9 October 1952, 30 Elmwood Ave, Belfast
I really am going to meet Forster: I thought I shouldn’t, but apparently the old boy E.M.F. is staying with remembered my name & I am bid to John Hewitt’s at 8 tomorrow. Shall I ask him if he’s a homo? It’s the only thing I really want to know about him, you see. I don’t even care why he packed up writing.
April 28 1966
32 Pearson Park, Hull
[…] Well, [academic and critic, FR] Leavis was no great strain, no more than anyone else, but what a ghastly little man! He seemed to me rather like a Beckett who’d read Lawrence & wasn’t Irish: a compulsive talker – one of the bores of the century, I’d say – and really a typical Oxbridge don, cocky, smart, full of petty cattiness. Oh dear. […] I’ve never met a man so full of himself. Stupid little sod, the ideas rattling in him like peas. […] I’m awfully glad to reflect that I don’t possess a single book by him. Not a single book. […]
‘Dearest bun, I didn’t want to hurt you…’, Philip Larkin’s letters to Monica Jones.
