Terry Castle

The lesbianism of

“Love variously doth various minds inexpressible–so odd and incoherent I inspire,” wrote Dryden, but for many can’t begin to plumb their inner lives. of us true sexual eccentricity remains Greta Garbo, Virginia Woolf, T. E. Law- dif½cult to comprehend. We still don’t rence, the Duke of Windsor, Marlon have the words. Granted, in most mod- Brando, Simone de Beauvoir, Michael ern liberal societies, you can use the Jackson, and Andy Warhol have been on terms gay or straight and people will the list for some time; Condoleeza Rice know (or think they know) what you may join them soon. Futile my attempts mean. But anything more convoluted to pigeonhole such individuals: they than plain old homosexual or heterosexual seem to transcend–if not nullify–con- can be hard to grasp. (Bisexual doesn’t ventional taxonomies. help much: many sensible people re- Pious readers will already be splutter- main unconvinced that this elusive state ing: how presumptuous to ‘label’ someone of being even exists.) For a while I’ve else’s sexual inclinations! The truth is, how- kept a list in my head of famous people ever, Everybody Does It, and when it whose sexual proclivities I myself ½nd comes to understanding the very great- est writers and artists, some empathetic Terry Castle is Walter A. Haas Professor in the conjecture regarding the psychosexual Humanities at Stanford University. She has writ- factors involved in creativity seems to be ten seven books, including “The Apparitional necessary. Would life be better if Wilde Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern had not raised the issue of Shakespeare’s Culture” (1993), “The Female Thermometer: sexuality in “In Praise of Mr. W. H.”? If Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of Freud had not explored the homoerotic the Uncanny” (1995), a runner-up for the pen themes he found in the works of Michel- Spielvogel-Diamondstein Award for the Art of the angelo and Leonardo da Vinci? Essay, “Noel Coward and Radclyffe Hall: Kin- And it is hard to approach the work of dred Spirits” (1996), and “Courage, Mon Amie” Philip Larkin (1922–1985)–considered (2002). She also edited “The Literature of Les- by many the greatest English poet of the bianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to second half of the twentieth century– Stonewall” (2003). without acknowledging his particular brand of sexual eccentricity. The quin- © 2007 by the American Academy of Arts tessential Establishment poet–he was & Sciences offered the Poet Laureateship in 1984–

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2007.136.2.88 by guest on 30 September 2021 Larkin is usually thought of as a straight, But downright electrifying was the The lesbi- anism of if not blokish, man of letters. He por- news that, after ½nishing his ½nal term Philip trays himself as such in numerous po- at St. John’s College, Oxford, in 1943, the Larkin ems, though not in any vainglorious way. young poet, then twenty-one, had spent On the contrary, the rhetorical pose usu- several months writing such stories him- ally cultivated–indeed now regarded as self, under the pseudonym ‘Brunette typically Larkinesque–is that of shy (if Coleman.’ Brunette was in fact a full- sardonic) English bachelor: reclusive, blown comic persona: the imaginary sis- timid, physically unattractive to women, ter of Blanche Coleman, the platinum- envious of other men’s romantic suc- blonde leader of a 1940s ‘all-girl’ swing cesses. At its most poignant, to be Lark- band in whom the jazz-loving Larkin inesque is to feel excluded from the fam- took both a musical and prurient inter- ily life and ordinary sexual happiness est. Unlike her real-world sister, the ½c- granted to others. (“For Dockery a son, tional Brunette was supposedly tweedy, for me nothing.”) For those who love bookish, and sentimental–a proli½c Larkin, this rueful evocation of sexual author of Angela Brazil–style schoolgirl loneliness, tempered always with subtle novels and one of those mawkish mid- intransigence and a wildly uncensored dle-aged English lesbians whose imper- wit, is just what they love him for: fectly suppressed homosexuality is plain to everyone but themselves. Her works, Sexual intercourse began it seemed, were an odd mixture of the In nineteen sixty-three lecherous and the dotty. Amazingly (Which was rather late for me)– enough, the Brunette manuscripts had Between the end of the Chatterley ban survived, Motion disclosed, and were And the Beatles’ ½rst lp. to be found along with other unpub- Despite tiresome overquotation the lished works in the Larkin archive at the rhymes never go stale, nor do they lose Brynmor Jones Library, Hull University, their odd power to console. Yet, how- where Larkin had served with great dis- ever bleak the (real or imagined) erotic tinction as Head Librarian for almost life, Larkin’s ‘normality’ would seem to thirty years. be a given. As the poet has his frustrated Sensing curiosity–or at least titilla- stand-in say in “Round Another Point” tion–among Larkin readers, Faber, –an unpublished débat between two Larkin’s long-time publisher, made the young men on the subject of women, complete Brunette oeuvre available in sex, and marriage–“I want to screw de- a 2002 volume called Trouble at Willow cent girls of my own sort without being Gables and Other Fiction, edited by James made to feel a criminal about it.” Booth. ‘Brunette’s’ literary corpus con- Since the poet’s death, however, some sisted of ½ve works: Trouble at Willow unexpected kinks in the Larkin persona Gables and Michaelmas Term at St. Bride’s have come to light. Pixillating indeed (two fully elaborated parody-school was the revelation, in ’s stories, full of games mistresses, mash 1993 biography, that the bespectacled notes, and lubricious hijinks after lights author of was an out); Sugar and Spice (a set of fey sapphic avid, even compulsive, consumer of les- poems modeled–with suitable languor bian porn, especially the kind involving –on the “Femmes damnées” poems in frolicking English schoolgirls in gym Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal); Ante Meri- slips and hockey pads. dien (a fragment of autobiography in

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2007.136.2.88 by guest on 30 September 2021 Terry which Brunette reminisces about her process by which Philip Larkin became Castle on Cornish childhood in the blowsy she- ‘Larkinesque’–modern English poetry’s sex male manner of Daphne du Maurier); reigning bard of erotic frustration and and “What Are We Writing For?” (an depressive (if verse-enabling) self-dep- artistic manifesto, supposedly composed recation. Homosexual women have long at the instigation of her live-in protégée, been associated with sexual failure and Jacinth, wherein Brunette defends the ½asco: Sappho grieves for her faithless genre of popular girls’ school ½ction girls; Olivia loses Viola; Sister George is against “penny-a-liners” who flout the cuckolded and killed off. In The Well of time-honored rules of the form). In Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall’s classic lesbi- printed form, they run to nearly three an potboiler from 1928–a book I’m con- hundred densely packed pages and, vinced Larkin knew well–the luckless along with his jazz writings, could be heroine, a supposedly famous writer, said to represent, however risibly, the ends up suicidal and alone. Brunette otherwise costive Larkin’s most fluent Coleman, spinster-sapphist-cum-panto- and sustained literary endeavor. dame, no doubt seemed a marvelous It’s hard, of course, to keep the usual comic invention in 1943. Yet by imper- scholarly po-face. Why–at the very sonating her so fully and strangely the outset of Larkin’s estimable career– young Larkin was also plumbing his own this protracted muddy detour across the well of loneliness, gaining imaginative playing ½elds of Lesbos? A postadoles- and emotional purchase on an ever- cent liking for scabrous fun is one thing, deepening sense of sexual alienation. but what inspires an ambitious young The literary results would be beautiful, poet, already sizing up his chances in the witty, and original, but it was a sad busi- great literary game, to impersonate at ness nonetheless. What begins in play such length–and with such conspicuous ends in tristesse, or so the lives of the dedication–a leering, half-mad, sapphis- poets teach us, and the ‘trouble at Wil- tically inclined author of books for girls? low Gables’ was enough to be getting on The editor of the Girls’ Own Paper, last with for a sensitive soul named Larkin. heard from in 1956, has yet to address the question. It seems important to emphasize from Conservative poetry lovers have been the start the lesbianism of the Larkin per- displeased by the whole business. In sona. Unconvincing is the attempt of “Green Self-Conscious Spurts,” a stun- Larkin scholars to explain away the Bru- ningly humorless piece about Larkin’s nette fantasy by associating it (vaguely early work recently in the tls, Adam enough) with male homoeroticism. In Kirsch dismisses the posthumous pub- his introduction to Trouble at Willow lication of Trouble at Willow Gables as Gables, James Booth suggests that when “strictly unnecessary, and potentially Larkin began composing the Brunette damaging to [Larkin’s] reputation.” As material he “was not far from his own punishment for prissiness–not to men- as a shy ‘homosexual’ schoolboy” tion the frigid little blast of homopho- and still “undirected” in his sexuality. By bia–Kirsch should no doubt be required impersonating Brunette, he was simply to sit on it and rotate. “working out,” even seeking to exorcize, But one also wants to disagree with residual homoerotic feelings for boys, him profoundly. The Brunette phase left over from his experiences at King speaks volumes about the paradoxical Henry VIII School, the Coventry gram-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2007.136.2.88 by guest on 30 September 2021 mar school he attended from 1930 to wise men, otherwise seemingly hetero- The lesbi- anism of 1939. The Willow Gables milieu, Booth sexual, who become oddly trans½xed Philip claims, “is not fundamentally different by homosexual women. The sheer con- Larkin from that of the implicitly homosexual noisseurship, even pedantry, that Larkin boys’ school of Isherwood’s Lions and brought to the sapphic theme–not to Shadows or Julian Hall’s The Senior Com- mention the curious crystallization of moner, both of which Larkin read and ad- his own nascent poetic identity around mired at the time.” The last-mentioned that of Brunette–suggests exactly this even contains a scene, he notes, in which sort of unusual yet generative symbolic one senior boy asks another if a report- investment. edly winsome member of the junior Larkin’s preoccupation was from school is “a brunette.” the start a profoundly literary one. The Yet the theory depends–rather too young Larkin was an ardent reader, ½rst patly–on a view that male and female of all, of popular girls’ school ½ction–a homosexuality are, libidinally speaking, genre notorious since the late nineteenth but two sides of the same coin and that century for its barely sublimated sapph- one can automatically stand in for the ic inflections. His knowledge of “this other. The adolescent Larkin may well exciting ½eld of composition” (as Bru- have had feelings for other boys, but the nette calls it) seems to have been freak- somewhat hackneyed biographical sto- ishly extensive, taking in everyone from ry line applied here–After ‘Normal’ Charlotte Brontë to Angela Brazil. How- Schoolboy Crushes British Male Writer ever, not for Larkin was the sophisticat- Goes Straight and Stays Straight (More ed artistry of Brontë, or that of Colette, or Less)–strikes me as a bit cursory and whose cheerfully salacious Claudine nov- cartoonish, and not only because it has els perhaps constituted, around the turn been attributed over the years, with a of the century, the aesthetic apotheosis broad brush, to everybody from Robert of the genre. Larkin’s tastes were at once Graves and Siegfried Sassoon to Evelyn more juvenile and down-market: he pre- Waugh, David Garnett, Cyril Connolly, ferred the ostensibly innocent works Stephen Spender, Graham Greene, and produced by earnest female hacks for (indeed) Larkin’s friend, . fourteen- or ½fteen-year-old girls. Thus Larkin himself claimed to be bewildered Dorothy Vicary’s Niece of the Headmistress by his evolving fantasy life: “Homosex- (1939) and Nancy Breary’s Two Thrilling uality,” he wrote to Amis in September Terms (1944) were special favorites; Lark- 1943, “has been completely replaced by in owned copies of both. But to judge by lesbianism in my character at the mo- Brunette’s writings, he was acquainted ment–I don’t know why.” with a truly startling number of other To be interested in lesbianism is, de girls’ school stories: Brazil’s The Jolliest facto, to be interested in women–in lik- Term on Record, The Fortunes of Philippa, ing women and thinking about women, and A Pair of Schoolgirls; Dorita Fairlie in thinking about women liking other Bruce’s popular Dimsie Moves Up (1921) women, and in liking to think about and Dimsie Moves Up Again (1922); Elsie J. women liking other women. And just Oxenham’s The Abbey Girls Win Through as there are women whose particular (1928); Phyllis Matthewman’s The Queer- psychosexual idiosyncrasy is to hanker ness of Rusty: A Dinneswood Book (1941); obscurely after homosexual men–‘fag Joy Francis’s The Girls of the Rose Dormi- hags’ in rude parlance–there are like- tory (1942); and Judith Grey’s Christmas

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2007.136.2.88 by guest on 30 September 2021 Terry Term at Chillinghurst (1942), among oth- ’s publication, in which Amis report- Castle on ers. ed seeing a copy of Jill in a seedy Oxford sex No doubt the ½xation had its lubri- bookshop lodged “between Naked and cious dimension. In a 1945 letter to Amis, Unashamed and High-Heeled Yvonne.” As Larkin describes a conversation in which Larkin explains, it was most likely the he and Bruce Montgomery planned a reputation of his publisher, Reginald fanciful “little library of short novels,” Ashley Caton, that had won Jill its place each of which was to focus on a different on the X-rated shelf. Caton “divided “sexual perversion.” The labors were to his publishing activity between poetry be divided between them according to and what then passed for pornography,” personal preferences. “Dropping onan- Larkin writes, “often of a homosexual ism as too trite,” he writes, “[Mont- tinge,” and Jill’s own dust jacket bore ad- gomery] put in a claim for sadism and verts for such intriguing titles as “Climb- sodomy (male) while I bagged les- ing Boy, Barbarian Boy, A Diary of the Teens bianism and anal eroticism. He by A Boy, and so on.” brought up mixoscopy, and we dis- The image of the chaste Jill indecently cussed for some time paederasty and wedged in between works of a less deco- what I call willowgablismus.” By rous nature no doubt appealed to Lark- willowgablismus Larkin is no doubt in-the-librarian’s subversive side. (One referring to the kinky schoolgirl sex- can’t help thinking how much time he play so often featured in the male por- must have spent reshelving misplaced nographic imagination. Booth suggests books early in his career.) But it also in- that of all the school stories he had read, dicates how permeable the conceptual Larkin especially favored the Vicary boundary between the ‘polite’ and the book, Niece of the Headmistress, because ‘pornographic’ sometimes was for him. it has “an unusually legible erotic sub- The modes were, as it were, thrust up text.” against one another–like two strangers Yet what Larkin appears to have prized in a crowded Underground train–and about the girls’ school story was not so when the action involved schoolgirls, much any outright kink as an odd, over- one kind of writing could all too easily all, seemingly unintended suggestiveness: morph into the other. In fact, the more the comic way that novelists like Vicary sentimental and old-maidish the story and Bruce managed to set up titillating writer’s attitude, the more the ½ctional situations without ever seeming to be mise-en-scène seemed to lend itself to ob- aware that they were doing so. Larkin scene embellishment. took obvious delight in just how easily a prurient reader might convert a suppos- At ½rst glance the edly nice story into a naughty one. ‘Nice’ writings might be thought to promote and ‘naughty’ seem to have been curi- exactly this kind of salacious comic dis- ously proximate categories for him, as sonance. The ‘proximity’ ploy works a famous Larkin anecdote suggests. In perhaps most effectively in “What Are the introduction to the 1963 reprint of We Writing For?”–Brunette’s supposed Jill (1946)–the ½rst of the two ‘serious’ artistic manifesto. This Dame-Ednaish novels he published immediately follow- little treatise is a satiric mini-master- ing the Brunette phase (A Girl in Winter piece–in a class with works by Wode- is the other)–Larkin describes a letter house, Waugh, or Grossmith. Ostensib- from Kingsley Amis, written just after ly a call for a more scrupulous regard to

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2007.136.2.88 by guest on 30 September 2021 craft–Brunette chastises “slovenly” sis- spread slackness through the Hockey xi! The lesbi- anism of ter novelists for dashing off stories “with Let us . . . remember the dictum of Baude- Philip the radio playing and a cigarette in the laire: ‘There are in the young girl all the Larkin mouth”–it exposes, fairly flagrantly, its despicable qualities of the footpad and the spinster-author’s sublimated obsession schoolboy.’ Alas! it is only too true! with the school story’s homoerotic con- Finally, the writer must seek to imbue ventions. Thus Brunette’s quasi-neoclas- her narrative with “body” and “fervour.” sical aesthetic strictures: no stories set in “Vast webs of friendships, hatreds, loy- day schools (scenes of nocturnal conspira- alties, indecisions, schemings, plottings, cy, illicit biscuit-eating, and pajama-clad quarrelings, reconciliations, and adora- hair-stroking are essential, she argues, tions must arise: incredible self-tortur- to the “excitement” of the genre); no epi- ings and divided allegiances must lie be- sodes set outside the school (too reminiscent hind that white, strained little fourth- of tiresome boy-girl “Adventure” sto- form face. And behind all must stand the ries), and, above all, few, if any, male char- school itself–the rooms, the dripping acters: trees, the crumbling stone fountain, the The essence of the story we are writing noise of water in the pipes as the Early is that “our little corner” becomes a mi- Bath List undress.” In the juvenile bos- crocosm. I cannot stress strongly enough om of a Dimsie or Millicent, the emo- the need for the elimination of all irrele- tions of Phèdre or Andromache. vancies. There must be no men, no boy Oddly enough, neither Trouble at cousins, no neighbouring boys’ schools, Willow Gables nor Michaelmas Term at St. no (Oh, Elsie J. Oxenham!) coeducation. Bride’s holds to such Homo-Rhapsodi- Uncles and fathers must be admitted with cal Unities. Like Dorita Fairlie Bruce’s the greatest circumspection. And as for Dimsie novels, Brunette’s ½ctions share ½ancés and husbands (Oh, Elsie J. Oxen- the same dramatis personae: a heroine ham!)–they are so tabu that I hardly dare named Marie Moore, whose older sister mention the matter. Philippa is “Captain of the School” and a leather-belt fetishist; Myfanwy, the Brunette recommends instead a se- devoted “chum” with whom Marie is questered all-girl milieu: “a closed, sin- often seen cuddling; Margaret, a secret gle-sexed world, which Mr. Orwell gambling addict who prefers off-track would doubtless call a womb-replica, or betting to more usual schoolgirl pur- something equally coarse.” A handsome suits; Hilary Russell, aesthete, lesbian “Jehovah”-like headmistress should be seductress-in-training, and supposed in charge–one who delivers awards and “villainess”; and Mary Beech, the hulk- punishments publicly, in accordance ing, slightly moronic captain of the with a clearly de½ned “moral code.” Hockey Second xi who is the principal Head Girls, in turn, are to be “beauti- object of Hilary’s lascivious wiles. In ful, strict and fair”–especially when re- Trouble at Willow Gables, the main action quired to administer “thrashings”– revolves around a mysterious theft: and villainesses demonstrably wicked: someone has stolen ½ve pounds intend- Remember Satan, and Iago, and Lady ed for the new Gymnasium Fund (an Macbeth! Let the villainess be vicious and endowment sponsored by one “Lord savage: let her scheme to overthrow game Amis”). In Michaelmas Term at St. Bride’s captaincies and ½rm friendships, and –a sequel of sorts–Marie, Myfanwy,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2007.136.2.88 by guest on 30 September 2021 Terry and the rest are seen adjusting, some- jaded Hilary for example–turn out to be Castle on what imperfectly, to their ½rst term at surprisingly maladroit. In Willow Gables sex St. Bride’s, a ½ctional Oxford women’s the one schoolmate Hilary succeeds in college rather like Somerville or St. bedding (the racing-form addict Mar- Hugh’s. Larkin intriguingly uses differ- garet Tattenham) is hers only through ent surnames in the second tale: “Marie blackmail, and the lovemaking is never Moore” becomes “Marie Woolf,” and described. The overall mood is one of her sister “Philippa Woolf.” tristesse–as when Hilary, oppressed by A certain slapstick porniness surfaces, her inability to land her main prey to be sure, at various points in both sto- (Mary Beech) during an intimate late- ries. When the Fourth Form gets ram- night tutoring session, succumbs to the bunctious while undressing for bed in mopes as soon as Mary leaves her room: Trouble at Willow Gables, a plump prefect Lighting a cigarette, she stretched herself named Ursula restores order by “sweep- on the sofa, rubbing her cheek caressively ing up and down the lines of beds” flick- on the cushion Mary had warmed, and ing offenders with a leather belt– murmuring idiotically to herself: “She She had considerable skill in doing this, was here, and is gone. The young lioness and there was a hasty scuffling and strip- was here and is gone . . . ” After that she ping and knotting of pyjama cords as she undressed slowly, munching a biscuit, and toured from girl to girl like a well-made read Mademoiselle de Maupin in bed till a Nemesis. Myfanwy returned to her bed very late hour. with as much dignity as was compatible The fact that Larkin describes the with a stung bottom: Marie’s head was thwarted prefect as feeling–rather un- buried in the pillow. appetizingly–like a “jelly newly tipped In a later episode, after a wild argument- out onto a plate” adds another element cum-wrestling match with Philippa, the of anticlimax to the scene. belt fetishist, poor Marie ends up “lying In Michaelmas Term at St. Bride’s, the face downwards on Philippa’s silken absence of willowgablismus is even knees,” her “velvet skirt folded neatly more pronounced. Most of the Willow round her waist,” while Philippa admin- Gables characters, it’s true, reappear: isters a dreadful “thrashing” using one Hilary is again on the scene; likewise, of the thirty-seven “exotic” belts in her Mary Beech (now called Burch), who collection–one sporting “a curious discovers to her horror, upon arriving metal buckle, which Philippa rightly ad- for her “fresher” term at St. Bride’s, that judged would add an awful sting to the she will be sharing rooms with her for- lashes.” mer persecutor. Marie, Myfanwy, and Yet such questionable moments apart, Philippa also return, the last-mentioned one can’t help noticing how curiously with collection of leather belts intact. In unerotic the ‘Brunette’ stories are–how the ½ne old nice-turned-naughty tradi- often they seem merely dif½dent and tion of Willow Gables Philippa at one strange. For a would-be pornographer, point even invites her little sister into even a very soft-core one, the young her college rooms clad only in “socks Larkin seems painfully lacking in sei- and nail varnish.” gneurial aplomb. Titillating situations But the Oxford setting changes every- ½zzle; characters who one might expect thing–not least of all because men, odi- to deliver some smutty business–the ous men, now intrude upon the action.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2007.136.2.88 by guest on 30 September 2021 In so allowing Brunette necessarily welter of half-hearted ‘meta½ctional’ The lesbi- anism of flouts the very “tabu” marked in “What incidents. (When Marie ½nds Pat–the Philip Are We Writing For?” as fundamental school skivvy from Trouble at Willow Larkin to the girls’ school genre: that no male Gables–tending bar in an Oxford pub character ever penetrate the all-female and asks her why she isn’t still working “womb-replica” of the school. Can the at the school, Pat replies: “That story’s famed university on the Isis in fact be over now, Miss Marie, [ . . . ] Willow considered a ‘school’ in the Angela Bra- Gables doesn’t exist anymore.”) Signi½- zil sense? Even the redoubtable Dorothy cantly, the Creature’s love-dream re- Sayers twigged it: Oxford could hardly mains unrequited at the breaking-off be mistaken for a lesbian hothouse. point: we last see him alone in the same Dire and bewildering is Brunette’s pub’s infernal “Smoke Room,” soddenly turn, for the men of Michaelmas Term “picking out in an incompetent fashion are clammy chaps of the sort British a negro twelve-bar blues.” tabloids are wont to refer to as “sex- Much could be said about Michaelmas pests.” Not even hardened tribades like Term at St. Bride’s, but perhaps the tale’s Hilary Russell can avoid them. The per- most immediately striking feature is the plexing relationship Hilary develops transparent, almost algebraic way it an- over the course of the fragment with the nounces Larkin’s poetic identi½cation “Creature”–a tall, weak-eyed, chroni- with what might be called the ‘Sappho- cally doleful male undergraduate who position’–that of sex-starved, ugly, erot- after being “thrashed hollow” by her in ically luckless pseudo-man. One is hard- a game of table tennis becomes her ab- ly surprised to read in Motion’s biogra- ject swain–is emblematic. Despite the phy that as a St. John’s undergraduate abuse heaped on him–Hilary likes to Larkin was himself soundly “thrashed” “minimize his masculine qualities” and in a game of table tennis by an Amazon- make him cry–the Creature pursues ian friend named Hilary; or that in let- her with masochistic ardor, asserting at ters to male friends he referred to the every turn that “in a previous existence young woman to whom he was briefly [she] had been a Roman empress, who and unhappily engaged in 1950–Ruth had personally chastised a Christian Bowman–as the “School Captain.” slave, of whom [he] was a reincarna- (Panic-stricken, he rescinded his propos- tion.” Hilary seems to tolerate his damp- al after three weeks.) palmed presence: not only does she al- Like Brunette, the Creature is no doubt low the Creature to ply her with cock- a self-inscription. In fact the two personae tails, theater tickets, and expensive seem oddly to interact, if not merge, at meals at the Randolph, she’s even will- the end of Michaelmas Term. The same ing on occasion to let him “inspect, rev- pub in which the Creature plays his feck- erently, the strength of her muscles.” less tune–or so the meta½ctional Pat This oddly stagnant relationship–like tells Marie–was once frequented by other boy-girl unions in the sequel– “the woman that writes all these books.” seems to destroy whatever minimal nar- (“Haven’t you ever met her, Miss Marie? rative coherence Michaelmas Term might I saw her once. She used to come in here be said to possess. Larkin-as-Brunette and drink. Very tall she was, and beauti- seems unsure what to do with his rapidly fully dressed.”) The Creature is nothing multiplying quasi-heterosexual couples, less than a quasi-male Brunette–stu- and the story breaks off abruptly in a dious, melancholic, rapidly balding (as

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2007.136.2.88 by guest on 30 September 2021 Terry Larkin himself was by the mid-1940s), –as in “Peer of the Gods,” the celebrated Castle on partial to alcohol, jazz, and adolescent “Fragment 31”–the poet becomes dizzy, sex girls. breathless, and fears she will expire from Watching the Creature’s slotting into the pain. the Sappho position, one senses, rather The logic of the amor impossibilia op- more ominously than in Trouble at Wil- erates just as harshly elsewhere. When low Gables, the self-critical, even self- the cross-dressing Rosalind is reunited punishing, aspect of Larkin’s cross-sex with her lover Orlando in As You Like It, identi½cation. At the deepest level the Phebe, the gullible shepherdess who has poet’s af½nity with female homosexual- fallen in love with her, is fobbed off on ity was a bleak one, and perhaps could oa½sh Silvius. In Balzac’s The Girl with the not have been otherwise. Love between Golden Eyes, both the wicked Marquise women, after all, is hardly an unexplored de Réal and Paquita, her female lover, or uncontroversial theme in mainstream end up stabbed to death. The epony- Western literature. However harshly or mous heroine of Swinburne’s lurid Les- obliquely, over the centuries a host of bia Brandon (1877) expires in agony, worn writers have approached the topic: not out by unnatural practices. In both Wed- just Sappho, obviously, but also Ovid, ekind’s Lulu and Berg’s opera, the lesbi- Juvenal, Martial, Ariosto, Shakespeare, an Countess Geschwitz, hopelessly be- Ben Jonson, Donne, Dryden, Aphra sotted with the femme fatale of the title, is Behn, Pope, Fielding, John Cleland, Di- murdered by Jack the Ripper in the dra- derot, Sade, Laclos, Maria Edgeworth, ma’s ½nal scene. And in The Fox (1929), Coleridge, Gautier, Baudelaire, Emily one of several campy lucubrations on fe- Dickinson, Balzac, Verlaine, Maupas- male homosexuality by D. H. Lawrence, sant, Zola, Swinburne, Hardy, Henry March, the more childish and charmless James, Wedekind, Proust, Strindberg, member of a quasi-lesbian couple, is Colette, H.D., Ronald Firbank, Amy abandoned by her companion for a man Lowell, Cather, Stein, Woolf, Katherine and crushed by a falling tree. Radclyffe Mans½eld, D. H. Lawrence, Rosamond Hall, as usual, trumps everyone in the Lehmann, Radclyffe Hall, Djuna Barnes, Utter Misery Department: after four Daphne Du Maurier, Dorothy Sayers, hundred pages of rejection, insult, and Elizabeth Bowen, Wyndham Lewis, sexual frustration, Stephen Gordon– Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, mannish heroine of The Well of Loneliness Lillian Hellman, Graham Greene, Mar- –not only loses her lover to a man, but guerite Yourcenar, Sartre, de Beauvoir, succumbs at novel’s end to “the terrible Elizabeth Bishop, Jane Bowles, Iris Mur- nerves of the invert.” She is last seen doch, et multi alia. lurching suicidally through Paris from However oddly assorted, what almost one squalid dyke bar to another. all of the works in the Western lesbian Nowhere is the doomed nature of fe- canon share–including even the more male same-sex love more explicit, ½nal- worldly or forgiving–is a sense of the ly, than in what one might call (pace Bru- unviability of female same-sex love. To nette) the School Story for Grown-Ups: yearn for a woman, it would seem, is to the explicitly homoerotic tale–often fe- fall victim to an amor impossibilia. Pas- male-authored and autobiographical– sionate Sappho, alas, set the pattern: set in a girls’ boarding school or college. watching her former beloved simper on Enough of these ‘serious’ school ½ctions the wedding dais with her new husband exist to constitute a distinct subgenre of

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2007.136.2.88 by guest on 30 September 2021 lesbian writing: Colette’s Claudine à sublimated, covered over with misogy- The lesbi- anism of l’école (1900), Gertrude Stein’s Q.E.D. ny and a lot of schoolboy smuttiness; it Philip (1903), Henry Handel Richardson’s would likewise be transformed soon Larkin The Getting of Wisdom (1910), Clemence enough into a matchless poetic endeav- Dane’s Regiment of Women (1915), Chris- or. But however much he intended the ta Winsloe’s The Child Manuela (source Brunette oeuvre as collegiate spoof–an for the classic German cult ½lm Mädchen experiment, egged on by Amis, in the in Uniform [1933]), Antonia White’s Frost higher prurience–he could not help cas- in May (1933), Lillian Hellman’s The Chil- tigating his own deepest longings: You drens’ Hour (1934), Dorothy Strachey’s wish to be loved? Dream on, bloke: you will Olivia (1949), May Sarton’s The Small fail–pathetically–while real men succeed. Room (1961), Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Better not to bother. Drink; listen to jazz; Miss Jean Brodie (1961), and Violette Le- write poems; accept privation as your lot. duc’s Thérèse and Isabelle (1964) are only Pretending to be a middle-aged invert some of many. named Brunette was a bookish young These ‘adult’ school narratives are man’s way of neutering himself at the almost always dysphoric in tendency. starting gate. No Enormous Yes, or even Some, like Dane’s Regiment of Women a tiny yes, in the Larkin love-and-sex and Strachey’s Olivia, are toxic little tales game: sadness, loss, and loneliness–the of female-on-female abuse: a charismat- original Sapphic hat trick–seemed from ic teacher seduces a susceptible young the beginning the main thing on offer. student and then turns on her; an older and more sophisticated girl entangles How far from Brunette, burbling spin- one younger or more naive in an ‘un- ster-sapphist, to the chilled-to-the-bone healthy’ friendship. In other works, the speakers of “Mr. Bleaney” or “The Whit- homoerotic bond between two female sun Weddings”? characters is destroyed by an intruder- In his introduction to Trouble at Wil- male. Thus, in Dorothy Baker’s melodra- low Gables, Booth suggests that the Bau- matic Trio (1948), the student-heroine, delaire knock-offs in Sugar and Spice–the seduced by an unsavory female French “slim sheaf” of verses attributed to Bru- professor–a specialist in nineteenth- nette–are already recognizably Larkin- century “decadent” verse!–is saved esque in mood and manner: “Technical- from a life of Fleurs du mal perversion ly,” he declares, the Brunette poems are by a strapping young fellow who falls “among the ½nest poems Larkin wrote in love with her and threatens the pro- during the decade, with an assured deli- fessor with exposure. The latter, under- cacy of tone far beyond anything in The standably dismayed, shoots herself at North Ship.” He cites the opening lines of novel’s end. “The School in August”– The repetitive, ruthlessly end-stopped pattern is clear, and for Larkin the bad The cloakroom pegs are empty now, news plainly resonated. In the brutal and And locked the classroom door, bittersweet narratives of lesbian desire The hollow desks are dim with dust, Larkin found a doom-laden prediction And slow across the floor of what was to become the central and A sunbeam creeps between the chairs most painful theme of his imaginative Till the sun shines no more. and emotional life: no girls for you. –and notes how closely they anticipate The pain of the discovery was no doubt the “empty rooms” in such characteris-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2007.136.2.88 by guest on 30 September 2021 Terry tic Larkin poems as “Home is So Sad,” Another should be read “lingeringly”; and Castle on “Friday Night in the Royal Station Ho- another, “with something of ‘the monstrous sex tel,” and “The Old Fools.” One has to crying of wind’–Yeats, of course.” As for agree: against all expectation, the Bru- the bittersweet envoi, it requires a “rising nette poems are spare, elegiac, ominous- to, and falling from, an ecstasy of nostalgia.” ly good. Above all, somewhat anachro- Yet looming up, too, in silhouette, like nistically, they already display the ma- a tall evening shadow cast forward in ture poet’s weary autumnal sense of Ubi time–the solitary witness of master- sunt: works to come: Who did their hair before this glass? A group of us have flattened the long grass Who scratched “Elaine loves Jill” Where through the day we watched the One drowsy summer sewing class wickets fall With scissors on the sill? Far from the pav. Wenda has left her hat, Who practised this piano And only I remain, now they are gone, Whose notes are now so still? To notice how the evening sun can show The unsuspected hollows in the ½eld, Ah, notices are taken down, When it is all deserted. And scorebooks stowed away, (“Fourth Former Loquitur”) And seniors grow tomorrow From the juniors today, And even swimming groups can fade, One doesn’t want to make the Bru- Games mistresses turn grey. nette oeuvre sound more sanitary than The echo in the last line here of Pope’s it is. Though no Humbert Humbert or Rape of the Lock–“But since, alas! frail Henry Darger, Larkin played his sapphic Beauty must decay, / Curl’d or uncurl’d, game in part to camouflage what many since Locks will turn to grey”–is appo- still regard as an unwholesome prefer- site, for Larkin’s sense of erotic alien- ence for underage girls. In Trouble at ation, of gauche unsuitedness for carnal Willow Gables, when Hilary Russell deli- love, rivals the satirist’s. (Pope was tiny, quesces over Mary Beech’s “shell-like wry-necked, and hunchbacked.) What ears,” “tawny hair,” and “bare white other two English male poets have felt ankles emerging from woolly slippers,” themselves so bitterly excluded from one can’t help but sense–somewhat “sugar and spice and everything nice”? queasily–the storyteller’s own preoc- There’s Amis-style mischief, too, of cupation with the barely pubescent: course–as in “Ballade des Dames du Hilary thought, as so often before she had Temps Jadis,” a Villon pastiche to which thought, that there was nothing so beau- ‘Brunette’ appends instructions for read- tiful in the world as a fourteen-year-old ing the poem aloud. The opening qua- schoolgirl: the uncosmetic’d charm de- train– pended on the early flowering into a quiet beauty of soft, silken skin, ribboned hair, Tell me, into what far lands print dresses, socks and sensible shoes and They are gone, whom once I knew a serious outlook on a world limited by With tennis-racquets in their hands, puppies, horses, a few simple ideas, and And gym-shoes, dabbled with the dew? changing Mummy’s book at Boots. How –is to be delivered, we learn, “with a anyone could regard the version of six sense of ‘old, unhappy, far-off things.’” years later as in any way superior beat Hil-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2007.136.2.88 by guest on 30 September 2021 ary to a frazzle: it was preferring a painted recycling (and darkening) of his Wil- The lesbi- savage dressed in bangles and skins, anism of low Gables material. In Jill’s central and Philip chockfull of feminine wiles, dodges, and strangest sequence, the otherwise timid Larkin other dishonesties directed to the same Kemp–hoping to impress Christopher, degrading sexual end, to a being who lived his crass and carousing roommate–tells a life so simple and rounded-off in its puri- him (falsely) that he, Kemp, has an ador- ty that it only remained for it to be shat- able younger sister named Jill. When tered–as it was. Chris expresses mild curiosity, Kemp begins embellishing wildly. Jill and he The mock-heroic rhetoric used to monu- have always been very close, he explains: mentalize such ½xations–“Hilary had a “She’s fond of poetry–that line. And vision of [Mary] embodying the purity it’s funny, she’s very sensitive. She had a of youth, dressed in white tennis things great friend at school called Patsy–Pat- and haloed with a netball stand, sur- sy Hammond. They were really awfully rounded, like a goddess of plenty, with thick. Then a year ago she went back to hockey-sticks, cricket-pads, and other school as usual after the holidays and impedimenta”–does not entirely obvi- found that Patsy had gone to America ate the rather nasty wet-dream quality. with her people and wasn’t coming back That said, for me at least, the lubri- again. She was awfully cut up: hardly ciousness is okay–and stays okay– wrote for weeks.” Chris asks what when I consider what it led to. I don’t school and Kemp promptly fabricates mean only Larkin’s poetry. It would take one: “Willow Gables, the place is called. a far longer essay than this one to begin It’s not very big.” to measure the greatness of Jill (1946), Christopher will evince no further the extraordinary ‘Oxford novel’ Lark- interest in Kemp or his supposed sib- in began writing immediately after jet- ling–he’s cynically pursuing a rather tisoning the Brunette persona. Though fast young woman named Elizabeth– oddly neglected, even by Larkin a½cio- but Kemp, shunned by Chris and his nados, Jill is perhaps the most exquisite friends over the next weeks, becomes and self-lacerating male-authored Eng- increasingly obsessed with his nonex- lish ½ction of the postwar period. But it istent ‘sister’: is also, I’d like to conclude by asserting, the work in which the poet’s sapphic [She] was ½fteen, and slight, her long ½ne identi½cation shows itself most poi- dark honey-coloured hair fell to her shoul- gnantly and irreversibly. ders and was bound by a white ribbon. By self-lacerating I simply mean honest Her dress was white. Her face was not like and self-revealing to a shocking, painful, Elizabeth’s, coarse for all its make-up, but poetic degree. True, Larkin always insist- serious-looking, delicate in shape and ed that the story of John Kemp–a shy beautiful in repose, with high cheekbones: scholarship student from the Midlands when she laughed these cheekbones were who arrives at Oxford in wartime and most noticeable and her expression be- becomes disastrously obsessed with the came almost savage. schoolgirl cousin of his roommate’s girl- The fantasy ‘Jill,’ one can’t help noticing, friend–had little connection with his is an almost exact replica of the “uncos- own university experiences. But the au- metic’d” schoolgirl admired by Hilary tobiographical aspect of Jill is glaring and Russell in Michaelmas Term. And soon signaled above all by Larkin’s flagrant enough, Pygmalion-like, Kemp begins

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2007.136.2.88 by guest on 30 September 2021 Terry writing a story about her. In this strange is last seen, having succumbed to pneu- Castle on twelve-page tale-within-a-tale, Kemp monia, abject and feverish in the Oxford sex imagines ‘Jill’ at Willow Gables, shortly in½rmary–dimly conscious that “the after the departure of Patsy Hammond. love [he and Jill] had shared was dead.” Jill is lonely and falling in love from a Confused about “whether she had ac- distance, it seems, with another girl, a cepted him or not,” Kemp can see “no tall and introverted prefect named ‘Min- difference”–alarmingly–“between love erva Strachey,’ whose air of digni½ed ful½lled and love unful½lled.” solitude intrigues the heroine. The story Might Kemp’s suffering be construed breaks off abruptly: Jill’s father dies sud- as lesbian in nature? Time and again denly, and when she returns to school Larkin makes the lesbian subtext im- following his funeral, she is met at the possible to miss. The aborted connec- station by Minerva, who has been sent tions in the embedded school tale–Jill by the headmistress to accompany her and Patsy, Jill and Minerva–provide a back in a cab. Minerva is sympathetic homoerotic matrix of course for Kemp’s but reticent: when Jill, sadly over- own doomed infatuation: even before wrought, declares she hates school, has seeing Gillian, he already inhabits his no friends, and wants to be like Minerva own private Willow Gables, a dream- –“able to get on without anyone else”– world of impotence, fear, and imping- the prefect rebuffs the obvious overture. ing loss. (Psychologically speaking, the “[Jill] saw that Minerva had indicated interpolated tale seems at once uncan- that her detachment, even though it was ny and overdetermined: it is as if Kemp admired, must still be respected; that both wants to have Jill and to be Jill.) loneliness was not to be abandoned at Striking, too, are the book’s other invo- the ½rst chance of friendship, but was a cations of amor impossibilia. Sitting im- thing to be cherished in itself.” patiently through a comic ½lm in an Ox- This last appalling notation–that ford cinema because ‘Jill’ is in the the- loneliness is to be cherished in itself– ater across the street with Elizabeth and might be said to encapsulate the zero- Chris, Kemp, like a sort of down-market sum vision of the mature Larkin. For Sidney, experiences precisely those Kemp, of course, solitary fantasy leads symptoms of love-anguish itemized– to a kind of self-obliteration: he sees an so momentously for English poetry–in attractive young schoolgirl in an Oxford Sappho’s “Fragment 31”: bookshop; imagines, uncannily, that she The enormous shadows gesticulated be- is his ‘Jill’ come to life; and starts stalk- fore him and he sat with his eyes shut, ing her in an inept yet sinister fashion. hearing only the intermittent remarks When he ½nds out that she is the ½fteen- of the characters and the sounds of the year-old cousin of Christopher’s girl- action. It was curious how little speech friend Elizabeth and that her name is there was. A squalling childish voice said Gillian he simply becomes all the more something and everyone laughed: this infatuated. At the end of the ½ction, hav- was followed by a long interval of bang- ing drunkenly tried to kiss Jill/Gillian ing, scraping, and rending, interspersed on the stairwell outside a party in some- with studiedly familiar noises–the tin- one’s room, the hapless Kemp is excori- kling of glass against decanter, the slam- ated by Elizabeth, punched in the face by ming of a car door. He opened his eyes Christopher, and thrown into a freezing for a moment, saw a man and a girl driv- fountain by a gang of loutish revelers. He

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2007.136.2.88 by guest on 30 September 2021 ing through the country, and shut them an Philip Larkin be forgiven? In a The lesbi- C anism of again. When he thought of Jill being so startling rant after Trouble at Willow Philip near, only across the street, with people he Gables was posthumously published in Larkin knew, yet where he was not with her and 2002, a critic for the Guardian sent Lark- could not see her, his breath came faster in to “the back of the class”–½rst for and a curious physical unease affected him writing porn she felt wasn’t “saucy” and he wanted to stretch. enough, and then, somewhat unfairly, for having been glum, bald, and bespec- Nor does Larkin ignore the English tacled. The fact that since his death he Sappho, the lugubrious Radclyffe Hall. had been exposed as a “man with . . . The word ‘loneliness’ resounds through- urges” struck her as “pretty funny,” she out Jill, ever more numbingly. One’s revealed, for sense of the repetition is largely sublimi- nal: one feels it as a sort of low-level tex- after all, with skin the colour of soft curd tual headache. Yet every now and then cheese and his curranty eyes blinking out Larkin sets the word off talismanically– from behind a couple of jam-jar bottoms, as when Kemp watches ‘Jill’ ride away Larkin was hardly made for sex. The ½rst on her bicycle after seeing her for the time Monica Jones clapped eyes on the ½rst time in the bookshop: man who was to be her lover for more than three decades, she turned to her com- He stopped under a tree, looking this way panion and said: “He looks like a snorer.” and that. And if he found her name and address, what then? He would not dare to Now, from what I have written one approach her again after his rudeness that perhaps might conclude–wrongly– afternoon. All that would remain for him that the adult Larkin had no sex life at to do would be to discover her real life, to all. Such was not the case, as Motion’s follow her about and not be noticed, to biography made clear in the 1990s. Yet make lists of the clothes she wore and the the description above of Larkin as the places she went to, to make her the pur- “lover” of Monica Jones for over three pose of his life once more . . . . In this quest decades produces a somewhat distorted his loneliness would be an asset: it would image of both poet and work. Though be mobility and even charm. obviously of long duration, the intimacy with Jones, a lecturer at the University Later, having discovered her identity and of Leicester and subsequently Larkin’s waited in vain to see her, he feels “hol- literary executor, does not strike one as low with grief, as if there were a great well primarily eros-driven. Nor indeed do of aloneness inside him that could never the poet’s other somewhat sketchy af- be ½lled up” (my italics). A case could fairs–including an elderly fling with even be made that Jill’s tragibuffoonish Betty Mackereth, his secretary at the next-to-last scene–the tossing of the Bryn Jones Library in the 1970s. Judg- drunken Kemp into the fountain–is a ing by photographs, none of these girl- kind of mock-heroic literalization of friends was either young or convention- Hall’s title: Kemp ½nds his own well of ally beautiful; not a single ‘Jill’ among loneliness, bathetically, in the middle of them. On the contrary–especially to a college quadrangle, above which “stars the lesbian eye–several have a curiously [march] frostily across the sky.” mannish ‘Brunette’ look. With ½fteen- year-olds out of the running, it would

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2007.136.2.88 by guest on 30 September 2021 Terry seem, Larkin made do with his own lit- Castle on tle crew of middle-aged spinsters. The sex “loaf-haired” Betty–risibly described as such in the poem “Toads Revisited”– looks like a rangy, somewhat weather- beaten games mistress. And so, one might add, did Larkin’s mother Eva– another Larkinesque brunette to whom he remained devoted all his life. Yet whatever the ‘real’ circumstances, what matters is the inner life. I ½nd the dysphoric sense of self–and of the erot- ic–revealed in Larkin’s poetry rather more sympathetic than the comments of erstwhile critics. Who is to judge who is “made for sex” and who isn’t? A lack of pulchritude does not always spell carnal frustration: Jean-Paul Sartre was pretty hideous–Larkin a George Clooney in comparison–but in Sartre’s case troll- ish looks seem not to have diverted him from a lengthy career as the Casanova of the Left Bank. What differs, obviously, is whether one has the necessary full-for- wardness and esprit–especially when so- cial conventions, rightly or wrongly, set up barriers to ful½llment. Philip Larkin was as “made for sex” as anyone else, which is not to say it came to him easily. In the character of Brunette Coleman he created someone whose loneliness, obliquely observed, mirrored his own– indeed, was his own. Was he entirely aware of what he was doing? Perhaps not. But he knew enough to know he needed her–needed to smoke her ciga- rettes and write her stories, to dream of Willow Gables in her company, and in the waywardness of her desire ½nd a way into his own.

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