Philip Larkin would condense his poems into limericks for his friend Robert Conquest. This is Aubade.

An exasperated Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, as remembered by Martin Amis during a discussion at the University of Manchester. The younger Amis has an interesting take on the Eeyorish Larkin, who maintained an unlikely three affairs concurrently before circumstance forced his hand and he finally assented to an ailing Monica Jones moving into 105 Newland Park. Amis argues that this image of Larkin as the “Don Juan of Hull” is misplaced and the often-noted ugliness in his character was matched also by something equally unpleasant in the triumvirate of Jones, Maeve Brennan and his “loaf-haired secretary” Betty Mackereth. I think there’s something to his interpretation, or at least there might be when it comes to the abrasive Jones - of whom Amis describes as looking like an urka, a hereditary substrate of Siberian criminal - and Brennan, a pious and virginial Catholic who tried to claim Larkin for God after his death in 1985. He’s less convincing when it comes to Mackereth and I’m not altogether comfortable with absolving Larkin as the innocent dupe whose unlucky trifecta came home but it makes for an absorbing listen.