Talk:Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940–1985

quote to be used later?

When people come to write about the controversies of the letters, they might find this quote helpful:

Although it is not much of a defense, one might say of Larkin that he was the victim of what our teacher-priests used to call "bad companions." Richard Bradford points out that "virtually all indications that Larkin was a misogynistic, intolerant racist occur in his letters to Colin Gunner and Kingsley Amis." Amis, who was as funny as Larkin, early on abandoned his youthful socialist convictions in favor of a kind of radical low Toryism which swelled with the years to caricature proportions; Gunner, whom Larkin had not seen since their schooldays together, renewed contact with him in 1971, and the two embarked on a correspondence in which each shored up the other's baleful right-wing leanings. "Gunner," Bradford writes, "was the kind of eccentric Englishman one might expect to find in fiction but who frequently survives outside it: lower middle class, quixotic and reactionary, and almost endearingly self-destructive."

Source: New York Review of Books almost-instinct 11:54, 18 November 2009 (UTC)