Philip Larkin

by James Booth

  As Kemp boards his train and leaves behind him the brightly moonlit ‘blank walls and piles of masonry that undulated like a frozen sea’, he, like the commercial traveller, internalizes the destruction he has seen.22 The blitz becomes an agent of his unconscious Jungian will:

  he thought it represented the end of his use for the place. It meant no more to him now, and so it was destroyed: it seemed symbolic, a kind of annulling of his childhood. The thought excited him. It was as if he had been told: all the past is cancelled: all the suffering connected with that town, all your childhood, is wiped out.23

  The final sequences of the novel powerfully dramatize Kemp’s nervous breakdown. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, he finds himself wrecking the ‘garret-like’ room24 of an impoverished fellow student, Whitbread: shoving pats of butter into his slippers, filling the pockets of his jackets with sugar and tea, pouring his milk into the coal scuttle and stealing a pound note. Whitbread is a working-class boy from the North like himself, and his act of destruction is less of Whitbread’s room than of the structure of his own life. In contrast to the farcical class-based embarrassment of parallel scenes in Lucky Jim, this destruction has a systematic, abstract quality to it. Kemp is confirming his own alienation. ‘A great cheerfulness came over him now and he sauntered out through the cloisters into the dark. There was a letter from his parents in the Lodge, but he did not even trouble to pick it up.’25 There is keen insight into the psychology of the self-harmer here.

  At the close of the novel Kemp compulsively places himself beyond the pale, refusing the challenge to engage with reality. After a solitary pub-crawl, he gate-crashes a party and kisses Gillian, reducing the vulnerable, fifteen-year-old schoolgirl to tears. Warner and his friends throw him into a fountain and the novel comes to an inconclusive close with the protagonist in a hectic fever, tended by his devoted parents. As Larkin promised, Kemp has been completely disillusioned. Though the fictional Kemp is not the real Larkin, the novel offers no alternative to Kemp’s viewpoint, and the author inevitably seems an active participant in Kemp’s self-destruction. On one level the novel is displaced autobiography, a chapter of Larkin’s own ‘soul-history’, and its verdict on himself, as both man and artist, seems bleak indeed.

  Like Kemp, Katherine Lind, the protagonist of The Kingdom of Winter, experiences complete disillusion. But she embodies a more subtle and artistic sublimation of the author’s autobiography. Katherine is a woman, and also, with metaphorical, poetic resonance, a ‘displaced person’. Larkin’s plan for the novel, written in June 1944 in a small black notebook, sketches a ruthless nihilistic diagram:

  Katherine Lind, a refugee to England, works in a branch library in a fairly large provincial city.26

  The story describes about the whole of a day in her life.

  It demonstrates through various selected incidents how she awakes from the loneliness beyond which nothing seemed to exist or matter, to a state where loneliness as being alone is a positive quality.27

  Katherine’s fate is to be more positive than Kemp’s, but only because she embraces her disillusion, and finds strength in ‘loneliness as being alone’. Larkin’s mood as he settled into the writing of the novel is revealed in a letter to Sutton of 10 December 1944: ‘The weather is very cold today, snow blowing in the rain and wind and not settling [. . .] do you feel that winter is more true than summer? It is nearer death and I am vaguely concerned about death these days, which shows probably a lack of spiritual understanding &c.’28

  The protagonist shares Mansfield’s name, and in his letters Larkin cited another female influence: ‘If I write like anybody, it is like Virginia Woolf – but much better, or it will be.’29 In December 1944 he reread Woolf’s most poetic work, The Waves, and declared ‘it knocked me for six’.30 The ternary, ABA structure of The Kingdom of Winter may owe something to Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, two sections in a wintry present framing a contrasted section in a past summer. There is a laconic poetry in the description of Katherine’s journey through a snowbound townscape with her pathetic, toothache-stricken colleague, referred to always, impersonally, as ‘Miss Green’. ‘The Library was an ugly old building built up on a bank, where laurel bushes grew: the bank was now covered with snow and littered with bus-tickets. A newspaper had been carefully folded and thrust into a drift, where it was frosted stiff.’31 In the scene at the dentist’s surgery Larkin keeps a relentless focus on the precisely observed symptoms of physical pain: ‘The drilling started again, and the little quavering moans. This time there was a definite crackling sound, quite audible. One of Miss Green’s feet lifted a second from the iron foot-rest, then was jammed back again as quickly.’32 Katherine cannot believe that the anaesthetic has dispelled the girl’s pain:

  she felt an upswerve of terror lest the girl should still be half-conscious but unable to move or speak. Her head stirred as he first pulled, and he put his free hand on her forehead, rumpling her hair, before giving another dragging wrench in the other direction. Katherine could almost feel the pain exploding beneath the anaesthetic and nerved herself against a shriek. It seemed impossible for the girl to feel nothing.33

  The fact that she has nothing in common with Miss Green, and does not like her, makes Katherine’s empathy with her all the more primitive and intense.

  From the start the reader has doubts about Katherine’s wan romantic excitement at the coming visit of her English friend Robin Fennel. Ominously she re-established contact with him after noticing in the newspaper that his sister’s infant daughter had died. In the middle, summer section of the novel, Larkin develops a female variant on the Pygmalion myth. Robin, an ordinary conventional Englishman, not dissimilar to Warner, becomes the desired statue. During her three weeks with the family before the war, the schoolgirl Katherine builds an imaginary romance around her ‘harmless but dull’ English host.34 She imagines that love prompts him to take her on a bus visit to Oxford, and is touched by his apparent foresight, when he gives her a mackintosh from his haversack to keep off the rain. Then she finds his sister’s name tag on the gloves in its pockets, and realizes that he is simply doing his sister’s bidding, and the whole trip was her idea:

  she had been constructing an elaborate pagoda out of nothing, and the shame she now felt was a punishment for this. In fact she could not have made a bigger fool of herself if she had tried carefully. At that moment she hated England and everybody in it – this would never have happened if she could have understood all the foreign inflexions and shades of meaning.35

  The biographical implications seem cruelly explicit. Like Ruth Bowman, this sixteen-year-old schoolgirl has built her unreal hopes on a man from a world she does not understand, and who is in reality unworthy of her love.

  What gives the novel a touch of real distinction, is its all-pervasive metaphor of foreignness. Katherine’s nationality and personal history are deliberately withheld. As Larkin wrote in his preparatory notebook: ‘What city, what Katherine’s original name and nationality were, etc all left unstated.’ (In an early draft she answers a query about her name: ‘Katherine Lind is near enough [. . .] It’s not exactly the name on my passport, but it will do.’)36 He manages the evasion with considerable skill. First-time readers of the novel not infrequently assume that they have simply missed this detail, and they must have been told somewhere that Katherine is Belgian or Scandinavian. If one were forced to assign Katherine a nationality she would surely be German, if only because Larkin’s own first-hand experience of Europe had been largely limited to Germany. His preparatory note indicating that Katherine’s nationality should be left ‘unstated’ is written on the inside cover of the notebook under the heading ‘Notes Germane to the Opposite’.37 The pun seems deliberate. He was aware that, whether he intended it or not, Katherine would be bound to be more German than anything else. Miriam Plaut, the ‘displaced’ German Jew in Oxford to whom Larkin gave one of the typescripts of Sugar and Spice, claimed that she was the ‘original’ of Katherine. Larkin remarked, wit
h teasing equivocation, that this was ‘not very true’.38 But though Miriam Plaut or Germany may have been in his mind, it is clear that his theme is not the social and political situation of enemy aliens in Britain in 1944; it is foreignness as a metaphor of the human condition. Larkin ensures that Katherine neither says nor does anything specifically German.39

  This is a novel written in English and set in England, in which England is foreign territory. Larkin subtly translates his own childhood difficulties as a foreigner in Germany into Katherine’s confusions as a foreigner in England. Like him she is baffled by the unfamiliar language. Mrs Fennel comments that the proximity of their house to the river ‘“makes the place rather damp, do you know? And it’s mournful in winter.” This last remark, spoken as it was in a foreign language, came to Katherine with something of the impact of a line of poetry.’40 Robin’s Englishness gives him glamour in Katherine’s eyes. She comments on a local gymkhana that ‘It was very English and interesting.’ Robin’s sister Jane counters: ‘I am English, more’s the pity. And I know a lot of those people, rot them, and they aren’t at all interesting.’41 The fact that her brother is ‘the perfect Englishman’ seems to Jane a great defect.42

  Just as Larkin had tried to write like a woman in the Brunette works, here he tries to write like a foreigner. The language of the novel sometimes takes on an oddly bilingual quality. Before she comes to England her schoolfriends nickname Katherine’s pen friend ‘the bicyclist’, rather than the more normal English ‘cyclist’, and the phrases through which they project her future relationship with him have a slightly stilted simplicity which marks them as clearly not English.43 Jack Stormalong, with his ridiculous name, his ‘dark crimson sports car’, his protruding front teeth, his habit of calling Mr Fennel ‘Sir’ and his tall tales about tiger-shooting in India, seems a cartoon Englishman from Hergé’s Tintin rather than a novelistic caricature conceived by an English author.44

  More intriguing still, the literary texture of the novel at times aligns it, uniquely among Larkin’s works, with contemporary continental fiction. The Kingdom of Winter sounds faintly like a translation. In conversation with Montgomery he referred to it as Winterreich, perhaps remembering Königswinter, where the Larkin family had holidayed in 1936. In a letter to Amis he calls it Le Royaume d’Hiver.45 In his débat ‘Round the Point’ written six years later, the failed novelist Geraint rejects modish continental avant-gardism: ‘I don’t lie awake sweating about my vocation as a European, I don’t read Gide or Hölderlin or Rilke or Kafka or Sartre, I don’t go to the Academy cinema [. . .]’46 However, in the mid-1940s Larkin had been less hostile to continental influence. Bruce Montgomery will surely have introduced him to Camus’ recently published L’Étranger (The Foreigner, or The Outsider, 1942), and Sartre’s L’Être et le Néant (Being and Nothingness, 1943). Like Kafka’s K, Katherine moves through half-understood situations, never sure of her ground. Like Roquentin in Sartre’s La Nausée (Nausea, 1938), she has to create her own meaning from a series of meaningless epiphanies. However, Larkin never uses continental philosophical vocabulary. He writes about ‘loneliness’ rather than ‘alienation’, and the final epiphany is less a matter of Katherine’s rejection of ‘false consciousness’ or Sartrean mauvaise foi (bad faith), than of Hardyesque pessimism: ‘if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst’.47 Nevertheless, despite himself, Larkin has to some extent been caught up in the European current of Existentialism which was flowing so strongly at this moment.

  The novel ends on the brink of the post-humanist void. Like Kemp, Katherine burns all her boats in a humiliating confrontation with her boss, Mr Anstey, over a telegram which Robin has sent to her at the Library. (Larkin’s self-depreciation perhaps shows itself in the depiction of the librarian as a self-important bully.)48 She confirms her outsider status by addressing Anstey ‘with an exaggerated foreign accent she had learned annoyed people’.49 More practically she compounds her difficulties as a refugee by giving up her job. But Larkin makes nothing of her practical financial plight. Instead we follow her back to her attic, where her tenuous English dream of summer collides with wintry reality in the form of the real Robin, a provincial auctioneer, now a soldier, ‘rather drunk’ and importunate for sex. Wearily she succumbs, naming ‘a condition that he accepted’, presumably a contraceptive strategy such as avoidance of full penetration.50 United in their alienation the foreign woman and the Englishman drift together into sleep:

  There was the snow, and her watch ticking. So many snowflakes, so many seconds. As time passed they seemed to mingle in their minds, heaping up into a vast shape that might be a burial mound, or the cliff of an iceberg whose summit is out of sight. Into its shadow dreams crowded, full of conceptions and stirrings of cold, as if icefloes were moving down a lightless channel of water [. . .] Unsatisfied dreams rose and fell about them, crying out against their implacability, but in the end glad that such order, such destiny, existed. Against this knowledge, the heart, the will, and all that made for protest, could at last sleep.51

  The writing is tenuous and insubstantial, imitating the drift into sleep. But it is also a touch forced and artificial.

  Though Larkin later expressed a certain affection for Jill, recollecting his Oxford undergraduate days with nostalgia, he developed an active distaste for A Girl in Winter. He wrote to Barbara Pym in 1961: ‘I can’t bear to look at A G. in W.: it seems so knowing and smart.’52 There seems something painfully personal behind his feeling. Perhaps its association with his own early experiences in Germany, or with his failed relationship with Ruth, or with the miserable winter of 1944 in provincial Wellington, unduly coloured his judgement of this minor masterpiece of poetic prose. Or perhaps his dislike was simply a result of bitter disappointment that, despite all his efforts, he never succeeded in following it with a third novel.

  6

  The Grip of Light

  1945–8

  On his twenty-third birthday, 9 August 1945, Larkin gave Amis a gloomy account of his relationship with Ruth, ‘the school captain’, or ‘Misruth’ as they called her: ‘As long as she keeps on talking about me I am flattered. When she criticizes me, or speaks of herself, I am bored.’ He attempted to titillate his friend: ‘she has begun to write a novel about her school days, with a lot of lesbianism in it’.1 But in reality Ruth had no interest in his literary ‘lesbianism’. She expected straightforward commitment, and her ingenuous devotion put him off the idea of sex: ‘I really do not think it likely I shall ever get into the same bed as anyone again because it is so much trouble, almost as much trouble as standing for Parliament. I have formed a very low opinion of women [. . .]’ His phrasing is evasive. He was at this time effectively still a virgin. Amis was puzzled that his friend failed to follow through his pursuit of sexual satisfaction. But Larkin feared for his freedom. Earlier in this letter he mentioned a ‘brawny young man’ he knew in Wellington ‘who has just married and fucked his wife without a french letter so that she is now going to have a baby’.2

  Ruth was five years younger than Larkin, and suffered from an inherited condition which made her slightly lame. She shared with Penelope Scott Stokes a vein of victimhood, confiding to Philip: ‘When I was small if anything I ate had a peculiar flavour I immediately suspected that my mother had grown tired of me and was trying to poison me.’3 Larkin felt protective towards her and wished to give her the affection for which she longed. He related a dream to Sutton in which, ‘at some richly-coloured wedding celebrations I met – or, as it almost seemed, remet – a beautiful lame girl, whom I gladly felt was mine for keeps. This cheered me up for a bit.’4

  In September 1945, now eighteen, Ruth was accepted to read English at King’s College London. Her imminent departure prompted their first sexual encounter. Shortly afterwards she wrote humbly from London: ‘The fact that you like me and have made love to me is the greatest source of pride and happiness in my life.’5 There is something ominous in her past perfect tense – ‘and have made lo
ve to me’ – as though she were steeling herself for the end of the relationship. But Philip remained loyal. He travelled to London at weekends and sometimes met Ruth secretly in Wellington after the Library closed. They went on trips together to D. H. Lawrence’s Eastwood and Hardy’s Dorchester. The emotional quality of the relationship would be easier to imagine if we could read any of the ‘over four hundred letters’ which, as he recalls in his later poem, ‘Wild Oats’, he sent to her over seven years. But when the relationship ended her grandfather persuaded her to destroy them.6 Today we see the relationship only as refracted through the scathing self-criticism of Larkin’s letters to Sutton and the ribaldry of his letters to Amis. September 1945 was also the month Amis was demobbed. But Philip at first avoided bringing Kingsley and Ruth together. They met for the first time only in January 1946. Ruth recalled that Kingsley ‘wanted to make Philip a “love ’em and lose ’em” type. He was possessive of Philip and tried to keep me separate from him.’7

  Shortly before he sent the typescript of The North Ship to Reginald Caton in October 1944, Larkin had begun to write the drafts of his poems in a substantial limp-bound manuscript workbook.8 Of little apparent significance at the time, the move seems in retrospect momentous. This was the first of eight books in which Larkin would compose virtually all his mature poetry. By the time he moved on to the second workbook in 1950 he had become a great poet. As time went on, his drafting became increasingly consistent. He wrote in pencil, generally working on one stanza at a time and often inserting dates when he considered a work complete. From April 1959 onward he generally started a fresh page whenever he began a new session of drafting. In many cases he produced a separate typescript including final corrections. He thus made it possible, to a degree unknown in other poets, to follow the sequence of his poems, to see the relative ease or difficulty with which he brought, or failed to bring them to completion, and to relate them to the events of his life. His sense of the importance of this record of the creative process was shown by his donation, in 1964, of his first workbook, covering 1944–50, to the British Library. At that time he tore out several pages containing material too personal to be made public. Significantly, however, he did not destroy them, but kept them to await ultimate restoration after his death.9 His sense of the integrity of his oeuvre is strong.