Philip Larkin (91 page)

  
57.
   Interview with the
Observer
,
RW
, pp. 54–5.

  
58.
   7 January 1956.
LM
,
p. 193.

  
59.
   26 August 1956.
LM
,
p. 204.

  
60.
   Motion, p. 259.

13: Poet-Librarian (1956–60)

    
1.
   To Eva Larkin, 26 May 1957.

    
2.
   Betty Mackereth, interview with the author, 4 August 2003.

    
3.
   Brennan, p. 23.

    
4.
   Ibid.

    
5.
   Ibid., p. 24. In 1967 the novel was made into a film starring Sidney Poitier.

    
6.
   Betty Mackereth, interview with the author, 9 February 2013.

    
7.
   Brennan, p. 28.

    
8.
   
LM
,
pp. 173, 223, 256.

    
9.
   Brennan, pp. 25–6.

  
10.
   To Eva Larkin, 19 May 1957.

  
11.
   Mary Judd (née Wrench), interview with the author, 28 June 2011.

  
12.
   Brennan, pp. 29–30.

  
13.
   Ibid., p. 23.

  
14.
   Mary Judd (née Wrench), interview with the author, 28 June 2011.

  
15.
   Verso of p. 286 of diary no. 12, 1954–7 (DPL4/1/4). He gave the names of the writers on a separate inserted list: Miss Cuming (Agnes Cuming, his predecessor as Librarian at Hull), J. B. Sutton, Jill McIver, Joan Loughlin, John Wain, Ruth Bowman, Robert Conquest, E. E. Larkin (his mother), Molly Terry, Judy Egerton, Patricia Murphy, Miriam Plaut, Hilly Amis, Margaret Sutton, Jane Exall, Vernon Watkins, Charles Madge, Bruce Montgomery, Philip Brown, Karl Lehmann, Peter Rose, Colin Gunner, Madeleine Boyall, Winifred Arnott, Kingsley Amis, John Betjeman, Philip Oakes, Harry Hoff, Pamela Hansford Johnson, C. P. Snow, Edward Du Cann, Eric Ashby, Janet Murphy, Elizabeth Jennings, Linda Murphy.

  
16.
   Letter to Monica Jones, 28 July 1956. Not in
LM
.

  
17.
   See Joan Redford, Jean Watson, Jean Humphries, Ann Connolly, John Yates and Margaret Austin, ‘Monica at Leicester’,
AL
12 (October 2001), pp. 17–18; and Yvonne Rowland, ‘Remembering Monica Jones in Leicester’,
AL
30 (October 2010), pp. 18–19.

  
18.
   16 October 1957.
LM
,
p. 229.

  
19.
   
LM
, p. 245.
See Peter Keating, ‘Monica’, in
Autobiographical Tales
(Priskus: Edinburgh, 2013), for an account of Monica in Leicester.

  
20.
   4 May 1957.
LM
,
p. 221.

  
21.
   8 December 1956.
LM
,
p. 212.

  
22.
   
LM
,
pp. 225–6.

  
23.
   To Monica Jones, 7 and 8 August 1957. Not in
LM
.

  
24.
   Letter from Mary Judd (née Wrench) to Maeve Brennan and Betty Mackereth, 15 April 1986.

  
25.
   Ibid. Mary married in 1960 and Philip and Betty Mackereth acted as godparents to her daughter. She left Hull in 1964.

  
26.
   16 October 1957.
LM
,
p. 229.

  
27.
   29 January 1958.
LM
,
p. 235.

  
28.
   To Eva Larkin, 6 May 1956.

  
29.
   
LM
,
pp. 209–10.

  
30.
   Larkin dated the last complete draft in the workbook ‘1 Jan 57’; only minor adjustments followed.
Complete Poems
, pp. 397–8.

  
31.
   
LM
,
p. 170.

  
32.
   Unpublished interview,
South Bank Show
, 16 April 1981. Motion, pp. 287–8.

  
33.
   ‘An Interview with John Haffenden’,
FR
, p. 53.

  
34.
   Ibid., p. 57.

  
35.
   To Thwaite, 17 March 1959.
SL
, p. 301.

  
36.
   
The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy
, ed. James Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976), p. 135.

  
37.
   Larkin perhaps recalls the biblical phrase ‘all flesh is grass’. He may also have had in mind Auden’s ‘The crowds upon the pavement / Were fields of harvest wheat’ in ‘As I walked out one evening’. W. H. Auden,
Another Time
(London: Faber & Faber, 1996), p. 43.

  
38.
   Hartley, p. 125.

  
39.
   David Lodge, ‘Philip Larkin: The Metonymic Muse’, in Stephen Regan
(ed.),
Philip Larkin: Contemporary Critical Essays
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 71–82, at p. 77.

  
40.
   Ibid., p. 78.

  
41.
   In Christopher Ricks, ‘The Pursuit of Metaphor’,
Allusion to the Poets
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 248.

  
42.
   Lodge, ‘Philip Larkin: The Metonymic Muse’, p. 76.

  
43.
   Motion, p. 280. Judy Egerton always received Larkin’s letters with great pleasure. Interview, 17 December 2010.

  
44.
   3 November 1958.
LM
,
p. 245.

  
45.
   Motion, p. 284.

  
46.
   Anthony Thwaite, personal communication, 14 August 2011.

  
47.
   Jean Hartley, ‘Larkin, Love and Sex’,
AL
30 (October 2010), p. 6.

  
48.
   Larkin, indeed, had played the same prank on his sister Catherine during the war, sending her a typewritten letter in an envelope with an official ‘On His Majesty’s Service’ cover, informing her that she had been ‘drafted to the Colliery at Pwllycracrach. Mon., for light duties at the shafthead’. Unlike Conquest, however, he revealed the joke in the PS: ‘Well, I hope [. . .] that this didn’t give you too much of a turn.’ 8 September 1943. DLN/3/2/11.

  
49.
   Motion, p. 267.

  
50.
   
LM
,
p. 256.

  
51.
   Hartley, p. 100.

  
52.
   17 December 1958.
SL
, p. 297.

  
53.
   To Judy Egerton, 19 January 1959.
SL
, p. 298.

  
54.
   Motion, p. 294.

  
55.
   Greenwich Mean Time. He is alluding to Mary’s poor time-keeping. Betty recalls Larkin standing at the issue desk, watch in hand in pantomimic censure, as Mary arrived late yet again.

  
56.
   Betty still has Mary’s letter.