Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

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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. In Maeve’s company he scrupulously avoided any touch of the four-letter words and pornographic high jinks he so relished with Monica or Kingsley Amis, so that when Maeve was faced with this side of him after his death, her initial reaction was one of shocked astonishment. 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. Philip and Monica were contemporaries at Oxford—where they both got Firsts in English, but never knew each other—between 1940 and 1943.

These words were written after more than a decade in which, as a librarian (despite his barrage of self-deprecatory throwaway remarks), he had shown himself conscientious, inventive, well-informed, hard-working, and even somewhat professional, while midwifing the first of the postwar British university libraries to birth, something that no “book-drunk freak” could ever have done. 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. 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.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. His unobtrusive cuts give a shape to the letters, bringing Larkin's clear-eyed observations of love, work and his surroundings to the fore.

Photograph: Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images Philip Larkin and Monica Jones at the memorial service for John Betjeman at Westminster Abbey, June 1984. 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. When in 1982 Monica fell downstairs in her Haydon Bridge cottage, he took her in and looked after her.What Larkin ruefully described as his “misengagement” dragged on long after he and Monica met in 1946, and was only resolved, amid emotional stress all round, in 1950—Monica and Philip became lovers that summer. How much of the impetus for Moby-Dick (“a kind of fishy Dickens”) came from “sublimated liking-to-talk-to-sailors”? Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today. Fascinating insight into the life of poet Philip Larkin revealed through a long-term correspondence.

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. The dithering and wavering, of which there is a good deal, becomes at least understandable in the light of such dark fantasies.

At first sight, this mise-en-scène reminded me of those penny-pinching British vacations, so popular with students, in the years immediately after World War II, when austerity flourished, rationing remained in force, and foreign currency was severely restricted, so that the Channel Islands were often the nearest that hopeful holiday-makers could get to Going Abroad.

Philip Larkin was a committophobe's committophobe, king of the ditherers, and his inadequacy was the only thing he was sure of. 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. It's not really fair of me to make this 'parade of extraordinary frankness' - I don't like it myself - I wish I could decide things, fiercely and for good, and say them - instead of this almost-Russian verbiage, concealing I don't know what, probably nothing but funk. spends the time thinking about next summer's thunder-storms, gas taps, electricity switches, dark clouds, and I don't know what.The 1992 volume of Selected Letters (also edited by Anthony Thwaite) hurt Larkin's reputation by giving space to his seedy side, shown particularly in letters to Robert Conquest, with whom he shared tastes in pornography, and Kingsley Amis. Thwaite quotes from her side of the correspondence only to provide explanatory context, but even so it's obvious that she wasn't any sort of pushover, and 20-page letters from her were not unusual. Far from avoiding relationships with women, he undertook two long-lasting major affairs, as well as quite a few other dalliances on the side, that absorbed an enormous amount of his time and energy.