IN THE FONDLY-REMEMBERED Nineties comedy The Fast Show, one of the sketches revolved around the character of the jovial painter Johnny Nice, played by the series’ co-creator Charlie Higson. Johnny likes nothing more than to set-up his easel at a local beauty spot with his wife Katie. Unfortunately, if ever the colour black intrudes on his reverie, then Johnny undergoes a Jekyll-and-Hyde-like transformation, and flies into a rage, shouting bizarrely Gothic things like “Where shall we sleep tonight, Mother? In Father’s grave?”
Philip Larkin may not have asked his widowed mother Eva for an evening in the graveyard of St Michael’s Church in Lichfield (the final resting place of his father Sydney) but a century after his birth, Larkin is coming to occupy a position in English letters not so very far away from a black-phase Johnny Nice.
He has become a writer whose glum and mournful view of life and humanity can seem simultaneously bracing and repellent, as Martin Amis’s once-popular image of Larkin as “a reclusive yet twinkly drudge — bald, bespectacled, bicycle-clipped, slumped in a shabby library gaslit against the dusk”, has given way to a view of him as a man whose predilections and obsessions were unwholesome and best off buried with him.
that the remainder of his well-thumbed collection of pornography, largely focusing on schoolgirl-themed erotica,
