Two of a kind

They were ‘soulmates’ according to people who knew both of them.

They were ‘soulmates’ according to people who knew both of them. The word has a double-edged quality; it may suggest that they got on well together because they presented such a problem to everyone else. Both Philip Larkin and Monica Jones found it difficult to suffer fools gladly, and in this collection of letters (ranging from 1946-84) from Larkin to his long-term companion and lover, the mean-spirited and misanthropic are given full rein.

Larkin met Jones in 1946, and they soon became lovers. (So much for sexual intercourse beginning in 1963). She was a flamboyant presence in the English Department of Leicester University, remaining a junior lecturer until her retirement in 1981. He went from university library to university library, ending up at Hull. They holidayed with one another; she put up with his occasional other mistresses; but only late in life did they move in together. Monica destroyed Philip’s diaries after his death in 1985, and went on living, somewhat chaotically, in his house in Hull until her own death in 2001. Most of these letters surfaced, in a terrible condition, long after Andrew Motion’s fine biography and Anthony Thwaite’s edition of the poet’s other letters.

Monica was the poet’s sounding-board about all sorts of matters. The first letters here show a familiar, guarded restraint —‘Oh dear! I do seem to have created a bad impression lately’ — but before much longer he is talking to her about anything and everything on his mind. Some letters are the sort of frank outpourings of rage (memorably about his neighbours’ taste in music) which no doubt the incinerated diaries were filled with. They were so much alike that Larkin once said to her that ‘what we have is a kind of homosexual relation, disguised.’