- \n
- Critique<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
28 January, 2019<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"\/standpoint\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/files_u28_critique_larkin_kitty.jpg\" "\\"Feature")
<\/p>\nLarkin\u2019s early \u201cBrunette Coleman\u201d girls\u2019-school stories are generally misunderstood. Andrew Motion finds the stories \u201cdisparaging about women\u201d, \u201cfrivolous things, done for private pleasure, with very limited aims.\u201d Clive James sees deeper, puzzled that the young writer should have chosen to dedicate such intense creative energy to this disregarded genre. To James, Larkin\u2019s correspondence with his mother came as the revelation which made sense of Brunette for the first time. In a review of Letters Home <\/em>in Prospect<\/em> magazine he wrote:<\/p>\n
\u201cConsidering the immense trouble it must have taken to write Trouble at Willow Gables<\/em> . . . I myself was inclined to think its author . . . was a nut. It was the way it wasn\u2019t pornographic that staggered me. These infants were in paradise, but from what boiling, twisting psychic ambivalence came all that finely noticed detail about a world without men? Well, now we know: he was channelling his mother.<\/p>\n
But James is only partly right. More immediately Larkin was channelling his sister.<\/p>\n
The young Larkin constructed his identity by identifying himself with all three members of his family. The style of his earliest letters varies depending on his correspondent. He channels his father in a terse, executive style: \u201cI note the Government have done several drastic things, although I never read the papers. The suppression of the Daily Worker<\/em> has caused a good deal of annoyance here.\u201d In writing to his mother he falls into an idiom of domestic triviality: \u201cNo marmite yet . . . I broke the handle from a tea-cup the other day, unfortunately. This is the first breakage of any sort we have had. We lost the strainer the other day.\u201d<\/p>\n
Philip\u2019s early letters to his sister show the same close intimacy. Ten years older than her brother, Kitty had \u201creally brought him up\u201d (she later told her daughter) when their mother could not cope. An early photograph, presumably taken by their father, shows Larkin, aged about 11, photographing Kitty, in her early twenties, as she strikes a Vogue<\/em> pose in the garden, a broad belt tight round her slim waist. In another photograph he is transfixed as she applies make-up on the beach.<\/p>\n
Letters which Philip wrote to Kitty in the early 1940s, while she was training as a teacher of art and design, give a glimpse into their shared world. In November 1941 he told her that, preparing to be \u201cpolyfotoed\u201d, \u201cI . . . did my hair (as far as possible) in the Rupert Brooke Coiffure you approved of once.\u201d He encouraged her theatrical projects, analysed the films they had seen, and drew an affectionate caricature of Kitty as a cat teaching \u201cForm and Content\u201d to \u201ca whole secondary school in Art\u201d (\u201cplease miss, come an\u2019 draw a cow\u201d; \u201cplease miss, yer \u2019air\u2019s cummin down\u201d). He attempted to counter her self-doubt: \u201cIt must be difficult to be ceaselessly adapting your personality to the different subjects and classes. You are very clever to be able to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n
He frequently mentions colours in writing to her. In January 1941 he tells her that Jim Sutton\u2019s newly-acquired sports coat \u201cisn\u2019t quite purple \u2014 a kind of red, more . . . it looks excellent with an orange sweater.\u201d Three months later he boasts from Oxford that he has bought the only pair of \u201ccrimson trousers \u2014 dark crimson\u201d, in the university. He thanks her for her \u201celaborate envelope, and her coloured notepaper\u201d, and suggests sending letters on orange paper in red envelopes or on red paper in orange envelopes. \u201cWhat is your opinion on this? Actually I suppose orange and green, or orange and yellow would be better, but I want to be bright and sunlike.\u201d In October 1941 he mentions to his mother that Kitty has written to him \u201con her swagger crested paper in answer to one of my orange telegrams\u201d.<\/p>\n
The florid handwriting on some of the envelopes addressed to Kitty imitates her style. Strangely he changes her name from letter to letter, addressing her as \u201cK\u201d, \u201cKit\u201d, \u201cKath\u201d, \u201cKathryn\u201d, \u201cKatherine\u201d, \u201cKatharine\u201d or \u201cKitty\u201d. The name echoes in his later writing. The vulnerable protagonist of his second novel, A Girl in Winter<\/em>, is called Katherine, and in \u201cDublinesque\u201d (1970) the name \u201cKitty, or Katy\u201d echoes in a dream down the streets of Dublin, as if it \u201cmeant once \/ All love, all beauty.\u201d In a letter to their mother of 1966 he asserts his virtual identity with his sister: \u201cI dreamed about Kitty the other night, but have forgotten what. Fancy her saying we were utterly unlike each other! Only as one red is utterly unlike another red, I shd have thought.\u201d<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/standpoint-cdn.trystandfirst.com\/uploads\/2019\/03\/files_u28_critique_larkin_2.jpg\"\/)
Difficulties with girls: Larkin as a student at St John\u2019s College, Oxford, in 1941 (PHOTO \u00a9THE ESTATE OF PHILIP LARKIN)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\nLarkin\u2019s close relations with his unconventional family encouraged a feminisation of his sensibility. Even his father discussed the letters of Katherine Mansfield with him, and praised a novel by the lesbian Radclyffe Hall. However, it still seems astonishing that he should have chosen to devote his literary energies following his graduation in 1943, to a series of girls\u2019-school stories, poems and essays written under a pseudonym. Kitty\u2019s daughter thinks that her mother read The School Friend<\/em> comic (later Schoolgirl<\/em>), and an Angela Brazil novel was among her books when she died. But it seems probable that Larkin was following his own literary compulsion in seeking out the eight girls\u2019-school stories which Brunette cites in her essay \u201cWhat Are We Writing For?\u201d, a sophisticated, aestheticist riposte to George Orwell\u2019s ideological analysis, \u201cBoy\u2019s Weeklies\u201d, published in 1940 in Horizon<\/em>.<\/p>\n
Kingsley Amis\u2019s crudely pornographic explanation of these works is a red herring. From May 1941 to early summer 1942, when Amis was commissioned into the Signals, the two men were fast friends in St John\u2019s College. Larkin had already taken his first steps in poetry before they met, imitating W.H. Auden in erotic poems about his schoolfriends. Now in uneasy short stories he fictionalised his and Amis\u2019s attitudes to \u201cthis buggery business\u201d. Philip Brown, with whom he lodged in Oxford in 1942, recalls that Larkin might have had a \u201ccrush\u201d on him, though \u201cthere wasn\u2019t any serious action. Besides, I was extremely interested in girls. And so was he. He was sexual, you see, but undirected.\u201d Larkin readily fell in with Amis\u2019s lubricious fantasies and matched his friend\u2019s rampantly lesbian \u201cAnna Lucasta\u201d with his own \u201cBrunette Coleman\u201d. But, unlike Anna, Brunette was never the projection of heterosexual voyeurism.<\/p>\n
Brunette\u2019s oeuvre was written over a year after Amis had left Oxford, at a time when Larkin had fallen under quite different influences. In his final year he was constantly in the company of the art student Diana Gollancz, whose habit of calling everyone \u201cdear creature\u201d gave him his \u201ccreature\u201d persona in the drawings in his letters. But the key influence at this time was the charismatic modern languages student and detective novelist, Bruce Montgomery. Under Montgomery\u2019s influence he adopted a dilettantish pose of insouciant narcissism: \u201cI am preparing to take Finals,\u201d he wrote to Sutton, \u201cand the prospect is an expanding shite. I am also dressed in red trousers, shirt, and white pullover, and look very beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n
Larkin later remembered that \u201cleaving Oxford was like taking a cork out of a bottle . . . Writing flooded out of me.\u201d In three or four months, back at home in his attic room in Warwick, he wrote the camp, pastiche novellas, Trouble at Willow Gables <\/em>and Michaelmas Term at St Bride\u2019s<\/em>, and also Brunette\u2019s seven \u201cSugar and Spice\u201d poems, by far the best poetry he was to write in the decade. As Clive James perceives, he took \u201cimmense trouble\u201d over these works. He even sent the carefully typed Trouble at Willow Gables<\/em> for publication to one of Diana Gollancz\u2019s father\u2019s companies, Rochefort Publications Ltd., though it was rejected. In a letter to Amis he considered sending a copy of \u201cSugar and Spice\u201d to John Betjeman: \u201c \u2014 wonder what he\u2019d say?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was the way it wasn\u2019t pornographic that staggered me,\u201d writes James. Indeed the main impulse behind the beautifully-crafted Trouble at Willow Gables<\/em> is an affectionate homage to the girls\u2019-school genre. He studied and creatively absorbed the genre fiction of Dorita Fairlie Bruce, Dorothy Vicary, Nancy Breary and Joy Francis, with the same respect he paid to the classic texts of the English syllabus. When Trouble<\/em> was published in 2002 Sue Sims, editor of Folly<\/em>, the magazine for lovers of the girls\u2019-school story, commented that some passages \u201ccould have come straight out of Dorita Fairlie Bruce or Elsie J. Oxenham\u201d. <\/p>\n
\u201cBare feet patted the linoleum, pyjamas were thrown limply onto beds, sounds of splashing arose. Heads emerged from blouses, from tunics: stockings were drawn on, garters snapped round thighs, sashes fastened, slides clipped into place. Philippa did up her black skirt, with one eye on a text-book open on her dressing-table: Ursula sucked a lozenge . . .\u201d<\/p>\n
The characterisation is assured, and follows the genre prescription, though the lesbian strand is explicit, rather than a suppressed subtext as it is in Vicary and Oxenham. There are the fourth-formers: loveable, impulsive Marie Moore, greedy for second and third helpings at dinner; rebellious, accident-prone, ruefully sardonic Margaret Tattenham, who gambles secretly on the Oaks; and Mary Beech, who fascinates the lesbian Hilary with her \u201csoft, silken skin, ribboned hair, print dresses, socks and sensible shoes, and a serious outlook on a world limited by puppies, horses, a few simple ideas, and changing Mummy\u2019s book at Boots\u201d. Then there are the sixth-formers, Hilary, Ursula and Pam, who play poker and smoke in the privacy of their studies. Hilary, \u201ca big girl, with a strongly-moulded body, damp lips, and smouldering, discontented eyes\u201d, dictates the plot by confiscating the five-pound note Marie\u2019s aunt has sent her, and forcing her attentions on Mary Beech. Philippa, Marie\u2019s elder sister and Head of School, is more psychologically complicated: always in black, her nose in a book, nervously \u201cinserting her hands between her broad leather belt and her soft, jumpered stomach\u201d. Later, in Michaelmas Term at St Bride\u2019s<\/em>, the characters all become Oxford undergraduates, and Larkin pushes beyond the genre parameters when Marie, newly interested in psychological theory, discovers that Philippa is obsessed with belts:<\/p>\n
\u201cPhil, what an incredible lot of belts.\u201d
\u201cWhat\u2019s incredible about them?\u201d
\u201cI never knew you had so many.\u201d
\u201cOh, one picks them up, you know,\u201d said Philippa vaguely, holding her dress out on the support of two forearms before diving within it. \u201cThey accumulate, you know.\u201d
Marie inspected them more closely. \u201cBut you must have at least thirty!\u201d
\u201cThirty-seven, I think.\u201d<\/p>\nChoosing one made of rhinoceros-hide she \u201ctook a deep breath and by a sudden jerk of the wrist managed to secure the buckle on the last hole. Marie noticed with increased disquiet that this last hole was rather ragged round the edges and was obviously home-bored.\u201d<\/p>\n
In \u201cWhat Are We Writing For?\u201d Brunette quotes Dorita Fairlie-Bruce\u2019s poetic epigraph to Dimsie Moves Up Again<\/em>, \u201cTo the Old Girls of Clarence House, Roehampton\u201d:<\/p>\n
And if from words of mine you catch
One breath of the old cedars\u2019 scent \u2014
Hear blithe young voices cheer the match,
Across the sunny field, or see
Forgotten faces flushed with glee \u2014
I shall be well-content.<\/p>\nLarkin was moved by the nostalgia of these idylls of girlhood. More importantly he recognised the deep elegiac roots of the genre. In \u201cBallade des Dames du Temps Jadis\u201d he short-circuits from the archetypes of Villon\u2019s celebrated 15th-century poem to those of Willow Gables<\/em>, substituting for Villon\u2019s fabled women of history \u2014 Thais, mistress of Alexander the Great, Eloise, lover of Abelard, Blanche of Castile and Joan of Arc \u2014 the tomboy Valerie with her golden-red hair, Julia improvising on the Londonderry Air, brown-legged Jill, and Patricia who played Rosalind in the school play. \u201cMais o\u00f9 sont les neiges d\u2019antan?<\/em>\u201d asks Villon; Brunette sighs, \u201cSo many summer terms away.\u201d But her \u201cDames du Temps Jadis\u201d are not, like Villon\u2019s, the femmes fatales of masculine ideology, but girls in their own world, without men.<\/p>\n
Tell me, into what far lands
They are all gone, whom once I knew
With tennis-racquets in their hands,
And gym-shoes, dabbled with the dew? <\/p>\nThe brilliant first-class graduate had learned the lesson of William Empson\u2019s Some Versions of Pastoral<\/em> (1935). Brunette\u2019s world is as \u201carchetypal\u201d as that of Villon or Theocritus. Later, the mature poet transfigures the clich\u00e9s of shopping and advertising in poems such as \u201cEssential Beauty\u201d, \u201cSunny Prestatyn\u201d and \u201cThe Large Cool Store\u201d. Here, in these poems, he makes the clich\u00e9s of the schoolgirl world into a poignant metonym for Life: <\/p>\n
Now the ponies all are dead,
The summer frocks have been outgrown,
The books are changed, beside the bed,
And all the stitches that were sewn
Have been unpicked. <\/p>\nThe key that unlocked the literary floodgates was the adoption of what Larkin called a \u201clesbian\u201d persona. In a letter to Amis of September 1943 he wrote: \u201chomosexuality has been completely replaced by lesbianism in my character at the moment \u2014 I don\u2019t know why.\u201d It was presumably Bruce Montgomery who introduced him to Theodore Gautier\u2019s Mademoiselle de Maupin<\/em> (1835), with its elusive bisexual heroine. Hilary cherishes her copy of the novel, and pursues her dream of beauty with a neo-Platonic idealism like that of Gautier\u2019s protagonist, d\u2019Albert. The most original poem in \u201cSugar and Spice\u201d is a deliberately British pastiche of Baudelaire\u2019s \u201cFemmes Damn\u00e9es\u201d (\u201cLesbians\u201d; 1857). The French poet\u2019s lurid melodrama is elaborated over 26 stanzas and ends with the \u201clamentables victimes<\/em>\u201d descending the road to \u201cl\u2019enfer \u00e9ternel<\/em>\u201d. Brunette\u2019s imitation extends to a mere six mock-heroic quatrains and her lesbians are middle-class students in a comfortable suburb, milk bottles on the doorstep and the Guardian<\/em> in the letter-box. Baudelaire\u2019s Delphine becomes Rachel, whose graduation photograph in cap and gown overlooks the scene of seduction. Brunette outdoes Baudelaire in rhetorical malice:<\/p>\n
Rachel curls and curves,
Eyelids and lips apart, her glances filled
With satisfied ferocity; she smiles,
As beasts smile on the prey they have just killed.<\/p>\nBut the tone is playful, and when we are told that Rachel\u2019s victim, Rosemary, weeps on \u201cCushions from Harrods . . . smelling of smoke and wine\u201d, the reader suspects that, once she has dried her tears, life will carry on as it does for Mary Beech in Michaelmas Term at St Bride\u2019s<\/em>, who after her seduction becomes Hilary\u2019s companionable lover.<\/p>\n
Late in 1943, before taking up his librarian post in Wellington, Larkin called it a day. He pasted the first typed pages of Michaelmas Term over the matching pages of the unfinished holograph, and inserted a corrected pencil draft of the last, most poignant Brunette poem, \u201cFourth Former Loquitur\u201d, into the \u201cSugar and Spice\u201d booklet. He filed Brunette away and made a clean break. He buckled down conscientiously to the duties of a provincial librarian and his letters from Wellington lack the \u00e9lan and high spirits of Oxford. But his early dream of girlhood continued to dominate his imagination throughout the 1940s.<\/p>\n
Soon after his arrival in Wellington his biological gender came into conflict with his dream of girlhood when he became entangled with a real 16-year-old schoolgirl, Ruth Bowman. The relationship descended into guilt and scathing self-criticism. His published novels, Jill<\/em> (1946) and A Girl in Winter <\/em>(1947), both evoke an innocent female world cruelly shattered by crude masculine sexuality.<\/p>\n
In the early 1944 poem \u201cI see a girl dragged by the wrists\u201d, the poet watches a laughing girl \u201cpretending to struggle\u201d as she is dragged across a field of snow in courtship horseplay. Startlingly he is jealous, not of the man\u2019s masterfulness, but of the girl\u2019s breathless surrender:<\/p>\n
Nothing so wild, nothing so glad as she
Rears up in me,
And would not, though I watched an hour yet.<\/p>\n\u201cTo be that girl!\u201d he exclaims, \u201c \u2014 but that\u2019s impossible.\u201d No doubt in writing this poem Larkin had in mind Ruth, who wanted nothing more than to enjoy a full romantic and sexual relationship with the reluctant young librarian. But it must also be relevant that at this time Larkin\u2019s sister was enjoying an untroubled courtship with Walter Hewett, whom she was to marry in August 1944. A letter of the previous year from Kitty to their mother describes a visit by the couple to Leicester. They browsed in the bookshops and watched a comedy at the theatre, after which they wandered around and then went dancing at the Bell Hotel. \u201cIt really was a lovely floor and quite select, not like the usual palais-de-danse. Of course I hadn\u2019t gone intending to dance but didn\u2019t feel out of place in my black dress and snow-white collar.\u201d Brunette and Hilary would have relished Kitty\u2019s pride in her fashionable \u201cblack dress and snow-white collar.\u201d<\/p>\n
In September 1946, when Ruth reached the age of 18, Larkin attempted to break the impasse through poetry, identifying himself with a newly-married woman in the ecstatic \u201cWedding-Wind\u201d. The therapy was successful in persuading him into deeper commitment. But, when it seemed that, as a result, Ruth had become pregnant, he revolted. In \u201cAt the chiming of light upon sleep\u201d written in early October 1946, he expresses (with wild puns on unprotected sex) a masculinist horror of spending his seed and thus welcoming mortality into his life. \u201cUnsheath\/ The life you carry and die, cries the cock\/ On the crest of the sun.\u201d He was never to find the way forward, as Dockery (perhaps) did, to a fulfilled life as husband and father. In the words of his late self-epitaph, \u201cLove Again\u201d, \u201cit never worked for me\u201d. \u201cWedding-Wind\u201d is the last poem in which he adopted the Brunette strategy of writing in the persona of a woman. <\/p>\n
But the Brunette works were not a false start. Echoes of his early desire to \u201cbe that girl\u201d resound through his mature poetry. The women in his life, his mother, sister, Ruth, Winifred Arnott and Monica Jones, are channelled in poems like \u201cDeceptions\u201d, \u201cLines on a Young Lady\u2019s Photograph Album\u201d, \u201cIf, My Darling\u201d, \u201cMaiden Name\u201d, \u201cLove Songs in Age\u201d, \u201cTalking in Bed\u201d.<\/p>\n
The implications of the Brunette episode for Larkin\u2019s sensibility were profound. Simone de Beauvoir noted that \u201cMany boys, frightened by the hard independence they are condemned to, wish they were girls.\u201d In her feminist analysis of the girls\u2019-school story genre, The World of Girls<\/em> (1992), Rosemary Auchmuty argues that such stories offered her \u201ca temporary escape and refuge from the pressures of that profoundly heterosexual society I lived in.\u201d Larkin\u2019s \u201clesbian\u201d writing shows the same rejection of heterosexual norms.<\/p>\n
In a letter to his 15-year-old niece Rosemary in 1962 Larkin wrote: <\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the nice things about being a girl is that you can wear all the nicest colours & precious stones & smell of the most beautiful flowers \u2014 you are much luckier than men who go about in perpetual camouflage smelling of Tweed & Gorse & Old Spice.\u201d<\/p>\n
In view of his early desire to \u201cbe that girl\u201d we can imagine Larkin\u2019s amusement at the cultural shift which brought Grayson Perry to Hull to deliver the 2017 Larkin Society Annual Guest Lecture, resplendent in white and blue frock and carrying a yellow handbag. <\/p>\n
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The key to the poet\u2019s early obsession with girls\u2019-school stories may lie with his sister Kitty<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7097,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}