Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

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In all his relationships, then or later, it was Larkin’s own interests that were, almost exclusively, uppermost in his mind: how far did Ruth, or Monica, or his mother, further or hinder his ideal of unencumbered freedom? Feelings of guilt, and possibly a desire for utter self-immolation, subjected Larkin to a recurrent temptation: that of setting up house with Eva. Only too infrequently are portions of what she wrote him presented here as footnotes to explain the content of his reply. We had a fine large cavalier time, though, and I look back on it with delight…" The next letter amplifies the mystery: "I'm sorry too that our encounter had such unhappy results for you! Fascinating insight into the life of poet Philip Larkin revealed through a long-term correspondence.

blurb - Philip Larkin's Letters to Monica span the forty years of their relationship from 1946 when they met, until Larkin's death in 1985. One short poem that started out as a self-parody (“The local snivels through the fields”) gets into the serious corpus. 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. She also (as the quotations from her end of their correspondence make clear) has no time for his evasions, and shows herself a match for him intellectually. There are a couple of cryptic references in October 1958, starting with: "I hope you are better now – I fear I didn't treat you very considerately!

They are what justifies—if justification be needed—this long inquiry into the patterns of their author’s life. One unexpected result of all this is to reveal Larkin as not so much underhanded in his dealings with his lovers (though that he was) as quite colossally imperceptive. The reasons he gives Monica for not marrying her (often rehearsed) are the same reasons he surely gave himself for not leaving her. This has elements of both happy ending and nemesis – the belated commitment coming without dignity or real freedom of choice. The whole episode is immensely revealing of Larkin’s remarkable capacity for producing self-exculpatory reasons for dithering endlessly between two ongoing affairs.

Larkin could be frightening too (and without much provocation): "No, I really can't do anything at all – it really is disgusting, I feel tearful with rage – why must [the landlady] leave her door open so that her filthy radio floods the whole house? Peppered with wry humour and biting critiques, these letters are as much a social and cultural history as a reflection of his tenderness towards [Jones] . And Larkin would continue to regale Kingsley with grimly jovial asides about Monica's affectations – and, for instance, about her facial resemblance to Stan Laurel (an improvement, one supposes, on Oliver Hardy). Slack, sloppy, sly, drivelling, daft, narrow, knobby, vacant, vicious, vulpine, vulturous - every kind of ugliness was represented, not once but tenfold.What Larkin ruefully described as his “misengagement” dragged on long after he and Monica met in 1946, and was only resolved, amid emotional stress all round, in 1950—Monica and Philip became lovers that summer. Ovid’s dictum— Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor, “I see the better and approve it, but follow the worse”—might have been written with Larkin as its prize example. He has an affair with a person named Maeve, who he works with (she isn't his only affair, that rat), this is a source of discussion. Sex,” noted the young masturbator in his pocket diary for 1950, “is too good to share with anyone else.