Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

Overview

A revelatory, intimate, and sympathetic study of Philip Larkin, an iconic poet and a much misunderstood man, offering fresh understanding of the interplay of his life and work.

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) is one of the most beloved poets in English. Yet after his death a largely negative image of the man himself took hold; he has been portrayed as a racist, a misogynist and a narcissist. Now Larkin scholar James Booth, for seventeen years a colleague of the poet’s at the University of Hull, offers a very different portrait. Drawn from years of research and a wide variety of Larkin’s friends and correspondents, this is the most comprehensive portrait of the poet yet published.

Booth traces the events that shaped Larkin in his formative years, from his early life when his his political instincts were neutralised by exposure to his father’s controversial Nazi values. He studies how the academic environment and the competition he felt with colleagues such as Kingsley Amis informed not only Larkin’s poetry, but also his little-known ambitions as a novelist.

Through the places and people Larkin encountered over the course of his life, including Monica Jones, with whom he had a tumultuous but enduring relationship, Booth pieces together an image of a rather reserved and gentle man, whose personality—and poetry—have been misinterpreted by decades of academic study. Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love reveals the man behind the words as he has never been seen before.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620407837
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	11/04/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	544
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

James Booth is the literary adviser and coeditor of the Philip Larkin Society. He is the author of two studies of Larkin's work, Philip Larkin: Writer in 1991 and Philip Larkin: The Poet's Plight. He has also edited a collection of Larkin's early girls' school stories and poems and a volume of critical essays, New Larkins for Old. He has recently retired from the Department of English at the University of Hull, where he was a colleague of Larkin's for seventeen years.

Editorial Reviews

James Booth's new biography of Philip Larkin is not very exciting, perhaps because Booth has the sense to leave the exciting writing to Larkin. But it is very welcome…Booth…is an excellent guide to just why a Larkin poem can merit being called great. He points out its features with the proud care of a well-suited senior BMW executive taking a turn in the salesroom…Yet Booth is sensitive enough not only to praise the master at his best but also to spot the moments when his sublime talent is not fully engaged…Booth has not written an academic book. He has written a book of the higher journalism, which is still the kind of attention Larkin needs; although from now on, and partly because of Booth's book, he might need it less.

The New York Times Book Review - Clive James

Booth shows Larkin's variety, from near-religious adoration to lasciviousness to slashingly witty… A consummated dream of a literary biography.” —Booklist (starred review)

From the Publisher

2014-08-18
A scholar who has published previously about Philip Larkin (1922-1985) returns with a full-meal biography glowing with admiration.Booth (Philip Larkin: The Poet's Plight, 2005), who was for nearly two decades one of Larkin's colleagues at the University of Hull, does not find a lot to dislike in this lushly detailed life. Where others have found fault, the author often begs to differ. In Larkin's letters, for example, are occasional terms and phrases that many readers find racially offensive. Booth characterizes them as "performative riffs," examples of Larkin's linguistic posturing. After a defensive introduction (Larkin was neither a racist nor a misogynist), Booth proceeds in chronological fashion. We learn about Larkin's parents (his mother lived until 1977), his lifelong passion for classic jazz (and, later, his unhappiness with John Coltrane and other more modern performers), his schooling and his off-and-on friendship with Kingsley Amis. Both were hopeful novelists, but when Amis' Lucky Jim (1954) appeared and soared, Larkin, who had published a couple of novels in the mid-1940s, turned exclusively to poetry. Larkin became a librarian and held various positions throughout his life, jobs that enabled him to have time for his poetry, and his verse soon became both popular and honored. Booth spends many pages discussing individual poems, as well as the drafts Larkin recorded in his many workbooks. Most of these analyses are accessible, though we occasionally read something precious: "The hissing monosyllable ‘this' with its high short vowel seems arrogant." Booth also charts the poet's intimate relationships with various women (Larkin sometimes maintained as many as three simultaneously). We read, too, about his jealous disdain for Ted Hughes (he preferred Sylvia Plath's poetry), as well as his physical decline (including deafness) preceding the arrival of the cancer that killed him. Definitive in its scope and detail but somewhat too hagiographic.

Kirkus Reviews