Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love

by James Booth

  With its playful enjoyment of the stereotypes and idioms of romantic-magazine writing, and its blend of comic satire and warm sympathy, this is an extraordinary piece of writing from the pencil of a twenty-year-old.

  During his final term in summer 1943, ‘on the whole one of the most purely enjoyable I have spent’,16 Larkin fell into a mood of pleasantly fatalistic euphoria. In a letter to Sutton in May he depicts himself in the role of an effete dandy: ‘You ask me what I am doing – I am preparing to take Finals, and the prospect is an expanding shite. I am also dressed in red trousers, shirt, & white pullover, and look very beautiful [. . .] In fact I am happy.’17 In a letter to his parents written the following day he elevates a shopping trip into a mock-heroic adventure of whimsical sentimentalism: ‘after standing in the Cadena queue yesterday for half an hour I staggered out with bloodshot eyes clutching two “trifles” and a couple of currant buns. I then bought a very sad looking lettuce. “It’s got a good heart,” said the shopkeeper, pinching it cruelly, like a warder speaking of a prisoner’s conduct. I bought it out of pity.’18

  With Bruce and Diana as his audience, Philip found himself plunging deeper into irresponsible literary transgression. Montgomery had written a detective story under a male pseudonym. Larkin decided he would go one better and write a girls’-school story under a female pseudonym. So the gender-ambiguous ‘P. A. Larkin’ became the female ‘Brunette Coleman’, her name suggested by Blanche Coleman, whose All-Girl Band was popular at the time.19 He wrote to Amis later: ‘Blanche Coleman is Brunette’s sister, a natural ashblonde.’20 Looking back in 1964 in the Introduction to Jill Larkin seems still a little taken aback by the unaccountable originality of this move: ‘Even in that last term, with Finals a matter of weeks away, I began an unclassifiable story called Trouble at Willow Gables, which Bruce and Diana Gollancz would come back to read after an evening at the Lord Napier.’21

  The impetus continued through his final examinations. Glumly he prepared his parents for that ‘hallmark of imbecility’, a third-class degree.22 But he was more successful than he expected, underlining ‘FIRST’ thirteen times in a letter to Sutton of 18 July.23 Following the award ceremony on 24 July he celebrated with lunch at the George Hotel together with his family, Bruce and Diana. Then he returned to Warwick, and, in an extended limbo briefly broken by attempts to secure a job, he completed the ‘Brunette Coleman’ canon: Trouble at Willow Gables, its Oxford sequel Michaelmas Term at St Bride’s, the essay ‘What Are We Writing For?’ and his most impressive writing so far, the verse-sequence Sugar and Spice. He later recalled: ‘leaving Oxford was like taking a cork out of a bottle. Writing flooded out of me.’24 It was the adoption of a female persona that uncorked the bottle.

  He devoted great care to Trouble at Willow Gables, typing it out neatly on 143 pages of poor war-quality paper. It is comic parody, but the parody of affectionate homage rather than satire. Larkin treated this disregarded genre with all the respect due to D. H. Lawrence or Dylan Thomas. He read numerous examples, absorbing their conventions and idioms. In her essay ‘What Are We Writing For?’ Brunette cites seven works, most of them recently published. In chronological order of publication they are: Dorita Fairlie Bruce, Dimsie Moves Up Again (1922), Elsie J. Oxenham, The Abbey Girls Win Through (1928), Dorothy Vicary, Niece of the Headmistress (1939), Phyllis Matthewman, The Queerness of Rusty: A Daneswood Book (1941), Joy Francis, The Girls of the Rose Dormitory (1942), Judith Grey, Christmas Term at Chillinghurst (1942) and Nancy Breary, Two Thrilling Terms (1943). There are also unspecific references to Elinor Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School stories and the Farm School stories by Josephine Elder. Two of his particular favourites, he told Amis, ‘charming in their way’, were Vicary’s Niece of the Headmistress, and Breary’s Two Thrilling Terms.25

  Though the plot and language of Trouble at Willow Gables are more complex than those of actual girls’-school stories, Larkin/Brunette still submits to the key imperatives of the genre. The characters, for instance, show the proper age hierarchy. The junior fourth-formers, Marie and Myfanwy, have an innocent pre-adolescent narcissism. The protagonist, Marie, is based on Dorita Fairlie Bruce’s heroine in the popular Dimsie series of the 1930s, sharing Dimsie’s ingenuous, impulsive nature and appetite for second (and third) helpings at dinner. The sixth-formers Hilary, Ursula and Pamela are more adult, affecting the dignity of seniors. When Trouble at Willow Gables was published in 2002 Sue Sims, editor of Folly, the magazine for devotees of the girls’-school story, found it a charming if unorthodox example of her beloved genre. Some passages, she wrote, ‘could have come straight out of Dorita Fairlie Bruce or Elsie J. Oxenham’.26

  The story is intricately plotted. It centres on a £5 note sent to Marie by her aunt Rosamond, who seems to be Rosamond Lehmann, author of the novel of lesbian love Dusty Answer:

  ‘Now isn’t that jolly decent of her?’ Marie cried joyously, her amber hair shaking. Across her mind danced a preposterous procession of what £5 could buy: tennis racquets, evening frocks, wristlet-watches, slave-bangles, bicycles, underwear of finest silk, puppies, mountains of soap and cosmetics, rivulets of expensive Paris perfume, or even the collected morocco-bound works of Sir Hugh Walpole.27

  Her joy is cut short, however, when the note is spitefully confiscated by the prefect Hilary, since girls are not permitted to possess more than two pounds pocket-money during term-time. When the headstrong Marie is discovered to have stolen the note back from the Headmistress’s study, the Headmistress forces her, under moral blackmail, to donate it publicly to the school’s Gymnasium Fund. The note is then stolen again, this time not by Marie, though the Headmistress mercilessly beats her for the crime and locks her in the punishment room, where she is consoled clandestinely by her friend Myfanwy:

  Her golden hair fell rhapsodically over the remains of her cup of tea.

  ‘Marie!’ Myfanwy called softly, and her friend looked swiftly round.

  ‘Myfanwy!’

  She ran lightly down the dormitory, and knelt by Marie’s bed, her eyes filling with tears. Marie hastily shoved the teatray out of the way.

  ‘Oh, Marie!—’

  For a second they clung together, Myfanwy’s lips pressed against her chum’s hair. Then Marie gave an uneasy wriggle, and slid down onto her side. Myfanwy, guessing the cause, gazed with an infinity of pity at the small girl lying in her arms.

  ‘Oh, Marie, how awful!—’

  ‘Oh, it’s all right,’ said Marie gallantly. ‘It doesn’t hurt, much.’

  ‘The old beast!’ Myfanwy hissed with all the anger of which she was capable.28

  Larkin/Brunette relishes this fourth-former ‘chumminess’, one of the staple elements of the genre, evoking its ingenuous charm with an affectionate detachment which would be lacking in any actual girls’-school story.

  The characterization of the senior Hilary, with her wilfulness and taste for violence, owes something to Una Vickers in Dorothy Vicary’s Niece of the Headmistress. Larkin, however, pushes the genre beyond its conventional limits by making Hilary’s lesbianism explicit. In Vicary’s Niece of the Headmistress, and in Elsie J. Oxenham’s novels, lesbianism is merely a suppressed, if sometimes clamorous, subtext. In a delicious variation on the stereotypical sixth-former, Hilary is depicted as a sophisticated decadent who smokes and plays cards with the other prefects in her study. The ‘crush’ of the conventional girls’-school genre becomes, in Hilary’s case, an aestheticist obsession with the ‘young lioness’, Mary Beech, a hockey-playing junior to whom she is giving secret midnight coaching in French and Latin.

  Hilary’s most prized possession, Brunette tells us, is a calf-bound copy of Théophile Gautier’s scandalous novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), in which the hapless idealist d’Albert searches for the perfect woman: ‘someone whom I have never seen, who must exist somewhere, and whom, if it please God, I shall find. I know just what she is like and, when we meet, I shall recognize her.’29 D’Albert believes he has achieved his goal when he makes
the delectably feminine Rosette his mistress, only to be left comically bereft when Rosette rejects her subject role and elopes with Mademoiselle de Maupin, a bisexual member of the ‘third sex’, whose members lack both the ‘imbecile submissiveness’ of women and the ‘disgusting crapulence and bestial propensities’ of men.30 Gautier’s imagery frequently alludes to the Greek myth of Pygmalion, the sculptor whose statue of the sea-nymph Galatea was of such beauty that he fell in love with it. In Ovid’s version the gods took pity and rewarded the artist by breathing life into his creation. But, as in other post-Romantic variations on the myth, such as Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray and Hardy’s The Well-Beloved, in Gautier’s and Larkin’s versions the coming to life of the statue brings only disillusion.

  Larkin/Brunette takes delight in reformulating decadent French aesthetic doctrine in terms appropriate to an English sixth-former with a crush on a fourth-former. Like d’Albert, Hilary builds an impossible dream in her imagination. She yearns to possess Mary’s unselfconscious pre-adolescent innocence: ‘the early flowering into a quiet beauty of soft, 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’s book at Boots’. Hilary has nothing but contempt for the version of six years later: ‘a painted savage dressed in bangles and skins, chock-full of feminine wiles, dodges, and other dishonesties directed to the same degrading sexual end’.31

  Fatally, when Mary drowses off during one of their secret French lessons, Hilary, deluded by the passivity of the thinly clad form, mistakes dream for reality and makes a clumsy advance. At this point Mary wakes up and, deeply shocked, rushes back to her dorm. The prefect chases after her, only to come upon Margaret Tattenham, the girl who has actually stolen the confiscated £5 note, in the act of returning it to the Headmistress’s study (she had needed it to bet on a cert in the Oaks). Hilary wrestles with Margaret in the dark and, having been baulked of Mary, blackmails the sporty girl into bed with her.

  With a smile she stroked Margaret’s cheek where her blows had landed, and felt under her hand a solid body. Mary Beech was, alas, not for her, but here in her possession was the slender, horse-riding body of Margaret Tattenham, who, Hilary reflected, brutally, would do. Moth-wings of passion ran all over her body, and she released Margaret’s wrists.32

  The scene owes something to the passage in Dorothy Vicary’s Niece of the Headmistress in which Una, who has been reading Torture through the Ages, inflicts a chinese burn on the defenceless Dora: ‘Her strong, hard little hands dealt mercilessly with Dora’s slender white wrist. Dora flushed and grew pale, and struggled to free herself, but, failing, put her head back against the wall and took her lip between her teeth. “You – you utter bully,” she stammered.’33 It is notable that Vicary’s depiction of sado-masochistic violence has a direct vividness which makes Brunette’s version sound studied and literary in comparison.

  The story ends, as the typical girls’-school story so often does, with a dangerous excursion beyond the safe school bounds. Marie, having escaped from the punishment room and blundered about the countryside all night, treading in cowpats and tearing her trousers on barbed wire, is tracked down by Hilary and the other prefects, who have been dispatched by the Headmistress to bring her back, her innocence having been established by Margaret’s confession. Margaret has also escaped from the punishment room, by means of a rope made from her underclothes, and ridden off across the fields on Toby, the school pony:

  they started to gallop across the next field, the wind blowing her short tunic precisely against her body, and her flying hair making her look like some exquisite nymph riding the horse of the dawn over the Pan-guarded slopes of Arcady. Mentally, with pardonable epicureanism, she noted for future reference that bare-backed riding without knickers was a pleasurable occupation. The sun shone warmly on her bare arms and legs.34

  Finally the plot, with elegant complication worthy of Beaumarchais, brings all the characters together in a country lane at exactly the moment when Marie’s chum Myfanwy, the school’s water-polo captain, out for morning swimming practice, floats past in the river about to drown through cramp. Margaret redeems herself by leaping in and saving Myfanwy’s life. They then all return to the school to receive inevitable justice at the Headmistress’s hands. The lesbian Hilary is expelled, Margaret is forgiven because of her heroism, and the story ends with Marie visiting Myfanwy in the sanatorium: ‘ “Everything’s settled . . . Everyone’s happy. Nobody’s been punished. And . . . Myfanwy!” She leant closer. “They’ve started a Swimming-Bath Fund!” ’35

  Trouble at Willow Gables is not pornography. The narrator is empathetic rather than lubricious. Motion cites ‘the wish to dominate’ as one of Larkin’s motives in writing the story.36 But Larkin/Brunette has no more wish to dominate women than do Dorita Fairlie Bruce or Nancy Breary, and arguably less than Dorothy Vicary. He was, however, content to allow Amis to interpret his motives in terms of his own predatory sexuality. He told his friend gleefully that the lesbian seduction scene ‘gave Diana Gollancz quite a “crisis des nerfs” or whatever the French is’.37 And he complained that there was not enough lesbianism in the stories written by women: ‘It’s nice when the girls kiss each other and get into each others’ beds and quarrel and twist each others’ wrists, but in between there is an awful lot of waffle, and the authoresses are very stupid women, without a grain of humour in their tiny little minds.’38 Significantly, he represents his disappointment as literary as much as sexual. And he seems to attribute a private, specifically literary meaning to the word ‘lesbianism’. On 7 September 1943 he wrote to Amis: ‘homosexuality has been completely replaced by lesbianism in my character at the moment – I don’t know why’.39 He chooses his words carefully. His early stories had taken their tone, uneasily, from Christopher Isherwood’s celebration of homosocial boyhood in Lions and Shadows, and the near-explicit homosexuality of Julian Hall’s Eton novel, The Senior Commoner (1934).40 He had now achieved a more objective artistic outlet for this same fictional impulse by transposing it into the female mode.

  Recently the feminist critic Terry Castle has perceived tragic implications in Larkin’s impersonation of Brunette: ‘Pretending to be a middle-aged invert named Brunette was a bookish young man’s way of neutering himself at the starting gate – of announcing second-tier status and yielding in advance to the competition.’41 But Castle underestimates Larkin’s imaginative control of this literary exercise. Outside his writing he did not neuter himself; nor, despite the show of wimpishness with which he flattered Amis’s ego, did he yield to ‘the competition’ in his dealings with women. His transgendering was not a symptom of sexual timidity.

  Larkin was severely selective in what he disclosed about his ‘lesbian’ story to his correspondents, and we would understand his motives better were the letters to Montgomery available; but they are embargoed in the Bodleian until 2035.42 Larkin did not mention Willow Gables to Sutton, and it seems that he shared his interest in Gautier with Montgomery alone. He does not mention Mademoiselle de Maupin in his letters to Sutton or Amis, who would have had no sympathy with such foreign sophistication. Larkin made a show of furtiveness, begging Amis: ‘Please don’t ask me to send it, because I simply daren’t let it out of my sight, it’s too valuable and incriminating.’43 Startlingly, however, the typescript gives evidence that he made an attempt to have the work published. At some point after its completion he went through the text with a pen, altering the names of his real Oxford contemporaries to fictional ones. Marie Woolf becomes Marie Moore; Margaret Flannery Margaret Tattenham; Mary Burch Mary Beech; Hilary Allen Hilary Russell, and so on. He also included in the stapling an unnumbered typed sheet listing the ‘Correct Nomenclature’. The only conceivable reason for these indications is to guide a typesetter. The tattered wallet-file which contains the typescript bears two ink-stamps of ‘Rochefort Productions (Literary Property) Ltd’, a literary and film agency with which Victor G
ollancz, Diana’s father, was briefly associated.44 Larkin, it seems, attempted to see the work into print in 1943, trusting that, ‘unclassifiable’ though it was, it would find some kind of readership.

  Both Montgomery and Amis also tried their hand at writing in a female voice. But their attempts are in different styles, and on a different scale from Larkin’s. Among Montgomery’s papers there is a very brief, 126-word fragment in which a woman nostalgically reminisces about having been stripped and spanked, as a naughty fifteen-year-old, by her handsome thirty-year-old stepfather.45 It is closer to the male pornography of Fanny Hill than to Brunette’s writings. Amis took the literary challenge more seriously, developing his own lesbian alter ego, ‘Anna Lucasta’, in parallel with Brunette. In their letters the two men tell each other about Brunette’s and Anna’s projects, including a novel concerned with lesbian art-students in Oxford, referred to as ‘Iwdafy’ (‘I Would Do Anything for You’), whose title comes from a song by Billy Banks.46 A surviving fragment, included in a letter to Larkin of early 1945, gives an idea of the camp luridness of Anna’s style:

  ‘all I want is to be close to you, but somehow we never seem to be close enough to one another.’ For answer, Jennifer pulled her on to her lap and held her mouth in a long, shuddering kiss. Marsha flexed her slim body and pressed herself to her. And then there was nothing but their closeness as the shadows lengthened and the sunlight paled and dusk swam into the still, silent room.47

  This soft-core sentimental pornography is very different from Larkin’s complex genre-gender adventure.