Philip Larkin

by James Booth

  In October 1942 John Layard returned to Oxford to deliver a lecture about the symbolism of dreams. Shortly afterwards, a friend of Brown’s, Karl Lehmann, a keen Jungian, came and stayed in Walton Street. Larkin recalls: ‘We each began a recording of our dreams, and up to the present [‘Dec 19th 1942’ penned in the margin] I have amassed nearly seventy. Karl gave us indications as to how to interpret them, and we began searching for “problems”. I don’t believe Philip had one. I had.’76 Between 26 October 1942 and 4 January 1943, Larkin typed out ninety-five numbered dreams, painstakingly illustrated with diagrams showing the relations between ‘myself’ or ‘my path’ and people, animals, buildings and streets. In one simple realistic dream he pulls Philip Brown out of the path of an unlighted car as they ‘whizz’ on their bicycles out of Hertford Street into Greyfriar’s Lane in Coventry. Less realistically, in another dream he is singing a hymn, resigned to marrying ‘a girl called “Helen Rose” whom I disliked’. He consoles himself that ‘anyway I can get divorced immediately afterwards, and then I shall be even more sophisticated’. Another dream resembles a thriller film. He is ‘a member of a secret service in some eastern town’ where, ambushed in a conference room, he kills two hostile agents by firing his revolver repeatedly at their advancing bodies. Another dream is a brief moral fable: ‘Someone was playing with a cat that obviously wanted to escape. When it at last did so, it had shat all over his hands. I regarded this as just.’

  Other dreams are surreal. In one, headed ‘A visit to the home of Christopher Isherwood’, he sneaks away from Isherwood and his mother to try out a piano in a ‘wonderful room’ with bookshelves ascending out of sight under an ‘immensely high ceiling’. But he becomes lost in the dark and, hearing two women laughing in the next room, runs away. In another he has volunteered to commit suicide by putting his name on a list posted up in the gym, and is annoyed to find that the shoes he is to wear when he jumps off the roof have not been laid out ready for him. Other dreams are purely absurd, such as one concerning ‘an extremely savage rabbit that I made kill someone’. In a dream recorded on Christmas Day he is driving a car that grows smaller and smaller until he can push it along with his foot.77

  Some of the dreams have obvious ‘Freudian’ interpretations: ‘someone took the lid off a hamper, which was filled with a huge snake. It began uncoiling and I fled in horror.’ In a dream of sexual self-doubt he finds himself ‘in the custody of four girls’, including Margaret Flannery, an Oxford acquaintance:

  It seemed that I was going to bed with her. We two went back to the first room and she lay on the floor. She was wearing a flame coloured skirt and brilliant yellow knickers. I began fucking her and she talked dreamily about copulation. After a while I stopped fucking, not feeling I was getting anywhere, and we both stood up. She maintained her dreamy indifference.78

  In another he is kissing a male friend on a sofa near Carfax in the centre of Oxford. ‘I disliked this intensely but remained polite.’

  Other dreams feature encounters with ‘negroes’. In one he strangles and drowns a ‘great tiger’ which threatens to stop him reaching Lil Armstrong (Louis’s second wife) and a ‘negro band’ performing on the far bank of a river. In a more delicate psychological wish-fulfilment dream he meets ‘a most beautiful negress’ as he walks through a symbolist landscape ‘along a path between several rivers and canals’. ‘We remained together for some time, and I was going to ask to meet her again. Someone called her “a new Billie Holiday”.’ In another dream comedy takes charge: ‘I was making a violent speech against Louis Armstrong, the President of the United States. I said “The only merit of this buffoon is that he has not had the effrontery to submit any laws to Congress.” Voices called out from other bedrooms, telling me to shut up, because it was assumed I was talking in my sleep. One voice was my Father’s.’79

  Though his imagination throws up some colourful psychological and subliterary material, Larkin’s dream diary failed in its primary psychoanalytical purpose of defining his ‘problem’. He wrote wryly to Sutton on 7 January: ‘I have dropped my dream-business, (where? into the Thames?): presumably I am the individuated man.’80 A more focused stimulus to his literary development was provided the following month, February 1943, when the poet Vernon Watkins spoke at the Oxford English Club about W. B. Yeats. Larkin’s early poems already show Yeatsian influence, but now Watkins’s crusading enthusiasm for Yeats’s elliptical symbolism overwhelmed his sceptical defences. As he later recorded, ‘I spent the next three years trying to write like Yeats, not because I liked his personality or understood his ideas but out of infatuation with his music (to use the word I think Vernon used).’81 Larkin abruptly ditched his knowing Audenesque detachment in favour of loud Yeatsian self-dramatization. Watkins’s own impact on Larkin was ambiguous. Though he inspired his enthusiasm for Yeats’s music, in himself he presented a poetic example quite different from either Yeats or Thomas. In peacetime he had been a bank clerk. He did not adopt a poetic pose ‘as an artful protection’. He seemed to Larkin ‘a genuinely modest, genuinely dedicated person, who had chosen, in Yeats’s phraseology, perfection of the work rather than of the life. To anyone who, like myself, was on the edge of the world of employment his example was significant. Indeed, it was almost encouraging.’82 Watkins ‘made it clear how one could, in fact, “live by poetry”; it was a vocation, at once difficult as sainthood and easy as breathing’.83

  Three poems which Larkin wrote at this time show the impact of the various new influences on him. ‘I dreamed of an out-thrust arm of land’ ends with a glamorous Yeatsian dramatization of the poet as rejected lover:

  Till your voice forsook my ear

  Till your two hands withdrew

  And I was empty of tears,

  On the edge of a bricked and streeted sea

  And a cold hill of stars.

  In contrast, ‘Mythological Introduction’ is an entry from his dream diary turned into poetry. A ‘white girl’ sings in Blakean mode, ‘I am your senses’ crossroads, / Where the four seasons lie’, but then:

  She rose up in the middle of the lawn

  And spread her arms wide;

  And the webbed earth where she had lain

  Had eaten away her side.

  Eros and Thanatos are juxtaposed in a visually exact image (‘webbed earth’) reminiscent of paintings by Salvador Dalí. These two poems were published in Arabesque (Hilary Term 1943). The third poem, ‘A Stone Church Damaged by a Bomb’, shows the influence of the Thomas of ‘A Centenarian Killed in an Air Raid’. The Dylanesque contortion of thought sits uneasily with the poem’s simple religious scepticism. With ‘metaphysical’ wit the poet finds ‘magnificence’ in the bomb’s destructive work in contrast with the Church’s feeble spell against death. When Ian Davie accepted all three poems to appear alongside works by Drummond Allison, Sidney Keyes, Michael Meyer, Michael Hamburger and John Heath-Stubbs in the volume Oxford Poetry 1942–3, Larkin could feel that he was beginning to make some progress as a poet. The volume appeared in June 1943, by which time he had already embarked on a quite different literary adventure, as a ‘lesbian’ writer of girls’-school stories.

  3

  Brunette Coleman

  1943

  In the spring of 1943 Larkin adopted a new and radical literary strategy. He began to experiment with female styles and genres. At the same time he adopted a tone of frivolous comedy, at an opposite extreme from Yeats’s high seriousness. During summer and autumn 1943 he devoted much energy to writing girls’-school fiction under a female pseudonym. This seems a strange development for a twenty-year-old male undergraduate in the middle of a war. One motive was simple escapism. He wanted to pretend there was no war on. The abrasive masculine Amis had left, and with so many male academics and students away in the army Larkin found himself in an Oxford which was overwhelmingly female. He described the candidates for the Final Examination in a letter to his parents in June 1943 as ‘a sea of women, a little thin file of men [. . .] 6 of
us in all out of 70 or 80’.1 In his experiments with women’s writing he embraces his exempt situation, hors de combat.

  But there were also deeper and more personal motives. In a dialectic characteristic of his sensibility, a restless literary instinct impelled him to contradict the serious tones of his earlier attempts at fiction, and the earnest pretension of his Audenesque and Yeatsian poems. Male critics have made heavy weather of Larkin’s ‘lesbian’ phase, interpreting it as distasteful heterosexual pornography or trivial flippancy. But, immature as he was, Larkin had the sure instinct of an original writer. It is a mistake to raise our eyebrows in prurient embarrassment at these works. Apart from their considerable success as high-camp comedy, they add a key new element to his developing literary repertoire. A keen sensitivity to different genres, and particularly to the idioms and motifs of popular culture, figures largely in the mature poems.

  Two new friends, both of whom lived a stone’s throw from St John’s, played their part in Larkin’s literary modulation from earnest, idealistic young man to witty, subversive woman. Bruce Montgomery was a year older than Larkin, though since his Modern Languages course took four years rather than three they were to take their Final Examinations at the same time:

  Bruce lived in Wellington Square, and could make a very strong impression on the unwary, being a good pianist, a fluent composer, and author of several unpublished books. He also seemed very rich. Under his immediate influence, I suddenly revolted against all the things I had previously worshipped – poetry, Lawrence, psychoanalysis, seriousness, the creative life, and so forth. It was like being back in the fourth form again. Bruce’s irresponsibility and self-confidence were exactly what I needed at the time and our friendship flared up like a flame in oxygen. In return I lent him jazz records.2

  Montgomery ‘professed to do very little work, and usually hung round the Playhouse and the Randolph [the most prestigious hotel in Oxford]. The only books he read were detective stories.’3 During the Easter vacation of 1943 he completed a detective novel, The Case of the Gilded Fly, which he was seeking to publish under the pseudonym ‘Edmund Crispin’. Larkin’s relationship with Montgomery had none of the edgy rivalry of that with Amis. In his 1964 Introduction to Jill Larkin wrote: ‘For the next three years we were in fairly constant contact, and I wrote continuously as never before or since.’ He continued: ‘Possibly his brisk intellectual epicureanism was just the catalyst I needed.’4 Out of deference to Amis, Larkin retrospectively underplayed Montgomery’s influence. But Montgomery radically altered the direction of his writing. He also confirmed Larkin’s lifelong fascination with French literature.

  The second new influence, Diana Gollancz, Larkin’s first female friend of any importance, was a student at the Slade School of Art. She remains elusive, and it is difficult to gauge how seriously he took her. A daughter of the left-wing Jewish publisher Victor Gollancz, she adopted the image of a socialite and projected her rooms in Beaumont Buildings, off St John Street, as a salon for talented and fashionable undergraduates.5 Larkin’s attitude towards her was, however, familiar and affectionate: ‘Diana Gollancz, the only publisher’s daughter I have yet encountered, was a pale, excitable girl of boundless cheerfulness and good nature. She painted. We spent a great many evenings drinking together, either at The Gloucester Arms or more often the Lord Napier in Observatory Street.’6 He told Sutton, a touch unconvincingly, that he was physically attracted to her: ‘I like publishers’ daughters. Oh, I do like publishers’ daughters! The more we mix together, etc. I’d like to brush some of the dust off her myself. She is quite a good painter and dislikes the Slade intensely.’7 Though he affected a lordly disdain for Oxford women, he made an exception for Diana, ‘who is really lesbian and therefore probably a better artist’.8

  Larkin’s new literary voice is heard first in ‘An Incident in the English Camp’, written in the month following Vernon Watkins’s appearance at the Poetry Club. The story, celebrating the life of a wartime female undergraduate in the style of a woman’s magazine, is dated ‘March 15th 1943’, and appears to have been composed compulsively during the course of one day as a deliberate exercise, as if the author were setting himself a challenge. Larkin even calculated, as he went, exactly how many pencilled words would be needed to fill all the pages of the small lined notebook in which it is written. He missed one page in the middle, to which he returned for the final words of the story.9 The subtitle, ‘A Thoroughly Unhealthy Story, by P. A. Larkin’, suggests that the author is aiming at a transgression beyond the lukewarm homoerotism of the earlier stories. It even seems possible that ‘P. A. Larkin’ is female. What is remarkable about the story, in contrast with his earlier fiction, is its assured narrative voice and accomplished tone. The author is no longer the ingenuous autobiographer of ‘Story 1’ and ‘Peter’, but a master of the professional skills of romantic-magazine writing.

  At the outset the reader is immersed in a closed world of female domesticity. Pamela Fenton fetches her milk-ration from the College kitchen, in ‘a small Poole jug’, amid the smell of fishcakes, the ‘ripple of high voices’ and the sounds of freshers ‘doing each others’ hair’ in one of the bathrooms. The anticipated boring afternoon of reading and fire practice is suddenly dispelled when the portress tells her that a ‘gentleman visitor’ has called. She rushes up to her room:

  the sun poured in from windows in two walls on her hearth rug, her books, the pussy willow catkins in her Poole vase, and her camouflaged divan-bed. And as she opened the heavy door, with her name slipped crookedly in the socket outside, the room burst upon her like a bomb of sunshine, streaming from the mirror and the backs of the hairbrush and handmirror on the dressing table, and winking from Robbie’s gold buttons and ‘pips’ as he stood, magnificently astride, his cap, gloves, and cane thrown carelessly across her bed, in the very centre of her room.

  ‘Hallo, Pam!’

  ‘Hallo, Robbie!’

  To conceal her emotion she put the milk jug down on a copy of The Complete Poems of John Donne, saying:

  ‘What brings you here? Surely you aren’t on another leave, are you?’

  ‘I’ve got four days. As a matter of fact –’ his voice grew selfconscious, proud and sad – ‘it’s embarkation leave.’10

  Unlike the edgily masculine rooms described in ‘Biographical Details’, this feminine room is orderly, domestic, charming. Arch allusions to the war, the ‘camouflaged’ divan-bed and the bursting ‘bomb’ of sunshine serve merely to emphasize the innocuousness of the scene. We may be reminded of Larkin’s letter to his family following his visit to the blitzed Coventry, foregrounding a broken tea-cup handle and a mislaid strainer.11

  Robbie’s conventional masculine good looks and military bearing are seen through Pamela’s admiring, but also gently mocking, eyes. He has a ‘tiny tidy little moustache the same colour as his fair hair that waved like a toy sea from left to right of his small peashaped head’.12 ‘Pamela parted her lips in a half smile: “You have got the officer and gentleman badly, Robbie.”’ The narrator reveals that Pamela’s books disturb him with their cosmopolitanism: ‘He noticed with some alarm a few new additions since he last inspected the shelf: Fleurs du Mal, by Charles Baudelaire. French, eh? He frowned.’ (Enid Starkie’s edition of Les Fleurs du Mal, published in November 1942, was the focus of some scandal at this time.)

  This archetypical English couple go on to spend an afternoon of wartime solidarity together. She challenges him to a game of squash: ‘Pamela, her hair tossing lightly on her neck, fought bitterly for every point, each muscle in her body tigerishly taut.’ To the gratification of both, he finally overcomes her ‘brave defence’, in his borrowed ‘togs’. They go on to Elliston’s tea-house where they consume ‘cress and paste sandwiches, sponge cake and china tea’, and afterwards they attend a morale-boosting variety performance at the theatre. Robbie, who, we are told, runs a discussion group on the British Empire back in his camp, enthuses about his desire to ‘go abroad somewhere and help ke
ep the English tradition of fair ruling going’.The show ends with community singing: ‘There’ll Always Be an England’ and ‘God Save the King’.13

  The ending of the story at dusk on the platform of Oxford Station is a scene to be played by Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson (Noël Coward’s film Brief Encounter was released two years later in 1945):

  The signals dropped: a bell rang. Far away in the mouth of darkness a red light appeared, and in a moment the train drew up steaming to the platform. Silently soldiers and civilians got out and in. Robbie was leaning from a window, his peaked cap casting a shadow over his face. ‘Goodbye, darling,’ he whispered, and she put her face up to his. For a minute they clung until the whistle sounded and the dark train drew slowly out.14

  Then, in the final paragraphs, the knowing narrator makes fun of Pamela’s exalted emotions, revealing the narcissism beneath:

  Pamela watched it go, without regret, almost with exaltation, for now she could face life alone again. She almost wished Robbie could be struck dead, his words would have been so beautiful, and then she could cherish his memory and live as he would have wished. She walked in exaltation through the black streets, her heart glowing like a coal with deep love.15