How brush over Chatterley ban lit Larkin’s creative fire
IF A librarian at the Bodleian had had her way, Philip Larkin would never have read Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
It was DH Lawrence’s erotic novel, which was banned until 1960, that partly inspired Larkin to write Annus Mirabilis, his celebrated 1967 poem about the year that sex was apparently invented in Britain: “Sexual intercourse began/ In nineteen sixty-three/ (which was rather late for me) / Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban/ And the Beatles’ first LP… ” Now a previously unpublished letter reveals the librarian in Oxford did her hardest to stop him reading anything as salacious as a novel that was to spark a landmark obscenity trial two decades later.
Larkin was just 18 when, in March 1941, he wrote to his older sister Kitty of an exasperating attempt to order Lady Chatterley’s Lover and a volume of Lawrence’s paintings in the Bodleian: “After about three quarters of an hour I was disturbed at my seat/desk by… an unpleasant girl with spectacles – with a face as red as a peony who demanded, ‘What is your reason for applying for these books?’
“I said, ‘I want to read them.’ This rather puzzled her. She didn’t consider this a serious answer & pressed me for a reason ... With motions of the hands suggesting one who explains to a child, I pointed out that these works were not available to the general public and, as I had a considerable admiration for Lawrence, I wanted to read them. She said I couldn’t have them without being a student of Lawrence or writing a thesis on him... I said: ‘Isn’t that childish?’ She became even redder.” She directed him to her senior, a “Mr Wright”, ridiculed by Larkin as “an objectionable little man like a constipated bank clerk”.
Larkin added: “I repeated the foregoing in essentials and so did he. Then I remarked with pontifical scorn: ‘You see, I don’t consider these works obscene.’ This touched him in his sensitive spot – his ‘tolerance’ – and he snivellingly began explaining that neither did he nor the Library. I said their action implied as much, and brushing aside his mumbling about copyright, responsibility, defacement, etc. I shambled back to my seat, snarling.”
The letter is included in a forthcoming book, Philip Larkin: Letters Home 1936–1977, published on Nov 1. It focuses on the last major archive of Larkin’s unpublished writings – letters to his family – held by the University of Hull, where he worked as librarian from 1955 until his death in 1985.
James Booth, the book’s editor and Larkin’s biographer, said it was “pretty bold” for an undergraduate then to pursue a banned novel: “His letter shows an unusual assurance for a writer so young.”
Larkin letters: Review