Following on from his 2014 bio of John Betjeman, the novelist A. N. Wilson tackles the life of Philip Larkin. We follow Wilson as he retraces the poet's biographical paths in Coventry, Oxford, and Hull, interspersed with readings from his work, often recorded by Larkin himself.
From the evidence presented here, it seems that Larkin was a thoroughly unsavory character. Born into middle-class respectability in Coventry, the son of an able administrator, he witnessed the rise of Nazism in the Thirties - an experience that might account for his racist attitudes so vividly displayed in his letters. Larkin also kept a small toy of Adolf Hitler with one arm that could be raised in a fascist salute. Quite why he did so was left conveniently unexplained, but the fact that the toy remains among the poet's possessions (many of them now stored at the Hull History Centre), suggests a certain tendency towards extreme right wing attitudes.
In his personal life Larkin was relentlessly self-absorbed. Unable (or unwilling) to commit himself to a deep relationship, he conducted a long-running affair at a distance with lecturer Monica Jones. Yet this did not stop him having parallel affairs with Maeve Brennan, as well as his secretary at Hull. Jones repeatedly berated Larkin for his infidelities, but it seems that he never wanted to abandon them.
Throughout his sixty-plus years of life, Larkin never ventured abroad. Wilson explained that this was due to bad experiences during his childhood. This might be true, but Larkin's insularity rendered many of his poems extremely parochial, the product of a man of limited horizons and no real ambition. Although Wilson argued that Larkin's work summed up the spirit of Britain from the Fifties to the Seventies, the program showed that the poet embraced a very narrow version of Britishness - white, middle-class, inhibited. He had little or no understanding of the ways in which other socio- economic or ethnic groups responded to changing times.
Designed to re-establish Larkin's reputation in the popular imagination, three decades after his passing, this documentary had the opposite effect. The poet came across as a rather irascible person, someone to be shunned rather than encouraged.