Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

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Turn the book over, and there, looking out to sea leftward, so that they are back to back, is Monica Jones.

Some were more revealingly expressed than the admissions that in later life his public persona allowed itself. Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica, edited by Anthony Thwaite, is remarkable collection of letters that reveals the unseen life of Philip Larkin. Yet whatever he did, whatever she said, for four tumultuous decades they remained together, if separate, and for the last few years, when sickness made inroads on both, not even separate. In this fond struggle between two passive-aggressive types, each of them trying to finesse some decisiveness out of the other, she must have known that a double negative was the most she could hope for.Only too infrequently are portions of what she wrote him presented here as footnotes to explain the content of his reply. Larkin would never have written so exhaustedly to Amis, or to Thwaite, or to Barbara Pym, or to Robert Conquest (the world-famous historian whom he monotonously belittles: "a cheerful idiot", "the feeblewit", "what an old bore Bob is"). blurb - Philip Larkin's Letters to Monica span the forty years of their relationship from 1946 when they met, until Larkin's death in 1985.

Few moments are sadder than the one when, on a country walk with Monica, he finds out that he can no longer hear the lark singing high overhead. He tries to oblige, but the words he chooses are, "I don't mean, of course, that I don't like making love with you.In bed," the poet Ian Hamilton once told me, "you don't want to be too clear-headed about what you're doing. Eva Larkin, then, in combination with the long-deceased Sydney (clever, cynical, despotic and pro-Nazi even after the outbreak of the second world war), might be expected to leave her son a heavy legacy. Larkin was at least twice unfaithful to their romance, most notably with an assistant at Hull named Maeve Brennan, while she's reported to have been true to him through all those years, though, described by peers as attractive and sexy, she had many opportunities. The photograph also makes them look as though they had, in some sense, been living in a time warp: there is an unmistakable air of the late 1940s about them, and each in his or her way—Larkin more noticeably, as their correspondence hints—had a distinct aversion to the unwelcome business of growing up.

She accepted much else: his emotional sluggishness, and his morbid dread of effort in any sphere except poetry.They liked Beatrix Potter even when she strayed beyond bunnies, with Larkin declaring that he would sacrifice Joyce, Proust and Mann (foreigners all, admittedly, and he had become scrupulously xenophobic) for The Tailor of Gloucester. Indeed, although I know you are living there a normal girl I do deeply feel 'somehow' there is a rabbit there too, doing the things you do; even lecturing on Hopkins. Interspersed with his mundanity are some interesting literary comments in particular the revelation that "The Secret Garden" and "Lady Chatterly's Lover" have striking similarities!

Faber Members get access to live and online author events and receive regular e-newsletters with book previews, promotional offers, articles and quizzes. How far, by and large, do Larkin’s letters to Monica Jones enhance our understanding of his creative work? Hence the Channel Islands and, later, the Hebrides: sea and mountains without—a cherished national myth—all that tedious business involving passports, Monopoly money, dysentery, and being shaken down by Frogs, Wops, or Dagoes sheltering behind a stream of incomprehensible jabber, plus a culture founded on shameless bribery and ooh-la-la.She also (as the quotations from her end of their correspondence make clear) has no time for his evasions, and shows herself a match for him intellectually. Above Monica’s head on that wraparound dust jacket is a quotation from a review by Hilary Spurling, not normally given to hyperbole, who remarks that “what beats most steadily between the lines is the depth and strength of his commitment which makes other more eventful lives seem essentially frivolous, if not empty, by comparison. To lovers of the poetry, this selection of correspondence that lasted forty years is completely fascinating - not just for the inadvertent light it shines on the poetry but also for the elucidation of Larkin's own taste and his opinion of his own work and worth.