Bachelor poet Philip Larkin, known as the ‘Hermit of Hull’, took pains to present himself as an unassuming man, with little appetite for the trappings of a public literary life. His much loved poetry was brilliant and profound without being wilfully obscure. In his poem ‘Coming’ he wrote that his childhood was a ‘forgotten boredom’. He described his undergraduate years at Oxford during the war as austere and a world away from ‘Michael Fane and his fine bindings, or Charles Ryder and his plover’s eggs’. Throughout his life he toiled as a librarian in remote and unremarkable towns; places where, as he wrote in his poem ‘Here’, ‘only salesmen and relations come’. To establishment types, Larkin gave the appearance of being a levelheaded, deeply reassuring man, refreshingly without idealogical positions or perversity.

But Larkin’s posthumously published Selected Letters (1992) and and Andrew Motion’s biography Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life which arrived the following year, destroyed this image, and a far more complex and contradictory person emerged. One critic described this ‘new’ Larkin as a mix of ‘cheerful, despairing, frolicsome, often foul-mouthed, grouchy, self-assertive and self-deprecating’. Controversy was sparked by Larkin’s taste for porn (for which he went on buying expeditions to London), his gleeful racism and homophobia. There was his womanising and his misogyny: ‘Why should I spend five pounds taking a woman to dinner, when I can toss off in five minutes and have the evening to myself?’ he wrote to his friend Kingsley Amis. The literary left were alienated by his defence of English imperial values and his disdain for those ‘little subsidised socialist sods’ of the revolution. And when Thatcher came to power, he adored her. To him she was ‘The Leaderene’.

Larkin would have been slyly pleased that so many had had him all wrong – ‘stupid sods’, as he was apt to say. In any case, he had always felt misunderstood. In 1972 he had written to his old university friend Norman Iles from his bolthole in Hull:

For the last sixteen years I’ve lived in the same small flat, washing in the sink, & not having central heating or double glazing or fitted carpets or the other things everyone has, & of course I haven’t any biblical things such as wife, children, house, land, cattle, sheep etc. To me I seem very much an outsider, yet I suppose 99% of people wd say I’m very establishment & conventional. Funny, isn’t it?

Hull

When he was thirty-three, Larkin moved to Hull to run its university library. This northern coastal city was economically depressed but unpretentious. Surrounded by a hinterland of empty vistas and big skies, it is situated at the end of a railway line with the North Sea and Scandinavia beyond. Larkin wrote to friends that it was ‘a frightful dump, chilly and smelling of fish’. He complained to D.J. Enright, ‘I’m settling down in Hull alright. Every day I sink a little further.’

But the city was a good match for the lugubrious Larkin, who had an appetite for the grim and the grey. By 1961 it had almost won him over. ‘Here’ is a serene and moody evocation of the city and its country surrounds: its ‘thin’ and ‘thistled’ fields, ‘rich industrial shadows’ and the ‘widening river’s slow presence’. There is the ‘surprise of a large town’, its ‘spires and cranes’ and ‘ships up streets’. Some years later, Larkin called Hull his ‘lonely northern daughter’.

The 17th century metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell had grown up in Hull and was educated in the city, as Larkin acknowledged:

Poetry, like prose, happens anywhere. Hull got its clearance on this from Andrew Marvell many years ago, and if that singular Member of Parliament would have little in common with today’s ancient and modern city lodged unexpectedly in the triangle of flat country between the Humber and the North Sea it is still as good a place to write in as any. Better, in fact, than some. For a place cannot produce poems, it can only prevent them, and Hull is good at that. It neither impresses nor insists.

According to his biographer James Booth, the earlier years in Hull, were Larkin’s happiest. For the first eighteen of the thirty years he spent here until he died, he lived in a University flat at the top of a house that had been the American Consulate during the war. It was cold and sometimes noisy but its sitting room was a spacious attic with high arched windows overlooking a picturesque park. He would later commemorate this outlook in his poem ‘High Windows’. Once settled, he invited library staff two by two for afternoon teas on Sundays in a series of mini house warmings. In this flat he quickly fell into bachelor routines that suited him to perfection.

Thinking in terms of one

Is easily done—

One room, one bed, one chair,

One person there,

Makes perfect sense; one set

Of wishes can be met,

One coffin filled.

– ‘Counting’

Larkin was well liked amongst his staff at the library. He put people at their ease and followed their lives with sympathy and engagement. On days off he rode his enormous bike to local villages, taking photographs of churches and landscapes. He had an eye for beauty: ‘Everyday things are lovely to me’. And on Saturdays he cycled to Hull for his groceries, then on to the home of his friends Jean and George Hartley, who became the publishers of his second poetry collection: The Less Deceived. Jean Hartley spoke of her early impression of Larkin:

a dignified gent, slim, with dark hair (receding), very formally-suited, serious and quite unsmiling. His frequent ‘White Rabbit’ glances at his pocket-watch did nothing to put us at our ease […] With his chin well tucked in he paced up and down our small living-room, his tall body bowed to avoid a head-on collision with the light bulb.

In one letter he wrote that Sunday morning

consists of plodding across Pearson Park, past the children’s playground, & then on the other side I buy 4 Sunday papers of deep scurrility & vanish into a drab premises called the Queens Hotel, where in a fireless room I settle on an imitation-leather couch and drink a pint or two of pallid Hull beer, scanning headlines of rare promise (‘When the Girl Guide Was Late Home’) and sometimes being glowered at by a large yellow cat…

In his modest flat ‘on the edge of things’, Larkin wrote nearly all his remaining poetry including the collections The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974).

Family Affairs

The man who wrote the line: ’They fuck you up, your mum and dad’ was a loyal and long suffering son. His parent’s gloomy and loveless marriage had left him with ‘two convictions: that human beings should not live together, and that children should be taken from their parents at an early age.’

Larkin’s father Sydney was a cold disciplinarian who had risen up the ranks from office junior to Coventry City Treasurer. Sydney was a fan of the New Germany of the 1930s. He corresponded with Hitler’s Minister for Economics and had a statue of Hitler on the mantlepiece that performed a salute at the touch of a button (which he was only persuaded to remove after the city of Coventry was bombed to bits by the Nazis). Sydney took his son on two trips to Germany which sowed the seed for Larkin’s hatred of travel. He  said that being unable to understand the language had felt terrifying. Larkin’s background inculcated prejudices of all kinds and he failed to educate himself out of them. Yet his father also introduced him to the works of Joyce, Hardy, Katherine Mansfield, D.H. Lawrence and Oscar Wilde.

Larkin’s mother Eva was anxious and brow-beaten and her son loathed what he described as her ‘whining panicky grumbling maddening manner’. Sydney had the grace to die early but Eva lingered on, clingy, and unwell, to the age of 91. From his mid twenties, to his mid fifties, Larkin did his ‘dooty’, churning out chatty, innocuous letters twice a week which were designed to cheer her up. He visited regularly, and he lived with her for two years while working at Leicester university. But Larkin always felt guilty that he did not do enough to ease Eva’s loneliness. His fear of being entrapped by his mother could turn him nasty. He wrote to his lover Monica that no sooner had he arrived at his mother’s than:

I become snappy, ungrateful, ungracious, wounding, inconsiderate & even abusive, longing only to get away, muttering obscenities because I know she can’t hear them, refusing to speak clearly so that she can hear, refusing to make conversation or evince any interest in her ‘news’ or things she has to say.

He understood that his reaction was a ‘fight for emotional freedom against the enemy’, but the strength of his emotion took him aback. ‘Sometimes I wonder if I’m fond of my mother at all’, he wrote.

Women

This terror of entrapment spilled into Larkin’s relationships with women. In a documentary about his life, his first girlfriend Ruth Siverns, who became his fiancee, observed that whenever Larkin felt ensnared, he became unkind, and she began to realise that sharing a life with him would not be possible. Larkin told her he wanted to become a great writer. He opted for a ‘glittering loneliness’ and perfection of the work, rather than the life. Besides which, as he confided in a letter to a friend, at the prospect of enduring intimacy,

something unmeetable & immoveable rises up in me – something infantile, cowardly, regressive…Remote things seem desirable. Bring them close, & I start shitting myself.

Many years later Larkin looked back on that first relationship in ‘Wild Oats’ with a dismissive shrug:

…I was too selfish, withdrawn,

And easily bored to love.

Well, useful to get that learnt.

Larkin came to view marriage as an unfair trade of indifferent sex for a lifetime of domestic servitude. As he puts it in ‘Self’s the Man’:

He married a woman to stop her getting away

Now she’s there all day,

And the money he gets for wasting his life on work

She takes as her perk

To pay for the kiddies’ clobber and the drier

Monica Jones

By the time he moved to Hull, Larkin was deeply embroiled in a relationship with Monica Jones. They had met at the University of Leicester, where Monica was an English lecturer. She was flamboyant, remembered by one student as ‘loud, witty, inspirational’ and ‘amusingly  indiscreet, with the ever-present tang of malice’. Monica had a taste for matching her outfits to her lecture topics – ‘A touch of tartan when the topic was Macbeth: swinging pearls when it was Cleopatra.’  She was popular with her male students: ‘my boys’, as she called them, and drank with them at pubs in the evenings. ‘I’d never have expected I’d be a great success with a lot of young men but I can see that they all like me’, she boasted to Larkin.

Their relationship spanned three decades but although she wanted to marry Larkin, he kept her at arm’s length and she remained more than a hundred miles away in Leicester. Early on in their relationship she was cruelly lampooned in Kingsley Amis’s novel Lucky Jim (1954) as Margaret Peel, a drab, neurotic lecturer, needy and manipulative. And in an act of spite, Larkin betrayed his lover by providing his friend Amis with extra details about Monica’s appearance and mannerisms. She tried to make light of it – ‘some of it is really funny’ – and she seemed determined to absolve Larkin of any wrongdoing.

Over time, the differences in their lives created tension. After the publication of his second poetry collection The Less Deceived in 1955, Larkin gradually gained a significant public reputation, and his involvement in the construction of a bigger library gave him increased satisfaction at work. But Monica found her lecturing role a ‘hardship’. She was a perfectionist and remained reluctant to publish her work, so was never promoted beyond lecturer grade. It left Larkin puzzled: ‘I wonder why you’re finding your work hard’, he wrote to her.

Although Larkin had his prejudices, they were no match for Monica’s antisemitism and her extreme racism (she was an admirer of Enoch Powell), and she was not shy about sharing her opinions. He implored her to tone things down: ‘I do want to urge you, with all love and kindness, to think about how much you say & how you say it…’ Sexually they became increasingly mismatched. Monica complained that Larkin’s lovemaking was impersonal. Larkin found her lacking in ‘lustfulness’. In his letters he made suggestions about how they might spice things up but she never seemed to take the hint. As Christopher Hitchens observed: ‘What Larkin wanted was a Nora Barnacle and what he got was – Margaret Peel.’ Larkin blew hot and cold, broaching marriage several times and then fleeing in panic: his indecision was selfish and exasperating.

There was a marked conflict between Larkin’s rampant ambition and his uncontrollable physical desires. Some of these desires were satiated by his interest in pornography and he bonded with the writer Robert Conquest over their shared interest in girlie magazines, haunting the porn shops of Soho together.

And then there was Larkin’s affair with Maeve Brennan, a colleague in Hull, which lasted eighteen years. This was an unequal relationship both culturally and intellectually, but it caused Monica acute pain, almost tipping her at times into madness. There were other lovers too; Larkin’s stammer and shyness brought out a protectiveness in women, and his sophisticated tastes kept them interested. ‘It seems to me I am spoiling yr life in a hideously ingenious way’, he replied after receiving a particularly distraught letter from Monica. But in spite of the pain of his betrayals, she clung to Larkin and they fell into a lifetime of interdependence, alcoholism and ill health. Yet Monica was also a constant friend and a gifted woman, who sometimes gave Larkin thoughtful suggestions about his poetry. Of all the many people with whom he corresponded, it was in the letters to Monica that he seems most himself, without props or masks.

Over time, the literary success he had sought, for which he had sacrificed so much, began to feel hollow. He wrote to Monica:

Our lives are so different from other people’s, or have been, – I feel I am landed on my 45th year as if washed up on a rock, not knowing how I got here or ever had a chance of being anywhere else . . . Of course my external surroundings have changed, but inside I’ve been the same, trying to hold everything off in order to ‘write’. Anyone wd think I was Tolstoy, the value I put on it. It hasn’t amounted to much. I mean, I know I’ve been successful in that I’ve made a name & got a medal & so on, but it’s a very small achievement to set against all the rest.

Consolations

Jazz music represented a type of Dionysian escape for Larkin. He famously said that he could live a week without poetry, but not a day without jazz. By the age of eleven he had become a fan, and his love for it represents some of his warmest memories of childhood. On Sunday afternoons he would sit with a friend in his bedroom for hours, taking turns to wind the portable HMV. In the introduction to All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961 – 1971 he wrote:

For the generations that came to adolescence between the wars jazz was that unique private excitement that youth seems to demand. In another age it might have been drink or drugs, religion or poetry.

From 1961 to 1968 Larkin wrote jazz reviews for The Telegraph in which he extolled the virtues of the happy jazz of the twenties and thirties. He was venomous about the ‘new’ wave of bebop and  loathed John Coltrane and Miles Davis in particular. It dawned on him that modern jazz was a version of all that had alienated him in the arts. In the introduction to his collection of reviews in All What Jazz, he took the opportunity to make a loud attack on all modernism ‘whether perpetrated by Parker, Pound or Picasso’:

I am sure there are books in which the genesis of modernism is set out in full. My own theory is that it is related to an imbalance between the two tensions from which art springs: these are the tension between the artist and his material, and between the artist and his audience, and that in the last seventy-five years or so the second of these has slackened or even perished. In consequence, the artist has become over-concerned with his material (hence an age of technical experiment), and, in isolation, has busied himself with the two principal themes of modernism, mystification and outrage.

The writing and receiving of letters was important to Larkin: they kept him sane. He had fun with some by turning up his opinion up a notch or two for comedic purposes. And by exaggerating or venting, his tension was relieved, his life made more endurable. Some believe that a great deal of his reactionary impulses were designed to amuse his friends in private. The lifetime of correspondence with Kingsley Amis was particularly inflammatory, full of sexist in jokes, misogyny and school boy smut. But often his letters to men are full of bravado, designed to impress. Larkin had his closest relationships with women: with Monica, gentle Maeve Brennan, the elderly novelist Barbara Pym and art historian and curator Judy Egerton. There were many sides to him, and he was different with each of his regular correspondents. He seemed to dissolve into a certain personae to match the recipient: spinsterish and cosy, dirty old man, learned gentleman of letters, and so on. But undoubtedly letters brought him consolation throughout his frequently troubled life. The last line of his bleak ‘Aubade’ written at the end of his life reads:

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

As though their cargo could similarly heal and renew.

Poetry

Larkin once said: ‘I wanted to be a novelist in a way I never wanted to be a poet. Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.’ He wrote two novels in his twenties, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter  (1947) but he was unable to complete a third. These novels have been judged by critics to be highly original and successful. They contain the precise and startling phrasing for which Larkin’s poetry would become famous. Remembering them later he described them as ‘over-sized poems.’

By the age of thirty, he had set his sights on poetry:

I should like to write about 75-100 new poems, all rather better than anything I’ve ever done before, and dealing with such subjects as Life, Death, Time, Love and Scenery in such a manner as would render further attention to them by other poets superfluous.

Most critics would agree that he came close to this aim. For such a small body of work (just over one hundred pages of poetry) one critic wrote that he had produced ‘the most technically brilliant and resonantly beautiful, profoundly disturbing yet appealing and approachable body of verse of any English poet in the last twenty-five years.’ Larkin particularly enjoyed the observation made by one critic, D.J. Enright, which he shared with Monica, that ‘I persuade words & don’t bully them.’

He wrote about the everyday: rituals to do with children, marriage and family, in which he did not himself participate, much of it set in overcrowded and impoverished postwar Britain. He described actual experiences and the general shittiness of existence, how it can stunt, bewilder and infantilise us, yet still contain moments of beauty. Sometimes, as Clive James points out, the beauty is found in the despair, as in the poem ‘High Windows’. Larkin’s poems are full of the modern malaise: self-doubt, isolation, boredom, the shrinking of romantic hopes and dreams in the face of mundane reality. Larkin observed to one interviewer: ‘I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any…Deprivation is for me what daffodils were to Wordsworth’.

David Timms notes Larkin was

…an extraordinarily various and accomplished poet, a poet who [used] the devices of metre and rhyme for specific effects…His language is never flat, unless he intends it to be so for a particular reason, and his diction is never stereotyped. He [was] always ready…to reach across accepted literary boundaries for a word that will precisely express what he intends.

His father had introduced him to Thomas Hardy, whose verse taught him that as a modern poet he could use the language of the society around him. In common with Hardy he also connected experiences and feelings with detailed settings and used his poetry to examine his own life.

Larkin has been called the novelists’ favourite poet due to his ability to tell a story, often a complex one, in a concise form. Ian McEwan writes:

I have a careless theory that the poetry of Larkin has had a profound effect on the prose writing of my generation. There are many writers of my age who are steeped in Larkin and, like me, incorporate the cadences of his lines, often without being aware of it. His poems are part of my mental furniture. Yesterday I slipped outside to get a sandwich at lunchtime, the sun was out, I looked at some rowan trees across the street, and I thought – ah yes! – ‘The trees are coming into leaf / Like something almost being said’. That’s Larkin’s poem ‘The Trees’. It has some almost Shakespearian lines: ‘Yet still the unresting castles thresh / In fullgrown thickness every May’.

Writing Routine

Larkin’s routine was similar to the one described in his 1977 poem ‘Aubade’: ‘I work all day, and get half drunk at night’. He later described his daily routine to The Paris Review:

My life is as simple as I can make it. Work all day, cook, eat, wash up, telephone, hack writing, drink, television in the evenings. I almost never go out. I suppose everyone tries to ignore the passing of time – some people by doing a lot, being in California one year and Japan the next. Or there’s my way – making every day and every year exactly the same. Probably neither works.

He worked as a librarian for most of his life because he never believed he would be able to make a living from writing. ‘I was brought up to think you had to have a job, and write in your spare  time, like Trollope’, he said. In his years at the library in Hull the eleven staff he supervised swelled to over a hundred employees. It was work that left him ‘worn to a ravelling’. He envied those few writers, like his friend Kingsley Amis, who earned a living from it. ‘Its not his success I mind so much as his immunity from worry and hard work, though I mind the success as well’, he wrote to Monica. And he wasted no time in criticising those he thought were overrated: ‘At Ilkley literature festival a woman shrieked and vomited during a Ted Hughes reading. I must say I’ve never felt like shrieking.’

Although he had wondered what his life might have been like had he pursued writing full time, Larkin came to believe that the two hours of composition he reserved for the evenings after dinner and washing up was enough.

After that you’re going round in circles, and it’s much better to leave it for twenty-four hours, by which time your subconscious or whatever has solved the block and you’re ready to go on.

Decline

After 1974, Larkin could not seem to organise his usual two hours per night and he wrote very little. His drinking slowly sapped the life out of him. A.N. Wilson recalled that he once accompanied Larkin to his local off-licence in Oxford, but the cheap whisky he’d wanted to buy cost six or seven pence more than his own off-licence in Hull, and he baulked. Complaining to Wilson how much was taken in duty and tax, he said he was ‘buggered’ if he’d pay ‘a sodding penny more’ than he had to. ‘I drink so much of it Andrew, and it makes me so ill…’

For the last two years of his life Monica finally moved in with him. By that stage she was most unwell. There, in the house he had finally bought, they lived ‘in mutual collapse’. Larkin had always feared death terribly. He died from what he feared most: cancer of the oesophagus, the same disease as his father, and at the same age of sixty-three.

Since the initial wave of disapproval of Larkin the man, more than twenty years ago, his reputation as a poet has only grown. Larkin’s poetry continues to be taught at universities, and in Great Britain, he remains the most quoted and beloved poet of the twentieth century. Larkin caught the mood of the British in a language that was readily understood, with a voice that was ‘stubbornly indigenous’. As for the man himself, who would not rather have him ‘warts and all?’, as Andrew Motion asks.

The way Larkin lived might often look cramped, confined, melancholy and sometimes objectionable. But in terms that often seem almost miraculous, he also told us truths about ourselves. He is our poet, beautifully, complicatedly, truthfully, cleverly, plainly, even disagreeably our poet, and all these things together.

Perhaps final words should be left to Clive James, who, during his career as a literary critic, wrote at least six essays about Philip Larkin which he said did nothing more than ‘scratch the surface of his brilliance’. In a collection of his writings published just before his death, James wrote:

The turmoil of his psyche is the least interesting thing about him. His true profundity is right there on the surface, in the beauty of his line. Every ugly moment of his interior battles was in service to that beauty. That being said, his unique thematic originality should be remarked: no other great modern poet, not even Yeats, was so successful at making his own personality the subject, and this despite the fact that his personality was something that he would really rather not have been stuck with. He would rather have been Sidney Bechet.

Music

Sidney Bechet, Blue Horizon

Larkin wrote a love song to New Orleans, and to one of his favourite musicians: the saxophonist Sidney Bechet, which he included in The Whitsun Weddings (1964).

On me your voice falls as they say love should,

Like an enormous yes. My Crescent City

Is where your speech alone is understood,

And greeted as the natural noise of good,

Scattering long-haired grief and scored pity.

He goes on to describe Bechet’s vibrato ‘narrowing and rising’ as it ‘shakes, Like New Orleans reflected on the water’. Larkin felt that for himself and for others of his generation,’the great jazz players had the same emotional effect as perhaps a hundred years ago, the great poets had.’ ‘Blue Horizon’ was one of his favourite pieces and it was played at his memorial service in Westminster Abbey in 1986.

Connection

Larkin did have sensitive and empathic relationships with women. For nineteen years until her death, he corresponded with the novelist Barbara Pym. Both were shy and reserved, both admired each other’s writing, and for many years, Larkin offered Pym encouragement and assistance. In 1963, after publishing six novels with Jonathan Cape, she was told by her editor that they would not publish her next one, having chosen to focus on more contemporary novels instead. Larkin was aghast and on her behalf wrote a letter to his editor Charles Monteith at Faber & Faber:

I feel it is a great shame if ordinary sane novels about ordinary sane people doing ordinary sane things can’t find a publisher these days. This is the tradition of Jane Austen and Trollope, and I refuse to believe that no one wants its successors today. Why should I have to choose between spy rubbish, science fiction rubbish, Negro-homosexual rubbish, or dope-take nervous-breakdown rubbish? I like to read about people who have done nothing spectacular, who aren’t beautiful and lucky, who try to behave well in the limited field of activity they command, but who can see, in the little autumnal moments of vision, that the so called “big” experiences of life are going to miss them; and I like to read about such things presented not with self-pity or despair or romanticism, but with realistic firmness and even humour. That is in fact what the critics call the moral tone of the book. It seems to me the kind of writing a responsible publisher ought to support (that’s you Charles!).

The letter failed to persuade his editor. Meanwhile, Jonathan Cape made room for the Beatle John Lennon, whom Pym said resembled ‘a very plain middle-aged Victorian female novelist.’ Larkin kept suggesting potentially sympathetic editors, but her novel, An Unsuitable Attachment was rejected by twenty-one different publishers. ‘If only somebody would have the courage to be unfashionable’, she wrote to him.

It was not until 1977, three years before her death, that Barbara Pym’s luck changed when a list of the most underrated writers of the 20th Century was published in the Times Literary Supplement. The choices were made by well known writers of the day and Barbara Pym was mentioned twice, both by Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil. This broke the curse and all at once, Pym received an offer by Macmillan to publish her unpublished novels, and Cape began to reissue her earlier novels. Within a year she was being taught at universities and on the short list for the Booker Prize. After the Booker Prize dinner, she wrote to Larkin:

Don’t bother to answer this – I don’t expect or wish it. It’s only just a heartfelt expression of thanks from the most overestimated novelist of 1977.