Joan Hartley: Poet off the page

The story of a young woman's passion to get Philip larkin into print is now being told on stage. Stephen McClarence reports

Jean Hartley wasn't sure what to expect when she arranged to meet a little-known poet called Philip Larkin. It was 1955 and Jean and her then-husband George, both in their early twenties, had already published some of Larkin's work in Listen, a shoestring poetry magazine they ran from their home, a two-up, two-down between a chip shop and a beer-off in Hessle, near Hull.

All previous contact had been by post, but now there was talk of publishing a book of Larkin's poems, so he came to see them. "He probably thought we were going to be middle-class, well-established grown-ups and then he arrived and found a little hovel, ill-furnished, poverty-stricken, certainly not a provincial version of Faber and Faber," she recalls. "But he could see that here were two very idealistic young people who felt as passionately about poetry as he did."

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She paints a vivid picture of that first meeting in Philip Larkin, the Marvell Press and Me, her autobiography, just reissued by, rather neatly, Faber and Faber. It's the inspiration for Wrong Beginnings, a new play about Jean's life premiered this weekend at the Hull Truck Studio Theatre.

"I had cleaned and titivated the house," she writes. "But it can only have given an impression of extreme poverty – which might just have been mistaken for deliberate bohemianism, but I doubt it."

She had imagined Larkin would have "lots of ginger hair and a merry smile with a hint of sadness around the eyes". The reality was very different: "I was

greatly alarmed when I saw a dignified gent, slim, with dark hair (receding), very formally suited, serious and quite unsmiling. His frequent 'White Rabbit' glances at his pocket-watch did nothing to put us at our ease." They weighed each other up, "and he thought 'how young' and we thought 'how old'. The difference between 22 and 32 seems enormous to people of those ages."

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It was a successful meeting, though, resulting in The Less Deceived, the collection in which Larkin found his poetic voice and which made his reputation.

I first met Jean Hartley in 1995, six years after her feisty, funny, and often very moving autobiography had first been published. Jean had followed it up with a Larkin trail around Hull, and was taking me round some of its highlights, with a telling anecdote at every turn.

She talked of Larkin's shyness: "When he went to railway stations as a young man, he used to write the name of the station he wanted to go to on a piece of paper and hand it to the booking clerk, rather than speak to him."

Since 1995, what Jean presciently called "the Larkin industry" has boomed. The almost obsessive interest in his life and work has culminated in Larkin 25, this year's Hull-based jamboree commemorating the 25th anniversary of his death. Jean and I marked it last January on a chilly, slushy day, trudging through muddy cemeteries to rekindle the essential Larkin melancholy.

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"That was his living room," she said, pointing to the attic flat in Pearson Park where he spent his most productive years. "He would have called it by a middle-class name – 'sitting room'."

Her working-class upbringing is vividly described in the autobiography, reissued as part of the Faber Finds series.

Born in 1933 in "romantic yet prosaic" Hull, Jean was the daughter of a foundry labourer. She was evacuated during the war to a Lincolnshire village and billeted with the local Major. "I was not happy there," she writes. "The house rang with haughty upper-class voices and the one-eyed major and his tall, be-jodhpured sons strutted about carrying riding-crops, but the maid was kind."

She left school at 15, became a shorthand typist and ignored her mother's advice about settling down. Her love for literature, particularly poetry, gave her higher aspirations, but they were threatened when she became an unmarried mother at 17. She was sent to a home and recalls that, when she went out with the pram, friends would cross the road to avoid her.

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George Hartley, an art college student, wasn't the child's father, but they married and, with staggering ambition, set up The Marvell Press to publish poetry. The name was chosen partly as a tribute to the 17th century Hull poet Andrew Marvell and partly because "it would be a bloody marvel if we managed to publish a book."

But publish they did, as she shows me at our latest meeting, at her present Hull home. Upstairs is a complete run of Listen. We flick through them. The second issue includes Toads, Larkin's brooding meditation on work ("Ah, were I courageous enough/ To shout Stuff your pension!").

There's a starry cast of authors – Edwin Morgan, Thom Gunn, RS Thomas – and cover designs by celebrated artists. "We'd write: 'Dear Henry Moore, We would like to have a drawing by you on the next cover. Of course we can't pay, but we would be very happy to send you three copies of the magazine.' It was just cheek really, wasn't it?" And did Moore send anything? "Oh yes, look..." She hands over several issues with his pen-and-ink covers. Ezra Pound declined their invitation to contribute a poem. So they printed his reply instead.

The Hartleys became Larkin's first friends when he arrived in Hull to be university librarian, and they duly appear in Letters to Monica, the recently published selection of the 1,400 letters he wrote to Monica Jones, his lover for 40 years. He reflects on their hand-to-mouth existence on one visit: "They seem more in the money. Jean has a new dress, George has new shoes and a new typewriter like mine and they have a new bowl in the outside, ie the only, lavatory."

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The letters reveal Larkin's gentler side and will, Jean thinks, be a corrective to the public perception of him. "A lot of what's written about Larkin is about seedy sex," she says. "But you've only got to read the letters to see that sex didn't really figure in his life. And he was very gentlemanly about it. He would have to have a distinct invitation."

For this reason, Jean never became one of "Larkin's women" after she separated from George. "There were a number of times, when he came for a meal or we were out for a drink, when it could have happened, but it didn't, because I didn't want it to. You knew it was in the air, if you gave him the wink, and I didn't."

All the women in his life, she points out, "said he was the most interesting man they'd ever known. And funny too. Any man who makes you laugh is sexy."

And did she like Monica too? "No, because she didn't like me. She was in love with Philip and very worried in case anyone else might be interested in him."

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For all that Monica wanted it, Larkin never married her. Marriage, Jean thinks, was never an option for him. "He was really firm about his feeling that he did his job as university librarian, came home, had his meal, washed up – and then he wrote. He used to say that was just the time you don't have if you're married."

This is a busy few months for Jean, who moved on to take BA & MA degrees and teach in Higher Education. As well as the book reissue, she will be awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters by Hull University in January. And there's the play, written by Hull-based David Pattison and being given three performances (all sold out) this weekend. How will it will feel to see herself portrayed on stage? "Bizarre. Normally, unless you're notorious like Myra Hindley or Margaret Thatcher, you don't get a play written about you."

The book is full of good stories. A favourite is Larkin telling her that after reading the manuscript of That Uncertain Feeling, by his friend Kingsley Amis, "he complained that Kingsley had cannibalised his letters for some of the material. 'Life transmuted into art,' Kingsley retorted. Philip replied: 'But God damn it, Kingsley, my letters ARE art!'"

Hull Truck Theatre: 01482 323638 (www.hulltruck.co.uk). Philip Larkin, The Marvell Press and Me (Faber Finds) 14. Larkin 25 website: www.larkin25.co.uk.

YP MAG 27/11/10

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