Return to Larkinland

This programme contains some strong language

Oxford in the early eighties wasn't perhaps the most natural place

to meet a librarian from Hull.

But the man I first met here at All Souls College also happened

to be the most popular and celebrated poet in Britain at that time,

Philip Larkin.

For a long time, I'd loved the poems.

The Whitsun Weddings, Church Going,

An Arundel Tomb with its memorable last line,

"What will survive of us is love."

I'd loved them because Larkin used language with such skill,

so carefully, to such powerful effect, to evoke landscape and place,

telling truths which had never quite been told before,

or never in such stark terms.

After our first encounter in Oxford,

I wanted to get to know Larkin better.

So, we met up again,

and exchanged letters which I have donated to the Bodleian Library.

The man revealed here is morose and pessimistic but also witty and funny.

A man who enjoyed a drink and loved his jazz.

Someone I very much liked.

But my feelings about Larkin changed.

Seven years after he died, there appeared his Selected Letters.

And, a year after that, a biography by Andrew Motion.

They revealed a man that I felt I hadn't known

and found it very hard to like.

Here was another Larkin, sour, two-faced, two-timing,

crudely misogynistic, racist and coarse.

Like others I reacted harshly to this other Larkin

and wrote, as the young do, some judgmental, angry things about him.

'Now, I'm older, hopefully wiser,

'painfully aware that good and bad can exist in one person,

'especially a writer.

'So, it seems the right time for me to look again

'at these different sides to Larkin,

'exploring the extremes of his character

'to try and understand this most complex and paradoxical man.

'And, on this, the 30th anniversary of his death,

'I want to go back and look at the work.

'Back to those astonishing poems of his

'by travelling back in time, and to the places that shaped them,

'back to what I call Larkinland.'

So, who was Philip Larkin?

And where might our journey into Larkinland begin?

First, to Hull.

Hull was a bustling, busy port when Larkin first arrived here in 1955.

The city's past can be discovered in its History Centre.

But you can also find here all manner of curious artefacts

that give clues to the poet.

X-rays.

These were taken during a health scare in 1969

confirming his everlasting pessimism about death.

I'm looking into the mind of a great poet.

And here are his specs.

Those hallmark specs by which the world defined Larkin.

And here, Larkin the boozer.

These are champagne corks.

Each one labelled, by the good librarian,

and they commemorate some birthday or award.

This one is for the CBE in 1975.

And, finally, what have we here?

A little statue of Hitler that can raise his arm in salute.

And this is a rather surprising clue from Larkin's childhood.

It's a memento, inherited from his father,

that connects to an upbringing Larkin had the genius to transform

into poetic truth, in well-known but notorious lines of verse.

So, how did Larkin's own upbringing, as it were, fuck him up?

He was born in Coventry on 9 August 1922,

the son of Sydney and Eva, with an older sister, Kitty.

None of their early houses still remain

but, where his father worked, at the old City Hall in Coventry,

escaped war-time bombing.

Here, Sydney Larkin paced the corridors

and attended council meetings

as Chief Treasurer of Coventry Corporation.

Larkin senior was, by all accounts, autocratic, quick-tempered and rude.

Yet, he was a superb administrator.

A taste for efficiency led Sydney to be an admirer of

how things seemed to be getting done in Germany

before the Second World War.

He took the shy, stammering Philip there twice,

witnessed the Nuremberg rallies, and brought home souvenirs.

Hence that little Hitler figurine that stood on the family mantelpiece.

There is no doubt Sydney Larkin had a very curious influence on his son.

It was a bookish home

with quite racy works by Oscar Wilde and DH Lawrence on the shelves.

The father taught the son never to believe in God.

As for women, and especially Eva, his long-suffering wife,

they were inferior beings, mere decoration.

So, it was a miserable marriage punctuated by bickering and rows

and no display of affection.

Larkin once wrote to a friend -

"The only married state I intimately know, ie, that of my parents,

"is bloody hell."

Perhaps his years at the King Henry VIII School were some kind of escape.

Larkin was a pupil here from 1930 until the summer of 1940.

His school reports have been kept and they make for fascinating reading.

Mathematics, "rather slow".

Geography, "hardly satisfactory".

What's called Manual Training, "doesn't try, very weak"!

But he was always good at English.

And look at this report,

it's a real prophecy by his English teacher when he was nine years old.

"He has a true sense of rhythm and of beauty."

His first published poems appeared in the school magazine, The Coventrian.

This one's a really beautiful poem, I think.

Spring Warning, it was published in 1940, the year he left the school.

Written very much under the influence of WH Auden.

"Refuse the sun that flashes from their high

"Attic windows, and follow with their eye

"The muffled boy with his compelling badge,

"On his serious errand, riding to the gorge."

Larkin went up to St John's College on a scholarship

in the Michaelmas term of 1940.

War-time Oxford wasn't terribly Brideshead.

They had doubling up on rooms, basic food and drink.

In the Canterbury quad, he had an attic room,

the first of the lofty lodgings he would favour in later life.

Professing an indifference to the war, he was nevertheless

greatly relieved to fail his medical for active service

because of bad eyesight.

Larkin would later claim, "Oxford terrified me".

But, to outward appearances, he seemed a confident young man.

He formed a lifelong friendship with Kingsley Amis

and, together, they were part of a heavy-drinking, laddish crowd.

But from them was hidden another Larkin.

Shy, prone to introspection and self-analysis,

uncertain of his own sexuality.

He had a gay crush on a medical student with whom he shared lodgings.

He was so confused, he even took to analysing his own dreams.

His first experience of heterosexual love had been a humiliating disaster.

To his male friends, he expressed his fury against Oxford women

in the coarsest terms.

"They are shits," he said.

During his time in Oxford, Larkin was never keen on going to lectures

and he was rather bored in tutorials.

And evidence about how he felt about poetry, old rather than new,

can be found in the college library.

This is a copy of the long Elizabethan poem

Spenser's Faerie Queene.

It's a college library book, so it's rather bad form that Larkin,

the future librarian, has been scribbling in it in pencil.

He makes a list of all the other long poems he's had to read

for the English syllabus.

"First, I thought Troilus And Cressida

"was the most boring poem in English.

"Then I thought Beowulf was.

"Then I though Paradise Lost was.

"Now I know that the Faerie Queene is the dullest thing out, blast it!"

Larkin took his final examinations in June 1943

and got his degree at the Sheldonian Theatre,

witnessed by his proud family.

He thought he might get a third.

"I wasn't meant to study but to be studied," he wrote to a friend.

In fact, he got a first, and was more than pleased with himself.

"Oh, how clever I am now," he wrote.

On his 21st birthday, Larkin was on the train to London

for an interview to join the Civil Service.

Confessing his real ambition to be a writer,

not surprisingly, he was rejected.

He was then turned down for intelligence work at Bletchley Park.

So, he travelled to Wellington in Shropshire

to take up a job at the local library,

admitting that he knew, in his words, "Sweet fuck all about librarianship."

But, after work, he was writing, now under the influence of WB Yeats.

These poems, published in his 1945 collection, The North Ship,

signpost that Larkinland could be an intense, romantic place.

But his first attempt at being a novelist

showed a very different side to Larkin.

Under the pseudonym Brunette Coleman,

Larkin began to write girls' school stories, with titles like

Trouble At Willow Gables, and Michaelmas Term At St Brides.

They were partly to amuse his Oxford friends.

They were partly a genuine homage to the genre.

They featured figures such as Mary,

the much-flogged madcap of the remove,

and her rather sinister older chum, Hilary,

who has a passionate lesbian crush on Mary.

I'll read you this little bit which I find rather moving.

It's in the dorm one night.

Mary is fast asleep in her pyjamas. And Hilary has her in her arms.

"With her free hand, she switched out the light.

"Mary breathed on placidly,

"and Hilary's hand wandered eclectically over her body

"while she kissed her sleeping face.

"Her hand pulled aside Mary's pyjama so she could kiss her bared shoulder.

"Encountering a button, she cast away prudence and undid it

"and then another."

It's all good, high camp, escapist fantasy

but with a curiously feminine tone.

Larkin use to say that Brunette Coleman was

"the passionately sentimental spinster" who lurked within him.

In September 1946, Larkin was on the move again

when he began working at University College, Leicester.

Now a published poet,

he also had two, shall we say, more serious-minded novels

ready for publication, Jill, and A Girl In Winter.

So, for those attracted to the literary type,

assistant librarian Larkin was quite a catch.

The new man in the library was spotted

by assistant lecturer in English literature Monica Jones,

whose first observation was, "He looks like a snorer."

Monica was a popular lecturer here although it must be said

not everyone appreciated her robust, right-wing opinions

and her outrageous personality.

When, many years later, Larkin introduced me to Monica,

I liked her.

She was sexily dressed, she was loud,

her voice was something between a duchess and a pantomime dame.

She was a blowsy woman.

Her lips were smeared with scarlet lipstick.

But, above all, she was fun!

At first, there was friendship. But then they became lovers.

In the Bodleian Library in Oxford are the many letters Monica and Larkin

sent each other during what became a long, long-distance relationship.

How sentimental they are.

They had this shared love of Beatrix Potter

and it fed into their fantasy life.

He often addressed her as "Dear Bun" or "Dearest Bunny".

And he did drawings of her as a little rabbit.

Here she is in the kitchen wearing a frock and doing the cooking.

He was always drawn... They are very good, these cartoons.

He was always drawn as the seal, for some reason.

And the letters are full of the usual Larkinian moaning and groaning.

Gossip, love of sport, particularly boxing and cricket.

They also reflect the troubled sexual life the pair had,

and they are haunted, of course,

by Larkin's everlasting sense of failure.

So, importantly, what Monica's letters gave a doubting Larkin

was support, in particular, for his writing.

In one, she wrote to him emphatically,

"It's you who are the one."

And Larkin took her advice.

They once visited Chichester Cathedral

and saw the 14th-century tomb of the Earl and Countess of Arundel,

their two figures in stone, holding hands.

The experience inspired one of Larkin's

most tender meditations on love, its permanence and impermanence,

An Arundel Tomb.

And it was Monica who helped him decide on the exact wording

of the poem's immortal last line.

Time has transfigured them into Untruth.

The stone fidelity They hardly meant has come to be

Their final blazon, and to prove

Our almost instinct almost true:

What will survive of us is love.

As for mother love,

when his father, Sydney, died, Larkin felt duty bound to look after Eva.

For a while, they lived together here, at 12 Dixon Drive in Leicester.

It was a particularly miserable time for Larkin,

made guilty by her depression, and furious by their mutual dependence.

He admitted to Monica that he was trapped in a mother complex.

She implored him, "Don't be robbed, don't be robbed of your soul."

When he eventually escaped this claustrophobic household,

Larkin wrote to the "Dearest Old Creature" twice a week.

And, throughout Eva's long widowhood, he visited her once a month,

he took her to the seaside every year

in visits which were echoes of his childhood holidays.

His mother became his muse.

The anger, the resentment, the bitterness against her

which he expressed in letters to Monica and the other friends

translated into poems of deep compassion,

such as Reference Back, Love Songs In Age

or, a particular favourite of mine, Home Is So Sad.

After Leicester, Larkin's life in universities continued

when he moved to Queen's, Belfast.

Then, in March 1955, he gained promotion,

becoming head librarian here at the University Of Hull.

The Brynmor Jones Library is as much Larkin's creation as his poems.

Built in two phases over 15 years,

he was deeply involved in every stage of its construction.

This is Larkin's office, of which he was inordinately proud, boasting that

his desk was larger than that of the President of the United States.

And where other people might have a framed photograph

of the wife and kids on their desk,

here, he has a picture of Guy The Gorilla

from Regents Park Zoo, who appears to be quoting Oscar Wilde.

"Other people are quite dreadful.

"The only possible society is oneself."

Larkin liked being a librarian.

It suited him.

He used to say he liked the feel of a library.

And he was very good at it,

with organisational skills inherited from his father.

In 1964, the BBC filmed Larkin in the library for the arts series Monitor.

-VOICE OF PHILIP LARKIN:

-Taking it all in all,

work and I get on fairly well, I think.

There are just these occasions when one would like to prove it

by not working for a bit!

And to feel that you're spending your life

on the one rather than the other

is perhaps the most depressing thought that work can bring you.

When I bind up library committee minutes at the end of five years,

it makes a great fat volume.

But it's not the same as a volume of poetry.

Larkin's ambivalence about work revealed itself in two poems,

each presided over by the extraordinary, memorable symbol

of a toad.

TOAD CHIRPS

First there was Toads,

with Larkin playfully resentful.

TOAD CHIRPS

Eight years later, he wrote Toads Revisited,

this time on the consolations of the daily grind.

No, give me my in-tray, My loaf-haired secretary,

My shall-I-keep-the-call-in-Sir.

What else can I answer,

When the lights come on at four At the end of another year?

Give me your arm, old toad' Help me down Cemetery Road.

Paid work was central to Larkin's life

and he was one of the few poets to write about the experience

of having a routine job and why it is important to us.

So, the poems Toads and Toads Revisited

are much loved because they reflect this daily reality.

And, to remind himself of their popularity,

he used to keep this figurine on his desk.

Incidentally, those of you paying attention will realise

this is a frog and not a toad.

Larkin came to live on the top floor of 32 Pearson Park

where he could gaze out onto park and people opposite.

Though first impressions were that it was a bit chilly in Hull

and smelt of fish,

Larkin came to appreciate and enjoy the city

and the countryside nearby.

Hull appealed to him because, if you know what I mean,

it is the end of the pier.

It's on the edge of things, it's looking out to the North Sea

and the isolation was necessary to him.

He was through and through a provincial man

and this enabled him to be a poet on his own terms.

He never wanted to be the poet of some metropolitan literary salon

and he despised those who did.

With his trusty Rolleiflex camera,

he took photograph after photograph of his surroundings.

And it's that same accurate photographic eye

that we can see on display in a wonderful poem like Here

about Hull and beyond.

It shows, I think, what a truly great poet he was

of landscape and of place.

In the Monitor documentary,

director Patrick Garland added images to Larkin's words.

Narrating the poem is John Betjeman, the film's presenter

and a great admirer of Larkin.

Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster

Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water,

And residents from raw estates, brought down

The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,

Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires.

One of his favourite trips was north, out of Hull,

to the town of Beverley and the church of St Mary's.

Larkin loved churches as repositories of the past.

He adored music inspired by Christian faith.

But, following the advice of his father, Larkin himself had none.

I came here with Larkin.

I think, by then, it was pretty clear that I was religious and he wasn't.

He obviously didn't have the smallest glimmering of faith,

not the smallest.

That didn't stop him, however, enjoying church buildings.

That experience is what fed into his famous poem, Church Going.

In that poem, Larkin, the narrator,

looks at a beautiful church building like this,

with the eyes of total scepticism.

But also with such warmth, such empathy, such feeling.

A serious house on serious earth it is.

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognised, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

Now, because a poem like Church Going has something melancholic about it,

you might conclude that Larkinland wasn't a place to be enjoyed.

But you'd be wrong.

Ye Old Blacke Boy is one of the many pubs that Larkin liked to drink in,

happily nattering to friends and strangers alike.

Here, he once gave a talk

about one of the other great pleasures in his life, jazz.

This rather nice old record player is actually

identical to the one Larkin himself had, his old Black Box.

And I'm going to play one of his very own records.

MUSIC: Shake It And Break It, by Sidney Bechet

He called himself "a jazz addict",

believing that, "man can live a week without bread

"but not a day without the righteous jazz."

JAZZ CLARINET CONTINUES

For Larkin, there was such emotion in the music, such feeling.

But there was one thing that really got to him,

really transported him, and that was the rhythms of jazz.

A friend of Larkin's remembers him in his flat,

dancing around with joy, music blaring from the record player.

In one hand, a hug G and T, while the other hand mimicked

the movement of the drumstick hammering out the beat.

DOUBLE BASS PLAYS

In February 1961, Larkin began a monthly column about jazz

for the Daily Telegraph, and he made his opinions very clear indeed.

He railed against contemporary greats like Miles Davis and John Coltrane,

whose art was, in his delicious phrase,

"not the music of happy men".

What he disliked about modernism in jazz

was what he disliked about modernism in general.

Too clever by half, sterile, obscure.

He talked about a calculated perversity, ugly on purpose.

Larkin valued the simple, lyrical and melodious in poetry.

So his jazz heroes had these qualities too.

For this reason, he considered Sidney Bechet, the New Orleans virtuoso,

a true artist.

So, Larkin wrote him a fan letter, in verse.

That note you hold, narrowing and rising, shakes

Like New Orleans reflected on the water,

And in all ears appropriate falsehood wakes,

Building for some a legendary Quarter

Of balconies, flower-baskets and quadrilles,

Everyone making love and going shares -

Oh, play that thing!

By the time Larkin arrived at the University Library in Hull,

he had given up being a novelist, explaining that

"When I lapsed back into poetry, it was so much easier, so much quicker."

Poetry could be something done for a couple of hours a night

over a drink or two after the toad work.

And why and how Larkin wrote poetry can be discovered

in Hull's History Centre.

A clue can be found in the second of eight notebooks

and a picture of Thomas Hardy.

After first Auden then Yeats,

the great poetic mentor and hero for Larkin was Thomas Hardy.

It was under Hardy's influence that he found his own voice.

Hardy taught him simplicity of language.

He also taught him that he could use his own experience of life,

of misery, of love, as a subject for his own poetry.

Here, we find in the notebook, under a photo of Hardy, this quotation.

"The ultimate aim of a poet should be to touch our hearts

"by showing his own, and not exhibit his learning, or his fine tastes

"or his skill in mimicking the notes of his predecessors."

Looking at these notebooks in which Larkin kept over 35 years of writing,

you get an extraordinary insight into his working methods.

Writing in pencil the different drafts,

with notes in the margins and revealing doodles,

each version of the poem is precisely dated

so we can know what events and experiences have inspired them.

I want to look in detail at the writing

of one of his most celebrated poems, The Whitsun Weddings,

which is to be found here in notebook number four.

The origin of the poem was a railway journey he made

in a hot summer, in 1955.

That Whitsun, I was late getting away:

Not till about One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday

Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,

All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense

Of being in a hurry gone.

As the train stopped at various stations along the line,

he passed all these wedding parties.

What Larkin had seen were family and friends

sending off honeymooners to London.

All down the line

Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round

The last confetti and advice were thrown

And, as we moved, each face seemed to define

Just what it saw departing: children frowned

At something dull; fathers had never known

Success so huge and wholly farcical;

The women shared The secret like a happy funeral.

While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared

At a religious wounding.

And it made a great impression on him.

But he didn't turn it into a poem all at once.

You see here, because he dated the poems in the notebook,

it wasn't until May 1957,

nearly two years later, that the poem begins,

and he immortalises that railway journey.

It began as a journey in July.

But he changes it immediately into a Whitsun journey earlier in the year.

And you can see how hard he's working,

crossing out, changing things, even in this early draft.

He then, very interestingly, puts it on one side for nearly a year.

And you turn a few pages of the notebook,

and you come here to 16 March 1958.

And here, you watch him, once again, forming this great work of art.

Altogether, it's three years from the moment on the railway platform

to the finished poem that we now know.

They watched the landscape, sitting side by side

- An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,

And someone running up to bowl - and none

Thought of the others they would never meet

Or how their lives would all contain this hour.

It's Larkin at his absolute best, I think.

Here you see him observant, but compassionately observant.

Lyrical, imaginative, optimistic,

moving to this great transcendent climax at the end.

But there is bitter sweetness, perhaps even poignancy,

in this evocation of newlyweds,

if we understand Larkin's own dogged bachelorhood

and the growing complications of his love life.

By the early 1960s,

the relationship with Monica had developed a fairly set pattern.

She in Leicester, he in his flat here in Pearson Park,

with his books and his records and his solitude.

Monica wanted to marry.

But Larkin lived life on his own terms.

And what went with marriage was to be avoided at all costs.

Of course, Monica was very unhappy, but she'd come to recognise

what she defined as his "iron selfishness".

And yet, the long-term relationship continued.

Every year, they went away together,

even though Larkin once bizarrely dismissed holidays as

a "wholly feminine conception".

But they never went abroad.

Germany, as a teenager, had put him off all that for life.

However, in autumn of 1960, things became messy.

Larkin had begun to fall for a work colleague at the library,

Maeve Brennan.

She was different from Monica.

From Maeve, there was no bawdiness, sharp tongue

or loud views on literature, life and politics.

She was quieter, less abrasive,

and satisfied the romantic side to Larkin that Monica never could.

And, of course, there is irony that the devoutly Catholic Maeve

now became the faithless Larkin's new muse, the latest face.

And new love made new poetry.

One evening, Maeve attended a performance of

Elgar's Introduction And Allegro For Strings here at Hull's City Hall.

Larkin was at home in Pearson Park,

listening to it transmitted live on the radio.

This physical separation yet emotional closeness through the music

inspired a love poem, Broadcast.

I think of your face among all those faces,

Beautiful and devout before Cascades of monumental slithering,

One of your gloves unnoticed on the floor

Beside those new, slightly-outmoded shoes.

When the poem Broadcast was first published in the Listener magazine,

making his feelings so clear about Maeve,

Monica, obviously, was hurt.

She was very much upset, she sank into a depression.

Of course, she'd known about Maeve.

Larkin could hardly keep Maeve a secret.

But it was now clear Maeve was a rival for his affections

and Monica naturally wanted to know who was his real partner

in what had now become a painful love triangle.

Letters in the Bodleian Library between Larkin and Monica

from this period are full of anger and sarcasm from her,

self-justification and self-reproach from him.

These letters show Larkin in the midst of an eternal triangle

torn between Maeve and Monica.

A period, as Monica called it, when he was pretending to give up Maeve.

She writes comments in the margins of his letters. Here he writes -

"Dearest Bun, dear, don't please be miserable over this Maeve business.

"You've been extremely tolerant all the time.

"And I should be glad to have your sympathy.

"But I think we both feel this is the best thing, at present."

"For five minutes," puts Monica.

Here, over the page, "Both of you had my sympathy.

"What a good giggle for both of you.

"I was terribly upset for both of you while you were giggling together."

So, you see Larkin unable to commit to one woman

and leading another woman into exactly the same position.

Any woman would find this upsetting, and absolutely bloody.

A Larkin selfishly self-absorbed,

a Larkin yearning and vulnerable, this was the divided soul of the poet

entering what he called the silent shadowland of middle age.

And now, as Larkin looked in the mirror,

he increasingly disliked what he saw.

Now there comes a definite darkening in his writing

to something more acerbic, nearer the knuckle, and calculatingly shocking.

Here is the notebook with the drafts of Annus Mirabilis

with its famous first stanza so full of wit and sarcasm.

I see it was written in June 1967, the Summer Of Love,

so, peace and love, Philip! Here it is.

"Sexual intercourse began

"In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) -

"Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban

"And the Beatles' first LP."

Another in this vein is the poem High Windows, again finished in 1967.

Larkin looks out from his flat

and sees a teenage couple in the park opposite

and muses on the sexual revolution seemingly passing him by.

The first stanza is crude, almost shocking.

"When I see a couple of kids And guess he's fucking her and she's

"Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, I know this is paradise

"Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives."

And yet, the poem moves towards a dreamy, escapist climax.

"And immediately

"Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:

"The sun-comprehending glass,

"And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows

"Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless."

It almost seems to me that there are two Larkins,

and you see them in this poem.

There's the rather laddish, blokeish Larkin

who'd like the company of his male friends

and liked shocking them with letters with rude language.

And there's a much more feminine, vulnerable Larkin

who creates this music at the end of his poem.

With middle age, Larkin became ever more despondent

to the point of self-caricature.

"What an absurd, empty life, and the grave yawns,"

he once wrote to a friend at this time.

Mortality had always been a preoccupation

and there were real places in Larkinland

that made him brood on the subject.

One was the Hull Royal Infirmary, where he had gone for X-rays

to help diagnose a worrying neck condition.

Larkin came away shaken.

The experience inspired him to write a poem called The Building,

a powerful but bleak meditation on sickness and where that might lead.

With sickness comes ageing.

And, about this, Larkin was unflinchingly brutal.

In the early 1970s, Eva, his mother, became increasingly frail.

She was often in hospital.

Then she developed dementia and had to be taken into a care home

where he was a frequent visitor.

Faced with all this, Larkin sat down

and penned that savage but hauntingly honest poem, The Old Fools.

What do they think has happened, the old fools,

To make them like this?

Do they somehow suppose

It's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,

And you keep on pissing yourself, and can't remember

Who called this morning?

Or that, if they only chose,

They could alter things back to when they danced all night,

Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September?

Or do they fancy there's really been no change,

And they've always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,

Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming

Watching the light move?

If they don't (and they can't), it's strange;

Why aren't they screaming?

# When I woke up this mornin' my sweet man couldn't be found

# I'm going down to the river

# Into it I'm goin' to jump... #

Though he would never admit it, Larkin at 50, in 1972, was a success.

The provincial poet librarian was now feted by the Establishment.

He had a visiting fellowship here at All Souls in Oxford.

Honorary doctorates and literary awards.

Larkin posed for his portrait, this by the photographer Fay Godwin,

which, nevertheless, he grumbled,

made him look like the Boston Strangler.

On Desert Island Discs,

his one of eight records had to be

Bessie Smith's I'm Down In The Dumps,

so full of life, he advised, and Dr Larkin meant it.

# I'm ready to jump

# I need a whole lot of loving

# 'Cause I'm down in the dumps. #

But, in private, you would find a rather less cuddly Philip Larkin.

Egged on by the true blue Monica Jones,

an uglier side to Larkin emerged.

He and Monica wrote a lyric, and he was obviously very proud of it

because, in his letters,

we find he's sent it to quite a number of his chums.

Here it is in a letter to a school friend called Colin Gunner.

"Yes, I quite agree about life being better under the Conservatives.

"Let's try Enoch for a bit, I say.

"Prison for strikers,

"Bring back the cat,

"Kick out the niggers - How about that?"

"Ooh, Larkin, I'm sorry to hear you holding these views."

Do I find myself, in my 60s, more tolerant of this low racism here?

No, actually, I find myself less tolerant.

Larkin once wrote,

"It's the job of poetry to make the beautiful seem true,

"and the true beautiful."

What he wrote about race is neither true nor beautiful.

Confronted with this saloon bar Larkin, many questions arise.

For example, could the same man who loved Sidney Bechet

and the other black maestros really be such a Little Englander?

And, how could the plaintive voice that captured our innermost feelings

seem so downright nasty?

But, yes, they were the same man.

As his views coarsened,

his love life became ever more complicated and fraught.

Maeve Brennan, some time in 1974,

a strong Catholic who strongly disapproved of sex before marriage,

in her own words, yielded to temptation with Larkin.

At the same time, he began an affair with his secretary, Betty Mackereth.

With his usual mordant humour, he could see there was something

ludicrous and middle-aged about sleeping with your secretary,

particularly after such a long time.

In November 1977, Larkin's mother died.

Wearily, he remarked that maybe he was next for the chop.

By now, the writing had virtually dried up.

But, in the final notebook,

he finished one final masterpiece, Aubade.

Here, Larkin looks at himself one last time in verse

just as he did in his last photographic self-portrait.

It's a harrowing self-elegy.

Perhaps you wouldn't be surprised to know

that a favourite haunt of Larkin's in Hull was the Springbank Cemetery,

a tranquil but sombre spot that he was drawn to photograph.

I can't think of a more appropriate place in Larkinland

to contemplate life, death and the poet.

Much of his work is a relentless reminder

that we are all going to become the "old fools",

that we're all walking down Cemetery Road, that we're all going to die.

He's an Eeyorish, secular equivalent of the old Medieval hermit

with his scythe and his hour-glass, reminding us of mortality.

That, funnily enough, is one of the reasons he's such a popular writer.

There are many, many people in this world who believe that, when you die,

that's it. This life is all there is.

Work is a drug that can make you forget it some of the time.

Much of the time, you can't forget it.

And even people like myself who retain religious belief

must ask ourselves sometimes, what if Larkin wasn't right?

He's the most articulate, memorable poet of materialist atheism.

The last decade of his life was spent at 105 Newland Park

when Larkin left the contentment of his rented flat

and begrudgingly experienced home ownership for the first time.

I came up to Hull in 1984, and interviewed him here for Radio Four.

RADIO: 'Are you writing poems at the moment?

'Well, I haven't given poetry up.

'But I rather think poetry has given me up which is a great sorrow to me.

'But not an enormous crushing sorrow.

'It's a bit like going bald, you can't do anything about it.'

But, privately, Larkin showed me another state of mind.

Another time I remember during a very drunken evening,

he moaned at me, "You don't know what's it's like,

"what it's like to be fat, you don't know what it's like to be deaf.

"You don't know what it's like not to be able to write any more."

I had to reply rather feebly, "I'm afraid I don't know what it's like."

But then he said, "On top of all that, Monica's so ill,

"she wants to come and live here, and I've got to look after her."

I didn't really get the hang of what he was saying.

I said, "I'm so sorry, Philip."

He looked at me with a little smile, I'll never forget it. And said,

"I don't think you really understand.

"You see, we both want it. We're both so lonely."

In March 1985, Larkin checked into the Hull Royal Infirmary,

the building he feared, for an internal investigation.

He was found to have a tumour in his oesophagus.

After it was removed,

another, inoperable this time, was found in his throat.

Monica decided he shouldn't be told that his condition was now terminal.

One morning, Larkin woke up in hospital

and saw the Roman Catholic chaplain from the university

sitting beside his bed.

Sent by Maeve, presumably hoping for a death-bed conversion.

When he saw this well-meaning cleric, the poet said, "Oh, fuck."

When Larkin died, his apparent last words were,

"I am going to the inevitable."

He was 63.

I remember coming to his funeral here at St Mary The Virgin, Cottingham.

I looked round for Monica but she wasn't here,

too grief stricken to attend.

It was an absolutely traditional Church Of England funeral service

with Larkin's favourite hymns sung.

But the high point, undoubtedly,

was when his lifelong friend Kingsley Amis stood in the pulpit behind me,

very red in the face, close to tears,

and encapsulated what is so important about Larkin

for all of us who love his poetry.

He said, "He never showed off,

"he never pretended to feelings that he didn't feel."

And it was this honesty,

more total in his case than in any other I've ever known,

which gave his poetry such power. He meant every word of it.

In the nearby cemetery, Larkin is buried.

Monica chose a plain white headstone.

She died in 2001 and is buried close by.

Close by, too, is Maeve,

who, on the gravestone shared with her last lover,

has the line from An Arundel Tomb that Larkin once shared with Monica.

"What will survive of us is love."

But it seems that, 30 years after his death,

there will be one final honour to be seen

in the godly splendour of Westminster Abbey.

I like to think Larkin would have been both pleased and amused

by the setting.

Here in Poet's Corner

are memorial stones to his great mentors Hardy and Auden.

And here in this Parnassus of stone and marble,

a similar tribute to Philip Larkin will soon be unveiled.

I know that it is more than justified.

Why? Because he had painted so accurately

life in Britain between the 1950s and 1970s.

He wasn't a modernist, but he was modern.

More than any other British writer of that date, I should say,

he spoke of the human condition, he spoke of our needs for work,

for love, for sex, and the mess we make of those needs.

Above all, he spoke of our dread of death.

So, 30 years on, I ask myself, what will survive of Philip Larkin?

And I have no doubts what will survive.

Not his faults, but his poems.

So, leaving Larkinland, let's hear it one more time,

with Philip Larkin on words

accompanied by Sidney Bechet on clarinet.

CLARINET PLAYS IN BACKGROUND

What are days for? Days are where we live.

They come, they wake us Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:

Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question Brings the priest and the doctor

In their long coats Running over the fields.