Helenism.(Bad Girls Go Everywhere)(Book review)

"Sexual intercourse," according to the British poet Philip Larkin, "began / In nineteen sixty-three / (Which was rather late for me)-- / Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles' first LP." This, it turns out, is complete nonsense. Sexual intercourse began for Larkin, at the very latest, in the early nineteen-forties, with his teen-aged girlfriend, and continued at an energetic pace with a variety of women, including his secretary and the wife of a colleague--at one point, he shared his favors among three lovers--until he died, in his early sixties. I mention Larkin's amorous history, and cite his succinct, famous poem "Annus Mirabilis" (the narrator goes ...