Return to Larkinland

Librarian and poet Philip Larkin was better known as a misanthrope. A grouch whose best know poem was about parents. A little Englander who admired Enoch Powell and some years after his death was revealed to be a racist. Of course given how in his life he went from Coventry to Hull, he had a lot to be miserable about.

A N Wilson whose documentary on John Betjeman I was not entirely enthused with does a better job here. Wilson does not over look Larkin's shortcomings, after all he is a product of his age. Wilson notes his contradictions, a jazz lover who had peculiar views of black people. A person who was a fogey but not entirely against the modern age and by gum did he show it with some of the cursing words he used.

Larkin wrote about a Britain from the 1950s to the 1970s. A post war Britain that had undergone bombings, slum clearance and rebuilding. Unfortunately that meant brutalist architecture, how ironic it is that Larkin ends up being the right man to describe this Britain. When the Beatles came and heralded a summer of love, Larkin laments that it was all too late for him.

What struck me the most about this programme was that Larkin was capable of such tender and romantic poetry. This is something which is overlooked about him and something Wilson went a long way to put right.

We learn about his rather complicated love life and how this influenced his romantic poetry.

I thought Wilson was too much of a fan of Betjeman which left me disappointed about his film about him. Although Wilson knew Larkin when he was alive he is determined to view him with a detached retina an opinion that has become milder now that Wilson has got older. It was an intriguing and appealing programme about a celebrated poet who has divided opinions.

Following on from his 2014 bio of John Betjeman, the novelist A. N. Wilson tackles the life of Philip Larkin. We follow Wilson as he retraces the poet's biographical paths in Coventry, Oxford, and Hull, interspersed with readings from his work, often recorded by Larkin himself.

From the evidence presented here, it seems that Larkin was a thoroughly unsavory character. Born into middle-class respectability in Coventry, the son of an able administrator, he witnessed the rise of Nazism in the Thirties - an experience that might account for his racist attitudes so vividly displayed in his letters. Larkin also kept a small toy of Adolf Hitler with one arm that could be raised in a fascist salute. Quite why he did so was left conveniently unexplained, but the fact that the toy remains among the poet's possessions (many of them now stored at the Hull History Centre), suggests a certain tendency towards extreme right wing attitudes.

In his personal life Larkin was relentlessly self-absorbed. Unable (or unwilling) to commit himself to a deep relationship, he conducted a long-running affair at a distance with lecturer Monica Jones. Yet this did not stop him having parallel affairs with Maeve Brennan, as well as his secretary at Hull. Jones repeatedly berated Larkin for his infidelities, but it seems that he never wanted to abandon them.

Throughout his sixty-plus years of life, Larkin never ventured abroad. Wilson explained that this was due to bad experiences during his childhood. This might be true, but Larkin's insularity rendered many of his poems extremely parochial, the product of a man of limited horizons and no real ambition. Although Wilson argued that Larkin's work summed up the spirit of Britain from the Fifties to the Seventies, the program showed that the poet embraced a very narrow version of Britishness - white, middle-class, inhibited. He had little or no understanding of the ways in which other socio- economic or ethnic groups responded to changing times.

Designed to re-establish Larkin's reputation in the popular imagination, three decades after his passing, this documentary had the opposite effect. The poet came across as a rather irascible person, someone to be shunned rather than encouraged.