Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

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In his depressed Eeyorish way, he may have merely been announcing (as his second stanza suggests) his own failure to be born at the right time so as to embrace a sexual revolution that was both reasonably safe (pills, diaphragms, no AIDS yet, and so on) and not conditional on marriage; but in fact anyone could be forgiven for the assumption that, owing to earlier social pressures, he was portraying himself as a late developer who only came to the full joys of sex at the ripe old age of forty-one.

No wonder Larkin was insisting, as early as 1954, that his diaries must be destroyed after his death. To lovers of the poetry, this selection of correspondence that lasted forty years is completely fascinating - not just for the inadvertent light it shines on the poetry but also for the elucidation of Larkin's own taste and his opinion of his own work and worth. I was girding myself for the nasty, racist, homophobic Larkin that was revealed when his first correspondence was published but in this respect found him mild. Still, one way or another, Monica enabled Larkin to cherish his crucial essences – and to turn them into immortal poetry. He might have added his other underlying distastes for them: they drained away time, money, and attention.Far from avoiding relationships with women, he undertook two long-lasting major affairs, as well as quite a few other dalliances on the side, that absorbed an enormous amount of his time and energy. The Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull stands as a monument to his brilliance in a career that he affected to despise. What came as new, with the force of a revelation, was the steady, inexorable growth of poetic skill and creative depth, to the very end. I defy any man – even the most self-sufficient poodlefaker – to read the following without a twinge: "I think .

There is something of Mass Observation about them - reflections on life, literature, domestic chores and personal feelings .How far, by and large, do Larkin’s letters to Monica Jones enhance our understanding of his creative work? Yet whatever he did, whatever she said, for four tumultuous decades they remained together, if separate, and for the last few years, when sickness made inroads on both, not even separate.

He said he loved her, and they talked many times about living together and even getting married, but Larkin maintained their separation and indeed had relationships with other women. It also aroused, not for the first time, my heartfelt sympathy and admiration for Monica Jones, whose single-minded devotion to an extremely difficult and contrary genius not only fostered a clutch of great poems, but stimulated one of the oddest and most improbably touching love stories of the twentieth century. 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.By 1962, however, when he wrote “Toads Revisited,” free time had come to look less attractive, a haven for the stupid or the weak, while his in-tray and “loaf-haired secretary” (Betty Mackereth, with whom he had a late-flowering affair that produced at least two recently discovered poems) offered comforting stability. 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. Larkin's clarity, his almost clinical over-sensitivity (naturally vital to his genius), could not be muted or muffled.

There are a couple of cryptic references in October 1958, starting with: "I hope you are better now – I fear I didn't treat you very considerately! By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. In between apologies for his two timing ways and general inadequacies, he is a kind and funny friend to his Rabbit gal, Monica.Not surprisingly, in a rambling discussion of their attitudes to sex, we learn that while Monica wants personal emotion in making love, he does not see the act that way at all, and to pretend otherwise would be faking it. Philip and Monica were contemporaries at Oxford—where they both got Firsts in English, but never knew each other—between 1940 and 1943.