Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me: Her Life and Long Loves, by John Sutherland
REVIEW BY A N WILSON
moments of ‘sexual frenzy’; how Diana Vreeland remarked of David Bailey, ‘The queer side of Bailey is that he likes women’; or how Noël Coward advised the young Bruce Chatwin, ‘Never let anything artistic stand in your way.’
Although Vickers has added necessary – and illuminating – footnotes, and short linking passages in italic, he has resisted the temptation to edit his younger self. We are left with his charmingly ingenuous rapture over a – very – brief encounter with ‘THE PRINCESS OF WALES’: ‘It was as though one had met the girl of one’s dreams, never believing such a thing possible.’ (An editorial aside tersely remarks that these ‘sparklingly original words’ show ‘the pulverising effect that royalty has on so many mortals’.)
The revelation of personal feeling is rare. Vickers’s brilliance as a diarist is in his sympathetic objectivity. There is something Firbankian in the dabs of impressionist detail, the snatches of waspish dialogue and the telegraphic concision, to say nothing of the plethora of titled ladies and ‘lesbianic’ lapdogs.
And, to rival even the eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, there is the arresting (and wonderfully described) figure of Stephen Tennant, the rouged recluse of Wilsford Manor. He is one of the constants in the book – a source of fascination to almost all of Vickers’s interviewees.
Indeed, amid the coruscation of anecdote and gossip, the diary builds up a vivid picture of the biographer’s craft, as we witness the author carefully assembling his information about Beaton, asking the same questions of different people – with often wildly different results.
There are conflicting estimates of Beaton’s achievements – ranging from genius to a ‘middle-class’ capacity for hard work. Lady Juliet Duff thought that he had ‘flair but absolutely no taste’. She taught him that every room in a country house must have a trowel by the grate ‘to give the impression of gardening, etc’.
There were differing views about his sex life – his gay loves, heterosexual liaisons and relationship with Greta Garbo. The one thing on which everyone seemed able to agree, though, was the excellence of his exemplary manservant, Mr Grant. Beaton claimed not to know his first name.
By the end of this book, the reader will be left with a no less profound admiration for the excellence of the exemplary Mr Vickers.
One of the best chapters in this gallant – I would say, actually heroic – book describes Monica Jones lecturing at what she persisted in calling the College and others were by then calling the University of Leicester.
She was clearly a gifted, histrionic lecturer, who dressed to match her themes. If her beloved Sir Walter Scott was the subject, tartan would be worn. Swinging pearls if Cleopatra was the matter of her discourse. On this occasion, she was swathed in the deep black of the Oxford MA gown, of which she was so proud that she sported a black cashmere jumper and black tights to match the funerary garb of the Prince of Denmark.
Her lecture was a diatribe against the ‘lilac establishment’ – Gielgud and co. There was nothing admirable about Hamlet. He was a lout. He robbed Ophelia of her virginity and her dignity. He shamed her reputation at court, making oafish jokes about ‘country matters’. ‘I loved thee not,’ he brutally tells her. ‘I was the more deceived,’ says Ophelia in reply to … to whom? To Hamlet, or to the author of a volume called The Less Deceived, one P A Larkin, then rising in fame and, after giving Monica to understand she was The One, having skedaddled, first to Belfast, then to Hull.
Already Miss Jones was a byword on the campus of Leicester, known as the original of Margaret Peel, the awful girlfriend of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. (She was in the lonely position of being the only person in the world not to have found that book funny.) It was well known that Jim Dixon was inspired partly by Kingsley himself, partly by his chum former Leicester librarian P A Larkin, who had lived at Dixon Road, Leicester.
Larkin had supplied Amis with all the real malice about ‘Margaret’. Yet she stayed with him, as this remarkable book shows – stayed until the end, eventually moving into his bleak house in Hull and helping him drink himself silly, while they egged one another on to further extremes of racism, misanthropy, misogyny and hate.
Monica Jones never got academic preferment, because she would not write a book; not even an article for a learned journal. Plenty of great people, from Christ and Socrates to most of our favourite teachers, have never published. And this book is written in part as a tribute to his old Leicester teacher by the distinguished literary professor John Sutherland, who remained a grateful admirer and fellow boozer until Monica’s alcoholism made her a housebound hermit.
There is a paradox at the heart of the book, however, as there is in the very title. He wants to give us Monica in her own right. He proudly says that she is the only Leicester lecturer to have made it into the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. But, of course, he would not have written the book unless she had been the decades-long neglected, belittled, betrayed attachment of a famous poet.
Larkin’s best prose-writing is to be found in the volume entitled Letters to Monica, and when we heard that she had bequeathed her own letters to him to the Bodleian Library, we hoped she might prove to be one of those writers – like Jane Welsh Carlyle, to whom she sometimes compared herself – whose independent existence sprang to life posthumously on the page, through letters.
Her prolixity made it impossible for Sutherland simply to reproduce the letters. That and their defying every current law of wokery. The Senior Common Room at Leicester seen through Jones’s Edna Everage specs is ‘a glittering mob of foreigners, Papists, pansies, Scotchmen, local historians, Jews’. Her letters, Sutherland says, are ‘a long cry of pain’, with emphasis on the word long.
In one letter – ‘Do you realise that in this January I shall have been IN THIS PLACE FOR TEN YEARS’ – we are told that the ‘self-laceration’ that follows – dwelling on the fact that the poet no longer finds her ‘sexually inflaming’ – continues for 16 pages. When her cottage in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, was burgled, Larkin got a 15-pager. When he failed to turn up for her birthday, after she had