Over 60 volumes, each approaching this idée fixe from a slightly different angle, attest to that monomaniacal pursuit. The same preoccupation animates his correspondence — some 25,000 letters, a slender selection of which is due to appear next week as A Life in Letters, edited by the Cincinnati don James Schiff. Here, as in his fiction, the erotic and the ecclesiastical intertwine, rendering his theology of tumescence in full relief. By turns fascinating, embarrassing, and even moving, the letters reveal that Updike’s ceaseless coupling was never quite about lust at all. It was about faith — about locating meaning amid the mundanities of the modern world. Though he merely flits through these pages, the presiding spirit of this collection is the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, one of Updike’s heroes, whose theology equipped him with a worldview.

Updike was, for all his libidinous reputation, a surprisingly serious fellow; and the fact that so little scholarly or journalistic ink has been spilled on this unexpected influence is testament to how precipitously his star has fallen in our century. He is now read, if at all, as a period curiosity. In a letter to Ian McEwan in 2005, he saw it coming: “It occurs to me that since you interviewed me that first time in a BBC studio you have risen to be generally called the best novelist of your generation whereas I have fallen to the status of an elderly duffer whose tales of suburban American sex are hopelessly yawnworthy period pieces.”

He was right. Updike has been superseded by events. His tales of New England adultery, those lovingly lacquered chronicles of cocktail parties and postprandial assignations, now have the texture of foxed antimacassars. What enormous strides we have made since Couples, which surveyed the lives of wife- and breastmilk-swapping swingers in suburbia, became a succès de scandale in 1968. At the start of that decade, he feared imprisonment for the indecencies of Rabbit, Run; now, in the age of gooning, it is hard to imagine the average teenager feeling so much as a smutty frisson reading Updike.

Then there have been the belated stabs at outright cancellation. Patricia Lockwood, in a takedown calibrated to appeal to the pustular trust-fund babies of Brooklyn and Brixton garrets who howl “problematic” with dispiriting frequency, likened his prose to “a malfunctioning sex robot attempting to administer cunnilingus to his typewriter”. The charge is familiar: that his femmes fatales are fantasy projections, his patriotism tedious; that he mistook vaginal depth for his own. And there is truth in it. He could never quite portray women — only paint them, in glossy, adulatory strokes, as creatures of allure. 

Nor do his politics endear him to contemporary sensibilities. Updike was a reactionary Democrat, given to taking pot-shots at the civil rights movement. More egregiously, he was a cheerleader of the Vietnam War. Finding himself, awkwardly, in a minority of one as the only prominent American novelist “unequivocally for” the war, he attempted a feeble course correction that was at once defensive and disingenuous: “How could anyone not be at least equivocal about an action so costly, so cruel in its details, so indecisive in its results? The bombing of the North seems futile as well as brutal and should be stopped… I differ, perhaps, from my unanimously doveish confrères in crediting the Johnson Administration with good faith and some good sense.”

Such views scream suburban parochialism, of which he was a product. Born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania to Lutheran parents, Updike grew up in a world of scripture and Sunday school. Aged 13, however, he moved to his maternal family’s farm in Plowville: “Never since leaving it,” he later wistfully wrote, “have I enjoyed such thrilling idleness.” Later came Harvard, followed by a year at Oxford’s Ruskin School and then a position as a staff writer at the New Yorker. There, he developed a lifelong allergy to what he called the “elegant hacks” of literary Manhattan. In 1957, aged 25, he decamped with his wife and two children to Ipswich, Massachusetts (the real Tarbox of Couples), a move he justified as parental prudence, but one suspects small-town anti-intellectualism had rather more to do with it. He would never return.

His great creation Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a Pennsylvanian without a degree, embodies this stubborn provincialism. Like in Updike himself, there’s something of the autodidact in Rabbit’s steady accretion of a menagerie of lovers. These were not the one-night assignations of the skirt-chaser. Rabbit, rather, was trying to find existential meaning through concupiscence, to transcend the vapidity of postwar American life. 

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As in Updike’s fiction, so in his letters. The Ariadne’s thread here, inevitably, is Updike’s sexual excursions and their ramifications. For a man so routinely portrayed as America’s priapic laureate, his body count — 13 — feels almost monastic. Then again, he was a late starter. His first marriage, to Mary Pennington, a Unitarian minister’s daughter, began with virginal vows. “I am very interested in sex,” he had admitted to her in 1952, before conceding his knowledge of it was chiefly theoretical. 

Then there is the “adulterous affair”, as Schiff fustily puts it in his footnotes, with Joyce Harrington (“the life of the party”) in 1961-62, later written up as Marry Me, a work that, were Updike a fortysomething woman today, would pass for autofiction. Two years later came Joan Cudhea: “You are visually charming,” he wrote to her, before dispensing with the gallantry and thanking her “for your goodness, your shyness, your eyes, your tongue, your glimpsey ass, your yummy cunt”.

By 1974, his marriage had taken a desultory turn. Martha Bernhard — his neighbor, who studied under Nabokov at Cornell and later became Updike’s wife — rekindled his joie de vivre. On the eve of their marriage, he confessed to a ménage à trois with two Australian women (“awful of me”). Apart from this drip-feed of revelations, Martha also had to fend off literal blows from Mary: “you knocked her down as a mechanic would wipe a piece of grit out of a balky machine,” Updike wrote of a catfight.

These letters double as field notes from the sexual revolution. Updike, it seems, recognized them as such, repurposing them in his fiction. “Driving back from taking the babysitter home,” goes a line in one typical story, “Frank would pass darkened houses where husbands he knew were lying in bed, head to murmuring head, with wives he coveted.” Perhaps he was thinking of Martha, who was married to a clerk when she started seeing Updike. In another story, he surely had Joan in mind when he wrote: “Ever since my days of car-seat courtship I’ve liked to press my face into a girlfriend’s nether soul, to taste the waters in which we all must swim out to the light.”

Yes, the prose can be overwrought, the sex inadvertently comic. Updike’s sentences luxuriate perhaps a little too much in particulars. For some, this is style without substance. “Updike has nothing to say,” declared the literary critic John Aldridge. But he does. Behind the bustle and bumping, one senses the specter of Søren Kierkegaard, whose book Fear and Trembling features among Updike’s favorite books, listed in a 2005 letter to his Knopf publicist. Four decades earlier, in 1965, Updike wrote an entry on Kierkegaard for a compendium of biographical sketches. In a 1974 letter to Mary, he remarked that life in Ipswich was “very depressing, but for the Kierkegaard”. At one point, he even admitted that “for a time, I thought of all my fictions as illustrations of Kierkegaard”.

Like Kierkegaard, Updike prized interiority: inwardness and individuality were what mattered, not collectives or society. From the Dane, the American learned that desire ought not to be condemned but redeemed. This is the crux of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, which sets out two lifestyles — the aesthetic and the ethical. Love and sex belong to the former, a realm of sybaritic hedonism that can, through acts of faith, be transfigured into the latter. This is Kierkegaard’s fideism; faith is placed above reason and passion before proof.

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Updike’s strategy is much the same. In Couples, as in the Rabbit novels, sexual desire is not denied (far from it) but elevated into a quasi-religious register, made almost an article of faith. His aim is to render the ordinary radiant — to “give the mundane its beautiful due”, as he put it. Writing to his publisher Victor Gollancz in 1960, Updike explained that sex was, in his fiction, merely a springboard for reflection on “the innerness that nourishes Christian orthodoxy”.

So far so Kierkegaardian. Yet there is, all the same, a distinctly American inflection to Updike’s Kierkegaardianism, as David Crowe observes in his rather desiccated but valuable study Cosmic Defiance — still the only sustained treatment of this intellectual lineage. Crowe notes, rightly, that Updike’s characters rarely complete the Kierkegaardian ascent from aesthetic indulgence through ethical responsibility to purblind faith. They quail at the leap, lingering instead at the threshold. To my mind, this is to Updike’s credit. There is no preachiness in his pages, no hortatory insistence that we discern the piety beneath the prurience, the hymn beneath the hard-on. The irresolution is precisely what makes his heroes human.

That is the typical problem of a 26-year-old Western man living in 1959, when John Updike’s novel Rabbit, Run is set (it was published in 1960). Rabbit got married and had his first child at 23; in America today, he would probably be 30 before he had the wife or the kid, and it’s not impossible that he’d be living with his parents until then. But in the late Fifties, making the passage from youth to adulthood in your twenties was not merely possible — it was compulsory. In a culture that was tentatively embracing personal freedom, this could feel more like prison than possibility.

In an essay on Rabbit published in 1995, Updike explained how his protagonist was a reflection of his times. “Jack Kerouac’s On the Road came out in 1957, and without reading it, I resented its apparent injunction to cut loose; Rabbit, Run was meant to be a realistic demonstration of what happens when a young American man goes on the road — the people left behind get hurt,” wrote Updike. “There was no painless dropping out of the Fifties’ fraying but still tight social weave.”

What Rabbit does has terrible, horrifying repercussions: in consequence of his actions, his wife accidentally drowns their baby, while the mistress he takes up with and then deserts is left to organize an abortion by herself. But there is also something glorious, something exciting, something right about what Rabbit does. He is no beatnik, and he acts from no organized sense of radicalism. He is, essentially, normal. Rabbit is not exceptionally clever, hardly exceptionally brave, and neither exceptionally good nor exceptionally bad.

His defining feature, besides his propensity to flit, is that his days of being exceptional are behind him: he’s a former high-school basketball star desperately hankering for the time when everyone cheered him and he was famous throughout the county. This ordinary man’s one great gift is to have deduced the rules of the world that is about to come, and to have started living by them a little ahead of the people around him.

His flight is less a rebellion, more a rush towards the new kind of conformity, scratched out against the great dominating influence of mass media but nonetheless shaped by it. The moment Rabbit decides to make his escape is probably when he gets home to see his wife slumped in front of a children’s TV show with the host enjoining his audience to “know yourself”. Rabbit is appalled at the banality; Rabbit is inspired by the sentiment. His drive towards freedom is soundtracked by the radio.

The novel ends with him still running, this time away from his infant daughter’s funeral: “His hands lift of their own and he feels the wind on his ears even before, his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs.” Even with everything he has done, all the mess he has created, Updike knows there’s something magnificent about his Rabbit.

Eventually, Rabbit would run through four novels (Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest), covering not only a life but also the latter half of the 20th century. It’s a commonplace that the Fifties invented the teenager, but really the teenager was only a side product of the decade’s greater creation: the individual in lifelong pursuit of self-realization. An age of personal freedom, carved out against the backdrop of screens that declared how a person should be: mass media defined a mean reality, and taught its consumers how to want the things that would mark them as an individual like everybody else. Liberty through the eternal eye of the camera.

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The 21st century has been the undoing of that one, singular lens. Rabbit’s predicament feels alien now partly because the things that hemmed him in are now almost exotically elusive for young people, but also because the media landscape he’s both repulsed by and defined by doesn’t exist in the same way anymore. At the very least, his disappointing wife would have been scrolling TikTok as well as watching television; Rabbit would probably have been listening to podcasts.

Actually, they’d probably have been making the content as well as absorbing it. The atomized individuals spawned by the media age have become, in turn, creators of their own atomized media in which they create perfectly consumable versions of themselves which just happen to replicate the tics and interests of every other individual in this ecosystem. Currently, two influencers are locked in a legal battle over who owns the greige, minimalist aesthetic both have made their trademark. One believes herself to be the original, and is suing the other for copyright infringement, claiming that she has been imitated right down to the level of specific camera angles.

It is, on the surface, an absurd claim: how can anyone “own” something as generic as an absence color? Weirder still: both influencers in the case derive their income from selling the products they feature in their Instagram and TikTok posts, meaning their entire existence is predicated on being mimicked. A more likely explanation than plagiarism is that both influencers simply followed the cues of audience engagement and the algorithm until they arrived at two versions of the self that were very nearly indistinguishable from each other.

But the fact that the case exists at all suggests that even the blandest wants to believe in the myth of their individuality. “You want to feel like you have unique value that you’re giving out into this world,” commented another influencer unrelated to the case. The inevitable result of the feedback system, though, is that “you kind of middle yourself out”. Every individual is their own brand online, and every brand is a variation of a wider product category. There are as many different versions of the “Instagram clean girl” as there are kinds of cereal.

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It’s a curious thing that the #sponcon influencer essentially has the same profession Rabbit was trying to escape: demonstrating consumer goods that promise to make your life better, and which will probably end up gathering dust somewhere in your cluttered, non-minimalist house. The rush to individualism that Rabbit embodied has turned everyone back into a version of him. The TV host’s message to Rabbit — “know yourself” — becomes its inverse: be knowable to the world. And by being knowable, buyable. The consumer and the consumable in one perfect whole.

Each person ends up in a duet with their own digital version, alive to themselves as much as they can imagine being recognized and consumed by others. I thought about this while I was watching Charli XCX last month on the (brilliant) Brat Tour. The setting is simple: for most of the show, Charli is on her own on the stage, performing directly to a video camera, the footage from which is then displayed on giant screens either side of the stage. She is singing to herself; we in the arena are watching the output, just as though we were consuming it on social media. She is, splendidly, herself, and we are the witnesses to it.

If you want to see it this way, the Brat Tour is the ultimate triumph of social media over mass media. Tens of thousands of people, including me, poured into arenas to experience a simulacra of watching Charli on their phones. The screen Rabbit ran away from has become the destination and the home for a collective dream of individualism. Everyone is special and different; everyone is the same in their pursuit of the self.

Nothing illustrates an author’s reputation as clearly as misattributed work. The Sunscreen confusion proved that one of his era’s most scathing satirists had been recast as the cuddly hipster grandpa of American letters. This certainly chimed with one strand of Vonnegut’s work, which is summed up by a famous line from his 1965 novel God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine (“God damn it babies, you’ve got to be kind”) but that was by no means the whole picture.

Like Dolly Parton, Alan Bennett, George Michael and Anthony Bourdain, Vonnegut has become simplified into an avatar of kindness, his wrinkles ironed flat by the heat of sainthood. This happened long before his death in 2007 and he was a willing conspirator. George Saunders recently spoke about his own reputation as literature’s Mr Nice Guy and gave himself some advice: “one: don’t believe it; two, interrupt it.” The first is easier than the second. One of Vonnegut’s most famous lines is from 1961’s Mother Night: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Vonnegut often pretended to be nicer than he was, which was good for both his ego and his income.

If you Google Vonnegut, one of the most-asked questions that comes up is: “Was Vonnegut a nice person?” Tough one. He could certainly be warm, wise and generous, but he could also be a greedy and disloyal business partner, a selfish, unfaithful husband and a crotchety, intimidating father. He suffered from depression and suicidal ideation; his work often flirts with nihilism. Robert B. Weide’s recent documentary Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time (the title quotes Vonnegut’s masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five) is candid about the writer’s failings as a family man but Weide, who considered Vonnegut a close friend and mentor, still sands off a lot of rough edges.

In his more objective biography And So It Goes, Charles J. Shields quotes the private notes that Vonnegut’s ex-wife Jane made after reading his 1981 quasi-memoir, Palm Sunday: “Kurt doesn’t mind being hurtful, really, although he talks a good game to make you think the opposite. He’s fooled most of his public now, for a long time. You see, he doesn’t really know what he’s doing. He’s really very innocent.”

When Vonnegut died, one newscaster tagged him as “an oracle for the baby boomer generation”, but that was not his generation. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born in Indianapolis on 11 November 1922, a few months before Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller. His childhood was happy and prosperous for seven years before falling off a cliff with the Great Depression. Kurt Vonnegut Sr, formerly a successful architect, couldn’t get a single commission during the Thirties. Edith Vonnegut, a society belle from a brewing dynasty, lost her inheritance in a Ponzi scheme and the shock of her reduced circumstances exacerbated serious mental health issues. Her family insisted that her death from an overdose of sleeping pills in 1944 was accidental but Kurt knew better. His father was shattered. “After I’m gone,” Vonnegut told Playboy three decades later, “I don’t want my children to have to say about me what I have to say about my father: ‘He made wonderful jokes, but he was such an unhappy man.’”

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By 1944, Vonnegut was in the US Army. He had agreed to study science at Cornell to please his father and his older brother Bernard, a brilliant atmospheric scientist, but put more effort into student journalism than his grades and figured it was better to enlist than wait to be drafted. Sent to Europe, he was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge and incarcerated in an abattoir in Dresden, a beautiful, militarily insignificant city that did not expect to be bombed. On the night of 13 February 1945, however, Allied bombers almost razed it to the ground, killing around 25,000 civilians. When Vonnegut and his fellow POWs emerged from their underground meat locker the next day, they were tasked with removing the corpses of people who had been suffocated in their homes by the firestorm. “The end of the world is not an idea to Vonnegut,” John Updike wrote. “It is a reality he experienced.”

Vonnegut published his first short stories while working in public relations at General Electric, an experience that informed his relatively conventional debut novel, 1952’s Player Piano, a futuristic satire on automation. Vonnegut said that his first six novels were “all about the abuses of technology”. They are also about morality, mortality, free will, war, death, God, the nature of time and the meaning of life. As one character asks in Player Piano: “What are people for?” Vonnegut’s experience in journalism made his prose irresistibly swift, punchy and funny. As his former student John Irving says in Unstuck in Time: “It’s not easy to be easy to read.”

All Vonnegut lacked was readers, and therefore money to support his unexpectedly large family. In 1958, his beloved sister Alice died of cancer, just two days after her husband Jim was killed in a train crash. Kurt and Jane agreed to adopt the couple’s four boys but Jane did the parenting (they had two children of their own) while Kurt typed, chainsmoked and grouched about the noise. “Please let me off the father hook,” he would complain, reserving his physical warmth for his dog. When Vonnegut began teaching fiction at the University of Iowa in the autumn of 1965, all but one of his books was out of print. His latest, God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, introduced his alter ego Kilgore Trout, a desperately unsuccessful science-fiction writer and crank who was, Vonnegut later admitted, “the lonesome and unappreciated writer I thought I might become”.

Vonnegut finally got what he wanted with the 1969 publication of Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, the novel about Dresden that he had been trying to write since 1945. It remains a radically entertaining read. Like the Charlie Kaufman/Spike Jonze movie Adaptation, it has the startling originality that comes from acknowledging that a story is untellable by conventional means — a sui generis medley of memoir, history, philosophy, science fiction and outrageous black comedy.

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“I got three dollars for each person killed,” Vonnegut said sardonically of his advance, but he made a lot more than that. Coinciding with the peak of the movement against the war in Vietnam, Slaughterhouse-Five made the 47-year-old a hero to readers less than half his age, who saw in his work their own anxieties reflected and made funny. Previously apolitical, if not conservative, he became “A Campus Orwell”, according to Newsweek, growing a moustache and bushy hair to suit his new persona as a public satirist. The press said that he was to the late Sixties what J.D. Salinger had been to the Fifties: an icon of dissent.

Yet Vonnegut was ambivalent about his new celebrity. “I was just writing books to entertain,” he protested in 1972. “I never dreamed of becoming a Pied Piper of the young.” Asked by Playboy if he was a radical, he replied: “No, because everything I believe I was taught in junior civics during the Great Depression.” It’s striking that, with the exception of 1985’s Galapagos, all of Vonnegut’s essential novels — Player Piano, Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You, My Rosewater, and Slaughterhouse-Five — were written while he was unsuccessful. He had been poor and obscure for so long that he was discombobulated by the tardy onslaught of wealth and fame. Slaughterhouse-Five, he said, “was the end of some sort of career”.

It was also the end of his marriage to Jane, who had been his most ardent cheerleader during the lean years and never got to enjoy the fat ones. Vonnegut eventually produced 1973’s Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday, a metafictional patchwork festooned with whimsical illustrations and more interested in aphorisms than plot. He summed up its strengths and flaws in an interview: “My books are essentially mosaics, thousands and thousands of tiny little chips all glued together, and each chip is… this thing I learned to make as a child, which is a little joke.”

Breakfast of Champions lodged in the bestseller list for a year but, like most of his later novels, was poorly reviewed, with accusations of glib wisecracks, sophomoric philosophy and recycled ideas. Hostile critics assumed that because his books appealed to students, he must be pandering to them. Reviewing 1976’s Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!, Newsweek called him “an ideal writer for the semi-literate young”. Vonnegut also became a popular target for censors — some of his books were literally burned — which dismayed him. When a Michigan judge condemned Slaughterhouse-Five as “depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar and anti-Christian”, Vonnegut drily responded: “But Billy Pilgrim was a Christian. The judge apparently read the wrong book.”

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During the Eighties, Vonnegut’s talent and confidence were on the slide (“The only way I can regain credit for my early work is to die,” he told Martin Amis) but he was still in demand as a celebrity. He advertised coffee, played himself in the comedy Back to School and accepted a mindboggling $150,000 from Time for six one-page articles. His speeches became more celebrated than his novels, and his interviews were sensationally entertaining.

They could also be very bleak. “God will kill us by the millions quite soon, I think — by starvation, with flu, through war, in any number of ways,” he said in 1976. And what about this, from 1980? “I think that at least half the people alive, and maybe nine-tenths of them, really do not like this ordeal at all… You know, you talk about the dark side of life: that’s really it. Most people don’t want to be alive.” There is nothing cuddly about that. Salman Rushdie observes that “So it goes”, the famous phrase from Slaughterhouse-Five, is often misinterpreted as a stoic shrug — life goes on — when it’s really about the inevitability of death: “Beneath the apparent resignation is a sadness for which there are no words.” In 1984, Vonnegut attempted suicide with an overdose of pills, just like his mother. So it almost went.

Clearly, Kurt Vonnegut was not the man he pretended to be. His adopted son Jim Adams told Charles J Shields, “There was a definite disconnect between the kind of guy you would imagine Kurt must be from the tone of his books, the kind of guy who would say ‘God damn it, you got to be kind’, and the reality of his behaviour on a daily basis. He was a complicated, difficult man.” There are two ways of interpreting this. One is as cold hypocrisy. Another is to see him as a troubled, serially traumatised man who wanted to be a force for good and often fell short, in which case his talk of living decently in an indecent world was not a scam but a genuine aspiration. “All my books are my effort… to make myself like life better than I do,” he once said.

The truth is that paradox and disappointment are what make Vonnegut’s work such a compelling dance between cynicism and idealism. Who needs perfection? “The crude term that every writer would like to do is mind-fucking,” he said in 1987. “It’s to get into somebody else’s head.” Kurt Vonnegut didn’t need to be a saint or a guru because he succeeded, as well as any writer of his generation, in getting into people’s heads.

A conservative in everything else (literature, politics, jazz), in this Larkin was a trendsetter. An aggressive reappraisal of the work based upon revelations about the life — this is the pattern that has established itself for every successive male literary titan, and which is in the post for the rest. But today, 100 years from his birth, Larkin’s lines remain widely loved and quoted at a time when poetry in general seems to be in terminal decline. That he survived this cancellation makes its story a parable for our age of intolerance, forcing us to reckon directly with the relationship of the dignified public to the sordid private, of art and beauty to ugly, human truth.

Larkin’s letters, published in 1991, are first and foremost a triumph of life-writing. A chronicle of the pinched English post-war, they record (in hilarious, confiding detail) a time of rationed cigarettes, economical beer-drinking, class resentment and fear of “abroad”. And they are rich in the era’s comedy of coping, recording money troubles (“I am having an ineffectual economy drive. It consists of not buying other people drinks”), dysfunctional dwellings (“central heating in the sense that it never reached the bedrooms or bathroom”) and self-conscious ageing (“There are some nice pictures of me from when I didn’t look like a pregnant salmon”).

But their publication also immediately opened up Larkin to attack. They lifted the veil from a carefully protected personality, rendering a writer who had aimed at the universal suddenly and frightfully particular. Most obviously they drew him into the realm of politics, littered as they were with reflexive prejudices around race, class and women. And the insularity of Larkin’s world and perspective was soon transferred by his attackers onto his poetry, itself downgraded to “minor” and “provincial”. But more troublingly still, they hinted at the underlying source of these prejudices: his distaste for the world as it stood. Morbid humour aside, the letters’ key theme is decline, and a growing resentment at life’s failures and Larkin’s own inability to correct them.

Initially, failure seemed distant. A First from Oxford, two novels and a book of poems published by the age of 25. But first the fiction dried up, and novel three was abandoned. Ambition and hope fell away from Larkin like clumps of hair, his dreams of an independent writer’s life (which he deeply envied Kingsley Amis for enjoying) replaced by the drudgery of his work as a librarian. He was sustained only by his poetry, until that mostly went too in the late Seventies, leaving only the illness and alcoholism of his final years: “I used to believe that I should perfect the work and the life could fuck itself. Now I’m not doing anything, all I’ve got is a fucked up life.”

This was all unhappy enough. But it took Andrew Motion’s biography two years later to fully entangle the personal and political, to smash the glass and set sirens wailing with outrage. Far from the eccentric chronicler of 20th century Englishness, it seemed the real Larkin — a midden of unexamined neuroses — had been unearthed. Of course, it all starts with mum and dad, in this case especially dad, Sydney Larkin, a domestic totalitarian who decorated his office and home with Nazi regalia and took the young Philip on holiday to the Reich in 1936 and 1937 to witness the “new Germany”. Philip then heads up to Oxford where — besides developing his poetic talent — he developed the odd and introverted sexuality that beset him all his life.

Under the auspices of “Brunette Coleman”, Larkin spent an abnormal amount of time at university writing a series of lesbian schoolgirl fictions (“As Pam finally pulled Marie’s tunic down over her black stockinged legs, Miss Holden, pausing only to snatch a cane from the cupboard…”) These stories were harmless smut, mainly produced for the amusement of friends. But bondage and schoolgirls would become erotic constants for Larkin — he made sorties from Hull to Soho to seek out specialist magazines on the subject, a cache of which was kept in his library office (“to wank to, or with, or at”), and also circulated with like-minded comrades (“do pass on any that have ceased to stimulate”). But presumably not shared was the dream journal Larkin kept at university, in which sex dreams featuring Nazis, black dogs, faeces and oppressive but distant parental figures predominate.

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This far from cloudless adolescent psychology is not immediately suggestive of an empathetic poetic spirit, and we are now understandably wary of such a congealed male sexuality. It would be easy to write off the young Larkin as a borderline incel. But after this inauspicious start there were several love affairs, and Larkin’s erotic misalignment remains as Martin Amis recently wrote “mysterious and very hard to infiltrate… a maze, or a marshland with a few slippery handholds”. Sex itself more or less dried up in Larkin’s mid-30s — like trying to get “someone else to blow your own nose for you” was how he described the act itself. And terrified of marriage his whole life, he strung along his companion of more than 30 years, Monica Jones, in a relationship in which he was manipulative and unfaithful — not through any philanderer’s prerogative but through a juvenile fear of commitment.

A recent biographer of Jones even judges Larkin’s behaviour to be coercive control, and clearly shows how he stifled and inhibited her life. And there is one instance of now-immortalised cruelty: he colluded with Amis in fictionalising Monica as the clingy, boring, attention-seeking Margaret Peel in Lucky Jim. He even sent her a nervous copy after publication which she read over an agonising three days, and never forgot. “Oh he was a bugger,” Monica later said. “He lied to me, the bugger, but I loved him.”

Whether one’s response to this suburban tragedy is pity or disgust, the effect is the same as his letters: to de-universalise Larkin. To make a man, whose secluded personality meant he was only known through his work, seedily peculiar. It is a blow that has struck many a stale male in recent years, the reputations of (most recently) Philip Roth, V.S. Naipaul, and Saul Bellow collapsing from their 20th century pomp as their work, which pitched itself at broad, sweeping themes, was shown to be the product of a flawed masculinity.

Unlike them Larkin has come through the other side. So, what do readers continue to find in his work? It can’t be his personality or his surroundings — indeed, the post-war so wonderfully enlivened in Larkin’s letters no longer exists. But his poetry has endured because it does capture a universal human instinct, one which can now be read as a subconscious retort to the attacks upon his personality: the desire to record what is humdrum and shameful, and to transform it into something sublime. To, in John Updike’s phrase, give “the mundane its beautiful due”.

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By Mary Gaitskill

Larkin did not live in an age of therapy and self-care — he would barely have known how to recognise his emotional flaws, let alone “work on them”. And he never directly addressed the most squalid parts of his interior world. But, as he famously said, “deprivation for me is what daffodils were for Wordsworth”, a quip often interpreted as cutesy and self-dramatising. But he really meant it; misery stirred his muse. And you can see it happening within the poems as he takes some highly personal, ignoble incident and uses it as a platform to ascend toward some classical profundity.

There is a needy, lustful instinct behind the initial lines of “Sunny Prestatyn” and “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album”, and Larkin often uses his openings as confessional hooks, drawing you into the naked reality of his consciousness before leading you away and above it. But this movement is best seen in “High Windows”, opening with the notoriously obscene lines:

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

The poem continues relatively plainly from this ugly statement of generational sexual jealousy, weighing up this feeling and pondering if Larkin’s elders had envied him in his own youth. And then, from nowhere, an extraordinary shift takes places, up and away from that scene:

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

This is an image of ambiguous oblivion, perhaps implying religious absolution behind what could be stained-glass church windows, or a nihilistic absence of meaning beyond them. But either way, the image is that of a thwarted 20th century Romantic, a poet fully aware of the coarseness of his age and personhood, but able to find in it metaphysical beauty nonetheless. Not all Larkin poems take such an extreme route. But this is the technical accomplishment that recurs across his greatest works, a capacity to transfigure train journeys, music, photographs, and churches into pockets of narrative which illuminate what he saw as the abiding human themes. “Time and the passing of time, love and the fading of love.”

The greatest writers will always be those who have suffered dully all the wrongs of man, and yet remain alive to a greater wisdom and beauty beyond what they could afford themselves. And to read through Larkin’s letters, with all their everyday drollness and tedium, and grapple with his personality while remembering the genius of his poetry is to be confronted with this truth. But what is more, his poetry insists upon it, understanding that to be human is to be familiar with what is low and wrong, and to yearn for what could, possibly, transcend it. This is why Larkin resists what our age of moral purity would prefer: to be able to separate the fuddled bigot and the sedate chronicler of his age. Both men wrote the poems.