![]() He said it was because he wasn’t interested enough in other people. ![]() So this vision of a life as a novelist ground to a halt with his third novel, which he titled A New World Symphony, and he just couldn’t finish it, and he realised that he would never be able to continue as a novelist, and poetry chose him he had written lots and lots of poems by that point, but that he just couldn’t keep going as a novelist. But still, he wasn’t a lothario of the kind that Kingsley Amis was. And there is a kind of leitmotiv throughout Larkin’s life of Amis being a sort of successful doppelganger – that Amis was Jack the Lad, who did make all his money from his books, and had lots and lots of girls, and Larkin was old misery-guts in Hull, who didn’t have that much money and didn’t get the girls though that, in fact, posthumously turned out not to be quite the case – he at one time had four girls on the go at once. This is a kind of fantasy life which he felt Kingsley Amis, his friend whom he met at Oxford, had succeeded in achieving. In a late poem, he fantasised about what he calls ‘the shit in the shuttered chateau’, writing 500 words a day, parsing out the rest of the afternoon between booze and birds. And Larkin did like the idea of being a novelist. And they are poetic novels in some ways, in that there is a limited cast of characters, and the themes of them are close to the themes explored in his poetry: fantasy, the erotic life, one’s dreams of being an ideal self, and the ways in which reality cuts you down to size – and the ways in which we come to accommodate ourselves to reality. Two novels, he wrote in his very early twenties – Jill was published when he was only twenty-one, I think and the book published as A Girl in Winter, but which he thought of as The Kingdom of Winter, in 1947, just after the war. Where do we place these early novels that Larkin wrote? What are they like? But perhaps a good place to start would be where Larkin started, and it’s perhaps not where we might think he started – which is to say, although he always wrote poems, his earliest ambitions as a literary figure were to write novels, and I wonder, Mark, if you might say something about that. Larkin features very largely in the archives of the London Review of Books – many great pieces about him have appeared in the pages of the LRB, by Barbara Everett and John Bayley and Alan Bennett and Jenny Diski, and other people, and we may be referring to some of those as we continue our conversation. So we thought, for those reasons alone, it would be a good idea to talk about Larkin and try and reassess his importance, and why he still matters as a poet today. This has been prompted by a number of things: one was the relatively recent publication of a big defensive biography of Larkin by James Booth, who is a great scholar of Larkin at the University of Hull also, the arrival of Larkin in Westminster Abbey, posthumously and, finally, 2017 is Hull’s turn to be the City of Culture, in which Larkin is bound to loom very large. We are both contributors to the London Review of Books – me, merely prose Mark, both prose and poetry – and we are here to talk about the poetry and the life of Philip Larkin. Seamus Perry: My name is Seamus Perry and I teach English at the University of Oxford, and I’m here today to talk to Mark Ford, who is professor of English at University College, London. Photo: The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Philip Larkin To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up here: lrb.me/closereadings The eloquent contradictions of his life and work have made Larkin a subject we’ve returned to more than most throughout the LRB’s 38-year history. By the time his second appeared in our pages ten years later, contributors including Barbara Everett, Frank Kermode, Alan Bennett, Ian Hamilton and Christopher Ricks had also written for the paper about the ‘man on the jetty,’ as Bennett described him at the end of his review of Andrew Motion’s biography, ‘who might be anybody’. ‘Why is Larkin so different from other poets of today?’ asked John Bayley in his first piece about the poet for the LRB, published in 1983. For their first episode together, recorded in 2017, Mark Ford and Seamus Perry look at the life and work of Philip Larkin, a poet written about extensively in the archive of the London Review of Books.
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