Richard Bradford, The Importance of Elsewhere, Philip Larkin's Photographs (Francis Lincoln) The Complete Poems was an exhaustive edition of more Larkin poems than might have needed to see print. There have been the books of juvenilia, the fiction, the letters, the Letters to Monica, the Required Writing, then more of it and the jazz reviews. With three biographies and a number of memoirs by those who knew him, it could have seemed as if there was nothing else that needed doing but that was betting without his photography.
But this is a very welcome book and not quite what one could have expected. Richard Bradford makes it into a 'life', with chapters devoted to family, friends and girlfriends in a chronological order accompanied by a useful commentary. I expected full page reproductions of black and white studies of cemetries, country churches, Hull, the hinterland of Holderness as well as portraits of those he knew well but it is more personal and less art for art's sake than that.
The story, and the way it is presented, stresses Larkin's compartmentalised life, keeping his relationships separate as best he could, not only one girlfriend from another but all of them from Kingsley Amis, his friend with who he can be compared and contrasted. There was a hiatus in correspondance with Amis, more or less coinciding with more time being spent with Monica, who was not a favourite of the novelist's. And we appreciate how it wasn't clear in their early days which of them was going to be the poet and which the novelist, either.
Early impressions of Martin Amis compare him with Mick Jagger but the photographs, more tellingly, show Monica to be the most imposing and photogenic of Larkin's womenfriends, with Ruth Bowman, seen in 1947 aged 16, illustrating a time before teenagers as we have known them since the 1950's, looking particularly mature in retrospect.
Alongside Betjeman, Larkin is at ease; next to Ted Hughes, there is no need for the text to suggest that there was no chemistry between them. Larkin's cars are a stately Vanden Plas and a Singer- distinguished, choice vehicles seen on holidays in the British Isles, which were taken from Mull to Sark and places in between. Where, in Going, Going, he wrote of
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
this is one of the books in which he imagined such things lingering on. And it is a treasure.
With some gadgetry, he takes self-portraits, posing as he takes breakfast, for example, and for the most part is very much the bookish Oxford man but, in early middle age he presents a debonair image of one who knew what he was about. It has been remarked how girlfriends are pictured in similar poses, as if there is something sinister about that, but it takes some noticing and reviewers bringing such suggestions with them are importing them from other suspicions they nurture from elsewhere. Give the man a break.All biographies are sad, recounting the years of achievement and success before their subject is a household name, to be followed by the necessity of living up to it and then the inevitable demise but, once released from the tangled web of contingent relationships that Larkin allowed to build up around him, these photographs make an admirably understated album that describe how a very major figure can lead a relatively ordinary life, extraordinary though it may seem.
In the Foreword, Mark Hayward-Booth calls it, 'this first book of photographs by... Philip Larkin', so we can perhaps look forward to further volumes. There is less art in this one than there might have been. It is inward looking and probably not the selection that Larkin would have made himself. There are clearly more letters and archive material available but by now enough is known of the man to make publication of such material a recondite exercise. More of the photographs that he took on his bicycle rides or on holiday would be welcome, though, just to enjoy some good, old pictures rather than use them for yet more psychoanalysis.