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Larkin: Nice and Nasty
James booth, Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love (Bloomsbury) £25.00
For those who know Andrew Motion's Philip Larkin: A Writer' s Life, the first thought on picking up James Booth's new biography may well be 'Do we really need it?' Motion's was a long, detailed, and very well-written account by a fellowpoet who had known Larkin personally. Although Larkin's life, like anyone's, had its shades, subtleties, and tensions, it was not a very complicated one. There was little travel, no marriage or children, few moves or job changes. He wrote a respectable quantity but was not prolific. And although Motion's book appeared more than twenty years ago, and new poems and letters have been published, together with Booth's own edition of Larkin's curious schoolgirl stories in Trouble at Willow Gables and Other Fictions, none of this has required fundamental reinterpretation of either life or work.
Booth sets out the new book's raison d'être in his Introduction. The effect of Anthony Thwaite's selection of the letters, followed by Motion's biography, was to present Larkin as Mr Nasty: 'a Tory snob with sexist and racist tendencies', as one reviewer summed up. Yet Booth, while admitting that 'there is no requirement that poets should be likeable or virtuous', finds that 'those who shared [Larkin's] life simply do not recognize the Mr Nasty version'. Rather, 'all those who were close to him remember him with affection and feel privileged to have known him'. Clearly, Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love is to be the case for the defence.
From the outset, there are hints of questionable logic in the enterprise. One is suggested by the sentence quoted above; if poets need not be nice people, is it necessary to write a 500-page book to prove that one of them was? Moreover, listing some of the people 'close to' Larkin who felt so warmly about him, Booth includes Anthony Thwaite - the very editor whose grim edition of Larkin's letters helped to create such a negative impression of the man. Was Larkin, then, lovely in person but merely (deceptively) nasty on paper? That would certainly imply a psychological complexity that has gone unnoticed. And when Booth subpoenas Larkin's own poems to demonstrate his human decency, he...