Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) is one of the most beloved poets in English. Yet after his death a largely negative image of the man himself took hold; he has been portrayed as a racist, a misogynist and a narcissist. Larkin scholar James Booth, for seventeen years a colleague of the poet's at the University of Hull, offers a very different portrait. Drawn from years of research and a wide variety of Larkin's friends and correspondents, this is the most comprehensive portrait of the poet available.

Booth traces the events that shaped Larkin in his formative years, from his early life when his political instincts were neutralized by exposure to his father's controversial Nazi values. He studies how the academic environment and the competition he felt with colleagues such as Kingsley Amis informed not only Larkin's poetry, but also his little-known ambitions as a novelist.

Through the places and people Larkin encountered over the course of his life, including Monica Jones, with whom he had a tumultuous but enduring relationship, Booth pieces together an image of a rather reserved and gentle man, whose personality--and poetry--have been misinterpreted by decades of academic study. Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love reveals the man behind the words as he has never been seen before.

Genres: Biography, Poetry, Nonfiction, History, Books About Books, Biography Memoir, Literary Criticism

570 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

James Booth has written extensively on Philip Larkin. Booth has recently retired from the Department of English at the University of Hull, where he had been Larkin's colleague for seventeen years.

The distinction between Booth's and Andrew Motion's biographies is, in Booth's own words:

"His (Motion's) biography is a magnificent achievement, but he is not on Larkin's wavelength when it comes to humour".

However, despite praising Motion's achievement in this regard, Booth adds that:

"I think Motion took Larkin too much at his own word. When Larkin said he was a sour brute who didn't treat his mother well, he believed him. In fact, Larkin wrote two letters to his mother every week for 40-odd years."

Booth's writing is defined by his admiration for one of Britain's most beloved poets of the twentieth-century:

"I have always loved his poetry and love is the right word"

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

The introduction says that Philip Larkin was “by common consent, the best-loved British poet of the last century”. And I see that in 2008, he was number one in a poll of readers of The Times to find the "50 greatest British writers since 1945". He described himself as “the paltry librarian of a piffling university”. His thing was dreariness and impending death (“Outside it’s pissing with rain & I sit in my enormous duffel coat before my lukewarm fire, hands like two chilly frogs”) – well, a lot of the time anyway – and he was given to making comments like

Children I would willingly bayonet by the score.

He was the right-wing son of a right-wing father who

shared the anti-Semitism of many of his class and generation. During the thirties he had brightened up his office in Coventry with Nazi paraphernalia brought back from conferences and Nuremberg rallies.

Philip told a colleague that his father

had a statue of Hitler on the mantelpiece which at the touch of a button leapt into a Nazi salute … However, when the object came to light in 2002, it turned out, in fact, to be a tiny hand-painted figurine, barely three inches high, with brown shirt and piercing blue eyes… There is no button, the arm simply props up on a catch.

(Well, you can’t have everything.).

Off he went to Oxford university where he attended lectures on Anglo-Saxon by JRR Tolkien and became a woman… literarily. Brunette Coleman, authoress!

During summer and autumn 1943 he devoted much energy to writing girls’-school fiction under a female pseudonym. This seems a strange development for a twenty-year-old male undergraduate in the middle of a war.

Well, yes. It was this kind of thing:



Then he wrote two novels you would have to pay me to read, and then he met two people, Monica Jones and Kingsley Amis, who hated each other. MJ became his life-long long-distance girlfriend and Amis his best friend.

So he and Amis were both fiddling around with novels and Larkin was doling out much well-taken advice about the novel Amis was struggling over. It was apparently quite a serious realist novel but Larkin kept pointing out how funny it was or could be, and gradually it became Lucky Jim.

Monica Jones features in Lucky Jim as the neurotic, manipulative and really rather creepy Margaret Peel. Amis is quite vicious about her:

What a pity it was, he thought, that she wasn’t better-looking, that she didn’t read articles in the three-halfpenny press that told you what lipstick went with what natural colouring. With twenty per cent more of what she lacked in these ways, she’d never have run into any of her appalling difficulties : the vices and morbidities bred of loneliness would have remained safely dormant until old age.

Well, maybe that’s Amis for you – but here’s our biographer:

Edgy, defensive, loud and with little interest in other people, Monica was not an easy companion. Anthony Thwaite remembers being baffled, when he first met her a few years later, that the urbane Philip should have paired himself with so socially inept and ungracious a partner.

Larkin to Monica:

In my view you would do better to revise, dramatically, the amount you say and the intensity with which you say it.... you've no idea of the exhausting quality of yourself in full voice...

He proposes three rules:

1 –
restrict yourself to two or at the most three sentences at a time

2 –
abandon altogether your harsh didactic voice, & use only the soft musical one

3 –
do more than glance at your interlocutor once or twice while speaking. You're getting a habit of boring your face up or round into the features of your listener - don't do it! It's most trying.

I love to be made to goggle and cackle by biographies and page 138 of this one made me do both. In 1949 Larkin had the idea that maybe Amis would let his new wife pose for some photographs.

Letter from Amis:


I have asked Hilly about your dirty-picture proposal, and obtained a modified assent. She is prepared to do corset-and-black-stockings or holding-up-a-towel stuff, and bare-bosom stuff but is a hit hesitant about being quite undraped “though I’ll probably get bolder when I start”.

Alas, our biographer doesn’t say if this project was embarked upon.

But in 1958, Larkin’s porn collecting habits brought a letter to his door :

On headed notepaper, putatively from the Vice Squad, saying that his name and address had been found on a mailing liste of a pornographic publisher and that legal proceedings would be taken… He was certain that his mugshot and crude headlines would be blazoned over the News of the World and the Hull Daily Mail and that he would lose his job. He might even be sent to prison. … He visited his solicitor.

Quite soon, however, his great friend Robert Conquest revealed that it was all a hoax, just something to try to give him a heart attack and get a great laugh. Larkin “appreciated the prank” and “remained on cordial terms” with Mr Conquest.

Sad biographer’s comment on p285 :

Larkin’s pornography collection is almost entirely lost.

The second photo section helpfully provides two examples of what has survived : “Left : a characteristic ‘nude study’ of the model Sophia Dawn…Right: a naughty schoolgirl photograph.”

Larkin’s life is easy to sum up. He was a university librarian in a distant northern town. He had two girlfriends, one local and Monica. He didn’t want to get married. He wrote poems, quite slowly. He gradually got semi-famous.


2 people asked me to autograph The Whitsun Weddings in the train – the Ringo Starr of contemporary verse.

His character is another matter and here the story turns dark – he was a racist all right, although James Both jumps through many hoops to try to exculpate him. He was a towering snob too. And a traditional jazz fan, in which pursuit his racism was inverted – whites out, blacks in. This irony did occur to him. He was the kind of genteel buffer who you would never think had a nasty bone in his long body until you got a letter from him or you read his diary. And this is the danger of biography – you read about those you admire at your peril. Maybe better to stick to the work, which in this case is magnificently memorable. You all must know this one:

I work all day, and get half drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.

Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not used, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never:
But at the total emptiness forever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says no rational being
Can fear a thing it cannot feel, not seeing
that this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no-one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.



If that butters your parsnip, there's plenty more where that came from.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

When Letters to Monica was published in 2011, you might have been forgiven for thinking the stink left after Andrew Motion and Anthony Thwaite published Larkin's biography and Selected Letters had dispersed. After Motion's biography followed Richard Bradford's, then Maeve Brennan's memoir, and a succession of intelligent criticism to foil the scolds. Larkin topped the Times' list of the best 50 writers since World War 2, and his Collected Poems secured its place in John Carey's Pure Pleasure, a list of the best 50 books of the twentieth century. After a brief but furious debate about the man's character, it seemed, the work was as inviolate as ever. Was another biography, then, seeking to 'reinstate a man misunderstood', quite necessary?

Booth, unsurprisingly, thinks so. His credentials, at first, seem right. Booth was a colleague of Larkin's at the University of Hull for seventeen years, has published two critical studies on Larkin, is the Literary Adviser to the Philip Larkin Society, co-edits its journal, and saw an edition of Larkin's early fiction into print. His 'Larkin on Ice', presumably, is forthcoming.

Booth's credentials, while extensive, are also his major weakness. He writes as if Larkin's reputation was still locked away in a tower, awaiting the heroic Sir James to turn up and rescue it single handed. Booth's constant finger-wagging at, variously, Larkin's maltreated women, friends, acquaintances, publishers, biographers, critics, along with the weather, Hull, London, the provinces and readers of Larkin's poems other than Booth himself, is somewhat annoying.

To give credit where it's due, Booth's biography pours more smoothly than any before it. Making the life of a partially deaf, unmarried, Hull-dwelling, near-hermit Librarian sound interesting is a feat by anyone's standards. Jargon, allowing for some technical words relating to the intricacies of meter and rhyme, is all but excluded. His comments on the poems are frequently incisive, and an improvement on those Archie Burnett devoted so much space to in the 2012 edition of Larkin's Collected Poems. One particularly remembers this one, on 'Here': 'Larkin pulls out all the organ-stops of rhyme and assonance to create a sumptuous music of consonant clusters and shifting vowels, unlike any else in his poetry.'

Booth is also to be praised for reminding the scolds - Tom Paulin, Lisa Jardine (though, sadly, not Bonnie Greer) - that the man they condemned as a racist hailed Sidney Bechet and Louis Armstrong as his artistic masters. Like Bradford before him, Booth points out that every instance of Larkin's supposed deep-seated racism was in the language he used to shock his unshockable friends, usually expressed in private correspondence. The letters were evidence of a voice modulating according to its receiver. As John Banville put it, they showed 'less the grimace of a bigot than a mischievously fashioned Halloween mask.' The porn - two samples of which are included in the photo section - seem as tame and quaint as Friday the 13th Part 1.

Booth's line goes wonky when it arrives at the subject of Larkin's women. Here, Booth's mission does leads him into saying things not merely dim, but borderline despicable. Just as the editors who turned down Larkin's early jottings have to be demonised for not recognising the Genius Among Us, Booth has to brand Larkin's women as grasping, hypocritical, fame-seeking, neurotic, difficult, constantly making him 'the victim of the breadth and generosity of his sensibility and the narrowness of theirs.' Uh-huh.

I don't think it unfair to question Booth's critical judgment. Simple opinions are presented as indisputable fact. Remember the last stanza of 'High Windows'?

'Rather than words come the thought of High Windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And, beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.'

At the end of the draft version of the poem, Booth tells us, Larkin wrote as an alternative to the last three words 'and f*****g p***.' How many beside Booth would say this has 'now become an inextricable part of the poem [How, given how few have seen this version of it?]; indeed it makes it a more profound work.' Why?

Booth also contradicts himself. In the introduction, he talks of a 'critical orthodoxy' (a rather odd, self-justifying term for 'an awful lot of readers that independently reached a common conclusion') that felt Thwaite's decision to present the first edition of Larkin's Collected Poems in chronological order was no real order at all. It has its uses, as he says, for biographers and other people interested in the `soul history' of Philip Larkin. But for most readers, that was no order at all. As Clive James, who is never referenced in the entire book, once put it, when a man is so careful to arrange his works in a certain order, it is probably wiser to assume that when he subtracts something he is adding to the arrangement. If Booth disagrees, then he's entitled his opinion. What he isn't entitled to is having his cake and eating it. You can't pat yourself on the back for pointing out how carefully Larkin ordered his poems in one chapter, then pat yourself on the back elsewhere for urging people to ignore that very order. You can perhaps see why some are already saying that James' review of Larkin's Collected Poems (reprinted in Reliable Essays) managed to say more about Larkin and his work than Booth's two studies of the poet put together.

This is an enjoyable book in spite of itself, and despite its often misplaced zeal, I still think it worthy of any Larkin fan.

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bettie's Books

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a critical biography of the acclaimed poet Philip Larkin, and a good one. It's probably the most comprehensive discussion of the craft and the relation to the poet's life the individual poems display. Braiding the subject and the work in a literary biography necessarily explains where the work comes from. Booth does it well. As biography it adds little to our knowledge of the events of his life because much has been written. But Booth, who was a colleague of Larkin's at Hull University, magnifies our understanding of the man and writings largely through the focus of love, the third thread of his title. It's hard to resist reading about a poet with a muse. Larkin had three in concert. His relationships with Monica Jones, which spanned decades, Maeve Brennan, a fellow library worker, and Betty Mackereth, his secretary, Booth convincingly maintains, is one of the most important ways of defining Larkin and his work. Few of us are incurious and willing enough to look away from the juicy details of love life, anyway. So important was love to Larkin that he began the last affair--Betty Mackereth--with the hope that it would help jumpstart his flagging creativity.

I've read, too, that it was Booth's intention to dispel some of the bad air that arose with the 1993 publication of Larkin's letters assembled by Anthony Thwaite. The correspondence revealed a man who seemed not only a racist and misogynist but a cantankerous complainer and waspish critic of other poets, as well as a collector and lover of pornography. The letters portrayed a man quite different from that his growing audience had come to admire. Booth's Larkin is kinder, gentler. The disreputable characteristics aren't ignored, but their sharp edges have been blunted.

All that's beside the point, in my view. It doesn't deflate the work any more than does Eliot's anti-Semitism, Neruda's Communism, or Pound's collaboration with fascism. Booth's story is the poetry. His critical appraisal of the poems makes this an invaluable book for those who admire Larkin's oeuvre.

[Nick Davies · Rating 3 out of 5]

DNF at approx two thirds through. Though this was well-researched and thorough, and not unpleasant to read as it provided insight and interesting documentation of a talented and unusual poet and man, it basically was a little too dense and chewy a read for me as someone with a casual interest only. As with my biographies, I found the chpaters dealing with the formative years to be of much more interest, the latter three quarters of this were rather turgid for all that the author tried to make them more varied. There's only so much 'odd bloke moves jobs to another provincial town library, writes letters to male friends and female muses, composes and publishes a few poems some of which have some lovely clever aspects, and moans a bit about people and things' one can remain interested in, and there was a lot of this in Larkin's adult life.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

From BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week:
Philip Larkin was that rare thing among poets - a household name in his own lifetime. Lines such as 'Never such innocence again' and 'Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three' made him one of the most popular poets of the last century.

Larkin's reputation as a man, however, has been more controversial. A solitary librarian known for his pessimism, he disliked exposure and had no patience with the literary circus. And when, in 1992, the publication of his Selected Letters laid bare his compartmentalised personal life, accusations of duplicity, faithlessness, racism and misogyny were levelled against him.

There is, of course, no requirement that poets should be likeable or virtuous, but James Booth asks whether art and life were really so deeply at odds with each other. Can the poet who composed the moving 'Love Songs in Age' have been such a cold-hearted man? Can he who uttered the playful, self-deprecating words 'Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth' really have been so boorish?

A very different public image is offered by those who shared the poet's life - the women with whom he was romantically involved, his friends and his university colleagues. It is with their personal testimony, including access to previously unseen letters, that Booth reinstates a man misunderstood - not a gaunt, emotional failure, but a witty, provocative and entertaining presence, delightful company; an attentive son and a man devoted to the women he loved.

Read by Michael Pennington

Written by James Booth
Abridged by Libby Spurrier

Produced by Joanna Green

[Neale · Rating 3 out of 5]

James Booth’s new biography of Larkin presents itself as an attempt to restore the poet’s reputation, damaged in the eyes of many by the revelations in Andrew Motion’s biography.

Personally I found Motion’s biography extremely moving. It certainly revealed Larkin’s humanity in a clear-eyed and unromantic manner. What I think really outraged some commentators was not so much the casual misogyny or racism as Larkin’s very ordinariness – the fact that his faults were not the faults of a ‘poet’ (such will always be forgiven) but the faults of a balding, conservative, bespectacled, socially insecure office-worker who liked a drink and liked to look at pictures of naked women. It is this very ordinariness that makes Larkin’s poetry so extraordinary.

As long as Booth is in ‘defensive’ mode his biography is on the back foot. But fortunately much of the time he forgets his intentions and delivers a perfectly good biography, interspersed with some effective literary criticism. He endeavours to portray Larkin in a sympathetic light, and is rather more critical of some of the other people in the poet’s life, mostly the women, but the man that he describes is really no different to the one that Motion described.

If this book had come out shortly after Larkin’s death, as Motion’s did, I am sure it would have created much the same furore. That particular pre-internet ‘furore’ was in many ways prescient of the internet ‘furores’ that bedevil us today – apparently orchestrated by people who are inhumanly pure in their own lives and outraged by any sign of impurity in others...

[Nelson Wattie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don’t think I would have liked Philip Larkin. Much as I love the beauties of childhood and youth, I find them less attractive in a man who refuses to grow up. On the other hand, of course, I have no reason to believe that Larkin would have liked me.
After a childhood in which he was not encouraged to look beyond himself and his own needs, he studied briefly at Oxford and acquired, it would seem, that effete self-confidence and articulacy that marks out so many Oxbridge personalities and comes, perhaps, from the assurance that whatever blows life might bring will never knock great men from the perch erected by their social status. This outward grandeur that papers over the cracks beneath it can be irritating to blunt colonials, who fill the cracks in their own facades with coarser materials. But colonials are beneath the range of vision of England’s Larkins, especially if their faces are insufficiently white. In short, Larkin was a snob, a xenophobe and a racist. He could afford the self-deprecation so typical of his poems because he knew that the sense of security behind it could never be shattered. Travel was anathema to him, because it would bring him in touch with people outside his own narrow world.
On leaving Oxford he first made a living by writing stories about girls’ schools. His biographer calls them “lesbian” stories, but they seem to have been about crushes rather than passions. Perhaps his own cold fascination with girls’ bodies could be best expressed in the disguise of one girl’s crush on another. For most of his life he shared his sexuality with two women, to neither of whom he would commit. One of them was a long-term virgin, with whom he came close to the sexual act without “going the whole way” (his language) – there are salacious references to hands in his letters and poems. The other was a woman with whom he enjoyed not only sex but also foul language, crude put-downs of their fellows and similar adolescent behaviour. They afforded one of the great women novelists of their time the sickening attention of going through one of her books, page by page, turning every occurrence of “sit” and “sat” into “shit’ and “shat” and altering words in every one of its thousands of sentences into puerile, tawdry lavatory “humour”. Much time and effort was clearly spent on that. Over the years he also built up an astonishing collection of pornography.
He shared his failure to grow up with his friends, notably with Kingsley Amis. The two men competed with schoolboy-style rivalry throughout their lives.
However, this smart boy had a clever way with words. Throughout his life, while living the modestly secure life of a (much appreciated) university librarian, he wrote and published poems. Many have the charming lightness and ephemeral fragility of feathers, but some half-dozen are more substantial than that. A few have a felicitous wit that makes them memorable, so that not a few readers of poetry can quote them from memory – usually with a slightly embarrassed, self-deprecating giggle. The language of his poems is “pure” – perfectly appropriate to the subject-matter and, especially, the voice of its speaker. The modernist urge to break with the grandiose in imagery and sound is carried to a charming extreme by Larkin, who never uses an unnecessary word and never an unnecessarily charged one.
His earliest literary love seems to have been for D.H. Lawrence, but this is Lawrence without the Lawrentian passion and human conscience. Like most young poets of the past century, he also found a friend in W.B. Yeats, but Yeats’s political commitment, his love of the mystical and his concern for other individuals all went beyond Larkin’s range. In Larkin, people are generalised or made to represent something, with little personality of their own. This is of course continuous with his narrow social sense. And then, to his delight, he found Thomas Hardy, who was to be an inspiration to him. But his comment on Hardy seems limited by narcissism. If Hardy were really the writer presented here he would never have been able to write his novels (and it is significant that Larkin’s two non-school novels were relative failures): ‘When I came to Hardy it was with the sense of relief that I didn’t have to try and jack myself up to a concept of poetry that lay outside my own life – this is perhaps what I felt Yeats was trying to make me do. One could simply relapse back into one’s own life and write from it.’ Children, adolescents (with acknowledged exceptions) and Philip Larkin are typically unable to look far from themselves. But after noting this seeming affinity for Hardy, Larkin wrote his best (I think) poem, ‘An Arundel Tomb’, where ‘love’, a word he uses so often, is in a more credible context.
As his biographer, James Booth is partly aware of the flaws in Larkin’s personality and writing and he sees it as his task to refute or justify them. He claims, for example, that his subject suddenly acquired maturity in the years 1945-46. Is that credible? Doesn’t maturity come to us more gradually than that? In any case Larkin continued to be unable to commit himself to another person. He even refers to his own ‘monstrous infantile shell of egotism’, hoping to overcome it (page 165), to which Booth comments, ‘However, his tone remains detached and analytical, and in other letters he stresses his need for solitude.’ He goes on – and always went on – to refer to his girlfriend as ‘Bun’ – a nickname derived from Beatrix Potter. What he objects to in the trap of sex and commitment is ‘this letting in of a second person’.
But is James Booth best placed to speak judiciously of Larkin? A former colleague at Hull university he sometimes seem to be trying to vindicate the honour of the institution against Larkin’s critics. He wants to see Larkin as a witty sophisticate, but his agenda is sometimes too strongly urged. It is Booth, not Larkin, who uses the phrase, ‘the awesome impersonal power of sex’. Does ‘impersonal’ mean the sort of sex applied to pornography? The sex that avoids the personality of the partner? The refusal to recognise the partner’s independent humanity? There’s certainly nothing Lawrentian in that. And another question arises: is the ‘kindness’ attributed to Larkin by Booth also ‘impersonal’ – a kindness more concerned with the giver than the recipient?
The story, as told by Booth, becomes sadder, more desperate, sometimes brutal and ultimately totally negative. Since Larkin has been called ‘the best poet of the twentieth century’ – an offence to so many others – it is probably worthwhile to find out what one can about him. Indeed Booth supplies some acute – and some plainly wrong – interpretations of poems and, unlike some ‘literary’ biographies, his book has the virtue of clearly being about a poet. To be fair, after all this, it is pleasantly readable in style.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

A detailed look at the life and work of Philip Larkin. The book combines a thoughtful analysis of the poems with a look at the life that created them. Despite the controversy about Larkin, a wonderful poet who always got to the point.

[Bookthesp1 · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Booth "knew" Philip Larkin, though only in a public capacity at events run by Hull University, where Booth was in the English department (which was in turn consciously avoided by Larkin.) Booth is now a leading light in the Larkin society and this hefty volume is heralded as a corrective to the warts and all work of Andrew Motion and to a much lesser degree Anthony Thwaite- both of which also "knew" Larkin. Booth seeks to provide a narrative that shows and perhaps justifies or explains some of Larkin's supposed "warts"- his "racism"; sexism, little Englander, curmudgeonly presence that spills over into his poetry and his private life. That he ordered all his diaries to be burned on his death suggests that he wanted a public profile and poetic reputation to be untarnished by such private peccadilloes. Booth seeks to provide a more rounded and grounded explanation for such behaviour by closely examining his relationships and by attempting to "know" or surmise his likely motivations and mindset.
The book has been criticised by some for explaining away or excusing his behaviour, particularly in relation to the women in his life- he was far from a hermit but like many writers needed a muse and solitary time away from said muse to produce poetry- though in point of truth he was forever sending drafts (mainly to Monica Jones) asking for opinions or suggestions which he usually, but not always ignored.
For me, as a reader I felt Booths narrative was strong and well organised. He doesn't always excuse Larkin but there are occasions when you wish he didn't feel the need to provide surmised motivations or a list of possible excuses why he behaved the way he did...What Booth is strong on is the poetry itself which is carefully analysed and the portrayal of Larkins perambulatory existence from Coventry to Wellingborough to Belfast too Hull.
Booth writes very well about Larkin's emotional states and his growing interdependence on Monica Jones which almost came to marriage but fell on the stony ground of Larkin's worries about that final (and perhaps for him) irrevocable commitment which would mean losing his own space and his own thought world....he only lived with Monica when she was unable to look after herself. There are occasional glimpses of humour. Larkin was razor sharp and caustic about other poets. Ted Hughes, in particular seemed to unnerve and annoy him. Booth is also good on his relationships with other women, with the ever present "noise" of Monica in the background. The final chapters are irrevocably sad. Larkin, whose poetry often referenced death died at the same age as his father, of the same condition- which is strangely and darkly poetic.
Whatever the faults of Booths book it is still a fine piece of work and perhaps we did need another full biography to go alongside the works of Motion and Richard Bradford and to accompany both the wonderful, Letters to Monica (Thwaite ed.) and the excellent book on Larkin's photographic life-
The Importance of Elsewhere. I suspect we won't need another biography for at least a generation or more unless some new aspect of his life and work is evidenced. Booths book may jettison the warts but Larkin is still recognisably the man who could memorably (and irresistibly) pastiche Ted Hughes when they were both commissioned to write a quatrain on the queens jubilee-
The sky split apart in malice
Stars rattled like pans on a shelf
Crow shat on Buckingham palace
God pissed Himself...

Its that humour and Larkin's glee in using it that can be missed in accounts of Larkin- he cared deeply about many things but also recognised the occasion where only a dagger would do. At times Booth suggests that biography had the daggers out for Larkin himself and as a corrective his book is fine, but its more than that. Its a respectful and empathetic account of a complex man who expressed himself in carefully chosen words. A writer, a poet and a mere human mortal man with faults and frailties who left us - perhaps too soon..

[Peter Ellwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

A sympathetic biography of Philip Larkin’s life, interleaved with sensitive and excellent analysis of almost every poem he wrote.

My volume of his collected poems had been languishing on my shelves for years before I picked up this account by James Booth. Decades even – the pages are depressingly brown and aged.

His detailed account of Larkin’s life and loves was an ideal trigger for me; and the more I read the more I found myself increasingly reaching for the collected poems, to get the maximum amount of juice out of JB’s references. I cannot recommend that approach strongly enough if you have the inclination. The more I gravitated towards it, the more it became a double ‘win’: the book itself comes alive when you read each poem in its entirety alongside JB’s analysis; and, oh me oh my, I have to say that his analysis helped me realise what spine-tinglingly wonderful poetry it is, even more so than when I first acquired the collected poems.

There is a tiny whiff of controversy about Philip Larkin, and I feel vaguely sulky about even having to mention it. But a Google search will dig up one or two sneering reviews of JB’s book, combined with a degree of sneering about Philip Larkin himself. In brief, Larkin was a grumpy recluse who occasionally wrote about masturbation and fucking, drank too much, and avoided getting married. Naughty boy. But his poetry was sublime. Booth worked with Larkin in Hull for 17 years, and it is clear that he is trying hard, in his entirely objective academic fashion, to rebalance the story.

For me there are a couple of aspects here. First, the old debate about whether a work of art – a poem for example - can be best appreciated and accepted as a free-standing entity, unencumbered by considerations of what its creator was like, or was doing: or the opposite: whether some biographical background helps. And second, the more transient (I fervently hope) twenty-first century problem of virtue-signalling, where it is fashionable to screech blue murder and send the lynch mob out after anyone who doesn’t conform.

Looking at them in reverse order, I imagine that few readers of this review would give a damn about Larkin’s private preferences. If you did, why would you want to read his biography? But – snowflake spoiler alert coming up – if you are the kind of person who thinks it’s right to sack someone for writing “fuck” into a tweet twenty years previously, then go no further, look for something else!

On the former point, I have to say that JB’s writing changed my views quite drastically. I’ve always held to the view that it’s the works themselves that matter: either they stand up or they don’t. Many people argue that it helps to know whether Shakespeare’s sonnets were addressed to a boy, or whether it helps your understanding of Caravaggio’s painting to know that he was a murderer; but I’ve always preferred to look at what was in front of me, so to speak. I have to say though, that Life Art and Love is living proof that the biographical approach does work sometimes.

In many ways I felt that JB’s careful and cerebral analysis lays it on a bit thick. For example, in describing the second novel, A Girl in Winter, he writes “the ternary, ABA structure of the [novel] may owe something to [Virginia] Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, two sections in a wintry present framing a contrasted section in a past summer”, which he caps a few pages on by declaring “the novel ends on the brink of a post-humanist void”.

Again, picking it out almost at random – he says of the poem “Talking in bed”: “..then in line eight a gesture of extravagant despair breaks the poem’s composure - ”None of this cares for us”. The hissing monosyllable with its high short vowel seems arrogant; the lower vowel of ‘us’, unprotected by an opening consonant, is defenceless against it. A verbal perversity unique to this poem intensifies the emotional excess”. Well, shiver my timbers, that’s just what I was going to say.

Finally, the marvellous ‘The Building’ contains the lines:

nothing contravenes
The coming dark, though crowds each evening try
With wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers.

Of which he says: “The language outlines the formal Latinate eloquence of ‘contravenes’ and ‘propitiatory’ with the homely Anglo-Saxon plainness of ‘dark’, ‘weak’ and ‘wasteful’. The ‘w’ alliteration has a hint of exasperation and, after the emotional stammer of the cluttered polysyllabic ‘propitiatory’ the voice falls, in a Mozartean diminuendo, to the open vowel of ‘flowers’".

Well, maybe. But I prefer Larkin’s own formulation (of his work as a whole): “I want readers to feel, yes, I’ve never thought of it that way, but that’s how it is”

That’s how it is. At his best, again and again, Larkin comes out, apparently casually, with phrasing that conveys, exactly, how it is. That’s his glory.

I must say that JB does in his turn show that this casualness is anything but: and his flowery academic language does help convey how Larkin worked and worked to produce language like that. And when all's said and done, it is perfectly obvious that JB loved him to bits.

In a way then, Life Art and Love is two books, a straight biography of Larkin, and a simultaneous literary appreciation of his writing and poetry. I found the former less interesting than the latter. It’s not a prerequisite to be an interesting person when someone writes your biography – but it certainly helps. And frankly, Philip Larkin was not the world’s most exciting personality. A provincial university librarian who couldn’t make his mind up between women and who tended towards wanking and porn perhaps as a result. As timeless biographies go, not the most promising core material.


Regardless, JB brings it all alive in a way that no one else has, and he really does remind you how searingly, transcendently marvellous Larkin at his best truly is. For that, nothing less than five stars will do.

[Nigel Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

It can be said that Larkin led a life of frustrations ; never achieving the commercial success of his friend Kingsley Amis, the stresses of looking after his mother, and his various emotional entanglements with the women in his life. His poetry had long gestation periods, emerging from his many note books which Booth had access to in writing this new biography of the poet.

Booth’s biography places more of a focus on Larkin’s poetry, than does the first port of call for any one interested in the poet ; Andrew Motion’s A Writers Life.

The latter should remain the go- to book on Larkin, but this is worth reading also.

The poems get much attention by detailed studies, but this can get a little tiresome if you are not particularly interested in literary criticism.

In his assessment of Larkin’s life and relationships Booth can be a little forgiving of some of Larkin’s less savoury views but does not condone them.

I would recommend this as an addendum to Motion’s work rather than the first biography to read.

[Penelope Nelson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Philip Larkin - what an enigma. Much loved poems, but an individual who is hard to admire. Booth accepts Larkin's account of putting his work first, and keeping his love interests at bay. He puts the racist and misogynist comments in the context of letters to friends that whose humour remained at the undergraduate (or high school?) level.
I enjoyed this book very much. Booth's response to the poems is always interesting, and it was fun to read with a copy of Larkin's poems nearby. The analysis of "The Whitsun Weddings" is just one instance of good commentary.
Unlike Motion, he does not go on and on about Monica versus Maeve for chapter after chapter, lie after lie, deception after deception. On the Monica front, Booth does quote the Amis remarks about Monica and Larkin's advice to Monica uncritically. Larkin's advice was basically that Monica should keep quiet and listen to her betters (i.e. the guys). This is classic 1950s misogyny. And what male Oxford First of that era considered a female Oxford First as an intellectual peer?
There are good insights in Booth's book on all the aspects of Larkin promised in the title.

[Dulcie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This really ended up as a marathon; an interesting and elegiac marathon, but still a marathon. The recovery of Larkin's reputation after the trashing by a previous biography is very welcome.
His very "hungry" approach to life may well have seen him on the wrong side of the me too movement if he was around today which does take some of the gloss off his achievements.
The poetry more than stands the test of time & Larkin must be recorded as on of the greatest literary figures of the 20th century.

[tabby · Rating 3 out of 5]

mehhh I liked this and liked the way it was written

reading it in the vain hope that I would do well in my english lit poetry nea made it worse

not to mention I am confuzzled as to how marxist he truly is and his marxist views

if you want a physical copy of this book, email me on dianarosamsp@gmail.com and I'll send you a version for free if you pay for the postage lol

only read the bits I needed so lowkey dnfed the rest
but go James booth he made Larkin more fun than I perceived he could be

turning in my first draft of my nea on the 24th :))

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Biography Philip Larkin

Generally a good biography on Philip Larkin from a well informed and sympathetic writer. Be prepared for considerable analysis of Larkin's poems. The author addresses Larkin's somewhat alter ego, with his taste for pornography, alcohol, swearing and keeping two, sometimes three women on the go. I thought the book concluded Larkin's death rather abruptly but perhaps his death was such. Overall, I would recommend this biography of this deceptively rascal poet.

[TjeerdFokkens · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice biography of the famous poet. The text is well-researched. The analyses of his poetry are good and are connected to important events in his life. The structure of the text is not so clear and in fact a bit deceptive, as the chapters seem to indicate a clear division into time intervals, while the text itself hops back and forth in time. It is difficult to get a good picture of the man. The author moreover tries to defend Larkin's stance regarding racial and gender issues. This is something to be avoided in a biography, I think.

[Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a very thoughtful & enjoyable read on the life of Philip Larkin and I feel I have a much better appreciation of his work since reading this book. The author avoids getting bogged down on the minutia of his life & focuses more on his poems which I was very grateful for and along with the Collected Poems I enjoyed many an entertaining evening.

[BrianC75 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Found the book to be disappointing. Dry and sometimes turgid. I am hugely impressed by Larkin’s poetry but found this detailed account of his life and personal relationships did not give credibility to his obvious genius.

[JoJo · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I have always struggled to like Philip Larkin poetry I found this autobiography rather interesting, and while I still find him a rather unusual man I maybe now see more of the reasons driving his eccentric creations.

[E. D. · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fluid, somewhat salacious read spoilt by two factors: an insistence on forensically examining key poems using very specialist academic jargon WITHOUT relating it to 'the life' and skipping over the frequent xenophobia / misogyny used as primary sources.

[Tapan Roy]

Very informative

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

BBC Book of the Week

Philip Larkin was that rare thing among poets - a household name in his own lifetime. Lines such as 'Never such innocence again' and 'Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three' made him one of the most popular poets of the last century.

Larkin's reputation as a man, however, has been more controversial. A solitary librarian known for his pessimism, he disliked exposure and had no patience with the literary circus. And when, in 1992, the publication of his Selected Letters laid bare his compartmentalised personal life, accusations of duplicity, faithlessness, racism and misogyny were levelled against him.

There is, of course, no requirement that poets should be likeable or virtuous, but James Booth asks whether art and life were really so deeply at odds with each other. Can the poet who composed the moving 'Love Songs in Age' have been such a cold-hearted man? Can he who uttered the playful, self-deprecating words 'Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth' really have been so boorish?

A very different public image is offered by those who shared the poet's life - the women with whom he was romantically involved, his friends and his university colleagues. It is with their personal testimony, including access to previously unseen letters, that Booth reinstates a man misunderstood - not a gaunt, emotional failure, but a witty, provocative and entertaining presence, delightful company; an attentive son and a man devoted to the women he loved.



1/5 Aged 17, Larkin goes up to Oxford to read English and meets a jazz-loving kindred spirit.
2/5 Philip meets Monica Jones, an assistant English lecturer at Leicester University.
3/5 Philip begins work as librarian at Hull University and oversees plans for expansion.
4/5 As middle age approaches, Larkin's private life is as complicated as ever.
5/5 Despite having two continuing relationships, Larkin brings another woman into his life.

[Jeff Howells · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have nearly a whole shelf dedicated to books by and about Philip Larkin. His poems and his life have weaved a spell on me since studying The Whitsun Weddings at A level. This is the first major biography since Andrew Motion's 'A Writer's Life' and whilst I still prefer that book (it's more detailed I think) this is still an engrossing read. The thing that this book really drives home is how Larkin could be so many different things to different people. Bawdy and lewd with his close friends, kind & loyal to his colleagues playful and gentle to lovers. Yet all through this he is essentially a remote figure (living on his own for the majority of his life, even when conducting relationships with 3 women at the same time). He made a big thing about avoiding commitment, in his youth it was probably a pose, but it became a self fulfilling prophesy. Personally his is a life story that I admire and I won't apologise for that...

[Helen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This biography seems to be trying to redress the balance after the earlier Motion biography which upset some of Larkin's friends and acquaintances by exposing some of the darker side of his life. (How much do we really know about anyone, though?) The emphasis in this book is very much more on his writings, with his poems treated chronologically, and the biography definitely more in the background. Since the Motion biography a number of the people in Larkin's life, including Monica Jones, have died, and some more source material is available therefore (mainly letters in archives). Interesting, but I do still think he treated the women in his life badly - a commitmentphobe and a cheat - and his politics and some other things are not very attractive. I for one rather regret that he didn't continue with his novel writing, but some of the poems make up for that loss.

[Tim Atkinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This monumental survey of Larkin's life and loves was a long overdue attempt to pour oil on the troubled, sensationalist waters of earlier books about the poet, and in particular to expose the myth of the man as a fascist and misogynist. Larkin comes over as weak and ridiculously loyal where women are concerned rather than selfish and heartless. Basically, he sacrificed his own chances of a settled, committed relationship by an inability to do the dirty on a neurotic and overbearing partner of long-standing. Having said that, the book is not blind to Larkin's many faults but is at its strongest when dealing with the richness of the poetry, plumbing depths of meaning and finding resonances that ultimately add so much to Larkin's rather meagre output that the lack of any further poems from the great man's pen becomes irrelevant.

[Jan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an absolutely excellent book which gives a balanced view of a complex man. We knew many people mentioned in the book (Pete knew them better than I because he worked at the Brynmor Jones Library, University of Hull, from 1972 until 1989). He admired Larkin enormously. We both hated the Motion biography which focused upon negative matters. I recommend this book which also serves to introduce many of the poems in the order that Larkin wrote them.

[Anup Das · Rating 5 out of 5]

An insightful and vivid biography of poet Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) was a university librarian in England by profession, and an accomplished poet and writer by passion. This book illustrates his literary career spanning four decades. James Booth was an editor to many of Larkin's books. Thus, Booth possessed a first-hand knowledge that helps in bring out this insightful and vivid biography of Philip Larkin.

[Graham Tennyson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating read. I'm still not sure I would have liked Larkin - difficult to reconcile some of his statements and attitudes with his poetry. However, this book gives a much more nuanced picture of the man behind the image. It is also a fascinating insight into the creative process. Made me want to re read the poems.

[Warrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very much a defence of a man who really needs defending it seems. I like a lot of Larkin's work but, in contrast to Hughes, for example, Larkin's life is so ... ordinary. Maybe that's why his poetry resonates for so many? The early life is interesting. Then it's the life of a librarian!