James Booth: Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love (2014)•
James Booth (1945- )James Booth: Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love (2014)
[Finally Books - Hospice Bookshop, Birkenhead - 31/7/24]:
James Booth. Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love. 2014. Bloomsbury Paperbacks. London: Bloomsbury Publications Plc, 2015.
I remember being stuck in an airport bar, idly watching the TV, I'm guessing around 2003 or so, when the huge face of some British pundit called (according to the subtitle) "Christopher Hitchens" appeared on the screen.
The subject under discussion on this particular talk show was the desirability of the invasion of Iraq by US forces - either:
1/ as some kind of imaginary "revenge" for the 9-11 attack on the World Trade Centre, or"Now we'll hear some fireworks," I thought to myself. "This straight-shooting Brit will put those Yankee imperialists in their place!"
2/ to make a preemptive strike on the WMDs ["Weapons of Mass Destruction"] which Saddam Hussein allegedly had squirrelled away somewhere.
I certainly heard some fireworks, but (alas) they were all in the other direction. There's no such thing as a Sunni or a Shiite or a Kurd in Iraq, Hitchens confidently asserted. They're Iraqi first, religious affiliation second. It's nonsense to object to the invasion on these grounds. Saddam Hussain is the common enemy of mankind, and must be wiped from the map.
I could scarcely believe my ears. All the other experts I'd heard going on about the subject had claimed the precise opposite: the tendency of Iraqui Shiites to take direction from Shiite Iran; the overarching desire of the Kurds on both sides of the Iraqui-Turkish border to establish their own Kurdistan; the reluctance of Sunnis to accept the end of the preeminence they'd enjoyed under Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist régime ...
All lies and exaggerations, according to Hitchens. Nothing could be further from the truth. He knew these people; he knew what they wanted - a simple end to tyranny.
Many years, and many hundreds of thousands of deaths later, the less-than-accurate pronouncements of this somewhat tarnished "public intellectual" were forcibly recalled to me as I attempted to work my way through Martin Amis's final, autobiographical novel, Inside Story.
It's "The Hitch this" and "The Hitch that" until you get thoroughly sick of the man. Martin Amis's book, which gets more and more chaotic and overloaded as it proceeds, consists mainly of recollections of his three principal mentors: Saul Bellow, Hitchens, and - my excuse for mentioning it here - Philip Larkin, the subject of this post.
Mind you, I certainly accept that one should cut Amis some slack, given that he was dying from oesophageal cancer when he wrote it. I can't help blaming his publishers, though, for not working a bit harder to eliminate verb-less sentences and unpunctuated footnotes (not to mention cutting a hundred or so pages of indiscriminate waffle).
Amis clearly worshipped the Hitch. The final straw (for me, at least) was when he attempted an encomium of "the Hitch's thatch" - a thick pelt of body hair, much admired by his girlfriends, which apparently kept Hitchens from ever feeling the cold, and which remained unaffected even by his cancer treatment. TMI, as they say ... Nor did I feel it was necessary for Amis to revisit so many of the anecdotes Hitchens had already told in propria persona in his own memoir Hitch-22, which I also recently had occasion to read.
It's a shame, really, because elsewhere in the book Martin Amis reveals to a waiting world the far more vital information that there's reason to suppose that he may himself have been the love-child of Philip Larkin, who came over to "comfort" his mother one Christmas when her husband, Kingsley Amis, was off attending to the needs of some other lady ...
It must be true, because one of Martin's own ex's heard it from Kingsley himself one day when he was trying to seduce her. He claimed that it wouldn't be "weird," as he wasn't actually Martin's father. What better testimony do you need than that? And the resemblance is quite unmistakable! No wonder Mart insisted on editing his ol' Dad's Selected Poems after hearing about it ...
That sardonic twist in aged roué Anthony Powell's mouth says it all:
Anyway, enough of all this facetiousness. The real subject under discussion here is not so much Philip Larkin's work as his life - or rather his lives, the various biographies of this allegedly colourless monad of a man ("Don Juan in Hull", as Clive James once described him) which have already appeared.
Besides the most recent one, James Booth's Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love (2014), pictured at the top of this post, there's the first, authorised biography, Andrew Motion's Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life (1993), but also Richard Bradford's First Boredom, Then Fear: The Life of Philip Larkin (2005), which he's now followed up with The Odd Couple: The Curious Friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin (2012).
Richard Bradford: The Odd Couple: The Curious Friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin (2012)That's quite a large crop of biographies for someone so deliberately self-effacing - even without counting all the various memoirs and collections of letters which have appeared since Larkin's death in 1985.
So what is it about him? What makes him so relentlessly biographicable (if that's really a word)? I suppose, in the end, it's mostly the fault of the book below, Larkin's Selected Letters, edited by his friend and fellow-poet Anthony Thwaite, who also edited the first, perhaps rather too compendious version of his Collected Poems (1988).
Larkin's readers can be forgiven for having regarded him as the most carefully polished of writers, as well as a reasonably fastidious private individual, just as long as they only had access to the four canonical poetry collections, two novels, and two volumes of selected non-fiction which appeared in his lifetime.
The sprawling, untidy nature of the Collected Poems constituted the first serious dint in this reputation for having chosen perfection of the work over the life (to paraphrase W. B. Yeats). You could attribute that to sloppy editing, though - especially as Thwaite published a tighter, more focussed version of the Collected Poems some fifteen years later, in 2003.
Nothing could argue away the shock of the letters, though ... Racism, misogyny, even incipient Nazism, all were blatantly on display in this huge grab-bag of a collection. Had Thwaite grown to hate having to be the literary executor for this profoundly flawed individual? Had he simply got tired of keeping up the façade?
If so, he could be forgiven if the culprit really was so egregiously hateful. Not since Robert Frost's own literary executor Lawrance Thompson's brutal hatchet job of a three-volume "authorized biography" had a much-loved national poet been so thoroughly shown up, posthumously, as this ...
After the letters, Andrew Motion's rather more nuanced account of the poet's life came as something of a relief. There were plenty of unsavoury details here, too: Larkin's abiding taste for (softcore) porn; his rather Jonathan Swift-like habit of juggling two girlfriends at a time; his pursuit of pretty girls through the library stacks ...
However, compared to the brute shock of the letters, this could be written off as fairly typical of the homme moyen sensuel of his era. And, considering the company he kept - inveterate lecher Kingsley Amis, and confirmed pornography buff Robert Conquest, who used to supply him with the latest sex magazines - his bachelor lifestyle sounded as if it was more deadly dull than morally reprehensible: most of the time, at least.
The question remained, though: How did he get from there to here? How did so grotty a man produce so beloved a body of poems - not to mention such masterpieces as his empathetic, atmospheric second novel, A Girl in Winter?
This is the conundrum that his ex-colleague James Booth has set out to answer. Rejecting the "dirty old man of Hull" caricature of the intelligent, sensitive man he himself knew, he pins virtually every detail of his new life of Larkin to a particular poem or other piece of writing.
While not at all, in itself, a bad idea, one has to admit that at times this approach can lead him astray. The entire chapter he devotes to Larkin's early, girly romances Trouble at Willow Gables and Michaelmas Term at St Bride's', written, along with the poem sequence 'Sugar and Spice', under the pseudonym Brunette Coleman, does seem a little excessive.
Amusing (and basically harmless) though these works may be, they're surely more important as sources of inspiration for Larkin's first novel Jill than in themselves. Perhaps it's because it was Booth who first shared these works with the world in 2002 which makes him so eager to empathise their merits.
Later on, though, when we get to the mature poems, the advantages of lining up these minute expressions of Larkin's feelings about his successive domiciles - Leicester, Belfast, Hull - become more apparent. Talk about a rich inner life! He may have looked miserable on the outside - and, indeed, used that as one of the principal inspirations for his work - but precisely what he had to say about this "ordinary life" of an "ordinary bloke" has continued to strike sparks from successive generations of readers.
It's true that Booth's book is best read with an open copy of either the original 1988 Collected Poems or the 2012 Complete Poems beside you, but that's no real hardship. It's hard to imagine a better way of immersing yourself in his work than that.
Perhaps it's because I've been collecting and reading his books for so long - at least forty years now - that I appreciate this chance to realign, at least tentatively, the work with the man. Without meaning to disparage Larkin's other biographers, Motion and Bradford, I have to say that Booth's the man for me.
As for Martin Amis's claims about his descent from the older writer, he should be so lucky. I don't doubt that every inch of him was sired by Kingsley. When Larkin wrote "don't have any kids yourself" I fear he meant exactly what he said.
Books I own are marked in bold:
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Poetry:
- The North Ship (1945)
- The North Ship. 1945. London: Faber, 1982.
- XX Poems (1951)
- The Less Deceived (1955)
- The Less Deceived. Hull: The Marvell Press, 1955.
- The Whitsun Weddings (1964)
- The Whitsun Weddings. 1964. London: Faber, 1968.
- High Windows (1974)
- High Windows. 1974. London: Faber, 1979.
- Collected Poems. Ed. Anthony Thwaite (1988)
- Collected Poems. Ed. Anthony Thwaite. London & Boston: Faber / The Marvell Press, 1988.
- Collected Poems. Ed. Anthony Thwaite ['The North Ship' (1945); 'XX Poems' (1951); 'The Less Deceived' (1955); 'The Whitsun Weddings' (1964); 'High Windows' (1974); 'Appendix: Other Published Poems'] (2003)
- Collected Poems: New Edition. Ed. Anthony Thwaite. 1988. London: Faber / Melbourne: The Marvell Press, 2003.
- Early Poems and Juvenilia. Ed. A. T. Tolley (2005)
- Early Poems and Juvenilia. Ed. A. T. Tolley. London: Faber, 2005.
- Poems: Selected by Martin Amis (2011)
- The Complete Poems. Ed. Archie Burnett (2012)
- The Complete Poems. Ed. Archie Burnett. London: Faber, 2012.
- Jill (1946)
- Jill. 1945. London: Faber, 1975.
- A Girl in Winter (1947)
- A Girl in Winter. 1947. London: Faber, 1982.
- "Trouble at Willow Gables" and Other Fiction 1943–1953. Ed. James Booth (2002)
- Trouble at Willow Gables and Other Fictions. Ed. James Booth. London: Faber, 2002.
- All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961–1971 (1970 / 1985)
- All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961-1971. 1970. London: Faber, 1985.
- "The Brynmor Jones Library 1929–1979". 'A Lifted Study-Storehouse': The Brynmor Jones Library 1929–1979, updated to 1985. Ed. Maeve Brennan (1987))
- Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–1982 (1983)
- Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982. London: Faber, 1983.
- Further Requirements: Interviews, Broadcasts, Statements and Book Reviews 1952–1985 (2001)
- Further Requirements: Interviews, Broadcasts, Statements and Book Reviews 1952-1985. Ed. Anthony Thwaite. 2001. London: Faber, 2002.
- The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973)
- The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse. 1973. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974.
- The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse. 1973. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.
- Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940–1985. Ed. Anthony Thwaite (1992)
- Selected Letters 1940-1985. Ed. Anthony Thwaite. London & Boston: Faber, 1992.
- Letters to Monica. Ed. Anthony Thwaite (2010)
- Letters Home, 1936-1977 (2018)
- Letters Home, 1936-1977. Ed. James Booth. 2018. London: Faber, 2022.
- Motion, Andrew. Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life. London & Boston: Faber, 1993.
- Brennan, Maeve. The Philip Larkin I Knew (2002)
- Bradford, Richard. First Boredom, Then Fear: The Life of Philip Larkin (2005)
- Bradford, Richard. The Odd Couple: The Curious Friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin (2012)
- Booth, James. Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love. 2014. Bloomsbury Paperbacks. London: Bloomsbury Publications Plc, 2015.
Fiction:
Non-fiction:
Edited:
Letters:
Secondary:
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- category - English poetry (post-1900): Authors
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