When Philip Larkin's long-time companion Monica Jones died in Hull recently, the poet's house in Newland Park was found to be more or less as he left it: his suits still in the wardrobe, the signed edition of D. H. Lawrence still on the shelf, the hedgehog-killing lawnmower still in the back garden. As for his reputation, the removal men had comprehensively seen to that in the years that followed his death in 1985. Martin Amis has coined a verb for the process: "to larkinise", meaning to demolish and discredit through biographical revelation and manufactured indignation. Larkin? Racist. Misogynist. Undesirable. Enough said. Such is the received wisdom, in some quarters at least.
How shockingly unshocking then to pick up Further Requirements. After the long years of training in how to sniff out "the sewer under the national monument" (Tom Paulin's phrase), we are forced to confront the awful truth once again: that a more good-humoured, easy-going, all-round likeable writer than Larkin you couldn't imagine. This book is only a collection of second-string miscellanea that Larkin couldn't bring himself to include in Required Writing in 1983, but even so it's a treat.
His critical beginnings are memorably awkward. Larkin's first piece for the Manchester Guardian, as it was then, was a review of Kathleen Raine. Manifestly bored to tears, he suggests she consider a "cruder, more strongly marked mode of expression" in future. Worried that he's been a naughty boy, he then adds by way of apology "that the distance Miss Raine has already travelled is sufficient to earn the honour and gratitude of her age".
It doesn't take him long to adopt a more trenchant tone of dislike. No one who has stared despairingly at the runts of the jiffybag litter will fail to recognise the dying falls of his round-up reviews. "This is not the occasion to say why I found Edwin Muir unreadable," he reports of the Guinness Book of Poetry 1958-9. Peter Levi is "a slightly precious writer with nothing particular to say", whose "characterless approach" renders his work "insipid". Then the killer blow: "The collection is a choice of the Poetry Book Society." The plums are reserved for the old favourites: Betjeman and Hardy (seven and five reviews), Gavin Ewart, the Powys brothers, Tennyson and Stevie Smith. It's not all reviews either. There is a dry-eyed mini-memoir of Coventry, 'Not the Place's Fault', and no less than four interviews.
Larkin does have his limits, though. He tends to groan if asked to go any further than round the block (he once expressed a desire to visit China, but only if he could come back the same day). Intriguingly, there's a piece on Randolph Stow and Geoffrey Dutton from Australian Letters in 1959, but how this unlikely connection came about Anthony Thwaite is unable to say. As for literature in translation, Larkin can't really see the point. Davie's version of Mickiewicz's great epic, Pan Tadeusz, is "a pleasure to read in spite of continued bewilderment as to what it is about and why it was written". Where Ireland is concerned, he is well-disposed but nervous of Celtic difference. With the emergence of Yeats, he tells us in a review of Donagh McDonagh and Lennox Robinson's Oxford Book of Irish Verse, Irish poetry enters into the "Anglo-American mainstream", while, reassuringly, "with the gaining of independence the ruling passion of nationalism died".
One area of Larkin's criticism not covered by Further Requirements is his jazz reviewing. All What Jazz (1970) now has a sequel too, Larkin's Jazz (Continuum). Readers who shudder with horror at the reactionary jeremiad that opens All What Jazz will be startled to learn that in 1965 he named John Coltrane's A Love Supreme as one of his records of the year. Elsewhere he even concedes that, "technically", Charlie Parker "was a genius". As a technical term, "genius" lends itself to jazz giants a lot more readily than to book reviewers, but only a writer on speaking terms with that condition could make his outtakes as unfailingly readable as this. As Larkin used to say: dig him, man.
David Wheatley is a poet and critic. He lectures at the University of Hull