You’ve misquoted him. If you quote the full text of the interview that the “most unhappy” line was lifted from, you’ll realise that Larkin was talking about his job, which is evident by the fact that he actually said “at Wellington” (implying the library), not “in Wellington”, as you suggest (which would imply the town).

“I saw and applied for a job as librarian at Wellington”, he said.

“The last man had scrubbed the floor and stoked the boiler but I refused to do this. I was accepted nonetheless. This was a stupid choice that has determined the course of my life ever since but I didn’t have the courage to chuck it up. My two-and-three-quarter years at Wellington were the most unhappy of my life – and the most creative.”

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Rob, sadly a number of misconceptions have arisen over the years about Philip Larkin’s time in Wellington – most of them, it seems, arising from his comments about ‘handing out tripey novels to morons’! This remark, which was published posthumously in a volume of Larkin’s private letters some years ago, was made at the beginning of his tenure as Librarian in 1943 – his first professional appointment. Taken in context, these words (made by a precocious young Oxbridge graduate who, at the time, wanted nothing more than to ‘live entirely for pleasure, with money and friends and alcohol and art’!) perhaps say more about Larkin’s own personal frustrations than any lingering resentment he harboured towards the good folk of Wellington. Indeed, Larkin’s attitude to the town appeared to mellow considerably in later years, when he praised its ‘treasured community spirit’ and lamented its administrative subordination to Telford, a place he imagined to be ‘quite unlike the Wellington I knew’.

In fact, Larkin was only too happy to return to Wellington in 1962, when he opened the ‘split level and splendid’ extension to the library in Walker Street, which the old Larkin Way formerly passed beneath. That the thoroughfare was renamed in his honour seems fitting, as it was Larkin who, with the support of an enlightened library committee, was largely responsible for dragging the archaic institution into the Twentieth Century ¾ and doubling readership in the process! Later, in 1977, Larkin wrote a memorable account of his time in Wellington for the Library Association, where he revealed that he had kept several mementoes of his tenure. This included a note from an elderly customer who due to failing eye sight was returning her library card but still wished to thank him for choosing her books – all of which seems far removed from the ‘tripey novels to morons’ comment.

At a time when Wellington is actively seeking to improve its visitor economy, I find it difficult to understand why the town would wish to sever its connection to an internationally renowned poet who in only 2008 was voted by the Times newspaper as Britain’s greatest post-war writer! Aside from being the location where he wrote his only two novels and published his first book of poetry, The North Ship, many scholars now recognise the formative years he spent in the town as crucial to his development as a writer, shaping many of the attitudes that lay at the heart of much of his greatest work. Surely, then, this is an important, and potentially lucrative, part of Wellington’s cultural history that, rather than being forgotten, should be celebrated – for the benefit of the whole town.

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