Philip Larkin (107 page)

Penelope Scott Stokes (
centre
). Larkin’s sonnet ‘So through that unripe day’ was inspired by this ‘girl resembling an Eton boy’.

‘
Dora is bullied’ and ‘At the top of her form’: illustrations from
Niece of the Headmistress
by Dorothy Vicary (1939), one of the girls’-school stories to which Larkin paid homage in his ‘Brunette Coleman’ writings.

Philip proposed to Ruth Bowman in 1948. ‘The engagement, to me anyway, is to give myself a sincere chance of “opening out” towards someone I do love a lot in a rather strangled way, and to help her take her Finals.’ The engagement ended when Larkin left for Belfast in 1950.

‘Pop’ and ‘Mop’. Sydney Larkin O.B.E. and Eva Larkin, newly widowed, in 1949. In May 1947 Philip wrote: ‘How young you both are […] young in keen response to things […] It makes home a very nice place to come to.’

‘Beautiful handsome girl!’ Monica Jones was a Lecturer at Leicester University College when Larkin arrived in 1946. He took this photograph in the early 1950s in his top-floor flat in Elmwood Avenue, Belfast.

Kingsley and Hilly Amis in 1948, the year of their marriage. Kingsley encouraged the flirtation between Hilly and Philip.

Larkin was responsible for the Library Issue Desk at Queen’s University, Belfast (1950–55).

Larkin’s more intimate letters are interspersed with doodles and sketches in which he depicts himself as a seal (from a childhood pun on ‘sealing’ a letter). His most elaborate drawings come in the early letters to Monica Jones, nicknamed ‘Rabbit’ or ‘Bun’.

Winifred Arnott in Belfast in the early 1950s. Philip’s unconsummated courtship with Winifred inspired ‘Latest Face’ and ‘Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album’.

Patsy Strang, 1953. Their affair, evoked in the poem ‘Whatever Happened?’, lasted from spring 1952 to summer 1953. Patsy had lived in Paris and was eager to fall in love with a poet.

A draft page of ‘If, My Darling’, May 1950 (Workbook 2). Larkin’s feelings for Monica Jones make this one of his most dynamically reworked drafts.

George and Jean Hartley printed Larkin’s poems ‘Spring’, ‘Dry-Point’ and ‘Toads’ in their magazine
Listen
(1954). In 1955 they founded the Marvell Press and published
The Less Deceived
.