INTERVIEW / Mr Nice tackles Mr Nasty: Andrew Motion: The poet behind the first biography of Philip Larkin, serialised in this paper next week, tells Mark Lawson his subject is also his hero

IN his 1968 poem 'Posterity', Philip Larkin grumpily imagined his own biographer. The author he saw was Jake Balokowsky, a hackish American post- grad who needs a modern English poet on his CV to help his case for tenure. Larkin offers Balokowsky's one-line summary of his thesis: 'Oh, you know the thing . . . one of those old-type natural fouled-up guys.'

Seven years after his death, Larkin has got his first biographer. But he is no Balokowsky. Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life - published by Faber next month and beginning a three-week serialisation in this newspaper next week - is written by Andrew Motion, a poet who was a colleague of Larkin's at Hull University (Larkin as librarian, Motion as English don); a close friend and one of his literary executors. Where Balokowsky was cynical, opportunistic and hostile, Motion has been devoted, diligent and fretful about the subject's reputation. 'Although I have aimed to be honest, the book is written with love,' Motion says, which is a rare comment at a time when phone calls between publishers and biographers increasingly resemble those between the Mafia and their hit men.

Even so, Balokowsky's line is going to prove tempting to many reviewers because Larkin emerges from Motion's book as significantly fouled-up and exceptionally old-type: for some, repulsively so. Larkin offers perfect material for the debate in literary criticism: to what extent do a writer's ugly views negate the great art they produced? In the last few years, some libraries and university courses have slung out the bigots, racists and sexists. Larkin, while alive, was the hero poet for a generation of critics and readers - his many liberal admirers tended to regard Larkin's often-expressed erotic and ideological interest in Margaret Thatcher as a tease - but, since his death, the poet has increasingly been reinterpreted as the Alf Garnett of English letters: a racist, sexist, right-wing, bald old grumpy git. Larkin's Selected Letters - edited by Motion's co-executor Anthony Thwaite and published last year - included the political manifesto: 'Prison for strikers / Bring back the cat / Kick out the niggers / How about that?' Two leaked details from Motion's book have already made front-page news: that the poet ended his phone calls to his friend Kingsley Amis with the liberal-baiting sign-off 'Fuck Oxfam', and that Larkin had a serious girlie-mag habit.

Motion accepts that his biography may provide more kindling for the academic world's book-burning tendency, but says: 'The conclusion I came to was that the dogmatic opinions writers hold, either publicly or socially, or the private habits they pursue, are not the whole story of their work. The traditional defence of literary biography is that it shows the connections between life and work. I wanted to show that there were connections, but that the lack of connection was interesting as well. My theme was that the flower of art sometimes grows on a long stem out of some very mucky stuff.'

BUT Motion has to accept that it is mainly the compost that will bring buyers to the bookshops: and, specifically, the sexual dirt. The Larkin biography is a rare modern example of the genre in that is does not reveal that its subject was a closet homosexual, but it does deal with what you might call an eternal quadrangle between Larkin and three women. Another of the poet's famous lines - 'Sexual intercourse began in 1963' - is likely to be used in reviews with ironic application to other decades. Does Motion agree that a literary biography has increasingly come to mean a revelation of the author's sexual arrangements? 'I think you're right about that. And, as a matter of general record, I would regret it. If you pay so much attention to the sex life that it distorts or discredits the work, then clearly it's wrong . . . But it so happens with Philip, that there is an interesting connection between his relationships and not just his strike rate as

a poet but the subject of his poems. You learn at school that Larkin was

the great poet of death, but, in fact, love, sex and marriage are almost

equal themes.'

This rationalisation might be thought convenient. The sex life was not always relevant, but it was in the case of the book Motion was writing. What if a newspaper said, OK, Andrew Motion, you're a poet, we're going to publish all the details of your private life to help illuminate your work? 'I got rid of everything. No, I'm not joking. I had a great bonfire in the middle of writing this book . . . ' This was, he says, not grandiosity about his own reputation, but infectious paranoia from working on Larkin. 'Well, suppose a newspaper did do that to me, God forbid, there is one crucial difference, which is that I'm still alive. I think the rules do change when a person dies. Of course, I accept that it's not a pure distinction. If a person has died recently, there are people who are around still to be hurt. If I ever did another Life, I would choose someone long-dead, for that reason.'

Larkin's friends - particularly his long-time companion Monica Jones and his woman friend Maeve Brennan - assisted Motion. His key discoveries were their letters from Larkin, which, along with those to his mother (with whom he corresponded twice a week for 30 years), Anthony Thwaite had either not secured or not used in his Selected Letters. The letters home were an especially important trawl for Motion, as Larkin, after all, had inadvertently summarised the thesis of post-Freudian literary biography in another of his celebrated phrases: 'They fuck you up, your mum and dad'.

Like P D James's Adam Dalgleish, Motion became, during the research, a detective-poet. He grabbed Monica Jones's hundreds of letters from Larkin out of her abandoned Northumberland home weeks before the place was gutted by burglars. He interviewed the Hull cancer-ward nurse whose hand Larkin grasped as he faced his long- contemplated enemy at 1.24 in the morning of 1 December 1985, and thus uncovered Larkin's last words. All biographies have a final-days sequence, but this book's is particularly poignant, for, as Motion says, 'Philip had seen this thing coming at him since he was about 17'.

Motion dealt with the ethical question of the sensitivities of his subject's surviving intimates by showing them the manuscript before publication. There is also, though, the matter of what Larkin would have wanted. The traditional reading of the Jake Balakowsky poem has been that Larkin did not want a biography, but Ian Hamilton argues, in his excellent book on literary estates, Keepers of the Flame, that the poem is 'actually alive with self- esteem': Larkin expected posterity, and was just being snobby about the terms. Yet Larkin arranged for the shredding of his private diaries - dream material for a Life-writer - by his university secretary, who, having glimpsed a few pages as they went through the blades, said that they contained 'things you would tell no person'. Larkin's will contained contradictory clauses, one ordering the suppression of all personal material, the other leaving such decisions to his executors. This had made the testament inoperative. Motion argues that the will was wilful, deliberately leaving the posterity questions to his estate. 'Philip was ambivalent about a lot of things - work, poetry, women, everything - and he was, I think, ambivalent on this question. He wanted to be let off the decision.'

In fact, Larkin has already given his reaction to the biography, although the provenance of his comment may be questioned by some. During the research of the book, Motion was in contact with the man who fitted Larkin's hearing aids. It turned out that this gentleman was a part-time medium, tuning his own ear to the spirit world, with which he communicated through an old wireless set. Motion was sent three cassettes of a session with the dead poet. 'I don't know what to think about this - and I don't want to spend the rest of my life getting letters from the ghost of Arthur Koestler - but the fact is that on the tapes was the deaf- aid man's voice saying 'Are you there, Philip Larkin?', then a lengthy crackle of static and then the authentic Eeyore tones of Philip.'

Two weeks ago, Motion received another Jiffy bag, with a further cassette. The aural electrician had taken the opportunity to ask the shade of Larkin for his reaction to the Motion book. Larkin was heard to say: 'Very satisfactory.' In contemplating this revelation, Motion's scepticism battles with the fact that, for a biographer, the dead writer does become a tangible ghost at the shoulder.

Regrettably, the spiritual phone-in host did not ask Larkin - a devoted MCC member - for his view on the recent row over the non-selection for England's catastrophic Indian tour of David Gower. The polarities offered by the controversy - between the elegant but dilettante Gower and the rugged, banned-for-playing-in-South-Africa Englishmen selected ahead of him - have become a useful quick way of assessing an Englishman's priorities. So I asked Motion - who regularly attended matches with Larkin - which side he thought Larkin would have been on.

'I have wondered about that. I think he would have backed Gower, because he admired elegance. Also - in that rough old English class distinction between gentlemen and players - Philip would have been on the side of the gentlemen.'

But he would also have admired the ones who went to South Africa when it was politically unrespectable for them to do so . . .?

'Yes. Quite. Absolutely.'

(Photograph omitted)