In celebration of Philip Larkin’s memorialisation in Poets’ Corner, the Friends of the Bodleian are to hold a reading of Philip Larkin and Barbara Pym’s letters on Saturday, 10 December at 6pm in the Weston Library (part of the Bodleian Libraries) in Oxford.
Further details are available via the Friends of the Bodleian website
www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/bodley/friends
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St James the Less, Pimlico: 21 September 2016, 6.00 for 6.30 – 8.00 pm
Schoolgirls, Seaside, Churches and Death: Betjeman and Larkin
James Booth
The poems of Betjeman and Larkin present striking similarities, but also strong contrasts. Larkin frequently cited Betjeman in his campaign of anti-Modernism. He derecated T. S. Eliot’s dictum that: ‘Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult‘, and praised Betjeman for managing ‘to bypass the whole light industry of exegesis that had grown up around his fatal phrase’. Betjeman had proved, he wrote, ‘that a direct relation with the reading public could be established by anyone prepared to be moving and memorable.’ In the same way he himself followed the axiom: ‘The ultimate aim of a poet should be to touch our hearts by showing his own.’ But Larkin was not always so positive. Betjeman, he wrote, ‘is a poet for whom the modern poetic revolution has literally not taken place.’ His themes are ‘insular’ and ‘regressive’; ‘what a poor figure he would have cut in the Paris of Stein and Cocteau: he was not, and has never been, a cosmopolitan’. Larkin champions ‘the robustness, precision and … vivacious affection’ with which Betjeman registers “dear old, bloody old” England’. But he is dismissive of Betjeman’s idiosyncrasies: what he calls ‘High Church camp about fiddleback chasubles and Eastern position and Low Church cocoa and so on.’
In this talk James Booth compares poems on the common topics of schoolgirls, seaside, churches and death, in order to explore the similarities and differences between the poets.
Tickets £12.00 Contact Carole Collinson: Tel: 01482 847047 Email: chriscarole@hotmail.com
We are pleased to announce that, following the recent AGM, membership fees for 2016-17 are unchanged.
Click below to download the relevant form.
Our 42nd AGM, held at the Lawns Centre, Cottingham on 4 June 2016, showed the Society at a high point. Our finances are under no threat, though Jackie Sewell’s clear and comprehensive Treasurer’s Report recommended various economies which have been put into effect. Our wish to take membership payments by Direct Debit would, she had discovered, be too expensive, but Standing Orders serve the same purpose and are our preferred option. Andrew Eastwood’s Secretary’s entertaining Annual Report recorded among other events, the Dean of Westminster’s visit to the University on 17 June 2015 in connection with the plaque by Martin Jennings to be installed in Westminster Abbey on 2 December 2016. (Members will be informed directly when our limited supply of tickets for this event becomes available.) The other highlight of the year was Rosie Millard’s address ‘Larkin Hull and 2017’ in the Brynmor Jones Library on 2 December 2015 which launched the Society’s contribution to the City of Culture activities. Andrew Eastwood welcomed new members on to the committee: Simon Wilson, Archivist at the History Centre, Chris Cagney who has taken over marketing (and was doing a brisk trade at the back of the room ably helped by his son Joe), Lyn Lockwood who will be responsible for the Education portfolio, and Rachel Galletly, who brings her experience as a teacher to the committee. Andrew reported that our membership stands currently at 217 and asked anyone present who knew of possible new members to encourage them to join.
After a delicious lunch (for which many thanks to the Lawns catering service) the audience, now swollen to over 60, was welcomed by our Chairman, Professor Eddie Dawes. The Society’s President Anthony Thwaite introduced the Distinguished Guest Speaker, Mark Haworth-Booth, former Keeper of Photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum, who gave a relaxed, informative talk on ‘Larkin as Photographer’, full of specialist insight and illustrated by some of Larkin’s well-known, and not so well-known photographs. Mark listed the three cameras which Larkin used, each of increasing technical sophistication and bought at what at the time was huge expense. He mentioned Larkin’s expertise with light-meter and tripod and concluded that, though he never ventured into developing and enlargement himself, Larkin’s photographs are well up to professional standard. Highlights of Mark’s talk were a front-lit photograph of Leicester football fans on their way to a match, a carefully cropped and enlarged photograph of picknickers in Pearson Park, a photograph of Eva, the poet’s mother in her garden seen from below, and, of course, most revealing of all, his numerous introspective, often ironic ‘selfies’ taken with a delayed action shutter release.
Mark began with a fascinating account of his own ancestral connections with this area of the country (including a poet who had written a couplet poem 112 pages long, extolling Cottingham), and ended with his own terza rima poem paying homage to Larkin’s example: ‘Walking through the garden in the dark / my forehead breaks a sticky spider thread. / A crescent moon describes a white-cold arc //… And now leaves and branches are silhouetted / against the early morning sky. Blue-grey. / Unscrew the thermos, pour the tea – a blessed / moment – and now the grass is on its way / to green and I recall that Philip Larkin / “loved everything about the everyday”.
Mark’s talk was a unique and rewarding experience for all who were there. His full lecture will be published in About Larkin 42 this autumn.
The current 40-page issue of About Larkin shows a photograph of a smiling Eva Larkin taken by Philip in 1970. It includes facsimiles of communications between Philip and Eva featuring his charming sketches of ‘young creature’ and ‘old creature’.
We also publish a facsimile of a letter from Larkin written to Lord Tennyson following the death of John Betjeman in 1984. Philip Pullen contributes a fascinating piece on Larkin’s attitude towards Coventry, illustrated with photographs taken by the poet, and R.H. Winnick explores unrecorded allusions in the Complete Poems. Geoff Weston intriguingly documents Larkin’s rejection of the OBE in 1968; Lyn Lockwood and Rachael Galletly offer lively accounts of Larkin’s impact in the classroom, and Janice Rossen entertainingly recalls her early researches into Barbara Pym and Larkin, conducted, as often as not, over the lunch or dinner table. In a far-ranging article Douglas Porteous analyses Larkin’s attitudes towards Nature, while the late Hull poet Douglas Houston whimsically recalls Larkin in the library in the 1970s. There are obituaries of Robert Conquest and, sadly also, Terry Kelly, a mainstay contributor to About Larkin over the last decade. We include also accounts of Society events at the British Library, King Henry VIII School Coventry and the Brynmor Jones Library, Hull. There are original poems by Monica Cheale, Peter Didsbury and Alison Mace.
Saturday 4th June 2016
The Lawns Centre, Cottingham
AGM 12.30 followed by lunch at 1.15 pm
and at 2.30 pm our distinguished Guest Lecturer:
Mark Haworth-Booth (formerly Curator of Photography at the V & A): Larkin the Photographer
For tickets contact Carole Collinson Tel: 01482 847047. Email: chriscarole@hotmail.com
£12 for members and guests
Lecture only £5.00 for non-members
On Sunday April 3rd a group of 36 students and their teachers from Queensland Academy, Brisbane, visited Hull for a Larkin Study Day, hosted by the University and the Philip Larkin Society. They toured the newly refurbished University Library, including a rare opportunity to visit the Librarian’s Office, which has been little changed since Philip Larkin’s time as Librarian. After lunch in the Library’s fabulous new cafe area, they attended an entertaining talk given by James Booth, Larkin’s latest biographer.
The visit also took in various Larkin-related parts of Hull, including Pearson Park where the party was able to obtain an exterior view of the famous ‘High Windows’ of Larkin’s top floor flat at number 32.
The students are studying Larkin as part of the International Baccalaureate examination and found the visit invaluable for gaining a background to and cultural perspective on Larkin’s life and work.
Inside the Librarian’s Office.
J
James Booth gives his talk, wearing one of Larkin’s ties.
Arriving at 32 Pearson Park.
On Sunday 9th August 2015, to mark Larkin’s birthday and the 30th anniversary of the year of his death, a fabulous evening of musical and poetic performances took place at various stages along Hull’s Larkin Trail, beginning in Spring Bank Cemetery and ending in Ye Olde Black Boy in the Old Town, where Larkin used to go to listen to jazz. Composed and created by local musician Dave Gawthorpe the event will stay long in the memory of those privileged to be there. Dave has now edited a brilliant film version of the event which can be viewed here.
