The ghost stalking this selection is Martin Amis’s father, Kingsley, who, Martin tells us in his introduction, ‘loved Philip with a near-physical passion’, and mused: ‘I sometimes wonder if I ever really knew him.’ Ruth Bowman, to whom Philip Larkin was engaged in the late 1940s, remembers that Kingsley was ‘possessive of Philip and tried to keep me separate from him’. Kingsley always remained slightly offended by Larkin’s soft, feminine side, never understanding what the latter called ‘the dear passionately sentimental spinster that lurks within me’, and insisted that his friend be consistently masculine, abrasive, philistine.
Martin Amis’s selection reflects his father’s version. It includes ‘This Be The Verse’ (‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’), but omits both the exquisite elegy on Larkin’s father, ‘An April Sunday brings the snow’, and his heart-rending evocation of widowhood, ‘Love Songs in Age’.
Among other rivals only Monica Jones, the neurotic Margaret Peel of Lucky Jim, features with any prominence, in ‘If, My Darling’, ‘An Arundel Tomb’ and ‘Talking in Bed’. Larkin’s first love, Ruth Bowman, is glimpsed in the self-excoriating ‘Deceptions’ and the sour ‘Wild Oats’. But ‘Wedding-Wind’, an ecstatic aubade in a woman’s voice, is excluded.
Moreover, as far as this selection is concerned, Larkin never met Winifred Arnott, the muse of ‘Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album’ and ‘Maiden Name’, nor Maeve Brennan, to whom ‘Broadcast’ is addressed, nor Betty Mackereth, subject of the poignant love poems ‘When first we faced, and touching showed’ and ‘We met at the end of the party’. Mackereth is present only as the ‘loaf-haired secretary’ of ‘Toads Revisited’. Of the personal poems which came to light after Larkin’s death, Amis includes only ‘Letter to a Friend about Girls’ (often read as addressed to Kingsley), and the bleak ‘Love Again’.
Amis takes decisive sides in the debate between Larkin the social realist and Larkin the symbolist. Larkin is, he writes, ‘definingly a novelist’s poet’. The unnovelistic ‘Absences’ is relegated to the bibliographical limbo of the dustwrapper, though this could seem a promotion. Amis’s claim that High Windows is ten times better than The Whitsun Weddings will not convince many readers.
But these subtexts will trouble only those already familiar with Larkin’s work and life. New readers will find here a vivid introduction to his poetic world, from the raucous zest of ‘Toads’ to the sublimity of ‘Solar’; from the euphoria of ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ to the despair of ‘Aubade’. Amis insists that Larkin’s poetry ‘is never “depressing”’ and acknowledges his originality as ‘a voice that is part of our language’.
Nevertheless, it is a pity that what is bound to become the standard introduction to this great poet should be so refracted through his relationship with a man who never even visited the city in which Larkin spent the second half of his life. In an implicit contrast with his ‘bohemian’, metropolitan father, Martin Amis tells us that Larkin was ‘a nine-to-five librarian, who lived for 30 years in a northern city that smelled of fish.’ His personal history was of sad ‘gauntness’, with ‘no emotions, no vital essences worth looking back on’. Without close friends, he ‘siphoned all his energy, and all his love, out of the life and into the work’.
Those who were closer to the poet than either Amis tell a different story. Kind, empathetic, and funny, Larkin loved generously and with passion. No one enjoyed the million-petalled flower of being here more intensely than he. Had he produced a son, perhaps Martin Amis’s verdict would have been less harsh.
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