Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life - Hardcover

Motion, Andrew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374231680 ISBN 13: 9780374231682

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1993

Synopsis

A biography of the poet discusses his friendships with other aspiring writers, painters, and musicians, his repressive family life, his need for affection and fear of the encroachment on his writing that marriage represented, and his work.

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Reviews

Beneath his quiet, self-effacing persona as "archetypal librarian," English poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985) led a much more dramatic and troubled life than was commonly known. Raised by an arrogant father--a Nazi sympathizer who corresponded with Hitler's economics minister--and by an overprotective mother, Larkin harbored self-disgust and sexual confusion. He had a homosexual crush in college, avidly collected pornography and wrote two facetious would-be lesbian romances under the pseudonym Brunette Coleman. His 30-volume diary was destroyed after his death by his indulgent companion Monica Jones. Drawing on unpublished papers and letters, Motion, Larkin's friend and fellow poet, has produced the first biography of a poet who some rank with Auden and Eliot. This revealing, disquieting portrait limns "a selfish man" who played off one lover against another, and a reactionary strongly prejudiced against immigrants, students, unions and socialists. Snippets of poems, interspersed with the narrative, remind us of Larkin's genius. Photos.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

One of three literary executors of British poet Philip Larkin (1922-85), fellow poet Motion (The Lamberts, 1987) ill serves his subject with this drab, exhaustive biography full of bland literary criticism and inappropriate psychologizing. With complete access to Larkin's unpublished archival material--from which he quotes liberally--Motion establishes that Larkin's father was a Nazi sympathizer, as well as a misogynist and an autocratic parent, and that the poet's ``whining'' mother exerted an equally debilitating influence on her sensitive son. Tall and gawky, young Philip stammered and made few friends: This overwhelming sense of isolation stayed with him even through his years of critical acclaim. A voracious reader, he idolized Auden, Lawrence, and Yeats, despite his later antimodernist stance. At Oxford, Larkin formed his legendary friendship with Kingsley Amis, whose fame he would continually envy even as they shared a love of jazz and drinking, as well as a hatred of pretension. Larkin experienced difficulty with girls, not losing his virginity until well into his first job as a librarian (``handing out tripey novels to morons''). While developing his career--he created a major library at Hull--he also gained stature as a writer. Hoping to equal the achievements of Amis and their friend, Bruce Montgomery, he devoted his early efforts to fiction, producing two novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter, which was a modest success. But Larkin's real greatness was as a poet. Some juvenilia inspired largely by Yeats was eclipsed by his mature work--poetry in the plain-speaking tradition of Hardy, Housman, and Edward Thomas. The obsessions of his verse--sadness, death, failure--flow directly from his troubled life (fearing marriage and family, he managed to maintain three long relationships with dramatically different types of women), though he himself always discouraged such readings. Sure to be the standard life for some time, this cadaverous book seems dead to Larkin's amazing sense of humor, one of the sources of his poetic achievement. (Photos) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374231680
• ISBN 13: 9780374231682
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 570