John Sutherland - Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me

 

John Sutherland says he is, and we can take his word for it, 'the last living, breathing, still actively writing, witness to what Monica Jones actually was in her prime and in the flesh'. She was the long-term female companion, as much as any of them were allowed to be, of Philip Larkin, whose reputation as a great curmudgeon, one of the finest English poets of the C20th and, on the sly, a bit of a ladies' man, was outstaying the detriment the political incorrectness that they shared had brought to it.

Sutherland wants to set the record straight about Monica while he still can. I'm glad of it mainly because the stories of monochrome Oxford in the 1940's and 50's, the acerbic distain for certain colleagues, the inspirational lecturing and refusal to publish anything arrive as great refreshment after equally quickly taking in the lifestyle of needy promiscuity in leather bars pursued in San Francisco and New York by Thom Gunn in his letters.

I was very glad to be given, many years ago, a copy of Brenda Maddox's biography of Nora Barnacle which was, of course, equally about James Joyce. If we need to know all we possibly can about the artist as well as the art then such books as these are essential. Jane Glover's Mozart's Women and Alexander Larman's Byron's Women testify to an approach via the lady friend as if such biographical forensics had long overtaken Dubliners, the Magic Flute or The Whitsun Weddings as the proper focus of our attention.

I always liked Monica and she needed as little defending, for me, of the sort Larkin was provided with in James Booth's Life, Art and Love. It was not just that she wore a kilt to lecture on Macbeth, the 'squalor' that Anthony Thwaite found she had been living in before she died, it was much more that, as an academic in a time when academics were expected to find something to publish themselves about, she put nothing into print. There could have been a book about George Crabbe, we now know, but it didn't happen. She just wouldn't do it.

Not everybody liked her and why she devoted herself to Larkin, with his pathological distaste for permanent attachments, isn't obvious because she, like anybody, might have done better. Better than the duplicitous, awkward mummy's boy who happened to be the superb administrator of a university library who found himself also the finest and most frugal poet of his generation having first thought himself to be a novelist. 

She wasn't given much thanks for the devotion she came to give him. Never mind the portraits of her painted as Margaret Peel in Lucky Jim or Augusta Bax in the unpublished novel by Larkin, she is perceived as 'garrulous' by others and Larkin takes it upon himself to explain to her, from the distance of Belfast by letter, how to conduct herself in polite conversation. Sutherland is not so partisan that he leaves out the downsides, though, which are unmitigated anti-semitism, sympathy for far right politics and, less distressingly, an inappropriate dress sense on occasions.

Sutherland has had access to the uncatalogued letters of Monica to Larkin that are in the Bodleian Library so now, seeing everything from the opposite side, one is less inclined to indulge Larkin's highly compartmentalized life in which he keeps his girlfriends apart both geographically and as little aware of each other as he can. Only now do we see the full impact his conduct had on those he is 'close to', where 'close' doesn't seem the right word. He was, 

a maestro of the unprogressive relationship

and he keeps his women 'trapped in aspic'.

Monica is for many years relegated to second position, in Leicester, while Larkin enters into a different, less sexual, relationship with Maeve Brennan who he sees daily at work in Hull. She gets routine weekend visits when she's lucky, goes to the Lord's test and has a holiday in Sark but otherwise, seeing academic writing as the menu rather than the meal, she is landed with a heavy lecturing load in Leicester's English Dept while others make bigger names for themselves. She is never promoted.

Her desperation and loneliness lead her to excessive alcohol intake, loss of any feeling of self-worth and in her cottage at Haydon Bridge is plagued, with some justification, with worries about intruders. Her devotion to Larkin on the grounds of his great poetry comes at enormous cost and she doesn't achieve even the facsimile of marriage until their mutual need demands it and the end of the relationship with Maeve allows it, by which time Larkin has a new office romance.  While John Sutherland was well-placed to collect first-hand evidence during his time as one of Monica's star students and does a good job of evoking our sympathies for her, it is a dispiriting experience to come to terms with her story.

Larkin's reputation suffered after the Selected Letters and Andrew Motion's biography but seemed to be somewhat restored as his poetry was accorded a high place in the C20th canon and further letters showed him in a kinder light but this book undoes much of that re-habilitation. With Ted Hughes shown to be something of a monster at times in accounts of his life and Thom Gunn's letters revealing the extent of his incontinent promiscuity (which was entirely his own business), one is left to reflect if keeping to the text without reference to biographical detail wasn't a better idea after all but it's too late now.

While it's easy to say, ahh, poets - mad, bad and dangerous, etc., the only difference between poets and non-poets is that they write poems. Any other special distinction allowed to poets is only part of their own publicity and mystique. It's the selfishness, the idiosyncracy and disregard for others that one is left feeling sorry about but it's not only poets that are capable of that.

Monica lived on reclusively for seventeen years after Larkin's death. At the first Philip Larkin Society conference in Hull in 1997 we were told she was aware of what was happening but was unable to attend. Maeve was there, gentle and unassuming, on the guided walk round Hull. But Monica had attended all the doctoral inaugurations as consort in the later years when poetry had all but given Larkin up. She had provided the word 'blazon' for An Arundel Tomb and, in this account, been a big influence on the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse in all its Georgian, anti-Modernist retro-chic.

What survives of Larkin is some meticulously made, very fine poems but not Love. Whatever it is finally decided love is, it won't be that.