This be the curse: Philip Larkin’s big problem

In matters of sex, Philip Larkin was late getting away. On his 23rd birthday, he wrote defeatedly to Kingsley Amis: ‘I really do not think it likely I shall ever get into the same bed as anyone again because it is so much trouble, almost as much trouble as standing for parliament.’ His 2014 biographer, James Booth, adds that Larkin was ‘still effectively a virgin… [and] Amis was puzzled that his friend failed to follow through his pursuit of sexual satisfaction’.

There is no join-the-dots explanation for what Larkin called the ‘sex-fear and auto-erotic fantasies’ that beset him all his life. But in the centenary of his birth, it’s time to bring in the anatomical peculiarity incarnating his trouble with sexual fulfilment: his penis.

I’ve been hearing of Larkin’s penis at intervals for much of my adult life. The first time was 30 years ago; the most recent this week. In all cases, my informants had it from his first biographer, Andrew Motion, who had been told by Larkin’s tailor that the poet’s penis was abnormally large, obliging him to alter the cut of his trouser legs. As a friend of Larkin’s, Motion was also able to confirm this rumour from an adjacent stall of a men’s urinal.

Motion doesn’t mention the penis in his excellent and otherwise comprehensive A Writer’s Life (1993). Nor does Booth, in his also excellent Life, Art and Love (2014), though it seems improbable that he didn’t know about it if I do. Is it because penis size is the last taboo? Or was it thought to be a prurient sideshow, a distraction unsuitable to the findings of literary biography? I propose instead that this piece of information is so acutely relevant to Larkin’s life and work that it should be enshrined in Coles Notes, handed out to secondary school children as part of their poetry pack.