Larkin meets Eliot meets Auden meets Dylan Thomas..

An interview to keep, here.

Larkin and Pym:"I suppose I used to write many more letters than I do now, but
so did everyone. Nowadays I keep up with one or two people, in
the sense of writing when there isn’t anything special to say. I love
getting letters, which means you have to answer them, and there
isn’t always time. I had a very amusing and undemanding correspondence
with the novelist Barbara Pym, who died in 1980, that
arose simply out of a fan letter. I wrote her and went on for over
ten years before we actually met. I hope she liked getting my letters,
I certainly liked hers. "


Larkin meets...:
"INTERVIEWER
Did you ever meet Eliot?
LARKIN
I didn’t know him. Once I was in the Faber offices—the old
ones, 24 Russell Square, that magic address!—talking to Charles
Monteith, and he said, Have you ever met Eliot? I said no, and to
my astonishment he stepped out and reappeared with Eliot, who
must have been in the next room. We shook hands, and he
explained that he was expecting someone to tea and couldn’t stay.
There was a pause, and he said, I’m glad to see you in this office.
The significance of that was that I wasn’t a Faber author—it must
have been before 1964, when they published The Whitsun
Weddings—and I took it as a great compliment. But it was a shattering
few minutes, I hardly remember what I thought.INTERVIEWER
What about Auden? Were you acquainted?
LARKIN
I didn’t know him, either. I met Auden once at Stephen
Spender’s house, which was very kind of Spender, and in a sense he
was more frightening than Eliot. I remember he said, Do you like
living in Hull? and I said, I don’t suppose I’m unhappier there than
I should be anywhere else. To which he replied, Naughty, naughty.
I thought that was very funny.
But this business of meeting famous writers is agonizing; I had
a dreadful few minutes with Forster. My fault, not his. Dylan
Thomas came to Oxford to speak to a club I belonged to, and we
had a drink the following morning. He wasn’t frightening. In fact,
and I know it sounds absurd to say so, but I should say I had more
in common with Dylan Thomas than with any other “famous
writer,” in this sort of context. "