Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

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Larkin was demurely diffident (though he retained his "impeccable attentive courtesy: grave, but at the same time sunlit," as Kingsley would say in his funeral address, four years later). This has elements of both happy ending and nemesis – the belated commitment coming without dignity or real freedom of choice. This remarkable unpublished correspondence only came to light after Monica Jones’s death in 2001, and consists of nearly two thousand letters, postcards and telegrams, which chronicle –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.

Beatrix Potter and Kenneth Grahame are familiar and much-quoted authors—early on we find Monica giving him the Rackham-illustrated Wind in the Willows as a Christmas present—who offer them a ready-made escapist world when their adult relationship becomes too difficult. At the same time he was juggling his close and needy relationship with his recently widowed mother, Eva. This never previously published correspondence, edited by Anthony Thwaite, offers a unique insight into Larkin's most intimate thoughts.

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. What a 1960 photograph will suggest, first and foremost, to a reader of Larkin’s poetry is the opening stanza of “Annus Mirabilis,” published in 1967, and, along with “This Be the Verse” (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad,” etc. A good place to start on the protagonists of this curious correspondence—culled from some 1,400 letters discovered after the addressee’s death in 2001—is the wrap-around photograph that takes up most of both sides of the book’s dust jacket. Much of the time, though, readers will be thinking that the "literary correspondence" is something we're well shot of – a postwar embarrassment, like child labour, meat rationing and outdoor toilets. Anguish of indecision, nine times out of ten, is caused by a decision struggling to be recognised' - that is a quotation from Camembert (fl.

spends the time thinking about next summer's thunder-storms, gas taps, electricity switches, dark clouds, and I don't know what. This is a proper correspondence, intelligent but easy, fluent, encouraging; we see the charm and the point of sitting down, at the end of the day, or the beginning of an evening, and putting one's thoughts into writing, and sending them off to someone we love. 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.It's in discussing the responsibilities of those activities and those he came in contact with while living the life of an active poet and reviewer that some of his famous irritability becomes evident.