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Looking back on it now Ruth says, ‘I was his first love and there’s something special about a first love, isn’t there?’ Except that ‘love’ is never quite the right word with Larkin, ‘getting involved’ for once not a euphemism for the tortuous process it always turns out to be. ‘My relations with women’, he wrote, ‘are governed by a shrinking sensitivity, a morbid sense of sin, a
furtive lechery. Women don’t just sit still and back you up. They want children; they like scenes; they want a chance of parading all the empty haberdashery they are stocked with. Above all they like feeling they own you − or that you own them − a thing I hate.’ A.C. Benson, whose medal Larkin was later to receive from the Royal Society of Literature, put it more succinctly, quoting (I think) Aristophanes:’ ‘Don’t make your house in my mind.’ Though with Larkin it was ‘Don’t make your house in my house either,’ his constant fear being that he will be moved in on, first by his mother and then, when she’s safely in a home, by some other scheming woman. When towards the finish Monica Jones does manage to move in it’s because she’s ill and can’t look after herself, and so the cause of a great deal more grumbling. With hindsight (Larkin’s favourite vantage point) it would have been wiser to have persisted with the messy homosexual fumblings, one of the advantages of boys being that they’re more anxious to move on than in. Not, of course, that one has a choice, ‘something hidden from us’ seeing to that.

Larkin’s earliest poems were published by R. A. Caton of the Fortune Press. Caton’s list might have been entitled ‘Poetic Justice’, as besides the poetry it included such tides as
Chastisement Across the Ages
and an account of corporal punishment as meted out to women in South German prisons; since Larkin’s tastes ran to both poetry and porn there is poetic justice in that too. He found that he shared his interest in dirty books with ‘the sensitive and worldly-wise’ Robert Conquest, and together they went on expeditions, trawling the specialist shops for their respective bag in a partnership that seems both carefree and innocent. Unusual, too, as I had always thought that porn, looking for it and looking at it, was something solo. Conquest would also send him juicy material through the post, and on one occasion conned the fearful Larkin into thinking the law was on his tracks and ruin imminent; he made him sweat for
two or three days before letting him off the hook. That Larkin forgave him and bore no ill-will seems to me one of the few occasions outside his poetry when he comes close to real generosity of spirit.

Timorous though Larkin was, he was not shamefaced and made no secret of his predilections. Just as Elsie, secretary to his father, took her bottom-pinching Führer-friendly boss in her stride, so Betty, the secretary to the son, never turned a hair when she came across his lunch-time reading in the shape of the splayed buttocks of some gym-slipped tot, just covering it briskly with a copy of the
Library Association Record
and carrying on cataloguing. One of the many virtues of Motion’s book is that it celebrates the understanding and tolerance of the average British secretary and the forbearance of women generally. As, for instance, the friend to whom Larkin showed a large cupboard in his office, full of both literary and photographic porn. ‘What is it for?’ she asked. ‘To wank to, or with, or at’ was Larkin’s reply, which Motion calls embarrassed, though it doesn’t sound so, the question, or at any rate the answer, presumably giving him a bit of a thrill. Like the other documents of his life and his half-life, the magazines were carefully kept, if not catalogued, in his desolate attic, though after twenty-odd years’ perusal they must have been about as stimulating as
Beowulf
.

One unremarked oddity in the
Selected Letters
is a note from Larkin to Conquest in 1976 mentioning a visit to Cardiff, where he had ‘found a newsagent with a good line in Yank homo porn, in quite a classy district too. Didn’t dare touch it.’ I had assumed that in the matter of dirty magazines, be it nurses, nuns or louts in leather, you found whatever knocked on your particular box and stuck to it. So what did Larkin want with ‘this nice line in homo porn’? Swaps? Or hadn’t all that messy homosexuality really evaporated? Certainly pictured holidaying on Sark in
1955 he looks anything but butch. One here for Jake Balokowsky.

I am writing this before the book is published, but Larkin’s taste for pornography is already being touted by the newspapers as something shocking. It isn’t, but, deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life. Illogically I tend to assume that if you dream of caning schoolgirls ‘bottoms it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy. It doesn’t, of course − more often it’s the other way round − but when Larkin and Conquest rant about the country going to the dogs there’s a touch of hypocrisy about it. As an undergraduate Larkin had written two facetious novels set in a girls’ school, under the pseudonym of Brunette Coleman. It’s tempting to think that his much advertised adoration of Mrs Thatcher (‘What a superb creature she is, right and beautiful!’) owes something to the sadistic headmistress of St Bride’s, Miss Holden.

Whether Mr Heseltine is ever known as Marie is a detail; that apart it could be a verbatim extract from A History of Cabinet Government 1979–90.
Meeting Larkin at Downing Street in 1980, Mrs Thatcher gushed that she liked his wonderful poem about a girl. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘“Her mind was full of knives.”’ The line is actually ‘All the unhurried day/Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives,’ but Larkin liked to think that Madam knew the poem or she would not have been able to misquote it. Inadequate briefing seems a likelier explanation and, anyway, since the line is about an open mind it’s not surprising the superb creature got it wrong.

Mrs Thatcher’s great virtue, Larkin told a journalist, ‘is saying that two and two makes four, which is as unpopular nowadays as it always has been.’ What Larkin did not see was that it was only by banking on two and two making five that institutions like the Brynmor Jones Library could survive. He lived long enough to see much of his work at the library dismantled; one of the meetings he was putting off before his death was with the Vice-Chancellor designate, who was seeking ways of saving a quarter of a million pounds and wanted to shrink the library by hiving off some of its rooms. That was two and two making four.

Andrew Motion makes most of these points himself, but without rancour or the impatience this reader certainly felt. Honest but not prurient, critical but also compassionate, Motion’s book could not be bettered. It is above all patient, and with no trace of the condescension or irritation that are the hazards of biography. He is a sure guide when he relates the poetry to the life, even though the mystery of where the poetry came from, and why, and when, sometimes defeats him. But then it defeated Larkin, or his writing would not have petered out when it did. For all that, it’s a sad read, and Motion’s patience with his subject is often hard to match. Larkin being Larkin, though, there are lots of laughs and jokes never far away. Before he became a celebrity (and, wriggle though he did, that
was what he became) and one heard gossip about Larkin it was generally his jokes and his crabbiness that were quoted. ‘More creaking from an old gate’, was his dedication in Patrick Garland’s volume of
High Windows
, and there were the PCs (which were not PC at all) he used to send to Charles Monteith, including one not quoted here or in the
Selected Letters
. Along with other Faber authors, Larkin had been circularized asking what events, if any, he was prepared to take part in to mark National Libraries Week. Larkin wrote back saying that the letter reminded him of the story of Sir George Sitwell being stopped by someone selling flags in aid of National Self-Denial Week: ‘For some of us’, said Sir George, ‘every week is self-denial week.’ ‘I feel’, wrote Larkin, ‘exactly the same about National Libraries Week.’ The letters are full of jokes. ‘I fully expect,’ he says of ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’, ‘to hear it recited by 1000 Girl Guides before I die’; he gets ‘a letter from a whole form of Welsh schoolgirls, seemingly inviting mass coition. Where were they when I wanted them?’ And in the cause of jokes he was prepared to dramatize himself, heighten his circumstances, darken his despair, claim to have been a bastard in situations where he had actually been all charm. What one wants to go on feeling was that, the poems apart, the jokes were the man, and the saddest thing about this book and the
Selected Letters
is to find that they weren’t, that beyond the jokes was a sphere of gloom, fear and self-pity that nothing and no one touched. And, so far from feeling compassion for him on this score, as Motion always manages to do, I just felt impatient and somehow conned.

Trying to locate why takes one back to Auden:

Larkin was like that, certainly after the publication of
The Less
Deceived
and even for a few years after
The Whitsun Weddings
came out. Because his poems spoke in an ordinary voice and boasted his quiescence and self-deprecation, one felt that here was someone to like, to take to, and whose voice echoed one’s inner thoughts, and that he was, as he is here engagingly indexed (under his initials), a PAL. So that in those days, certainly until the mid-seventies, Larkin seemed always a shared secret. The great and unexpected outpouring of regret when he died showed this sentiment to have been widespread and that through the public intimacy of his poetry he had acquired a constituency as Betjeman, partly through being less introspective and more available, never entirely did. And while we did not quite learn his language or make him our pattern to live and to die, what one is left with now is a sense of betrayal which is quite difficult to locate and no less palpable for the fact that he never sought to mislead the public about his character, particularly as he got older.

They were deceived, though. When Anthony Thwaite published the
Selected Letters
last year, the balance of critical opinion was disposed to overlook − or at any rate excuse − his racist and reactionary sentiments as partly a joke, racism more pardonable these days in the backlash against political correctness. Besides, it was plain that in his letters Larkin exaggerated; he wasn’t really like that. Motion’s book closes down this escape route. ‘You’ll be pleased to see the black folk go from the house over the way,’ he says in a 1970 letter, and were it written to Amis or Conquest it might get by as irony, wit even, a voice put on.
But he is writing to his mother, for whom he did not put on a voice − or not that voice anyway. Did it come with the flimsiest of apologies it would help (‘I’m sorry,’ as I once heard someone say, ‘but I have a blind spot with black people’). How were the blacks across the way different from ‘those antique negroes’ who blew their ‘flock of notes’ out of ‘Chicago air into/A huge remembering pre-electric horn/The year after I was born’? Well, they were in Loughborough for a start, not Chicago. Wanting so much for him to be other, one is forced against every inclination to conclude that, in trading bigotries with an eighty-year-old, Larkin was sincere; he was being really himself:

The man who penned that might have been pleased to come up with the slogan of the 1968 Smethwick by-election: ‘If you want a nigger neighbour, Vote Labour.’ Larkin refused the Laureate-ship because he couldn’t turn out poetry to order. But if he could churn out this stuff for his letters and postcards he could have turned an honest penny on the
Sun
any day of the week.

Then there is Larkin the Hermit of Hull. Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull. No matter that of the four places he spent most of his life − Hull, Coventry, Leicester and Belfast − Hull is probably the most pleasant; or that poets are not and never have been creatures of the capital: to the newspapers, as Motion says, remoteness is synonymous with integrity. But Hull isn’t even particularly remote. Ted Hughes, living in Devon, is further from London (as the crow flies, of course) than Larkin ever was, but that he gets no credit for it is partly the place’s fault, Devon to the metropolitan crowd having nothing on the horrors of
Hull. Hughes, incidentally, gets much the same treatment here as he did in the
Selected Letters
, more pissed on than the back wall of the Batley Working Men’s club before a Dusty Springfield concert.

Peter Cook once did a sketch in which, dressed as Garbo, he was filmed touring the streets in an open-topped limousine shouting through a megaphone ‘I want to be alone’. Larkin wasn’t quite as obvious as that, but poetry is a public-address system too and that his remoteness was so well publicized came about less from his interviews or personal pronouncements than from the popularity of poems like ‘Here’ and ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ which located Larkin, put him on (and off) the map, and advertised his distance from the centre of things.