Philip Larkin (84 page)

  
45.
   To Amis, 13 September 1945. Not in
SL
.

  
46.
   
TWG
, p. 474.

  
47.
   Thomas Hardy, '
In Tenebris
II', l. 14.

  
48.
   Motion suggests that the name is based on Astley-Jones, Chief Clerk of Wellington UDC, who had misspelled Larkin’s name (‘Larking’) in the letter offering him the Wellington post. Motion, p. 159.

  
49.
   
AGW
,
p.
210.

  
50.
   Ibid., p. 243.

  
51.
   Ibid., p. 248.

  
52.
   To Barbara Pym, 18 November 1961.
SL
, p. 334.

6: The Grip of Light (1945–8)

    
1.
   
SL
, p. 104.

    
2.
   Ibid., pp. 104–5.

    
3.
   From Ruth Bowman to Larkin, 12 April 1947. Motion, p. 170.

    
4.
   To Sutton, 9 March 1945. Not in
SL
.

    
5.
   From Ruth Bowman to Larkin, 27 October 1945. Motion, p. 135.

    
6.
   Ruth Siverns (née Bowman), personal communication, 2 April 1999. Philip preserved Ruth’s letters to him, and directed that they be returned to her after his death.

    
7.
   Motion, p. 122.

    
8.
   The first completed draft in the new workbook was of ‘If grief could burn out’, dated 5 October 1944. DPL/1/1/3.

    
9.
   All except pp. 2–10 (which seem to be lost) are preserved in the University of Hull collection in the History Centre, Hull, DPL/2/1/14 and DPL/1/2/50. See Trevor Tolley, ‘Lost Pages’,
AL
11 (April 2001), pp. 24–7.

  
10.
   The title is from a typescript in the Bodleian. In the workbook it was titled ‘For my Father’. See
Complete Poems
, p. 577. The workbook page on which it is written was one of those later torn out.

  
11.
   ‘Plymouth’ and ‘Portrait’ were published in
Mandrake
, May 1946. In the typescript of
In the Grip of Light
, ‘Portrait’ was retitled ‘The quiet one’.
Complete Poems
, p. 486.

  
12.
   Jean Hartley recalled Larkin’s disconcerting lack of inhibition about farting in company. At the age of nineteen he had written to Sutton: ‘I have just farted with the sound of an iron ruler twanging in a desk-lid and the smell of a west wind over a decaying patch of red cabbages.’ 31 December 1941,
SL
, p. 30.

  
13.
   The house has been demolished. See David Gerard, ‘Wellington Walkabout’,
AL
8 (October 1999), p. 30.

  
14.
   ‘The Poetry of Hardy’,
RW
, p. 175.

  
15.
   Ibid.

  
16.
   Ibid.

  
17.
   Philip Larkin,
Early Poems and Juvenilia
, ed. A. T. Tolley (London: Faber & Faber, 2005).

  
18.
   Counting ‘Two Guitar Pieces’ and ‘Two Portraits of Sex’ as two poems each, and ‘Livings’ as three.

  
19.
   Completed by 23 February 1946. The date given in the 1988
Collected Poems
is incorrect.
Complete Poems
, p. 587.

  
20.
   1 April 1946.
LKA
, p. 54.

  
21.
   7 April 1946.
SL
, p. 116.

  
22.
   24 June and 15 July 1946.
LKA
, pp. 76 and 79.

  
23.
   To Sutton, 28 July 1946. Not in
SL
.

  
24.
   To Sutton, 26 June 1946. Not in
SL
.

  
25.
   Postcard to his parents, 7 February 1945.

  
26.
   Letter to his parents, 31 March 1946.

  
27.
   To his parents, 24 June 1945.

  
28.
   To his parents, 30 June 1946.

  
29.
   To his parents, 7 July 1946.

  
30.
   While awaiting Jill’s visit, John Kemp imagines that he knows ‘for one curious transient second [. . .] how a bride feels on the morning of her wedding’.
Jill
, p. 185.

  
31.
   Burnett (
Complete Poems
, p. 358) claims that it is almost certainly this poem to which Larkin was referring in his 1973 comment that he had written his first ‘good poem’ when he was twenty-six. However, the poet had only just turned twenty-four in September 1946. Larkin may perhaps have meant ‘An April Sunday brings the snow’, written a few months before his twenty-sixth birthday, or ‘At Grass’, written when he was twenty-seven.

  
32.
   Motion, p. 153.

  
33.
   
The Poems of Andrew Marvell
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), p. 53.

  
34.
   DPL/2/3/63.

  
35.
   ‘The Poetry of Hardy’,
RW
, p. 176.

  
36.
   ‘Larkin’s Dream Diary 1942–3, Part 2’, ed. Don Lee,
AL
28 (October 2009), p. 12.

  
37.
   Only a single detached page of this second dream diary survives, loosely inserted into the second workbook (DPL/1/2/51). It is misdated 1942 in the catalogue on the assumption that it is part of the earlier dream diary. But the reference to Gillian Evans dates it to 1946. See James Booth, ‘Larkin’s Second Dream Diary’,
AL
32 (October 2011), pp. 6–7.

  
38.
   DPL/1/2/51.

  
39.
   26 February 1947.
SL
, p. 135.

  
40.
   DPL/1/2/51.

  
41.
   2 December 1946.
LKA
,
p. 103.

  
42.
   26 March 1947.
LKA
, p. 124.

  
43.
   From Kingsley Amis, 5 May 1947. Passage not in
LKA
.

  
44.
   26 February 1947.
SL
, p. 136.

  
45.
   Anthony Thwaite, personal communication, 7 June 2013. Not in
Complete Poems
.

  
46.
   Motion, p. 119.

  
47.
   15 March 1947.
LKA
, p. 117.

  
48.
   21 December 1946.
LM
, p. 3.

  
49.
   Motion, p. 170.

  
50.
   Postcard to Sydney Larkin, addressed to ‘Ward 2, Warwick Hospital’, 24 February 1948. ‘Nottingham have taken up my references.’

  
51.
   14 January 1948.
SL
, p. 143.