Philip Larkin
“But he did at last have to furnish his life in the expected manner. He described the upheaval to Anthony Thwaite with gloomy wit: ‘I’ve been v. upset [. . .] in most senses: feel like a tortoise that has been taken out of one shell and put in another.’ He had had to cope with a jammed door, lost key and ill-fitting carpet, and needed to ‘buy heap furniture fast’. Moreover, ‘The garden is growing. Feel like Hölderlin going bonk.’ He concluded in the plaintive tones of an exile: ‘Drop me a line o...ccasionally.’2 Judy Egerton helped him choose a stylish lampshade in London.3 He bought a new washing machine and no longer had the pleasure of wringing out his socks and underwear by hand, as he had done all his life. He mourned the loss of his simple attic existence. He could not find a satisfactory place to work, so he recreated his flat, sitting in an armchair by the fire downstairs, his back to the garden, bookshelves within reach. He wrote to Barbara Pym, ‘Perhaps I shall produce a version of About the House (Auden’s sequence about his Austrian “pad”),’ adding a grim self-quotation: ‘“Well, we shall find out.”’4Andrew Motion’s interpretation of Larkin’s state of mind at this point seems ungenerous.MoreLess
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