Life is too short to read Philip Larkin's juvenilia. Reading 'Trouble at Willow Gables' and 'Michaelmas Term at St Brides' is up there with stuffing mushrooms: there is a part of me which, as I read - or stuff - has precognition of the moment of my death and the very last conscious thought, which is the blinding awareness of the precious hours wasted on Larkin's schoolgirl stories or mushrooms when I might have done something more positive with them such as sleeping or filing my nails. Actually, I've never stuffed a mushroom in my life. That much sense I've got. I have no idea whether James Booth has ever gone in for fancy cooking. No time probably. He has his hands full of Larkin. He is a Reader in English at Hull University, and after a false start in 1981 (Writers and Politics in Nigeria), he has devoted himself to the cause of Philip Larkin. Philip Larkin: Writer in 1992 was followed by a collection of essays, New Larkins for Old (2000); he is secretary of the Philip Larkin Society and edits its newsletter, About Larkin (it's a joke, d'you see?). Now he has edited and introduced these mostly unfinished and unpublished fictions that have been lying around in the archive. It's what some literary academics do for a living, I know, hanging on the every word of their chosen one, but when it comes down to scratching about at the bottom of the barrel of the 21-year-old Larkin's doodlings during the summer after leaving university, it's time to head for the kitchen and get the mushroom scraper out.

LRB 23 May 2002 | PDF Download