On the publication of Letters to Monica, Anthony Thwaite pre-empted any concerns about the reading of private letters by saying that Larkin was aware he was 'writing for posterity' and the letters would be read 'over his shoulder' by an audience beyond Monica Jones. The precedent of publishing letters was set long before Larkin's generation. Whether James Booth can stretch the same reasoning to cover Larkin's letters to his mother, with a few to his sister and an appendix of some replies, is a further question.Had the three volumes of letters now available been published in reverse order, his reputation would have gone from the quaintly domestic, through thoughtful erudition to the cartoon reactionary with a complete checklist of poltical incorrectness and it would by now be at its low point. As it is, the letters have become gentler as the books have been published and so some, if not all, of the damage done by the Selected Letters has been repaired.
From Oxford and through his junior library positions to the eventual Chief Librarianship at Hull, Larkin writes home very conscientiously, providing an account of his life in tiny detail sometimes on an almost daily basis. They are written from an England of Rain Stopped Play, noisy neighbours, drab Sundays and bad railways not quite unrecognizable by now but as gone as it was predicted to be in the poem Going, Going. They are illustrated with relevant drawings of creature characters representing himself and his mother, Eva, and addressed to 'my dearest old creature', and long before one reaches the end one is likely to have surrendered to their fey whimsicality and recovered from finding them mawkish.
If there are occasional apologies for unspecified outbursts of bad temper on visits 'home', Philip and Eva are mutually dependent with their minor anxieties seeming enormous to them and she can't have been easy, worrying more about stormy weather than is reasonable. She is, however, a discriminating reader and, give or take misplaced apostrophes, clear and literate. The same could be said of Sydney, his father, whose 'discrimination' might have gone further than it ought, but he dies in 1948 leaving Eva on her own for a further twenty-six years.
Apart from being the mostly quaint and often endearing read that it is, one reason to help justify Prof. Booth's great dedication in producing this book is how it augments his biography, PL, Life, Art and Love, in further revealing a sympathetic side to Larkin. Usually derided as 'the hermit of Hull' and 'miserabilist', he got about these islands and enjoyed himself enough in his appreciation of some of the finer things. Martin Amis went to unnecessary lengths in producing a Selected Poems, in 2011, the only point of which seemed to be its introduction in which the brooding bad boy of contemporary English fiction derided his father's mate for living in Hull, as if London, anything more cosmopolitan or the world were braver and preferable options. But, even now, it's still not possible to go to China and come back the same day and so lots of us still aren't going to bother.
Although clearly aware of his pre-eminent status in English poetry, his daily concerns are more with buying tweed; the garden, eventually; seeing his mother; good, bad or indifferent hotel food, obviously gin and the value of having time to himself. This compares with the fixations of the Ted Hughes letters which, from memory, were trying to arrange collector's editions of his poems to be published on auspicious days as indicated by horoscopes and lamenting the carnage that he saw happening around him without noticing that it was him that had caused it.
But Larkin has a defence mechanism in place that doesn't allow him to like anyone until he has reason to. Stammering, bookish and reluctant to dance, it is less easy to impress with quiet erudition up against opposition like Amis, pere et fils, and the likes of Hughes, who he understates as,
as famous as I am, only younger: a great thug of a man, never does any work
and so it is these disparaging assessments that make for such entertainment, given that he met Auden, Iris Murdoch, obviously Betjeman and Cecil Day-Lewis a number of times and, it seems, Agatha Christie plus, perhaps top of his own charts, the Queen.
He 'loathes' Norman Iles at Oxford in 1940, which came as an early shock to me because I met Mr. Iles some 39 years later and one couldn't wish to meet a nicer bloke, but it is the shy person's defence against that which they can't deal with and he's fine with Norman henceforth.
The DeputyLibrarian at Hull, the unfortunate Arthur Wood, is a 'goggling little ass' in 1960 and never improves in Larkin's bilious estimation of him; I expect they are a rum lot is his expectation of some landladies who take in students that he has to speak to, and in 1975, at the Ilkley Literature Festival, having shown up for the presentations,
M & I legged it before the poetry-reading began,
which might well have been wise. In later life, with Monica, he is admirably worried about being met on the stairs of a hotel, sneaking a bottle of booze up to their room rather than have to pay bar prices and be sociable.
All of which is traditional, English sitcom or postcard humour except this is in the life of the finest poet of his generation until, it begins in the early 1960's and even insinuates itself into these letters, James Booth is not such an apologist that he can leave out evidence of the worst bits.
Up to a point, one can accept that the 1960's and 70's were the age of On the Buses, Love Thy Neighbour and casual racism that was then a staple of mainstream humour ahead of any Corbynite fundamentalism or the fact that it is by now simply illegal. Larkin wasn't the only one who failed to grasp the benefits of immigration and thus regarded West Indians as some kind of undefined threat, despite his extensive collection of 'negro' jazz records. One tries to forgive as much as one can until,
in 1970,
I regret the banning of cricket as a giving-in to forces of disruption more baleful than apartheid could ever be,
where, in so few words, he undoes all the much good work put together in the rest of the book.
We know he goes to Lords for test matches, eventually achieves membership of the MCC, but he has missed the whole point of Basil D'Oliveira, and that undermines all the minute detail of a photograph of some darned socks (Good Grief); the complaints about the weather; the genius poker hand he played, keeping Monica, Maeve and Betty onside and somehow his mother understanding; the brilliant administration of the library and, meanwhile, knocking out not just these letters and all the others but the diaries we must now be becoming more grateful to Betty Mackareth for destroying, and the poems, too.
No more is necessary, no more is needed if all we would like is some background to the poems without finding ourselves implicated as weird voyeurs into the life of someone who regarded himself as private.
It is a hugely enjoyable read, meticulously edited to distraction by Prof. Booth, but not the first book on any list of required Larkin reading. Once you've read the poems, you want the Required Writing.
Just because someone writes like an angel, that doesn't mean they're an angel. Like George Orwell said, and Larkin concurs, good writers aren't ipso facto good people. I was saving that line up for Shakespeare but I'll give it a little rehearsal here now.