But before he disappears forever once again, I would ask that a deputation of artists, writers, even critics - hell, why not a few purveyors of online smut, for old time’s sake - should be granted access to this neo-Larkin and given an audience with him. Let us hope that whichever scientific body misguidedly brought him here grants him his wish.
Judging by his consistent contempt for his own times, it is likely that Larkin would have arrived in our brave new world of cancel culture, #MeToo, sex-positivity and the rest, and asked to be sent straight back into oblivion. And the thought persists that, if some of Larkin’s DNA could be harvested in some (no doubt appropriately grubby) way, the poet could be cloned and arrive, blinking and bewildered, in 2022, to see what he makes of modernity. I will never cease to find it funny that the remainder of his well-thumbed collection of pornography, largely focusing on schoolgirl-themed erotica, is kept in pristine, catalogued condition in the archives at Hull University, along with the rest of his personal affects. He has become a writer whose glum and mournful view of life and humanity can seem simultaneously bracing and repellent, as Martin Amis’s once-popular image of Larkin as “a reclusive yet twinkly drudge - bald, bespectacled, bicycle-clipped, slumped in a shabby library gaslit against the dusk”, has given way to a view of him as a man whose predilections and obsessions were unwholesome and best off buried with him. Philip Larkin may not have asked his widowed mother Eva for an evening in the graveyard of St Michael’s Church in Lichfield (the final resting place of his father Sydney) but a century after his birth, Larkin is coming to occupy a position in English letters not so very far away from a black-phase Johnny Nice. Unfortunately, if ever the colour black intrudes on his reverie, then Johnny undergoes a Jekyll-and-Hyde-like transformation, and flies into a rage, shouting bizarrely Gothic things like “Where shall we sleep tonight, Mother? In Father’s grave?”
Johnny likes nothing more than to set-up his easel at a local beauty spot with his wife Katie. In the fondly-remembered Nineties comedy The Fast Show, one of the sketches revolved around the character of the jovial painter Johnny Nice, played by the series’ co-creator Charlie Higson. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. This article is taken from the October 2022 issue of The Critic.
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