'There Wasn't a Trace of Gloom About Him'

The story is now famous, at least among people who still read. When Philip Larkin met Margaret Thatcher in 1982, the prime minister recited lines from his “Deceptions” and committed a small misquotation. Here are the eighth and ninth lines as written by Larkin: “All the unhurried day, / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.” It’s a memorable image, so it’s easy to understand why Thatcher remembered it, even though she substituted “Her mind was full of knives.” Three years later, in a letter to Julian Barnes, Larkin noted: “She might think a mind full of knives was rather along her own lines,” adding, “not that I don’t kiss the ground she treads.” Anti-Thatcherites used the episode as evidence that the prime minister was a philistine and had been briefed on the poem by her handlers moments before the meeting. Larkin would have none of it: “I took that as a great compliment—I thought that if it weren’t spontaneous, she’d have got it right. But I am a child in these things.” As usual, Larkin was a shrewder judge of character than his (and her) critics.

Miriam Gross, who conducted a memorable interview with Larkin for the Observer in 1979, confirms Larkin’s defense of Thatcher in a recent remembrance in The Oldie: “However, I have since learned that Mrs Thatcher was an enthusiastic reader of poetry and that she knew lots of it by heart – Kipling, T S Eliot, Longfellow and, yes, Larkin.” Political partisans, as we have much recent reason to know, enjoy attacking the intelligence of their opponents, usually without ever having met them. Before the interview, Gross prepared herself by reading all of Larkin’s books, “talked to various of his friends, studied photographs and formed a strong impression of the kind of person he would be: lugubrious, shy, polite, physically unprepossessing, depressed, unforthcoming and charming.” Meeting Larkin changed all of that:

“As soon as I entered his spacious office, I realised that most of those adjectives didn’t fit. He greeted me in a positively jovial manner. There wasn’t a trace of gloom about him. If he had once been shy, he had completely cured himself of this disability. He seemed almost extrovert. His appearance, too, confounded my expectations. He was much taller and physically much more imposing than I had imagined. And yes, charming – and funny.”

None of this comes as news to close readers of Larkin’s work. His sin is to be human – that is, contradictory, impervious to cheap psychologizing and definitive understanding. What matters are the novels and poems, some of the best written in the twentieth century.