Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

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There are flashes in the early poems—in the final stanza, for example, of “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album,” encapsulating “a past that no one now can share,/No matter whose your future; calm and dry,/It holds you like a heaven, and you lie/Unvariably lovely there,/Smaller and clearer as the years go by.

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? In an unpublished memoir (quoted in Motion's biography), Larkin wrote: "When I try to tune into my childhood, the dominant emotions I pick up are, overwhelmingly, fear and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 . They are what justifies—if justification be needed—this long inquiry into the patterns of their author’s life. Photograph: Express/Getty Images Philip Larkin and Monica Jones at the memorial service for Sir John Betjeman, Westminster Abbey, London, 1984.In Dostoevsky's Demons (1872) Varvara Petrovna accuses a portly valetudinarian bachelor of being "an old woman" – a verdict she promptly refines to "an old bag". Ovid’s dictum— Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor, “I see the better and approve it, but follow the worse”—might have been written with Larkin as its prize example. Butler said that anyone who was still worrying about his parents at 35 was a fool, but he certainly didn't forget them himself, and I think the influence they exert is enormous . He is a bald vulture sitting on a crag; a plant in a pot that nobody waters; an egg sculpted in lard, with goggles. Relaxed, intimate, affectionate and often very funny, they chronicle, day by day, almost every aspect of Larkin's his poetry and the events that shaped it, his work as a librarian, his friendships, and his insights on literature, from Hardy and DH Lawrence to WH Auden and Kingsley Amis.

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.What tends to confirm such a verdict is that the pattern—carrying on intimate relationships with two women at the same time, unable or unwilling to decide between them, to the long-term exasperation and misery of both—was, a decade later, to repeat itself exactly, when Monica, the newcomer in the earlier affair, became the maîtresse en titre (whom Larkin found endless reasons not to marry, but could not renounce), and found their relationship now threatened by her lover’s budding romance with Maeve Brennan, his sub-librarian in Hull. Maeve represented all that he most needed, on his own account, to escape from: conventional family life, a Catholic emphasis on numerous children, suburban innocence. Innocent, growingly devoted (their on-and-off affair lasted over eighteen years), and at first never letting this highly sensual relationship reach the point of actual intercourse (she was a firm Catholic), Maeve represented the most dangerous challenge to Monica’s inherently precarious position. 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. The truth is that sexual intercourse began for him as early as the spring of 1945, when he was in charge of the public library at Wellington, a small town in Housman’s Shropshire.

What services could they perform that might be traded off against a certain diminution of that freedom? He said of Mansfield's journal that it made readers "more sensitive, more receptive, happier than before".

She accepted much else: his emotional sluggishness, and his morbid dread of effort in any sphere except poetry. Yesterday I listened, in a cold chill, to Larkin himself reading “Aubade,” as no one else could, and now from outre-tombe: an unforgettable, and scary, experience. One of these, extended over years, involved systematic obscene (and sometimes very funny) alterations to the text of Iris Murdoch’s novel The Flight from the Enchanter, a nice reconciliation of childish fantasies with adult dirty-mindedness. Nor does his dislike for venturing anywhere beyond the British Isles—a trait that he shared with literary characters as diverse as John Betjeman and Kingsley Amis, not to mention Nancy Mitford’s father, Lord Redesdale, the model for Uncle Matthew in The Pursuit of Love, who was fond of saying that “abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends. For Larkin she is his rabbit, his “dearest bun” (and often represented as such, aproned, in surprisingly skillful little sketches included with his letters).