'He was tall, bald and not what we'd expected from this wonderful poet'

But despite the salacious and controversial details that have emerged from letters and biographies, his popularity with the reading public remains undimmed.

The Philip Larkin Society, set up 15 years ago, promotes his work both at home and abroad while June saw the launch of a series of events celebrating the poet's life and marking the anniversary of his death.

It was from the unlikely backdrop of postwar Hull that Larkin emerged as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century and in November, it will be 55 years since the publication of his first poetry collection, The Less Deceived. But while the author of The Whitsun Weddings is now arguably our most frequently quoted poet his career had a less than auspicious start.

In 1955, Jean and George Hartley were a married couple struggling to raise a young family in a tiny two-up two-down cottage in Hessle. They shared a love of jazz and literature and armed with nothing more than a typewriter and the folly and enthusiasm of youth, set up their own poetry magazine Listen.

In only its second issue it contained poems by the likes of Al Alvarez and Kingsley Amis. But of all those who contributed it was Larkin's poems they liked the best. So when they decided to produce a volume by a single poet he was the obvious choice. "We were both united that it should be Philip's poems so we wrote to him in Belfast where he was working as a librarian and asked him if he had enough for a book and he said he had," says Jean.

Larkin agreed to let them publish a book of his poems on the proviso that the fledgling publishers did a decent job. The only problem was that he was moving to Hull where he'd been offered a job as the university's librarian and he didn't want any copies sold in the city.

"He didn't want the publicity because he was a shy, modest man. He liked to keep his writing separate from his public life. What we didn't know was that practically every publisher in England had turned it down, including Faber. He was at a pretty low ebb because he thought nobody wanted his book and wondered if perhaps he should give up writing poetry.

So it must have been heartening for him that here were these two, keen young people who really wanted to publish his work."

Jean remembers meeting Larkin for the first time when he arrived in Hull, in the spring of 1955. "He was 10 years older than us which seemed a big gap. He was tall and bald and not what we'd expected from this wonderful poet. But he was apprehensive because there we were living in this little hovel with no mod cons looking nothing at all like the provincial version of Faber and Faber. So he must have thought can these kids with no money possibly do a decent job with my poems? But in the end it was a wonderful collaboration because the three of us learnt together how to successfully publish a book."

The Less Deceived was published by Marvell Press that autumn, with copies sold to subscribers of their magazine and what Larkin called his "sucker list" of friends and acquaintances. It quickly attracted a flurry of rave reviews, although Jean admits they didn't realise at the time just how popular the book was.

"We had no previous experience of publishing a book so we only printed about 500 to start with and bound up 300 and left the rest in sheets, but in no time at all we had to bind those up and by the time we did that we needed a new edition," she says. "It made his name as a poet and ours as a publisher. But its popularity was misleading and led us to over produce on each of our subsequent publications because we didn't realise we had a best seller in poetry terms."

Despite going on to become one of the nation's best-loved poets, he remained in Hull for the rest of his life, working at the university's library that he built up from scratch. "People who like his poems often think of him having to do this awful day job, but they forget what a

well esteemed and inspired librarian he was."

She says his public image – that of a glum-looking writer – was also out of kilter with the private man she knew. "He had a wonderful sense of humour and Saturday afternoons when he came to visit us after doing

his weekly food shopping were the high point of our week. We'd sit and talk about jazz and literature and he was a very good mimic so he'd entertain us with impressions of people whohad got on the wrong side of him."

However, Larkin's obsession with death is something she recognises having witnessed the mordant side of his personality. "He was afraid of death from an early age and he was convinced he was going to die of cancer at the age of 63, as his father had done. I remember him saying to me one day, 'don't you ever worry about death?' And I said 'no, not really Philip'. But he couldn't understand how people didn't always have that spectre in front of them."

He did, though, have a more caring side to his personality, coming to Jean's aid when her marriage broke down in the late 1960s. "I'd started an English literature degree at the university and he came along one day and said he'd opened a book account for me. I hadn't thought about books and finding the money for them so it was an absolute godsend and a very kind gesture."

He was also a very modest man, she says. "I never once heard him boast about anything, he was much more in the business of comically running himself down. When he was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for poetry,

he rather diffidently mentioned to us that he had won it and I found out later that he thought he was going to be invited to the palace for tea and cucumber sandwiches. But in the end it arrived through the post and he was deeply disappointed because I think he quite liked the idea of that."

Larkin was the antithesis of today's fawning celebrity culture and turned down the laureateship after the death of his friend John Betjeman in 1984. "He felt he had stopped writing by then and that it

would have been a sham to take up the laureateship, but also the whole cult of celebrity was starting around that time and he would have hated all the press attention."

The poet famously wrote that what survives of us is love, but in his case there's also a canon of carefully crafted poems that linger long in the memory. "He was a very nimble poet, he could be both lyrical and satirical in the same poem and he wrote about everyday life and how you deal with it, but above all he wrote with great humanity," she says.

"He loved Hull and if you look at a poem like Here, for instance, you can see this affection. He felt it was a place that didn't draw attention to itself and he wrote about it in a beautifully lyrical way." And despite the recent vandalism of several

fibreglass toads, dotted around the city as part of the

celebrations marking the poet's life, Jean hopes people in Hull start appreciating the city's most famous adopted literary son.

"It's great that we're having this celebration of Larkin and that people become more aware of him, because I think it was John Osborne who said, 'Philip Larkin's the best free advertisement Hull ever had' and he was quite right."

To find out more information about events celebrating Larkin's life and work visit www.larkin25.co.uk