Philip Larkin (17 page)

On its publication in the summer of 1945
The North Ship
received only a single brief notice, in the
Coventry Evening Telegraph
(26 October 1945), which gives every sign of having been written by Larkin himself: ‘He has an inner vision that must be sought for with care. His recondite imagery is couched in phrases that make up in a kind of wistful, hinted beauty what they lack in lucidity.’
²⁸
Nevertheless his literary career was at last on track, however modestly. In May, shortly after Victory in Europe Day, he completed work on his second novel,
The Kingdom of Winter
, in ‘Proustian’ mood, and Montgomery’s agent Peter Watt agreed to seek a publisher for it. By now Montgomery had completed his own second novel,
The Moving Toyshop
, intensifying Larkin’s feeling of impatience at not yet being a published novelist. He remained passive, however. Kingsley Amis, demobbed in September 1945, was horrified to find that the finished manuscript of
The Kingdom of Winter
was still untyped. Larkin wrote to his parents asking for help and they paid the £5 typist’s fee. He sent the book to Watt in October 1945. Months were to pass before, in June 1946, he heard that no less a publisher than Faber had accepted it, offering an advance of £30. At last, it seemed, he was breaking into the larger literary world. Then in October 1946
the Fortune Press
published
Jill
. He sent a copy to his father who, characteristically, responded with a cheque in payment.
²⁹
Faber followed, in
February 1947, with
The Kingdom of Winter
,
the title having been changed after discussion to the more saleable
A Girl in Winter
, though Larkin had earlier rejected this as ‘Mills & Boony’.
³⁰
With a volume of poems and two novels in print, Larkin now had some reason to feel that he had arrived as a writer.

5

The Novels

1943–5

The momentum created in his final months at Oxford had driven Larkin forward, and he had completed two novels in less than two years, between August 1943 and May 1945. They are highly precocious works for a writer in his early twenties. But they led him into an artistic and personal dead end. He was not fully to regain creative self-possession until he moved to Belfast in 1950 and abandoned his ambitions as a novelist. The narratives of both works drive inexorably towards negative conclusions. Self-depreciation was, as John Banville has said, ‘not second but first nature’ to Larkin,
¹
and a strong subtext of both novels is a scathing critique of his own masculine selfishness and immaturity. As a
Bildungsroman
, or coming-of-age novel,
Jill
is very sour. Unlike Lawrence’s Paul Morel or Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus, Larkin’s Kemp has no promising future. Similarly
A Girl in Winter
, contradicting its final published title, is the bitterest of anti-romances. He later said ‘I always think of [it] as The Kingdom of Winter’, and it seems appropriate to employ the original title here rather than the misleadingly sentimental version forced on him by Faber.
²

Jill
, like
Michaelmas Term at St Bride’s
, which he was writing when he first conceived it, transfers Willow Gables to Oxford. The protagonist, Kemp, is a Pygmalion aesthete enchanted, as was Hilary, by a dream of innocence. But grim heterosexual reality replaces comic lesbian fantasy. Hilary’s dream of Mary ultimately became flesh; Kemp’s dream of Jill is from the start unattainable. The delightful pastoral of Willow Gables is reduced to the obsessive delusion of ‘a very poor young man who goes to Oxford who is exceptionally nervous and rather feminine’, and whose ‘complicated sexless daydream’ is broken by the appearance of a real-life Jill. As Larkin put it, with brisk relish, in a letter to Sutton, written shortly after he first conceived the novel: ‘the rest of the story, in action and in a long dream, serves to disillusion him completely’.
³

In a later interview he dismissed the idea that
Jill
had the ‘political overtones’ of later works by Sillitoe, Wain, Waterhouse and Amis. His ineffectual, moody protagonist is no class champion or victim, but a displaced version of himself: ‘John’s being working-class was a kind of equivalent of my stammer, a built-in handicap to put him one down.’
⁴
At first sight Kemp might seem a similar self-projection to Jim Dixon in Amis’s
Lucky Jim
, ‘unlucky John’ perhaps. Larkin’s and Amis’s protagonists are both versions of the blundering ‘northern scholar’, invented by Larkin and his undergraduate friends.
⁵
Both descend into a spiral of disaster, ending in drunkenness and physical mayhem. But the tones of the novels are quite different.
Lucky Jim
takes sides with its protagonist. The reader is encouraged to identify him or herself with the young man’s pursuit of the girl and the money. The desires of Larkin’s ‘exceptionally nervous’ protagonist are altogether more elusive.

Kemp’s is a fundamentally poetic sensibility. As early as 1940 Larkin had declared to Sutton that ‘A novel should be a diffused poem,’
⁶
and in August and September 1943 his letters were full of admiring references to George Moore’s ‘real prose poem’,
Esther Waters
, the elusive novels of Henry Green and, most enthusiastically, the poetic prose of Katherine Mansfield. Kemp’s consciousness is rendered with something of Mansfield’s cool descriptive precision:

From the stone façades pigeons fluttered down on to the pavements and waddled uneasily about, casting a wary eye at him, but he paid no attention to them. The wind blew and a whole wall of ivy danced in the sun, the leaves blowing back to show their white undersides. So in him a thousand restlessnesses yearned and shook.
⁷

On one level Larkin was trying again to ‘be that girl’ by writing, as he announced to Sutton, with ‘double-distilled purity of essence-of-Mansfield’.
⁸
But, characteristically, even as he was embarking on the novel he was doubting this strategy, ridiculing his poetic prose in the Lawrentian dialect of a Mr Morel: ‘It’s got no guts, no earth. Wheer keeps tha ba’s, lad?’
⁹
Jill
was, he told Sutton, ‘very tiny and thin’ compared with
Sons and Lovers
, which he could feel mocking him from the bookcase, ‘
breathing
, very slightly’.
¹⁰

On the realistic level, Kemp’s fantasy is a barely plausible attempt to impress his public-school room-mate, Warner, who regrets not being closer to his own sister. But the novel insists on a more aesthetic version. The fantasy takes on an imaginative life of its own. Kemp is an artist offering selfless devotion to a muse. An emotional climax is reached when he starts writing letters to the imagined Jill, and posting them: ‘He was trembling when he dropped [the letter] into a pillar-box, and leant against the wall a moment, filled with exultation at the idea of thus speaking with nothingness. He envisaged the envelope wandering around England, collecting pencilled scribbles of suggestions on the front and back until, perhaps a year or more hence, it came to rest in some dusty corner of a dead-letter office.’
¹¹
In Gautier’s theory ‘there is something grand and beautiful about loving a statue; the love is perfectly disinterested, there is no fear of satiety nor conqueror’s disgust, and you cannot reasonably hope for the miracle that happened to Pygmalion’.
¹²
Kemp is such a selfless aesthete, absorbed in his own creation, speaking excitedly with nothingness.

Like his creator before him Kemp seeks to bring his vision closer by literary transgendering. He pursues the Pygmalion miracle by writing Jill’s diary, in a pale version of the Willow Gables mode:

All my kirbi-grips had vanished for a start this morning (yes, and WHO took them?), so what with searching for them and trying to find a slide, I hadn’t time to get my hymn-book before prayers – and of course the Badger had to choose today to inspect them, as she said she’d seen too many girls sharing recently. I suppose she thinks I
like
sharing with Molly.
¹³

But, like the blessing of the gods which breathes life into the statue, or the visitation of the poet’s muse, the epiphany cannot be forced or willed. When it does come, it is quite unexpected, and catches him unawares:

The final possession came one day at lunch, when he was quietly eating bread and cheese and listening to casual talk [. . .] The sensation he had was of looking intently into the centre of a pure white light: he seemed to see the essence of Jill, around which all the secondary material things formed and reformed as he wrote them down. He thought he saw exactly what she was and how he should express it: the word was
innocent
, one he had used dozens of times in his own mind, and yet until that moment had never understood.
¹⁴

In a version of the hyacinth-girl episode in
The Waste Land
, Kemp looks ‘into the heart of light, the silence’.

By the time Larkin came to write the later part of the novel reality had caught up with his artificial fiction. Just as Kemp comes upon the very Jill of his imagination in an Oxford bookshop, with her blue woollen gloves, her belted fawn coat with flaps over the pockets and her Wellingtons, so the young Larkin had met the all-too-real schoolgirl Ruth Bowman. In the novel Gillian insists on being a real girl in a real place. She is, indeed, the cousin of Elizabeth, the sexually aware girlfriend of Kemp’s room-mate, the odious public-school ‘hearty’, Warner. Warner’s friends, Patrick and Eddy, crudely mock Kemp’s obsession: ‘This man’s got a letch on your kid cousin.’ He can only protest feebly, ‘I’m not a damn baby snatcher’,
¹⁵
and cling stubbornly to his dream: ‘The door to the different world had been left half ajar and swiftly, lightly, coolly, calmly, he must slip through it and be for ever safe.’
¹⁶
However, his preparations to entertain Jill to tea take on a hopeless fatalism as he makes his room tidy and neat, sets out large quantities of cakes and lettuce, and then rushes out distractedly to buy a too-large packet of salt. Dream cannot possibly become reality. And, indeed, instead of Gillian it is Elizabeth who arrives. Gillian, she quite properly insists, is too young and fragile for his attentions.

Until this point the war has scarcely registered with the reader. None of the characters has shown any interest in the progress of the conflict, and casual references to the black-out, fire-watching and changes in the age of the army call-up have served merely to reinforce the atmosphere of insecurity. Now, it seems, the bombing of his home town is to bring about Kemp’s awakening to reality. As he sets out on the train to discover his parents’ fate, he ‘seemed to be leaving a region of unreality and insubstantial pain for the real world where he could really be hurt’.
¹⁷
Ominously, however, he remains a self-obsessed neurotic, imagining that his parents must have been killed to punish him personally for his neglect: ‘he deserved to be punished in this way [. . .] he was tormented with thinking the worst had happened, they had been killed because he treated them lightly’.
¹⁸
He views the ruins of the city with refined objective detachment: familiar streets uncannily deserted; ‘broken bricks, lurching floors and laths sticking out like delicate broken bones’.
¹⁹
On his visit to Coventry Larkin had been accompanied by Noel Hughes. In the novel, however, John roams the ruins of Huddlesford poignantly alone. Personal tragedy and loss are omitted. John’s own area of the city is untouched and he discovers that his family is safe in Preston. The most vivid image is the Larkinesque deserted living room of his family home: