| Philip Larkin |
James Underwood
Published: December 2, 2016 9.47am GMT
Philip Larkin, one of English poetry’s most recognisable voices, has been memorialised in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner.
Using unpublished letters, John Sutherland's book Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me reveals the tragic squandering of a brilliant woman
“Iam simply ridiculous – a reject, an incapable” wrote Monica Jones in 1955. This wasn’t a passing moment of hysterical despair: over her entire adult life, she would refer to herself as “the old bag”, an “ordinary little worm” or “a dull unleavened lump” in self-lacerating recognition that her existence was a pathetic flop. And that is how posterity is in danger of picturing Philip Larkin’s mistress: a harpy in horn-rimmed spectacles who drank and shouted and made a fool of herself in an increasingly desperate campaign to keep hold of the man she loved.
They were ‘soulmates’ according to people who knew both of them.
They were ‘soulmates’ according to people who knew both of them. The word has a double-edged quality; it may suggest that they got on well together because they presented such a problem to everyone else. Both Philip Larkin and Monica Jones found it difficult to suffer fools gladly, and in this collection of letters (ranging from 1946-84) from Larkin to his long-term companion and lover, the mean-spirited and misanthropic are given full rein.
| Philip Larkin and Monica Jones |
She was a vile racist, a depressed companion to a constitutionally unfaithful man, but Monica Jones was also the woman who cultivated the aesthetic sensibility of one of the greatest poets of the last century, says Tomiwa Owolade
Towiwa Owolade
15 April 2021
ohn Sutherland’s memoir-cum-biography hinges on a profound question: how well do we truly know a person? Sutherland - who is Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at UCL, and author of, among other books, Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives - ponders which Monica Jones is more real: “The Monica I knew as a young man in the 1960s? Or the Monica I now know from thousands of pages of manuscript documentation, sixty years on?”.
"The Trees" by Philip Larkin
| Philip Larkin |
James Booth
1 December 2015
Thirty years after his death, the poet Philip Larkin is finally to be awarded a memorial in Westminster Abbey’s ‘Poets’ Corner’ – that revered shrine to British writers. Chaucer, Dickens and Tennyson are buried there, while many others – Shakespeare, Keats and Wilde included – have been memorialised.
| Philip Larkin with wicker rabbit ‘Veronica’; ‘I will always lose myself in Larkin.’ |
Poems are Swiss army knives of words – they have multiple uses
Ican’t remember when I fell in love with poetry, though I remember the teachers who encouraged it. I remember bringing in a lever-arch file of my own “efforts”, aged 14, mostly aping Wilfred Owen – a war poet who had the distinct advantage of having served in a war, which I had not. I had been kettled while on an Iraq protest, though, which I maintain counts for something.
| Philip Larkin |
Named Britain’s greatest postwar writer by the Times in 2008, Philip Larkin remains justly celebrated as a wry observer of life’s routines, banalities and quiet poignancies. He was a writer who once spoke of poetry as “enhancing the everyday”.
| Philip Larkin |
ALEC CHARLES
Published: July 6, 2017 8.49am BST
Do the lives of poets matter? It’s a debate that has raged since the middle of last century. In Philip Larkin’s day, the scholarly advocates of New Criticism felt that the text itself, regardless of authorial intent or audience affect, was all that really counted.
But we’re surrounded by the paratext – material such as covers, blurbs, biographies and introductions, which surrounds any text. We’re steeped in literary knowledge impossible to ignore. Can we interpret the demise of Helen Burns in Jane Eyre without acknowledging the Brontës’ history of consumption? Can we read Keats in ignorance of his similar fate? And might we enjoy the poetry of Larkin innocent of any knowledge of the poet’s outmoded beliefs?
| Philip Larkin |
Aaron MacLean
After taking a bad fall in his downstairs bathroom, the poet Philip Larkin was rushed to the hospital on the night of 29 November 1985. Having actively contemplated death for most of his 63 years, he now felt—accurately—that his moment of expiration was approaching. In the ambulance, he begged his longtime companion Monica Jones, who rode to the hospital with him, to destroy his diaries.After Larkin’s death a few days later, Monica complied, turning the diaries over to his secretary—who happened to be another 'longtime companion' of Larkin's, Betty Mackereth. Mackereth spent an entire afternoon shredding and incinerating their contents.
| ‘A victim of misogyny, she was a bit of a misogynist herself’ … Monica Jones with Philip Larkin. |
In thrall to Larkin’s genius: racism, drink and despair in a generous account of a tortured relationship over four decades
Blake Morrison
17 April 2021
Poor Monica Jones. She would have liked to marry Philip Larkin but he kept her at arm’s length (or the 100 miles between Hull and Leicester) for more than 30 years. An academic, she loved her subject, English literature, but failed to publish any books and, as a result, was never promoted by her university department. She dressed with flair and flamboyance but was dismissed by Larkin’s friends as “a grim old bag”, “a beast”, “frigid, drab and hysterical”, and appeared, thinly disguised, as the appalling Margaret Peel (her own middle name was Beale) in Kingsley Amis’s debut novel Lucky Jim. “I dread the whole of the rest of my life,” she wrote in her 30s, and death has done little to rescue her reputation.
In a poem he wrote in 1953 about perusing a photo album that belonged to Winifred Arnott—one of the many objects of his frequently anticlimactic erotic pursuits—Philip Larkin had this to say about the art of picture taking:
| Philip Larkin |
The Importance of Elsewhere:
Philip Larkin’s Photographs
by Richard Bradford.
Frances Lincoln, 2015,
$26.60 cloth.
At least twice in his life—once in a passing remark and once in a perfect line—Philip Larkin, who played at being merely dour, used the word lovely. It doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that photography (almost his second art, as this selection of Larkin’s prodigious output reveals) is a close presence in each case. The poet, on a trip to the country, turns positively exclamatory on seeing, of all things, some cows. “How lovely they are!” he writes in a letter, not having to explain, really, not explaining away. He takes several snaps in close-up. The loveliness on offer at the close of “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album” is of another order: “It holds you like a heaven, and you lie / Unvariably lovely there, / Smaller and clearer as the years go by.”
Philip Larkin aged 14, with his sister Kitty, during one of the family’s trips to Germany, in 1936. Larkin didn’t say much about the political situation they would have encountered there, but he wrote that their father, Sydney, “liked jolly singing in beer cellars, three-four times to accordians…” Photograph: All photographs Philip Larkin/ The Estate of Philip Larkin |
| Larkin’s mother Eva. The poet wrote to Monica in 1954: “you must never come back ... till she is dead and gone if you want a quiet life, which suggests that some morbidly humorous intent went into his carefully posed photograph in a museum of wartime memorabilia near Loughborough. |
| Hilly Kilmarnock, sunbathing in Swansea, at the time when she was married to Kingsley Amis. She wrote to Larkin in 1950: “I’m sick to death of all the men I love and admire going off with other women, usually much better looking than me. There’s Kingsley with Barbara and Terry … I’ve got a weekend off in April, when I shall be going to London. I dream that I’m meeting you there, and that we’ll have loads to drink and then go to bed together, but alas, only a dream.” |
| Monica in the bedroom of Larkin’s Pearson Park in Hull, in 1957. References to her clothes feature habitually in his letters to her. He revelled in her willingness to play the role of sex-object, to become as much the figure of his fantasies as the individual with whom he talked about literature and architecture. She too enjoyed shifting between these roles and was happy, often flattered, to pose for the many mildly erotic photographs he took of her. |