Biography: Philip Larkin (1922-1985), Companion of Honour, a sometimes blocked writer of beautifully crafted poems about frustration and mortality and a prolific writer of comically outrageous letters to his friend Kingsley Amis, was the sort of person who could give masturbation a bad name.
One of England's most justly, widely acclaimed poets of the 20th century found that "wanking", inspired by his collection of pornography, was cheaper and more reliably gratifying than taking a woman out to dinner in a restaurant. Two women tried simultaneously for many years to inveigle him into matrimony, in vain. He made onanism an art form of ruthless exclusivity.
In his self-conscious, neurotically melancholy style, Larkin was quite funny about himself and his way of life, which Richard Bradford, Professor of English at the University of Ulster, now anatomises with admirable thoroughness, clarity and even a certain charitable respect. Bradford had already published an excellent biography of Amis, Lucky Him (Peter Owen, 2001), which Amis's son, Martin, praised as "original and stimulating", so he - Bradford - has been well able to present a stereoscopic view of the poet and the novelist and their correspondence with each other, with its elements of schoolboyish smutty jokiness and extremist right-wing irascibility. They were both adoring Thatcherites.
The publisher of First Boredom, Then Fear (Larkin's words) offers it as a defence against Larkin's critics' perceptions of his faults: " . . . there were grumbles that his poetry was anti-modernist, philistine, provincial, suburban, snarling". After the publication of Anthony Thwaite's collection of the poet's letters in 1992 and Andrew Motion's biography, A Writer's Life (Faber, 1993), "Larkin's enemies," according to Peter Owen, "seized on the new disclosures with a frenzy hardly witnessed since the McCarthy era. What had hitherto been regarded only as potential inclinations hinted at in his poems - misogyny and xenophobia in particular - were now indisputable facts, and since then Larkin's reputation as a poet has been tarnished by his image as a human being".
Bradford, Owen goes on, "argues that Larkin is one of the most superbly talented practitioners of English verse whose most vocal detractors are motivated not only by envy and political self-righteousness but by aesthetic prejudice". Bradford seeks to detoxify the letters by calling them "farce, caricature and self-parody"; but, in spite of his generous intentions, the more he quotes from them and the more he reveals of Larkin's once private life, the worse Larkin appears. Perhaps one should refrain from learning all the intimate details of artists whose art one admires.
It is easy to see in Larkin's works that he himself is aware how he has been twisted by the genes and upbringing of his heritage. One of his poems most often quoted, This Be The Verse, sets forth his complaint in plainly understandable colloquial terms. It begins:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
There is conclusive advice:
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
As Bradford observes, having studied Larkin's unsparingly candid notebooks, "His parents' marriage has left him with two certainties: 'that human beings should not live together; and that children should be taken from their parents at an early age'". Larkin's own mum and dad evidently gave him the least possible chance of becoming a reasonable grown-up.
Sydney Larkin, Philip's father, was an English Nazi. A bureaucrat who rose through the hierarchy of the Coventry city council to the rank of treasurer, he visited Germany several times in the late 1920s and the 1930s, once taking Philip, when he was 14. Sydney decorated his office with Nazi regalia, absurdly including a 12-inch statuette of Hitler, which, at the push of a button, gave the Nazi salute. Sydney kept these souvenirs in place even after the war began, until city hall ordered him to remove them. Perhaps Sydney's most confusing bequest to Philip was to have had him christened and then to tell him not to believe in God. Philip duly complied.
His mother, a retired teacher, was timidly dependent on her authoritarian husband. In widowhood she clung to Philip as closely as allowed and jealously tried to sever his relationships with other women. Motion described her as "indispensable but infuriating".
After grammar school and Oxford, although his literary achievement began early, with the publication of Jill, the first of his two novels, Larkin soon opted for the security of a career as a librarian, eventually directing the development of the library in Hull and writing poetry when he could, with increasing difficulty.
Bradford comments on Larkin's "claustrophobic unease", "torpidity and stagnation", "lethargic fatalism" and "a meticulous, calculated exercise in masochism", and calls Aubade, one of the finest, most depressing poems of all time, "a creative suicide note".
"Academics hate him," Bradford writes, because the meanings of his poems are so clear that they require no exegetical falderol. And that, quite simply, is why so many people understand and love them.
Patrick Skene Catling is a writer and critic
First Boredom, Then Fear: The Life of Philip Larkin By Richard Bradford Peter Owen, 272pp. £19.95