Word: larkins
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TITLE: PHILIP LARKIN: A WRITER'S LIFE...
...LEADING BRITISH POETS appeared together on a platform at Hull University. One was Ted Hughes, the widower of Sylvia Plath: intense, leather- jacketed, trailing a romantic aura. The other was Philip Larkin, an overweight, bald, bespectacled and partly deaf figure in a dark suit who later described himself as providing the "sophisticated, insincere, effete, and gold-watch-chained alternative...
...Larkin made a life's work of offering the unfashionable alternative -- joking about it but meaning it too. His verse, unlike Hughes', was resolutely un-modernist; he clung to the notion that poems should be clearly written in everyday language and should avoid posturing and pretension at all costs -- though, in his hands, that left plenty of room for craft and eloquence. He steered clear of London and the literary life, spending his career as a librarian in provincial cities. Formidably shy, he never married, remaining deeply attached to a burdensome mother until her death at 91, when...
Drab as this existence may sound, it was the essence of Larkin's poetic impulse. The calculated isolation, the lack of commitment were what enabled , him to write what little he did (four volumes in 40 years), just as the fate of the mockingly ironic outsider was his persistent subject. As he put it, "Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth." Characteristically, he declined the post of poet laureate, but by the time he died of cancer at 63 in 1985, he had become a sort of grumpy unofficial laureate of all that was middling, thwarted and humorously...
Andrew Motion, a fellow poet and younger colleague of Larkin's at Hull, gets close to his subject, but not too close, in this finely nuanced book. The biographer is as shrewd and sympathetic in sorting out Larkin's surprisingly energetic sex life as in parsing his poems. Larkin's longest attachment (38 years) was with Monica Jones, a lecturer at Leicester University. About halfway through this affair he took up with Maeve Brennan, a library staff member at Hull, and a few years later he added his secretary, Betty Mackereth. The point was to play one woman off against...