CLIVE JAMES
Actually, they don’t always fuck you up: Philip Larkin with his mother Eva
ALL IMAGES © ESTATE OF PHILIP LARKIN
As the ancillary books of correspondence and commentary accumulate, our picture of Philip Larkin grows more nuanced all the time, and at this rate he will soon be as complex a character as your weird uncle, the one who thought that modern society was falling apart for lack of discipline. A new collection, Letters Home, 1936-1977, edited by James Booth, does a vital job of apprising us, if we ever thought the opposite, that Larkin’s father’s pre-war admiration for the Nazis stopped well short of staging a Nuremberg rally in the parlour, and that his mother, while undoubtedly prey to psychological frailties, was no dullard. On p483, near the end of the book, she can be found reading The Rainbow, but firm in her opinion that Sons and Lovers was its superior.