It had to be, in the end, a common cancer that bore off Philip Larkin. He could hardly have died with a flourish, like Saint-Exupéry, by charging off into the sky on a mission of reconnaissance only to vanish; or like. Hemingway, by blowing out his brains. Nor could he go, like Matthew Arnold, in a burst of joy that stopped his heart in midair while leaping a fence to welcome a granddaughter. No, the dismal ordinariness of life, which Larkin so fondly celebrated, had to bring him down by its own dull strategies.

As a critic, to be sure, he delighted in being a curmudgeon. The gist of his message, given in his introduction to a sheaf of record reviews, All What Jazz, is that art, unless it helps us to enjoy and to endure, is nothing at all. In deliberately cultivating a stance of reaction—blaming Picasso for placing two eyes on the same side of a face, Henry Moore for perforating his figures, Samuel Beckett for setting out his actors with the trash—Larkin seems hardly a serious foe of modernity. But for the great modern artist’s hordes of inferior imitators, he is a dangerous critic to meet in a dark alley. What refreshes in Larkin’s complaint isn’t its querulous tone, but its brash willingness to risk the charge of philistinism. Here, he implies, am I, a reasonably intelligent man willing to utter the worst doubts of the man in the street. And along with this