…included the current (Feb. 23) NY Review of Books, my subscription to which I keep meaning to cancel for their relentless, brainless nitwit leftism & for their taking seriously talentless bores like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but which then goes & redeems itself for another year with a piece like John Banville’s “Homage to Philip Larkin” in this issue.

Larkin was the greatest poet writing in English during my lifetime, though an odd & in some ways unattractive man. Banville, reviewing the 2003 edition of his “Collected Poems” and a new biography by Richard Bradford, gets Larkin’s measure nicely, and acknowledges his greatness. Samples:

[Larkin interviewed] “I see life more as an affair of solitude diversified by company than an affair of company diversified by solitude.”

[Same] “I’ve always been right-wing. It’s difficult to say why, but not being a political thinker I suppose I identify the Right with certain virtues and the Left with certain vices. All very unfair, no doubt.”

[Banville on Larkin’s weird father] Sydney Larkin, an accountant by profession, was a remarkable man, a self-righteous authoritarian and a keen admirer of the Nazis — he kept on the mantelpiece in the family home a miniature statue of Hitler which made a Nazi salute when a button was pressed…

[Larkin and women] Larkin vacillated between his women, lying to all of them, as he ineptly sought to conceal from each of them his true feelings for the others.

[Most famous of all Larkin interview quotes] “Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.”

[Banville on a po-mo Eng. Lit. professor quoted by Bradford] She dismisses the poems — “Actually, we don’t tend to teach Larkin much in my Department of English” — for not engaging with “everyday discriminations, everyday assumptions of white British superiority’ and for the fact that the values she thinks he celebrates sit uneasily “within our revised curriculum, which seeks to give all of our students, regardless of background, race, or creed, a voice within British culture.” By this criterion, much of the work of Shakespeare, to name but one dead white British male, would be banished from the curriculum.

[Snippet of Larkin’s verse] In everyone there sleeps / A sense of life lived according to love. / To some it means the difference they could make / By loving others, but across most it sweeps / As all they might have done had they been loved.