The Grouch From Hull

By Christopher Porterfield

TITLE: PHILIP LARKIN: A WRITER'S LIFE

AUTHOR: ANDREW MOTION

PUBLISHER: FARRAR STRAUS GIROUX; 570 PAGES; $35

THE BOTTOM LINE: The biography of England's unofficial laureate of gloom makes surprisingly lively reading.

IN 1974 TWO LEADING BRITISH POETS appeared together on a platform at Hull University. One was Ted Hughes, the widower of Sylvia Plath: intense, leather- jacketed, trailing a romantic aura. The other was Philip Larkin, an overweight, bald, bespectacled and partly deaf figure in a dark suit who later described himself as providing the "sophisticated, insincere, effete, and gold-watch-chained alternative."

Larkin made a life's work of offering the unfashionable alternative -- joking about it but meaning it too. His verse, unlike Hughes', was resolutely un-modernist; he clung to the notion that poems should be clearly written in everyday language and should avoid posturing and pretension at all costs -- though, in his hands, that left plenty of room for craft and eloquence. He steered clear of London and the literary life, spending his career as a librarian in provincial cities. Formidably shy, he never married, remaining deeply attached to a burdensome mother until her death at 91, when he was 55. He was a drinker and a jazz buff, but he habitually cloaked himself in a grave manner (when he turned 60, Alan Bennett asked, "but when was he anything else?").

Drab as this existence may sound, it was the essence of Larkin's poetic impulse. The calculated isolation, the lack of commitment were what enabled , him to write what little he did (four volumes in 40 years), just as the fate of the mockingly ironic outsider was his persistent subject. As he put it, "Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth." Characteristically, he declined the post of poet laureate, but by the time he died of cancer at 63 in 1985, he had become a sort of grumpy unofficial laureate of all that was middling, thwarted and humorously stoic in the contemporary psyche.

Andrew Motion, a fellow poet and younger colleague of Larkin's at Hull, gets close to his subject, but not too close, in this finely nuanced book. The biographer is as shrewd and sympathetic in sorting out Larkin's surprisingly energetic sex life as in parsing his poems. Larkin's longest attachment (38 years) was with Monica Jones, a lecturer at Leicester University. About halfway through this affair he took up with Maeve Brennan, a library staff member at Hull, and a few years later he added his secretary, Betty Mackereth. The point was to play one woman off against another, sometimes callously, to keep them all at a certain distance.

Motion maintains a non-p.c. perspective about the crotchets that caused such an outcry when this biography, along with Larkin's collected letters, was published in England last year: the private man's coarseness, his penchant for pornography, his blasts against women and "niggers." Much of this, Motion makes clear, was boisterous role-playing, especially in matey letters to friends like Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest.

In his later years Larkin's gift all but dried up. "I used to believe," he told Motion, "that I should perfect the work and life could f itself." Now, he lamented, "all I've got is a f ed up life." But that wasn't all he had; he still had the poems, and now we do too. Over and over, Motion reminds us that Larkin's memorably plangent way of proclaiming his own futility was in fact his triumph over it:

Life is first boredom, then fear.

Whether or not we use it, it goes,

And leaves what something hidden

from us chose,

And age, and then the only end of

age.