The Odd Couple E-Book

Richard Bradford

• Herausgeber: The Robson Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Kingsley Amis was a mimic, jester, father, husband, atheist, pseudo-socialist and clubland Tory boozer with a limitless taste for adultery; Philip Larkin a glum misanthrope who lived in self-imposed solitude. And yet, after meeting at St John's, Oxford in 1941, this unlikely pair struck up a friendship to endure for more than forty years, despite a period of acrimony in the 1960s. From their early days of undergraduate ambitions and enthusiasms through to the bitterness of middle age, Richard Bradford charts the progress of a remarkable friendship, and shows how crucial it was to the making of these two literary giants. Without Larkin's inspiration and input, Amis would never have written his award-winning debut, Lucky Jim; if not for Amis's overnight success, Larkin would never have abandoned his hopes of becoming a novelist and turned instead to verse. Larkin's ensuing resentment would simmer beneath the surface of their relationship for years to come. Drawing on an enormous archive of letters, manuscripts and interviews, The Odd Couple not only offers a rare glimpse into the private correspondence of two controversial and eccentric men, it also illuminates some of the finest novels and poems of the twentieth century.

Leseprobe

For Amy

And for Helen and Gerard Burns

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction and Acknowledgements

Chapter 1Before They Met

Chapter 2Early Years

Chapter 3 The Return of Amis

Chapter 4 Lucky Jim

Chapter 5Belfast

Chapter 6The 1950s

Chapter 7The Third Man

Chapter 8The Split

Chapter 9Worlds Apart

Chapter 10Reconciliation

Chapter 11‘And age, and then the only end of age’

Select Bibliography

Index

Plates

Copyright

Introduction and Acknowledgements

During a thirty-year period between the mid-1950s and the 1980s, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin produced, respectively, the finest fiction and poetry of the era.

In Stanley and the Women Amis contemplates the enclosed, impenetrable condition of insanity as the worst form of human misery, and through Nash, the common-sense psychoanalyst, he allows us a glimpse into his own most essential literary, and, I suppose philosophical, precept: ‘The rewards for being sane may not be very many but knowing what’s funny is one of them. And that’s an end of the matter’ (Kingsley Amis, Stanley and the Women, p. 183).

Amis is too often second-graded as a novelist because he knew what was funny. The only comic mode now granted respect by the literati is the kind of surreal speculation on the absurdities of the intellect that finds its way into the work of Joyce, Beckett, Pinter and their successors. It is acceptable because it detaches comedy from anything remotely realistic and because it has more to do with smug elitism than laughter. In Amis’s novels we are continuously aware of a presence that hovers behind and around the narrator, always ready to pounce and never willing to allow a piece of dialogue or solemn proclamation of intent to get past without first puncturing whatever pretentions to absolute validity it might carry with it. His work restores to English a brand of comedy lost since the eighteenth century. It is certainly difficult to find a set of beliefs or a code of existence in Amis’s work that is actively promoted rather than systematically demolished, but the same could be said of the writings of Jonathan Swift. Amis does not write parables, or submit disguised solutions to personal, intellectual or political problems. Instead, he allows his characters and his own powerfully intolerant intellect to roam through a finely crafted version of the world we know. His work is serious because it is funny.

This same tendency to perceive most human beings as by degrees preposterous and infuriating is what cemented the friendship between Amis and Philip Larkin within weeks of their first encounter in Oxford. For Larkin, however, humour was the flip side of a mordant, depressive state of mind. He began as an able practitioner of fiction but the very nature of the genre, involving as it does an obligation to transplant vast tracts of experience into narrative, was at variance with his temperament. For him, life in general was tiresome enough, and having to endure it yet again in lengthy passages of prose was more than he could stand. Instead, he found in verse a means of shifting between private and public registers without spending too much time with either. His stepping stones were the minutiae of ordinary existence. In ‘Vers de Société’, for example, he has been asked round to dinner by a distinguished university colleague, and he alters the wording of the letter in accordance with his feelings about the prospect.

My wife and I have asked a crowd of craps

To come and waste their time and ours: perhaps

You’d care to join us? In a pig’s arse, friend.

Thereafter, the poem becomes the occasion for reflections on how such gatherings prompt him to perceive life as largely a catalogue of equally pointless routines, variously customised to reinforce the assumption that something might matter. As an exercise in depressive loneliness, verging upon nihilism, it matches anything by Kafka. The state of mind rehearsed by the words is unenviable but we are not asked to share it; far more powerful is our feeling of admiration for a work of art. In his verse, Larkin appears to relish the tedious, the ordinary, often the distasteful. What makes his work superior to that of his contemporaries is his ability to graft such material on to poems of seemingly incongruous elegance. For this reason he is loathed. Academics hate him because he is not self-indulgent. He makes his language work for him and the reader, not for them: ‘There’s not much to say about my work. When you’ve read a poem, that’s it, it’s all quite clear what it means’ (Philip Larkin, Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces, 1955–82, pp. 53–4). Academics and other members of the literary establishment dislike writing that is self-evidently beautiful but which does not, like modernism, demand their services as explicators.

Here too, Larkin and Amis have much in common. Both undermine the longstanding injunction of the literary and university hierarchy that, without innovation, writing is intellectually hidebound, indebted to nothing but the past. Each of them disproves this formula by demonstrating that formal conservatism can coexist with urgent questionings of the way we think and live. Moreover, they show that the successful command of traditional techniques requires far more skill and intellectual investment than the tired and predictable practices of experiment.

In the latter half of the twentieth century they were the torchbearers for writing that tested the intellect and sensibility of its readers without resorting to the self-obsessed preoccupations of modernism. The fact that they also maintained an intimate, often difficult, friendship for nearly forty-five years involves another insight into their effect upon literary history. ‘What if’ hypotheses are generally the hobbyhorses of historians but it is fascinating to wonder about what would have happened if Larkin had not met Amis in the Front Quad of St John’s, Oxford, that day in May 1941, if their encounters during the subsequent year had been merely brief and cursory until Amis departed for military service. They would certainly have become writers but their work would have been very different from what they have bequeathed us. Their continued relationship energised, sometimes even shaped, much of their finest writing. Lucky Jim, the novel that launched Amis’s career, could not have been written without Larkin. It was not simply a matter of him offering advice and encouragement to his friend. Their exchanges had by the early 1950s become a site for exclusive disclosures, observations, confessions; the sort of things routinely thought to lie too deep for discussion or exchange. This was the impetus for Amis’s debut novel, and indeed their ongoing friendship was the foundation for much of Amis’s work of the 1950s. Larkin came to life as a poet with The Less Deceived and The Whitsun Weddings, and Amis’s influence was significant for both collections. But while Amis exploited their intimacy for his writing, Larkin’s mature poetry was largely a reaction against it. In 1961 Larkin felt so drained, even humiliated, by his connection with Amis that he ceased communications with him. Within a decade, amicable relations had been restored. It was not simply that Larkin now felt sufficiently secure with his own literary achievements to allow Amis back. He knew he was an exceptional poet but he knew also that even if he continued to keep Amis at arm’s length his presence would, until death, be an unrelenting feature of his existence, and would by implication continue to cast a shadow across him as a poet. So with commendable, if wary, resignation, he resumed their friendship.

Aside from its effect on their work, their relationship demonstrates how easy it is to mistake intimacy for exploitation and misapprehension. It would not be inaccurate to state that they knew each other better than anyone else knew either of them, yet quite often it seemed that Amis’s perception of Larkin was a convenient simplification of who he really was. Sometimes the latter felt that he had become like a character in one of Amis’s novels: authentically engaging and querulous but nonetheless someone else’s creation. Conversely, Larkin frequently detected idiosyncracies and preoccupations in Amis to which his friend had blinded himself.

It is a fascinating story, and while a good deal of the material that charts it is in the public realm, notably in collections of letters, my work has benefited greatly from unpublished documents still in library archives. With regard to this, I am particularly grateful to the Hull History Centre (referred to below as ‘Hull’), the Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California (referred to below as ‘Hunt’), and the Bodleian Library, Oxford (referred to as ‘Bod’). If none of these abbreviations is used, the letter or book from which the quotation comes appears in one of the published collections listed in the Bibliography. In bracketed references to correspondence, Larkin is ‘L’, Amis ‘A’, and all other correspondents are referred to by either their surname or first name.

Sarah Chestnutt and Rosemary Savage deserve thanks for their assistance, and Hollie Teague and Olivia Beattie laboured heroically during the production period.

Dr Amy Burns has played a vital part in the work for this book.

Thanks are due to Faber & Faber Ltd and to the estate of Philip Larkin for granting permission to quote from the work of Philip Larkin, and thanks are due to Orion and the estate of Kingsley Amis for permission to quote from Kingsley Amis’s work.

The following have provided useful information in interviews, some conducted with specific reference to this book and others for my earlier work on Amis and Larkin: Martin Amis, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Colin Howard, Esmond Cleary, Eric Jacobs, Sam Dawson, Mavis Nicholson and Christopher Hitchens.

1

Before They Met

Amis’s account in his Memoirs of his life in suburban Norbury blends disbelief with black comedy. It seemed to him, aged sixty, that his early years were too preposterous to be taken seriously. First, he offers the reader a tour of his satellite relatives, as if keen to postpone for as long as possible a visit to 16 Buckingham Gardens, home of his father, William, mother, Rosa (‘Peggy’) and himself, their only child. He introduces us to Mater and Dadda, his paternal grandparents, with a deadpan account of their ghastly existence in their Victorian manor house, ‘Borchester’, in Purley, where Amis would be taken for meals at Christmas and for family birthdays.

Amis can never recall Dadda addressing him directly, but he remembers being obliged to kiss both of his grandparents, who apparently had an almost equal preponderance of facial hair. He also remembers how Dadda would sit at the head of the table, napkin stuffed into his shirt collar, and, between savage bouts of eating and drinking, tell jokes which combined the vulgar with the surreal. The actual presence of Dadda would have been disturbing enough, but this was later supplemented by William’s account to the teenaged Kingsley of how Dadda had effectively ruined the family business. J. J. Amis & Co. were glassware wholesalers, and Dadda had become convinced that he had access to a brand of unbreakable plates, glasses and related domestic paraphernalia. To test this thesis, or perhaps just to entertain the family, Dadda once crept into the drawing-room and hurled one of the items at the stone fireplace, a performance he repeated for potential clients in the company office. He was on all occasions apparently both surprised and disappointed when these products disintegrated. Mater was equally peculiar but far more disagreeable. Her legendary meanness involved the leaving out of only two matches for the maids to light the gas in the morning, and the substitution of grocer’s bags for lavatory paper.

Amis’s aunt, Dora, his mother’s sister, went mad, officially. Amis remembers, aged about eleven, sitting with her in his parents’ kitchen. She kept asking him to move his chair away from the window so that she could ‘see if there’s anyone out there’. This sense of anticipating something dreadful, apocalyptic but never clearly specified, attended Dora’s entire existence, and eventually, in 1941, she was committed to a mental hospital. Apparently she flourished in this environment, virtually taking over the running of the kitchen from the employees. On the day she heard of her mother’s death, her neurotic symptoms, already in abeyance, disappeared for good, and within a year she was taken on as a middle-rank administrator in the same hospital.

Amis’s uncle, Leslie, his father’s brother, replaced Dadda as manager of the ailing J. J. Amis & Co. Glassware, and after Dadda’s death was responsible for the increasingly unpleasant Mater. Amis liked Leslie and was saddened by ‘his horrible life’ (Memoirs, p. 4). In his late teens, Amis was approached by his father with some apparently disturbing news. Leslie had told his brother that he wanted to go to bed with men, and William had advised him to ‘see a doctor’. No one knew if Leslie’s homosexual instincts were real or hypothetical, but in any event, when Mater died, everything changed. Leslie sold the business premises and invested his inherited capital in a world cruise, during which he ‘fucked every female in sight’ (Memoirs, pp. 4–5). Two years later he was dead.

Freudians would no doubt have a field day with all of this, but we can leave its effect upon Amis to common sense. His aunt on his mother’s side and his uncle on his father’s side had reconciled themselves to their own identity only after the death of their last parent. Amis, by the time he left home, would know that he had already embarked upon a very effective strategy of independence. ‘As I came to sense the image in which my father was trying to mould my character and future I began to resist him, and we quarrelled violently at least every week or two for years’ (Memoirs, p. 14). In the Memoirs Amis concedes, if only implicitly, that his father did play a vital role in the shaping of his tastes and character. He operated as a foil, a testing ground, for enthusiasms and inclinations that Kingsley would acquire independently.

William was once a Liberal who turned into an arch-Tory after the Great War, and his affiliation was strengthened by the General Strike and the emergence of the Labour Party as a serious contender for power. Amis himself, summarising his father’s view of him, became a ‘bloody little fool of a leftie’ and an avid supporter of Joseph Stalin. Unlike his love of music, which was transparent and unflagging, Amis’s political opinions were always reactive, shifting, often self-contradictory, a condition that owed something to his early instinct to rebel against anything his father espoused.

Their arguments were on Kingsley’s part rooted in a level of self-willed alienation. ‘What my father wanted me to be was, of course, a version of William Robert Amis, a more successful version…’ (ibid., p. 17). After war service spent tending airships in Scotland, William Amis had joined Colman’s, the mustard manufacturers, as a junior clerk, where he stayed, gradually acquiring seniority, until retirement. Kingsley never regarded his father as a failure, but he hated the idea that success involved, at least for people of his own lower middle-class origins, a future in the higher regions of banking or commerce.

Amis’s early life was an assembly of adult narratives, stories of a potential future, all of which he strenuously avoided and rejected. But what was their alternative?

At St Hilda’s Primary School, Amis was introduced to literature by a Miss Barr, a ‘tall, Eton-cropped figure of improbable elegance’ (Memoirs, pp. 24–5). He cannot recall the texts promoted by Miss Barr, but after moving to Norbury College, a local state school with ambitions, he encountered Mr Ashley, who employed what was in those days a radical method of teaching English. Ashley made them read Shakespeare, and then had them contrast this with almost-contemporary poetry, mostly the verse of the Georgians. He also believed that for his pupils properly to understand and appreciate literature, they should attempt to write it. Aged ten, Amis had written ninety-nine lines of blank verse and a 300-word short story, published in the school magazine, on Captain Hartly, a ‘veteran hunter’ of rhino.

In 1934, aged twelve, Amis went to the City of London School, an institution of solid academic reputation that took boys of various backgrounds. His father and his uncle Leslie had been pupils. William paid for his first year there, gambling on Kingsley’s securing a scholarship, which he did in his next year. At the school, middle-class fee-payers mixed with a large number of scholarship boys, and for Amis his six years there were like university, and often better. He was taught Latin and Greek poetry in a way that encouraged him to enjoy its distant beauty and to recognise that poetry per se transcended linguistic difference. He discovered A. E. Housman, whose verse he would treasure, even more than that of his friend Larkin, for the rest of his life. And he talked with the Reverend C. J. Ellingham, an unequivocal Christian, to whom Housman’s agnostic inclinations mattered little in comparison with the sheer quality of his verse: ‘so I saw forever that a poem is not a statement and the poet “affirmeth nothing”’ (Memoirs, p. 28). A Mr Marsh would lend out editions of verse by Auden and MacNeice; Eliot and Pound were talked about by masters and pupils.

With his peers, Amis discussed sex, radical politics, French verse, Fats Waller, Delius, Charles Morgan and more sex. While 15 per cent of the boys were Jewish, Amis claims never to have encountered anti-Semitism, even in its polite middle-class manifestation.

The City of London School provided a cosmopolitan contrast to Amis’s family life. His parents had little time for ‘serious’ literature. His mother, Peggy, enjoyed the work of middlebrow contemporary novelists which, in Amis’s view, were not ‘the classics but not “slop” either’. When Kingsley seemed to have little else to do, Peggy would encourage him to ‘do a bit of writing’, although he was never quite certain what she imagined he would write. William favoured detective novels ‘by such as R. Austin Freeman, Francis Grierson and John Rhode from the middle part of the spectrum’ (Memoirs, p. 15). The only member of his family whose interests corresponded with Kingsley’s growing awareness of mainstream literature was his maternal grandfather, George Lucas. Lucas died before Amis was old enough to talk with him about books, but Peggy provided her son with an anecdote that must have seemed consistent with the tragicomic mythology of the rest of his extended family. His grandfather would read out his favourite passages to his wife, who, when his head was lowered to the page, would make faces and gestures at him indicating various expressions of boredom, ridicule and contempt. This, says Amis, ‘helped to make me hate her very much’ (Memoirs, p. 5). And we might recall that this was the woman whose death had caused her mad daughter to regain almost instantaneous sanity.

It would stretch credibility to cite too many direct channels of influence between Amis’s early life and his writing, but some parallels are evident enough. Housman became his favourite poet, and he also, at City of London School, discovered the novels of G. K. Chesterton. Characteristically, Chesterton would use witty and often disturbing paradoxes to startle his readers, to disrupt the comfortable expectation of what a character was really like or what would happen next. Amis’s favourites, from his early teens onwards, were The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) and The Man Who Was Thursday (1908). Both novels defy easy categorisation. They mix the genres of fantasy and science fiction with political diagnosis and a style that reflects contemporary habits and locutions. Amis, in such middle-period novels as The Green Man (1969) and The Alteration (1976), would do something similar, but his attraction to Chesterton ran much deeper than that, because his childhood was in itself not unlike a mixed-genre narrative. His world seemed to comprise not-quite-compatible segments of experience, but he found that he was able to drift between them without much effort or distress.

Larkin usually recalled his childhood with a mixture of feigned forgetfulness and irritation at being obliged, through fame, to speak of it at all. In one poem, however, he says a great deal. ‘Best Society’ begins:

When I was a child, I thought,

Casually, that solitude

Never needed to be sought.

Something everybody had,

Like nakedness, it lay at hand,

Not specially right or specially wrong.

A plentiful and obvious thing

Not at all hard to understand.

Larkin was twenty-nine when he wrote this, and he goes on to state that the adulthood of ‘after twenty’ has caused him to realise that solitude now involves effort; other people and the burden of being sociable have to be dealt with. Only then can he properly appreciate their avoidance: ‘I lock my door … Once more / Uncontradicting solitude / Supports me on its giant palm.’ In 1951, Larkin was still a relatively obscure poet, but his speaking presence anticipates the figure we would come to know – a man for whom the mundane, the dreary and the mildly depressing were inspirational. The poem is fascinating because it raises questions about the kind of solitude that Larkin claims to have experienced as a child. He was never isolated or maltreated by his parents, and he had a standard retinue of school friends. It was not that he was using childhood, as Wordsworth had done, as a conceit, a vehicle for creative misremembering; not quite. When he wrote the poem his father had been dead for three-and-a-half years, enough time to reflect and take stock of the past as something genuinely irrecoverable. He could now look at his childhood and adolescence with dispassionate sincerity, and what he found was difficult to describe, one might even say bizarre. It was not so much that he remembered solitude, more that the act of remembering caused him to doubt that he could ever really have been a participant in that curious assembly known as the Larkin family.

On the face of things, the Larkins embodied the stereotype of provincial, lower middle-class ordinariness, but Sydney, Larkin’s father, was a figure who regularly disrupted expectations. He was descended from four generations of small businessmen – tailors, coach makers, cobblers and finally shopkeepers – based in Lichfield. At Lichfield Grammar School he proved impressive enough to secure a place at the more esteemed King Edward VI High School in Birmingham where he continued to shine as an exemplar of self-discipline, raw intelligence and commitment. He left school, aged eighteen, in 1902, and his first job was as a junior clerk in Birmingham City Treasury. For the next five years he successfully completed a series of part-time courses in accountancy at Birmingham University, sufficient to earn him promotion to Chief Audit Accountant in 1911. In 1913 he moved further up the ladder of local government finance and was appointed Assistant Borough Accountant in Doncaster, and six years after that he moved back to the West Midlands to become deputy treasurer of Coventry City Corporation. In 1922 he applied successfully for the position of treasurer, where he would remain until his death in 1947.

Sydney Larkin is never mentioned in ‘Best Society’, but for Philip he patrolled the poem’s genesis as a spectral presence, felt but not acknowledged. Significantly, the same effect informs the extant accounts and records of Sydney’s life. His obituaries, for example, praise his studious efficiency and dedication to the duties of local authority administration, but they read like encyclopaedia entries for some obscure twelfth-century cleric of whose personality virtually nothing is known – except that in Sydney’s case the omissions were deliberate. The war had been over for little more than two years, and his family had to be thought of. He had during the 1930s been an ardent and vocal supporter of fascism, particularly its German manifestation. 

There are accounts in Sydney’s notebooks, preserved by Philip, of how he perceived himself as a necessary and ruthless agent of efficiency in his work in local government. For example, the ‘clauses inserted by my suggestion in the Doncaster Corporation Act of 1915’ have ‘completely reformed the system of short term loans and brought into effect a consolidated system of taxes’. And at Coventry he had created a template of ‘financial legislation … for many years the best in the country’ (Hull). The style and temper of these accounts carry echoes of Mr Pooter, but the Grossmiths would have required a much darker sense of humour to have created someone like Sydney Larkin.

On the mantelpiece in the house where Philip grew up stood a 12-inch statue of Hitler which, when a button was pressed, would do a passable imitation of a Nazi salute. Sydney had acquired this on one of his many trips to Germany during the late 1920s and 1930s; he had attended at least two Nuremberg rallies. Sydney’s notebooks include no direct references to Nazi Germany as the inspiration for his approach to local authority administration and accounting – or at least those which Philip retained do not – but the parallels were clear enough to everyone who knew him. In the mid-1930s he corresponded regularly with Hjalmar Schacht, the German economics minister. Schacht is credited with rescuing the German economy from the cycle of depression and inflation carried over from the 1929 slump, and Sydney was keen to impose a similar model upon Coventry. He was also by all accounts the only city treasurer in Britain whose office was decorated with Nazi regalia, causing it to resemble the by-then-familiar newsreel of the Führer’s headquarters. Even up to the declaration of war in 1939 these remained in place, only to be removed reluctantly and at the insistence of Sydney’s superiors in City Hall.

He could not have claimed – as, after the war, did many of the British Union of Fascists, the so-called Blackshirts – that his affiliations were fuelled by a personal experience of poverty. Nor could he have pretended that his preoccupation with Germany was grounded exclusively in the pursuit of economic efficiency: by the mid-1930s Nazi economics had become one strand of an all-encompassing ideology – including, of course, savagely pragmatic anti-Semitism. (At the Nuremberg rally of 1935, two laws were announced: one forbidding any form of sexual contact between non-Jews and Jews, the other depriving Jews of basic civil rights. Sydney was there.) Yet strangely, he possessed a personality which, while less than amiable, was difficult to stereotype. He was an avid reader of contemporary and near-contemporary literature, with a keen taste for Hardy, Bennett, Wilde, Butler and Shaw. By the time Philip was born he had acquired complete collections of their works, alongside an impressive selection of other contemporaneous authors. More significantly, he knew and admired the poetry of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, had read Joyce’s Ulysses and enjoyed the stories of Katherine Mansfield. Literary modernism was not a particularly widespread interest among local authority figures in the West Midlands, but Sydney’s enthusiasm gives some credence to the claim that there was a natural affinity between the fascist notion of disciplined elitism and the view held by some modernists and their followers that accessibility involved populist degradation.

The author who fascinated Sydney most of all was D. H. Lawrence, and the parallels between them are intriguing. Both were self-made men in that they evolved mindsets and ideological viewpoints that unshackled them completely from the formative influences of their respective backgrounds. Above all, they shared a belief in the power and supremacy of the individual. This was not the liberal-humanist notion of the freedom of the individual, but a more exclusive model of individualism as an ability to detach oneself from the weary excesses of collective thinking and consensus – such as a belief in God, attendance to the idealism of democracy, or deference to such abstractions as generosity and compassion. In Aaron’s Rod, for example, Lilly, one of the principal characters, argues for the reintroduction of ‘a proper and healthy and energetic slavery’, plus a programme of extermination for the worst of the lower orders and, for the rest, an instilling of respect for a natural aristocracy. The novel was published a few months before Philip’s birth in 1922. Whether Sydney purchased his copy at this time is not known, but its subsequent influence upon his son makes one wonder. Sydney had to an extent modelled his life upon what would become Lilly’s thesis (which, incidentally, Lawrence treats with respectful objectivity), but Philip’s arrival gave him the opportunity to create an embodiment of it from the raw material of a new, male, human being.

Philip was not, of course, the exclusive product of Sydney. Sydney met Eva Day when both of them were on holiday in Rhyl during the summer of 1906. She was twenty, he twenty-two, and their backgrounds were similar. Her father had been a minor civil servant – excise officer and then pensions administrator – in Epping, Essex. She had been to grammar school, and when they met she was a junior-school teacher. 

The story of their first encounter, as passed on to Philip, resembles an extract from Arnold Bennett’s Clayhanger series. They found themselves sheltering from the rain in a hut overlooking the beach, exchanged pleasantries, and Sydney became interested when Eva continued to read her book. Obviously this was a woman for whom literature demanded attention, more so than the potentially unsettling situation of sharing a hut with a male stranger. He introduced himself, persuaded her to meet him again, and within three days they were engaged. It sounds romantic, in a very English, Edwardian kind of way, but in truth it was a moment of misunderstanding that would have miserable consequences. Eva was attracted by Sydney’s confidence and impetuosity. She had never met anyone quite so exciting before, yet at the same time his apparent commitment to a respectable secure career reminded her of home. For Sydney she was a manageable version of the new independent woman: educated, moderately cultured but not over-ambitious. These early impressions were sustained by circumstances. Sydney explained that marriage would only be possible when he had a better-paid job, and, because of the distance between Essex and Birmingham, they met for relatively brief periods and exchanged letters. During the five years between their first meeting and their marriage in 1911, Sydney would have no idea that his fiancée was in truth a nervous, jittery individual who craved support, and Eva had no evidence to foresee a life with a monomaniac who would interpret such cravings as evidence of weakness and failure.

Larkin mentions his parents’ first meeting only once in his published work. ‘To the Sea’, written in 1969, is a curious poem. It is a catalogue of images of a seaside town drawn randomly from the past – part-remembered, part-imagined – and the perceived present. It could be anywhere on the English or Welsh coast. Larkin has been there before, as a child: ‘happy at being on my own, / I searched the sand for famous cricketers’. The fact that ‘my parents … first became known’ in this place is a brief aside, their presence of little apparent significance among the crowded retinue of happy children, bathers, chocolate papers, rusting soup tins and families trekking back to cars as the day concludes. They met there, of that he is certain, but the consequences of the meeting seem to be obscured by matters of questionable significance. What happened after they met is not mentioned; best left unsaid. The poem is Larkin at his most transparent; elegance is mixed with listlessness, not much is said but a great deal is magnificently inferred. 

When Philip was born they lived at 2 Poultney Street in a suburb of Coventry. It was a council house but not the type to be mythologised in histories of the Labour movement. Poultney Street had been built by Coventry Corporation as an investment to provide housing for the skilled workforce of the locality. For the Larkins it was a temporary residence until Sydney found something that befitted his status as treasurer. This would be ‘Penvorn’, Manor Road, closer to the city centre. They moved in when Philip was five, and the house would be the locus for his memories of childhood and adolescence. It was almost new, and its combination of Tudor and Gothic features gave it an incongruously sinister aspect, fully reflected by life within.

Sydney Larkin had six brothers, of whom at least four lived in the vicinity, but Larkin cannot recall meeting any of them until he was obliged to stay with his Uncle Arthur during the Blitz in 1940. His one maternal uncle, another Arthur, lived in Essex and never visited the family. Apart from there being no relatives to speak of, Philip’s parents appeared to have no friends. Penvorn was occasionally visited by people from Sydney’s office, but these were not social calls.

When they met, Eva’s nervousness presented itself as a tolerable eccentricity. Sydney treated her fear of thunderstorms and anxious concern for unforeseen trivialities as superficial elements of her otherwise reliable character. By the time Philip was born, his authoritarian, sometimes short-tempered manner had exacerbated Eva’s jittery tendencies, turning her into an involuntary recluse. And one might easily forget that there was a fourth member of the Penvorn household, a daughter, Catherine (Kitty); through no fault of her own she had become in Sydney’s view an appendage to Eva. She was born in 1912, and after that Sydney put child production on hold. He wanted a boy, a version of himself, and he was willing to wait until the family had reached an appropriate level of financial security until he tried again.

Sydney ran the household in the same way that he presided over the finances of the City Corporation, and Eva and Kitty became more like possessions than sharers. He was a member of the local chess club – he had always treated chess as an invigorating form of intellectual exercise – he went for long cycle rides, gave papers to the Coventry Literary and Philosophical Society, mostly on contemporary writers, and became a respected after-dinner speaker. This aspect of his life was essentially his own. Eva and Kitty would accompany him to Shakespeare performances in nearby Stratford and to concerts in Coventry, but more for appearance’s sake than as a genuine reflection of a family with shared cultural interests. Eva became more and more reluctant to do anything but stay at home, attend to a schedule of duties planned by Sydney and look after the children. This active–passive imbalance was a feature of most lower middle-class marriages of the time, but with Eva and Sydney Larkin, the conventionalism of their relationship intensified their personality traits. The only figure upon whom Eva could rely for advice or encouragement, let alone sympathy, was an autodidact for whom anxiety meant weakness.

Larkin made few public statements about his childhood. The most detailed is probably an article called ‘Not the Place’s Fault’ (1959), an almost nostalgic recollection of his early schooldays and hobbies and of day-to-day life in Coventry in the early 1930s. His parents are hardly mentioned at all. In 1986 he was interviewed by Melvyn Bragg for The South Bank Show and the most curious thing about his reflections on childhood is the way in which he appears to want to explain or allude to something in particular without ever saying what this is. He states that children ‘don’t control their destinies’; they have no choice regarding what they can do and where they live. Then he shifts from the general to the personal. ‘This isn’t to say I didn’t have nice friends I visited and played with and so on, or that my parents weren’t perfectly kind to me’, but he has also found other people’s accounts of their childhoods to be more exciting than his. His ‘seemed to have a fairly insulated quality that looking back I can’t quite account for’. ‘Can’t quite’ is a suitably ambiguous term, but ‘would rather not’ is closer to the truth. A more honest account can be found in his notebooks (Hull), written in the early 1950s and never intended for publication. Sydney, according to Larkin, treated Kitty as ‘little better than a mental defective’, all the more irritating because of her apparent reluctance to find a husband and leave home. Sydney himself had a mind that was ‘dominating, active and keen’, but he seemed to find difficulties with other human beings. He had no friends, ‘he worked all day and shut himself away reading in the evening’.

The notebooks are remarkably candid and at the same time perverse. Rarely, if ever, does he allow his own feelings or his memories of them to intrude upon the catalogue of facts. They read like a physician’s report upon the dreadful circumstances surrounding an untimely death, and in his summing-up he maintains this mood of cool objectivity. 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’. It is fascinating to read this alongside the poem celebrating solitude, ‘Best Society’, written around the same time. It becomes apparent that the speaker of the poem, who laments the loss of the unasked-for solitude of childhood and recognises that he prefers it to the efforts of adult companionability, is in fact a compendium of recollections and recognitions, not least of which is Larkin’s growing acceptance that, temperamentally, he has decided to design his life in a way that abates these affinities. In the third stanza he reaches the conclusion that the more agreeable aspects of humanity are manifest only when provoked by the presence of others – lovers, friends, family:

                              … in short,

Our virtues are all social; if

Deprived of solitude, you chafe,

It’s clear you’re not the virtuous sort.

So after he has locked his door and retreated from the company of others, ‘there cautiously / Unfolds, emerges, what I am’. Or, rather what I prefer.

The short poem ‘To My Wife’ was written in 1951, the same year as ‘Best Society’. It is a depressing piece uttered by a man who perceives his marriage and subsequent existence as a kind of living suicide; a single decision has systematically eliminated all others. It ‘shuts up that peacock-fan / The future was … for your face I have exchanged all faces’; ‘No future now’. Larkin’s biographer, Andrew Motion, suggests that it was prompted by his feelings for Winifred Arnott, then his occasional girlfriend, but if it was a grisly projection of the consequences of commitment it was grounded as much upon second-hand experience as hypothesis. It is a savagely economical account of his parents’ marriage and could indeed have been uttered by his father. In the notebooks, Larkin writes of how Sydney’s ‘personality had imposed that taut ungenerous defeated pattern of life on the family, and it was only to be expected that it would make them miserable and that their misery would react on him’. Something very similar informs the last three lines of the poem spoken by the man to his wife:

Now you become my boredom and my failure,

Another way of suffering, a risk,

A heavier-than-air hypostasis.

For the figure in the poem, and Sydney, it is too late, but Larkin still has a choice. In the notebooks he writes of how his parents’ marriage has ‘remained in my mind as something I mustn’t under any circumstances risk encountering again’.

Irrespective of our innate dispositions, some aspect of our adult personality will be a consequence of our experiences in childhood. The problem arises, however, when we attempt to estimate exactly how and to what extent we are formed by our past, because memories of childhood are a contradiction in terms. We might recollect events that occurred when we were twelve, but for the adult mind their effects involve as much a process of reconstruction as remembering. For Larkin, this juggling act was further complicated by his having effectively inhabited two separate childhood worlds. One involved the family home and the presence of Sydney, while the other was composed partly of his state of mind and partly of the people and events that he knew outside the home.

Already one becomes aware of parallels between Larkin’s and Amis’s  childhood experiences. Both cultivated strategies of withdrawal and isolation, tendencies that would have a striking effect on them in adulthood and most significantly on their writing. But there are subtle differences too that can be seen as prefigurings of the contrasts between them as grown men. Clearly, Larkin’s particular encounter with the way a family works caused him to insulate himself from any inclinations toward marriage and children. This would be the cause of some distress for his long-term partner, Monica Jones, and it would contribute to a broader refusal to affiliate that informs the mood of some of his finest poems: he observes, comments on the beauty, beguiling modernity or sheer ghastliness of the world, but with a hint of relief, as if he is not quite of it. There is no evidence that Larkin disliked his father. But his emotional attachment was equalled by a sense of unease. He admired, even shared, Sydney’s commitment to self achievement, and he was certainly impressed by his unorthodox artistic and intellectual tastes, but he also sensed that as a human being, someone obliged to share their world with others, he was, to say the least, clumsy and conflicted. Larkin’s own solution was to become prudent and watchful with anything resembling personal or emotional investment.

Amis, on the other hand, chose to set up his father William as a figure against whom he could test his own rebellious ambitions. In two of his novels, The Riverside Villas Murder (1973) and You Can’t Do Both (1994), he incorporated transparently autobiographical accounts of his relationship with his parents and in his recreation of his father there is more than a hint of remorse. There are no reliable or detailed records of what William was really like. We rely on the somewhat partial versions of him related by those who knew him, Amis in particular, and there is evidence, especially in his accounts to Larkin, that Amis carried into early adulthood a tendency to satirise him, deliberately exaggerating aspects of his character that for some might have been amusing, even endearing, but for his son became legitimate excuses for irritation, sometimes vilification. In this respect, his early relationship with his father was a rehearsal for the interdependent relationship between two aspects of Amis the adult: the private individual and the novelist. The latter would use his work as a means of dispersing his cabinet of phobias, hatreds and emotional catastrophes.

In You Can’t Do Both, Amis acknowledges that in his previous accounts of his relationship with his parents, his mother is always in the background. This, to his regret, is how he tended to recall her, given that the hostilities between father and son would always feature as the most memorable contrast to the otherwise unremarkable routines of life in Norbury. In fact, Peggy Amis, in an albeit unassertive and almost diplomatic manner, played an important part in Amis’s early years. Throughout his life Amis had a fear of complete darkness, made worse when he was alone. It began when he was about eight, and Peggy, with a good deal of shrewd and tolerant understanding, would help him through what in modern parlance are called panic attacks. She would also function not exactly as a referee but more as a counterbalancing presence, a friend to both parties, in the disagreements between Amis and his father, a day-to-day activity that would prepare her for the more demanding role of negotiator. Two events, the first involving his affair with a married woman and the second the premarital pregnancy of his eventual wife, would cause William to ostracise his then adult son. Peggy brought them back together, and in You Can’t Do Both Amis repays the debt.

Amis’s first period away from his parents was caused by the Second World War. Months before it was declared, the City of London School had made arrangements to evacuate its central London premises in expectation of the city becoming the target for German bombers. Marlborough College in Wiltshire agreed to share its buildings and grounds with the City of London School, and, in late August 1939, staff and pupils, the latter allowed one large suitcase each, boarded the train from Blackfriars Station to Paddington and there changed to the Taunton Express.

Amis recalls the experience as both sinister and exciting. War would not be officially declared until 3 September, but most people were aware of its inevitability. The famous ‘Walls Have Ears’ posters advising everyone to remain discreet about practically everything, given that Hitler’s agents might be listening in, would not appear for a year, but the City of London School pre-empted them. Apart from the senior masters, no one knew where they were going. The train made an unscheduled stop at Savernake, a few miles from Marlborough. They had arrived – but until later that day, when officially informed by the masters, Amis and his friends did not know quite where they were.

Amis never made use of the actuality of these events in his fiction, but one suspects that his remembrance of the atmosphere created by them informs the texture of his mid-period novel The Anti-Death League (1966). In both, the metropolis and the comfortable Home Counties are visited by a blend of secrecy and subdued anxiety.

Autumn 1939 to early summer 1940 at Marlborough was Amis’s final year at school, and it influenced his adulthood in a number of ways.

For the first time in his life he had the opportunity, indeed the obligation, properly to get to know people outside the family home. Leonard Richenberg, then head boy of the City of London School, shared a room with Amis in a decrepit, unheated farm-worker’s cottage just outside the school grounds. Richenberg, together with Peter Baldwin, George Blunden, Cyril Metliss and Saul Rose, became Amis’s closest friends. He had, of course, known them before, but all were now detached from their families; they spent their days and evenings in each other’s company. Marlborough was for Amis a rehearsal for Oxford. He became the figure whose intelligence was respected by his peers but who seemed intent on making everything a lot less serious, more absurd and amusing than it might appear to be. The recollections of his friends are both affectionate and accurately inconsistent. Blunden remembers him as someone who ‘set the standards of cultural and intellectual activity … the intellectual star’, Metliss as ‘a great mimic and full of fun’ (Eric Jacobs, Kingsley Amis: A Biography, p. 60).

When interviewed by Eric Jacobs, all five of Amis’s school friends stated that when they read Lucky Jim, it was as though they had been returned to the atmosphere of Marlborough, with Amis the at once iconoclastic, hilarious and confidently clever leader of their group. Amis the man would, reinforced by Marlborough, become a puzzling combination of an intellectual and an anti-intellectual farceur, but it was fifteen years before he realised that this blending would be the essence of his early success as a writer.

Marlborough was one of England’s senior public schools. Its pupils, then all fee-paying, came from a class above Amis and his City of London School pals; they were the sons of QCs, landowners, rich, socially aspirant businessmen and minor aristocrats. The City of London boys were treated by their hosts with a mixture of arrogance and condescending politeness. While Amis and his friends were from comfortably-off homes, he felt that the tension between themselves and the haughtily distant pupils of Marlborough was like something out of Dickens, people who existed in the world mixing uneasily with people who thought they owned it.

It was Amis’s first real encounter with the pre-war English class system. His family, Norbury and the City of London School incorporated various strands of lower middle-class London with relatively slight variations in lifestyles, speech patterns and levels of income. His own accent was inherited from his father. It was what used to be referred to as ‘BBC English’, involving an unflamboyant attention to ‘correct’ grammar and habits of pronunciation. It was neutrally middle class, suggesting a comfortable enough background but invoking no clear affiliation to a particular region, nor any obvious political allegiance. As such it became the ideal foundation for Amis’s talents as a mimic, a bare canvas on to which he could project all manner of caricatures and representations. He began to perfect these at Marlborough.

The evacuation of the City of London School had created something like a bizarre socio-linguistic experiment. The college was not attached to a town of any size, and outside it the quaint verbal mannerisms of the West Country predominated. A regiment of middle-class Londoners had suddenly created an unusual counterbalance to the stark contrast between the upper-class drawl of most of the college boys and the relaxed burr of the surrounding district. Amis thrived on this. It made him more aware than he had previously been of how the way people sound is as much a feature of their perceived personality as the way they look and what they actually say. He started paying closer attention to how vocal habits merged with temperamental and physical attributes, and his unnervingly accurate imitations of the City of London masters had his co-evacuees in stitches. As a means of becoming one of a crowd, his talent would prove very useful in Oxford, but more significantly, he would eventually recognise it as not incompatible with his intellectual astuteness – and out of this, Jim Dixon would be born.

More predictably, the class divisions of Marlborough encouraged Amis’s affiliation to Marxism. Despite the fact that both schools now existed in the same place, he could not remember anything resembling a conversation with one of the Marlborough boys – their choice, apparently. He recalls that they behaved as though their privileged part of the world had been invaded by individuals who, simply because of their background, did not deserve to be there. The officer/other ranks structure of the army would, a few years later, further provoke his anger.

This was his last year at school. His masters knew that he would go to Oxbridge and that he was capable of winning an exhibition or scholarship. He had to, given that his parents could not afford to pay his fees. There were far more classics prizes available than for any other single humanities discipline, and Amis was recognised as the best classics scholar at the City of London School. But he chose to read English Literature. There were few English scholarships at either of the old universities, and his choice caused him to spend a year after leaving school at home with his parents. Competition was fierce, and he would not secure an Oxford exhibition until 1941.

Like Amis, at school Larkin found the opportunity to explore and account for aspects of his own personality that were stifled by life at home.

Despite the fact that Sydney was an agnostic, he had Philip christened in Coventry Cathedral: the grandeur of the place offered a suitable starting point for an envisioned successful future. More pragmatically, he made sure that his son was enrolled for King Henry VIII School. KHS, as it was known, was the best grammar school in the region (the fact that it was named after a dictatorial psychopath obsessed with male offspring was purely coincidental). The then-headmaster, A. A. C. Burton, ran the place more like a public school, introducing a streaming system which ensured that bright pupils could be spotted early and introduced to Latin, a basic Oxbridge entrance requirement. Indeed, Burton employed only teachers with first-class degrees from Oxford or Cambridge.

Larkin enrolled at the KHS Junior School aged eight, in 1930. The school was about ten minutes’ walk from Manor Road, and most significantly it represented Larkin’s first real encounter with life outside Penvorn. Previously he had been educated at home. Eva’s experience as a primary-school teacher came in handy here, and Kitty, ten years Philip’s senior, was used as a kind of junior assistant, reading to him and encouraging him to write and draw. So when Philip, accompanied by Eva, set out on an August morning in 1930, he was about to experience something unprecedented: never before had he encountered so many people of the same age and size gathered in the same place. Larkin adjusted surprisingly well both to this and to the equally unfamiliar experience of collective schooling. His academic performance was adequate, and although the stammer he had acquired as an infant made him anxious about speaking in class, it seems to have been treated with commendable tolerance by his teachers and peers. No one made fun of him; it was simply part of his physical make-up, like the colour of his hair.

During the three years at junior school he met and became friends with James (Jim) Sutton, a friendship that would endure for the following two decades (and then cease, without apparent cause). After his move to senior school in 1933 he met Colin Gunner and Noel ‘Josh’ Hughes. As the four of them reached their early teens, Gunner and Sutton in particular would operate as foils, points of correspondence and contrast for Larkin’s own attempts to establish an identity beyond the stifling atmosphere of Manor Road. Gunner was the imaginative joker. He would do imitations of teachers and, more significantly, he encouraged Larkin to participate in a kind of surreal, mildly anarchistic version of the Famous Five’s adventures. If a particular teacher irritated them they would create around him an unpleasant personal history, such as ‘that the repellent-looking dwarf who stumped the town wearing a black cricket cap was in fact his father’ (Hull). On one occasion, during the period of the Munich Crisis in 1938, the two sixteen-year-olds imitated newspaper-sellers and ran alongside a stationary train in Coventry station yelling ‘War declared!’ They had become fantasists in order to contemplate the effects, particularly on the expressions of the passengers, caused by their interferences with fact.

For Gunner, these exercises were an extension of his ebullient personality, but for Larkin they were rehearsals for something more ambitious. By 1936 he had begun to write short stories and make plans for longer pieces of fiction. These veered between pseudo-fictional sketches anchored to the real events and people of Larkin’s immediate experience, and self-conscious excursions into the unknown, such as murder mysteries involving famous saxophonists and Chinese detectives. He would recollect that during the late 1930s he ‘wrote ceaselessly’, and by 1938 he began to supplement his attempts at fiction with verse, his range of styles and subjects being equally eclectic: nature poetry of a descriptive, pre-Romantic temper along with interrogative, subjective considerations of the nature of existence, influenced by a random selection of literary thinkers from Keats to Aldous Huxley.

While Gunner had played a peripheral role in all this, Sutton was more of a stabilising presence. The Suttons lived on the other side of town from the Larkins, and from about twelve onwards Philip became a regular visitor to their house in Beechwood Avenue. Jim’s father, Ernest, was a successful building contractor and had built and partly designed the house himself. It contrasted sharply with Penvorn, making concessions to a suburban version of modernism. The rooms admitted generous amounts of natural light, and opened via French windows to a large garden complete with tennis court. Not only did the shape of the building show Larkin that home life could be different; he also found that Sutton’s parents were the antithesis of his own. During the summer they would have regular garden parties, and all year round occasional visitors would take a drink, stay on and match the agreeable appearance of the house with the sound of relaxed companionability. Larkin liked his visits, but knew also that the place and the people were made all the more fascinating by his knowledge of their alternative.

By their teens, the temperamental affinities which first drew them together had been supplemented by precocious intellectual and aesthetic partnership. They discovered jazz, graduating from the anglicised mediocrity of Billy Cotton and Teddy Foster to the real thing of the United States – Louis Armstrong, Pee Wee Russell, Bix Beiderbecke, Sidney Bechet. Much later, Larkin would raise the possibility that his early love for jazz had influenced his poetry. Jazz lyrics scanned and rhymed: it was his first private, pleasurable encounter with something that resembled poetry outside the dreary obligations of having to study it at school. By about fifteen, Larkin, prompted by his father, had started reading D. H. Lawrence. Larkin in turn introduced Sutton to him, and the two of them would argue over the qualities and embedded messages of his work. Sutton was more interested in the visual arts and preferred the unemotional detachment of the French post-Impressionists to the loaded turmoil of Lawrence. Sutton would eventually go to art school, but he recognised that his friend’s aesthetic inclinations were verbal and encouraged him to write.

Later, Larkin would see the parallels between his teenage friendships with Gunner and Sutton and his relationship with Amis. The latter incorporated aspects of both, providing Larkin with an erudite adult version of Gunner’s taste for irreverence and misbehaviour, and a substitute for Sutton’s reassuring air of confidence and ambition. But he would also find in Amis a capacity for dissimulation that was by equal degrees guileless and harmful. Larkin would disclose to Monica Jones that what had first attracted him to Amis, the ebullient performer with stimulating ideas on life and letters, he later found to be a facade for something more shiftless and manipulative.

Nothing survives of the prose fiction written during his late teens, but the poems are intriguing. Six appeared in the school magazine, The Coventrian, in 1938–9, while others remained unpublished until after Larkin’s death. They are, as one would expect of a well-read late adolescent, a patchwork of resonances and borrowings. Snatches of the contemplative-symbolic mood of late T. S. Eliot occasionally interrupt the more pervasive presence of Auden. Just to remind us that this poet is still a schoolboy, we sometimes encounter awe-laden locutions from a Shakespeare-to-Tennyson miscellany – ‘footsteps cold … o’er wood and wold’, etc. But despite the chaotic potential of all this learned shoplifting, the young Larkin proves himself to be a skilled technician. It is easy enough to spot the acquisitions, but he fits them together well, if not quite seamlessly. At KHS he would have been taught to recognise and name the devices of poetry, and when we read these early attempts at writing we sense the apprentice trying them out, almost self-consciously. Enjambment, for instance, crops up with studied decorum – rarely more than twice in a poem and executed so as to create a polite contre-rejet. For example,

I do not think we shall be

Troubled …

With thanks to Milton. The most consistent and puzzling feature of these early poems is their anonymity. All manner of themes and inferences are tried out – predominantly isolation, embedded significance, loss – but there is not a recognisably individual presence behind the performance. Certainly most young writers are often difficult to locate among the fabric of debts to their eminent forebears or contemporaries, but with Larkin it seems almost to be a deliberate act of disappearance. This, given his circumstances, was understandable and consistent with many of his other personal traits.

By the age of sixteen he had begun to dress in a self-confidently unconventional manner. Daringly bright waistcoats and bow ties would set themselves off against his expensive, well-polished brogues and country tweed suits. One would assume that he was translating his new-found taste for European fin de siècle culture into a fashion statement. As well as offering poems to The Coventrian, he would submit letters and diatribes on all manner of subjects (the state of the cricket pitch, the existence of God, etc.) and became an enthusiastic participant in and organiser of sessions of the school debating society. His stammer was as pronounced and unhidden as his bow ties. It would be too easy to classify all of this as merely performance – the standard repertoire of hormone-fuelled late adolescence – because in most instances such rites of passage are involuntary, a necessary state in the process of growing up. It is only in retrospect, having reached maturity, that we are granted an impartial, often embarrassed, perspective upon our activities. There is, however, evidence to suggest that Larkin was engaged in a bizarre process of conscious self-scrutiny; he was watching himself.

Alongside the actual writing of the poems of the late 1930s, he played the roles of publisher and critic. He arranged them into collections, with separate titles. These he would literally sew together as booklets with self-illustrated