IN one of the very few published interviews with Philip Larkin, Miriam Gross of the Observer asked him in 1979 if he liked living in Hull. "I like it," he said, "because it's so far away from everywhere else. It's in the middle of this lonely country, and beyond the lonely country there's only the sea. I like that."
Mischievously he added: "I love all the Americans getting on the train at King's Cross and thinking they're going to come and bother me, and then looking at the connections and deciding they'll go to Newcastle and bother Basil Bunting instead. Makes it harder for people to get at you. I think it's very sensible not to let people know what you're like."
Well, the posthumous letters and the biography by Andrew Motion have let the world know what - on one level - this greatest poet of our age in the English language was like. (And, of course, predictable howls came from those who, attempting to do the poetry down, declared his occasional racism and his fondness for pornography unacceptable - as if his racism, though unpleasant, was unusual among his generation, and as if a liking for pornography was an odd trait in a middle aged, single man).
The poet, dead eleven years now, has nothing more to fear from his detractors (or from some of his admirers), but I can imagine his reaction to the latest Larkin lark a literary trail of places in Hull that were associated with him. Eager for tourists, the local council has dreamed up this itinerary, which takes in a Chinese restaurant he frequented, a hospital, a cemetery, the university where he spent thirty years as librarian, and even the Hull branch of Marks and Spencer which was the inspiration for his poem "The Long Cool Store".
"You have to come here," Hull council leader Patrick Doyle explains, "with your Collected Works of Philip Larkin in one hand and the trail in the other to do the job properly." Attaboy, Patrick, and never mind that there's no such book as the Collected Works of Philip Larkin.
Andrew Motion, Larkin's biographer, thinks that "in some quite secret part of him he'd have been thrilled to bits by the idea". A very secret part, I'd say, especially given his response when told by John Betjeman that some local enthusiasts had declared "We must know this man. Can't he come to see us?" At the mere thought of it, Larkin wailed: `God, another night gone!"
Still, don't let me stop you traipsing around Hull in pursuit of Larkin's shade. Heck, you might even run into Jake Balokowsky, the tenure seeking biographer in Larkin's poem, "Posterity", who dismisses the poet as "one of those old type natural fouled up guys.
I see that the fad for the 60p mini paperbacks has peaked, and I say that I'm either surprised or saddened. Perhaps these gimmicky style accessories encouraged some people to become acquainted with poets, philosophers and fiction writers with whom they were hitherto unfamiliar, but they struck me as essentially silly little objects that had more to do with frantic marketing ploys than anything else. Certainly, I never saw anyone reading them on the DART - generally a good indicator of reading habits.
Much more to my liking are the £1 classics being published by Penguin and Wordsworth. These are real books made available at a price that anyone can afford, and they're much in evidence on the DART: in one carriage alone this week I saw £1 editions of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes and Gaskell's Mary Barton being read.
So three cheers for these editions, and three cheers also for Penguin's latest £1 series, Penguin Popular Poetry. Two volumes especially attracted me, both of them edited by Paul Driver:
Victorian Poetry is an admirable introduction to much great poetry of the later 19th century, while Early Twentieth Century Poetry is an absolute joy, containing almost all of my favourite Hardy, Edward Thomas, Owen, Sassoon, Masefield, Kipling and Rosenberg.
WRITERS of children's books have an embarrassment of British literary awards for which they can enter. There's the Smarties award, there's the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, there's the Kurt Maschler award, and now there's the Whitbread Children's Book of the Year Award - which, like the Smarties, is worth a cool £8,000.
And, of course, there's the oldest of them all, the Carnegie Medal, which this year has just been won by Philip Pullman for his book Northern Lights. Interestingly, Mr Pullman chose the occasion to deride the lack of stories in contemporary adult literature.
"In adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance," he declared. "Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness." Indeed, he asserted, if most modern novelists "could write novels without stories in them, they would."
This fighting talk so moved the esteemed London paper, the Independent, that it has devoted a main editorial to the subject, in the course of which the leader writer wondered: "How many readers shamefacedly gave up on the latest Salman Rushdie at page 12? How many experienced as much torment as enlightenment in the hands of Kazuo Ishiguro? How many struggled vainly with Ben Okri? Who really likes Martin Amis's The Information?" Methinks I hear the rumblings of a new literary row.