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I imagine women will be less shocked by the Larkin story, find it less different from the norm than will men, who don’t care to see their stratagems mapped out as sedulously as Motion has done with Larkin’s. To will his own discomfort then complain about it, as Larkin persistently does, makes infuriating reading, but women see it every day. And if I have a criticism of this book it is that Motion attributes to Larkin the poet faults I would have said were to do with Larkin the man. It’s true Larkin wanted to keep women at a distance, fend off family life, because he felt that writing poetry depended on it. But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten. They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury’s, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play. Larkin complains to Judy Egerton about Christmas and having to

‘And’ (though he doesn’t say this) ‘I’m the poet.’ Motion comments, ‘As in “Self’s the Man”, Larkin here angrily acknowledges his selfishness hoping that by admitting it he will be forgiven.’ ‘Not that old trick!’ wives will say, though sometimes they have to be grateful just for that, and few ordinary husbands would get away with it. But Larkin wasn’t a husband, and that he did get away with it was partly because of that and because he had this fall-back position as Great Poet. Monica, Maeve and even Betty took more from him, gave him more rope, because this was someone with a line to posterity.

In all this the writer he most resembles − though, ‘falling over backwards to be thought philistine’ (as was said at All Souls), he would hardly relish the comparison − is Kafka. Here is the same looming father and timid, unprotesting mother, a day job meticulously performed with the writing done at night, and the same dithering on the brink of marriage with art the likely casualty. Larkin’s letters analysing these difficulties with girls are as wearisome to read as Kafka’s and as inconclusive. Both played games with death − Larkin hiding, Kafka seeking − and when they were called in it got them both by the throat.

Like Kafka, it was only as a failure that Larkin could be a success. ‘Striving to succeed he had failed; accepting failure he had begun to triumph.’ Not that this dispersed the gloom then, or ever. Motion calls him a Parnassian Ron Glum, and A. L. Rowse (not usually a fount of common sense) remarks, ‘What the hell was the matter with him? He hadn’t much to complain about. He was
tall
!’
The publication of the
Selected Letters
and now the biography is not, I fear, the end of it. This is early days for Larkin plc as there’s a hoard of material still unpublished, the correspondence already printed just a drop in the bucket, and with no widow standing guard packs of postgraduates must already be converging on the grave. May I toss them a bone?

In 1962 Monica Jones bought a holiday cottage at Haydon Bridge, near Hexham in Northumberland. Two up, two down, it’s in a bleakish spot with the Tyne at the back and the main Newcastle-Carlisle road at the front, and in Motion’s account of his visit there to rescue Larkin’s letters it sounds particularly desolate. However, Jones and Larkin spent many happy holidays at the cottage, and on their first visit in 1962 they

Something to look forward to after a breezy day on Hadrian’s Wall or striding across the sands at Lindisfarne, this ‘childishly naughty game’ was continued over many years.

As a librarian, Larkin must have derived a special pleasure from the defacement of the text, but he and Miss Jones were not the first. Two other lovers had been at the same game a year or so earlier, only, more daring than our two pranksters, they had borrowed the books they planned to deface from a public library
and then, despite the scrutiny of the staff, had managed to smuggle them back on to the shelves. But in 1962 their luck ran out and Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell were prosecuted for defacing the property of Islington Borough Council. Was it this case, plentifully written up in the national press, that gave Philip and Monica their wicked idea? Or did he take his cue from the more detailed account of the case published the following year in the
Library Association Record
, that delightful periodical which was his constant study? It’s another one for Jake Balokowsky.

At forty-five Larkin had felt himself ‘periodically washed over by waves of sadness, remorse, fear and all the rest of it, like the automatic flushing of a urinal’. By sixty the slide towards extinction is unremitting, made helpless by the dead weight of his own self. His life becomes so dark that it takes on a quality of inevitability: when a hedgehog turns up in the garden you know, as you would know in a film, that the creature is doomed. Sure enough he runs over it with the lawnmower, and comes running into the house wailing. He had always predicted he would die at sixty-three, as his father did, and when he falls ill at sixty-two it is of the cancer he is most afraid of. He goes into the Nuffield to be operated on, the surgeon telling him he will be a new man ‘when I was quite fond of the old one’. One of the nurses is called Thatcher, another Scargill (‘They wear labels’). A privilege of private medicine is that patients have ready access to drink, and it was a bottle of whisky from an unknown friend that is thought to have led him to swallow his own vomit and go into a coma. In a crisis in a private hospital the patient is generally transferred to a National Health unit, in this case the Hull Royal Infirmary, for them to clear up the mess. ‘As usual’ I was piously preparing to write, but then I read how Louis MacNeice died. He caught a chill down a pothole in Yorkshire while producing a documentary for the BBC and was taken into University College
Hospital. He was accustomed at this time to drinking a bottle of whisky a day but, being an NHS patient, was not allowed even a sip; whereupon the chill turned to pneumonia and he died, his case almost the exact converse of Larkin’s. Larkin came out of the coma, went home but not to work, and returned to hospital a few months later, dying on 2 December 1985.

Fear of death had been the subject of his last major poem, ‘Aubade’, finished in 1977, and when he died it was much quoted and by implication his views endorsed, particularly perhaps the lines

The poem was read by Harold Pinter at a memorial meeting at Riverside Studios in the following March, which I wrote up in my diary:

Apropos Pinter, I thought it odd that in the
Selected Letters
almost alone of Larkin’s contemporaries he escaped whipping − given that neither his political views nor his poetry seemed likely to commend him to Larkin. But Pinter is passionate about cricket and, as Motion reveals, sponsored Larkin for the MCC, so it’s just a case of the chaps sticking together.

This must have been a hard book to write, and I read it with growing admiration for the author and, until his pitiful death, mounting impatience with the subject. Motion, who was a friend of Larkin’s, must have been attended throughout by the thought, by the sound even, of his subject’s sepulchral disclaimers. Without ever having known Larkin, I feel, as I think many readers will, that I have lost a friend. I found myself and still find myself not wanting to believe that Larkin was really like this, the unpacking of that ‘really’, which Motion has done, what so much of the poetry is about. The publication of the
Selected Letters
before the biography was criticized, but as a marketing strategy, which is what publishing is about these days, it can’t be faulted. The Letters may sell the Life; the Life, splendid though it is, is unlikely to sell the Letters: few readers coming to the end of this book would want to know more. Different, yes, but not more.

There remain the poems, without which there would be no biography. Reading it I could not see how they would emerge unscathed. But I have read them again and they do, just as with Auden and Hardy, who have taken a similar biographical battering. Auden’s epitaph on Yeats explains why:

The black-sailed unfamiliar ship has sailed on, leaving in its wake not a huge and birdless silence but an armada both sparkling and intact. Looking at this bright fleet, you see there is a man on the jetty, who might be anybody.

One thinks of buttons: the buttons on his boots; the buttons on his waistcoat; the four or five buttons on his Norfolk jacket. And in the middle of that funny little round cap, which A. C. Benson likened to a teacake, there was another button. And of course, Housman’s heart was buttoned too, and it’s an irony − though in the sepulchral congestion of this church hardly a unique one − that Housman’s window will look across to the pillar with Epstein’s bust of Blake, who was his very opposite and didn’t have much use for buttons and who said, ‘Damn braces. Bless
relaxes.’ But both were very English − one poet of England’s mountains green; the other of those blue remembered hills − and both are now comprehended in this commodious place.

I’m not sure how comfortable Housman would be, finding himself here. While its popular image is of a cosy place, there is an element of ferrets in the sack about Poets Corner, literary folks not always being the nicest of bedfellows. There are very few classicists here − which would not displease him − one of the few being Gilbert Murray, with whom Housman used to go to music-halls. Hardy he admired, and he was one of the pallbearers at his funeral, but what he would make of Auden, not to mention Dylan Thomas, one doesn’t like to think.

Some facts about him:

It was said of him that he looked as if he came from a long line of maiden aunts, and yet this mildness was deceptive. Insults and cutting remarks that occurred to him he stored away, only later allocating them a target − generally one of his academic colleagues.

Were he sitting here now he would be scanning the order of service for misprints and errors of punctuation − a misplaced comma all that would be needed to render the commemoration hollow and offensive.

At Cambridge, where he was Professor of Latin, he took a daily walk and after it would change all his underwear − a habit he shared with Swinburne.

For all his austere appearance he had a liking for rich food, and introduced
crème brûlée
to the menu of Trinity College high table.

He was a pioneer of air travel, flying often and fearlessly to France, where he went on lone gastronomic tours, seeking out in provincial cellars the relics of great vintages.

He shared the same staircase in Whewell’s Court in Trinity with the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Housman had a lavatory in his set, which Wittgenstein didn’t. Taken short one day, the philosopher knocked at the poet’s door and asked permission to use it. On the grounds that he disagreed with Wittgenstein’s philosophical theories, Housman refused. In many respects, though, the two were not unalike − particularly in the austerity of their intellect. Wittgenstein’s most famous aphorism is ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ And that might well serve as an epigraph for the poetry of Housman, for he is the poet of the awkward silence.

Girls in Housman’s poems are really only there as an excuse for the deaths of boys. Women didn’t seem to register with him in any department; when he was lecturing at University College, London, his elaborate sarcasm would sometimes reduce his women students to tears, but what really upset them was that the following week Housman couldn’t remember whom he had offended or even tell them apart.

Still, the poems are not a masculine preserve, nor should they be, for, though many of them are about love between men, they are all, gender aside, poems about the ineluctable inequity of loving: how there is no symmetry in affection − that one loves more, or differently, truer or longer than the other. They are poems about the difficulty of speaking, about stammering and how hard it is to avow affection; about shyness, which, God knows, is not gender-specific. With their awkward partings and their burden of love undeclared, Housman’s characters are not far from Chekhov’s, aching to reveal themselves but just a handshake having to say it all. It’s what Keats, another of Housman’s companions here, called ‘my awkward bow’.

It’s fitting that Housman’s fenestral neighbour should be Oscar Wilde, from whom he could scarcely have been more different but whose predicament he shared. As a critic has said, from Wenlock Edge one can see as far as Reading Gaol. Wilde was in prison when
A Shropshire Lad
was published, but his friend Robert Ross learned some of the poems by heart and recited them to him there. Housman’s boldest poem, though not his best, was occasioned by Wilde’s imprisonment, though it
only makes explicit what is implicit in so much of his other writing:

To end, though, Housman as the poet of the English countryside: