Philip Larkin, after a stint at Oxford during the war, lived a brief life in unfashionable places like Leicester, Belfast and finally ended up dying in Hull. The appearance of two biographies in the short span of time since his death in 1985 suggests the prurient interest in his life since the publication of his letters rather than a posthumous surge of popularity in Larkin’s work. Andrew Motion, being Larkin’s literary executor, was the first out of the blocks with his admirable Life. And now comes Richard Bradford with First Boredom, then Fear The Life of Philip Larkin.
Larkin is the paradox of English poetry and provokes a sharp debate between his readers who lionize him as the man who wrote three slim volumes of poetry: The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows. Poems of unquestionable merit that have become central to the English canon much in the same way as say Shakespeare or Eliot. The dissenting voices come from those who can’t fault the verse but can’t square it either with a man who had such loathsome ideas about race in his private life. His detractors liken his views to “the sewer beneath a national monument” and his love of Margaret Thatcher (“I adore the ground she walks on”) is bound to put a few people off.
The facts are that he was born in Coventry in 1922 to as mismatched a set of parents as you’re likely to find: the father, a minor city civil servant, decorated his office with Nazi regalia, complete with a Hitler statuette that would spring to a Nazi salute at the touch of a button, taking the juvenile Larkin to attend Nazi rallies in Germany; the mother, mousy and domineered by her husband, stayed silently in the background. After an undistinguished educational career at a minor grammar school in Coventry he went to Oxford to study English. Here he met and befriended a group of undergraduates who were to become the leading literary luminaries of the 20th century: Kingsley Amis, John Wain and Bruce Montgomery. It was at Oxford that Larkin developed a taste for New Orleans style Jazz that would stay with him for the rest of his life. Having failed his army medical and the civil services exam he was obliged to find other employment, which he did as an assistant librarian in Wellington, Shropshire. From here he moved to Leicester and then on to Queens in Belfast to further his career. After four years he applied for an obtained the job of the head librarian at Hull University. He was to remain in this post until his death in 1985. Along the way he cultivated a public persona of a recluse poet, living in a series of bedsits that would have been objectionable to even Mr. Bleaney. He got engaged once but never married (See Self’s The Man). Had several affairs, some simultaneously for decades, but was almost always happiest “tossing himself off” to pornography. He died in 1985 of cancer of the esophagus.
Richard Bradford’s effort is an amateurish one at best. One wonders what his academic publication track record was to allow him to become a Professor of English at Ulster. There are no footnotes. Quotes are sprinkled liberally without much in the way of attribution. And then there are out and out mistakes for which his editor at Peter Owen should be crucified. For God sakes man you’re writing a potted biography at least have the decency to get simple things like the year of Larkin’s death correct. Bradford has Larkin interviewed by Melvyn Bragg for the South Bank Show in 1986; an amazing event considering Larkin had died in 1985. Perhaps Bradford meant to say that the show with Larkin’s interview was broadcast in 1986 but if that’s the case man say it! At this point I was ready to hurl this book against the wall and contemplate the better uses my £19.95 could have been put to but I soldiered on. And it got worst: Winifred Arnott is presented as Larkin’s fiancé on page 30, a mistake that should have been caught by anyone presuming to edit a book written on Larkin. The year was 1951 and the fiancé in question was Ruth Bowman. Later in the book Bradford describes an exchange between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, observed by Martin Amis who asks Amis pére later what the conversation had been about, thinking some literary matters had been discussed but instead, he’s told, it was a harangue about the cost of everything. This is an anecdote lifted straight from Amis’ Memoirs but alas for poor Bradford, who should have known better considering he authored Lucky Him: The Life of Kingsley Amis (a more moronic title is hard to imagine), the conversation was between Amis fils and Larkin and the contents were reported to the elder Amis by the son. This is typical of the lazy research and poor editing.
Bradford’s six-page introduction is a polemic in the defense of Larkin, where perhaps none should have been offered. Isn’t the purpose of biography to allow the reader to draw her own conclusion after weighing up the evidence of the subject life and work? Instead Bradford is ridiculous and often foolish in his zeal to defend Larkin, enough to cause any thinking reader to loose all patience with him as a person capable of a reasonable argument or a possessor of a solitary new idea. He pooterishly says of the criticisms of the work of Larkin by Tom Paulin and Neil Corcoran:
“Had a commentator proposed a similar interrelationship between a particular, if presumed, state of mind and a national condition with regard to an Irish, Scottish or Welsh writer he or she would probably have been accused of racism or condescension. But for some [sic] time open season has been declared on the type of Englishness that Larkin is perceived to represent.”
The sort of Englishness being attacked is vile and small-minded; it’s the state of mind that leads to virulent strains that manifest themselves as politicians like Enoch Powell and organizations like the British National Party. Bradford also compares the treatment of Larkin to the victims of McCarthyism:
“But when Thwaite’s edition of the Letters was published in 1992 and Motion’ biography came out a year later Larkin’s enemies seized upon these new disclosures with a frenzy hardly witnessed since the McCarthy era.”
The posthumous treatment of Larkin by a few select academics and critics can hardly be compared to Joseph McCarthy’s wholesale destruction of the careers and lives of hundreds of people based merely on suspicion, hearsay and out-and-out lies. In Larkin’s case the evidence is there, in black and white, in Larkin’s own words. This isn’t made up, assumed or imagined. To show us that Larkin really wasn’t what his letters would indicate he writes:
“Not once during the debate surrounding the Letters and Motion’s biography was it pointed out that virtually all indications that Larkin was a misogynistic, intolerant racist occur in his letters to Colin Gunner and Kingsley Amis. […] These letters drifted between farce, caricature and self-parody.”
Again poor old Bradford has been lazy in his research. Without picking up my copy of the Letters I can still recall a letter written to Robert “Bob” Conquest about not visiting the United States because he [Larkin] would be assaulted by blacks and there are many more. This outrageous argument that Larkin presented a racist face to Amis because he expected it doesn’t say much for Amis, that would imply that Amis was a racist. Any reasonable person would conclude that Larkin showed his true face to people he knew he could trust and who shared his ideas. There are also letters to his mother in which he registers his satisfaction that some black person had moved away from his vicinity. A special face for his mother?
Motion’s biography in comparison looks an impressive bit of work. It has a decent index with proper and complete attributions. It doesn’t make hilarious mistakes and is judiciously edited. First Boredom, Then Fear uses much the same pictures that you will have seen in the Biography, Letters and other places. There’s one picture that I haven’t seen before: it’s a picture taken from an elevated point showing Larkin, the old walrus, with his herd of female underlings. There’s nothing new to be gleaned about Larkin’s life. No mention of what (if anything) Larkin got up to when he went to stay with Judy Egerton for the Lord’s Test. One always wanted to know who the neighbor was that Monica called to rescue Larkin when he was trapped in the lavatory? It would be interesting to know if it was the same “Paki Doctor” neighbor that Larkin dismissed in one of his letters, but alas Bradford doesn’t say. I was hoping for perhaps a new insight into the great man’s work if not his life. The lines:
“And like a sea-anemone/Or simple snail, there cautiously/Unfolds, emerges, what I am.”
appears ad nauseum throughout this book. I wonder if this is because Bradford has forgotten that he’s already made whatever point he’s trying to make in a previous chapter! There’s a comparison between Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dockery and Son that left me scratching my head and I am sure the interpretation of “to see ranged/Joining and parting lines reflect a strong/Unhindered moon” as “[…] is a fitting depiction of Larkin’s double life with Monica and Maeve” would even have Larkin scratching his head.
This is a very slight book with pretense to being scholarly. It isn’t. Instead read Motion’s Biography. All errors should be corrected in any future editions but perhaps the fate of this book is to be remaindered and pulped. I am sure Larkin would agree.