THE BITTER PRICE OF LOVING LARKIN
Monica Jones, Philip Larkin And Me
John Sutherland W&N €20 ★★★★★
Monica Jones wasted her life hoping to become Mrs Philip Larkin. Larkin, unquestionably a poet of genius, while simultaneously a deeply unpleasant man, made it clear to her he had no intention of being trapped ‘behind the wallbars of matrimony’. For over 30 years they lived 100 miles apart: she in Leicester and he in Hull, spending one weekend in four together, with an annual holiday on the Channel Islands. and she refused to publish any books. Larkin, meanwhile, became feted as a literary great.
He had affairs with several other women, while encouraging friends to mock Jones. Kingsley Amis, who described her as a ‘grim old bag’, immortalised her as the grotesque Margaret Peel in his novel Lucky Jim, which Larkin described as the funniest book he’d ever read.
Christopher Hitchens called her ‘frigid, drab, and hysterical’. Larkin cruelly told
her to talk more quietly as ‘you’ve no idea of the exhausting quality of yourself in full voice’.
Now John Sutherland, Professor of English Literature at University College London, attempts to redeem Jones, his undergraduate mentor. He is the first scholar to see the 54 boxes of Jones’s letters to Larkin. He concludes that Jones gave up her life to Larkin ‘because [she] believed his literary genius made sacrifice a tribute’. But that doesn’t make her largely unrequited passion any more edifying.
Born at a time when a woman’s achievements were nothing if she couldn’t hook a man, she despised other women and had no female friends. In her letters, she tried to entertain and titillate Larkin but too often descended into excoriating self-hatred. ‘I am simply ridiculous – a reject,’ was a typical line. She died in 2001, having spent much of her life suffering a ‘borderline psychotic’ loneliness, recurring bulimia, paranoia and anxiety.
You pity her for this, but it’s impossible to forgive Jones’s vocal antisemitism and the vile racist ditties she and Larkin composed and recorded together about kicking out ‘the n ****** ’.
Overall, Jones’s life reads like material for a Larkin poem – squandered in the provinces, destroyed by a misplaced belief in his often-quoted line ‘What will survive of us is love.’ Either way, love brought her only misery.