A biography of the poet discusses his friendships with other aspiring writers, painters, and musicians, his repressive family life, his need for affection and fear of the encroachment on his writing that marriage represented, and his work.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Beneath his quiet, self-effacing persona as "archetypal librarian," English poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985) led a much more dramatic and troubled life than was commonly known. Raised by an arrogant father--a Nazi sympathizer who corresponded with Hitler's economics minister--and by an overprotective mother, Larkin harbored self-disgust and sexual confusion. He had a homosexual crush in college, avidly collected pornography and wrote two facetious would-be lesbian romances under the pseudonym Brunette Coleman. His 30-volume diary was destroyed after his death by his indulgent companion Monica Jones. Drawing on unpublished papers and letters, Motion, Larkin's friend and fellow poet, has produced the first biography of a poet who some rank with Auden and Eliot. This revealing, disquieting portrait limns "a selfish man" who played off one lover against another, and a reactionary strongly prejudiced against immigrants, students, unions and socialists. Snippets of poems, interspersed with the narrative, remind us of Larkin's genius. Photos.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
One of three literary executors of British poet Philip Larkin (1922-85), fellow poet Motion (The Lamberts, 1987) ill serves his subject with this drab, exhaustive biography full of bland literary criticism and inappropriate psychologizing. With complete access to Larkin's unpublished archival material--from which he quotes liberally--Motion establishes that Larkin's father was a Nazi sympathizer, as well as a misogynist and an autocratic parent, and that the poet's ``whining'' mother exerted an equally debilitating influence on her sensitive son. Tall and gawky, young Philip stammered and made few friends: This overwhelming sense of isolation stayed with him even through his years of critical acclaim. A voracious reader, he idolized Auden, Lawrence, and Yeats, despite his later antimodernist stance. At Oxford, Larkin formed his legendary friendship with Kingsley Amis, whose fame he would continually envy even as they shared a love of jazz and drinking, as well as a hatred of pretension. Larkin experienced difficulty with girls, not losing his virginity until well into his first job as a librarian (``handing out tripey novels to morons''). While developing his career--he created a major library at Hull--he also gained stature as a writer. Hoping to equal the achievements of Amis and their friend, Bruce Montgomery, he devoted his early efforts to fiction, producing two novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter, which was a modest success. But Larkin's real greatness was as a poet. Some juvenilia inspired largely by Yeats was eclipsed by his mature work--poetry in the plain-speaking tradition of Hardy, Housman, and Edward Thomas. The obsessions of his verse--sadness, death, failure--flow directly from his troubled life (fearing marriage and family, he managed to maintain three long relationships with dramatically different types of women), though he himself always discouraged such readings. Sure to be the standard life for some time, this cadaverous book seems dead to Larkin's amazing sense of humor, one of the sources of his poetic achievement. (Photos) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Humbug,
By A Customer
This review is from: Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life (Hardcover)
Ignore the previous writer. This is one of the handful of truly fine literary biographies from the last fifty years, maybe more. Unless Larkin himself was fully devoted to falsifying the record, he was every bit the unrelenting prig Motion has made him out to be; and not only does Motion show how Larkin as an artist transcended this, Motion personally knew and liked Larkin. Nowhere does Motion naively simplify the cause and effect between Larkin's childhood and his adult unhappiness --again, the facts are laid out judiciously, and the reader is free to draw conclusions. Finally, the idea that Motion, a Poet laureate, acquaintance of Larkin, and a gifted literary essayist, is somehow lacking in his analysis of the poems is nonsense. Motion takes us through the major work without allowing it to dominate the narrative which is, after all, about Larkin's life. All in all, this is a remarkable piece of literary journalism; absolutely first rank. That anyone interested in Larkin would be scared off by the prior casual dismissal, inattentive as it is, is a travesty.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Philip Larkin,
By Bomojaz (South Central PA, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life (Paperback)
Andrew Motion is a poet and novelist whose earliest poems were lyrical and highly influenced by the work of Philip Larkin. He writes of Larkin in this biography with respect and candor, and not as a hero-worshiper (or disparager). Larkin's life, because of his reclusive nature, was not an open book, and he had a dark side, which contrasts greatly with the kind of lyrical, often witty (though at times bitter) poetry he produced.
Larkin wrote poetry from an early age, though his first desire was to be a novelist. In fact he wrote two novels, neither of which made much of a hit, and he could write no others. He worked every day as a librarian at Brynmor Jones Library in Hull. He loved traditional jazz and wrote frequently about it. He never married, but had two mistresses; one he mistreated badly. He could be funny and also mean-spirited. There were many parts to the man, some at odds with others. Motion does a good job fleshing these sides out and dealing with them without passing judgment. It's a fair and balanced, well-written biography. Recommended.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Champagne, Not Sparkling Wine,
By
This review is from: Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life (Paperback)
This magnificent biography reads like a novel. The prose is smooth and clear; this is decidedly not an academic biography. It belongs firmly to the art of literary biography for which the British are renowned. Larkin comes over as a classic eccentric on the order of his friends and contemporaries such as Kingsley Amis. The biography shows again how strong the reaction to social fascism can be; Larkin, like Waugh, Graham Greene and Muggeridge, had a visceral, instinctive mistrust of the Welfare State and its ideology of social "progress." His struggles with women are instructive, but only go to show once again that when asked to choose, some people prefer art to nappies and love. Motion, Martin Amis has pointed out, has a tendency to judge Larkin according to PC standards, thus finding him on the wrong side of history's recent celebration of all things human. Amis, not Motion, makes the case that Larkin should be judged by the standards of this time; if he was a racist, his was an ordinary bigotry, not the over-wrought, systematic racism of the Nazis. No doubt he was impossible to know or be around, but Motion's affectionate, if critical, treatment would be well-advised to consider Amis' warning to keep our faith in the triumph of the individual against the modern mob's claim to all-knowingness.
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