Chronic inactivity in an epic frame...

Hull is about to go Larkin crazy, with a several month-long celebration of, erm, the man's death. As was pointed out in The Guardian Review last month, "there will be no attempt to rebrand him as a genial figure who arrived at work each day with a spring in his step". Which is a good thing, obviously. I've just re-read an essay that Martin Amis wrote for the New Yorker in 1993 and was published in Amis's 2001 collection The War Against Cliche. The opening goes...

"In 1985, the year of his death, Philip Larkin was unquestionably England's unofficial laureate, our best-loved poet since the war: better loved qua poet, than John Betjeman, who was loved also for his charm, his famous giggle, his patrician bohemianism, and his televisual charisma, all of which Larkin notably lacked. Now, in 1993, Larkin is something like a pariah, or an untouchable. He who was beautiful is suddenly found to be ugly."

The few people I've spoken to recently re Larkin have said terrible things about him; they are very much in that 1993 state of mind. In 2010, Larkin looks set to return to his previous state, and be much-loved again. I like that. Sometimes, when I'm walking in a fug through Pearson Park near his old house, or near his other place on Newland Park, or am strolling along Cottingham Road, or enter the grounds of the University of Hull, I sometimes find myself wishing that he'd ride his bike into me.

Talking about Andrew Motion's biography Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life, Amis describes the book - full, as it is, of a "poverty of event" - as "chronic inactivity in an epic frame". Love that phrase. Good title for an emo album, perhaps?