The latest edition of About Larkin contains a wealth of material relating to Philip Larkin, including  a review of the highly successful ‘Philip Larkin: Personality, Poetry, Prose’ conference held at Hull History Centre in June and the joint conference held with the Thomas Hardy Society in August. As always, the journal offers fascinating new insights into Larkin’s life and work including some recently discovered and previously unpublished photographs from the Larkin Archive. The journal is available free to members.

Click below to read the editorial and contents pages:

Editorial page

Contents page

 

We have sold out of large men’s t-shirts! Other sizes are still in stock though.

Watch this space for exciting new designs!

The latest edition of the Society’s journal, About Larkin, has just been published. As usual it contains a wealth of valuable material relating to Larkin, including new research findings, reviews, poetry and personal recollections.

 

The journal is free to members.

For content details please click below:

Editorial

Contents page

On Saturday 1st December 2018 the distinguished poet and writer, Blake Morrison, will be giving a talk entitled ‘The Deep Blue Air: Larkin and the Idea of Freedom’, at The Royal Hotel, Ferensway, Hull commencing at 2.00 PM. This event is open to non-members. Tickets cost £10 per person.

The talk will be followed by pre-Christmas wine and mince pies.

Blake Morrison has published widely: academic works, poetry, drama and novels. When Did You Last See Your Father  won the J.R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography. Blake gave the Address in Westminster Abbey in December 2016 at the Dedication Ceremony for the memorial to Philip Larkin in Poets’ Corner.

To purchase tickets online click here.

Alternatively, please  contact Carole Collinson – Tel 01482 847047; Email chriscarole@hotmail.com or send a cheque made out to The Philip Larkin Society to 32 Queen’s Drive, Cottingham, East Yorkshire HU16 4EL

 

 

 

 

The Hull launch of Letters Home 1936-1977, James Booth’s edited edition of the Larkin family letters, will take place in The Observatory, Brynmor Jones Library, The University of Hull, at 6.30 pm on Monday 19th November 2018.

James will be ‘in conversation’ with Anthony and Ann Thwaite who were  close friends of Philip Larkin. Anthony is the Society’s President and edited the first edition of Philip Larkin’s letters in 1992 and Letters to Monica in 2010

The event will be hosted by Faber and Faber and the Librarian.

Wine and refreshments will be served.

Members of the Society who wish to attend should contact Carole Collinson – Tel 01482 847047, Email chriscarole@hotmail.com

 

The latest issue of About Larkin, the Society’s journal, has now been published. Members of the Society receive two issues of the journal each year as part of their membership.

Non-members can purchase a copy at a price of £8.00 per issue for the current year’s publications or £3.00 per issue for previous years.

A copy of the contents page can be found here – About Larkin 46 Contents Page

To read the editorial please click here – About Larkin 46 Editorial Page

The April 2018 edition of ‘About Larkin’ has now been published and constitutes a bumper edition of Lrkin-related items. It includes the previously unpublished correspondence which Philip Larkin wrote to Mary Wrench (later Judd), a member of the library  staff at the University of Hull. As James Booth states in his editorial, their relationship “was one of affection and respect rather than romance.”

Coverage of Society events include the walk conducted by Philip Pullen as part of the 2017 Beverley Walking Festival and the Jazz Evening held on 2nd December 2017. There are reviews of Writers and their mothers, edited by Dale Salwak which includes an essay on Larkin’s mother, Eva, and of Jonathan Tulloch’s Larkinland. There are also original poems by Audrey Dunne, Andrew Thomas, David Green and Layton Ring.

The issue also includes a fascinating piece by James Booth based on Alec Gill’s acclaimed photographic exhibition, ‘The Hessle Roaders’ which depicts Hull in the 1960s and 70s in ways that Larkin would have recognised and appreciated.

‘About Larkin’ is free to members of the Philip Larkin Society.

 

 

The Philip Larkin Society is pleased to announce that it has sponsored a new pew in Hull Minster in support of the Church’s £4.5 m regeneration project involving a major restoration and remodeling of the interior of the building.

 

Holy Trinity Church in the centre of Hull, was designated as a Minster in May 2017 in acknowledgement of the growth of its ministry and  the significance of  its spiritual and civic roles within the City.

Members of the Society and their family and friends are invited to a special dedication service to be held at the Minster on Sunday 8th April at 3.00 pm. Those wishing to attend are asked to contact Jonny Bottomley, the Fundraising and Marketing Manager at Hull Minster ( jonny@hullminster.org ) in order to help plan the required level of refreshments.

 

 

 

First of all, thank you to all who bought the Larkin Christmas cards- they sold like hot cakes (to use a cliché) – it was fantastic to see them flying off to our supporters and PLS members all around the world and popping up on tweets all through December. We are planning to produce two new Christmas cards for 2018 in the light of the success of the cards from this year.

Our original Larkin t-shirts have sold so well over the last year that we saw the last one disappear just before Christmas and we decided it was time for a fresh look. As we know, Larkin loved bright colours in his stationery and clothing and we thought we would reflect that in the colours for the new t-shirts, with Raspberry and Winter Emerald. We have simplified the design and introduced a ladies shape as well as the traditional men’s tees- now in two sizes- and they were printed by the excellent Hull company D3 who made our original t-shirts. We have also added a lovely timeline poster and some new cards. Any profits from our sales goes back into the promotion of Larkin’s work and life. Look out for more items later in the year!

Lyn and Rachael

Born and Bred: Larkin Reflections – Four Hull Poets respond to Philip Larkin (John Robinson, Joe Hakim, Vicky Foster, Dean Wilson) Middleton Hall, 25 October 2017

This event in the Hull City of Culture programme, introduced by Martin Goodman, Professor of Creative Writing in the University, featured four poets ‘born and bred’ in Hull. They spanned the generations: John Robinson had been ‘bolshy, and wanted to kick out the old guard’, including Larkin. Joe Hakon’s experience was quite different. He had read ‘Money’ at the age of 12, and felt that Larkin, like his beloved Charles Bukovski, ‘was putting two fingers up at the establishment’. On the other hand: ‘Let’s face it: he’s a “Dead White Male”‘. Dean Wilson, had come to University at the age of 17, already a poet, to work in the postroom and later the library, where Larkin reviewed the porters in a military style line up, a procedure Dean had rather liked. Vicky Foster had a different story again. She had much enjoyed poetry at school: ‘all the old poets: Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, Wordsworth’, and encountered Larkin’s poems at ‘A’ level, after his death.

The discussion opened unpromisingly with responses to passages from ‘Here’ and ‘The Whitsun Weddings’. John Robinson set the tone, asserting that he was ‘not fond of “Here”. Being ‘used to the landscape’ the poem had little attraction for him. Of the description of the ‘cut-price crowd’ he concluded: ‘Larkin doesn’t know them. He lines them up and inspects them’; ‘he’s a bloody snob.’ Vicky similarly found the middle (Hull) section of ‘Here’ ‘a bit sneery’, feeling it described her grandparents who would indeed have longed for an ‘electric mixer’. All four poets, true to their local accents and working-class backgrounds, disapproved of the posh middle-class Larkin.

But things looked up when they went on to comment in turn on images projected behind them, chosen to distil the essence of the poems which they subsequently read.

John Robinson was nostalgic for the pub life of the ‘Hull poets’ of the 70s and 80s. He showed images of Sean O’Brien, Peter Didsbury and Douglas Dunn together with the Polar Bear and Olde Black Boy pubs and the Humber Ferry, where one could watch the paddles churning while drinking in the bar all day. ‘Marooned’ evoked the scene as the poets ‘tottered and guffawed our way down to the ferry’, to pay for their drinks with ‘ten-bob notes’. Now, sadly, ‘they’ve bridged the river and most of the poets have left town.’ In ‘Don’t Write ‘Poetry’ he lamented: ‘for most of us poetry doesn’t pay’, and in the delightful ‘Lock, Stock and Beryl’ he invited the reader to do justice to this ‘brilliant’ title him or herself, since he cannot do so, having behaved rather badly to someone in his life called Beryl.

Joe Hakim showed a photograph of his gran’s house in Arthur Street. It was she who had determined his future by signing him up at the local library at the age of three. Later it was essential that poetry remained something pursued ‘outside school’. (Larkin would have echoed this sentiment.) He recited fluently without a text and it was refreshing to catch the chiming rhymes so audibly. He praised Larkin’s work for its ‘clockwork’ precision of technique, though he felt that Larkin would have found his work rather shallow ‘performance poetry’. His first poem was a thought-provoking update for the present generation of Larkin’s ‘This be the Verse’: ‘They fucked you over your mum and dad.’ The older generation has ‘inherited the future’, leaving the younger with reduced expectations and debt. In a similar vein he recited a sombre warning about the destructiveness of short term debt at high interest.

Vicky Foster’s presentation was more upbeat and celebratory than those of the men. She showed beautiful photographs of Bridlington beach where she had been an inhibited young girl and of an October sky over the Humber, where some of the significant events of her life had taken place. A photograph of herself with ‘my boys’ represented the importance of family to her work, and a chart of beetles and grasshoppers indicated that much of her poetry is founded on ‘bug imagery’: ‘There are moths living under my ribcage’. She became nostalgic about her schooldays around East Park and many of her pieces are ‘place poems. Her evocation of Castle Hill Hospital, ‘where we come when it’s time to go’, was moving and Larkinesque. Why not, she asked, end one’s days here ‘in good company’. As the leaves fall and the twigs of life become bare, perhaps we will find that ‘etched in the bark all along was love.’

Dean Wilson, had been encouraged to write by Larkin’s publisher, Jean Hartley, to whom he paid warm tribute. He also recalled the great Hull poet Maurice Rutherford, now in retirement in Kent. Dean showed a photograph of Sculcoates Cemetry where he had worked briefly and given a ceremonial burial to a rat he had found there. There was a haunting photograph of Withernsea which he remembered finding completely deserted one day, ‘like a film set’. The repeated phrases in some of his poems imparted a musical effect. ‘The future is medieval’ echoed intriguingly through one poem; ‘Dim the light sweetie’ through another, ending with a sad acknowledgement of the ravages of age: ‘Then dim it some more’. In ‘Eight Floors up, a visitor to a relative in hospital phones home: ‘The doctor says it’s touch and go. / The view is spectacular’. ‘Banker’s Lament’ elicits sympathy for a loveless man with too much money: ‘Love, love, love, everywhere. / When when, when will I get my share?’

For someone, like the present writer, familiar with Hull and the personalities recalled by the poets, this was a most enjoyable evening. Perhaps an outsider might have found the Hull accent, in which ‘toad’ and ‘phone’ become ‘terd’ and ‘fern’, difficult to interpret. But there seemed to be no outsiders in the highly appreciative audience. This was perhaps a local poetry-event for local people, but all the more rich and strange for that. No doubt similar events take place in Newcastle, Liverpool, Glasgow. As Larkin commented most of us live provincial lives, outside the metropolis.

James Booth

‘New Eyes Each Year’ finally came to the end of its highly successful run on Sunday 1st October. During the course of 13 weeks a total of 11,890 people visited the exhibition and the responses they left behind were overwhelmingly positive.

Brilliantly curated by Anna Farthing, the exhibition offered a new and exciting take on Philip Larkin based on the everyday objects with which he surrounded himself. It generated fresh interest in Larkin for many who already knew something about his life and also helped to stimulate and engage a lot of people who were getting to know Larkin for the first time.

A full review of the exhibition will appear in the next edition of About Larkin

 

 

 

 

As part of the highly popular East Yorkshire’s  Walking and Outdoors Festival, Philip Pullen, the Society’s media and publicity officer, led the first ever Larkin walk around Beverley.

Starting outside The Beverley Arms, a favourite haunt of Larkin throughout the 30 years he lived in Hull, the walk circled and criss-crossed the town centre, taking in the lanes leading to the Westwood Pastures which Larkin walked with Maeve Brennan; the Art Gallery, where he admired the Elwell paintings and bought a watercolour from an exhibition by ‘Friends of The Minster’ (“A very drab, Hully picture,” was how he described it to Monica Jones), and ending up in St Mary’s Church, a building which Larkin greatly admired and in which he took delight in discovering the ‘pilgrim rabbit’ said to be the inspiration for the white rabbit in ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ The route provided many opportunities to highlight features of Larkinalia and, in particular, the part Beverley had to play in his love life.

Larkin first visited Beverley in April 1955, a month or so after taking up his post as Librarian at Hull University, cycling the six miles or so in an impressive 35 minutes (he told his mother afterwards that it had left him with muscles “like perished rubber.”).  Typically, his initial view of the town was somewhat mixed and contradictory. “Beverley doesn’t make a great impression on me,” he wrote to Monica Jones, immediately after retuning from the visit. “ I went into the Minster, and also into the Parish Church (almost as big), but did not really grasp much.” Nevertheless, he was struck by ‘a beautiful street of mansions & chestnut trees called North Bar Without,’ and also by St Mary’s “lovely painted roof with all the early kings of England… over the choir.”

However, Larkin concluded that he didn’t want to live in the town as he felt it was “too far and too large.” He also condemned it for having no bookshop (an observation that might have been challenged by the then owners of Green’s Stationers on Saturday Market!).

Outside the Beverley Arms Hotel.

“I stayed for dinner (melon, steak, & raspberry & apple tart, with a glass of burgundy) and cycled back.”

(Larkin to his mother, 17th April 1955)

 

Saturday Market.

“Beverley is very much a country town, quite good for food but no good for anything else except gardening tools and labourers’ boots. There is a big market where they sell flowers & vegetables & cheap clothes… I always buy the same things from the same shops.”

(Larkin to his mother, 6th September 1970)

 

 

Outside Maeve Brennan’s birthplace on Wedneday Market

Despite his initial judgement, Larkin was to make frequent visits to the town throughout the rest of his life, for shopping expeditions, afternoon tea and dinner at the Beverley Arms (frequently with Maeve Brennan, who had been born in Beverley but also, on occasions with Monica Jones and Betty Mackereth). He soon developed a strong affinity for the town and many of the surrounding villages in the East Riding.

In 1956 Larkin attended a jazz concert given by the Chris Barber Band at the Regal Ballroom in Beverley (now Sleepers Restaurant) but had to leave after half of their set to catch the train back to Hull. “It cost me 9d on the train and 4/6 to get in,” he told Monica, “but it was worth it to see their faces again.”

The old Regal Ballroom and Cinema (now Sleepers Restaurant)

The walk also took in the homes of some famous Beverley residents with whom Larkin had a connection, including Sir Brynmor Jones, the University Vice Chancellor for more than half of Larkin’s tenure as Librarian, and the composer Anthony Hedges, who collaborated with Larkin to write “Bridge For The Living” in honour of the opening of the Humber Bridge. Walkers were also shown the birthplace of Maeve Brennan in Wednesday Market and discovered how Larkin took driving lessons with Betty Mackereth in the narrow streets of Beverley, greatly endangering the lives of fleeing pedestrians along Hengate.

Walkers also learned that Beverley surprisingly holds a small place in Larkin’s literary publications. In 1975, he consented to give a rare interview to the then editor of The Beverlonian, the magazine of Beverley Grammar school. ‘It so happens that in recent months I have declined to be interviewed by The Observer, The Sunday Times and the New York Times,” Larkin told the editor, Steuart Hamilton, in his letter of acceptance, “however, your magazine sounds a less frightening ordeal.” Larkin made one condition – that the interview would last for no more than half –an-hour. The resulting piece, which can be found in the East Riding Archive in Beverley’s Treasure House, provides a fascinating insight into the way Larkin approached poetry writing and his views on having his poetry set for G.C.E. examinations:

“Bernard Shaw said he never wanted to be taught in schools, because that would ensure that the younger generation hated him. But I think he is probably right. It is rather daunting to think that you are being thought of as, well, automatically dead: anybody taught in schools is dead.”

For his sheer pluck and endeavour, the enterprising young editor received a signed copy of ‘High Windows.’

 

 

Hot off the press, we now have available this fabulous Philip Larkin Society tote bag, suitably ascribed, and priced at £6 including postage and packing. They can be purchased via our online shop.

Bags can also be purchased at the New Eyes Each Year Exhibition in the Brynmor Jones Library, University of Hull until October 1st 2017.

 

On Wednesday 9th August, in celebration of what would have been Philip Larkin’s 95th birthday, the University of Hull and the Philip Larkin Society welcomed around 50 guests  to an informal evening of poetry and jazz in the Brynmor Jones Library.

 

Prior to the event, visitors had the opportunity to view the New Eyes Each Year Exhibition and were given a guided tour of the library building ending up on the fabulous seventh floor which became transformed into an after hours jazz lounge, with welcome drinks and a poetry recital.

 

 

The view is fine from fifty,

Experienced climbers say’

 

Chairman Eddie Dawes reads ‘The View’

 

 

 

 

“Why Coventry!” I exclaimed.  “I was born here.”

Philip Pullen recalls Larkin’s Coventry ‘roots’ and reads ‘I Remember, I Remember.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Here silence stands like heat.’

Carole Collinson reads Larkin’s great Hull poem ‘Here.’

 

 

 

On a beautiful sunlit Sunday afternoon, committee members of the Philip Larkin Society took part in a poetry reading event in the Avenues area of Hull to help raise funds for the Victoria Avenue Fountain appeal.

The group read a selection of appropriate Larkin poems in some of the gardens along Victoria Avenue, ending up in Pearson Park, near the house in which Larkin spent 18 years of his life and which has just received Grade II listed status.

Philip Pullen and Belinda Hakes reading a suitable combination of ‘The Mower’ and ‘Cut Grass’

 

 

 

 

 

Jackie Sewell reading ‘The Trees’

 

 

 

 

 

James Booth reading ‘Sunny Prestatyn’

 

Carole Collinson reading ‘This Be The Verse’

The event ended with a group reading of ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ within earshot of 32 Pearson Park.

Hopefully Philip would have approved!

 

Blending profound meditation with stand up comedy and dressed in a pink creation designed by himself Grayson Perry held a packed Middleton Hall enthralled with his witty, highly personal account of his life and work. Middle class audiences, he noted, ‘do like a reference’, and there were allusions in plenty: Breugel, Paul Nash, Alain de Botton, medieval church architecture. But Philip Larkin recurred as letmotiv through it all. Perry related that, earlier in the day he had enjoyed the, for him, novel experience of ‘being a fan’, as he had, been shown round the ordinary sites of Larkin’s life by members of the Society. He has been ‘stuck on Larkin big time’ for many years. Like Larkin he finds ‘everyday things’ lovely. His works are concerned to ‘make the everyday resonant’.

He recollected quoting from ‘This Be the Verse’ in his Turner Prize acceptance speech in 2003, when he had teased his audience with a dangerous pause: ‘They…; concluding, to some relief, ‘may not mean to, but they do.’ An account of his dysfunctional early family life (he and his siblings were ‘like shrapnel around my mother’) led to an extended analysis of his ‘self portrait as a city’, ‘A Map of Days’. The title alludes to Larkin’s poem ‘Days’, which, he remarked is ‘partly about the idea that we live in time’. Larkin would have relished Perry’s deeply lyric conception of art. The centre of the picture is occupied by an empty space through which a tiny Grayson kicks a can down a road. There is no ‘core’. We are constantly mutable, without a fixed identity, mere sequences of experience. We may talk about geography and family, we may imagine a structure to life, but ‘we’re stuck in time. We have to move on into the next second, the next minute. We can’t relax – Sorry!’ (laughter and applause).

The philosopher Julian Baggini, Perry recalled, remarks that the word I is a verb masquerading as a noun; and, in an inspired self-analysis, he applied this truth to the very artistic process by which he produces his works: ‘I start in the top left-hand corner and carry on down’. Nevertheless, this having been admitted, he is pretty good at ‘post-rationalisation’, explaining, after the event, the ‘meaning’ at which every artistic work aims. As so often when reading Larkin, the audience was entertained by an apparent no-nonsense debunking of all pretension, which on reflection revealed itself to be a profound meditation on art, on life. The lecture roamed far and wide, as did the long-legged, shiny pink-clad lecturer, striding restlessly to and fro, moving from powerpoint image of one work to another, and ending with an extended account of his ‘A house for Essex’, or ‘Julie’s House’, or ‘The Taj Mahal on the Stour’, in Wrabness Essex, his most ambitious project to date.

This was, according to all, the most exhilarating annual guest lecture we have ever heard. Even afterwards Grayson Perry was adding to the experience (as @Alan_Measles), tweeting next day, against a photograph of himself on the train from Hull:  ‘Had he been on such a fast modern train “Whitsun Weddings” would have been a haiku.’

The major biographic exhibition ‘Larkin: New Eyes Each Year’  at the University of Hull’s Brynmor Jones Library  is now open and is already generating an enormous amount of interest from press and public alike .

The exhibition, curated by Anna Farthing and designed by Craig Oldham, offers exciting new insights into Larkin’s life, drawing on some never before seen or heard items from the vast Larkin Archive housed at Hull History Centre, including images, sounds and physical artefacts.

It is a not-to-be-missed opportunity for any Larkin afficionado and is already proving to be a real highlight in Hull’s year as the UK City of Culture.

 

 

The exhibition runs from 5^th July to 1^st October.

 

In addition, a number of Larkin-related events will be on offer in Hull and the East Riding throughout the summer. These include:

 

Larkin’ Out in Victoria – poetry readings in Victoria Avenue and Pearson Park by members of the Philip Larkin Society. Sunday 16th July

 

Larkin’s Hull – A morning stroll around Hull City Centre – Saturday 8^th July, Wednesday 9^th August (Larkin’s birthday) and Saturday 30th September with Don Lee, the Society’s External Liaison Officer. Tickets are free and are bookable in advance through Hull Box Office

‘Exploiting The Larkin Archive – A Researcher’s Paradise’. Talk by Philip Pullen on Thursday 7^th September as part of Hull Heritage Days 2017

‘Larkin About Beverley’. A guided walk of Beverley led by Philip Pullen on Friday 15^th September as part of the Yorkshire Wolds and Outdoors Walking Festival. THIS EVENT IS NOW FULLY BOOKED. A second walk may possibly be arranged if there is sufficient interest. Contact Beverley Tourist Information Centre (01482 391672) for details.