Philip Larkin: Letters Home

‘Philip Larkin’s “They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad”, probably his best-known line…has encouraged the idea that he had an unhappy childhood…James Booth’s superbly edited selection of previously unpublished Larkin family letters sweeps these illusions away…More than five hundred pages of new writing by our greatest modern poet would be a treasure whatever they contained. But in the end these letters are uplifting because they are the record of more than 30 years of trying to make someone else happy.’

‘Although Larkin might express intense irritation to outsiders, the fact is he visited his mother twice a month …He wrote at least a postcard every day. Despite his protestations Larkin was obviously devoted and I found the correspondence in his book mesmerising. It is like a dialogue composed by (and starring) Alan Bennett and Victoria Wood…This book’s account of emotional claustrophobia, bitter cruelty and the absolute blunt refusal to be happy and fulfilled , pared down by James Booth from more than 8,000 items in the Hull History Centre, is essential reading for Larkin addicts.’

‘[a] confounding collection . . .This turns out to be by far Larkin’s largest correspondence.’

‘Letters Home has been hailed as a work of scholarship. Its attention to detail, its range in years, its scope in material, are all remarkable...Larkin is famous for his line that parents tuck you up, or something that sounds rhymes with tuck. However, his letters to his mother offer evidence to support another line “What will survive of us is love”’

‘Booth is an efficient editor and provider of footnotes: this is the last significant collection of papers relating to Larkin’s life that needs to be published.’

‘This old, brown world of hissing gas fires, strange smells on the stairs, and filial duty worn like some heavy overcoat: how it hypnotises.When I wasn’t crying with laughter – “you can’t expect to enjoy yourself on holiday as you do at home” is among the more Hilda Ogden-ish advice Larkin dispenses to his ma – I was often close to sobbing at the sweet-sadness of it all. Behind the belly-aching and the penny-pinching, the making-do and the clay-cold depression, there is an immensity of kindness here, and the fact that this was sometimes so effortful on Larkin’s part only makes it the more tender (Eva, so anxious she could not sleep in her own house alone, frequently drove her son halfway round the bend)...Booth, Larkin’s biographer, has edited these letters superbly well... Neatly tracing the poet’s adult life from Oxford University, through Wellington, Leicester and Belfast, where he worked in various libraries, and finally to Hull, a picture of the man slowly emerges. It’s not new, but perhaps the emphasis is slightly altered. Larkin as we find him here is witty, wise, grossly impractical, and extremely modest, in every sense of the word.’