Philip Larkin (90 page)

  
67.
   Blake Morrison, ‘“Still Going On, All of It”: The Movement in the 1950s and the Movement Today’, in Leader (ed.),
The Movement
Reconsidered
, p. 33.

  
68.
   Conquest, ‘
New
Lines
, Movements, and Modernisms’, p. 307.

  
69.
   Letter to William Van O’Connor, 2 April 1958. Motion, p. 243.

  
70.
   ‘A Conversation with Ian Hamilton’,
FR
, p. 20.

12: Hull (1955–7)

    
1.
   27 April 1955.
LM
,
p. 155.

    
2.
   Originally titled ‘Lodgers’, and focused on ‘Mr Gridley’. W. I. Bleaney was one of the successful School Certificate candidates listed in the King Henry VIII school magazine, the
Coventrian
, in 1936.

    
3.
   Larkin is thinking not of Hull, but of Coventry or Oxford, with their vehicle-assembly plants.

    
4.
   In a sign of his working-class taste Bleaney prefers sauce from a bottle to properly prepared gravy. His ‘plugging at the four aways’ is an allusion to the ‘pools’, which, for a penny or halfpenny stake, gave punters the chance of winning hundreds of thousands of pounds by guessing the draws or away wins in Football League matches.

    
5.
   Published in the
Grapevine
(University of Durham Institute of Education), 4 February 1957.

    
6.
   ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’, W. B. Yeats,
Selected Poetry
, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (London: Macmillan, 1962), p. 202.

    
7.
   Hartley, p. 59.

    
8.
   Ibid., p. 74.

    
9.
   Ibid.

  
10.
   16 April 1955.
LM
,
p
.
152.

  
11.
   1 May 1955.
LM
,
p
.
157.

  
12.
   
LM,
p. 167.

  
13.
   Alison Hartley, personal communication, 2012.

  
14.
   
LM
, p. 167. The hare is in fact wearing the garb of a medieval pilgrim, but characteristically Larkin does not ‘bother’ with such antiquarianism.

  
15.
   
SL
, p. 246.

  
16.
   Judy Egerton, interview with the author, 17 December 2010. Ansell later became City Editor of
The
Times
, 1962–7.

  
17.
   9 November 1955.
SL
, p. 268.

  
18.
   Hartley, p. 177.

  
19.
   
LM
,
p.
171.

  
20.
   R. J. C. Watt,
A Concordance to the Poetry of Philip Larkin
(Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann, 1995), p. 521.

  
21.
   To Eva Larkin, 25 January 1956.

  
22.
   Martin Amis, Introduction to
Philip Larkin: Poems
(London: Faber & Faber, 2011), p. x.

  
23.
   To Eva Larkin, 25 January 1956.

  
24.
   To Ansell and Judy Egerton, 31 May 1955.
SL
, p. 243.

  
25.
   Hartley, p. 67.

  
26.
   To Conquest, 24 July 1955.
SL
, p. 245.

  
27.
   
LM
,
pp. 182–3.

  
28.
   Ibid.,
p. 178n.

  
29.
   Ibid.,
p. 192n.

  
30.
   11 March 1956.
LM
,
201.

  
31.
   Letters and cards to Eva Larkin, 4, 11, 14, 16 and 20 December 1955.

  
32.
   To Eva Larkin, 9 September 1956.

  
33.
   To Eva Larkin, 8 January 1956.

  
34.
   To Eva Larkin, 14 February 1956.

  
35.
   He made minor adjustments to the text before publication.
Complete Poems
, pp. 435–6.

  
36.
   There may be a buried echo of Book 9 of Milton’s
Paradise Lost
, ll. 385–6: ‘Thus saying, from her Husband’s hand her hand / Soft she withdrew.’

  
37.
   Simon Blackburn makes this point in his survey of the clasped-hands motif in medieval monuments and brasses, ‘English Tombs and Larkin’,
AL
36 (October 2013), pp. 7–11.

  
38.
   Larkin was wryly amused when it was suggested that the clasped hands might be a Victorian restorer’s addition. Trevor Brighton, ‘An Arundel Tomb: The Monument’, in Paul Foster, Trevor Brighton and Patrick Garland,
An Arundel Tomb
, Otter Memorial Paper 1 (Chichester: Chichester Institute, 1987), pp. 14–22. It is now thought that this feature was indeed original.

  
39.
   6 October 1951.
LM
, p. 63.

  
40.
   DPL/1/4/24.

  
41.
   21 February 1956.
LM
,
p. 196.

  
42.
   Motion, p. 275. He had asked her, in crossword-mode, for ‘something meaning a sign, two syllables’.

  
43.
   4 December 1956.
LM
,
p. 210.

  
44.
   To Monica Jones, 31 March 1956. Not in
LM
.

  
45.
   This public lavatory has received awards, and is to this day something of a tourist attraction.

  
46.
   Tranby Croft is a Grade II-listed country house at Anlaby, just outside Hull.

  
47.
   To Monica Jones, 22–23 April 1956. Not in
LM
.

  
48.
   John Malcom Brinnin,
Dylan Thomas in America: An Intimate Journal
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1955).

  
49.
   To Monica Jones, 22–23 April 1956.

  
50.
   To Eva Larkin, 23 September 1956.

  
51.
   Ibid.

  
52.
   Moira Phillips, ‘Larkin Recollected’,
AL
33 (April 2012), p. 11.

  
53.
   To Monica Jones, 27 October 1956. Not in
LM
.

  
54.
   To Monica Jones, 18 November 1956. Not in
LM
.

  
55.
   
SL
, p. 276.

  
56.
   At a Larkin Society dinner held in 2010 to raise money for the statue by Martin Jennings now at Paragon Station, Maureen Lipman, standing beside a fibre-glass toad in the form of Philip Larkin, declared, in her best Hull accent, that this was the first time she had shared the stage with a ‘turd’. Jackie Sewell, ‘An Evening with Maureen Lipman CBE’,
AL
30 (October 2010), p .26.