Philip Larkin (110 page)
Authors: James Booth
Maeve Brennan, 1970. Maeve’s caption for this photograph in her memoir
The Philip Larkin I Knew
is ‘Shades of D. H. Lawrence’.
Monica Jones on Jura or Mull, 1971. Philip and Monica’s holidays in the remoter parts of Scotland or on Sark became an annual routine.
From a letter to Maeve Brennan, 19 October 1970, written from All Souls, Oxford, where Larkin was working on
The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse
. Maeve is ‘Miss Bianca Mouse’.
Anthony Thwaite in 1972. Larkin chose the poet and former Literary Editor of the
Listener
,
New Statesman
and
Encounter
as his literary executor. At Anthony’s suggestion, he also recruited the young Andrew Motion.
Eva Larkin in the garden of 21 York Road, Loughborough, 1970. Larkin returned regularly to mow this lawn until the house was finally sold after Eva’s death in 1977.
Larkin wrote to his mother twice a week from the late 1940s to the 1970s. In this note of Thursday 28 January 1965 she appears as a seal in a mob-cap.
Eva (
left
, 1970;
right
, 1972) moved into Berrystead Nursing Home in February 1972 and died there five years later. ‘Smiles are for youth. For old age come / Death’s terror and delirium.’ (‘Heads in the Women’s Ward’).
During the 1960s and 1970s Monica and Philip frequently visited Bellingham Show, Northumberland. Larkin was intrigued by the wrestling of the Harrington Brothers: ‘long immobile strainings that end in unbalance’. (‘Show Saturday’, 1974).
Self-portrait, 1974, the year in which Larkin moved to Newland Park, and began ‘Aubade’. The first draft began: ‘I work all day, and hit the jug at night’.
Hedgehog in the garden of 105 Newland Park, March 1979. On 11 June Larkin killed a hedgehog while mowing his lawn, prompting him to write ‘The Mower’.
With Betty Mackereth, 1981. In 1975 Larkin ‘seduced’ his secretary of eighteen years. His poems ‘Dear Jake’ and ‘We met at the end of the party’ were inspired by her. During the following years they would escape to the North York Moors around Kirkbymoorside
The final page of ‘Love Again’ in Workbook 8. It is a sign of Larkin’s faltering inspiration that he returned to the page after nearly a year to complete the poem.