An Xmas present from B, maybe with Larkin’s most famous opening line in mind. (?)
I started hating it, seeing it as a typically footnoted (and there are many) academic book of the type I used to read at university. But Larkin, about whom I knew a little, is quite interesting if indefatigably gloomy, especially as he aged.
One of his three (parallel, all known to each other and quite different) women said that his death from cancer at 63 was almost self determined; he had decided years ago that he would follow his father exactly in this respect and did.
He interested me as half a generation older, so I can empathise with about half his likes and dislikes.
His attitude to women was quite interesting; he craved sex and love, but couldn’t stand the fixity of a long term monogamous partnership, although he ended up with two, one relatively chaste due to her Catholicism, so maybe that was close.
The poetry and the detailed over analysis of it left me pretty cold; detailed textual analysis for me is a bit like chess or discriminating between wines; I know what I feel is useful to know and to go beyond that one would need to devote too much of one’s mind to a subject of limited inherent interest.
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