Required Writing

A bowl of tart fruit: some five dozen introductions, book and record reviews, bits of reminiscence, and other prose items by a cantankerous, sharp-eyed poet. Actually Larkin doesn't write poetry any more, and producing even these minor fragments seems to have been a bother to him; but flashes of his dry, acerb intelligence enliven all but the most perfunctory pieces. How not to like a man who says that "Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth," who likes living in Hull (where he is University Librarian) "because it's so far away from everywhere else," who doesn't read much (he's never heard of Francis Parkman or Borges), who loathes academic critics, and refuses to make a fuss over anything. When asked to comment on his own work, Larkin almost always dodges: "Once I have said that the poems (The Whitsun Weddings) were written in or near Hull, Yorkshire, with a succession of Royal Sovereign 2B pencils during the years 1955 to 1963, there seems little to add." Larkin damns the "culture-mongering" of Pound and Eliot, the whole "aberration of modernism," in fact, as sterile and mandarin. The only contemporary poet he praises with any feeling is Betjeman - because he "knocked over the 'No Road Through to Real Life' signs that this new tradition had erected." As if to complete his self-portrait as a conservative troglodyte, Larkin announces that he "adores" Mrs. Thatcher, despises children, and is suspicious about the "invasion of women in men's colleges." But Larkin balances such peevishness with dead-pan wit ("I wouldn't mind seeing China if I could come back the same day") and total freedom from cant. A lonely, prickly original. (Kirkus Reviews)