Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

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It is some years since I studied Philip Larkin’s poetry with any care, and I decided at this point that the time had come to reread his entire output. Only too infrequently are portions of what she wrote him presented here as footnotes to explain the content of his reply. Against this, Larkin’s claim that the engagement was “to give myself a sincere chance of ‘opening out’ towards someone I do love a lot in a rather strangled way, and to help her take her Finals” sounds embarrassingly self-justificatory. He might be a bad bargain, but the relationship with Monica was stable as long as she had the exclusivity on it.

By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. It also aroused, not for the first time, my heartfelt sympathy and admiration for Monica Jones, whose single-minded devotion to an extremely difficult and contrary genius not only fostered a clutch of great poems, but stimulated one of the oddest and most improbably touching love stories of the twentieth century. In this fond struggle between two passive-aggressive types, each of them trying to finesse some decisiveness out of the other, she must have known that a double negative was the most she could hope for. On the whole, though, Larkin tries to resist Freudian entendres and psychological determinisms: "[I]f one starts blaming one's parents, well, one would never stop!Larkin was Assistant Librarian there, later took a position in Belfast, and finally became the Librarian at the University of Hull. He said of Mansfield's journal that it made readers "more sensitive, more receptive, happier than before".

And I suspect that means not that I can enjoy sex in my own quiet way but that I can't enjoy it at all. I think my enthusiasm for Letters to Monica, apart from my keen interest in Larkin and his poetry, is because this is a warm love story.Though her sillinesses could bore him to distraction and drive him into frenzies of rage, she “was more than a respectable excuse for dodging the frightening or complicated things in his life,” as Larkin’s biographer Andrew Motion observes; “she crucially influenced the accents and attitudes of his poems.

Those of us who are middle age know how things rise and fall, so I don’t want to be mean about their relationship. In bed," the poet Ian Hamilton once told me, "you don't want to be too clear-headed about what you're doing. This remarkable unpublished correspondence only came to light after Monica Jones's death in 2001, and consists of nearly two thousand letters, postcards and telegrams, which chronicle - day by day, sometimes hour by hour - every aspect of Larkin's life and the convolutions of their relationship. One of the most valuable features of Letters to Monica is the substantial revision of this picture that they cumulatively present.I think perhaps the rabbit takes your place at times, or stays behind when you go out to an evening at the Frasers. I found that this added depth to some of the poems I have studied, and I did enjoy finding out a bit more about Larkin himself, the man behind the poetry. On the positive side we register an urgent warmth, a snug intimacy of jokes and whimsies, and Monica's courageous acceptance of Larkin's intense melancholia – melancholia not as a mood or a susceptibility, but as a besetting Jonsonian humour ("black bile").