Philip Larkin (13 page)

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.’
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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.
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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.’
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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 Gollancz, Diana’s father, was briefly associated.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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This soft-core sentimental pornography is very different from Larkin’s complex genre-gender adventure.

Isolated in Warwick during the autumn of 1943 the precocious young writer pursued his Brunette impulse further into other ‘unclassifiable’ forms. Most remarkable perhaps is the essay ‘What Are We Writing For?’, neatly typed and stapled in October 1943. It begins with a camp self-portrait of the chain-smoking professional writer, Brunette, breakfasting with her assistant Jacinth, who has ‘great intelligent topaz eyes’. Jacinth has been reading George Orwell’s famous essay published in
Horizon
in 1940, ‘Boys’ Weeklies’,
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and suggests that Brunette might write an answering piece on the girls’ version of the genre. Brunette is taken with the idea and, putting aside her routine labours on
Wenda’s Worst Term
, she settles down to write a defence of her profession. Orwell’s pioneering essay was one of the first which subjected popular subliterature to serious analysis. It is a classic of ideological demystification, decoding the apparent trivialities of the boys’-school story in terms of British imperialist ideology. For Orwell, ‘All art is to some extent propaganda.’
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Britain’s imperialist wars, he asserts, were won on the playing-fields of Eton by people like Tom Brown in Thomas Hughes’s novel, or Frank Nugent and Bob Cherry in the Billy Bunter books by Frank Richards. With the casual sexism of his day Orwell makes only perfunctory reference to the girls’-school story, implying half-heartedly that a similar analysis would be possible. But Brunette will have none of this. In her view Orwell’s analysis is irrelevant to her genre. It is possible to read feminist motives into Brunette’s response. She can be seen as anticipating the work of recent feminists such as Alice Walker, who champion disregarded female cultural pursuits like quilt-making or gardening. In her 1992 study of the genre Rosemary Auchmuty includes the girls’-school story in this ideological programme, asserting that it ‘offered me as a young woman a temporary escape and refuge from the pressures of that profoundly heterosexual society I lived in’.
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More philosophically, in French feminist jargon, the girls’-school story could be seen as
écriture féminine
, outside the ‘symbolic order’ of patriarchy.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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: