Notes Introduction: A Textuality that Dare not Speak its Name 1. Although Burke’s eschewal of narratology means that his position is almost the opposite of my own, this Introduction (from the title onwards) is greatly indebted to The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida by Séan Burke (Edinburgh University Press, 1998). 2. Andrew Motion, ‘On the Plain of Holderness’, in Larkin at Sixty, ed. Anthony Thwaite (Faber, London, 1982), 68. 3. James Booth, Philip Larkin: Writer (Harvester, Hemel Hempstead, 1992), 79, 3. 4. Ibid., 93. 5. Anthony Thwaite, ‘The Poetry of Philip Larkin’, Phoenix, 11/12 (1973–74), 41. 6. Anthony Thwaite, Poetry Today: A Critical Guide to British Poetry, 1960–1984 (Longman, London, 1985), 43. 7. David Timms, Philip Larkin (Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh, 1973), 68. 8. John Whitehead, Hardy to Larkin: Seven English Poets (Hearthstone, Munslow, 1995), 215. 9. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Athlone, London, 1981), especially the essay ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’. 10. A.T. Tolley, Larkin at Work: A Study of Larkin’s Mode of Composition as Seen in his Workbooks (Hull University Press, 1997), 179. Contrast Tolley’s plodding literalism about the poet’s need to ‘be true to what did happen’ with Larkin’s nimble wit: INTERVIEWER: I think you’ve said that a writer must write the truth ... LARKIN: I was probably lying. (FR, 49) Similarly, Joseph Bristow argues that Larkin’s ‘work and his life proved almost inseparable from one another as his career developed over time [...] Rarely have the personality of the poet and his poetic persona been conflated into one and the same image. Larkin, in this respect, appeared to live up to the ordinariness upon which his reputation as a writer had been built.’ ‘The Obscenity of Philip Larkin’, Critical Inquiry (Autumn 1994), 161. 11. Anthony Thwaite, ‘The Poetry of Philip Larkin’, in The Survival of Poetry, ed. Martin Dodsworth (Faber, London, 1970), 47. 12. Even a life as short and emphatic as that of Sylvia Plath has leant itself to wildly discrepant biographies involving mutually exclusive assessments of her marriage: Plath the murder victim of Hughes (Robin Morgan); Plath the proto-feminist and her patriarchal husband (Edward Butscher); Plath the unbearable self-destructive genius and her long-suffering consort, Ted (Anne Stevenson); Sylvia and Ted, star- crossed lovers (Ronald Hayman). 13. Such biographical censorings are perpetuated in encyclopaedias and literary Baedekers. Michael Stapleton’s Cambridge Guide to English Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1983) has the unenviable distinction of failing to explain why Oscar Wilde was imprisoned, or why E.M. Forster’s frankly homoerotic novel Maurice was published posthumously. Again, W.H. Auden’s marriage to Erika 238 Notes to Introduction 239 Mann is mentioned, but not that he was a homosexual who entered the con- tract to give a refugee from the Nazis (she was the daughter of Thomas Mann) American citizenship. 14. Richard Bradford, First Boredom, Then Fear (Peter Owen, London, 2005), 154. Ronald Drinkwater writes, in a letter dated 18 March 1986: ‘Probably only a few of the older members of the University will remember that he lived in Cottingham for his first few years in Hull – at first in a four-square house over the garden wall from us – now sadly long-since demolished to make way for a block of flats; subsequently, after a chance meeting in Hallgate with my wife at the time when his landlady was just being admitted to hospital with a terminal illness, in a furnished flat which we had available here where he stayed for a year or so until a university flat in Pearson Park became available. In a note which he subsequently wrote in my son’s copy of The Whitsun Weddings he said that some of the poems in the volume had been written at [our house] 192 Hallgate. Not unnaturally that set us looking out for actual clues, and the fact that he was liv- ing in a family house in a not completely self-contained flat suggested a basis for the contrast between his state and that of the family man, allowing for a certain poetic licence in the account of the family man’s pattern of life! This is perhaps borne out by the fact that the name Arnold which he gives to the family man is an anagram of my own name’ (unpublished private correspondence). 15. Tolley, Larkin at Work, 183. 16. Burke, Death and Return, 51. 17. Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (Faber, London, 1993), 381. 18. Jean Hartley, Philip Larkin, the Marvell Press and Me (Carcanet, Manchester, 1989), 68, 73, 68. 19. A.T. Tolley, ‘Letter to the Editors’, About Larkin, 34 (October 2012), 23. 20. Sean O’Brien, ‘The Apprentice Poet’, Sunday Times, Culture supplement, 2005. James Booth and Janet Brennan, ‘Editorial’, About Larkin, 29 (April 2010), 2. Sean O’Brien, ‘A Desolation Foretold’, Times Literary Supplement, 8 June 2012, 9. Terry Kelly, ‘Living with Larkin’, About Larkin, 33 (April 2012), 15. Terry Kelly, [untitled book review], About Larkin, 19 (Spring 2005), 32. 21. In the present writer’s opinion, the demerits are threefold. First, the volume is too physically unwieldy and awkward of use to meet the needs of the general reader. It is a scholar’s edition. A possible solution would be to persuade Martin Amis to enlarge his excellent Selected Poems (Faber, London, 2011) sufficiently to plug the gap. Second, the crowding of poems upon the page is not just unsightly but seriously confusing as to where individual works (especially untitled ones) start and finish. Third, while Professor Burnett claims that ‘mere scraps of verse’ have been excluded, the volume scours Larkin’s private correspondence for just such snippets – one runs, in its entirety, ‘Thought you might welcome a dekko / At this pre-distortion El Greco’; and another, ‘Walt Whitman / Was certainly no titman / Leaves of Grass / ...’. Ridding a second edition of this unworthy material would help create space for a more pleasing presentation of the valid corpus. On the other hand, the need for Burnett’s editorial precision is everywhere apparent. For just as the distortions of biographies are replicated lower down the line in literary Baedekers, so the errors of critics like Tolley are mirrored in school and student guides. Alison Jones’s A Student’s Guide to High Windows and the Poetry of Philip Larkin (Twin Serpents, Oxford, 2009) mangles the titles of some of the same Larkin poems as does he. Jones, we are told, ‘is an experienced teacher of English and Media Studies’ who ‘trained at Oxford University, Warwick University and 240 Notes to Chapter 1 recently completed an M.A. in Modern Poetry at Oxford Brookes University. She is currently Head of Department at a school in Oxford’. Despite these impeccable credentials, she misspells such illustrious names as T.S. Eliot, Jean-Paul Sartre, Iris Murdoch (her first name is repeatedly given as Irish), Graham Greene, Doris Lessing, Caryl Churchill and Salman Rushdie. Krapp’s Last Tape is retitled Krapp’s Last Stand; Stoppard’s Travesties becomes Transvestites; a dramatist named Arnold has a play called Wesker Roots; and Larkin’s poem ‘Sympathy in White Major’ is ‘named after a well known jazz tune (Theophile Gautier’s “Symphonie en Blanc Majeur”)’. Does it matter that a generation of questing minds should be fed such misinformation? Yes. It matters. 22. Clive James, ‘Pretending To Be Him’, Times Literary Supplement, 28 February 2003, 19. 23. James Booth, Philip Larkin: The Poet’s Plight (Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2005), 121. 24. Booth, Philip Larkin: Writer, 183. 25. Ibid., 161; Booth, Philip Larkin: The Poet’s Plight, 104, 170. 26. Tom Paulin, ‘She Did Not Change: Philip Larkin’, in Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1992), 234. 27. Ibid., 235. 28. Terry Kelly, [untitled book review], About Larkin, 15 (April 2003), 29. 29. Kelly, ‘Living with Larkin’, 15. 30. Motion, Life, 287. 31. Ibid., 370. 32. Maeve Brennan, The Philip Larkin I Knew (Manchester University Press, 2002), 63. 33. Bradford, First Boredom, Then Fear, 229–31. 34. As Thwaite’s footnote to the letter observes,’This sounds like “Forget What Did”, which was not completed to L[arkin]’s satisfaction until almost twenty years later.’ SL, 187. 35. Marion Lomax, ‘Larkin with Women’, in Larkin with Poetry, ed. Michael Baron (English Association, Leicester, 1997), 39–40. 36. The ‘in life, which is true’ formula is adapted from a comment Peter Hall made regarding Vanessa Redgrave, quoted in ‘A Life in Parts’ by Roy Hattersley, The Guardian Saturday Review, 6 May 2000, 6. As for the concept of the author being a creation of the text, see Séan Burke’s statement that ‘faith in the oeuvre is nothing less than faith in the author, or in his signature at least, and the constants and correspondences thereby contracted. In absolutely minimalist terms, the author is that principle which unites the objects – whether collusive or discrete – that gather under his proper name.’ Burke, Death and Return, 35. 37. Gillian Steinberg, Philip Larkin and His Audiences (Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2010), xx. 1 Radical Ellipsis: A Girl in Winter 1. John Osborne, Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence: A Case of Wrongful Conviction (Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2008). 2. Richard Palmer, Such Deliberate Disguises: The Art of Philip Larkin (Continuum, London, 2008), 71. 3. For more of the same see James Booth, ed., Trouble at Willow Gables and Other Fictions, by Philip Larkin (Faber, London, 2002), xl–xli. Even the exhilarating young scholar Gillian Steinberg asserts that ‘Larkin’s novels, however interesting they are as precursors to his poems, never move beyond relatively standard sto- rytelling to play with identity or to destabilize the role of audience in relation to Notes to Chapter 1 241 speaker as so many of his poems successfully do.’ This statement neatly summa- rizes just what I hope to disprove in the ensuing argument.