Philip Larkin (22 page)

In the months following the completion of
The Kingdom of Winter
he put on a brave show of moving forward with Lawrentian purpose. In September 1945 he wrote to Sutton that
The Kingdom of Winter
was ‘a deathly book’ on the theme of ‘the relinquishing of live response to life’:

Now I am thinking of a third book in which the central character will pick up where Katherine left off and develop
logically
back to life again. In other words, the north ship will come back instead of being bogged up there in a glacier. Then I shall have finished this particular branch of soul-history (my own, of course) and what will happen then I don’t know.
⁴

The future perfect tense in which he looks forward to having ‘finished’ this branch of his ‘soul-history’ betrays little relish for the process, and the final sentence has a dispirited, helpless tone. To achieve this re-engagement with life Larkin would surely need, like Lawrence, to commit himself to a Jessie Chambers or elope with a Frieda Weekley. He would have to make a developing relationship with Ruth or Monica the creative centre of his fictional ‘soul-history’, and wander the world in search of new experience. Intriguingly, the two novels with which he wrestled over the next five or more years do show him, in a muted way, attempting something like this. Both protagonists were, it seems, to find new opportunities for themselves in America. But, crucially, Larkin himself never crossed the Atlantic, and the novels were never finished.

But Larkin is not consistent, and on occasion could give a very different analysis of his fictional ambitions. In an early letter to Sutton of 5 March 1942, he accurately predicted the future shape of his career. He would, he forecast, fail the difficult challenge of fiction ‘before I finally sprout wings and turn into a poet dashing forward like a Hussar’.
⁵
He alludes to Auden’s celebrated sonnet ‘The Novelist’, which contrasts the dashing Hussar poet with the novelist, whose task is to learn ‘How to be plain and awkward, how to be / One after whom none think it worth to turn’. The novelist must ‘Become the whole of boredom, subject to / Vulgar complaints like love, among the Just // Be just, among the Filthy filthy too’.
⁶
This notion of the novelist as a passive recorder of life on all its levels offers an alternative to the more elevated, egotistical notion of the novel as diffused poem or Lawrentian soul adventure. Vernon Watkins had offered Larkin a similar example in poetry of self-effacing devotion to ‘the work’.

In this version the novelist’s task is one of radical empathy. As Larkin later said: ‘novels are about other people and poetry is about yourself’.
⁷
In his unfinished novels of the late 1940s he was attempting to write not poetically about himself, but prosaically about others. He was no longer the inspired or cursed poet, but an ordinary man. In poetry he rejected the examples of Yeats and Thomas, who had encouraged him to jack himself up to ‘a concept of poetry that lay outside my own life’.
⁸
Similarly, in his fiction he would now learn to be plain and awkward, even perhaps ‘Become the whole of boredom’. While he was working on
Jill
he boasted to Amis, ‘There is not a single intelligent character in the book,’ and resolved in future drafts to repress Kemp’s growing signs of cleverness.
⁹

It is tempting to relate this development to Larkin’s association with Kingsley Amis. Between 1947 and 1951 Amis was wrestling with his own ultimately unpublished first novel,
The Legacy
, and constantly demanding his friend’s advice.
¹⁰
Amis certainly presented Larkin with the example of fiction lacking the poetic refinement of his own published novels. But Larkin’s determination to empathize with other people is alien to Amis, and it seems that, while offering Amis plentiful advice, Larkin evaded any interaction between his own fiction and that of his friend. Nevertheless Larkin and Amis found themselves moving with the literary current of the time in broadly the same direction. Fiction had moved beyond the modernism of Joyce and Woolf and was beginning to generate from the social realism of George Orwell’s and Graham Greene’s novels of the 1930s the raw post-war ‘angry young man’ idiom of Braine and Sillitoe. Amis’s
Lucky Jim
was to be a key early work in this literary movement.

Two substantial groups of drafts survive among Larkin’s papers. Both novels have their biographical origins in the period 1946–8, and he seems to have worked on them in parallel or alternately. One of them, titled in some drafts
No For An Answer
, focuses on Sam Wagstaff, a young ‘son of the firm’, about to inherit a motor-manufacturing business in Birmingham from his father. The narrative follows Sam’s relationship with his girlfriend Sheila Piggott (in some drafts Stella), a reductive caricature of Ruth Bowman as a cultureless provincial girl. They attend a rugby-club dance, encounter Sam’s lonely, ill father and visit a pub at Christmas. The prevailing tone of meticulous realism is set in the opening scene. Sheila is opening Christmas cards while her mother reads a novel on the sofa: ‘“Look at the price of that,” she said, tossing one over to Mrs Piggott. “Looks like one-and-six, doesn’t it? It’s tenpence really. You can see where they’ve altered it.”’ (‘10d’ has been changed to ‘1/6d’.) Her mother compliments her, ‘“You’re a sharp one,”’ bending her library book back ‘as if to keep it submissive’.

Her heavy face had stern good-humoured lines, her grey hair was permanently-waved. She wore horn-rimmed spectacles to read and play bridge. With each breath she blew out a faint blue plume from the cigarette she smoked, using a holder. ‘They’ve no money these days.’

Sheila went on studying [the cards], her small forehead wrinkled as if she were short-sighted. ‘This of Jack Ryman’s, now that only cost a bob but it looks more, doesn’t it? . . . Oh, for heaven’s sake.’ She extinguished the wireless. ‘Where’s Sam got to, I’d like to know.’ She stretched, shivered. ‘It doesn’t take all night to drive from Brum.’
¹¹

It is a perfectly visualized scene and the dialogue is exactly caught. But something is lacking. Does the narrator perhaps not like the Piggotts and Wagstaffs of this world enough to make the writing quite come alive? Or is it that the colourless, omniscient third-person narration precludes the humour, irony and playfulness which give vitality to the Willow Gables works and the later mature poems? Was Larkin repeating the same mistake he had made in
The North Ship
, rejecting mixed tones in favour of a consistent seriousness?

Four main drafts and four subsidiary drafts survive (with overlaps), and the page numbering shows that extensive further drafting was destroyed. Larkin devoted many months to the novel during 1947–9.
¹²
The process of composition was clearly strenuous. He repeatedly recast the text, making slight changes of action and wording without changing the basic conception. The high quality of much of the writing makes this puzzling. A less self-critical writer would certainly have pressed on to a finish. Moreover he sets himself new challenges of subject matter and tone. The scene in which Sam and Sheila eat Christmas lunch together, for instance, is peculiarly unsettling:

For a time they did nothing but eat. As he lifted the first forkful Sam felt water spring in his mouth, and he put in as much at once as he could. The flavour of the turkey, of cloves in the bread sauce, and sage in the stuffing, ran together and ascended his palate in a delicious fume. Every now and then he cleared his taste with bread, or washed the cold metallic claret over his tongue before starting again. They grinned at each other, mouths stuffed full: neither stopped chewing for an instant, but if they had they would have heard the sound of the other’s jaws. They did not want to talk. Their knives and forks worked steadily as spades clearing away snow, until the food was reduced to small heaps, then to nothing. Stella finished first by about a couple of mouthfuls.
¹³

The detailed description of these two healthy members of the lumpen-bourgeoisie gorging themselves makes for a subtly gross, disgusting effect. The author may not ‘want to be’ these unpoetic characters in the way that he earlier wanted ‘to be that girl’, but he certainly takes us uncomfortably into their skins. As Richard Bradford comments, ‘Had the novel been completed and found a publisher [. . .] it might have subtly altered the course of post-war literary history,’ by anticipating by a decade the work of Braine, Barstow, Sillitoe, Storey, Amis and Wain, whose works showed that ‘good writing could coexist with states of mind that had little time for high culture’.
¹⁴
The originality and adventurousness of such writing would have transformed the context for later novelists.

The scene which, in his notes to the novel, Larkin calls the ‘seduction fiasco’ explores, with an insight ahead of its time, the social phenomenon later called ‘heavy petting’. The new post-war freedom of the young, no longer respectful of earlier conventions of courtship, was to become a major theme of novels in the 1950s. The encounter, which Larkin rewrote five times with slight variations, also looks further forward to what would now be called ‘date rape’. After dinner, Sam and Sheila/Stella engage in horseplay which gets out of hand:

The sensation was like getting drunk extremely quickly: he forgot everything except that he was making love to Stella and that he must go on doing so at all costs. He got his hand under the edge of her long skirt and slid it up her nyloned right leg till she was holding it tightly between her two bare thighs. His cuff caught against the edge of her girdle and again he was impatient to get undressed. He felt desperate to have her, far too desperate to conduct successfully the polite moves necessary to get her, too desperate not to try. A dozen things about her were throbbing in him all at the same time, smells, sights, tastes, touches, all bucking like a jawful of aching teeth. But try as he might his hand could get no further.
¹⁵

Larkin catches with embarrassing directness the interplay of raw sex and social convention: Sam’s blundering impatience; Sheila’s clenched thighs and strict sense of propriety. In one of the drafts Sheila slaps Sam’s face and exclaims: ‘All right, I’ve had about enough [. . .] No one’s going to, to treat me like that. You’ve had it. Absolutely had it.’
¹⁶
It is not surprising that Larkin kept the novel secret from Ruth Bowman. When she first read it fifty years later in 1999, she was understandably offended at this depiction of a crude, inarticulate relationship, so different from their real-life mutual respect and shared artistic enthusiasms: ‘if Sam and Sheila are any metamorphosis of Philip and me it must be left to literary critics to make the connection. They say nothing to me.’
¹⁷

The narrative was to explore a familiar triangle. Sam’s affections are divided between the coarse-grained Sheila and the pathetic victim, Grace, a working-class girl whom he knocks over in his car and then visits in hospital. Larkin’s plot-outline suggests that Sam was ultimately to be condemned for failing to respond to Grace’s love. However, in a contradictory subtext, the novel was, it seems, to celebrate Sam’s escape from his tangled guilts and responsibilities. At the end he was to leave both Sheila and Grace behind and take ship for a business trip to the USA. Also on board were to be members of the Washington Band whose ‘hot’ music was to represent, Larkin’s notes indicate with ironic inverted commas, ‘the “falsity” of the American brand of spontaneity’.
¹⁸
It seems that the attempt to realize a world of ordinary Midland provincial life was to be short-circuited by an escapist wish-fulfilment fantasy not dissimilar to the ending of
Lucky Jim
, though in Larkin’s version Sam is not accompanied by a glamorous Christine.

The other explanation which Larkin gave for his inability to complete a third novel, apart from his over-poetic notion of the form, was his deficiency in empathy. ‘I think that was the trouble, really. I didn’t know enough about other people, I didn’t like them enough.’
¹⁹
He was morally scathing about his failure: ‘I suppose I must have lost interest in other people, or perhaps I was only pretending to be interested in them.’
²⁰
This explanation does not ring true. Larkin was, in fact, capable of the keenest psychological insights. From the comedy of Marie’s Jungian experiments and Philippa’s belt fetishism in
Michaelmas Term at St Bride’s
to the tragedy of Kemp’s self-destructive breakdown at the end of
Jill
and Katherine’s alienation in a foreign England in
The Kingdom of Winter
, he shows a generous instinct to venture beyond his own immediate subjectivity and a fascination with different worlds of experience.