Early Larkin

James Underwood

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350197138
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

"Astute." Times Literary Supplement Beginning in the late 1930s, this is the first book-length critical study of Larkin's early work: his poetry, novels, short fictions, essays, and letters. The book tells the story of Philip Larkin's early literary development, starting with Larkin's earliest literary efforts and his remarkable correspondence with Jim Sutton, and ending at the point Larkin's maturity begins, with the writing of his first great poems. In providing a comprehensive and systematic study of this part of Larkin's life, this book also presents a new and surprising narrative of Larkin's development. Critics have presented Larkin's early career as a false start which he overcame by swapping Yeats's influence for Hardy's. Having re-discovered Hardy's poetry in 1946, the story goes, Larkin realised the potential of writing about his own life, and disavowed Yeats. Central to this book's controversial counter-narrative is an insistence on the significance of Brunette Coleman, the female heteronym Larkin invented in 1943. Three years before his re-discovery of Hardy, Larkin wrote a strange and unique series of works for schoolgirls under Coleman's name. These writings not only led him away from Yeats and other hindering influences, but also away from himself. Whereas the Yeats-to-Hardy narrative emphasises the autobiographical qualities of Larkin's mature verse, Early Larkin proposes that the writer's breakthrough was a result of his burgeoning 'interest in everything outside himself' – itself the consequence of his curious experiment with Brunette Coleman.

1

A portrait of the artist as a young man

The Larkin-Sutton letters

This book is about the journey Larkin undertook to become a mature and original writer and one of the major poets of the twentieth century. Larkin’s correspondence with James (Jim) Ballard Sutton is an important place to begin, because it was there that Larkin constructed and negotiated his artistic identity – an identity that was forced to adapt to the changing circumstances of his life and his growing acceptance of his own character and art. It is there that we can first begin to see the shape his literary development would take and the various roads not taken, a narrative pursued across subsequent chapters.

The friendship between Philip Larkin and Jim Sutton began at Coventry’s King Henry VIII School. Their extant correspondence starts in 1938 with a letter Larkin wrote from a family holiday in Sidmouth, and trickles to a halt in the early 1950s.¹ It therefore spans the entire decade of the 1940s, and, as a running commentary on these formative years, is one of the most important available to Larkin scholars. This correspondence also contains some of the best writing Larkin produced that decade. These are vivid and lively letters, often deeply amusing, and electrified by playful language and obscenities. Such qualities are absent from much of the literary work Larkin produced during the 1940s, but would, during the course of the decade, gradually find their way into his writing and form part of what we now recognize as ‘Larkinesque’. Critics were quick to point out the value of these letters: Andrew Motion has described them as ‘extraordinary . . . intimate, spontaneous, vital’, whilst Anthony Thwaite argues that ‘They are very much a portrait of the artist as a young man’ (SL, xii).² These are common means of characterizing the correspondence. The intimacy which Motion describes makes this correspondence stand out, particularly from more perfunctory or excessively performative correspondences, like those with Kingsley Amis and Colin Gunner, which were in many ways conducted from a sense of social obligation or guilt. The letters to Sutton are full of longing and exhilaration:

Your word revived me like a warm fire, solid, sincere, deepest I wished more than anything else that rather you were here or I was in Coventry. (1 April 1941)³

Permit me to observe that during the last eight days I have received 6 (six) letters from you . . . . In other words, I resemble a man who has consumed 6 bots [sic] of beer in swift succession. (12 April 1943)

The language of warmth and intoxication is perhaps more redolent of love letters, and at times, the sense of yearning arguably borders on the sexual: ‘Ah, if only we could get together again and you stuff my poems in your cavernous pipe, and I put my feet through your canvases two at a time as of old’ (5 August 1942). ‘I long for you to come back’, he wrote the year after; ‘I feel you are a particularly good book or record I have voluntarily locked away and some time in the future shall take out and read or play again – if you see what I mean. Of course you are much better than a book or record. But it’s almost the sense of something saved up. I hope you come back, soon’ (12 August 1943).

Epistolarity

Letters occupy an unsound theoretical relationship to literary studies. As Hermione Lee writes, they are ‘dangerous, seductive, and invaluable for biographers’.⁴ That much may be obvious, but critics producing ostensibly less biographical scholarship are not immune to their seductions. Though some work has been done to theorize epistolarity, and literary correspondence is beginning to receive the more sophisticated attention it demands, a much older and more naïve notion of letter-writing continues to exercise a pull on the imagination of literary scholars and lay readers. As the historian Rebecca Earle points out, ‘Personal letters . . . have often been read as windows into the soul of the author. The ancient trope that views the letter as merely a conversation in writing lent particular force to this idea, whereby the letter becomes as unmediated as a casual conversation.’⁵ Larkin has been a notable victim of this approach, since it was his letters – and a sometimes wilfully simplistic way of reading them – that were responsible for the backlash of the 1990s. As Amanda Gilroy and W. M. Verhoeven argue, however, this view of letter-writing as a casual, unmediated form of expression involves two acts of erasure, namely the ‘dialogic construction of identity’ and the independent ‘textuality’ of letters.⁶ These aspects must surely be even more acute in the case of a writer’s letters. For Hugh Haughton, a poet’s letter ‘is not only a source of information but a form of information, a literary performance with a bearing on poetry’.⁷

In this chapter, however, I am less interested in the possibility that Larkin’s letters represent early rehearsals for poems than in the idea that they represent early rehearsals of a writerly identity. Larkin used this correspondence as a space in which to construct and negotiate his identity as a writer – the ‘form of information’ Haughton describes. In this sense, I concur with its characterization as a ‘portrait of the artist as a young man’, but complicate the implications of that phrase: declining to treat the correspondence as biographical plunder, a source of information about the young artist, I instead interpret it as the place where he first became a young artist. From the displays of power in early modern royal portraiture, to the carefully composed twenty-first-century ‘selfie’, the history of the portrait and self-portrait teaches us that this genre is fundamentally about the construction and projection of identity, not the naïve recording of it. If the Larkin-Sutton correspondence is a portrait of the artist as a young man, then it is only because the correspondence itself is the process by which the young Larkin constructs and projects himself as artist.

War and letter-writing

This correspondence was at its most intense during the Second World War. In 1940, Larkin and Sutton both went to Oxford, Larkin to study English Language and Literature at the university, and Sutton to study art at the Slade, recently relocated from London in order to avoid German bombing. Sutton, however, would only enjoy two terms, being called up into the Royal Army Service Corps in the spring of 1941. Larkin, whose exemption from military service due to poor eyesight had been confirmed earlier that year, was able to continue his studies. This distanced, wartime context is crucial to understanding the correspondence.

A casual reference in December 1940 – ‘My bloody Uncle is convinced that the invasion will start tomorrow’ – reminds us just how much the threat of disaster and defeat loomed over the country during these years (20 December 1940). However, references like this to the war are relatively scarce: it seems Larkin was largely uninterested in the subject, seeing it more as an interruption to the relationship and their artistic destinies (explored later in the chapter). His letters show almost no interest in nationalist sabre-rattling, the implications of the war, or its specific battles and developments. Even on 8 May 1945 – the day after Germany signed an act of military surrender – Larkin’s mind was elsewhere: ‘I hope the end of the European War means that we shall meet again soon, and be able to get going on affairs of mutual and eternal interest. By this I mean the appreciation and creation of temporal and timeless ART.’ As the nation erupted in euphoric relief, Larkin wrote this:

I listened to Churchill blathering out of him this afternoon, and the King this evening. But all day I have had a headache and felt despondent. The second draft of the novel has reached p.22. I have had some bad meat for supper which gives me a thoughtful expression. And the weather has turned enervatingly warm. (8 May 1945)

Here, the great war leader Churchill is ‘blathering’, the king is no better and the Allies’ victory is narrated as casually as Larkin’s headache, the drafting of his novel, his evening meal and the weather. For Larkin, there are concerns more personally significant than the fate of Europe.

One such concern is to keep Sutton’s ‘mutual and eternal interest’ in art alive throughout the war. Jenny Hartley has argued that ‘During a war letters assume a heightened significance, and the Second World War can be seen as the last golden age of letter-writing’.⁸ She goes on to discuss the important role women, and particularly mothers, played as letter-writers during this conflict:

In their letters, mothers reproduced the kind of dailiness we find in women’s fiction. The creation of the everyday, the ‘study of provincial life’, to borrow Middlemarch’s subtitle, is a project which the letter-writing mother shares with the writer of domestic fiction. . . . If mothers were the domestic realists of the war, they also had to practise the novelist’s arts of editing and selecting. Letters might offer space for creativity and enable the writing self to gain in confidence, but they had to be carefully angled and controlled with the reader in mind. Mothers could not forget for long the function of their letters as surrogate maternal comfort.⁹

Larkin, though neither a woman nor a mother, was in the privileged position of remaining at home and at Oxford, thanks to his exemption. In this context he seems to have assumed a similarly ‘surrogate’ role. This partly manifests itself as chatter about jazz, books, mutual friends and so on, but often also as scene-setting – presenting Sutton with vignettes of the ‘provincial life’ from which he has been torn. There is both an Englishness and a strong verbal-visual quality to these efforts. In one fascinating letter, penned in rich present tense from the gardens of St John’s College, Larkin writes:

Round the base of a treetrunk there is a wooden circular seat. The tree (unknown tree) lets its branches fall around on all sides so that anyone sitting on the seat is mainly obscured. A thin veil of green and sungreen leaves flick and mottle in the wind: this page is shadowed by endless changing. Farther, bells debate the exact moment of 2 o’clock. Due to the wind and the curious tree there is always a rustling, like constantly blowing leaves in Autumn streets, or, on a scorched headland, the distant sound of the sea. (21 May 1941)

This is impressive prose, and edited to achieve maximum impact. The passage shows genuine poetic promise: ‘flick and mottle . . . shadowed by endless changing’ is redolent of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and ‘bells debate the exact moment’ is a strong metaphor, which would find its way into a later poem, ‘Livings III’: ‘The bells discuss the hour’s gradations’ (TCP, 78–9). The letter seems designed to put Sutton back in touch with home – with the city and the country he has had to leave behind. Having been sent away to fight a war, a letter such as this one carries him, for the moment, out of his present reality and into another. But Larkin’s letter-writing goes beyond the mere provision of ‘comfort’; convinced, as Larkin was, that Sutton was the art world’s Next Big Thing, passages like this also seem to have been written to appeal to his friend’s visual imagination, lest it wither away in an unconducive military environment. Often, then, Larkin’s letters self-consciously participate in a version of ekphrasis:

I saw a horse last night, standing at the edge of a field, being patted on the nose by some people, and lifting its long proud head away, again & again, proudly; but gently the shape of its skull surprised me. It was a black one. And then the fields, in slopes and little hills, sunlit and hedged. And the clouds, small, pearly blue-grey sea-shells, drifting along the blue horizon, like Paul Nash. And the feeling of people out in their Sunday things on a summer evening. (6 July 1942)

Such passages represent a kind of ekphrasis because of the way they render visual experience into words, passing on those words for Sutton to re-produce as something visual again, whether in his imagination, or with pen and paper (this particular passage was prompted by a sketch of a horse which Sutton had sent). Larkin himself compares the scene to a Nash painting, so that life imitates art and becomes art again. What purpose could this serve, other than to keep Sutton’s painterly imagination kindled? This is much more than keeping his friend’s spirits high during testing times: letters like these represent a more significant project – the most important of this correspondence – which is the mutual construction of the pair’s artistic identities.

A shared artistic identity

When Larkin and Sutton arrived in Oxford in 1940, each man knew where he wanted his life to go: Larkin was determined to be a great novelist, and Sutton to be a great painter; and each one had confidence in the other’s abilities. Sometimes Larkin jokingly addresses Sutton as ‘Wotto Giotto’ or ‘Ello Angelo, Michael’ (respectively, 16 September 1941 and 5 October 1941), but is deadly serious about their mutual greatness:

Yes, I look forward to our meeting again, I do really. . . . I need someone who consciously accepts mystery at the bottom of things, a person who devotes themself to listening for this mystery – an artist – the kind of artist who is perpetually kneeling in his heart – who gives no fuck for anything except this mystery, and for that gives every fuck there is. Is this you? I believe it is. (16 August 1945)

This is perhaps the most explicit instance of Larkin constructing a narrative of shared artistic promise: in his directness – ‘Is this you? I believe it is’ – Larkin leaves no room for doubt that he and Sutton are both ‘artists’ in the deepest sense. He is also serious about Sutton’s talent:

By the way, the drawings you sent impressed me. There has always been something about your style of drawing that I only vaguely identify as ‘lower class’. By this I mean primarily the people you draw are l-cl, but there is also something about your ‘line’ (‘in two yahs from now, Sutton, you’ll draw as well as you evah will!’) which is rough, crude and fundamental, vivid and earthy. There is great hope for your painting. (23 June 1941)

In another intriguing letter, Larkin gives Sutton a tantalizing glimpse of the kind of work he might go on to produce:

I think you might make a name as ‘the painter of the brickyards’ – blue sky, red bricks, yellow sun. Scaffolds, shadows, comic labourers, brown tea, and the rarified ice-wind blowing through the grass. Or just one enormous . . . picture entitled ‘The Builders’ with about 50 builders running & jumping and falling and shouting and building and climbing and conveying with the wind against them. It would be richly beautiful and also richly humourous [sic]. (12 April 1943)

Larkin’s vision for Sutton’s aesthetic seems to be a blend of Ford Madox Brown’s Work (1852–63) and Stanley Spencer’s Cookham paintings. This is not simply a case of friendly encouragement. The visual stimuli, the pr...