For someone who didn’t grow up in a bookish family, let alone a poetic one, the young Andrew Motion lost no time in making up for his lack of connections. Hurtling back from a sixth-form pilgrimage to Rupert Brooke’s grave in Skyros, Motion is delighted to discover that the war poet’s literary executor, Geoffrey Keynes (brother of John Maynard), lives down the road from him in rural Essex. No sooner has the teenager got himself set up with regular invitations to discuss Brooke than Keynes is ogling his body and giving him whiskery kisses.
Up at Oxford and having burnished his fledgling career with the Newdigate prize for poetry, Motion has regular meetings with an ancient but still priapic WH Auden who is eking out his last days at Christ Church. It’s not long before Auden is asking Andrew leeringly what he’d like – which Motion pretends not to understand and requests a martini. Then it’s off to his first job as a lecturer at the University of Hull to try to meet Philip Larkin, the librarian, whose verse comes closest to what the young poet is trying to do himself. There is no lechery this time – Larkin only has eyes for the women he enjoys playing off against each other – but within weeks Motion is going round to Larkin’s squalid home and getting himself appointed as one of his literary executors.
