Michael Henderson

This be the verse

Philip Larkin, who died 25 years ago this week, was a truly great poet. His personal habits are utterly irrelevant

issue 27 November 2010

Spending pleasurable hours looking for books is not like drilling for oil. Recently, however, while browsing in the excellent Slightly Foxed bookshop in Gloucester Road, the black stuff spewed out like a geyser. A hardback collection of Philip Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings was on offer for £40. It wasn’t a first edition from 1964, which would have put another nought on the price. The book belonged to the fourth impression, published four years later, but it came with an inscription from another famous writer, who had presented it to an actress friend.

‘I hope you like these poems,’ he had written. ‘They are what I wanted the play to be — very English and full of affection and dissatisfaction. All my love. A.’ The ‘A’ was Alan Bennett, the actress Nora Nicholson, and the play, Bennett’s first for the stage, Forty Years On. Viewed from this distance, those words may be interpreted as a tribute from a superb writer, who was establishing an identity that is now much loved, to a great one.

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