Philip Larkin was not an inescapable presence in America, as he was in England, and to some extent you can see America’s point. His Englishness was so desolate and inhospitable that even the English were often scandalized by it. Certainly, you won’t find his work in the Personal Growth or Self-Improvement section of your local bookstore. “Man hands on misery to man,” as he once put it:

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don’t have any kids yourself.

All his values and attitudes were utterly, even fanatically “negative.” He really was “anti-life”—a condition that many are accused of but few achieve. To put it at its harshest, you could say that there is in his ethos a vein of spiritual poverty, almost of spiritual squalor. Along with John Betjeman, he was England’s best-loved postwar poet; but he didn’t love postwar England, or anything else. He didn’t love—end of story —because love seemed derisory when set against death. “The past is past and the future neuter”; “Life is first boredom, then fear”... That these elements should have produced a corpus full of truth, beauty, instruction, delight—and much wincing humor—is one of the many great retrievals wrought by irony. Everything about Larkin rests on irony, that English specialty and vice.

Anti-intellectual, incurious, and reactionary (“Oh, I adore Mrs Thatcher”), Larkin was himself an anti-poet. He never wanted to go anywhere or do anything. “I’ve never been to America, nor to anywhere else, for that matter.” Asked by an interviewer whether he would like to visit, say, China, he replied, ‘‘I wouldn’t mind seeing China if I could come back the same day.” He never read his poems in public, never lectured on poetry, and “never taught anyone how to write it.” He lived in Hull, which is like living in Akron, Ohio, with the further advantage that it is more or less impossible to get to.

His meanness was legendary, and closely connected to the solitude he built around himself. It is said that he never owned more than one kitchen chair, to make sure that no one could stop by for lunch—or, worse, come to stay. Christmas shopping was, for him, “that annual conversion of one’s indifference to others into active hatred.” Sometimes, though, he weakened:

Finding Stevie Smith’s Not Waving but Drowning in a bookshop one Christmas some years ago, I was sufficiently impressed by it to buy a number of copies for random distribution among friends. The surprise this caused them was partly, no doubt, due'to the reaction that before the war led us to emend the celebrated cigarette advertisement “If So-and-So [usually a well-known theatrical personality] offered you a cigarette it would be a Kensitas” by substituting for the brand name the words “bloody miracle”.

His feelings about money were complicated and pleasureless. He pronounced the word bills as if it were a violent obscenity. (He brooded deeply about his bills.) He always had enough money and, anyway, there was nothing he wanted to spend it on.

Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:

“Why do you let me lie here wastefully?

I am all you never had of goods and sex.

You could get them still by writing a few cheques.”

I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down

From long french windows at a provincial town,

The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad

In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

Money meant work, and there was a priestly stoicism in Larkin’s devotion, or submission, to his job as university librarian at Hull. He supervised a staff of over a hundred; typically, he was a brilliant administrator, with a great talent for drudgery. Work was the “toad” that he let “squat on my life.” In the last decade he didn’t need the job any longer, but he thought (with maximum lack of glamour), “Well, I might as well get my pension, since I’ve gone so far.”

What else can I answer,

When the lights come on at four

At the end of another year?

Give me your arm, old toad;

Help me down Cemetery Road.

He never married, naturally, and made a boast of his aversion to children. “Children are very horrible, aren’t they? Selfish, noisy, cruel, vulgar little brutes.” As a child himself, he has said, he thought he hated everybody, “but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn’t like.” His own childhood he repeatedly dismissed as “a forgotten boredom” (“ ‘Nothing, like something, happens anywhere’ ”). You feel that the very notion of childhood, with all its agitation and enchantment, was simply too “sexy” for Larkin. He regarded married life as a terrible mystery, something that other people did (and “other people are Hell”), a matter for appalled—and double-edged—ridicule:

He married a woman to stop her getting away 

Now she’s there all day,

And the money he gets for wasting his life on work 

She takes as her perk 

To pay for the kiddies’ clobber and the drier

And the electric fire,. ..

And so on, until the inevitable revenge:

So he and I are the same,

Only I’m a better hand At knowing what I can stand 

Without them sending a van—

Or I suppose I can.

The clinching paradox may be, however, that Larkin will survive as a romantic poet, an exponent of the ironic romance of exclusion, or inversion. One review of High Windows (his last book of poems, and his best by some distance) was headed “Don Juan in Hull,” and this says a great deal, I think, about the currents of thwarted eroticism in his work. Of the shopping center, the motorway cafe, the old people’s home, the madman-haunted park, the ambulance, the hospital, Larkin sang. Even his own inner ugliness (“Monkey-brown, fish-grey”) he made beautiful:

For something sufficiently toad-like 

Squats in me, too;

Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck, 

And cold as snow,. ..

“Do you feel you could have had a much happier life?” an interviewer once asked. “Not without being someone else.” What we are left with is the lyricism that Larkin seemed to be shedding or throwing away as he moved toward death. From “The Trees”:

Yet still the unresting castles thresh 

In fullgrown thickness every May. 

Last year is dead, they seem to say, 

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

It was in my capacity as a cruel and vulgar little brute that I first met Larkin—at the age of four or five. He was my older brother’s godfather and namesake, and to my brother and me (true to type: indeed, it may have been us who put him off), visits from godfathers meant money. My godfather was rich, generous, and seldom sober when he came to stay: half-crowns and ten-shilling notes dropped from his hand into ours. But it was always a solemn moment when the time came for Larkin to “tip the boys”—almost a religious experience, as I remember it. At first it was sixpence for Philip against threepence for Martin; years later it was tenpence against sixpence; later still it was a shilling against ninepence: always inflation-linked and carefully graded. Other poets I came across during that time—notably Robert Graves—tended to be ebullient, excitable, candidly bardic. Larkin was simply a melancholy man, prematurely bald and with the remains of a stutter. In my later dealings with him, he was always quietly amusing, doggedly honest, and (in the widest sense) exceptionally well mannered. Larkin may have written poetry, but he spent no time “being a poet.”

The death was as comfortless as the life. And it had its element of ironic heroism. There was no family, of course, and visits from friends were not encouraged. All his life he had girded himself for extinction, but when it came (and this is appropriate and consistent) he was quite unprepared, resolutely helpless, having closed no deal with death. He instructed his doctors to tell him nothing—to tell him lies. It is said that Evelyn Waugh died of snobbery. Philip Larkin died of shame: mortal, corporeal shame.

He made no effort to prolong matters. In the last year of his life he used to start the day with three glasses of supermarket port (“Well,” he explained to my father, “you’ve got to have some fucking reason for getting up in the morning”). In the last week he was subsisting on “gin, Complan, and cheap red wine.” “Couldn’t you at least get some expensive red wine?” my mother suggested on the telephone, three days before his death. But no. Live out the comfortlessness, in fear and bafflement—that was the strategy. Although he was Larkin’s best friend, my father saw him infrequently and now wonders if he ever really knew him.