Melville House Books

It’s one of the most famous lines from twentieth-century poetry: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.” The poem — “This Be the Verse,” by Philip Larkin – actually goes on to be pretty deeply sympathetic to parents, although it does, in the last line, recommend “… don’t have any kids yourself.”

Still, maybe now people will read the poem a little more deeply than as a one-line, toss-off slander of parents, and Larkin’s own parents in particular, thanks to a newly uncovered batch of letters between Larkin and his parents Sydney and Eva Larkin that shows “he enjoyed a closer relationship with them than he portrayed in poems such as This Be The Verse.”

As a Telegraph report by Stephen Adams details, the correspondence, donated from Larkin’s estate to Hull University, where he was a librarian, “demonstrates that he wrote to his ‘Mop and Pop’ two or three times a week while a student at Oxford, sharing both the important and the trivial. They reveal how he hitchhiked to the family home in Coventry after the city was bombed to check on them, that he told them about many of his student activities, and he even discussed literature with them.”

Says Graham Chesters, a committee member of the Philip Larkin Society, and Emeritus Professor at Hull, “The most striking thing is his humour, the wit he displays. The thing that you least expect, given the fact he thought they screwed him up, is how affectionate they are. Clearly he is somebody who feels his relationship with them is more than duty.”

From the website The Man Who Fell Asleep

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.