Is Martin Amis colonising Larkinland?

Who could be surprised to see that Martin Amis has edited a new selection of Philip Larkin’s poems? Amis’s articles on the poet, which predictably make much of Larkin's friendship with Kingsley Amis, have been difficult to avoid in the last year. He’s written about “Larkin’s women” in the Guardian and about his puzzling personality in the Financial Times; he has also lectured on his political incorrectness and threatened to write a literary novel about the poet’s life. And he has already channelled the Hull librarian’s spirit in The Pregnant Widow, in which Keith’s “land of sexual dearth” is affectionately named Larkinland.

Is Amis, who already presides over his father’s literary legacy, now positioning himself as Larkin’s legitimate heir? Amis’s interest in Larkin differs from most literary crushes, in that he constantly seeks to reassure us that he knew the poet personally. “In 1982, I had dinner with Philip and Monica,” he confides in the introduction to this new collection. “What follows is a personal assessment of Larkin’s character.” Similarly he teases in the Guardian article: “It is not indecorous, I hope, too add some inside information of my own.”

Decorum aside, the frustrating thing about Amis’s Larkin anecdotes is that they are almost determinedly lacking in insight. This, for instance, is the extent of the “inside information” Amis hesitated to disclose:

My mother, who revered Larkin, used to say, “Well, don’t forget he went bald in his 20s. And he had a stutter. I think women frightened him.”

What Hilly Amis says is true, but it’s also common knowledge. As for the 1982 dinner, Amis doesn’t say what happened that evening; though he does go on to make a school-boyish remark about the “virile” Monica Jones, Larkin’s long-term girlfriend. Meanwhile, here is a description of what Amis himself calls “the closest we ever got to any kind of intimate exchange”:

I praised him for his courage in learning to drive and buying a car (no other poet I knew would ever go near a steering wheel). Then it went like this:

“You should spend more, Philip. No, really. You’ve bought the car, and that’s good. Now you –”

“I just wish they wouldn’t keep on sending me all these bills.”

“Well it costs a bit to run a car.”

“I just wish they wouldn’t keep sending me all these bills.

Amis makes out that this was somehow a revealing conversation, proof of Larkin’s eccentricity. But it sounds more like Larkin was bored, if not offended, by Amis’s unsolicited life advice, and responded with blandness.

There is an air of condescension in much of Amis’s writing about Larkin. He returns frequently to his and his father’s inability to understand Larkin’s relationship with women (“When it comes to women,” Kingsley wrote, “I fucking give you up”), an inability which is swiftly converted to pity. Describing another encounter with the “apologetic and provincial” Larkin and Monica Jones, Amis writes as though they were mentally unstable: “I approached them slowly and obliquely, not wishing to cause alarm, and got them safely indoors.”

Luckily for Larkin fans, Martin Amis may not continue to harp on his connection with the poet, which looks increasingly thin. In his introduction to this selection of Larkin’s poems, Amis writes of his reservations about “insider” book reviewery, declaring himself convinced of the “simple truth that writers’ private lives don’t matter.” The one really important private life here is of course that of Martin Amis himself, as his opening sentence signals: “In the mid-1970s I edited the Weekend Competition in the literary pages of the New Statesman (with the judicious assistance of Julian Barnes)...” If reminiscences like that get you going, this may well be the book for you.