A Book That Honors a Complicated Figure
A recent work by the late critic Clive James about his literary idol, Philip Larkin, artfully examines the complex poet’s canon.
Pick your Larkin. There’s more than one. Do you want the minor-league mystic, sitting on a train somewhere and blinking at the void through his thick-framed specs? “What will survive of us is love.” That guy? “One of the best-known and best-loved poets of the English-speaking world,” according to the jacket of his Collected Poems. Perhaps you want the witty English celibate (not that he was actually celibate) with his droops and his disappointments: “Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (Which was rather late for me).” Or do you want the nihilist, snotty as a Sex Pistol, teeth bared, who wrote “The Old Fools,” “Sunny Prestatyn,” and “This Be the Verse”? “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.”
