Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

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The great myth of the relationship, to which both parties subscribed most of the time, was that he was spoiling her life by holding back from marriage, without leaving her free to pursue other prospects. The similar dismay generated in readers of his selected correspondence and Motion’s biography by these and other unpalatable traits, such as his racism, gloomy depression, and occasional outbursts of sour misogyny, have tended to give a darker impression of him than the facts warrant. In 1950 Larkin moved to Belfast, and thence to Hull, while Monica remained in Leicester, becoming by turns his correspondent, lover and closest confidante, in a relationship which lasted over forty years until the poet's death in 1985. When she points out that he tends to be chilly in letters after a successful meeting, as if to re-establish distance, he does better.

Anyway, "taking care of business" (to paraphrase Aretha Franklin) was definitely not this man's game. There are flashes in the early poems—in the final stanza, for example, of “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album,” encapsulating “a past that no one now can share,/No matter whose your future; calm and dry,/It holds you like a heaven, and you lie/Unvariably lovely there,/Smaller and clearer as the years go by.But a famous poet he was, and arguably a great one, and one piece of his public myth that has proved immensely attractive is the idea that he deliberately, and selflessly, sacrificed mere personal connections, above all marriage and familial ties, to the lonely demands of literary creativity. As for Monica – well, despite her clothes (brown trousers of crushed velvet, wifebeater blouse, plus earrings the size of hula hoops), she resembled an all-in wrestler renowned for an indifference to the norms of fair play. The 1992 volume of Selected Letters (also edited by Anthony Thwaite) hurt Larkin's reputation by giving space to his seedy side, shown particularly in letters to Robert Conquest, with whom he shared tastes in pornography, and Kingsley Amis. His unobtrusive cuts give a shape to the letters, bringing Larkin's clear-eyed observations of love, work and his surroundings to the fore. 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.

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. When we learn elsewhere, and from some hints in his letters, of Larkin’s parsimoniousness with money, the discovery does not come entirely as a surprise. Unfortunately there was evidence (letters received while on holiday with her, for instance) that he was being inadequate with other women. 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!

He said of Mansfield's journal that it made readers "more sensitive, more receptive, happier than before". Feelings of guilt, and possibly a desire for utter self-immolation, subjected Larkin to a recurrent temptation: that of setting up house with Eva. Larkin and Jones had a cult of the fluffy rodent, in a running joke that acquired its own seriousness. And Larkin would continue to regale Kingsley with grimly jovial asides about Monica's affectations – and, for instance, about her facial resemblance to Stan Laurel (an improvement, one supposes, on Oliver Hardy). I defy any man – even the most self-sufficient poodlefaker – to read the following without a twinge: "I think .

Those of us who are middle age know how things rise and fall, so I don’t want to be mean about their relationship. Nor does his dislike for venturing anywhere beyond the British Isles—a trait that he shared with literary characters as diverse as John Betjeman and Kingsley Amis, not to mention Nancy Mitford’s father, Lord Redesdale, the model for Uncle Matthew in The Pursuit of Love, who was fond of saying that “abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends.The day didn't get off to a very good start by my reading some stories by 'Flannery O'Connor' in the bath – horribly depressing American South things.

Since Amis had, notoriously, modeled the appalling Margaret Peel of Lucky Jim directly on Monica, and become filthy rich as a result, this may be understandable, but it does give one pause for thought. He sometimes confided to friends that while he felt he ought to marry Monica, he wanted to marry Maeve. Philip and Monica were both then approaching forty, and in good professional jobs: if not wealthy, at least reasonably well off, with neither of them supporting a family or paying off a mortgage. The whole episode is immensely revealing of Larkin’s remarkable capacity for producing self-exculpatory reasons for dithering endlessly between two ongoing affairs. Still, one way or another, Monica enabled Larkin to cherish his crucial essences – and to turn them into immortal poetry.Slack, sloppy, sly, drivelling, daft, narrow, knobby, vacant, vicious, vulpine, vulturous - every kind of ugliness was represented, not once but tenfold. 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. In 1950 Larkin moved to Belfast, and thence to Hull, while Monica remained in Leicester, becoming by turns his correspondent, lover and closest confidante, in a relationship which lasted over forty years until the poet’s death in 1985. The technical elements of his writing are left out but the reader can surmise from the context of many letters some idea of meaning.