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Andrew motion philip larkin6/19/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() There are signs that John Sutherland began his book in an upbeat and pioneering spirit, wanting to rescue Larkin’s longest-lasting love, Monica Jones, from the comparative neglect in which she’s languished up to now to do for her, in fact, a version of the job that Clare Tomalin did for Ellen Ternan’s role in the life of Charles Dickens. ![]() Hull City Council is presently considering a proposition to remove his statue from the concourse of the city’s train station. Thirty-five years later, after the publication of biographies and his previously private correspondence, his reputation is not so much changed as turned on its head: the outbursts of racism and misogyny that are splattered through his letters have for many readers cast a sickening pall over the poems, and for others led to his outright cancellation. By the time Philip Larkin died in 1985, he’d long since achieved national treasure status: his poems were critically admired as well as widely read his reticence (‘the Hermit of Hull’) was a matter of affectionate respect and his cantankerous published remarks about ‘difficulties with girls’, children, left-wing politics, and ‘abroad’ were generally embraced as proof of valiant individualism - or possibly a grouchy kind of joke. ![]()
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