What Larks, Pip!

[steepholm]

Remember I was wondering whether or not to submit a piece on those unpublished Philip Larkin letters to the TLS? I may have to put the idea on hold for a while, as I suspect they'll be a bit shy of taking on anything of that nature in the near future...

Comments

[legionseagle]

I bet his relationship was fractious if Larkin ended up plagiarising him when they were both dead.

[steepholm]

Or even "fractuous", as it appears on the post. A fructious relationship would probably have been more fruitful.

[gillo]

Oh dear. Some of the comments are priceless, however.

"A joyous shot at how he'd oughta writ."

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Wow -- but now might be the time to publish it. Then they can say they messed up, but LOOK!

Re: "A joyous shot at how he'd oughta writ."

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I like your way of thinking!

Mind you, apart from scanning and transcribing the letters I've not done anything since I wrote that last (now private) post. I need to talk to my mum first, I guess, and then the Society of Authors (who are handling the estate), but yeah, you may be right!

One of them has a rather lovely part about receiving the Queen's Medal for poetry (by recorded delivery) while shaving in the sink - who could fail to be interested in that?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I very much enjoyed 'A Finger of Fudge', which I sang to my daughter just the other week (to her bemusement).

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Gleep!

[sovay]

"And as Tom Cook wrote in last week's issue, it ended up as two halves of loose typescript tucked into one of Larkin's archived workbooks at the University of Hull."

I thought for years my grandmother had written a poem by A.E. Housman because she'd copied it out and pasted it into her 1942 anthology of modern American and British poetry. It took running into the same piece in a published book of his poetry in college to disabuse me.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

It's an easy mistake to make, God knows.