Philip Larkin

by James Booth

  In evading his masculine destiny as a war-combatant Larkin could also be seen as escaping heterosexual patriarchy. But he is neither a political demystifier like Orwell nor an ideological feminist like Auchmuty. Brunette rejects altogether what we would now call ‘historicist’ interpretations. Instead she proclaims in tones of magisterial authority the doctrine that art transcends politics and ideology.

  I am too familiar with Mr Orwell, and others of his kidney, to pay any attention to their ephemeral chatter; it seems to me to be a self-evident fact that Art cannot be explained away – or even explained – by foreign policy or trade cycles or youthful traumas, and that these disappointed artists whose soured creative instinct finds an outlet in insisting that it can are better ignored until Time has smoothed away all that they have scribbled on the sand.51

  Even the personal psychology of the author (‘youthful traumas’) is irrele­vant to the impersonal world of art. There is a delicious impudence in this arrogant attack by a twenty-one-year-old on a distinguished older contemporary, presented in the voice of a hard-bitten lesbian hack-writer. Larkin is, however, quite serious. William Empson’s brilliant genre study, Some Versions of Pastoral (1935), had familiarized Larkin’s generation with the idea that ancient literary tropes and patterns persist in transmuted modern forms. Larkin/Brunette detects in the conventions of the girls’-school story a version of timeless pastoral. This ‘closed, single-sexed world’ contained within the walls of the school is life simplified into a concentrated metaphor.52 It affords the writer a stock of simple images no less powerful than the groves of Theocritus’ Sicily, the ‘Pan-guarded slopes of Arcady’ of Ovid and Virgil, or the ploughland and blue vistas of Housman’s shires. The stereotypes of popular culture may be as universal as the archetypes of high culture. In the previous year, 1942, the naturalized American T. S. Eliot had constructed in ‘Little Gidding’ a timeless England of Anglican tradition and prayer. Brunette, like Eliot, believes, as she declares in the preface to Sugar and Spice, that in this time of war ‘more than ever a firm grasp on the essentials of life is needed’. However, she finds these essentials not in theology but in the secular clichés of girls’-school fiction. Behind Brunette we glimpse the mature Larkin of ‘Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album’, ‘Essential Beauty’ and ‘Sunny Prestatyn’, who found tears in things as trivial and familiar as advertisement hoardings, sentimental piano pieces and holiday snapshots.

  It is the seven poems of Sugar and Spice that most convincingly make Brunette’s aesthetic case: ‘The False Friend’, ‘Bliss’, ‘Femmes Damnées’, ‘Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis’, ‘Holidays’, ‘The School in August’ and ‘Fourth Former Loquitur’. They are extraordinarily accomplished for a writer at such an early stage of development. Larkin showed the value he placed on the sequence by typing out the first six poems with three carbon copies, and stitching them, with an elaborate title-page in two colours, into booklets with covers of black art-paper, thereby creating the most limited of editions.53 In Brunette Coleman’s poems we hear for the first time the inflections of the mature Larkinesque poetic style. ‘The False Friend’ adopts a confident demotic register far from the Yeatsian languour of the poems written in his own name at this time: ‘Joan always said, she wondered how I stuck you, / And now I see that she was jolly right.’ ‘The School in August’, like a number of his mature poems, depicts an empty room:

  The cloakroom pegs are empty now,

  And locked the classroom door,

  The hollow desks are dim with dust,

  And slow across the floor

  A sunbeam creeps between the chairs

  Till the sun shines no more.

  Who did their hair before this glass?

  Who scratched ‘Elaine loves Jill’

  One drowsy summer sewing-class

  With scissors on the sill?

  The questions are rhetorical in the purest sense. Elaine and Jill are the author, or the readers themselves. What matters is not who they were, but that they are lost in time:

  Ah, notices are taken down,

  And scorebooks stowed away,

  And seniors grow tomorrow

  From the juniors today,

  And even swimming groups can fade,

  Games mistresses turn grey.

  The rituals and recurrences of school life, its seniors, juniors and scorebooks, become a metonym of all existence. Transience is the more poignant when it afflicts a timeless symbol; games mistresses are by definition forever young.

  The last and most ambitious poem in the series, ‘Fourth Former Loquitur’ (‘Fourth Former Speaks’) was finished after he had bound up the booklet, and survives only in pencil script on an inserted sheet in Larkin’s own copy. Its tone owes something to Fairlie Bruce’s moving poem ‘To the Old Girls of Clarence House, Roehampton’, from which Brunette quotes in her essay.54 It begins in the leisurely manner of his mature reflective elegies, by evoking a lazy afternoon on the cricket pitch. The shadows have lengthened, the deckchairs have been abandoned and the final score has been hung up: ‘To show for once the Old Girls had been licked’. Only a single fourth-former remains ‘now they are gone’:

  Here they lay,

  Wenda and Brenda, Kathleen, and Elaine,

  And Jill, shock-headed and the pockets of

  Her blazer full of crumbs, while over all

  The sunlight lay like amber wine, matured

  By every minute.

  The phrasing is touchingly clumsy: ‘Jill, shock-headed and the pockets of / Her blazer full of crumbs’. Transcending her persona to become, for a moment, a prophetic seer, the fourth-former reassures her classmates that they are still at the mid-point of their idyll. Three years of school are behind them, but they still have three more to come. As the poem approaches its end, however, this secure perspective becomes blurred:

  Wenda, Brenda, Kathleen and Elaine

  Have flattened down the long grass where they’ve lain,

  And brownlegged Jill has left her hat,

  For they have gone to laugh and talk with those

  Who’ve played the Old Girls’ match out to its close.

  From her vantage point alone on the outfield the timeless fourth-former delicately hints at an elision of the generations: girls and old girls. With elegiac gravity, she observes the passing of the day, and also the passing of life. The grass, vivid to the eye in the present, has been flattened, in a sudden foreshortening of time, by girls who have returned to the pavilion to join those who have played the match of life out to its close. Larkin’s mature poetic voice it seems owes as much to Dorita Fairlie Bruce as to Yeats, Hardy or Auden. Larkin was not to write anything as assured and moving as this again until ‘At Grass’ seven years later.

  Brunette’s plentiful quotations from Mademoiselle de Maupin in Trouble at Willow Gables show that Larkin read the novel in French, and in a development which resonates throughout his mature work, two of Brunette’s poems imitate French originals. Though he never mastered the language with fluency, Larkin was fascinated by French poetry and culture. A poem written at school in 1939 had initially been entitled ‘Homage to Daddy Lamartine’,55 and some of his juvenile lyrics have French titles. During his second year at Oxford he had briefly associated with a group of students from Exeter College, who, unlike the blokish ‘Seven’, ‘read modern languages, and quoted La Rochefoucauld with relish’.56 Now his friendship with Montgomery inspired a fresh enthusiasm for French literature. He later recalled that when, in the 1940s, Charles Madge put before him some prose by Mallarmé, his ‘plume-de-ma-tante French wasn’t up to it’.57 On the other hand in a letter of 21 June 1953 he told his mother that he was reading Flaubert’s letters in French. Larkin saw French literature, with its formal exactitude, its lack of inhibition on sexual issues and its symbolist sublimities, as offering an intimate Other to his own Englishness. His use of French literary inflections was to become a way of refining and testing his English voice or, more radically, of evading his Engli
shness.

  Brunette impudently states that though ‘suggested’ by their namesakes in French her ‘paraphrases’ of Villon and Baudelaire ‘are not, of course, “renderings” in any sense. In my opinion they are improvements.’58 Larkin told Amis that Brunette considered ‘Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis’ ‘the best thing she has done’,59 and it remains one of his most moving poems. Without satire or subversion Larkin/Brunette transposes François Villon’s fifteenth-century elegy for the fatal women of history into the mode of Willow Gables. Villon contemplates the fates of classical and historical women: Thais the mistress of Alexander the Great, Eloise the lover of Abelard, Blanche of Castile, and Joan of Arc. Brunette mock-heroically elegizes typical twentieth-century schoolgirls: Valerie, the tomboy with golden-red hair, Julia improvising on the Londonderry Air, brown-legged Jill, Patricia, who played Rosalind:

  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?

  Brunette’s Jacqueline and June with their blazers and badges are as much the stuff of legend as Villon’s ‘Flora la belle Romaine’ or ‘la très sage Heloïs’.

  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. [. . .]60

  Brunette touchingly domesticates Villon’s celebrated refrain ‘Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?’ (‘Where are the snows of yesteryear?’) in terms of the school calendar: ‘So many summer terms away’. The English girls’ school is a version of pastoral as poignant as Villon’s historical vista.

  The other French paraphrase has a more vexed relationship with its original model. ‘Femmes Damnées’ (‘Lesbians’) brilliantly subverts the murky French melodrama of Baudelaire’s original poem, subtitled ‘Delphine et Hippolyte’ (‘À la pâle clarté des lampes languissantes’).61 Baudelaire expands on these ‘damned women’, through twenty-six stanzas of prurient fascination and horror, concluding with magisterial condemnation:

  – Descendez, descendez, lamentables victimes,

  Descendez le chemin de l’enfer éternel!

  Plongez au plus profond du gouffre, où tous les crimes,

  Flagellés par un vent qui ne vient pas du ciel,

  Bouillonnent pêle-mêle avec un bruit d’orage.

  (‘Descend, descend, lamentable victims, descend the path to eternal hell! Plunge to the deepest abyss where all crimes, whipped by an infernal wind, boil pell-mell with the noise of a tempest.’) Brunette distils the initial seduction into six mock-heroic quatrains, and transfers the scene into an English suburban context:

  the living-room is ruby: there upon

  Cushions from Harrods, strewn in tumbled heaps

  Around the floor, smelling of smoke and wine,

  Rosemary sits. Her hands are clasped. She weeps.

  Brunette has a good case for arguing that her version is an ‘improvement’. Where the poem comes closest to actual translation her version is indeed more sharp and vivid than the original:

  Étendue à ses pieds, calme et pleine de joie,

  Delphine la couvait avec des yeux ardents,

  Comme un animal fort qui surveille une proie,

  Après l’avoir d’abord marquée avec les dents.

  Brunette renders this:

  Stretched out before her, 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.

  Baudelaire’s hectic moralism is replaced by a tone of ‘brisk intellectual epicureanism’.

  Brunette’s poem focuses on a detailed empirical description of a room: the milk on the step, The Guardian neglected in the letterbox since dawn, beds unslept in upstairs. From the upper windows can be seen labourers on the way to work, a Green Line bus and plots of cabbages. This ordinary world, the reader gathers with a frisson, has been subverted by exotic ‘vice’. The innocent world of Rosemary’s books and pictures (‘Dance’; ‘The Rhythmic Life’; ‘Miss Rachel Wilson in a cap and gown’) has been destroyed by the damned lesbian animal stretched out before her, presumably this same ‘Miss Rachel Wilson’. But how seriously is the reader meant to take this seduction? ‘The only sound heard is the sound of tears.’ The disembodied ominousness of tone oddly forecasts the enigmatic serio-comic confrontations of Harold Pinter’s plays a generation later.62

  As the end of Larkin’s long exemption approached, his imagination multiplied ideas with ever greater inventiveness. He seems to have been writing at a frenetic rate, as if determined to make the very most of his precious Oxford inspiration before turning to the real world. The sequel to Trouble at Willow Gables, Michaelmas Term at St Bride’s, takes all the original characters, improbably, to Oxford. The sexual frisson of the girls’-school milieu disappears, and the tone is reminiscent of Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson or early Evelyn Waugh. Unlike Willow Gables, Oxford rewards rather than condemns Hilary’s lesbian aestheticism. Arriving in college, Mary Burch is horrified to discover that she is sharing a room with Hilary.63 For a time she succeeds in preserving the proper distance, but then, disappointed at failing a trial for the University hockey team, she succumbs to the sympathetic Hilary’s brandy and black Russian cigarettes.64 No disaster ensues, and these cheerful English ‘damned women’ become companionable lovers, setting out, like Gautier’s Mademoiselle, to wreak havoc in the world of heterosexual masculinity. Hilary tumbles accidentally-on-purpose into the Cherwell from the bridge in the University Parks, so that Pilot-Officer Clive Russell Vick can gallantly rescue her, glimpsing stocking tops and wet clinging fabric as he does so. Besotted, he showers invitations upon her and sends bunches of flowers which Hilary tells Mary to stuff down the toilet.

  Montgomery had set Larkin in revolt against ‘Lawrence, psycho­analysis, seriousness’,65 and in this spirit of self-contradiction Michaelmas Term satirizes his own recent preoccupations. The undergraduate Marie, still the same impetuous innocent as in Trouble at Willow Gables, is deeply impressed by the lectures of ‘John Barnyard’: ‘She bought a large metal-edged book, costing nearly a pound, which she soon filled with accounts of dreams, in her sprawling childish handwriting.’66 Then Marie discovers that her elder sister Philippa is a belt fetishist:

  Coiled neatly, sometimes three within each other, they lay, in all shapes and sizes. There were very thin leather thongs, with single businesslike buckles; there were summery ones of canvas, in gay green and yellow [. . .] Finally, at the back of the drawer, were a selection of Philippa’s favourite kind: ponderous thick leather ones, three inches or more broad, heavily inlaid with ornamental metal figures, strong enough to stand any imaginable strain.

  ‘Thirty-seven!’ repeated Marie, awestruck. ‘It’s fantastic.’ She uncoiled one, as if expecting it to give a sudden wriggle in her hands.

  ‘That’s made of rhinoceros-hide,’ said Philippa casually, smoothing her dress down. ‘The buckle is solid horn. Hand it over, will you? I think I’ll wear it.’67

  Marie is horrified to see how tightly her sister pulls the belt, securing it by the last hole, which, she notices ‘was rather ragged round the edges and was obviously home-bored’.68 There is serious insight into the anorexic temperament here. However, broad farce takes over when Marie determines to shock her sister out of her belt-fixation by planting earthworms about her rooms, since, as Barnyard has revealed, belts are really symbols of worms. Philippa’s friend Penelope Scott Stokes, reduced here to a comic stereotype, becomes the accidental victim of this stratagem when she discovers three worms in a teacup: ‘Penelope clutched both hands to her unemphatic bosom: worms always had a curious effect on her.’69