Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life is a 1994 biography of the English poet by Andrew Motion, himself a former British Poet Laureate and one of Larkin’s literary executors. Larkin is one of the most important British poets of the twentieth century, well known for choosing the life of a provincial librarian (albeit a successful and influential one) over metropolitan literary stardom. Motion’s 500-page biography reveals that although his public life was exemplary, Larkin’s private writings show a willingness to indulge in racist and misogynistic ranting. Philip Larkin also depicts the poet’s sometimes selfish and callous attitude toward the women in his life. It was well-received by critics (“could not be bettered”—London Review of Books), and has become the standard biography of Larkin, although some reviewers noted an excess of detail and a lack of humor: “This cadaverous book seems dead to Larkin's amazing sense of humor, one of the sources of his poetic achievement” (Kirkus Reviews).

Motion begins with the challenge he faces as one of the literary executors appointed by Larkin in his will. The poet has left seemingly contradictory instructions: to destroy all his unpublished papers, but also to publish anything that seems useful. Motion presents his biography as his attempt to resolve this paradox; it is a distillation of the useful information contained in Larkin’s neatly-filed boxfuls of unfinished poems, notes, personal letters, professional minutes, and recipes for jam.

From here, Motion proceeds chronologically, from Larkin’s birth into a lower-middle-class family in Coventry, a city in the English industrial area of the Midlands. His bookish, severe father worked for the civic government, and Motion reveals that he was something of a Nazi sympathizer—although apparently, it was only the Nazis’ supposed economic efficiency he admired. He stockpiled coffins before the war, believing that the Nazis would heavily bomb Coventry (a correct prediction, as it turned out). Motion portrays Larkin’s mother as anxious and overbearing: Motion would remain in close contact with her throughout his life, despite having little in common with her.



Larkin’s literary ambitions took hold early. Like his father, he loved reading, and he began writing fiction as a teenager. Novels like Brideshead Revisited made him keenly anticipate going up to Oxford University, but he was disappointed. The University was half-shut-down due to wartime conditions, and as a boy from a modest background, he encountered condescension from many of his peers and professors, one of whom wrote, “Mr. Larkin can see a point if it is explained to him.” Larkin was shy and stammered, but his wit and charisma made him attractive to his fellow students. At Oxford, he became friends with the novelist Kingsley Amis; their friendship and rivalry would be a life-long one. They shared a passion for jazz, literature, and heavy drinking.

Oxford’s lack of glamour was the first in a series of disappointments which, Motion argues, formed Larkin’s poetic sensibility, and in particular his ability to portray post-war England with such emotional force. At Oxford, Larkin wrote two (unsuccessful) novels, but he also began to write poetry, at first under the influence of T.S. Eliot.

After graduating, Larkin became a librarian, earning a rapid series of promotions. He spent most of his career at the helm of the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull, where he was regarded in his profession as something of a visionary. Motion notes that however reactionary the content of Larkin’s letters, in his professional life Larkin, a scrupulous leftist, built a superb Labor Archive at the Brynmor Jones Library.



As he worked his way up the ladder of his profession, Larkin progressed from imitating Eliot to Baudelaire, Yeats, and finally Hardy. It was from Hardy that he learned two of the signature features of his work: a colloquial, “Everyman” voice and what Motion calls “the license to be unhappy.” Motion notes that Larkin’s poetry also continued to hold echoes of Yeats’ work.

Motion portrays Larkin as psychologically unable to commit to anything outside himself, and above all, to the women in his life. Three major relationships emerge, and they were substantially concurrent. For forty years until his death, he was in a relationship with Monica Jones, although they lived several hours apart throughout. He had a more passionate and sexual relationship with one of his assistants, Maeve Brennan, and a strictly sexual relationship with his secretary, Betty Mackereth. Motion interviews all three women: all three combine some anger with great affection for a man they ultimately knew only in part.

Motion suggests a link between Larkin’s walled-off persona in his romantic life and the immovable construct of his poetic persona. He argues that Larkin’s “poetic universe was so unified that it became in certain respects a threat to his talent.” When his creative springs dried up, Larkin’s iron-clad poetic persona “stopped him from reinventing himself.” When he received his terminal diagnosis of cancer in 1985, Larkin told a friend, “My mind’s not with me.”