Anthony Thwaite on Larkin's Letters

Philip Larkin letters to Monica: Dearest bun, I didn’t want to hurt you...
Philip Larkin’s letters to Monica Jones, his lover and confidante for nearly 40 years, show the poet in a striking new light. Below, his friend and executor Anthony Thwaite explains how he discovered them, and how they reveal – among the bleakness and the barbs – a man fascinated by women and profoundly in love.

By Anthony Thwaite
02 Oct 2010

Philip Larkin and Monica Jones first met in autumn 1946 at Leicester University College. Both were 24. He was the newly appointed assistant librarian and she was an English lecturer. They became friends, correspondents, lovers.

Larkin moved to Belfast in 1950, then Hull in 1955, but the two frequently went on holiday together (never abroad), and for almost 40 years took part in a correspondence that was full of gossip, opinions about books and writers, affectionate endearments (he was a seal, she was a rabbit). There were painful times, too, especially over Larkin’s affair with Maeve Brennan.

Monica became Larkin’s closest confidante, the person to whom he poured out his fears and miseries, with whom he shared his poems as he was writing them.

When I was preparing my edition of the Selected Letters of Philip Larkin (1992), at my request Monica searched but could find only 20 letters from him. Later, my fellow literary executor of the Larkin estate, Andrew Motion, found more letters stashed away in the Haydon Bridge cottage in Northumberland that Monica owned, many in poor condition. (After Larkin’s death in December 1985, Monica had become deeply depressed and chaotic, drinking heavily and letting things go, until her executors brought in carers.)

After Monica’s death in 2001, when the house in Hull she and Larkin had shared for his last two years was being cleared, hundreds more came to light – more than 1,400 letters, more than 500 postcards, about 7,500 pages. These were gathered together as the property of the Monica Jones Estate and were eventually acquired by the Bodleian Library in Oxford. My edition of Letters to Monica, published later this month, includes 388 letters, or parts of letters, by Larkin. To have included everything would have made an impossibly unwieldy book.

What do Larkin’s letters to Monica show? They aren’t “performances”, as most of his letters to his old Oxford friend Kingsley Amis are, but are a window into the man’s and the poet’s day-by-day life. Since, Monica destroyed Larkin’s journals at his behest after his death, these letters are the only such quotidian documents that survive.

Toward the end of Larkin’s life, the correspondence dwindles, then dries up almost completely. Larkin was travelling to Leicester to visit his widowed mother in hospital, and was able to see Monica at her home. Then, at Easter 1985, when they were both at Haydon Bridge, Monica was badly stricken with shingles. When she was released from hospital, Larkin offered her care in his house in Hull. There, Larkin looked after her as best he could until his death. Monica hardly left that house until her own death in February 2001.

One of the most ludicrous charges laid at Larkin’s feet has been that he was a misogynist. This was largely based on some callow, undergraduate remarks made to Amis. In fact, Larkin’s relationships with women were in many ways at the centre of his life: with his mother, with several congenial woman friends and, most of all, with Monica.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/philip-larkin/8037257/Philip-Larkin-letters-to-Monica-Dearest-bun-I-didnt-want-to-hurt-you....html