Someone Call Hollywood!
John Sutherland, Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me: Her Life and Long Loves
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 288pp, £20.00, ISBN 9781474620185
reviewed by William Poulos
Poetry studies are becoming more like Hollywood. I don’t mean that they’re becoming more accessible or more entertaining. Rather, they’re becoming more and more obsessed with poets’ lives, as if poets were as glamorous or as interesting as Cary Grant or Marilyn Monroe. As the mounds of biographies, letters, memoirs and diaries increase, the poems lie neglected, foxing in some untidy spot. Back in the dark days, critics, deprived of the light of biographical scholarship, were forced to understand poems by reading them. The sort of criticism that discussed things like syllables, iambs, and trochees — the technical stuff of poetry — was known as ‘kitchen criticism’. Here is today’s kitchen criticism: ‘Monica loved eating and, particularly, slow-roasting, fowl. . . Her letters are salivatingly rich with chickens… partridge and duck. “Fred,” her poulterer, took care of her needs.’
But wait – the poet we’re interested in is Philip Larkin. Who was Monica? And why does anyone care that she liked to eat birds? Margaret Monica Beale Jones was one of Larkin’s many long-time lovers. Why is she, and not any of the other women, the subject of a biography? (I pray that no opportunistic publisher gets any ideas about filling this gap.) Sutherland states his case: ‘I believe . . . that Monica was a significant force on Larkin’s writing… that his poetry would not be what it is without her in its mix. But. . . I will leave it to the readers to make their own judgements after they have reviewed the evidence.’ When the argument is put so modestly, how could it fail? When the planned trajectory is only three feet high, what are the chances of a crash landing?
Unfortunately, the argument doesn’t even launch. Described in the press as a part-memoir, part-biography, Sutherland’s book is a one-man festschrift for a scholar who published nothing. The book’s front flap promises that Sutherland, who personally knew Monica and has read letters of hers which no one else has, will show us a new side of her story and allow her to ‘finally step out from behind the poet’s shadow’. Having carefully read Sutherland’s book and reviewed his evidence, I wonder if she should step back into the poet’s shadow.
Given Sutherland’s friendship with Monica, I would expect him to outline her virtues (if any) and explain how these affected Larkin and his poetry. Instead, Sutherland gives us episodes of Monica at home, Monica at work, Monica with Larkin, Monica in the kitchen, as if a series of anecdotes adds up to a personality. I am sure there was more to Monica than can be recorded in print — it seems like she was a great lecturer and fun at the pub — but there’s nothing in Sutherland’s book to suggest that Larkin’s poetry would have been much different without her.
With a first from Oxford and a reference from (later Dame) Helen Gardner, Monica joined the English Department at the University of Leicester. There she met Larkin, who briefly was the assistant librarian. But while he moved around the United Kingdom, she stayed in Leicester for 37 years. Soon after she joined the department, it found a new leader in the redoubtable A.R. Humphreys, whose untiring efforts transformed it from a weak, young thing into a prize-winning fighter. While the department flourished, Monica floundered. Some in the press have attributed this to the sexism of her colleagues. That might be part of the explanation, but not all of it. To put it charitably, Monica was unambitious. To put it another way, she stubbornly refused to do anything that might improve her career. Humphreys was editing a book — did Monica want to contribute a chapter about George Crabbe, one of her favourite authors? No. Humphreys noticed that the American government was giving fellowships to British academics to spend some time at American universities — did Monica want to apply? No. Instead, she complained about being the ‘department ghost’, and wrote of Humphreys that ‘his clothes are appalling not just old, not just dirty, tho’ they were both, but so cheap! They’d never been anything but appalling from the day he carried them home from a closing down sale at a surplus govt. supply store . . . convicts’ clothes’.
Contributing nothing to English scholarship, what did she contribute to English poetry? How could she be so influential on Larkin when, most of the time, they weren’t living in the same city and he was seeing other women? Sutherland argues that she ‘confirmed his sense of where the main tradition of English poetry, which he intended to lead, lay: Hardy not Eliot. Rhyme and half-rhyme not vers libre. Small not grand subjects. Self not world,’ and reassured him that ‘he was right to define himself as a traditionalist poet’. It’s discouraging to see an acclaimed scholar treat English poetry so simplistically; I’ve seen Hollywood movies with more nuance. Yes, Larkin and Monica loved Hardy’s poetry. Eliot, though, rhymed and half-rhymed consistently throughout his career, and in fact saved the tradition of English poetry from the triteness and archaism which threatened it. Hardy was a great talent, but much of his poetry is mannered beyond belief, if not endurance: his poem about the Titanic, ‘The Convergence of the Twain,’ (‘And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.’) was published only ten years before The Waste Land but sounds like it was written in the 17th century. Larkin often scorned ‘modernism’ but couldn’t escape Eliot’s example: compare Eliot’s ‘Preludes’ with Larkin’s ‘Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel’. Finally, Larkin was a ‘traditionalist’ poet in only the most superficial sense. Which ‘traditionalist’ poet could write ‘This Be The Verse’, ‘High Windows’, or ‘Love Again’?
Sutherland claims that Monica sacrificed herself for Larkin’s poetry. The reality is sadder. Disloyal to every woman he loved, Larkin sacrificed her for Lucky Jim, the novel which he edited for Kingsley Amis, and in which Monica is cruelly portrayed as Margaret Peel. If there was any influence, it seems like it flowed from Larkin to Monica. He did what I have never been able to do with any woman: he got her to like cricket. (They went to Lords every year.) The literary historian Peter Keating, who knew Monica for four years, was amazed that she knew about the jazz musicians Sidney Bechet, King Oliver, and Wild Bill Davison, all of whom often appear in Larkin’s jazz criticism. Larkin and Monica shared many moral failings: he was unfaithful to her; she was faithful to him. Had she left him she might have made something of herself.
Something more than a correspondent, at least. Many have noted that she brought the best out of his letter writing, though Sutherland doesn’t do it or their missives justice: ‘Fountain pen in hand, he was, literally, fountainous.’ Lest you think that the book is written by a character from Mean Girls, there is the odd vapid passage to remind you that Sutherland is an academic: ‘Monica’s darkest moments are Kurtzian. Philip’s are more Marcus Aurelius. As T.S. Eliot said of Larkin, he could make words mean what he wanted them to mean. Monica left words to speak for themselves. Their letters, in their reciprocal totality, are a unique literary duet. A genre for which we have no name.’ At least you can pity the Hollywood starlets. Sutherland should know better. What is the point of mentioning Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz, a Roman emperor, and T.S. Eliot? Why say that Larkin and Monica had ‘constructed themselves into a twentieth-century Heloise and Abelard’? With these allusions, Sutherland is trying to make the Larkin-Monica relationship sound more important than it actually is; he’s straining to make his argument convincing. Worse than that is when he describes Leicester University after the publication of Lucky Jim. It was, he tells us, Monica’s ‘gulag’. Teaching literature at a post-war English university sounds pretty nice to me. What were those Soviet prisoners complaining about?
For some reason, Sutherland spends a lot of time describing Monica’s taste in clothes and accessories: tortoiseshell glasses, high heels, Dior perfume, and her Parisian ‘New Look’ style. He records the opinion of one of her former students, who says that she was ‘very suspiciously blonde, very highly made-up’ and that ‘her tops were much too low at the front’. He records that Larkin said that her legs were ‘the only legs’ he ever ‘saw the point of’. He records that Larkin liked watching her undress, and especially liked her black nylon panties ‘with the small hole in!’ He records that she wore a tartan stole when giving lectures about Macbeth. How does any of this help us understand Larkin’s poetry? Beats me — but a stylish, intelligent woman who falls in love with a poet-librarian, doesn’t break up with him despite his infidelity, becomes an alcoholic, then, without telling the other literary executors, burns his diaries and unfinished works after his death? Someone call Hollywood!
But wait – the poet we’re interested in is Philip Larkin. Who was Monica? And why does anyone care that she liked to eat birds? Margaret Monica Beale Jones was one of Larkin’s many long-time lovers. Why is she, and not any of the other women, the subject of a biography? (I pray that no opportunistic publisher gets any ideas about filling this gap.) Sutherland states his case: ‘I believe . . . that Monica was a significant force on Larkin’s writing… that his poetry would not be what it is without her in its mix. But. . . I will leave it to the readers to make their own judgements after they have reviewed the evidence.’ When the argument is put so modestly, how could it fail? When the planned trajectory is only three feet high, what are the chances of a crash landing?
Unfortunately, the argument doesn’t even launch. Described in the press as a part-memoir, part-biography, Sutherland’s book is a one-man festschrift for a scholar who published nothing. The book’s front flap promises that Sutherland, who personally knew Monica and has read letters of hers which no one else has, will show us a new side of her story and allow her to ‘finally step out from behind the poet’s shadow’. Having carefully read Sutherland’s book and reviewed his evidence, I wonder if she should step back into the poet’s shadow.
Given Sutherland’s friendship with Monica, I would expect him to outline her virtues (if any) and explain how these affected Larkin and his poetry. Instead, Sutherland gives us episodes of Monica at home, Monica at work, Monica with Larkin, Monica in the kitchen, as if a series of anecdotes adds up to a personality. I am sure there was more to Monica than can be recorded in print — it seems like she was a great lecturer and fun at the pub — but there’s nothing in Sutherland’s book to suggest that Larkin’s poetry would have been much different without her.
With a first from Oxford and a reference from (later Dame) Helen Gardner, Monica joined the English Department at the University of Leicester. There she met Larkin, who briefly was the assistant librarian. But while he moved around the United Kingdom, she stayed in Leicester for 37 years. Soon after she joined the department, it found a new leader in the redoubtable A.R. Humphreys, whose untiring efforts transformed it from a weak, young thing into a prize-winning fighter. While the department flourished, Monica floundered. Some in the press have attributed this to the sexism of her colleagues. That might be part of the explanation, but not all of it. To put it charitably, Monica was unambitious. To put it another way, she stubbornly refused to do anything that might improve her career. Humphreys was editing a book — did Monica want to contribute a chapter about George Crabbe, one of her favourite authors? No. Humphreys noticed that the American government was giving fellowships to British academics to spend some time at American universities — did Monica want to apply? No. Instead, she complained about being the ‘department ghost’, and wrote of Humphreys that ‘his clothes are appalling not just old, not just dirty, tho’ they were both, but so cheap! They’d never been anything but appalling from the day he carried them home from a closing down sale at a surplus govt. supply store . . . convicts’ clothes’.
Contributing nothing to English scholarship, what did she contribute to English poetry? How could she be so influential on Larkin when, most of the time, they weren’t living in the same city and he was seeing other women? Sutherland argues that she ‘confirmed his sense of where the main tradition of English poetry, which he intended to lead, lay: Hardy not Eliot. Rhyme and half-rhyme not vers libre. Small not grand subjects. Self not world,’ and reassured him that ‘he was right to define himself as a traditionalist poet’. It’s discouraging to see an acclaimed scholar treat English poetry so simplistically; I’ve seen Hollywood movies with more nuance. Yes, Larkin and Monica loved Hardy’s poetry. Eliot, though, rhymed and half-rhymed consistently throughout his career, and in fact saved the tradition of English poetry from the triteness and archaism which threatened it. Hardy was a great talent, but much of his poetry is mannered beyond belief, if not endurance: his poem about the Titanic, ‘The Convergence of the Twain,’ (‘And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.’) was published only ten years before The Waste Land but sounds like it was written in the 17th century. Larkin often scorned ‘modernism’ but couldn’t escape Eliot’s example: compare Eliot’s ‘Preludes’ with Larkin’s ‘Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel’. Finally, Larkin was a ‘traditionalist’ poet in only the most superficial sense. Which ‘traditionalist’ poet could write ‘This Be The Verse’, ‘High Windows’, or ‘Love Again’?
Sutherland claims that Monica sacrificed herself for Larkin’s poetry. The reality is sadder. Disloyal to every woman he loved, Larkin sacrificed her for Lucky Jim, the novel which he edited for Kingsley Amis, and in which Monica is cruelly portrayed as Margaret Peel. If there was any influence, it seems like it flowed from Larkin to Monica. He did what I have never been able to do with any woman: he got her to like cricket. (They went to Lords every year.) The literary historian Peter Keating, who knew Monica for four years, was amazed that she knew about the jazz musicians Sidney Bechet, King Oliver, and Wild Bill Davison, all of whom often appear in Larkin’s jazz criticism. Larkin and Monica shared many moral failings: he was unfaithful to her; she was faithful to him. Had she left him she might have made something of herself.
Something more than a correspondent, at least. Many have noted that she brought the best out of his letter writing, though Sutherland doesn’t do it or their missives justice: ‘Fountain pen in hand, he was, literally, fountainous.’ Lest you think that the book is written by a character from Mean Girls, there is the odd vapid passage to remind you that Sutherland is an academic: ‘Monica’s darkest moments are Kurtzian. Philip’s are more Marcus Aurelius. As T.S. Eliot said of Larkin, he could make words mean what he wanted them to mean. Monica left words to speak for themselves. Their letters, in their reciprocal totality, are a unique literary duet. A genre for which we have no name.’ At least you can pity the Hollywood starlets. Sutherland should know better. What is the point of mentioning Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz, a Roman emperor, and T.S. Eliot? Why say that Larkin and Monica had ‘constructed themselves into a twentieth-century Heloise and Abelard’? With these allusions, Sutherland is trying to make the Larkin-Monica relationship sound more important than it actually is; he’s straining to make his argument convincing. Worse than that is when he describes Leicester University after the publication of Lucky Jim. It was, he tells us, Monica’s ‘gulag’. Teaching literature at a post-war English university sounds pretty nice to me. What were those Soviet prisoners complaining about?
For some reason, Sutherland spends a lot of time describing Monica’s taste in clothes and accessories: tortoiseshell glasses, high heels, Dior perfume, and her Parisian ‘New Look’ style. He records the opinion of one of her former students, who says that she was ‘very suspiciously blonde, very highly made-up’ and that ‘her tops were much too low at the front’. He records that Larkin said that her legs were ‘the only legs’ he ever ‘saw the point of’. He records that Larkin liked watching her undress, and especially liked her black nylon panties ‘with the small hole in!’ He records that she wore a tartan stole when giving lectures about Macbeth. How does any of this help us understand Larkin’s poetry? Beats me — but a stylish, intelligent woman who falls in love with a poet-librarian, doesn’t break up with him despite his infidelity, becomes an alcoholic, then, without telling the other literary executors, burns his diaries and unfinished works after his death? Someone call Hollywood!