Philip Larkin (18 page)

Bending close to the window-pane, he looked into the front room: it was tidy as usual, there were ornaments on the mantelpiece and the clocks showed the right time. There was a pile of newspapers on the table and behind a glass vase he could see the half-dozen letters he had written home all put neatly together. It was strange, like looking into a doll’s house, and putting his hands against the window frames he felt as protective as a child does feel towards a doll’s house and its tiny rooms.
²⁰

A numb, traumatized quality infuses the narrative. The pub-goers seem embarrassed rather than sympathetic as they listen to the commercial traveller whose wife has been killed in a direct hit on their hotel: ‘“I reckon they’ll do this to everywhere,” said the young man, looking up again. “Everywhere. There won’t be a town left standing.” His voice had a half-hysterical eager note as if he desired this more than anything.’
²¹

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’ room
²⁴
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, with 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.