First Boredom, Then Fear

First Boredom, Then Fear: The Life of Philip Larkin by Richard Bradford, 263 pages

Philip Larkin is generally accepted as one of the greatest English poets of the latter half of the 20th century.  The publication of his collected letters in 1992, unfortunately, led to a chorus of denunciations due to his outspoken heretical views on matters of race and gender.  First Boredom, Then Fear is Richard Bradford's attempt to correct the record, casting Larkin's racism and xenophobia as consciously exaggerated in his letters and incidental to his poetry.

Certainly, Bradford treats his subject with respect.  His book is a literary biography in the best sense, illuminating the poetry through the life of the poet.  This is somewhat difficult with Larkin, who was, as Bradford notes, uncomfortable with anything that revealed too much of himself.  In Bradford's telling, even Larkin's closest friend could only say, "He didn't keep half his life in compartments."  And yet, paradoxically, this was the same poet who "spoke so candidly to his readers." 

Some readers, exposed to the candid Larkin, are likely to agree with those who saw in him the embodiment of "an undergraduate attitude perpetuated into adult life."  Like all artists, Larkin was a man of his time and place, and for him that was England in a particularly silly season.  Seen from this perspective, his commitment to an accessible, popular poetry and his lifelong fascination with the permanent things take on a value diminished but not extinguished by his chronic inability to commit himself.