I’ve been a great fan of Philip Larkin ever since I first read his work in a twentieth-century British poetry class in college twenty years ago. His work has been of lasting importance to me, and I’ve long thought he ranked among the best poets in the English language.

My high opinion of Larkin has been confirmed from time to time, as when I met Seamus Heaney following one of his poetry readings and asked him what he thought of Larkin’s poetry. “Pure music,” he replied simply.

Richard Bradford’s recent biography of Larkin, First Boredom, Then Fear: The Life of Philip Larkin (Peter Owen, 2005), also provides reinforcement for those who hold Larkin’s verse in great esteem. Larkin created “the twentieth century’s most outstanding body of English verse,” Bradford writes in the concluding sentence of his book. In the introduction he calls Larkin “a Dutch Master of modern verse and life” (p. 19) and later writes that his “poetic repertoire…is one of the finest of the twentieth century” (115). Bradford’s accomplished record as a scholar and critic - he has published a diverse array of books on topics ranging from John Milton to literary theory - make his praise that much more persuasive.

Bradford’s biography is a fine, compact work that is less exhaustive in detail than Andrew Motion’s 1993 biography of Larkin but nevertheless illuminating in its commentary on Larkin’s life and writing. The book is particularly strong on Larkin’s long friendship with the novelist Kingsley Amis - not surprising given the fact that Bradford has also written a biography of Amis, Lucky Him (2001). In Bradford’s biography of Larkin, the poet emerges as an “unwitting collaborator” on Amis’s breakthrough 1954 novel, Lucky Jim, a book that probably would not have been written without Larkin’s influence (115). Indeed, Bradford sees Amis and Larkin as having a decisive influence on each other’s literary careers from the outset:

The relationship between Larkin and Amis in the year before the latter left Oxford for military service is fascinating principally because we fail to appreciate its immense significance. It would be a decade before each of them had served their apprenticeships as writers and begun to produce prestigious work, and this process was informed, instigated, by their friendship. The reason why we do not recognize the influence of one upon the other is because it was involuntary. Few if any writers would be willing to concede that the essential character of their work, its success, was due to an accident for which they were only partially responsible…. (46)

Bradford convincingly argues that the success of Lucky Jim caused Larkin to abandon his attempts at fiction and focus his talents on poetry.

Bradford also offers good accounts of Larkin’s father, who emerges as a more important figure than in Motion’s biography, and of his complicated relations with women.

Reading this biography, I was struck by Larkin’s precociousness - by the wide literary reading that Larkin did as a teenager (largely through the influence of his father), including contemporary writers such as Joyce and Auden, and also by the intensity of his early literary ambition. As Bradford writes:

Between 1937 and 1940 [Larkin] produced five novels, 250,000-300,000 words of prose fiction….Each would be destroyed almost immediately after completion; it was as if the process of writing was an addictive but self-defeating process. (34)

In 1943 that same ambitious young man, a recent Oxford graduate, appeared before a board to interview for a civil service position. “He claimed to have informed the panel,” writes Bradford, “that he would be happy to offer them his services if they provided him with a decent livelihood to pursue his true vocation as a writer” (65). Not surprisingly, the interview was unsuccessful.

I agree with Bradford’s conclusions on Larkin’s fiction, which includes the two published novels Jill and A Girl in Winter: “His fiction…was lyric verse in prose: narrative diversity, context and characterization would always be provisional elements, subsidiaries to the mindset of Philip Larkin, the latter sometimes disguised but continuously predominant” (247).

We can be thankful that Larkin was able to shift his literary ambitions to poetry, and thankful also that another biographer has helped us to understand such an important poet.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007 at 12:18 pm and is filed under Books/Literature.