Monday, October 29, 2007
Current reading: First Boredom, Then Fear, Richard Bradford's recent biog of Philip Larkin. Entertaining stuff: in response to the many critics of Larkin's less savoury personal qualities, Bradford's particularly keen to stress the development of Larkin's writing voice/persona as distinct and separable from the writer himself as 'real' person, and he draws on Larkin's correspondence and early attempts at fiction to suggest not only that that he created multiple writing personae depending on his audience, but that his poetic voice was a sort of nexus (rather than a synthesis) of all these voices. He also proposes that in writing prose and then poetry, Larkin allowed the writing self to govern the 'real' self, as well as the other way around. All most enjoyable but really more interesting for the mucky details about what a faithless shit Larkin was, especially as Bradford gamely tries to account for his shittiness in terms of the creation and maintenance of his writing persona. (Although when he comes to Larkin's racism he appears to lose heart.) Of course, now I'm going to have to read the Andrew Motion version.
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