Martin Amis Considers Philip Larkin's Legacy

Martin Amis's latest collection of essays The Rub of Time (2017) documents his meditations on poets and novelists. In this Los Angeles Review of Books interview with Scott Timberg, Amis talks about the fraught relationship between Philip Larkin's life and writings. Timberg leads their discussion with this question: "Your new collection includes a few new pieces on Philip Larkin. Has the Big Issue about Larkin — that his often delicate, sometimes sweeping poetry was written by a man with very limited life experience and a true nasty streak — softened at all over time? Is this still held against him?" From there: 

MARTIN AMIS: It was during the 1990s, after the appearance of his letters and Andrew Motion’s biography, that Larkin’s reputation sank. And it has largely recovered. I’m durably committed to his poetry, but I think his life was a mess. And a terrible failure. So I’m sort of more ambiguous about it than I used to be. I didn’t toe the critical line about his purported racism and misogyny — though those are definitely there. But I find I can separate the man and the work quite easily. It’s never troubled me, except when I consider his life in the absence of his poetry, and then it’s very unattractive.

You have a great line on Larkin in one of your essays, where you say he’s not exactly a poet’s poet — he’s too widely embraced for that — but a novelist’s poet. Tell me what you mean by that.

Well, it was suggested to me by the poet-novelist Nick Laird. We were talking about Zadie [Smith, Laird’s wife] loving Larkin, and Nick said, “All novelists love Larkin.” That resonated for me, and when I came to write that piece I saw just how true it was — that he belongs with the novelists rather than the other poets. “A poet’s poet” is usually very much in danger of being precious, or exquisitely technical. Larkin is technically amazing, but he doesn’t draw attention to it. It’s his character observation and phrase-making that put him in the camp of the novelists, I think.

Read more at Los Angeles Review of Books.