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Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

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The wrangle with Ruth lasted eight years; the wrangle with Monica would last for 35, leading to the same outcome. He might have added his other underlying distastes for them: they drained away time, money, and attention. They first met at the end of 1946, when both were appointed to positions at Leicester University College, he as an assistant librarian, she as a lecturer in English. What Larkin ruefully described as his “misengagement” dragged on long after he and Monica met in 1946, and was only resolved, amid emotional stress all round, in 1950—Monica and Philip became lovers that summer.

He dismisses his fears as “a horror story,” and he is sure that “we’d do better than that”—and yet he acts almost as though their individual wills were powerless to prevent some such depressing slide into ugly misery once they had uttered the fatal words “I do. I defy any man – even the most self-sufficient poodlefaker – to read the following without a twinge: "I think . long-winded, inessential man she'd go for; if she can see beauty in a derelict shit-house, she must have more [sensibility] than you.It would have been intriguing, in an awful way, to find out what Philip’s unspoken thoughts about his “dearest bun” really were; but after his death Betty Mackereth, his faithful secretary to the end, shredded and then incinerated some thirty volumes of his diaries.

Thus the most intriguing factor about Larkin’s supposed commitment to a quasi-monastic life devoted to the Muse is how little he in fact adhered to it.Anyway, "taking care of business" (to paraphrase Aretha Franklin) was definitely not this man's game. Philip Larkin met Monica Jones at University College Leicester in autumn 1946, when they were both twenty-four; he was the newly-appointed assistant librarian and she was an English lecturer.

Ruth and Monica shared a certain trait: a restless self-importance unaccompanied by the slightest distinction (Monica, for all her strong opinions, published not a single word in her entire career).

If he was really all those ists, this book is a vivid demonstration of why such labels are meaningless rubbish.

At one point in 1973 he laments that he hasn't written to her for a while ("sign we have been together"), as if the letter was the primary encounter. When Larkin's mother moved into a nursing home in 1972 he was able to see Monica more often, both women being based in Leicester. Why, oh why, I kept asking myself as I read more and more by and about him, couldn’t the idiot see when he was truly well off? She accepted much else: his emotional sluggishness, and his morbid dread of effort in any sphere except poetry. Although the trajectory of Larkin's relationship with Kingsley Amis was already evident in the 1992 Selected Letters (edited, as is the current volume, by Anthony Thwaite), Letters to Monica adds substance and detail: undergraduate infatuation, measured disaffection, growing irritation, unregulated envy (envy being best understood as empathy gone wrong), a bourgeois distaste for bohemianism ("Patsy says [so-and-so's] house is filthy.

In fact, the photograph was taken in 1960, three years after Harold Macmillan declared that most Brits “had never had it so good.

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