The joys and misery of Monica
Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me by John Sutherland, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20
EARLY IN HIS FASCINATING biography, John Sutherland relates that Monica Jones, on first seeing Philip Larkin in Leicester University College, was heard to say that he looked “like a snorer”. Sutherland suggests, plausibly, that this was a mishearing for “schnorrer” — slang Yiddish for worthless Jew — and that “Monica was casually anti-Semitic in her conversation”.
Within a matter of months the young novelist had embarked on A New World Symphony, focused on an unpleasantly anti-Semitic provincial lecturer, Augusta, with bad teeth and a pulsing vein at her temple.
Larkin’s plans for the later part of the new novel show that the aloof, vulnerable, Augusta was to throw off her prejudices and be transported by Mrs Klein, a Jewish colleague whose husband had been killed by the Nazis, to the New World where
