Philip Larkin - Letters to Monica
 

Currently available to listen to online as Radio 4's 'Book of the Week' over five episodes. All five episodes are now up and remain available over the next 2 - 7 days (each episode remains available for up to 7 days after its first broadcast):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00vkpk6

Hello Steve

Many thanks for letting us know about this opportunity to listen to Philip Larkin's Letters to Monica in five episodes. Most appreciated!

Chris

I listened as they were broadcast, smiling and sniffling and knowing that I will eventually buy the book (though it'll have to be the paperback and probably via eBay).

Sniffling, I thought of these lines from Oscar Wilde's sonnet on the sale by auction of Keats's love letters:

I think they love not art
Who break the crystal of a poet's heart
That small and sickly eyes may glare and gloat.

Smiling, I thought how the same sonnet in its entirety would have made Larkin cringe.

I get the impression that Larkin is not much regarded in America. Is this so?

Ann,
Growing up, I encountered Larkin's poems in several anthologies, and they made a lasting impression on me. That said, Larkin has nowhere near the broad recognition in America that someone like Frost has (a truly popular poet here) or that Larkin has in the UK.

Susan

But Susan, do any English poets have recognition in the USA? We are just as bad. But poetry is an insular art and perhaps the best poetry is local.

It's hard to know what to think of this volume of letters, really. How many of them would have made the cut, had they all been available to Anthony Thwaite when he was compiling the Selected Letters in the early 1990s? In five short radio blasts they seem interesting enough though, of course.

I'm sure John has something interesting to say.

John,
I credit Eratosphere for giving me most of the little knowledge of contemporary British writers I have. People like Ted Hughes, Paul Muldoon, and Seamus Heaney are known in the U.S., but it was here that I learned of Wendy Cope, Don Paterson, and Carol Ann Duffy. I'd say that in the past 50-60 years there has been less transatlantic awareness in the poetry world than there was earlier. I don't know why that should be true.

Susan

One thing the letters printed in the Daily Telegraph show is that Larkin said different things to different people. His description of Kingsley and Hilly to Monica is funny (and possibly just or at least wittily unjust). And the letters certainly show that he knew exactly what he was like without (of course) being able to do anything about it. Or even wanting to.

The thing is, we all say different things to different people. But one thing that seems to stand out about Larkin is just how scathing - albeit, yes, comically scathing - he could be about almost everyone he knew. Some of his comments about Kingsley Amis from about 1955 are a bit pathetic, really. Jealously, I suppose, L knowing full well that he'd helped to make Lucky Jim the book it is and hadn't been given much credit.

I think when Larkin is writing of old Kingers to Monica he is uncomfortably aware that Margaret Peel in Lucky Jim is based on Monica and he may suspect, or for all I know he may know, that Monica knows it too. Anyway, what he says about KA is fairly accurate.