Two angry old men

Though lasting literary friendships between natural rivals are not rare — Byron and Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth and Edward Thomas and Robert Frost spring to mind — few have been as durable as the one that began in the Front Quad of St John’s College, Oxford, one afternoon in May 1941 when a mutual friend introduced what their biographer calls ‘the odd couple’ by pointing his fingers at Kingsley Amis while imitating the sound of a gunshot.

On cue, the fair-haired freshman yelled in pain, clutched his chest and staggered back to fall on a convenient pile of laundry sacks. Philip Larkin, a deliberately conspicuous figure in drab wartime Oxford, clad in bow tie, yellow waistcoat and the city’s only pair of cerise trousers, was suitably impressed by the performance. ‘I stood silent. For the first time in my life I felt myself in the presence of a talent greater than my own,’ he later publicly recalled.

The encounter — jokey, irreverent, somewhat surreal — set the tone for a relationship that was to last — with one lengthy hiatus in the early 1960s — until Larkin’s death in December 1985, and it’s easy to see why. Though superficially so dissimilar — Amis in youth was blessed with matinee-idol looks and sexual success to match, while shy, stammering Larkin, in his own estimation, variously resembled a rapist, Eric Morecambe, and a bespectacled, balding trout — in their background, social class, interests and attitudes the pair were as alike as two peas in a pod.

Born in the same year, 1922, both were lower-middle-class Englishmen raised in quintessential suburbia. The Amis family home in Norbury, filled with mad relatives, was named ‘Borchester’, while Larkin’s ‘forgotten boredom’ of a ‘fucked up’ childhood with his Hitler-worshipping council treasurer father Sydney was spent in a Coventry house called ‘Penvorn’.