Philip Larkin - Letters to Monica

Philip Larkin, ed. Anthony Thwaite, Letters to Monica (Faber)

I was grateful to Anthony Thwaite at the Cheltenham Festival event for his reassurance that it was alright to read a book like this. He would say that, wouldn't he, but he points out that it was only the diaries that Larkin said should be destroyed, that he appointed two literary executors and that some of the letters mention the posterity that they now belong to, so he was well aware that we would be reading these letters over Monica's shoulder. So that's alright, then.

The primary justification for reading the private letters of a writer must be the background and context they provide to the primary texts. After that, some biographical detail might shed further light on the work and after that we descend into mere voyeurism as we are fed more detail on what it might have been like being Philip Larkin. And indeed, we do get plenty of first-hand commentary by Larkin about what he's reading, off the cuff opinions of his contemporaries and what he most likes (Hardy and Handel, by some way). But, as the years go by, the relationship with Monica comes under greater scrutiny, we see him ineffectual, indecisive and treating her quite badly and, as far as insight into their relationship goes, we might have been spared such letters as that on page 339, which I'm not going to quote here.

If these letters had been published before the Selected Letters (1992), the outcry at his misanthropy, racism, misogyny and Thatcherism might not have been so shrill. First impressions often do count for a lot, though, and many who used the evidence of those letters to damn Larkin are unlikely to rush to this book to find evidence of a more likeable man to balance them. He is kindly, unassuming, dithering really, and loves Beatrix Potter's books, almost to the extent of becoming an animal rights campaigner and good for him. It's nearly a charming, Pooter sort of life in the library, going home to listen to jazz or Handel and write to his girlfriend, well into his fifties. He listens to the test match, goes for a bicycle ride on Sunday and reads avidly.

But if likeable in that sense, one might have found him infuriating in person. Monica comes across as almost a saint in tolerating his lack of commitment and feeble apologies. It's not only marriage he can't commit to. The highlight of the book for me could be the anxiety that hiring a radio set caused him in 1955,

I felt terrified in the shop, just at the prospect of signing an agreement.

You can't see Hughes or Gunn struggling with that for long.

When viewing a flat he gets the people downstairs to put their radio on at normal volume to check if he can hear it. Which is a good idea, but fussy.

His backward-looking aesthetic is captured in the letters he writes while editing the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse. He doesn't really want to include anybody born after 1930 as well as wanting to exclude a list of Fuller, Day Lewis, Grigson, Gascoyne, Barker while he twice quotes Frances Cornford with admiration. A side of modern jazz 'sounded like a ferry boat trying to get out of a piano factory'.

The book confirms more of the received impression of Larkin than it does to alter it. He is genuinely happier on his own and forever under pressure from women, whether it be his mother 'a bottomless jar in which to pour sympathy, common-sense, & understanding', Monica or one of his other girlfriends, about who he is not really very apologetic.

Monica's letters might have been more impressive, apparently stretching to twenty pages on occasions, and she does seem to need him, but there must come a time when the scrutiny of a quiet, stammering man's inadequacies has gone on long enough and as much added in and around the frugal poetic output to satisfy anybody's curiosity. This book does contain entertaining and enlightening writing and is as essential to the Larkin admirer as the two biographies, the other letters and the juvenilia. What has often looked like scraping the barrel in the past has generally come to be regarded as worthy of our attention. Some of our gratitude goes to Anthony Thwaite for the fine scholarship in five year's working on this volume but we owe as much to Betty Mackereth, the secretary who shredded the diaries.