Moping around the local library I alighted upon Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica and decided to revisit this book. Here read again was his rather prejudiced and curmudgeonly view of life. His disparaging of foreigners, immigrants, the lower orders, even his privileged academic milieu. Larkin was at base a life-hater, a people hater, an everything mediocre hater. Letters to Monica also reveals how fragile was his psychology; his mental constitution was dominated by acute sensitivities and chronic aversions. He had a morbid fear of illness and death. He did not like to impose on or intrude upon others. He could not overtly self-promote even when he was being recognised as a major poet. An essentially lonely man he spend much effort in avoiding 'people'. He declined invitations for visiting lectureships in the USA. He detested foreign travel. Like a lot of lonely people he escaped his affliction by work ('the toad'), a select correspondence and a few friendships. He did not seem capable of intimate relationships but no doubt had a 'sort of loving' for women. Monica was his soul-mate, she sharing many of his artistic tastes, conservative politics and habitual drinking His admiration and affection was for books, the arts, literary figures and a nostalgic idealised England.
I discovered his poems in thin faber and faber paperbacks with poor quality paper published in the 1980s, The Whitsun Weddings, The North Ship, and High Windows. I was stimulated by his poetic skill which captured so succinctly the ferment of ordinary places and people. He was not unlike John Betjeman in seeking a blend of the comic and tragic, although Betjeman had a more kind and wholesome view of life. I was informed about his problematic personality and circumstances by Andrew Motion's Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life and his own all-revealing Letters To Monica
Perhaps here is the kind of poet that one should not to probe into for fear of spoiling the poetic image, the stand alone value of the work (Lord Byron might be a good example). I would disagree if only for the reason that I think the truth of the poet as man better elucidates the poetry. And in the truth of the poet we can discern the soil of the poem, it humus of time and place. His cribbed and despairing life was not uncommon in a Britain of cold war angst, the bomb, and the social overhang of the War. Ordinary people were not so converted to the need to appear nice and amiable. This was a time of character which cannot be faked. I can appreciate his disdain for pose or self-improvement mantras or cosmetic gimmicks so popular for the media-primed artist of our time. Those who create art out of a bare witness to reality produce the better art. And they seem to draw the sympathy from the reader and become vulnerable and almost loveable.
