Philip Larkin (101 page)

  
11.
   Brennan, p. 89.

  
12.
   Ibid., p. 141.

  
13.
   R. J. C. Watt, ‘“Scragged by embryo Leavises”: Larkin reading his poems’,
Critical Survey
1.2 (1989), pp. 172–5.

  
14.
   Motion, p. 449.

  
15.
   Ibid., p. 446.

  
16.
   Ibid., p. 447.

  
17.
   Ibid.

  
18.
   Brennan, p. 51.

  
19.
   Ibid., p. 219.

  
20.
   2 June 1975.
SL
,
p. 525.

  
21.
   15 June 1975.
SL
,
p. 526.

  
22.
   See James Booth,
Philip Larkin: The Poet’s Plight
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), Appendix, pp. 202–3. This book is now in Emory University Library, Atlanta, Georgia.

  
23.
   Motion, p. 487.

  
24.
   Ibid.

  
25.
   Burnett hears an echo of Kingsley Amis’s poem ‘Masters’, from
A Case of Samples
(1946), pp. 22–3: ‘For it is by surrender that we live, / And we are taken if we wish to give.’
Complete Poems
, p. 506.

  
26.
   Brennan, pp. 67–8.

  
27.
   Written originally to German lyrics by Friedrich Hollaender and sung by Dietrich in the film
The Blue Angel
(1930). The English lyrics were by Sammy Lerner: ‘Falling in love again. / Never wanted to. / What am I to do? / Can’t help it.’

  
28.
   Motion, p. 319.

  
29.
   25 November 1975. DPL/1/8/22, at p. 73.

  
30.
   
TWG
, p. 497.

  
31.
   Ibid., p. xixn.

  
32.
   Larkin’s verbal memory was hypersensitive. In a letter to Monteith of 16 April 1974 he asked for the word ‘with’ to be reinstated in the paperback reprint of
A Girl in Winter
, in a sentence ending ‘you would have to deal with.’ The word was, he writes, ‘cut out by your super-efficient editors in 1946’. He had however intended it as ‘a deliberate grammatical mistake [. . .] to show the muddle-headedness of the speaker’; ‘it has irked me for over a quarter of a century’.
SL
,
pp
.
503–4.

  
33.
   Brennan, p. 221.

  
34.
   Motion, p. 451.

  
35.
   Mary Judd (née Wrench), interview with the author, 28 June 2011.

  
36.
   Betty Mackereth, interview with the author, 20 June 2011.

  
37.
   Ibid.

  
38.
   Ibid., 4 August 2003.

  
39.
   
Philip Larkin: The Third Woman
, BBC4 television feature, 7 December 2010.

  
40.
   Betty Mackereth, interview with the author, 20 June 2011.

  
41.
   Ibid.

  
42.
   Motion, p. 282.

  
43.
   Betty Mackereth, interview with the author, 4 August 2003.

  
44.
   Betty Mackereth, interview with the author, 20 June 2011.

  
45.
   See R. J. C. Watt,
A Concordance to the Poetry of Philip Larkin
(Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann, 1995).

  
46.
   I am grateful to Suzanne Uniacke for this observation.

  
47.
   Motion, p. 453.

  
48.
   Kate Greenaway Valentine’s Day card, dated 30 December 1975.

  
49.
   The noun ‘singularity’ occurs in ‘Marriages’ (1951).

  
50.
   A typescript inserted into Workbook 8 is dated ‘1/2/76’.
Complete Poems
, p. 651.

  
51.
   ‘The Booker Prize 1977’,
RW
, p. 95.

  
52.
   Larkin may have recalled the ending of Hardy’s ‘Beyond the Last Lamp’: ‘they seem brooding on their pain, / And will, while such a lane remain’. Thomas Hardy,
Complete Poems
(London: Macmillan 1976), p. 315.

  
53.
   The surviving drafts, dated between 7 and 21 February, are in the Collins manuscript book, now at Emory University, and the text as he sent it to Betty is in holograph. It is possible that Larkin never made a typescript.

  
54.
   To Conquest, 9 December 1961.
SL
, p. 335.

  
55.
   Larkin uses the word ‘dirty’ three times in his mature poems, each time with a different idiomatic nuance. In ‘Success Story’ (1954) the speaker celebrates having dodged the metaphorical ‘dirty feeding’ of domestic compromise. In ‘A Study of Reading Habits’ (1960) the word appears in a demotic cliché, as the speaker fights ‘dirty dogs’. In contrast, in ‘We met at the end of the party’ the word has a simple physical application.

  
56.
   Betty Mackereth, interview with the author, 4 August 2003.

22: Death-Throes of a Talent (1976–9)

    
1.
   Motion, p. 457. Toepfer had indeed had Nazi connections, but the Foundation denied them.

    
2.
   ‘Subsidising Poetry’,
RW
, p. 90.

    
3.
   26 April 1976.
SL
, p. 539.

    
4.
   To Eva Larkin, 30 May 1976.

    
5.
   To Conquest, 26 May 1976.
SL
,
p. 541.

    
6.
   
SL
, p. 546.

    
7.
   21 September 1976.
SL
,
pp. 546–7.

    
8.
   Motion, pp. 460 and 221.

    
9.
   17 October 1968.
SL,
p. 406.

  
10.
   Hazel Holt,
A Lot to Ask: A Life of Barbara Pym
(London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 247.

  
11.
   
SL
, pp. 547–8.

  
12.
   28 November 1976.
SL
, p. 552.

  
13.
   
Times Literary Supplement
, 21 January 1977, p. 66.

  
14.
   Motion, p. 464.

  
15.
   24 October 1977.
SL
, p. 571.

  
16.
   Motion, p. 466.

  
17.
   Martin Amis, Introduction to
Philip Larkin: Poems
(London: Faber & Faber, 2011), p. xxi.

  
18.
   ‘So death . . . is nothing to us, since so long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist. It does not then concern either the living or the dead.’ Epicurus,
The Extant Remains
, trans. Cyril Bailey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), p. 85.