There is no direct train from London to Hull, in Yorkshire. You have to change at Doncaster. Philip Larkin used to claim that he went on working there because literary curiosity-seekers (not to speak of “Jake Balokowsky, my biographer”) would be daunted when they discovered that the journey took three to four hours, and might decide on another poet instead.

Certainly Hull seemed like seclusion, almost retreat, with correspondence as a lifeline. “Postmen like doctors go from house to house”—although Anthony Thwaite is perhaps too optimistic in saying that Larkin thought of both of them as healers. Postmen and doctors make mistakes, and the relief they bring is often only temporary.

Larkin decided early on against marriage, risking loneliness in exchange. He valued jazz, cricket, drink, women (some women), books (some books), poetry, and friendship. “‘Friend’ can mean three things,” he wrote somewhat sourly in 1941, “acquaintance, comrade, or antagonist.” Of his three joint literary executors, all were unquestionably his comrades and two are poets—Andrew Motion, whose biography of Larkin comes out this year, and Anthony Thwaite, who edited the Collected Poems (criticized for putting in too much) in 1988 and these Selected Letters (criticized for leaving out too much) in 1992. The third executor, Monica Jones, a university lecturer, was by far the closest of Larkin’s women friends.

The correspondence will only be completely comprehensible when the biography appears. Meanwhile, faced by several thousand letters, Thwaite has had to save space and at the same