(c) by Clarence Brown

Happy, well-adjusted librarians are the salt of the earth. They make life as I know it possible. But they do tend to be better at locating other people's books than at writing their own.

The late Philip Larkin was the Librarian of the University of Hull in England. I learned of this only long after I had discovered the Philip Larkin that matters, not the one who located books but the one who located words, fastened them together in lines of verse, unfastened them and then refastened them, burnished them, made adjustments so fine that no eye but his could have seen the need, and finally published them between two covers as books that will still be here when no one on earth knows or cares that he was once the Librarian of Hull.

Happy and well-adjusted he was not. He was a miserable, unhealthy, dishonest, and thoroughly nasty bigot. One of us, in short.

I have known and know a number of the notable British poets of our day W.H. Auden, Charles Tomlinson, Dannie Abse, Paul Muldoon but I never met Larkin, and am thoroughly glad that I did not.

Not that I would not have enjoyed his company. It's just that, had it occurred to him to mention me in his correspondence, I would very likely not have been kindly mentioned, for he disliked foreigners, and kindly mention, you may have noticed, is one of the things that sustains me in this life below.

But if I never knew him, on what authority do I label him with all those terrible adjectives?

I am reading a biography written by his friend Andrew Motion, himself a poet. Judging by the letters column in the Times Literary Supplement, Motion's revelations about Larkin's life and opinions, already previewed in the "Selected Letters" of 1988, have got all the knickers from John o' Groats to Land's End in a monumental twist.

Larkin was born in 1922 and died in 1985. His father was a Nazi sympathizer who kept a mechanical-toy Hitler on the mantle. It saluted. All the rest of Philip's life rain-sodden, sexually thwarted, trapped in tedious work during the day and, during the night, in solitary, cramped bed-sitters was marked by a crushingly familiar Englishness.

When, out of all this boredom and pain, he made some of the greatest English poetry of our time, his countrymen responded with relief and affection. He had not just given voice to a familiar predicament, he had raised it to the level of transcendent art. In a country where poetry still matters, Larkin mattered intensely to a generation of readers. Even for an American like me, with a life so different from his that it might have taken place on a different planet, he is one of the very few contemporary poets whose collected poems I repeatedly read.

Larkin's passion for privacy was notable even in a country where privacy is almost the same thing as sanity. But the only witness of his death, a nurse, had barely heard his last, terrified words, "I am going to the inevitable," before the evitable ensued: his friends published every scrap he'd written, with the possible exception of overdue notices.

Having wallpapered the sewer with all the evidence they could find of a sad and ugly life, critics have fallen over themselves to say, in effect: How he deceived us! We thought him a great poet, but he was a foul-mouthed old pervert and bigot.

Martin Amis, the novelist, son of the novelist Kingsley Amis, and, during his father's period as a visiting writer here in Princeton, a pupil of PDS, has just published in the New Yorker (12 July 1993) a generously wise and judicious analysis of this entire episode. It is a brilliant commentary not only on the Larkin affair, but also on the life of the mind in our times.