A Review of Philip Larkin's Letters Home 1936-1977

Rachel Cooke reviews Letters Home 1936-1977 (Faber & Faber) by Philip Larkin, edited by James Booth, for The Guardian. "Though his personal misery may have been deepening all the while, these letters bring to mind not the 'coastal shelf' of his most famous poem, but something far softer, and altogether more benevolent. Here, like it or not, is love," writes Cooke. More:

...It survives him, a better garland by far than a pile of old socks.

Booth, Larkin’s biographer, has edited these letters superbly well (there are 607 in this volume, a mere sliver of the terrifying total in existence), even if his footnotes are pedantic at times. Neatly tracing the poet’s adult life from Oxford University, through Wellington, Leicester and Belfast, where he worked in various libraries, and finally to Hull, a picture of the man slowly emerges. It’s not new, but perhaps the emphasis is slightly altered. Larkin as we find him here is witty, wise, grossly impractical, and extremely modest, in every sense of the word.

“I’m sorry… if your old friends have found out your new address,” he writes to Eva in 1952, a typical example of the way he wraps his (genuine, but weary) concern for her in a drollery she would not have noticed. It’s going to take me a long time to put from my mind the fact that, for his 50th birthday, he asked his sister, Kitty, for nothing more than a plastic container in which he might keep grapefruit juice. Above all, there is something so painfully contingent about his life: the rented rooms, the various triangles formed by various women, his conviction that (as the librarian of Hull University) he was in the wrong job in the wrong place. What part did Eva play in this suspended animation? (Larkin’s father, Sydney, the city treasurer of Coventry, died in 1948.)

Please find the full review right here.