LETTERS: Letters to MonicaBy Philip Larkin, edited by Anthony Thwaite Faber/Bodleian Library, 475pp. £22.50
IT USED to be so simple. Ted Hughes was the baddy of contemporary English poetry, and Philip Larkin the goody. Hughes was the tall, dark shaman embroiled in the suicides of his genius wife, Sylvia Plath, and his mistress, Assia Wevill. Larkin was the tall, lovable bachelor-librarian, the gloomy but droll Eeyore who quipped, “Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.”
Letters changed everything. Hughes's Birthday Letters, his best-selling verse memorial to Plath, and a 700-page volume of his correspondence won him enormous surges of sympathy and respect. By contrast, Larkin's Selected Lettersand Andrew Motion's biography of the poet brought odium down on his bald head like a ton of library books. Eeyore mutated to ogre. "Philip Larkin: the minor talent of a foul-mouthed bigot" blared a representative front-page announcement in the Times; he became an "emotionally-retarded misanthropist", "a petty-bourgeois fascist" whose life and work exuded "a repellent, smelly, inadequate masculinity". Racist, misogynist, pornophile: the insults piled up like charges in a Soviet show trial.
If Hughes was a shaman, the shamed Larkin was a scapegoat. Where the ashes of the Hughes-Plath relationship were once raked over obsessively in Mr Bleaney-style student bedsits, Larkin’s character became fodder for amateur psychologists as thistles were for Eeyore. Having led the most sequestered of lives, working as librarian of Hull University and renting an attic flat from his employer, refusing to give readings or accept visiting professorships, his life was suddenly thrown open: an unstately home through which hordes of gawkers traipsed.
Larkin’s extreme views cannot be lightly dismissed. But his most offensive outbursts were largely confined to three correspondences: those with Kingsley Amis (a lamentably philistine and coarsening influence from their Oxford days onwards) and a couple of right-wing acquaintances, Robert Conquest and Colin Gunner. A quintessential chameleon poet (to adopt Keats’s term), Larkin invariably adopted the colouring, political and otherwise, of his correspondents, as he aimed to please and entertain them. His earliest publications included two novels; having struggled in vain to maintain his fictional output, the sole remaining outlet for this talent lay in the many different characters he presented to his friends. A voluminous letter-writer – an epistolary genius when at his sprightly best – he seemed to address everyone in a different persona, a separate script.
Only with Monica Jones does Larkin consistently use his own undisguised handwriting, knowing it would be futile to don a mask for this no-nonsense friend and lover. Larkin's appropriately titled collection The Less Deceivedis dedicated to the sceptical Jones. Judging by the rueful post-mortems on their occasional weekend encounters and their annual holidays in bracing seaside towns and craggy islands around Britain (they shared an aversion to "abroad"), their relationship was often more satisfactory between the sheets of notepaper than in the bedroom. Born, like Larkin, in 1922, Jones was an assistant lecturer at Leicester University, where they met in 1946. Unlike the poet, who advanced quickly and steadily in his day job, becoming "the youngest University librarian in G.B.", the abrasive, flamboyant, highly intelligent Jones (who never published a book or scholarly article) remained unpromoted throughout her 35-year career.
ANTHONY THWAITE, the editor of this excellently-annotated new volume of Larkin’s letters, states that “between December 1946 and April 1984, Philip Larkin wrote to Monica Jones more than 1,421 letters and 521 postcards: about 7,500 surviving pages altogether. Other letters have apparently been lost or have disappeared”. The correspondence (only a portion of which appears here) is a dialogue of equals; they are passionate about literature, and Larkin is brilliantly insightful about DH Lawrence, Samuel Butler, Mary McCarthy and the Powys brothers. He can barely contain his admiration for Katherine Mansfield’s journal but would trade all of Joyce, Mann and Proust for Beatrix Potter’s The Tailor of Gloucester (“a perfect work of art”).
Thomas Hardy’s poetry is rated far more highly than Yeats’s: “Yeats seems to me an utterly artificial poet, dealing in make-believe, arid, ultimately stifling. And so dull! I doubt if another poet has ever had such dull subject-matter, often none at all.”
Among the most fascinating letters are those seeking Jones’s response to Larkin’s poems-in-progress; he dismisses the “Dolmen Press boys”, who rejected a collection of his poems in 1954, as “priest-ridden crooked little lice”. Non-literary themes that recur include cricket, The Archers, library developments (personal and structural), concerns for the welfare of his exasperating elderly mother, and valetudinarian anxieties about his own health. Work-related philippics are frequent: “How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up.”
His summary of the “classic formula” novel – “a beginning, a muddle, and an end” – would fit the plot of his own life. The muddle arose principally from his 17-year “intimacy”, commencing in 1961, with his genteel library colleague, Maeve Brennan, who espoused traditional Catholic values about sex and was the inspiration for several poems, including Broadcast (a Larkin-Jones flashpoint). Jones was the woman “I ought to marry”, Brennan the one “I want to marry”.
Larkin’s reaction to Jones’s righteous fury was characteristically blunt: “About love, if I could have said last September, ‘I’m in love with Maeve, goodbye’, I wd: as it was, I couldn’t – perhaps too fond of you, perhaps not fond enough of her, perhaps just too cowardly all round.”
In fact Larkin and Jones would eventually share a semi-married life – more in sickness than in health, more in bibulousness than in lasciviousness – from 1983 until the poet’s death, two years later.
Listing the themes of his poetry for Jones, Larkin led off with “the contrast between the ideal the real”, an exact parallel with Brennan’s encapsulation of the two relationships: “In many ways, we lived in a fantasy world, whereas Monica represented the real world.” Brennan in turn was betrayed when Larkin began an unheralded affair with Betty Mackereth, his “loaf-haired” secretary, then in her 50s – the very woman, I seem to remember, who said “He did like large, well-built ladies . . . the sort of lady you get on the Damart thermal underwear catalogues.” Notwithstanding these multiple liaisons, he contended that he was “not a highly-sexed person” and was “as incompetent at sex as at algebra”.
Attempts to square the Larkin love triangle might justly attribute his wariness of commitment to his parents’ icy marriage or explain it simply as a bachelor’s determination to retain autonomy over his life. There is also the telling insight of his first love, Ruth Bowman. Terminating their engagement in 1950, she identified literature as Larkin’s true mistress: “I hope . . . that you will find yourself able to write, for I know you will never rest until you do.”
Letters to Monica, although less sparkling in wit and style than the Selected Letters,is a valuable addition to the Larkin oeuvre. The only readers it will disappoint are those combing its pages for politically incorrect remarks against which they can fulminate. And the letters recording his solitary wanderings by bicycle and Singer Gazelle remind us how lovingly his poems captured the England of " the shadows, the meadows . . . / The guildhalls, the carved choirs". He recounts lanes "all lined shoulder high with cowparsley", "bees still burrowing into late flowers, the beautiful chill mauve blue of Michaelmas daisies in the churchyard", a sky "with the immoveable small curly clouds of autumn in it". Here is the "unfenced existence" he pined for, beyond the shackles of work, social convention and, God forbid, marriage.
Dennis O'Driscoll is a poet and critic. His latest publication, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (Faber), received the Argosy Irish Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award last year
