Book reviewers observe a law that Moses forgot to bring down from the mountain: Thou shalt not praise miscellaneous collections of periodical pieces. When I read censure of an author for gathering fugitive pieces, I usually respond by buying the book. Second-rate work from a first-rate writer has its utility. We would not read Henry James’s potboiling short stories or travel sketches or letters if we did not love Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors; and by-blows cast light on the great work. The perfected work of art stays within itself; the dashed-off journalism releases incoherent, suggestive, sometimes brilliant flashes of illumination. Why else should we read disquisitions on Pee Wee Russell and Fats Waller by a middle-aged English librarian? Even Philip Larkin’s praise for James Bond sheds minor light on The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings, and High Windows.
Required Writing includes two interviews, introductions to other writers, occasional reminiscences, talks, book reviews, and notices of jazz records. The autobiographical pieces are wholly charming—alert, attentive, intimate. Of course he will never do it, but what a wonderful autobiography Larkin could write, about a life in which nothing has happened: always the most interesting autobiography.
Larkin’s reputation makes him a forbidding figure, even misanthropic, but these essays turn out to be companionable. He is almost ingratiating when he praises what he loves. And he is funny, a masterful ironist: at the beginning of an essay about childishness in poets, he writes,
