Rehab?

Something I should have linked to last week: a fascinating article by Rachel Cooke in the Observer about how the publication of a collection of love letters between Philip Larkin and Monica Jones is set to salvage his reputation from the damage done to it by (at least in part) the publication of Andrew Motion's unflinchingly honest biography Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life. Motion's book itself arose out of Anthony Thwaite's Selected Letters, in which Larkin - prior to publication the nation's favourite and most revered poet - frequently came across in his own words as an unsavoury, sneering, bigoted misogynist.

I'm yet to be convinced that the distinction between the poet's life and work can be drawn quite so neatly and conveniently, but Cooke certainly does a good job of painting a positive picture of the correspondence about to see the light of day, and her conversations with those who knew Larkin - Thwaite, Motion, Jean Hartley - suggest a warm and, perhaps surprisingly, extraordinarily funny man.

Incidentally, as Cooke points out, there's something neatly appropriate in the organisation of a festival to celebrate Larkin's death rather than his birth...

Links:

My review of Motion's biography (back in the days when this site carried book reviews - sigh)