse,” “Self’s the Man,” or even “High Windows” could come to be described, by many, as Britain’s “best-loved” twentieth-century poet. Photograph: Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images Philip Larkin and Monica Jones at the memorial service for John Betjeman at Westminster Abbey, June 1984. Either way, I'm glad now he had all his other correspondence and his diaries shredded when he died - the more I know of the artist the less I like him. Philip and Monica were contemporaries at Oxford—where they both got Firsts in English, but never knew each other—between 1940 and 1943. The whole episode is immensely revealing of Larkin’s remarkable capacity for producing self-exculpatory reasons for dithering endlessly between two ongoing affairs.When in 1982 Monica fell downstairs in her Haydon Bridge cottage, he took her in and looked after her.

Still, on the negative side, we register Larkin's solemn exasperation, and his suppressed hostility and contempt. 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. 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. Above Monica’s head on that wraparound dust jacket is a quotation from a review by Hilary Spurling, not normally given to hyperbole, who remarks that “what beats most steadily between the lines is the depth and strength of his commitment which makes other more eventful lives seem essentially frivolous, if not empty, by comparison.

But these are turbid waters, thick with suspended matter, and go far deeper than Larkin's admittedly preternatural indolence.

Philip Larkin is the best-loved poet of the last 100 years, and these irresistibly readable letters reveal the life and personality more intimately than ever before . Since Amis had, notoriously, modeled the appalling Margaret Peel of Lucky Jim directly on Monica, and become filthy rich as a result, this may be understandable, but it does give one pause for thought.Monica is a professor of English at another college and they have a long distance relationship for decades. Her personification quickly became that of a rabbit, an endearment he continued their entire relationship. Faber Members get access to live and online author events and receive regular e-newsletters with book previews, promotional offers, articles and quizzes. We get neat parodies of Chaucer’s Pardoner and Manciple, a contemptuous attack on Leavis (“Stupid little sod, the ideas rattling in him like peas”), a paean of praise for Robert Graves’s notoriously anti-conventional Clark Lectures, The Crowning Privilege, and quite a few unannotated quotations, ranging from the Elizabethan Chidiock Tichborne’s verses written the night before his execution (“And now I live, and now my life is done”) to the irritated exclamation of the little Japanese baroness in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies: “Oh, twenty damns to your great pig-face.