Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

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One of the most valuable features of Letters to Monica is the substantial revision of this picture that they cumulatively present. This is from an Amis-Larkin letter of the same period: "It doesn't surprise me in the least that Monica is [studying George Crabbe, 1754-1832, poet and parson]; he's exactly the sort of priggish, boring, featureless (especially that; there isn't anything about him, is there? What tends to confirm such a verdict is that the pattern—carrying on intimate relationships with two women at the same time, unable or unwilling to decide between them, to the long-term exasperation and misery of both—was, a decade later, to repeat itself exactly, when Monica, the newcomer in the earlier affair, became the maîtresse en titre (whom Larkin found endless reasons not to marry, but could not renounce), and found their relationship now threatened by her lover’s budding romance with Maeve Brennan, his sub-librarian in Hull. They liked Beatrix Potter even when she strayed beyond bunnies, with Larkin declaring that he would sacrifice Joyce, Proust and Mann (foreigners all, admittedly, and he had become scrupulously xenophobic) for The Tailor of Gloucester.

Larkin was Assistant Librarian there, later took a position in Belfast, and finally became the Librarian at the University of Hull. I think my enthusiasm for Letters to Monica, apart from my keen interest in Larkin and his poetry, is because this is a warm love story. Though her sillinesses could bore him to distraction and drive him into frenzies of rage, she “was more than a respectable excuse for dodging the frightening or complicated things in his life,” as Larkin’s biographer Andrew Motion observes; “she crucially influenced the accents and attitudes of his poems. He published four volumes of poetry - The North Ship (1945), The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974) - for which he received innumerable honours including the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry and the WH Smith Award. Sex,” noted the young masturbator in his pocket diary for 1950, “is too good to share with anyone else.

The most extraordinary letters are ones where he is listening to a record or the radio ( The Messiah, for instance, or The Critics) and transmutes the experience even before it has finished. In this fond struggle between two passive-aggressive types, each of them trying to finesse some decisiveness out of the other, she must have known that a double negative was the most she could hope for. This notion took something of a beating with the first selections from Larkin’s letters to be published, and Motion’s uncomfortably penetrating biography made short work of his worst self-exculpatory posturing. Ovid’s dictum— Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor, “I see the better and approve it, but follow the worse”—might have been written with Larkin as its prize example.

This remarkable unpublished correspondence only came to light after Monica Jones’s death in 2001, and consists of nearly two thousand letters, postcards and telegrams, which chronicle – day by day, sometimes hour by hour – every aspect of Larkin’s life and the convolutions of their relationship. They only came to light after Monica Jones died in 2001, when nearly two thousand letters were discovered in Larkin's house in Hull. N. Wilson, I disliked being told what to think, and sometimes saw Larkin, as he did, as a character perilously close to the uncle “shouting smut” in “The Whitsun Weddings. 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. WHAT ON the surface he wanted, and more or less admitted, was to enjoy all the conveniences of an available lover without most of the concomitant financial or emotional responsibilities.The person this letter describes is not just an individual but a familiar and fearsome type: the congenital, and unstoppable, windbag. For me, the most illuminating but most difficult to read section of the book concerned the fallout of Larkin including the poem "Broadcast" in his collection "The Whitsun Weddings" - a poem he wrote about Maeve Brennan, a young fellow librarian at Hull. AS BY NOW should be apparent, Philip Larkin was not only a complex and elusive character, but also tended to present different, and carefully edited, sides of his personality to each of those friends (mostly women) with whom he had any kind of intimacy.

Most strikingly of all, Larkin’s oftrepeated claim to detest what he poeticized as “the toad work” was in fact largely camouflage for its exact opposite. 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. In these letters, no less than in his poems, he stands rather nakedly before us only this time with a damp dish towel over his wrist, the room gone a bit too cold, thinking about listening to the radio from bed. Yesterday I listened, in a cold chill, to Larkin himself reading “Aubade,” as no one else could, and now from outre-tombe: an unforgettable, and scary, experience. Ruth and Monica shared a certain trait: a restless self-importance unaccompanied by the slightest distinction (Monica, for all her strong opinions, published not a single word in her entire career).Philip Larkin and Monica Jones at the memorial service for Sir John Betjeman, Westminster Abbey, London, 1984. She was a formidable but not threatening reader, making it clear that her admiration for Larkin's poetry functioned separately from her personal feeling for him. She won him over by offering him, for the first time, an undisturbed secret retreat, a private rabbit-hole where, as Motion explains, “they lazed, drank, read, pottered round the village and amused themselves with private games. Feelings of guilt, and possibly a desire for utter self-immolation, subjected Larkin to a recurrent temptation: that of setting up house with Eva. All the old arguments that he had trotted out to pacify Ruth—his distrust of marriage, his need for privacy—were now refurbished for Monica, whose sharp critical intelligence was not taken in for one moment.