Book Reviews - Review 246

Maeve Brennan was sub-librarian at Hull University, and Philip Larkin's "unofficial" lover for most of the time that he worked there. Their relationship, though founded on deep mutual affection, was complicated by three factors: Larkin's ambivalent attachment to another woman, Monica Jones; Brennan's Catholicism, which precluded committed sexual relations outside marriage; and Larkin's belief that his creative talent was dependent on the emotional freedom of bachelorhood.

Larkin was open with Brennan about his relationship with Jones - a fact that the more mean-spirited commentators on his life might have given him more credit for. Jones' constant background presence pained Brennan, but she tolerated it, for the most part, with remarkable generosity of spirit, for reasons which she sums up as follows:

A theme running through Larkin's poetry is that once one tries to "pin down" happiness and build a life around its promises, it vanishes; his relationship with Brennan, with culmination permanently deferred, thus seems to have had an intangible perfection about it. And while Brennan probably did more giving than Larkin, she seems to have brought out the best in him: by her account he was, most of the time, a thoughtful, humorous, courteous and kind-hearted companion. Indeed, throughout the 1960s and the early 1970s, he clearly experienced considerable happiness, in contrast to the popular image of him (especially since Andrew Motion's 1993 biography) as an intractably curmudgeonly and mean-spirited man.

For a non-professional author, Brennan writes pretty well, and the book is sensibly structured, starting with an overview of her relationship with Larkin and then tracing a themes that ran through it, before ending with an account of events leading up to and after his death. That said, some of the details of library life stop a good deal short of being rivetting; and Brennan doesn't always seem particularly perceptive about Larkin's thinking or his poetry.

The final 80 pages of the book consist of a selection of letters between Brennan and Larkin. They bear witness to the tenderness of their relationship, but also shed light on an aspect of it that must have been unsatisfactory to Larkin: that Brennan wasn't his intellectual equal. The jokes and cultural observations that enliven his letters to other friends take a back seat, suggesting that she wouldn't have appreciated them; meanwhile, Brennan's own letters, while articulate enough, derive their interest from the light they shed on the relationship, and not generally from any literary qualities.

What Larkin's letters to Brennan do show - even the ones from the relatively happy days of the 1960s - are the extent of his self-preoccupation. He usually found more to complain about than to celebrate, especially so during his stints in hospital, when the litanies of fears for his health make initially amusing, but ultimately tedious reading. And though he was, for the most part, scrupulously honest with himself and others about his faults, he dwelt on them at a length that, quite often, didn't leave much room for those others in his thoughts.

But as Brennan's book illustrates, there was a warm, loving side to Larkin, and the barrage of denigration of him that greeted Andrew Motion's biography was clearly due for a corrective. Larkin had faults like all of us; his crime, it seems, was not to have paraded them during his lifetime. Anyone who has properly read his poems shouldn't have been surprised at the darker traits revealed in Motion's biography, and the Selected Letters published in 1992. Nor, though, should they be surprised at the mostly sensitive, thoughtful man that Brennan portrays.