Larkin's First Interview
The discovery of unpublished work by Philip Larkin is a big event—especially when it shows the notoriously reclusive poet behaving like the most manipulative of Hollywood stars. This week in the TLS we have the letters exchanged in 1956 between a then-little-known Larkin and a reporter sent to interview him for a teacher's magazine. Larkin asked if he could see a “draft” before publication of what was his first press interview—and John Shakespeare agreed, breaking best journalistic practices but setting in train a remarkable correspondence in the history of “copy-control.”
"First, I'm afraid, we really must cut the less discreet parts... you have drawn a picture of a very feeble negative kind of creature, typical life-hating bookworm, which I am most loath to accept..."
"Your account of me seems so flat and negative and downright dreary that I feel it can only do me harm".
And so on, and so on—for weeks of elegant PR bombardment by the curmudgeon who would become one of the most famed and loved poets of his age.
Portrait of a Portrait Painter
Sir Michael Holroyd, the distinguished biographer of Augustus John and George Bernard Shaw, was happy to accept to have his portrait painted for a new British literary museum. Recently recovering from cancer treatment, he sat for the maverick British artist, Michael Reynolds, who was also suffering from cancer and died of the disease before he could complete the work. "The saddest picture I ever saw" is how Holroyd describes the unfinished painting in the TLS. "Externally this portrait I am looking at has a resemblance to me, but essentially I believe it to be a concealed self-portrait of the artist".
China’s Fraternal Failings
Brothers is a revealing Chinese novel by Yu Hua, “an almost textbook history of the past 40 years” in the words of this week's TLS reviewer and newly available in English from Picador. It charts the fate of two stepbrothers in the get-rich-quick decades, and how Beauty Contests for Virgins—and hymen reconstruction as the price of fame—make Baldy Li rich enough to have a white BMW for daytime and a black Mercedes for the night. Baldy "always wanted to be at one with nature".
Plus: Check out Book Beast, for more news on hot titles and authors and excerpts from the latest books.
Peter Stothard is editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He was editor of The Times of London from 1992-2002. He writes on ancient and modern literature and is the author of Thirty Days, a Downing Street diary of his time with British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the Iraq War.
