Philip Larkin (87 page)

Authors: James Booth

BOOK: Philip Larkin

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28.
‘Tes mollets farauds, / Ton buste tentant, / – Gai, comme impudent, / Ton cul ferme et gros, // Nous boutent au sang / Un feu bête et doux / Qui nous rend tout fous, / Croupe, rein et flanc.’

29.
He did not recognize Verlaine’s demotic form ‘gas’ for ‘gars’ (‘lads’). It is excluded as incomplete from the
Collected Poems
and the
Complete Poems
. For a facsimile of the workbook page and a transcription of the poem see
AL
36 (October 2013), pp. 4–5.

30.
DPL/1/2/30.

31.
DPL/1/2/34.

32.
‘Poet’s Choice’,
FR
, p. 17.

33.
Graham Chesters, ‘Tireless Play: Speculations on Larkin’s “Absences”’, in Richard Bales (ed.),
Challenges of Translation in French Literature: Studies and Poems in Honour of Peter Broome
(Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 47–60.

34.
‘Poet’s Choice’,
FR
, p. 17.

35.
The word occurs a third time in ‘Unfinished Poem’ (October 1953), in which the poet hides away from Death in a squalid ‘emaciate attic’. It seems likely that Larkin held back this poem from publication to avoid diluting the effect of the word. The odd form ‘attic’d’ appears as a self-parodic joke in the late light-verse exercise, ‘Good for you, Gavin’, written in 1981.

36.
13 January 1951. Passage not in
LM
.

37.
6 October 1951.
LM
, p. 63.

38.
One draft has the title ‘Tenth Days’. The final title was added in
The Less Deceived
.
Complete Poems
,
p.
362.

39.
Winifred Dawson (née Arnott), interview with the author, 21 October 2003.

40.
Motion, p. 209.

41.
Ibid., p. 212.

42.
Ibid., p. 213.

43.
Winifred Dawson (née Arnott), personal communication, 14 February 2011.

44.
To Monica Jones, 13 July 1951. Not in
SL
.

45.
The march took place on Sunday 20 May 1951 (
LM
, 41), and Larkin all but completed the poem by 25 May or shortly afterwards.
Complete Poems
, p. 602.

46.
Burnett uses as copy-text a typescript enclosed with a letter to Monica Jones of 15 October 1951. In the 1988
Collected Poems
Thwaite reproduced an earlier typescript with different wording.

47.
Tom Paulin, ‘She Did Not Change: Philip Larkin’,
Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State
(London: Faber & Faber, 1992), p. 236.

48.
Motion, p. 210.

49.

LM
, pp. 48–9.

50.
To Eva Larkin, 15 July 1951.

51.

TWG
, pp. 485–6.

52.
Ibid., p. 487.

53.
Ibid., p. 493.

54.
Ibid., p. 495.

55.
Ibid., pp. 496–7.

56.

LM
, p. 58.

57.
Ibid.

58.
To Winifred Arnott, 22 October 1951. Motion, p. 218.

59.
To Eva Larkin (‘My dear Mop-Moust-Haugh’), 29 April 1951.

60.
DPL/1/2/49. James Sutton became a pharmacist, married and had two children. He died in 1997. See Maeve Brennan, ‘James Ballard Sutton 1921–1997’,
AL
5 (April 1998), pp. 24–7.

61.
14 October 1951. Not in
SL
.

62.

SL
, pp. 179–80.

10: Single in Belfast (1952–3)

1.
Motion, p. 217.

2.
Ibid., p. 211.

3.

LM
, pp. 69–70.

4.
Winifred Dawson (née Arnott), interview with the author, 21 October 2003.

5.
Motion, p. 221.

6.
George Gilpin, ‘Patricia Avis and Philip Larkin’, in James Booth (ed.),
New Larkins for Old
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 66–78, at p. 68.

7.

SL
, p. 183.

8.
Motion, p. 222.

9.
Winifred Dawson (née Arnott), interview with the author, 21 October 2003.

10.
Gilpin, ‘Patricia Avis and Philip Larkin’, p. 70;
SL
, p. 184.

11.
Gilpin, ‘Patricia Avis and Philip Larkin’, pp. 70–1. Not in
SL
.

12.
Ibid., p. 71.

13.

LM
, p. 86.

14.
Ibid., pp. 86–7.

15.
Ibid., p. 90.

16.
12 November 1951.
LM
, p. 70.

17.

LM
, p. 94.

18.
Winifred Dawson, ‘The Day I Met Monica’,
AL
31 (April 2011), p. 6.

19.
Winifred Dawson (née Arnott), personal communication, 10 June 2011. In return she lent him the very feminine
Ordinary Families
by E. Arnot Robertson.