Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

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I still set aside the satirical potshots, such as “Annus Mirabilis” or “Self’s the Man,” as clever and manipulative exercises in light verse, most often designed (“Get out as early as you can/And don’t have any kids yourself”) as propaganda in defense of his own way of life. It does rather spoil the incident, even at best, which was very exciting for me anyway…" What can the complication have been, damaging her but not him? When Larkin's mother moved into a nursing home in 1972 he was able to see Monica more often, both women being based in Leicester.

These letters were written over a long period to the woman he loved most (although not the only woman he loved), and they are wonderful. These words were written after more than a decade in which, as a librarian (despite his barrage of self-deprecatory throwaway remarks), he had shown himself conscientious, inventive, well-informed, hard-working, and even somewhat professional, while midwifing the first of the postwar British university libraries to birth, something that no “book-drunk freak” could ever have done. There was, of course, a prominent old woman in his life – his mother, whose solitary widowhood lasted 30 years: "For her the daily round is hideous with traps, and dangerous with hidden ambush, and calamity: it is all she can do to creep through it unscathed. With all this in mind, I went back to Letters to Monica, and saw how much, in his own twisted and inarticulate way, they do indeed embody Larkin’s own yearnings, choked always under his self-preservative instinct (“The difficult part of love/Is being selfish enough. One of these, extended over years, involved systematic obscene (and sometimes very funny) alterations to the text of Iris Murdoch’s novel The Flight from the Enchanter, a nice reconciliation of childish fantasies with adult dirty-mindedness.We get neat parodies of Chaucer’s Pardoner and Manciple, a contemptuous attack on Leavis (“Stupid little sod, the ideas rattling in him like peas”), a paean of praise for Robert Graves’s notoriously anti-conventional Clark Lectures, The Crowning Privilege, and quite a few unannotated quotations, ranging from the Elizabethan Chidiock Tichborne’s verses written the night before his execution (“And now I live, and now my life is done”) to the irritated exclamation of the little Japanese baroness in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies: “Oh, twenty damns to your great pig-face. For Larkin she is his rabbit, his “dearest bun” (and often represented as such, aproned, in surprisingly skillful little sketches included with his letters). I had never been as enthusiastic about him as most of my friends: in particular, I had never seen how the author of sour or bloody-minded squibs such as “The Life With a Hole in It,” “The View,” “This Be the Verse,” “Self’s the Man,” or even “High Windows” could come to be described, by many, as Britain’s “best-loved” twentieth-century poet. 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.

And I suspect that means not that I can enjoy sex in my own quiet way but that I can't enjoy it at all. He also wrote two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947), and his journalism is collected in two volumes, All What Jazz: A Record Diary and Required Writing: Miscellaneous Prose. This has elements of both happy ending and nemesis – the belated commitment coming without dignity or real freedom of choice. One of the most valuable features of Letters to Monica is the substantial revision of this picture that they cumulatively present. A lecturer in English at Leicester, she was a small-community "character": she wore tartan when she discussed Macbeth, and in general favoured dirndl skirts, low-cut tops and markedly cumbrous jewellery.long-winded, inessential man she'd go for; if she can see beauty in a derelict shit-house, she must have more [sensibility] than you.