Monica Jones in a photograph taken by Philip Larkin. Photograph: The estate of Philip Larkin

Sex, lies and despair: unseen letters reveal Larkin's tortured love

A cache of 2,400 letters between the poet and his long-time lover and muse, Monica Jones, charts an explosive and flawed romance

Dalya Alberge

Sunday 24 May 2020

“He lied to me, the bugger, but I loved him.” So Monica Jones described the revered poet Philip Larkin – a pithy but affectionate account of a lover who was serially unfaithful, but whose “utterly undistinguished little house” in Hull she turned into a shrine after his death.

Previously unpublished letters, however, reveal the full extent of her fury, fears and frustrations over a painful four-decade-long partnership with the man who wrote some of the most cherished verse in the English language.

“I don’t want to be and I won’t be an object of pity like a beggar’s sore,” she wrote to him in one letter. “I know you just think of me as a SITUATION, something to be fixed,” she lamented in another. She wrote repeatedly of feeling terribly alone and “so frightened”. Such was her despair that she referred to a bruised shoulder as “a kind of company”.

Her heart-wrenching thoughts are contained in 54 boxes filled with 2,400 letters to Larkin that she left to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, with the strict instruction that they were to remain closed until decades after her death. She died in 2001, aged 78.

Now Professor John Sutherland, a leading scholar and Jones’s close friend, has been given unrestricted access to the extraordinary collection.

He told the Observer that the letters were “explosive in their nature”, and represented “virtually everything that she wrote to Larkin over 37 years of separated love”.

Philip Larkin and Monica Jones at the memorial service for Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman at Westminster Abbey, London, in 1984.

Describing it as “the last great exchange of letters in literary history”, he said it was “like she’s ripping open her soul and her mind, letting it pour out. There’s a whole range of emotions. Sometimes she is furious when he doesn’t turn up for a meal she’s cooked. Other times, she’s just meditative.” She wrote of her emptiness: “Every smallest thing is too much for me.”

Larkin and Jones were both born in 1922 and studied at Oxford, although they first met at the then University College Leicester in 1946. He was a newly appointed deputy librarian and she was an English lecturer, a striking woman with peroxide hair. Larkin transferred to Queen’s University Belfast in 1950 and then five years later to the University of Hull. Jones lived for his visits. Their once-passionate relationship, blighted by their heavy drinking, lasted until his death in 1985.

Sutherland said: “Larkin had two women in Hull [one of whom was Maeve Brennan]. He would fit Monica in when he was visiting his mother up the road [in Loughborough] … Then he’d be back to Hull and the other women.”

Jones knew of those women, yet she repeatedly declared her love for Larkin in her letters: “I am so blessed to have you in my life.”

Sutherland said: “Her letters resemble a literary stream of consciousness – at times, more surging flood than stream. They have odd disjunctions. After a pages-long savage diatribe against Maeve, Monica suddenly reminds Philip to water the flowers.”

Larkin appreciated Jones as his intellectual equal, unlike his other women. He dedicated his breakthrough collection, The Less Deceived, to her – though it includes poems about his other partnerships. He bequeathed the bulk of his estate to her.

But the fact that he wrote so little poetry has been blamed on the stultifying effect of Jones, Sutherland said: “His poetry depends on four slim volumes … Around 100 poems.”

Monica Jones photographed by Larkin on the Isle of Mull, Scotland, 1971. Photograph: The estate of Philip Larkin

He noted that Kingsley Amis, Larkin’s closest friend from Oxford, was particularly vicious, dismissing her as a “grim old bag”.

“Margaret Peel in [Amis’s novel] Lucky Jim is a terrible caricature of Monica. Kingsley hadn’t met her at that point. Philip gave Kingsley all the details. He could be cruel in that way. She wrote an incredibly impassioned letter to Philip saying, ‘I am not so egotistical as to think everybody wants to put me in a book and I do not believe you would be so treacherous’.”

Jones has also been vilified for destroying 30 volumes of his diaries and private papers.

Sutherland, professor emeritus of modern English literature at University College London, was taught by Jones, and he attributes his career to her. He is now finishing a book on Jones, based on the letters, to be published next year by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. He expressed surprise that no one had written a biography of her before as she was the most important person in Larkin’s life.

He said no other biographer of Larkin had “enjoyed access to these letters”, which the Bodleian has catalogued in a “feat of librarianship at the highest level”. Poignantly, some of the envelopes still bear her lipstick marks.

The correspondence ends in the early 1970s when they got telephones. Sutherland said: “After that, he would telephone every night. When her health collapsed in the early 1980s, she moved in with him. They got drunk together. He died and she lived on drunkenly.

“She was a strange woman. You had to know her, to know the good things about her. He treated her badly, but always wrote fondly. It was an odd mixture … He did come near to trying to break up with her, but they needed each other. They were both very unhappy people.”

Sutherland hopes “to salvage Monica Jones from the versions of Monica Jones which circulated in her life and still circulate”. “From the unplumbed depths of the 54 boxes, one can exhume a Monica Jones to stand alongside Philip Larkin, not behind him as his dim correspondent shadow.”

THE GUARDIAN

The Letters of T S Eliot: Volume 8 by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden

The latest collection of T S Eliot’s letters is wonderfully insightful — but is it a little too exhaustive?

DAVID SEXTON
Thursday 17 January 2019 13:20

This immense edition of the correspondence of the greatest poet of his time is now entering its second decade. Covering just two years, this volume amounts to 1,100 pages, bringing the total so far published to a little over 7,600 pages, with 27 years of Eliot’s life still to go. Yet it is not even complete. The indefatigable, exemplary editor, John Haffenden, has posted the letters he chose not to include in each volume on a website, tseliot.com, and for these two years alone there are hundreds of them, perhaps even more than he has actually printed — eight, for example, from January 1, 1936 alone. 

Many of  the printed letters still seem at first of modest interest only: processing business for Faber & Faber, where he was an “ordinary director”; for the magazine he edited, The Criterion; and for his own career as a writer and, increasingly, a public man. 

He commissions books and articles, he assesses submissions. He responds to invitations and suggestions, always with courtesy, even when refusing. He supplies references and letters of introduction, he offers advice. He constantly apologises for delays in replying and he thanks people for their contributions, their comments, their hospitality, friendship and support.

All this can make repetitious reading now, essential though it may have been then to the literary culture he was seeking to nurture. Yet taken together these letters are little less than a lesson in conduct, a kind of tireless poise, a demonstration of grace under pressure. 

They are invariably, as Haffenden notes in his preface, “humane and engaging, constructive and inventive, and frequently jokey” — and sometimes they are more than that: revealing, touching and wise. They are also, like all good letters, wonderfully different in tone when writing to different friends and acquaintances. 

In these years, Eliot’s first stage play, Murder in the Cathedral, was being produced, and he was working on The Family Reunion. 

And it was during this time that his wife, Vivien Haigh-Wood Eliot, was finally committed to a psychiatric asylum, Northumberland House in Finsbury Park, close to Manor House Tube, after being found wandering in the streets in the early hours and taken to a police station. 

Haffenden includes enough of Vivien’s own letters, to her brother, to her bank, to Faber, and so forth, to make it clear quite how deranged she had become by this time, believing she was “OSTENTATIOUSLY FOLLOWED”, for example, and pretending to be other people acting on her behalf. 

"Taken together these letters are little less than a lesson in conduct, a demonstration of grace under pressure."

David Sexton

Eliot’s own letters dealing with her committal and support are faultlessly correct and responsible. Only once or twice in these years does he reveal his agony. In July 1936 he briefly mentions to Dorothy Pound: “I am rather shaky at the moment because I ran into my late wife in Wigmore Street an hour ago, and had to take to my heels: only people who have been ‘wanted’ know the sort of life I lead.” 

Only to his brother Henry does he speak directly of the “horrors” of his private life. There’s a revealing  letter, though, in response to Geoffrey Faber’s misgivings about the sex in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, which the company was publishing. Faber had naively confessed: “My own private struggle all my life has been to prevent sex meaning too much.” Eliot not only sees no sense in this, his view is quite the opposite, that trying to “keep sex in its place” is itself a symptom of instability.

“Between any two people (and the more intimate their relations the more important this becomes) there is always an unresolvable element of hostility,” he says. “It is I think, a coming to terms between the elements of attraction and repulsion that constitutes permanent affection…” 

To Bonamy Dobrée he writes eloquently about his understanding of St John of the Cross’s doctrine that in order to arrive at the love of God one must divest oneself of the love of created beings. “I don’t think that ordinary human affections are capable of leading us to the love of God, but rather that the love of God is capable of informing, intensifying and elevating our human affections, which otherwise may have little to distinguish them from the ‘natural’ affections of animals,” he explains. 

These are themes deep in his work — but there are also letters here about pyjamas, sherry and opening a cheese restaurant. There’s a salad recipe and a mock Abdication diary; a take-off of Henry James and spoof readers’ reports on his own verses; a denunciation of the English Verse Speaking Association and an inspiring letter of advice to the young poet George Barker, insisting “it is only necessary poems that matter” and “nothing is worth doing twice”. 

Just too many letters, though? Eliot, who did not want a biography or any letters printed “of any intimacy to anybody”, might have thought so. To one contributor he writes: “I quite agree that there are too many books, and that most books are too long. The tendency for books to say what they have to say at much greater length than necessary no doubt has something to do with the deterioration of the reading public into mere ruminants, who can only nourish themselves by a great deal of grass and reject more concentrated food.” Ha! Now, Faber, just where is that readers’ edition of Eliot’s uncollected prose?  

The Letters of T S Eliot: Volume 8: 1936-1938 edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (Faber, £50)

EVENING STANDARD

Philip Larkin is far from forgotten in Hull

 The Philip Larkin statue at Hull Paragon station.
Photograph: Alamy

Philip Larkin 

is far from forgotten in Hull

Letters
Monday 7 December 2015 19.38 GMT

What a pity that Mike Godwin (Letters, 3 December) spent the 30th anniversary of Philip Larkin’s death on a lonely pilgrimage to Larkin’s grave in Cottingham. If only he had thought a bit about it, he might have found his way to the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull, where Larkin was librarian for 30 years. There he would have discovered more than 150 members of the Larkin Society, including his biographer James Booth and his formidable secretary Betty Mackereth, enjoying wine and food in their annual celebration of the great poet, surrounded by a wonderful exhibition of Larkin photographs.

As chair of Hull City of Culture 2017, I was invited to speak about “Larkin in the light of 2017”, and did so with the assistance of my cherished first edition copy of  The Whitsun Weddings. The night was a joyous and totally unforlorn occasion, held in the building he loved. I suspect Larkin would have revelled in it. Next December, we shall all be at Westminster Abbey for the unveiling of Larkin’s plaque in Poets’ Corner. I suggest Mike Godwin comes along.

Rosie Millard
Chair, Hull City of Culture 2017

THE GUARDIAN

John Berryman / A short letter

A SHORT LETTER

by John Berryman

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, (1964). First Edition Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. 

INSCRIBED and SIGNED by Berryman with what amounts to a short letter: 

"To Anne/and to Chis--if, as Kate & I/hope without knowing anything really/about it, you have got together/again. We were bitterly sorry to/hear--from William, not in the least/as gossip--of your separation./Whatever is happening or does,let/me wish you a restoration of the/happiness I so admired in you on/Mr. Frost's last summer./Affectionately/John/The Abbott Hospital/Minneapolis 3,Minn./22 April '64." 

The book was published in April 1964 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize in May 1965. The recipients--Anne and Chis--are both referred to in Dream Song 38, contained in this volume, a poem about Robert Frost's death. The Abbott Hospital was a place of refuge for Berryman when overwhelmed by his alcoholism. "In hospitals he found his society," Saul Bellow wrote in his introduction to RECOVERY, Berryman's only novel. "University colleagues were often more philistine, less tolerant of poets than were alcoholics or suicidal girls." Cloth a bit faded and lightly spotted. Dustwrapper soiled with small chips at the spine tips. Very Good in a Very Good dustwrapper .

CHARLES ADVENT

Jay Martin / Berryman´s last student writes a letter

Jay Martin, JOHN BERRYMAN, original woodcut

BERRYMAN'S LAST STUDENT 

WRITES A LETTER

by Jay Martin

Dear Dr. Martin, you, I see, have caught
the Berryman bug.  Many another one
has come to me with questions.  Most pretend
some scholarly purpose, but I waive
pretense aside and ask directly:
‘Which Berryman do you want to know?’
I’m like a food machine.  You press
a button and I’ll deliver your selection—
John’s psychic stresses?  His abuse of drugs?
The thousand litres of alcohol he drank?
His violence toward himself and others?
His constant travels and his restlessness?
His yet more constant dream of death?
His breakdowns, deep depressions, manic flights?
His wild religious visions and revisions?
His love of women and his hate toward them?
His conquests and his losses?—All of these
were Berryman.  Which would you have?
Which of these sweet confections will you eat?
I could serve any of these dishes up to you.

But … if you asked me, if you asked me
what I think was at the center of John’s heart. . .
I’d tell you this: he was a dancer at his core.
He swayed with rhythms, and the dance steps came.
This elf, this druid, this grand roustabout
knew all the moves, the rhumba, tango,
waltz, cha-cha, samba, East Coast swing,
the Tiger Rag, Black Bottom, even the Beguine,
but best of all the lazy foxtrot
danced so slow that you could “hold a girl real tight.”
That’s the advice he always gave his pals.
At afternoon tea dances, late nights at Roseland,
in all the hip Mocambos of the world,
he always held them tight,  but not so tight
his dread of loss would ever dance away.
He could have been a Harvest Moon Ball champ,
and that way might have danced through life,
except he fell from dance to poetry.
He had a paltry fifty women in his bed,
but on the dance floor, countless thousands.
Oh, his poems were fine, his Shakespeare studies too,
but there he never could be No. 1.
That’s what he always yearned for, to reach the heights
of undisputed fame.  But there were
Frost and Lowell, Jarrell, and Schwartz, still living.
He always feared he might be No. 5.
Damn that Van Doren who made him turn to verse.
That did him in.  He should have stuck to dancing.
He had the moves, he had the rhythm there
and could have shown Astaire and Valentino steps
worth fortunes.  Only by jumping off a Minnesota bridge
in Winter could he free himself from poetry
inviting himself to dance.
On iron-cold Minnesota nights,
when the moon hangs like a spangled globe
above a ballroom floor, dispensing diamonds,
I think I see John dance across the moon
in endless marathon, holding a girl there, tight,
so tight.  The Duke and Count and Bix were swell
but now he hears the band play “Goodnight Sweetheart”
to the music of the spheres.
Goodnight sweetheart.  Dying to verse,
rising to dance, he knows, I hope, he’s

________________________________________

JAY MARTIN is the author, among other books, of Harvests of Change: American Literature 1865-1914, and Who Am I This Time?: Uncovering the Fictive Personality.  He is Professor of Government and Edward S. Gould Professor of Humanities at Claremont-McKenna College.  He is also a practicing psychoanalyst.  See: www.cmc.edu/legacy_asp/faculty/profile.asp?Fac=50 

THE FICKLE GREY BEAST

 

Elizabeth Bishop / Letters

THE SPACE BETWEEN THE WORDS

LOOKING FOR THE LIFE OF ELIZABETH BISHOP 

IN HER LETTERS

by Monica Westin

Elizabeth Bishop’s correspondence with the editors at The New Yorker who published the majority of her poems, lasting from 1934 until the poet’s death in the fall of 1979, are a provocative gesture at revealing the woman behind the writing, but they leave the reader wanting much more—in a way that’s entirely apropos to the way she worked and lived.

Elizabeth Bishop
Photo by Alice Helen Methfessel

On the one hand, the letters are entirely fitting for both Bishop’s poetry and general ethos; the genius of her poems often lies in their sensitive impersonality, and at a time when confessional poetry was de rigueur, Bishop’s strength lay in restraining herself from personal sentiment and finding an articulate but reserved mode of expression. Bishop, a U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner, was also famously protective of her personal life, not wanting to be known as a lesbian poet. The letters echo this reticence, but in so doing they don’t round out any sense of the woman herself.

If you aren’t familiar with Bishop’s work or her biography, the letters are often somewhat puzzling or enigmatic. The bulk of the discussions between Bishop and her editors are mostly business (contracts and checks, which Bishop increasingly has a harder time tracking) and editorial minutiae, often punctuation, in submitted poems, with the poems under discussion rarely included in the volume. It’s best read with Bishop’s “Complete Poems” as a companion, after familiarizing yourself with Bishop’s personal life—her partner, Alice, is only mentioned in a few letters, with little reference to who she is. And while her letters mention names of poets, such as Bishop’s mentor Marianne Moore and lifelong pen-pal Robert Lowell, they’re often in passing. Bishop doesn’t gossip, and she discusses other writers usually only when their work she admires. It’s hard not to wish for more details about her personal relationships; for example, the majority of the letters are written when Bishop was living with her Brazilian partner Lota. Readers get no sense of the relationship and its breakdown into tempestuousness—or any explanation of Lota’s job as an architect, although Bishop describes some of her projects. After Bishop left her, Lota committed suicide while visiting her, but all we learn from the book is an italicized note between two letters that Lota had overdosed. Characteristically, none of Bishop’s letters comment on this event, and the moment in the book is jarring and confusing.

Joelle Biele’s well-researched editing and introduction help explain some of the tension between Bishop and the magazine, as well as beautifully introduce the editors at The New Yorker, who come across more fully and warmly than Bishop herself in their correspondence. Howard Moss, the avuncular and travel-phobic poetry editor and Katharine White, the charming and warm editor at large (and wife of E.B. White) clearly adore Bishop, and it’s captivating to watch them try to get her to send them poems. The strongest impression that Bishop makes is that of a somewhat absentminded, slightly negligent dreamer. It’s hard not to laugh as she promises to send a travel essay on Sable Island to White for almost a decade before White, after gently reminding her in various ways, gives up, but just as often you feel anxious on Bishop’s behalf as she promises them new work more quickly than she writes it. Anyone who has ever felt pressure to deliver writing for a deadline will feel the agony of Bishop, who produced less than a hundred poems in her lifetime, at feeling pressure from various editors to send more poems before she felt they were ready. Her contract with The New Yorker was a source of stress to her; she received a salary/allowance for giving them the first cut at poems she wrote, even if she wanted them to be published elsewhere, and the letters contain subtle bargaining and a less-than-subtle, but brief, break from her contract as her frustrations with the magazine mounted. The editorial process at The New Yorker was obviously exacting and often stifling for Bishop, though there are few moments when she expresses frustration.

The letters are most poignant towards the end of Bishop’s life, as she wrote “Geography III” and had many of its poems, including “One Art” (which Bishop describes as a poem that makes everyone sad), published in The New Yorker. But ultimately, unlike, say, the letters of Flannery O’Connor, which Bishop mentions reading in one of her later letters, this volume doesn’t stand on its own as a piece of literature—it’s just another puzzle piece in the enigmatic life of the poet.

This year marks the centennial of Elizabeth Bishop’s birth, and the University of Chicago’s program in poetry and poetics and The Poetry Foundation are sponsoring a free reading of the letters February 17, 6pm, at International House, 1414 East 59th Street, with parts read by local actors and editor Biele narrating and answering questions.

Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence
Edited by Joelle Biele
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35, 496 pages