Philip Larkin (11 page)

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and could make a very strong impression on the unwary, being a good pianist, a fluent composer, and author of several unpublished books.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!’

‘Hall
o
, 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 keep 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

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