Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin was offered the post of Poet Laureate in 1984, and he turned it down. The death of Sir John Betjeman had opened the role, the highest poetic honour in Britain. Larkin said no, partly because he felt he had long since stopped being a writer of poetry in any meaningful sense. This was the man a 2003 survey by the Poetry Book Society would name the nation's best-loved poet of the previous 50 years. In 2008 The Times called him Britain's greatest post-war writer. Yet for thirty years his day job was running a university library in a city he described as "a little on the edge of things." How does a man who published only a handful of slim volumes become a national monument? And why, almost two decades after his death, would the contents of his private letters nearly destroy his name? Larkin himself once said that deprivation was for him "what daffodils were for Wordsworth." The story of how that bleakness became beloved begins in Coventry.
At 2 Poultney Road in the Radford district of Coventry, Philip Larkin was born on the 9th of August 1922. He was the only son of Sydney Larkin, the city treasurer, and his wife Eva Emily. His sister Catherine, known as Kitty, was ten years older. The family later moved to a large three-storey middle-class house with servants' quarters near Coventry railway station. Sydney Larkin was a self-made man and a singular one. He combined a love of literature with an enthusiasm for Nazism, and he attended two Nuremberg rallies during the mid-1930s. He pushed the works of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and above all D. H. Lawrence onto his son. Larkin's mother was described as nervous and passive, dominated by her husband, a woman whose ideal, as Larkin put it, was "to collapse" and be taken care of. The boy's early childhood was unusual in several respects. He was educated at home until the age of eight by his mother and sister. No friends or relatives ever visited the family home, and he developed a stammer. When he finally joined Coventry's King Henry VIII Junior School, he fitted in at once and made close, long-standing friendships. His passion for jazz was supported by his parents with a drum kit, a saxophone, and a subscription to DownBeat. He fared poorly in his School Certificate exam at sixteen, but was allowed to stay on. Two years later he earned distinctions in English and History and passed the entrance exams for St John's College, Oxford.
Larkin began at Oxford University in October 1940, a year into the Second World War. The old upper-class traditions had faded, and most male students were studying truncated wartime degrees. His poor eyesight failed him at his military medical examination, which meant he could study the usual three years. Through his tutorial partner Norman Iles he met Kingsley Amis, who encouraged his taste for ridicule and irreverence and remained a close friend for life. Amis, Larkin and other friends formed a group they called "The Seven," meeting to discuss each other's poetry, listen to jazz, and drink enthusiastically. In 1943 Larkin sat his finals. Having spent much of his time on his own writing, he was greatly surprised to be awarded a first-class honours degree. Years later, visiting Larkin at University College, Leicester, and witnessing its Senior Common Room, gave Amis the inspiration for Lucky Jim, the 1954 novel that made him famous. Larkin contributed considerably to that book's long gestation, and Amis repaid the debt by dedicating the finished novel to him.
In 1943, fresh from Oxford, Larkin was appointed librarian of the public library in Wellington, Shropshire. By June 1946 he was halfway through qualifying for the Library Association and became assistant librarian at University College, Leicester. In 1950 he moved to a sub-librarian post at The Queen's University of Belfast, where he spent five years that appear to have been the most contented of his life. Then in 1955 he became University Librarian at the University of Hull, a post he held until his death. Professor R. L. Brett, who chaired the committee that appointed him, was first impressed by how early Larkin arrived and how late he left. Only later did Brett realise that the office doubled as Larkin's study, where he spent hours on his private writing as well as library work. The plans for a new university library were already far advanced when he arrived. Larkin suggested a number of changes, some major and structural, and all were adopted. The building, completed in two stages, was named the Brynmor Jones Library in 1967 after the university's vice-chancellor. Ten years after its completion, Larkin computerized the entire library stock, making it the first library in Europe to install a Geac automated online circulation system. A colleague said he became a great figure in post-war British librarianship. During his thirty years there, the library's stock sextupled, and the budget grew from £4,500 to £448,500, a twelvefold increase in real terms. From 1957 until his death his secretary was Betty Mackereth, through whom all access to him by colleagues passed.
In early 1944, while working in Wellington, Larkin met his first girlfriend, Ruth Bowman, an academically ambitious 16-year-old schoolgirl. Six weeks after his father's death from cancer in March 1948, he proposed to her, but before his departure for Belfast in 1950 the couple split up. By then his friendship with Monica Jones, a lecturer in English at Leicester, had also become a sexual relationship. In Belfast he had what was described as the most satisfyingly erotic experience of his life with Patsy Strang, who was in an open marriage with one of his colleagues. At one stage she offered to leave her husband to marry him. He also had a significant though sexually undeveloped friendship with Winifred Arnott, the subject of "Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album," which ended when she married in 1954. In February 1961 his friendship with his colleague Maeve Brennan became romantic, despite her strong Roman Catholic beliefs. At her prompting he learnt to drive and bought his first car, a Singer Gazelle. In March 1975 he initiated a secret affair with Betty Mackereth, his own secretary, writing the long-undiscovered poem "We met at the end of the party" for her. For a time he juggled three relationships at once, until March 1978, after which he and Jones were a monogamous couple. When Jones fell ill with shingles in 1983, she moved into his Newland Park home and remained there for the rest of his life.
From his mid-teens, Larkin "wrote ceaselessly." He produced five full-length novels and destroyed each one shortly after finishing it. He even invented a pseudonymous alter ego, Brunette Coleman, under whose name he wrote two novellas and a fictitious creative manifesto. His first published novel, Jill, appeared in 1946 through Reginald A. Caton, a publisher of barely legal pornography who issued serious fiction as cover. When Caton asked whether Larkin also wrote poetry, the result was The North Ship, a 1945 collection showing the increasing influence of Yeats. A second novel, A Girl in Winter, followed in 1947, published by Faber and Faber and praised by one Sunday paper as "an exquisite performance and nearly faultless." It was during his Belfast years that Larkin reached maturity as a poet. The bulk of The Less Deceived was written there. In 1951 he privately printed a collection called XX Poems in a run of just 100 copies. The Less Deceived was published in November 1955 by the Marvell Press, a small independent company near Hull. At first it drew little attention, but in December it was included in The Times list of Books of the Year, and its reputation spread. The Whitsun Weddings followed in 1964, the volume that secured his reputation, earning him a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature almost immediately. His final collection, High Windows, was published in June 1974. It sold over twenty thousand copies in its first year and contained "This Be The Verse," "The Explosion," and "Annus Mirabilis," the last of which claims that sexual intercourse began in 1963, "rather late for me." His final major poem, "Aubade," was completed in 1977 and published in The Times Literary Supplement that December.
Andrew Motion called Larkin's poems marked by "a very English, glum accuracy" about emotions, places, and relationships. Donald Davie described them as showing "lowered sights and diminished expectations." Eric Homberger, echoing Randall Jarrell, called him "the saddest heart in the post-war supermarket." Influenced by W. H. Auden, W. B. Yeats, and Thomas Hardy, Larkin wrote in highly structured but flexible verse forms. His mature style was that of the detached, sometimes lugubrious, sometimes tender observer who looked at ordinary people doing ordinary things. He disparaged poems that leaned on shared classical and literary allusions, which he called the "myth-kitty," and his verse was never cluttered with elaborate imagery. He was also a vocal critic of modernism in art and literature. From 1961 to 1971 he wrote a jazz column for The Daily Telegraph, gathered in All What Jazz, whose introduction widens an attack on modern jazz into a wholesale critique of modernism in the arts. In 1973 he edited The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse, an anthology in which Thomas Hardy was the most generously represented poet, with twenty-seven poems against only nine by T. S. Eliot. Larkin included six of his own poems, the same number as Rupert Brooke. The most hostile response came from Donald Davie, who accused him of encouraging "the perverse triumph of philistinism."
On the 2nd of December 1985 Larkin died of oesophageal cancer at the age of 63, four days after collapsing and being readmitted to hospital. He was buried at Cottingham municipal cemetery near Hull. On his deathbed he had asked that his diaries be destroyed. Monica Jones and Betty Mackereth granted the request, and Mackereth shredded the unread diaries page by page before having them burned. Seven years later, the storm broke. The publication by Anthony Thwaite in 1992 of his letters, followed by Andrew Motion's official biography, revealed his obsession with pornography, his racism, and his shift to the political right. John Banville described the letters as hair-raising but also in places hilarious. Lisa Jardine called him a "casual, habitual racist, and an easy misogynist." In 2008 the academic John Osborne argued that "the worst that anyone has discovered about Larkin are some crass letters and a taste for porn softer than what passes for mainstream entertainment." The novelist Martin Amis dismissed the letters as showing only that Larkin tailored his words to each recipient. Despite the controversy, the public did not abandon him. In 2010, the 25th anniversary of his death, his adopted city of Kingston upon Hull held the Larkin 25 Festival. It culminated in a larger-than-life bronze statue by Martin Jennings, unveiled at Hull Paragon Interchange and inscribed "That Whitsun I was late getting away." On the 2nd of December 2016, a floor stone memorial was unveiled at Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. It carries two lines from his poem "An Arundel Tomb": "Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love."
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Common questions
Who was Philip Larkin and what is he known for?
Philip Larkin was an English poet, novelist, and librarian who lived from 1922 to 1985. He is best known for his poetry collections The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings, and High Windows, and in 2003 was chosen as Britain's best-loved poet of the previous 50 years.
Why did Philip Larkin decline the post of Poet Laureate?
Philip Larkin was offered the post of Poet Laureate in 1984 after the death of Sir John Betjeman, and he declined it. He felt he had long since ceased to be a writer of poetry in any meaningful sense.
What did Philip Larkin do for a living besides writing poetry?
Philip Larkin worked as a librarian, becoming University Librarian at the University of Hull in 1955, a post he held until his death. He produced the greater part of his published work during his thirty years at the Brynmor Jones Library there.
Why was Philip Larkin's reputation controversial after his death?
Philip Larkin's posthumous reputation was damaged by Anthony Thwaite's 1992 edition of his letters and Andrew Motion's official biography, which revealed his racism, his obsession with pornography, and his shift to the political right. Lisa Jardine called him a "casual, habitual racist, and an easy misogynist," though defenders argued the letters were tailored to their recipients.
What were Philip Larkin's most famous poems and collections?
Philip Larkin's major collections were The North Ship in 1945, The Less Deceived in 1955, The Whitsun Weddings in 1964, and High Windows in 1974. Famous individual poems include "This Be The Verse," "An Arundel Tomb," "Annus Mirabilis," and his final major poem "Aubade."
How is Philip Larkin commemorated in Hull and Westminster Abbey?
Philip Larkin is commemorated in Kingston upon Hull with a bronze statue by Martin Jennings, unveiled at Hull Paragon Interchange in December 2010 during the Larkin 25 Festival. A floor stone memorial was also unveiled at Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey on the 2nd of December 2016, inscribed with two lines from "An Arundel Tomb."