The biography that makes Philip Larkin human again

How does Philip Larkin’s gloom retain such power to disturb? His bleakest verses have the quality of direct address, as if a poetical Eeyore were protesting directly into our ear. ‘Aubade’, his haunting night-time meditation on the terrors of death and dying, focuses on ‘the sure extinction that we travel to/ And shall be lost in always’ and offers no consolation. His ‘Next Please’ makes grim fun out of our habit of hope, pictured as a ship we expect to greet us with its full cargo of rewards. But of course ‘Only one ship is seeking us, a black-/Sailed unfamiliar….’ He saw religious faith as a form of self-deception. Moreover, his ‘The Old Fools’ mercilessly depicts senility.

In 1991 the Observer attacked Larkin for his pessimism. We don’t expect things always to turn out well for Thomas Hardy’s characters, or Samuel Beckett’s, or for that matter Sophocles’ … and yet it would be surprising to see any of these writers featuring as an Observer ‘villain’. Larkin once commented that deprivation was to him what daffodils were to Wordsworth. Deprivation always cheered him up: it signalled new poetic discoveries.

Probably Larkin’s desolation distresses for other reasons. In his 1993 official biography, Andrew Motion helped paint Larkin as a sterile, loveless, nationalist, racist, woman-hating bigot. Larkin’s father, we learnt, had been a Nazi sympathiser who attended Nuremberg rallies and cherished in the family home a small statue of Hitler giving the Sieg Heil salute. Such toxic detail shed a baneful light. You felt you had to apologise for the frailties of the man before celebrating the felicities of the verse. After Motion’s book came out, teaching Larkin to undergraduates, I feared for his place in the canon.

Yet, as James Booth starts his superb new biography by saying, it would be weird if a writer whose poetry can be so humane and moving were secretly merely a horrible and emotionless shit.