A pencil box of bees

In the current edition of The American Scholar my friend, Steven Isenberg, recalls lunches in his enthusiastic youth with Auden, Larkin, Forster and Empson.

It is a rose-tinted piece of recollected pleasure - one which raises more issues than first appear, not least about whether how young admirers could or would have such meetings today.

These were not interviews, promotional opportunities, book-tour signings - just lunches.

Some readers may already know which of the four great men told Isenberg a joke about keeping bees in a pencil box.

Those that don't - and those that do too - can read the memoir for themselves right here.

Comments

[Candadai Tirumalai]

In July 1982, when Mr. Rosenberg had lunch with Philip Larkin, the poet had less than four years to live, and probably not in very good health. And yet the "jokey" side of Larkin, which struck many, rose naturally into the conversation; another reminder that if "the Hermit of Hull" was a memorable specialist in gloom ("Depression is to me what daffodils were to Wordsworth"), his zest for life was never far away. " Our Beloved Assistant Publisher Dies with Unknown English Poet" is inimitable Larkin. He could not, he said elsewhere, live without jazz. If he could be set down in New Orleans for an afternoon and then be spirited back to England, he would go but not otherwise.
Christopher Ricks was among the first academics to recognize the originality of Larkin's work.

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