REQUIRED WRITING

First edition, first printing. Paperback original (a hardback was issued the following year). Inscribed by Philip Larkin to Brynmor Jones with, laid in, a typed, hand-signed letter from Larkin to Jones which refers to the launch event for the book. A very near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the spine mildly toned but without creasing, the contents clean throughout. Priced £4.95 net to the rear panel. A scarce inscribed copy of this late collection of the poet's prose.

Inscribed in black ink to the front endpaper "For Brynmor, / who paid me for writing all this — / affectionately, Philip / 15 xii 83". The additional letter, typed on the poet's personalised library paper, and signed by hand, refers to a recent university luncheon event before apologising for not being able to attend another on account of "being lunched myself on that day by my publishers in London, in connection with a book that is coming out the following Monday"; the book was 'Required Writing'. In his Foreword to the volume, Larkin notes that the pieces are, with a single exception, commissioned – required – and written to a deadline: "I have never proposed to an editor that I should write this article or review that book, so that what I produced was someone else's idea rather than my own." Which is not to say he approached the task lightly: "A good reviewer combines the knowledge of the scholar with the judgement and cogency of the critic and the readability of the journalist, and knowing how far I fell short of this ideal made me all the more laboriously anxious to do the best I could. I have heard it said that anyone who has spent three years writing a weekly essay for his tutor finds literary journalism easy: I didn't. I found reading the books hard, thinking of something to say about them hard, and saying it hardest of all." That the resulting book is such a pleasure may be down to the same marriage of self-doubt and fastidiousness that had earlier informed his work on 'The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse'. In an extended review (London Review of Books, 1 March, 1984), Christopher Ricks cites F. R. Leavis who, when reviewing T. S. Eliot's 'On Poetry and Poets', enquired how "a book of criticism [can] be at once so distinguished and so unimportant?". Of Required Writing, Ricks surmises that "it might be asked: How can a book of criticism be at once so un-'distinguished' and so important? [H]ow can this Faber book of groans be so exhilarating? The open unsecret is: by being unremittingly attentive and diversely funny." There are pieces on Hardy, Betjeman, and Auden, William Barnes, Tennyson, W. H. Davies, Rupert Brooke, Stevie Smith, the novelists Anthony Powell, Barbara Pym, Gladys Mitchell, and a review of John Gardner's first "pseudo-Bond novel". The book is completed by a group of autobiographical pieces, some jazz writings, and a couple of very entertaining interviews. 'Required Writing' was published on 21 November 1983 in an impression of 8,014 copies (Bloomfield A17(a)).