THE NOVELS AND THE POETRY OF PHILIP LARKIN

by

JOAN SHEILA MAYNE

B.A., University of Hull, 1962

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF

THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

M .A.

in the Department

of

English

We accept this thesis as conforming to the

required standard

THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

April, 1968 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the

Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further

agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the Head of my Department or by his represen• tatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for

financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission.

Department of English

The University of British Columbia Vancouver 8, Canada

April 26, 1968 ii

THESIS ABSTRACT

Philip Larkin has been considered primarily in terms of his contribution to the Movement of the Fifties; this thesis considers Larkin as an artist in his own right. His novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter, and his first volume of poetry, The North Ship, have received very little critical attention. Larkin's last two volumes of poetry, The Less

Deceived and The Whitsun Weddings, have been considered as two very similar works with little or no relation to his earlier work. This thesis is an attempt to demonstrate that there is a very clear line of development running through

Larkin's work, in which the novels play as important a part as the poetry.

The North Ship contains in embryonic form those themes which become important in the later work; it is different in technique, largely because it is immature and influenced very strongly by the poetry which Larkin was reading at the time of writing. The lyric element in this volume of poetry anticipates the later development in Larkin's poetic technique. The novels are considered as novel-poems and their poetic quality is demonstrated through close analysis which reveals their closely patterned quality and that the narrative level is important only as it mirrors the internal action of the central characters. The novels develop iii ideas which are present in The North Ship and they represent a considerable advance in the writer's confidence in handling his material in his own way.

The Less Deceived and The Whitsun Weddings use many of the techniques of the novels and are very closely linked with them in their basic themes. The Less Deceived shows

Larkin becoming increasingly self-aware and from this aware• ness examining his society in a new light. In The Whitsun

Weddings his self-awareness is increased and he is more tolerant of his own failings. His tolerance is extended also to his society and the volume as a whole represents Larkin's attempt to view man and society clearly and to accept them as they are. Both the novels and the later poetry contain lyric elements of an unusual nature. The development through• out his work is based on his ability to develop his technique to express his changing ideas. He moves from the use of totally conventional forms to express conventional ideas to the use of individualistic forms, developed from traditional material including the lyric, to express his sense of a society looking for, but not finding, order in traditional values. iv

TABLE OP CONTENTS

Chapter Page

I. INTRODUCTION 1

II. JILL . . . 26

III. A GIRL IN WINTER 6l

IV. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE TREATMENT OF THE THEME OF LOVE IN LARKIN'S POETRY ... 103

V. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE TREATMENT OF ALL OTHER MAJOR THEMES IN LARKIN'S POETRY . . I36

VI. CONCLUSION: LARKIN'S DEVELOPMENT OF TECHNIQUE FROM THE NORTH SHIP THROUGH THE NOVELS TO THE LESS DECEIVED AND THE WHITSUN WEDDINGS 18?

BIBLIOGRAPHY 215 V

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I should like to thank Dr. J. F. Hulcoop,

Mr. George Garnett and Mr. Brian Mayne for the help which they have given me in the writing of this thesis. CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Philip Larkin is best known as a representative of

the Movement poets. This group consists of poets who gained

a name for themselves in the Fifties and who became associated

with each other largely because of the anthologies produced

by Robert Conquest and David Enright. The first anthology,

New Lines, edited by Robert Conquest, appeared in 1956,^

Enright*s book, Poets of the 1950'st An Anthology of New

English Verse.^ first appeared in Japan in 1955 but was not

published in England until 1958. Nine poets are included in

Conquest's books Elizabeth Jennings, John Holloway, Philip

Larkin, Thom Gunn, Donald Davie, David Enright, Kingsley Amis,

John Wain and Robert Conquest. The same poets are included

In Enright's volume with the exception of Thom Gunn.

The grouping together of these poets in two anthologies,

together with the statements of common aims which prefaced

each volume, caused the critics to respond to the poets as an

established school. The stress on the poets as a "Movement"

caused them to be viewed in a perspective which did none of

them justice. In his Introduction to New Llnes-Il3 Conquest

•'"Robert Conquest, ed., New Lines (London: Macmillan, 1956).

2D. J. Enright, Poets of the lg^O's: An Anthology of New English Verse (Tokyo: Kenkyusha Ltd., 1958).

^Robert Conquest, ed., New Llnes-II (London: Macmillan, 196.3). 2 attempts to explain what had caused him to group the poets in the first anthology: it was based on the recognition that a number of poets were already producing work which seemed to have something in common, although they had started from very different stand• points, and maintained their individual attitudes in many respects.

In their attempts to see similarities between the poets in the anthology, the critiws found themselves focusing on the least important aspects of the poets* work:

One critic of New Lines sought to demonstrate a common tone by assembling, from each of the nine poets in it, one iambic pentameter, in regular syntax and containing no startling image. To produce even this generalisation, it was necessary to omit one poet, D.J. Enright.-5

Undoubtedly the poets do have much in common, but only in that they are all very much products of their time as any group of contemporary poets tends to be. The poets themselves do not appear to have felt that they were making a distinct break away from their predecessors, although they were critical of those who formed the fringes of a group such as that dominated by Auden, and of the imitators of Dylan Thomas.

Conquest states their position:

In one sense, indeed the standpoint is not new, but merely the restoration of a sound and fruitful attitude to poetry,

• t

New Lines-II, p. xiii. 5 ibid., p.xxi. of the principle that poetry is written by and for the whole man, intellect, emotions, senses and all.°

It had become apparent that the Spanish Civil War and World War II created conditions which changed what the

individual could hope to do within society, and the artist was as much affected by this change as anyone. None of the

poets within the Movement could be described as a political

poet. Widespread disillusionment with politics and politicians had caused them to turn away from political and public poetry

to that which is largely introspective. They share a sense of the importance of the normal everyday situation and event

in a society which has few common -public aims or ambitions.

Two poems by Donald Davie indicate the shift in the poets'

outlook. "Too Late for Satire" shows the -narrowing of the poets' aims and the reason for this:

I might have been as pitiless as Pope But to no purpose; in a tragic age We share the hatred but we lack the hope By pinning follies to reform the age. To blame is lame, and satirists are late.'

In "Remembering the Thirties" he gives an account of the large events which had excited the poets of the time and shows how his own perspective has shrunk until he can only consider what

%ew Lines, p. xiv.

7New Lines, p. 69. significance these events have for him as an individual:

The Anschluss, Guernica—all the names At which those poets thrilled, or were afraid, For me mean schools and schoolmasters and games.0

Associated with the narrowing down of themes to those which seem immediately relevant to the individual poet is the limit• ing of form and style in which the poet felt he could express himself. The critic who ransacked the anthology for examples of regular iambic pentameters showed some awareness of what the Movement represents, though he pursued the point to absurdity. There is no form exclusively common to these poets but there is a general tendency to be conservative and to return to traditional forms. None of the Movement writers shows the range of Auden or Eliot but this seems to be from a deliberate choice to be limited rather than from inadequacy.

Both Eliot and Auden could assume a poetry-reading audience of a particular kind. Eliot in particular assumes a degree of familiarity with poetic traditions and an audience sufficient• ly educated to enjoy the allusive quality of his writing. He has a clear sense of a tradition which he can share with his readers. Auden could assume this to a much lesser degree but he could write either for a fairly esoteric group of similar education or appeal to the general interest in the current political movements. Even in the more personal poetry of both

8New Lines, p. 71. 5 there is a public tone springing from a sense of an audience who share certain assumptions and from a confidence in self and personal values. The language of both reflects this: although they are both capable of writing in the conversational tone which is most often used by the Movement poets, they by no means confine themselves to this, but on occasions use a language and tone which is poetic and rhetorical. Often

Auden's use of extremely colloquial language is an attempt to reach beyond what he normally regards as his audience to one much wider.

From this it can be seen that what distinguishes the

Movement poets as a group from those who came before them is their deliberate limiting of both subject matter and form.

In the introduction to New Lines II, Conquest quotes. Larkin as saying,

But at bottom poetry, like all art, is inextricably bound up with giving pleasure, and if a poet loses his pleasure-seeking audience he has lost the only audience worth having, for which the dutiful mob that signs on every September is no substitute. ...If the medium is in fact to be rescued from among our duties and restored to our pleasures, I can only think that a large scale revulsion has got to set in against present notions.9

Larkin's statement can be taken as representative of one of the basic links between- the Movement poets: a desire to reach the widest poetry-reading audience possible, rather than to see poetry as the property of academics and the Universities,

^New Lines, pp. xviii-xix. 6 appealing to a kind of intellectual snobbery. This desire coupled with the contemporary situation immediately forced the poets within certain limits. They can no longer assume common values and traditions, so that the poetry must seem to have an immediate if local relevance to the reader. As a result the Movement poets tend to start from the basis of individual experience within particular situations which are usually very regional. The universality of their poems arises because any man's reflections on his own Identity and the limitations and potentialities of his environment and life must strike a response in the reader, particularly when the poet is very solidly middle-class and is deliberately using this to appeal to or to attack a large portion of his potential audience. The language of these poets is very much that of witty conversation and in this respect they owe an undoubted debt to Auden; a debt which Larkin acknowledges in his introduction to The North Ship.

The form which is most common to the Movement poets is the dramatic narrative poem, though Wain, under the influence of Empson, became interested in the more complex and rigid form of the villanelle. The dramatic quality of much of this poetry springs from the poets' uncertainty of any positive values. Their poems often work towards resolving the conflict between an awareness of the meaninglessness of life and a desire not to accept this but either to find or create 7 something positive and meaningful. It is this attitude, together with their use of traditional unexperimental verse forms and rhyme schemes, to assert their sense of having been left without traditions which explains the generally ironic tone of much of their poetry. In the introduction to

New Lines, Conquest summarises the position of the Movement poets as follows:

If one had briefly to distinguish this poetry of the fifties from its predecessors, I believe the most important general point would be that it submits to no great systems of theoretical constructs nor agglomerations of unconscious commands. It is free from both mystical and logical compulsions and—like modern philosophy—is empirical in its attitude to all that comes.... On the more technical side, though of course related to all this, we see refusal to abandon a rational structure and comprehensible language, even when the verse is most highly charged with sensuous or emotional intent.^

Within the group of the Movement poets Larkin has most in common in terms of technique with Amis and Wain—a fact which is hardly surprising considering their common background and their friendship. However, in terms of themes and their relative seriousness, Larkin is much closer to Elizabeth

Jennings and Thorn Gunn, both of whom focus on man's essential isolation. Thorn Gunn also indicates a sense, similar to that of Larkin, of the importance of being aware of the impossi• bility of perfection within man's life. This is shown most clearly in his poem "On The Move", which is about

%ew Lines, pp. xiv-xv. 8

young motor-cyclists:

A minute holds them, who have come to go: The self-defined, astride the created will They burst away; the towns they travel through Are home for neither bird nor holiness, For birds and saints complete their purposes. At worst, one is in motion; and at best, Reaching no absolute, in which to rest, One is always nearer by not keeping still.H

Amis and Wain have the same delight as Larkin in the multi•

plicity of meaning in any word, and exploit this wittily without allowing it to destroy the balance of their poems.

They also share with Larkin the sense of timing which results

in the ironic twists effectively concluding some poems.

However, their poems do not penetrate in a totally meaningful way the basic problems facing man.

The difference between the poetry of Amis and Wain and that of Larkin is reflected in the differences between their novels. In Larkin's novels the Issues which any situation raises are faced, and if no resolution seems possible, then this is made clear. In the novels of Amis and Wain there is a consistent and deliberate avoidance of facing the moral

issues which are raised; there is little of Larkin's constant

insistence on the importance of total awareness. Despite the difference in seriousness of intention and skill in execution

Amis' and Wain's novels have received an attention which

11 J--LNew Lines, p. 33. 9

Larkin's have not. Jill12 and A Girl in Winter1^ have been dealt with only in brief book reviews and in incidental comments dealing principally with Larkin's poetry. Within even this limited coverage there appears to be a range of conflicting opinions about the significance of the novels, both in their own right, and within the context of the later

poetry. Edmund Crispin in "An Oxford Group," a review of

Jill, states, "Anyone casting in Jill for portents of the notable poet-to-come will find only few and skimpy fish rising to the fly." Reviewing the same novel, Stephen Hugh-Jones asserts, "The qualities one has learned to value in his poetry are there: control of emotion and language, keen observation, and In particular the very precise expression of half success, anticipated failure or sadness."^ William Van O'Connor in

The New University Wits expresses little interest in the novels and for the most part contents himself with brief plot

summaries. He comments on his view of Larkin's purpose in

Jill: "He seems to have intended to show that defeat is finally accompanied, or can be, by a glimmer of joy, but he

12Philip Larkin, Jill (London: Paber and Faber, 1964, 1st ed. 1946).

13 Philip Larkin, A Girl in Winter (London: Faber and Faber, 1964, 1st ed. 1947)•

i^The Spectator. April 17th, 1964, 525.

^Stephen Hugh-Jones, "Review of Jill," The New Statesman. April 3rd, 1964, 533. 10 did not manage to get this glimmer into his novel.n^

Whilst this has some relevance to the conclusion of A Girl

In Winter—though even there "joy" is a strange description— it seems inapplicable to the conclusion of Jill, as does his assertion of the theme of Jill; "a sense of peace is to be found in facing one's frustrations." Edmund Crispin's descrip• tion of the conclusion of Jill to which he refers as the "raw nightmarishness of the climax,"17 seems more accurate and directly contradicts O'Connor's statement, as does Alun Jones' description of Jill and A-Girl In Winter as "bleak and pessimistic to the point of nihilism."-^

In Postwar British Fiction, James Gindin sees Jill as the forerunner of novels dealing with the working class.

In his introduction to the 1964 edition of Jill. Larkin suggests that the choice of a working-class hero has been misunderstood: "My hero's background, though an integral part of the story, was not what the story was about. in a more general comment, Gindin pinpoints more accurately what Larkin is trying to do in the novel:

^William Van O'Connor, The New University Wits (Carbondale: Illinois University Press, 1963), p. 23.

17The Spectator, April 17th, 1964, 525.

18A. R. Jones, "The Poetry of Philip Larkin: A Note on Transatlantic Culture," Western Humanities Review XVI (1962), 146.

19P. larkin, Jill (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), p. 11. 11

the problems of the working classes have, in one sense, become the problems of many of the thoughtful men in the whole society: how to assert and defend oneself in the midst of chaos and indiffevence.

But it is Stephen Hugh-Jones who crystallizes this aspect

of the novel: "Class Is not the essence here; what Mr. Larkin

was really looking at was the soft shell in a world full of

spikes."2^

Despite the disagreements amongst the major critics

of Larkin's work as to the quality of his novels and poetry,

there is fairly general agreement on the major themes which

recur in the later volumes. C. B. Cox considers that Larkin op

deals with "universal themes of time, suffering and death"

accepting uncertainty as a condition of life. John Wain says

that Larkin deals with "the gap between dream and reality,

or what happens to ideals when they come down among the

inescapable facts of ordinary living."23

Similarly a number of statements on the structure of

Larkin's poetry indicate a general critical attitude.

20J. Gindin, Postwar British Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), p. 105.

2lThe New Statesman. April 3, 1964, 533.

22C. B. Cox, "Philip Larkin," The Critical Quarterly, I, 1 (Spring 1959), 16.

23john Wain, "Engagement or Withdrawal? Some notes on the Work of Philip Larkin," The Critical Quarterly. VI, 2 (Summer 1964), 172. 12

Anthony Thwaite describes Larkin the poet as having "the

ability to feel his way into complex emotions or resolution

by beginning with a concrete situation as a sort of parable

implicit in his resolution."2^ Frederick Grubb talks of

Larkin's "novelist's feeling for variety of narrative effect," J

and John Press states that "the visual aspects of his images

fuse perfectly with their emotional and Intellectual resonance."

Despite the obvious trend of these remarks towards

associating qualities of novels with the poems, no critic has

considered it worth while to think of Larkin as a poet-novelist

rather than as novelist and then poet and to look at the

novels in the context of his work as a whole, not only in terms

of their themes but also their structures. Larkin himself

gives a hint that this is a line that could be followed with

advantage, since in the comment prefacing the re-issue of Jill

he explains, "As, despite its length, it remains in essence an

unambitious short story, chapter-divisions have been dropped,

leaving it merely as a narrative with breathing-spaces.u^ No

such comment prefaces A Girl in Winter but it too lacks real

2^Anthony Thwaite, Contemporary English Poetry; An Introduction (London: Heinemarm, 1959), p. 87.

^Frederick Grubb, A Vision of Reality (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965), p. 226.

26john Press, Rule and Energy (London: Oxford, 1963)* p. 101.

27Jill, p. 20. chapter divisions. The novels, it seems to me, can in fact be best considered as long short stories or as narrative . , prose poems.

The idea of the novel as poem is far from being a new one. In several of her critical essays Virginia Woolf discusses the increasing interrelationship between poetry and prose in the modern novel, in particular in the work of

Joyce and Lawrence, and she discusses the works of writers such as the Brontes and Hardy in terms applicable to poetry rather than prose. Apart from the general poetic texture of language In these novelists, she feels that their novels approach poems when the emphasis shifts from the importance of the relationships between characters to their relationships with forces such as love, death and nature. P. R. Leavis and

G; D. Kllngopulis in the series of Scrutiny essays entitled

"The Novel as Dramatic Poem"20 express similar views, in that in their analyses of novels which they see as dramatic poems the concentration is on the "Moral fable" aspect, or, as

Kllngopulis states in his comments on Wuthering Heights,

"the subject matter is a way of feeling about man's place in the universe."29

2wF. R. Leavis and G. D. Kllngopulis, "The Novel as Dramatic Poem," Scrutiny. XIV, 3 & 4, 1947: XV, 3, 1948; XVII, 1 & 3, 1950; XVII, 4, 1951; XVIII, 1, 1951.

29G. D. Kllngopulis, "The Novel as Dramatic Poem (II): Wuthering Heights," Scrutiny, XIV, 4, September 194?, 205. 14

In Archetypal Patterns In Poetry. Maud Bodkin discusses both poetry and the novel, since

At the present time, the novel, rather than verse, appears the instrument of communication which even the poet must use, if he would reach any but a very restricted audience.30

In the novels of Lawrence, Woolf and Emily Bronte she traces the workings out of archetypal patterns in poetic terms.

David Lodge in Language of Fiction, having established that language is a continuum rather than made of two parts, referential and poetic, goes on to state that if we are to regard the art of poetry as essentially an art of language, then so is the art of the novel; and [that) the critic of the novel has no special dispensation from that close and sensitive engagement with language which we naturally expect from the critic of poetry."31

It is perhaps significant that among the novels he chooses to examine in close detail are Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles,

Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and Dickens' Hard Times, all of which novels or novelists have also been the focus of Virginia

Woolf and the Scrutineers. It would seem, then, that some common elements exist between these novels which make them obvious examples of the novel-poem. It is in the tradition

3°Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), p. 289.

3lDavid Lodge, Language of Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 47. 15 established by these writers that Larkin seems to have a place. Commenting on Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Virginia

Woolf' says s

They seized those aspects of the earth which were most akin to what they themselves felt or imputed to their characters, and so their storms, their moors, their lovely spaces of summer weather are not ornaments applied to decorate a dull page or display the writers' powers of observation—they carry on the emotion and light up the meaning of the book.32

This comment could be applied with equal,value to the work of Hardy, Dickens in Hard Times, Lawrence and to some extent

Virginia Woolf herself.

Similarly a comment on the novels of Meredith and

Hardy could be applied successfully to any of the above novelists:

Poetry, it would seem, requires a different ordering of the scene; human beings are needed, but needed in their relation to love, or death, or nature rather than to each other. For this reason their psychology is simplified, as it is both in Meredith and Hardy, and instead of feeling the intricacy of life, we feel its passion, its tragedy.33

I propose to take the above two quotations from Virginia Woolf as the basis for a discussion of Larkin's relationship to the tradition of novel-poem.

32Virginia Woolf, "Jane Eyre and Wutherlng Heights," The Common Reader I (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1925), p. 163.

33virginia Woolf, "Phases of Fiction," Granite and Rainbow (London: Hogarth Press, i960), pp. 140-141. 16

Virginia Woolf's comment on Emily and Charlotte

Bronte points to one of the important common aspects of the novel as poem, since in all of those novels which seem to qualify most clearly for this definition the Natural world plays an Important part, not only as a background but also as a pervasive influence on and a reflection of man's position, and as a part of both theme and structure. Since

Larkin himself establishes his affinities with Hardy the poet and makes clear his familiarity with Hardy's novels in his preface to The North Ship, it would perhaps be relevant in placing him in the tradition of the poet-novelist to consider his affinities with Hardy the novelist, particularly in their relative use of physical environment.

The clearest comparison can be made between The Return of the Native and A Girl in Winter. The opening chapters of the novels illustrate the similarities between the writers' use of the description of physical environment in a totally realistic manner, which, in retrospect expands into a symbol of the basic issues of the novel. The description of Egdon

Heath becomes more than a simple locating of the action of the novel, for, through the description, the mood of the novel is established and the heath takes on the significance of an archetypal mental landscape. Its quality of timelessness indicates the context within which Hardy sees man. Larkin's description of the winter landscape similarly transcends the 17 simple function of background and becomes a projection of the mood and the theme of A Girl In Winter. Much of this is indicated in the analysis of the opening section in my third chapter. Both here and in Jill the use of the season as a predominating image serves also to indicate the scale of

Larkin's vision. Whereas Hardy chooses an image of permanence and universality, Larkin chooses part of the cyclic movement of the year and uses this more as the projection of an individual's consciousness than of a collective consciousness as does Hardy. Larkin's focus is established here, as else• where in the poems, on the individual and his progression towards death; he expresses concern that this is the end for the individual rather than seeing him as part of a cyclic movement in history. In Larkin, as in Hardy,the opening symbol is taken up and reinforced throughout the novel, so that it gives to the novel a rhythm within the large pattern in the same way as individual words and phrases work within the context of a poem. As a result the development of the novels comes to be less dependent on the simple progression of plot and narrative and more, as in poetry, on the satis• factory patterning and working out of the Important images.

In fact the meaning of Larkin's novels^is not carried by the plot or theme alone but also by the development of the images.

The use of images rather than statements or description of action to resolve both novels shows this clearly and puts 18

Larkin in the class of those writers whose "meaning is inseparable from his language, and itself rather a mood than a particular observation."J

In her comment on Hardy and Meredith, Virginia Woolf indicates that the choice of focus in a poetic novel is different from the usual engagement with the Interaction of individuals. She suggests that in the attempt to present man in relation to the abstract concepts of love, death and nature, the novelist simplifies the psychology of his characters, not investigating in depth those aspects of personality most clearly revealed in social intercourse. In Larkin's novels the simplification is effected by the very close focus on the central character. We do become fully acquainted with the psychology of both John and Katherine, but it is only their minds we see in operation and our vision of the other characters is largely conditioned by the perspective of the central character. Since, in each case, only one mind is explored in any depth, the emphasis does fall on that individ• ual's relationship to the abstractions of love and death and nature. In A Girl in Winter this is most clearly apparent, since much of the novel is devoted to Katherine's thought processes, in which human relationships become important onlf as they serve to illuminate the central questions in Katherine's mind about the nature of life and the ways in which it can be

34The C ommon Reader I, p. 163. 19 made meaningful. John is less mature and reflective than

Katherlne hut, by implication, he considers all relationships

in the same way.

In both novels the very close focus is emphasised by the lack of any kind of subsidiary plot or theme, and a clear sense of action and detail simplified to the point where nothing extraneous to the central issues is Included for any reason. The novels can be read like poems in the sense that every word contributes to the closely defined pattern of the novel. This is shown in the way in which the novel is dominated by strands of interwoven images revealing the central theme rather than by action. The economy is further assisted by the absence of the author. The novels are, in fact, dramatic poems, since the themes are pursued purely in the terms of the central characters. All philosophizing, reflection and resolution take place in their minds; there is no authorial

intervention. Nothing intrudes which is outside the possible cognizance of these characters, so that the writer is only

present as the creator of the reader's omniscience of his characters' thought processes.

The novels further resemble poetry in that they have the

depth and allusive quality associated with it. Both novels make use of the season Imagery in a way which puts them clearly

into an established literary and even psychological tradition.

In his essay "The Archetypes of Literature" Northrop Prye 20 discusses the use of the seasons and their particular accumulated associations. He describes the autumn myth as the third of the seasonal phases:

The sunset, autumn and death phase. Myths of fall, and of the dying god, of violent death and sacrifice and of the isolation of the hero. Subordinate characters: the traitor and the siren. The archetype of tragedy and elegy.35

Clearly Larkin is making full use of all these assoc• iations, but as we already noticed in comparing his use of environment to that of Hardy's, he presents everything on a reduced scale, so that he is using the archetypal associations in a somewhat Ironic manner: he sees man and his world as much smaller and less significant than did his predecessors.

Instead of a dying god we have'John, ill but not beyond recovery; the manner of his becoming ill is violent and in this process he is something of a sacrifice. He is not, however, sacrificed towards any clear creative ends but simply to recreate a sense of identity for Christopher Warner and his friends. He does experience death of a kind in that he has clearly reached the end of a particular stage of development and he has to learn a new vision of life before he can begin again. His isolation is complete but it is accidental rather than clearly chosen. Christopher Warner can be seen as a type of traitor on a small scale, just as Jill or even

35Northrop Frye, Fables of Identity. Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, I963), p. 16. 21

Elizabeth are sirens reduced to the scale of the Oxford world. The novel is not, however, tragic. The reduction In scale of all values and characters makes this impossible.

Larkin does not see man as sufficiently heroic to be tragic and consequently he tends towards irony rather than tragedy.

A Girl In Winter fits less closely with the archetypal attributes that Frye sees in the winter mythology, but Larkin's use of the winter myth is so clearly related to a tradition that his final deviation is an assertion of the difference in his vision of man. The English literary tradition of the winter myth, in which larkin seems to have a place, goes back to such Anglo-Saxon poems as the "Seafarer", in which the poet, like Larkin, uses the winter myth in conjunction with the journey image. In this poem there is the clear sense of the necessity of the winter journey if self-knowledge is to be achieved; and there is also the sense of isolation and lovelessness. The poet emphasises his point by contrasting the present with the summer happiness he experienced when he was part of a clearly defined social structure. He creates a strong Impression that after the experience of the winter journey such delight in simple pleasures will no longer be completely possible. There is a pagan lack of optimism in the poem which Larkin's own work approaches.

Although the winter inage recurrs frequently in

Lawrence's work, Aaron's Rod seems to afford the most fruitful 22 comparison with A Girl in Winter, since in both novels the writers are also concerned with the problem of the retention of individuality within the most intimate relationships.

There is a difference in that Larkin sees the impossibility of any other situation existing, whilst Lawrence is striving to assert that this is something that must be sought as the most desirable kind of relationship. In both novels the journey image is central as the characters move towards maturity, and in both it is the winter which symbolises the end of a way of life based on the traditional, unworkable

Ideas of human relationships. Lawrence, however, is sufficiently close to the Christian concept of man to begin his novel at

Christmas and to make use of the associations the season has.

He makes use of the winter as part of the cyclic pattern and he presents Aaron undergoing a rebirth process into a more hopeful life. In Larkin's novel the sense of the beginning of a new way of life does not carry with it any idea of hope.

Katherine's extended awareness only reveals to her the severe limitations within which man must work and the prospect of the life ahead of her with her new awareness is not an inviting onei In this respect Larkin is closer to the Anglo-Saxon tradition than to the more contemporary one.

Eliot's poem "Journey of the Magi" has even closer affinities with Larkin's novel than does Lawrence's work.

The poem too uses the journey image in connection with the 23 winter image, and it too stresses that, "The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,/And the silken girls bringing sherbet'*36 can never again be enjoyed after the experience of the winter journey and its revelation of a sense of alien• ation, isolation and discomfort; "And the night fires going out, and the lack of shelters,/And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly" (p. 10?). The end of Eliot's poem, like the end of Larkin's novel, seems to question the nature of the death and birth which the experience has caused. Larkin presents Katherlne as having moved into a new phase of life, but that phase is a kind of death within life since her awareness and acceptance are purchased at the expense of a deadening of those senses which are associated with life and hope. Eliot, though using the Christian mythology as his basis, also sees the winter birth as bringing the Magi to an awareness which makes them alien to the life in which they have to continue living, so that they too experience a kind of death within life:

were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly, We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was . Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. We returned to our places, these kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death. (p. 108)

T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1935 (London: Faber, 3-936), p. 107. All other references to this poem within this chapter are from the same source. 24

The basic difference between the visions of the two writers is that Eliot by using such a Christian context Implies that, though the Spring and rebirth may be hard, they will exist. Larkin holds out no hope of anything to alleviate the pain of life beyond a state of awareness in which disillusion• ment can bring no further pain. He emphasises the point by his choice of a focus on young people in conjunction with the images of the end of the cycle. It is a more significant comment on the quality of life when it becomes a living death at such an early point.

Within the context of Larkin*s own work the two novels are more obviously connected with the two later volumes of poetry than with The North Ship. The romanticism and melodrama, together with borrowed forms and poses, which are present in

The North Ship (1945) are disappearing rapidly in the course of Jill (1946) and are eliminated in A Girl In Winter (1947) so that the tone and ideology which inform The Less Deceived

(1955) and The Whitsun Weddings (1964) are gradually established in the novels. The vision of man as tragic, which tends to

Inform the first volume of poetry, changes to a vision of man as being too diminished to be tragic in the later work. There is a lack of objectivity and an unthinking involvement in

The North Ship, which in the novels disappears, the tone becom• ing ironic. Very few of the poems in the early volume are narrative; the novels obviously provide Larkin with the narrative experience which he uses to the full in the later volumes of poetry. The later poetry, in fact, could be regarded as a series of condensed novels of the type of Jill and A Girl in Winter, since the techniques are similar but sharpened and the sense of economy developed to its extreme. These poems like the novels can be described as dramatic in that the narrative is the process by which the writer is attempting to reach some resolution. In The North Ship there is a marked tendency for the poems to present a situation about which the poet has already drawn his conclusions so that the sense of tension and of the dramatic element is for the most part absent. As the detailed analysis of the novels will.reveal? it is in them that Larkin establishes those symbols which recreate most closely his vision of life. CHAPTER II

JILL

In its simplest terms, Jill is an account of the efforts of a working-class boy to gain a place both academically and socially at Oxford in wartime. On arrival he finds himself in an isolated position, having no inclination to join his fellow scholars and lacking the ability to mix with his room-mate Christopher and his friends. In an effort to make himself more interesting to

Christopher and to increase his own evaluation of himself, he creates a fictitious sister, Jill. His original purpose becomes obscured and he finds himself involved in the creation of a life and world for Jill. By chance he meets a girl who physically matches his vision of Jill and he attempts to make the real girl conform to his vision in other respects. His attempts to establish an intimacy with her fail, and the failure breaks down the tenuous links he has formed with his contemporaries. Most of the action takes place in Oxford but part is in Huddlesford, John's home town.

Although the novel focuses closely on John, his contemporaries and life in an Oxford college, there is the constant background of the war and a sense of a larger world and larger action taking place simultaneously with the events of the novel. But the real Interest of the novel lies less in what happens to 27

John in terms of physical action than in what he becomes through a growing awareness and a loss of innocence: external action and setting serve as objective correlatives for psycho•

logical action.

Larkin uses the poetic technique of exploring and

signifying the psychological journey through the real

journeys which take place in the novel. The railway journey

in particular is given a metaphorical value. The opening

sequence of Jill takes place in a railway carriage on John's

journey from Huddlesford to Oxford. A sense is created that he Is not simply moving from one place to another but from

one stage of his life Into another one. The kind of pro• tection offered by his home and his way of life there is removed entirely and he has to cope with new situations in a new way. The railway compartment full of people seems to represent for Larkin here and elsewhere, for example in

"The Whitsun Weddings", a microcosm of life. Within this microcosm John fails completely. He has with him sandwiches packed up by his mother, but he is so ashamed of being observed

eating them that he throws them away and leaves himself without means of sustenance until he arrives in Oxford. The rest of his travelling companions are without the social embarrassment which affects him and they eat unconcernedly. They offer him

food, which he eventually takes through a desire to become as obscure as possible as soon as he can do so, but their kindness 28 does not diminish his uneasiness: it further increases it.

The working out of this small incident establishes very early

in the novel what is to happen throughout: John cannot use anything from his Huddlesford life as soon as he has moved away from it, but in discarding its values he is left with nothing. He is too immature and vulnerable to benefit from what contacts are offered to him. He wants to find himself

possessed immediately of what he regards as "Oxford values", that is the sophistication and apparent invulnerability of

Christopher Warner.

References throughout the novel indicate John's equating of the railway and the potential excitement of moving away from Huddlesford and his childhood to a different world where he can become someone other than the son of Mr.

Kemp. When he meets Whitbread who is a scholar from a working- class background like himself, he is reminded of his home and school and of the railway constantly making him aware of a world outside Huddlesford:

For the first time since arriving at the College his home life and boyhood seemed vivid to him: he could almost hear the clinking of railway wagons from the siding below the back garden and the sound of electric bells ringing simultaneously in all the classrooms of his grammar school.1

1Jill, p. Unless otherwise indicated all page references within the text in this chapter will refer to Jill. 29

At a later point in the novel, when he feels that at last he

has made some contact with Jill, he measures his satisfaction

with the present by his reaction to a passing train:

And as he watched, an express train hurtled past twenty yards off on the shining rails, and the long stretch of coaches racing away awakened nothing like regret in him, as they once would. He was glad to see them go; glad, simply, to be where he was, and to see them go. (p. 194)

Crouch, John's English master, shares with him the sense of

excitement and potential discovery aroused by the idea of the

railway linking up otherwise unconnected places. This is

shown most clearly when he visits John's father to suggest

that John should stay at school and eventually try for a

scholarship which will take him away from home to Oxford:

He felt like a diplomat on a visit to some barbarous ruler, with the job of persuading him to allow a railway to run through his territory, (p. 73)

He develops this idea later when he visits John in Oxford and

tries to give him a sense of the value of his life there:

You can look at this place as a big railway terminus. Thousands of people. Trains starting in every direction. What you've got to decide is, where are you going? And having decided, get in with your fellow passengers, (p. 228)

Most of the important transitions in the novel are associated with railway journeys. After John's first journey

to Oxford, there is his journey back to Huddlesford. At this 30 point he feels very clearly that he is moving from one world of experience to another. Going back to Huddlesford is a re-examination of his past and an attempt to assess it in terms of the present and Oxford. In Oxford he is unhappy but he feels that in Huddlesford where the bombing has taken place, where people have suffered a kind of destruction in their lives which represents something of a parallel to the destruction John feels that he has been undergoing, he will contact and experience pain more real than anything in Oxford:

As the train left Oxford John had a pang of regret and also of fear, because he seemed to be leaving a region of unreality and insubstantial pain for the real world where he could really be hurt, (pi 211)

But in fact he does not encounter the pain he anticipates, since his parents are quite safe and he makes no real contact with people. Far from seeing a more real world he has a sense of everything being shrunken, particularly his home;

It was strange, like looking into a doll's house, and putting his hands against the window frames he felt as protective as a child does feel towards a doll's house and its tiny rooms, (p. 215)

His second journey away from Huddlesford is then a more complete and irrevocable break with his childhood and what it stands for. whilst in Huddlesford he gains something of this impression:

The town had been so familiar and so intimately wound into his boyhood that its destruction became fasclnating;...The wreckage looked like ruins of an age over and done with. (p. 215) 31

But it is on the train that he realises fully the complete ness of his removal from that world. He goes over in his mind the destruction he has observed:

It no longer seemed meaningless: struggling ai-jake again, rubbing his eyes with chilled hands, he thought it represented the end of his use for the place. It meant no more to him now, and so it was destroyed: it seemed symbolic, a kind of annulling of his childhood. The thought excited him. It was as if he had been told: all the past is cancelled: all the suffering connected with that town, all your childhood, is wiped out. Now there is a fresh start for you: you are no longer governed by what has gone before, (p. 219)

Although the values of the past have been negated, the kind of landscape through which the .train is moving suggests John's negative state of mind: "The train ran on, through fields lying under the frost and darkness" (p. 219). John's own thoughts echo this:

All that anyone has is the life that keeps him going, and see how easily that can be patted out. See how appallingly little life is. (p. 219)

One of the people In the novel who makes the most power• ful impression on John is Mrs. Warner. Because Christopher is otherwise occupied John is sent to meet her when she visits

Oxford, so that once again he finds himself in the railway station waiting fearfully for a new element to enter his life:

With a sudden increase in apprehension he saw the engine come hissing up the platform, and as a few people who had collected to meet the train moved forward he backed behind an empty chocolate machine, (pp. 88-89) 32

Towards the end of the novel, when John is ill in hospital, his parents come up to Oxford to see him. Like John they take the train from Huddlesford and like him they find themselves in a new and alien world when they arrive. It is a measure of how far John has grown from his parents in that he has at least a superficial control in his Oxford world whereas his parents are lost, bewildered and obviously out of their element.

One of the final ironies of the book is the departure of Christopher and Elizabeth. It is Christopher's world that

John has been desperately trying to enter but Christopher himself is already leaving and journeying to London with

Elizabeth where they obviously expect to enter a new state of their lives.

For an English writer the use of the railway journey and the railway carriage as a metaphor for life carries with it certain obvious connotations. There is the sense of a group of people all travelling to the same destination, con• fined within each other's company but making contact only rarely and for the most part retaining impassable barriers around themselves. The sense of isolation within the group is explored in some depth in this novel, though it is dealt with more fully in A Girl In Winter and in some of the poems.

This theme in the novel is clearly established in the opening pages in the description of the railway compartment and its 33 occupants; it is developed more fully when John first enters his room at Oxford and finds it full of people "but gains no sense of companionship from their presence but rather an increased sense of his loneliness: "John stared at her, never having heard before this self-parodying southern coo, and a sense of his alien surroundings came over him" (p. 28); The incident with his china, when he suddenly discovers that a private joke against him is being shared by all the other occupants of the room, increases the distance between himself and them. Throughout the novel John's awareness of his isolation is always increased when he is with other people.

Whenever Christopher and his friends assemble to drink they talk of school or other topics in which John is obviously unable to participate. After a brief feeling of contact with

Elizabeth, John is made aware of its fragility by observing

Elizabeth's relationship with Christopher and realising his place in that context:

When he looked at them both, he felt like a waiter in an expensive restaurant. Their friendliness to him was like the tips they would give a waiter, (p. 110)

John makes several attempts to break out of his isolation but the nature of the attempts makes failure in• evitable. He feels that friendship is obviously one way of building a defence against loneliness and he seeks friendship with someone who appears not to understand loneliness, that 34

is Christopher. When Christopher remarks casually on John's file, he rushes out to buy one for Christopher to consolidate this approval. Christopher's ensuing comments and coldness create for John a greater sense of loneliness than ever:

John felt a sudden chill, as if a door had swung open and revealed his loneliness still awaiting him: for one moment he felt the waste desert that would receive him if Christopher were not there as a friend, (p. 49)

The irony at this point is the reader's awareness that the

"desert" is already receiving John, since there can never be any real possibility of Christopher responding to John's gestures of friendship.

John makes a second similar attempt to secure Chris• topher's friendship by lending him money when Christopher's chosen companions refuse to do so. Christopher falls to regard the loan as significant and in fact fails to return the money for a long period of time. Once again John is forced into an awareness of the failure of his attempt:

The streets were busy as he walked back towards the College for lunch, but they aroused no corresponding excitement in him, for an unconquerable sense of isolation was starting to possess him as he grew aware that people who had come into residence when he did had now made their own ways and had fallen into definite ways of life. They had run up the framework on which their university careers would be woven. John had not done so. Christopher was his closest friend. And this money business was creating a gaping hole of uncertainty in his mind, so that there was nothing to build on there, (p. 86) 35

In his dealings with Mrs. Warner, John feels for the first time a measure of success, for he feels that she lessens his sense of isolation by communicating with him in spite of his

inadequac ies:

She was one of those rare people who could construct his meaning from the few truncated phrases and gestures his nervousness permitted him to utter. (p. 90)

When he overhears Christopher's comments to Elizabeth on

Mrs. Warner's account of her meeting with him, once again his sense of having made contact is destroyed, and he realises that his friendship with Christopher does not exist except

in his own mind:

After all, then, he was on his own; he had failed, utterly and ignominiously failed to weave himself into the lives of these people. As he had feared, the door had swung open again and he was alone again, doubly alone. The days would be scrappy, bits and pieces of action. No objects, no continuity, (p. 114)

Since he fails so completely with real people, John creates for himself a close relationship with an Imaginary

sister, Jill. This enables him to diminish the importance of his isolation in two ways. First, in his letters to her he can recast his relationships with the people around him so that his own position appears very different from what it is in reality. When he ceases to write letters and begins the diary he creates for Jill an isolation which parallels 36 his own. But her isolation reflects favourably on her: she is isolated because she is more sensitive and aware than her companions. Within this situation John explores the idea of isolation as something desirable and admirable through the character of Minerva, an older girl at Jill's school: he describes in the following terms: "for all her loneliness; she simply went her own way, quietly and pleasantly, making no demands on anyone" (p. 141). The fact that her isolation is from choice is indicated when Jill attempts to break through it:

She saw that Minerva had indicated that her detachment, even though it was admired, must still be respected; that lone• liness was not to be abandoned at the first chance of friend• ship, but was a thing to be cherished in itself, (p. 148)

This idea carries over from John's imagination into his life: when he meets Gillian and determines to pursue her he feels that, "In this quest his loneliness would be an asset: it would be mobility and even charm" (p. 159). But John does not have the qualities he attributes to Minerva, as the very fact of his desire to establish contact with Gillian indicates.

In fact, he does not make any real contact with Gillian, and his failure to realise this makes him particularly vulnerable when Elizabeth intervenes and explains that Gillian cannot meet him as arranged: 37

All his life he had Imagined people were hostile to him and wanted to hurt him; now he knew he had been right and all the worst fears of childhood were realized. (p. 203)

The totality of John's failure and the completeness of his isolation is indicated at the end of the novel, when, all his attempts at friendship having failed, he is left alone at

Oxford in the hospital, after all his contemporaries have gone down.

John gives no appearance of realising that his loneliness is not unique and that others have devised ways of combating or ignoring it. His position is simply an extreme example of the essential loneliness and isolation experienced by everyone.

Christopher and his friends push their awareness as deep down under the surface of their consciousnesses as possible. They assist this process by rarely being alone, preferlng always a crowd of people around them. When Christopher's usual drink• ing companions are not available he will even drink with John rather than be alone. Most of this group have a common school background and they tend to refer back to this in order to recreate the sense of being part of something ordered. But the process involves an awareness that this is something that they have left behind them:

In the intervals of comparing notes and customs, they would sigh and gaze sadly at the fire, as if they were exiles gathered together far from their homes, (p. 57) 38

Inevitably conversations of this kind exclude John and some• times others who are present. This is important to the group because the feeling of being a group is increased by the awareness of someone outside.

At times, however, when there is a break in the drinking and rowdiness, Christopher is aware momentarily of a loneliness akin to John's. Ironically it is John's fabrications about his sister Jill that cause Christopher to reflect on his own

position:

"But you do lose touch with your home if you go to school young," he said. "It's a good thing. It teaches independence, teaches you to stand up for yourself, teaches you how to handle people."..."But I regret it sometimes, you know....One sort of loses touch. And one doesn't get a second chance, ever. And we're a pretty rackety family...." (p. 118)

Whitbread and the other scholars are clearly aware of

loneliness as Whitbread's first conversation with John

indicates:

"Not very matey, the other students, are they?" said Whitbread, his knees apart. "Take some getting to know. Of course, you have to choose your friends carefully. No good going about with millionaires." (p. 52)

One of Whitbread's defences against his awareness of his alien•

ation in a place like Oxford is to acquire a detailed knowledge

of the facts of his environment. John is repelled by this,

perhaps because he senses the vulnerability thus exposed. He

expresses his revulsion by thinking of Whitbread's activity in 39 physical terms: "Whitbread's eagerness was embarrassing: it was like watching a man scouring his plate with a piece of bread" (p. 53).

For the most part the scholars accept their loneliness and instead of fighting against it or hiding from it they attempt to utilise it, and in this situation manage to achieve limited contact with like-minded people. Their behaviour in the social context of coffee in Whitbread's room indicates their total attitude:

None of them would ever take the best armchair in the room or help himself to any foodstuffs without asking or accept an invitation he did not intend to return. All their actions were characterized by this scrupulous convention, and there, up in the little dingy room where Whitbread was assembling cups and saucers and milk, they collected like members of some persecuted sect, as if alien to the life around them. There was no luxury or waste in their company, and yet John was probably more at home with them than with anyone else, though he did not value their friendship. He was careful not to show this, however, as the one thing they all heartily detested was anyone "of their own class" "trying to get above himself", (p. 124)

It is as though they are aware of the potential threat of being in a situation like John's, and they attempt to avoid this by the deliberate creation of a different kind of isolation, which offers some immunity from the type of distress John experiences. The attitude of the scholars seems the one closest to Larkin's own: in the later poetry he shows that he feels that it is essential to be aware of man's loneliness as a necessary evil. Once this is accepted then it is possible to 40 build up limited but valuable relationships in which few illusions are cherished.

Closely associated with the theme of loneliness and contributing to the overall patterning of Images are a series of incidents imaging the gap between vision and reality. This discrepancy usually results from an unwilling• ness to recognise the harshness of man's existence of which loneliness is a part. Just as John is the principal sufferer from his loneliness so too he is most often forced to an awareness of a reality unlike what he had anticipated. His first disillusionment is his realisation that he is expected to share a room with someone, since, "He had thought that once he had found his room, he would always have a refuge, a place to retreat to and hide in. This was apparently not so"

(p. 26). Shortly after John arrives in his crowded room he realises that the china being used is his own. He remembers the purchase of the china:

Three weeks ago his mother had insisted that they spent an afternoon among the shops buying these things: it had been a touching little expedition, meaning he realized, far more to her than to him. (p. 32)

He contrasts the expectations built around the expedition with the present reality:

Most of the things they had bought lay dirty and scattered around the room; in fact, John wondered they had lain unrecognised for so long. The crate (he saw it now) was behind Christopher's trunk, broken open carelessly, so that 41

It would "be Impossible to use it again, as he had intended to doi These, then, were his cups and plates: his coffee strainer (choked with tea leaves); his shining kettle blackened by the fire. His bread-knife, his sugar basin. (p. J2)

On occasions the situation is reversed and it is the reality of the present which, for various reasons, John dis• torts by means of his imagination. When Christopher takes

John for a drink the situation is an uneasy one, and because

John cannot accept it he has to project it into the future, building from the present relationship with Christopher a long lasting friendship:

He imagined himself saying in the future: "D'you remember that time we went to the Bull, old boy. In our first term? D'you know, that was really and truly the first time I'd ever seen the inside of a bar...." ("Oh, come off it, old boy!") "S'fact! My dear fellow, it's absolutely bloody gospel! Here, after you with the-whoopsl Don't drown it...." His voice would be rich and husked with tobacco. Aloud he said: "Thank you." (pp. 61-62)

But his expectations of such a friendship are shattered when he overhears Christopher and Elizabeth discussing him. His feelings of humiliation are greater than the situation warrants because of his earlier hopes. Consequently he justifies the violence of his reaction by distorting In his mind the conversation which had upset him. The original conversation is as follows:

"You've trained him well." Christopher laughed and said "Yes." "Quite a little gent. And is this still his china? You are a horror." "That's his butter." He heard Elizabeth explode with laughter. "Well, of all the-l It's too bad. He must be a feeble sort of worm." "Mother said he looked stuffed." "Stuffed! That's .just the word!" (p. ill)

This conversation becomes:

Oh, yes, of course I use his crocks. He daren't stop me. Chris, you are awful! That's his butter your*re eating. Spread it on thick. Oh, Chris! Mother thought he was a scared stuffed little rabbit. He must be a pretty miserable specimen. (p. 112)

Related to these Incidents is John's recasting of events in his letters to Jill. He wishes to ignore his real position in relation to Christopher and so he distorts conversations which have taken place by reversing their roles as far as possible. A good example of this is his account of

Christopher's reaction on learning that John has not yet written an essay which he can plagiarize. In fact,

Christopher is menacing and John is intimidated into producing the essay. The following is his account of the incident:

As a scholar, one has a certain standing and certain privileges, but also certain obligations towards the less gifted members of the community.. Poor Christopher, for instance, with whom I share these rooms. Is pathetically dependent.on me for his weekly essay. I don't know how you write essays,, but I find I tend to plan them out in my head beforehand almost word for word. Yesterday it was after tea and I still hadn't made the least sign of putting pen to paper, so he began to get restless. "Look here, what about that essay?" "Yes, yes, in an hour or so, I haven't thought 43

out the ending yet." "Come off It, damn the ending, I want some solid dope " "My dear Christopher, you shall have it"" "by ten o'clock." "Ten! But I shall be drunk by thent " I pointed out that that was his affair and not mine. To cut a long story a trifle shorter, I drew a line under the last paragraph .lust as ten was booming out from Tom Tower, and shortly afterwards in stumbled Christopher, fuddled as usual, hiccoughing "Where's 'at essay?" I pushed it across to him, and while pretending to continue reading my essays of Montaigne, watched him covertly as he spelt It out line by line. When he had finished the first page, he pulled out his fountain pen and then fell asleep. (pp. I3O-I31)

Not only does John give to Christopher the position of the one intimidated, he also reverses his own attitude to things in Christopher which have aroused his admiration previously. In reality he does not find Christopher's drinking childishly amusing but sophisticated and adult and he tries to emulate him as the quotation from page forty-four indicates. John's normal method of speaking is totally unlike that used in the letter. The tone of the letter is fact closer to that used by Christopher.

A part of John's innocence which is destroyed by experience with reality Is his romantic view of love. His first shock comes when he discovers contraceptives in Christopher's drawer; this is quickly followed by his reaction to the easy sexual talk of Christopher and his friends:

Their stories were lustful and playfully savage, and John found they had extreme physical effect on him. He sat crouched on a hard chair, his fists clenched on his knees, gripped by an unreasoning terror that seized him whenever he heard of experiences that would have left him dumb. (p. 57) 44

More immediate realisation comes when he finds himself in

physical contact with Elizabeth. While she is tying his bow

tie for him on the second occasion, feelings are aroused in him which he thinks are rare and precious. He gradually becomes aware that Elizabeth is so accustomed to his response

that she is anticipating his subsequent actions; as a result

A horrible embarrassment tingled and shuddered Inside him, that what he had imagined to be his most secret feeling was almost cynically common. It shocked him deeply. He instinct ively moved his head uncomfortably, like an animal at bay. (p. 109)

Despite this limited awareness, he fails to recognise the relationship between Elizabeth and Christopher for what it is. As a result his shock is so much greater when Christopher casually reveals his intentions of enticing Elizabeth into bed with him:

What shocked him (for he felt shocked) was the enormous disparity he had stumbled upon between his imagination and what actually happened. When he thought of Christopher in his dressing-gown, legs straddling, his hand steadily working the razor and talking reflectively about what was going to happen, he knew with a sickening certainty that he could never sustain that position; that he would, in fact, turn and run long before it came. Even now he had turned and run, run away from that room, although he knew that he would think of nothing else all day, and in all conscience it had little enough to do with him. If this was what his quest for Jill was leading to, he would give it up without a second thought. (p. 170)

It is for this reason that when he first creates Jill he puts his love for her on a non-sexual basis by making her his sister. 45

Gradually he forgets this relationship and she assumes an identity apart from his own so that when he encounters

Gillian he is ready to attempt to create a "love relationship"; though one which has its origins in fairy-tale romance. Since

John is alone in his romantic view of love, his contemporaries make of the situation something very different from what exists.

When John is given the opportunity to meet Gillian alone,

Eddy and Patrick let their imaginations work on the course events will take:

John cautiously responded to the rhythm of their laughter, for his true feelings had shrunk away and he had seen them safely locked up. "Whose room can I have," he laughed. "You can have mine," said Eddy. "With pleasure, old man, and here, listen, here's an inside tip—let her get in first, there's a sod of a bump near the wall." "Now let's get it all straight," said Patrick, wagging his right forfinger in the air before them. "What you do is call for her " "No, damn it, Pat, that's no good; surely he picks her up at the Green Leaf where she can't get away. What he does is come along and say: 'Sorry, Elizabeth unavoidably detained but here's unworthy self in her place—'" "All right, then. Then at tea you put in the ground• work i Then after that suggest walking round to see Eddy—-" "Say you've left your cigar-piercer on my grand piano," cackled Eddy,.scratching himself. "And then you can get to work—sport the oak—put the black-out up ." (p. 187)

The reality of the meeting could not differ more from this.

Gillian is much more sensitive to the less romantic aspects of a relationship with a man and is very uneasy in John's company making her escape as quickly as possible and easing her way by promising to have tea with John; She does not keep 46 her promise on which John had built great hopes. Instead of

the quiet, innocent teaparty for two for which he had made

careful and dainty preparations he first meets a stern rebuke

from Elizabeth and then sees the room taken over by Patrick and Eddy and their friends who proceed to give their assess• ment of the situation and consume greedily the food John has

prepared for Gillian.

John's last attempt to build a relationship with

Gillian takes place at the party. He can only find the courage to do what he wishes when he has blurred the edge of reality by becoming drunk. In this state he kisses Gillian and steps over the limits he himself has set to the relation•

ship in his imagination. An equally drunken crew of

Christopher's friends are uncharacteristically offended by

John's action and bully him to the extent that he wakes to find himself in hospital. At this point, while John is in a fever, dream and reality become confused and shift in relation• ship to each other in a different way from earlier in the novel.

John transfers his real awareness of his bruised lips into a dream of the kiss:

The kiss, too, grew realler every hour. He could feel the quiet pressure of her lips perpetually, and in response she would fill his arms again. The memory was keen. At intervals he would become aware that it was his bruised lips and jarred teeth that remained with him, and another struggle would ensue, filling him somehow with nausea. The sensations tugged this way and that. (p. 240) 47

Somehow, through his confusion, John is experiencing a truth;

for in fact the kiss is actually responsible for his bruised

lips and his nausea.

In his love for Jill John has been deceived by his

vision into seeing love as totally romantic and removed from

the kind of relationship which exists between Christopher

and Elizabeth. But the compelling power of his vision has

forced him into a position with regard to Gillian which causes

him to respond instinctively to her in a physical manner and

to kiss her. Thus his vision, though removed from reality,

has enabled him to perceive a reality. . The suppressed aware•

ness of physical desire has been brought to the surface, and

his recollections of the evening which are removed from reality and accuracy by his fever carry him further into an examination and working out of his natural physical desires. In a state

of normality he could not admit to himself any feelings of

physical desire but the reality of their existence is brought

out in the dreams:

As his temperature rose, untruths took their place quite naturally among these recollections. One of the earliest was that they were lying together on the floor of some room in each other's arms. He could feel her lips pressed against his, but he could not feel the rest of her. He could not feel her with his body at all. He hugged her harder, rolling desperately against her, but it was all nothing, he could not feel her at all. Everything was confined to the mouth and he would wake up with burning lips. (p. 241) 48

In the dream which involves Christopher, Christopher's relationship with Gillian is far removed from the facts of the situation "but the dream does reveal what John had not known; that his desire to keep Christopher and Gillian apart was one based on a fear that Christopher could sustain a physical relationship and that perhaps Gillian could be drawn into one thus proving his vision of her and their love to be false.

Through John's attempt to ascertain the relative truth of his dream and reality, Larkin seems to be working out some• thing for himself which has a wider significance, since it questions the relative truth of any imaginative creation as opposed to facts. John feels that the facts of his relation• ship with Gillian do not give an accurate picture of the totality of what has happened to him. The love he has created and Its working out in his own mind up to the point of physical desire and then rejection has been as effective an experience as his actual meetings with Gillian. He has learnt something about himself and the nature of love as much through his imaginative experience as through his actual experience: he fell to pondering within the framework of the dream how the love they had shared was dead. For the fact that in life he had been cheated of her was not the whole truth. Somewhere, in dreams, perhaps, on some other level, they had interlocked and he had had his own way as completely as in life he had been denied it. And this dream showed that love died, whether fulfilled or unfulfilled, (p. 242) 49

The feeling that love inevitably dies leads John to a consideration of life as a whole and the fact that, no matter what the nature of the life and no matter what choices and decisions are made, an unchangeable progression from birth to death creates a framework of inevitability within which man is powerless:

Then if there was no difference between love fulfilled and love unfulfilled, how could there be any difference between any other pair of opposites? Was he not freed, for the rest of his life, from choice? For what could it matter? Let him take this course, or this course, but still behind the mind, on some other level, the way he had rejected was being simultaneously worked out and the same conclusion was being reached. What did it matter which road he took if they both led to the same place? (p. 243)

There is in this statement a perceptive and almost courageous acceptance of the conditions of life. Yet at the same time the concluding statement of this paragraph represents a surrender and sense of hopelessness:

He looked at the tree-tops in the wind. What control could he hope to have over the maddened surface of things? (p. 243)

In a closely preceding paragraph there is a description of the trees John is watching whilst the above thoughts are in his mind. It seems that Larkin's real statement of his position is made through this image rather than directly through John's conclusions. 50

He was watching the trees, the tops of which he could just see through the window. They tossed and tossed, recklessly. He saw them fling ["thi-sU way and that, throw• ing up their heads like impatient horses, like sea waves, bending and recovering in the wind. They had no leaves. Endlessly, this way and that, they were buffeted and still bore up again to their full height. They seemed tireless. Sometimes they were bent so low that they passed out of sight, leaving the square of white sky free for a second, but then they would be back again, clashing their proud branches together like the antlers of furious stags. (p. 242)

The influence of Hardy is quite clear here and the overall

position the passage suggests is similar to Hardy's. Larkin

appears to be acknowledging our powerlessness in the face of

a basically predetermined pattern of life, but he also implies

that just as the trees which can offer no actual resistance

to the wind create something magnificent in their fight, so

too man cannot resist but can create something through his

response to the pattern. The fact that Larkin chooses to

suggest this through an image is interesting in two ways: it

is a foretaste of the poetry since often the whole poem

operates in a similar manner, stating nothing but creating a sense of positive values through the relationship between

form and content; through its very existence this passage is an assertion about creativity, since from something essentially

bleak and hopeless Larkin has created something positive and beautiful.

Dream, creativity and vision are dealt with as almost

identical concepts. John's creation of the Jill world begins 51 as an escape from a real but destructive situation; despite this and the fact that what he creates is immature and not very

Impressive it has very positive values. Through the process of creativity John is in some respects brought closer to the world he is trying to escape: his sensitivity to people and his surrounding is developed and he finds beauty in hitherto unsuspected places, as for example, on the occasion after writing the first letter from Jill:

Outside in the Fellows' Garden, the trees were heaving in the wind, almost bare of their leaves. Another undergraduate kneeled in the window seat to look out; he had a very finely- made head and black hair. As he stared from the tall windows he slipped a ring off one finger and put it on another. John wondered vaguely who he was: his face was agreeable to look at: (p. 123)

A similar heightening occurs immediately after John's account of Jill to Christopher:

From next door came the sound of a piano; there was a rich young man there who played at all hours. John listened. He felt himself spun out very fine along the slender line of notes. The music was slow, with a logical sadness. (p. 120)

For a short time at least he can gain a better perspective of the world he lives in. His previous pre-occupation with the artificial day created by a rigid timetable disappears; he no longer needs the kind of confidence gained by conforming to the same pattern as everyone else. Similarly he ceases to worry about becoming like Christopher: 52

He was hardly conscious of the contentment he felt. All of a sudden there seemed nothing to do, nothing but the certain fact that this day would open into another equally empty day, only the soft pattering of the rain on ancient stones. The firelight shone on the brass ashtrays and on certain dark panels. He felt he had been very foolish to trouble over• much about Christopher Warner; he ceased to long that he himself could order servants about confidently, that he was rich, that he had a blue chin, that he sang dirty songs in his bathi These were very fine things, but they were losing their lustre as ideals. He yawned, (p. 123)

Although this is a less vividly realized impression of values

than that he has later in hospital, it tends in the same

direction.

In the hospital sequence John learns more about his own

nature: this knowledge has been made available to him through

the learning process involved in his creation of Jill. In

his everyday routine he acknowledges his loneliness, but only

as defect in his personality. He tries to overcome it by

binding people to him in some way. In the Jill sequence he

seems closer to understanding that loneliness is a condition

of life since he does not see Jill's isolation as the result

of a defect in her personality or of unattractiveness. He

also seems to see a positive side to loneliness which he has

not recognised in the lives of people such as Whitbread.

His evaluation of Christopher is different in his letters

from that in his actual relationship with him, and though the

details of John's description of Christopher are not accurate

he is recognising that Christopher is not a heroic figure of

extra large dimensions but a young man with obvious weaknesses and defects; 53

Strong contrast between John and Christopher is made throughout the novel; in the terms of the preceding discussion this contrast exists also, for Christopher has a strong grasp on the world of facts and on the experience of the present. At the end of the novel it could be possible to view Christopher as triumphant and John as defeated, since

Christopher has achieved his ends and John clearly has not.

But in other terms the position is reversed, for Christopher, as he leaves Oxford, is very little different from when he came up. He has not increased in awareness of himself or of his environment; whereas John's awareness of himself and of life has greatly increased.

It would seem then that the total statement of the novel as far as dream, vision and creativity are concerned could be summarised in the terms that Wallace Stevens uses:

"it is by breaking away from the world of facts that we make contact with reality."

The exploration of an idea or the revelation of a state of mind by means of an objective correlative, rather than through action, as in the description of the trees quoted earlier, is a device used extensively in the novel. It takes two main forms: the use of a description of landscape and environment to reflect a mental landscape; and the use of physical description of people to image their personalities.

^Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), p. 236. 54

The novel opens with a description of what John sees from the train window:

It was nearly four o'clock on a Thursday in the middle of October, and the air had begun to thicken as it always does before a dusk in Autumn. The sky had become stiff with opaque clouds. When they were clear 6? the gasometers, the wagons and blackened bridges of Banbury, he looked out over the fields, noticing the clumps of trees that sped by, whose dying leaves each had an individual colour, from palest ochre to nearly purple, so that each tree stood out distinctly as in spring. The hedges were still green, but the leaves of the convulvuli threaded through them had turned sickly yellow, and from a distance looked like late flowers. Little arms of rivers twisted through the meadows, lined with willows that littered the surface with leaves. The waters were spanned by empty footbridges, (p. 21)

Immediately, a certain tone is established which pervades the novel; the sense of the dying year with all its sombre accompaniments relieved only by flashes of beauty for which the season is also responsible; the sense of increasing cold and bleakness with the onset of winter. And, although John is to all appearances at the beginning of a new life, it becomes apparent that the novel is much more concerned with the ending of the old way of life and the loss of innocence.

Just as the dying leaves in the very process of dying acquire beauty, so too in John's increasing awareness is a certain beauty. The image is worked out so that at the end of the novel it is winter and by this point John's old life is totally destroyed and there is a bleakness in his awareness which the season reflects. 55

Because John's emotional development is the focus of the novel, it is his mood which is most often described in terms of his surroundings. Apart from adding to our awareness of his emotional state, this method also increases our sense of John's vulnerability, for often he clearly sees himself as the victim of a hostile world; but when he meets with kindness in his relationships with people like Christopher, then his sense of warmth and security extends itself into seeing his environment as no longer hostile. On his first morning in

Oxford he does not encounter the positive unfriendliness he anticipates from Christopher and so, when he walks through the town, his feelings of alienation are modified, as though he measures his acceptibility in Oxford by Christopher's attitude towards hims he looked curiously around him at the shops, the broad white pavements and the brightly-polished knockers on private doors. Even the new red brick air-raid shelters looked attractive in the sun, and he found them as pleasant as the old buildings with their tall windows and turrets. Suddenly he felt that he was going to enjoy Oxfords his early depression lifted clean away, and he threaded his way through the town whistling a few notes to himself, (pp. 44-45)

John's response to the air-raid shelters is particularly interesting, since only the previous night he had been worried by a sense of the discrepancies in his new environment and his own inability to reconcile them. In the same way, after his meeting with Mrs; Warner, who "affected him like an invigor• ating climate" ( pi 96), he feels a sympathy between himself 56 and what Is going on around him:

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. At the sight of the blue-and-white sky, the flashing windscreens of cars, the square new red brick air-raid shelters daubed with white paint, a vigour filled him almost equal to his desire. (p. 97)

When he feels that Christopher has rejected him, as for example when he overhears his conversation with Elizabeth, he feels a latent hostility towards him in everything around him. He walks through the streets of Oxford feeling isolated and

ignored:

The traffic and people in the streets receded as he walked; a column of soldiers whistling a music-hall song marched by on the other side of the road without paying any attention to him; a van was unloading bacon into a grocer's and he had to wait while a huge half-split pig wrapped in sacking was carried in. (p. 112)

In contrast, his sense of purpose after his first meeting with Gillian projects into a situation very similar to the one above his own vitality and energy and makes him part of the whole scene:

There had been a sharp frost the night before and lorries that had been out all night had white roofs that sparkled in the sun; The sky was remote and blue: everywhere an atmosphere of briskness prevailed. John watched large trays of loaves and buns being carried into a confectioner's shop from a van; already shoppers were out and students cycled past with books tumbled carelessly in the basket at their handlebars, (p. 160) 57

An even clearer example of this occurs as a result of his relief that Gillian is not involved with Christopher and his friends. The day itself is one which in another mood would seem depressing hut he endows it with his own feeling of excitement:

It was only half light when he took his towel and went for a bath, and a few stars were still shining among the towers. Smoke from newly-lit fires poured from chimneys and was whipped away. Wind, warm and blustering, tore along under the overcast sky: in half an hour it would be an ordinary dull morning. But John did not see it like that; this half- light, this standing as it were on a prow coming over the edge of a new day, all seemed to represent the Imminence of something new. And what could that be but Jill? The wet green grass in the quadrangle, the brooding of the cloisters, the trees with their dripping twigs, and, above all, the wind—these felt like the agents of some great force that was on his side. (pp. 182-3)

His disillusionment about Gillian is followed immediately by the news of the bombing of Huddlesford, so that John's

feeling of being emotionally destroyed is echoed in the

physical destruction all around him.

For the most part Larkin's handling of correlatives is

skilful and there is a sense of what John Press describes as

the visual aspects of the images fusing perfectly with the

emotional and intellectual. There are, however, occasions when such images fail since the image seems to be there for

its own sake so that the reader's attention focuses on it rather than being simultaneously concerned with the emotion and its correlative. The use of the dog at the end of the 58

novel fails in this way; it is too contrived and what it

reveals about the concluding situation of the novel has

already been made clear in more subtle and successful ways;

There are also a number of similes used which tend to distract

rather than illuminate since they usually occur not

individually but in series, so that the action is slowed down.

Two examples of the use to which Larkin puts physical

descriptions will suffice since, though it is a device used

very frequently, the method used and the significance attached

to appearance remains the same. The most important description

in the novel is the first one of Johns

He was an undersized boy, eighteen years old, with a pale face and soft pale hair brushed childishly from left to righti Lying back against the seat, he stretched his legs out and pushed his hands to the bottom of the pockets of his cheap blue overcoat. The lapels of it curled outx^ards and creases dragged from the buttons. His face was thin, and perhaps strained; the expression round the mouth was ready to become taut, and a small frown lingered on his forehead. His whole appearance lacked luxuriance. Only his silky hair, as soft as seeding thistle, gave him an air of beauty; (p: 21)

John's appearance illustrates clearly his personality. There

is in his a.ppearance and also in his personality, a meagreness aaad deprived quality. His appearance and behaviour both

indicate his background and his awareness of it. However, he

has a redeeming feature, the unlikely beauty of his hair, just as the poverty of his personality is relieved by the quality

of his imagination. 59

Christopher's appearance contrasts strongly with that of John in the same way that their personalities differ:

The young man was taller and stronger than John, with dark dry hair brushed back from his forehead, and a square, stubbly jaw. His nose was thick and his shoulders broad; John felt a twinge of distrust. He wore a dark grey lounge suit and dark blue shirt and on his right hand was a square- faced gold ring. There was a swagger in his bearing, he held himself well upright. (p. 27)

Christopher is as obviously a young man as John is still a boyi His aggressive nature is expressed in his build and in a certain coarseness in his appearance; his general confidence shows in his bearing and his sense of well-being in his clothes and the totality of his appearance.

The nature and effect of time is a theme of importance in Larkin's poetry; in the two novels time is less a theme than a part of the basic structure. It is as though in the larger medium Larkin is working out his theory of time rather than assuming it or presenting it in crystallized form. Both novels begin in medlas res and in both there is a section which recreates the past through a viewpoint different from the central character of the action in the present. In Jill the viewpoint is mostly that of Mr. Crouch in the retrospective section, so that we have a fairly objective view of John's background! In A Girl in Winter the viewpoint is that of

Katherine but a younger and very different Katherine so that the sense of a different viewpoint is created. After a view 6o of the past the reader is returned to the present and assesses it rather differently so that the past is definitely impinging on the present: There are then glimpses of the past through the eyes of the central characters. Since their view of the past is tinged by the present we see how the nature of the present and its affect on the character is recreating the past. The situation becomes further complicated in Jill by

John's refusal to accept the past and his creation of a new past which affects the present and which he projects into the future. At the point at which John is most involved in his creation of Jill, he lives in two presents, the one in his mind and the physical one to which he gives scant attention.

Yet another assessment of the past is made when John returns to Huddlesford taking with him an awareness of the changes he has undergone:

The structure of the novel becomes in itself an image through which Larkin seems to be exploring the idea that the past is never something which is over, finished and static but something which is always being recreated and which always adheres to the present so that they are mutually interacting. CHAPTER III

A GIRL IN WINTER

A Girl in Winter^ represents a similar advancement from Jill in its structure, theme, and informing philosophy

2 as The Whltsun Weddings does from The Less Deceived.3 j_n both cases the later work is more mature and a more complete achievement of the writer's purpose. In both he demonstrates a greater capacity for a broad sympathy for and an awareness of the society in which he lives. In fact, the development of Katherine as portrayed in the novel is clearly reflected in the growth of Larkin's own awareness as indicated in the differences between the two later volumes of poetry. A Girl in Winter is closer to the two volumes of poetry than Jill is, since it is even more clearly a prose poem. Although the time structure of this novel is more complex than that

°f Jill* the action is more clearly simplified and directed towards imaging the growth of Katherine's awareness, and all details of the environmental setting contribute more obviously

*P. Larkin, A Girl in Winter (London: Faber and Faber, 1964). Unless otherwise indicated all page reference within the text in this chapter will refer to this novel.

2P. Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings (London: Faber and Faber, 1964).

3p. Larkin, The Less Deceived (Hessle: The Marvell Press, 1962). 62 and closely to this same end. It is the increased tightness of control over all the elements to create a novel in which everything unites to form the image of the girl in winter that makes this novel even closer to poetry than is Jill.

As indicated in the previous chapter, both Jill and

A Girl in Winter represent an investigation through their structures of Larkin's theory of time. In Jill he relies to some extent on two different viewpoints to give a sense of the past as it really was, and how it is changed in the mind of John in the present. Because we see John's past through

Crouch's eyes, we gain an impression of objectivity. This means that in some respects Larkin evades issues which he does deal with in A Girl in Winter, where we see both present and past through Katherine's eyes. In Jill it becomes apparent, as I have already said, that Larkin is exploring the idea of the interaction of past and present and the continual recre• ation of both. But, although he suggests the filtering process of the individual consciousness affecting and in turn being affected by past and present, through such incidents as John's overhearing Christopher and Elizabeth and what he recollects of this, he does not fully integrate this problem with that of the interaction of past and present. In A Girl in Winter he does attempt to deal with the whole problem by using

Katherine as a constant point of reference. 63

The Katherine we meet in the first section of the book

is a girl in winter both physically and psychologically; she

is almost totally detached from her surroundings and the people with whom she comes into daily contact. The strongest emotional response she makes is in her hatred towards Mr. Anstey. Yet

throughout the first section are references back to the summer

spent with the Fennels. In retrospect this part of Katherine's

life, which had also been spent in England, has taken on all

the warmth and involvement which the present lacks. It is because she has become totally aware of her detachment and

been frightened by it, rather than pleased, that she allows

this part of her past to be reintroduced into her life. Her

letter to Jane which is her first attempt to re-establish

contact with the Fennels is an acknowledgement to herself about her way of life, and what the memory of the Fennels has

come to mean in this context:

So where did the Fennels come in all this? Simply, that she was lonely; more complexly, that they supported her falling hope that she was wrong to think that her life had worsened so irrevocably. Since writing to Jane, those three nearly- forgotten weeks had taken on a new character in her memory. It was the only period of her life that had not been spoiled by later events, and she found that she could draw upon it hearteningly, remembering when she had been happy, and ready to give and take, Instead of unwilling to give, and finding nothing worth taking. It was as if she hoped they would warm back to life a part of her that had been frozen, with the same solicitude she had tried to give Miss Green that morning— though she feared in retrospect that she had done no more than if she had handed her an elaborate basket of fruit left for weeks in a refrigerator, all frosted over and tasteless. 64

It was extravagant, even melodramatic. But she could hardly have cared more if her life had depended on them. (pp. 185-6)

Despite the fact that she has been in England for two years, she has not previously contacted the Fennels. She had instead refused to admit that her life in England had any reality; to link the present with the past and thus some hope for the future in England would be to give the present a substance she is unwilling to allow. Instead, she had attempted to govern time and assert control over a situation forced upon her by external circumstance by admitting only the immediate present and attempting to exclude the past and the future:

And so she had set herself to climb out of the slithering pit into which she had fallen, without success at first, but as time went on managing to re-establish herself gradually, to regain her willpower, to avoid the terrible moments that left her sickened. She did this by suppressing as far as she could every reference to her former life, and treating every day as complete in itself. She ate, slept and worked, and refused to compare what she did or ate, or where she slept, with any work or food or household she had known in the past; Everything had to be reduced to its simplest terms. (p. 181)

Yet even the rigidity of the imposed pattern had not succeeded in making time stand still. Katherine's control over time does not really exist, for without her awareness she has in fact been moulded by the pattern she had felt she was shaping; she recognises the futility of what she has been attempting: 65

The truth was, she had not been facing the facts. To live from day to day, as she had been doing, shut out the past, but it shut out the future too, and made the present one long temporary hand-to-mouth existence. (p; 182)

With this awareness comes also the realization of the changes

which she has undergone which now make her vision of taking

up the past where she had left off completely impossiblef

All the time she had been behaving as if everything would suddenly snap back to normal, if she could only hang on a little longer. Without admitting it to herself, she had been believing that in a little while the walls would fly back, and at a touch she would find herself back at home, or studying in the university, with her old life about her. It shocked her to realize she had been believing anything so absurd, and it shocked her to realize that it was absurd. But a third fact shocked her most of all: that even if her old life had been waiting for her, she no longer wanted to return to it. (p. 182)

Her perspective on life changes, and she realizes that a

continuity exists in her life despite the apparently disruptive

elements breaking in on it; Whereas John in Jill simply reaches

a stage of recognising that he has broken with the past and

become someone different, Katherine's awareness is maturer in

proportion as circumstances have treated her more harshly. She

too realizes that she cannot return to the past or the person

she was before the break with her old life was made, but she

can see a continuity and the fact that the past has played a

part in creating what she is in the present:

For she knew, now, that in most lives there had to come a break, when the past dropped away and the maturity it had 66 enclosed for so long stood painfully upright....life ceased to be a confused stumbling from one illumination to another, a series of unconnected clearings in a tropical forest, and became a flat landscape, wry and rather small, with a few unforgettable landmarks somewhat resembling a stretch of fenland, where an occasional dyke or broken fence shoxis up for miles, and the sails of a mill turn all day long in the steady wind. (p. I83)

When Katherine has reached this stage of awareness, she makes a voluntary return to her past. John is forced to do so by external circumstances. John is aware of little more than his complete break from the past whilst Katherine begins to both assess the past and to use its qualities as a means of evaluating the present. She begins to look at events of her everyday routine, her environment and her work at the library instead of simply accepting them passively. She attempts to measure things as they would appear to the Fennels, seeing them as people who unlike herself, are involved with life and people. The first instance of this occurs as she waits to take Miss Green home:

What would the Fennels think of this, Katherine wondered. She stood waiting in the entrance-hall of the library, three minutes later, as she had been bidden. This was a dim, unheated place, with double swing-doors leading out into the street: two sets of glass doors lay on either side, to the Lending Library and to the Reading room. The only piece of furniture was a large double-sided stand, painted duck-egg green, for Official War Photographs. This was now covered with pictures of destroyers, aeroplanes, and tanks in the desert: sometimes urchins crept in and stared at them, or prised out the drawing-pins to steal. High up on the walls, in the shadow from the blacked-over windows, hung worthless paintings by local artists. 67

What would they imagine from her letter? To them the phrase 'working in a library* would call up a picture of calf-bound aisles, with her holding hushed conversations with professors, or drowsing at a mahogany desk: they would be under the impression that the work involved some form of studying, un• aware that library assistants are forced to do everything with books except read them. They certainly would not visualize the daily round of string bags, trembling old men, tramps reading newspapers through magnifying glasses, soldiers asking to consult a medical dictionary. (pp. 21-22)

In her attempt to apply their standards to her life she begins to reconsider exactly what she knows of them and attempts to build up a mental image of them. She cannot recall details but her increased sensitivity to her surroundings created by her new contact with them gives her a sense of people more alive than she has felt since she came to England: she becomes aware of this as she looks out from the bus at the Saturday crowds in the streets:

This kind of scene—though it reminded her of them—would mean nothing to the Fennels at all. They only noticed things that artists had been bringing under their noses for centuries, such as sunsets and landscapes. Or was that unjust? It was all very well saying the Fennels would notice this or that, but her memories of them were not at all clear.... She looked from the unevenly-travelling bus, and saw a cheap dress shop, where a bare-ankled girl was arranging a copy of a stylish model; then a linen-draper's, with an old ceremonial frontage; a milk-bar, permanently blacked-out, with the door ajar and no-one on the tall stools; a pawn-shop window crowded with old coins, shirts, a theodolite, bed-pans and a harp; a public- house door with a bright brass rail, just opening; a sudden gap of high, papered walls and a heap of bricks, furred with frost, where a house had been destroyed. There was nothing in all this to remind her of them, yet it did. (pp. 29-30)

The very discrepancy between what Katherine is now noticing

in such detail and the kind of environment in which the Fennels 68

live indicates that the influence they have on her is not simply to remind her of their presence but to recreate in her a capacity for being aware of and interested in her surround•

ings however alien, as she had been during the summer spent with them. The warmth with which she associates the past becomes part of the present so that the cold quality of her detachment Is changed and affects her attitude towards Miss

Green:

Katherine, who ever since she had got up that morning had been thinking of the Fennels and herself with increasing excitement, was suddenly startled to sympathy for her..i; It was so unusual that she knew it to be linked with the thankfulness she had been feeling for the last few days. (PP. 3^-35)

She begins to attempt to communicate and once started is so eager to succeed that her conflict with the dentist becomes a significant trial—"she wanted desperately to move him, to make some contact." (p. 46) In the same way, uncharacteristic• ally of the person she has become in her detachment, she finds herself involved with Veronica Parbury's troubles and viewing Mr. Anstey as a person not a monster for the first time In her acquaintance with him:

For her conception of him as a hostile cartoon she had to substitute a person who had and could evoke feelings, who would undertake the support of an old woman, and on whose account she had seen another crying....when she next saw his mean face looking up at her, she would—if she were honest—be forced to juggle with rights and wrongs, instead of plainly wishing him dead. (pp. 204-5) 69

Despite the fact that the awareness of the past is what governs the change in Katherine's attitude towards everything around her, it is less her precise memory of events that is effective than that a part of her which had been develop• ed at this particular stage of her life comes alive again once she recognises that it had once existed. What she recollects of events during the summer spent with the Fennels is in fact inaccurate and is so to some extent because of the changes which have taken place in her. She remembers the Fennels as being typically English as she indicates when debating with herself the wisdom of having written to thems

And it might even be that they would dislike dealing with her because of her nationality, for the English, she found—and the Fennels were nothing if not English—were characterized in time of war by antagonism to every foreign country, friendly or unfriendly, as a simple matter of instinct. (p. 22)

And yet we learnin Book Two that this Is not at all the sense

Katherine had had of the Fennels, since she had become distinctly aware while staying with them of how much they had ceased to make her feel a foreigner. For whenever she had come into contact with other English people during her visit they had made her very much aware of the fact that she was not

English. The woman in the Post Office makes her feel like

"some rare animal in captivity" (p. 133)» and Jack Stormalong creates awkward moments by falling to make her understand him and by treating her as a distinct outsider: 70 he never said anything to Katherine. When they brought her into the conversation he forced himself to take notice of her, blinking his cold blue eyes once or twice. It was not quite as if they had introduced the maid into the discussion, but all the same he seemed disconcerted. (p. 160)

At the gymkhana, where the crox«xd is as typically English as possible, Jane is as much an observer and as detached as

Katherine herself.

What causes Katherine to think of the Fennels in this way is her highly developed sensitivity to her foreignness created by the. situation which exists in the present. Similarly, because of her general detachment and lack of contact with people, when she recollects Robin she does not remember with any conviction her brief but powerful feelings of love for him nor his attempt to kiss her:

There had been Robin, of course; he had puzzled her at first, because he was so very English—how English she never realized till she met more English people—but once she had got used to him he had been rather dull. She did not remember ever having been attracted by him.... Then afterwards she had told her friends that Robin was passionately, simply madly and passionately, in love with her. One had had to say something. Hadn't he kissed her once? Of had she made that up afterwards? (p. 180)

It is significant that it is when Katherine has made contact with the Fennels that she begins to have again a sense of a continuity in life, for her sense of disrupted time con• trasts with her ideas of time and those implied of Robin in the summer interlude. Throughout the middle section of the novel the stress is on the sense of history and'.a meaningful 71 time continuum. Katherine is constantly reminded of the past and its relationship to the present because she is living in a place of obvious antiquity where people and things have changed only gradually or not at all. The description of the gymkhana and the people attending suggests that this event is one which marks the passing of every year and at the same time establishes how little things have changed. The descrip• tion of the children crystallizes this impression:

Finally, there were the village children, the elder ones minding the younger, busy with anything but what was going on in the roped-off arena. Little ones strayed about almost under the feet of the horses. Small groups of bullet-headed boys, who a hundred years ago would have been scaring crows for a few pence a week, lifted their bottles to the sun to see who could drink the most without stopping: (p. 112)

The visit to Oxford is made on Robin's suggestion and it becomes clear that he enjoys the sense of visible history where a feeling of contact with the past is easy to achieve. It is the continuity which impresses him, whilst Katherine is more impressed by the disparities contained within the continuum:

But, as he continued to recite the litany of monasteries, kings, noblemen and prelates, she realized that every century had left accretions, and though she did not trouble to follow his details, she was impressed by the uniqueness of the place, where such variety was controlled within a single atmosphere. (p. 139)

Robin seems to enjoy the fact that man has asserted some kind of resistance to his mortality by perpetuating himself in his buildings; while Katherine sees even Oxford in such a large 72 perspective that it too seems temporal, being different from man only in degree: she leaned back and thought that as far as age was concerned, sheer age that was almost timelessness, the sound of the trees was more impressive. The surrounding tree-tops settling and unsettling with an endless sifting of leaves reminded her as she lay with closed eyes of the unceasing wash of waves round the shingle of an island. They filled the air with whispering of eternity, of as near eternity as made no matter, making this place, famous as it was, like all other places. Like all other places, it was both temporal and eternal, and she found that degrees of temporality did not interest her—while in eternity, of course, there were no such measurements. (p. 140)

The difference between the attitudes of Katherine and Robin is shown again through Katherine's interest in the Jacobean memorial. Part of the fascination it holds for her is the fact that it has in some way gone beyond time and man and become associated with the timelessness of the elements. She does not tell Robin of her feelings since she recognises that he would be uneasy at the timelessness and attempt to control it by naming the occupant of the grave.

It is not only a sense of the past which creates an awareness of the time continuum in the middle section of the book, but also Katherine's awareness of the future. In this part of the book she several times detaches herself from the present and attempts to see how it will look when she has really become distant from it. She seems fascinated by the disparity between what will seem to have existed and her sense of something making an impression on her beyond the actual sequence of events which will be recollected. Despite her own activities in this direction she resents the conversation between Robin, Jane and Jack about the length of Jacks stay, since they are discussing a time when Katherine will no longer be with them. She feels that a future which does not contain her is being shaped, and since they have no awareness of her immediate future it is as though they are denying its exist• ence and disturbing the sense of continuity by indicating that the present is rapidly splitting into two futures which are unrelated: This sense of separation is added to, and something of the future gap between them suggested, when Robin talks to Katherine about the Thames. In this case Robin's sense of history suggests diffusion rather than continuity:

"If we'd lived in prehistoric times, before England was an island, I could nearly have taken you home. The Thames used to flow into the Rhine." (p. 172)

The impossibility of entirely subtracting the present moment from the flux, which Katherine becomes fully aware of later, is first indicated whilst she is with the Fennels. On her last evening she reviews the last three weeks and regards them as something finished:

It's come to an end, she thought. No matter what she thought might happen, or what she had done that she regretted, it was all now part of the past. Tomorrow she would undertake the long journey back to her normal life, and this isolated excursion to England would remain in her mind as something irrelevant and beautiful. For better or worse, it was over; 74

it had been dull, perhaps; Robin had been less exciting than she had thought he would be, but that might be for the best: The parents had been tactful and quite uninterested in her, which had been a good thing. The house, so comfortable and unpretentious, would stand for many years yet among the trees, and she would not miss it: As for what she would tell her friends, she would distort her visit into something amusing. There was nothing sacred about it. Yet for all that as they floated there she x\ranted to add nothing more, not a word or a look: It was finished. (p. 173)

Yet seconds later Robin kisses her and her sense of completion disappears and yet another perspective appears and has to be added to what she had considered fully understood.

The incident in which the photo is taken makes a similar

point. The Fennels intend to take two photos, a group and one of Katherine alone: The first photo is taken:

And so the image of them standing and sitting in relaxed . attitudes in the evening sun was pressed onto the negative for all eternity: (p. 162)

Since there proves to be no more film In the camera, this one photo serves as the image to be carried into the future. But because it is static and represents one moment in isolation

it is entirely false: Katherine is not as much a part of the group as she appears to be, and a photo of her alone would be more accurate; the group which is depicted as relaxed, in reality represents a continually shifting and complex set of relationships.

In the Third Book, when Robin does actually arrive at

Katherine's rooms, he falls to bring the past into the present 75 as Katherine had hoped and anticipated. What she has made insufficient allowance for is that the Robin she remembers is, like the photo, a false image, since that version of Robin no longer exists• He too is disappointed in the meeting as though he had hoped that by contacting someone at once connected with and dissociated from his past a new continuity could be established. The old continuity is broken, his relationship with his parents and with his sister has ceased to be meaning• ful, so that his childhood seems to be severed from the present and the pattern he had created for his future is destroyed by the interruption of the war and the uncertainty it brings with iti Katherine*s disappointment gradually diminishes and as she sees more clearly and accepts the situation she gains a kind of strength and exhilaration from her sense of awarenessi

Robin, who has always seen continuity in a more rigid and limited way, is less able to accept the disruptions as part of a pattern, and he has a sense of chaos and dislocation against which he fights by laying stress on the present:

Unlike Katherine he does not do this by severing connections and suppressing expectations of a meaningful existence, but by trying to establish contacts which have meaning in the present, however temporary. The last few paragraphs of the novel establish the difference clearly and probably present

Larkincs own views through Katherine. As the night wears on and Katherine's watch ticks as a constant reminder, Robin protests against the awareness insisted on by the ticking of 76

the vra.tch, and at the same time talks almost desperately,

trying both to see something meaningful in his life and to

make contact with Katherine. Katherine accepts the watch as

she accepts the inevitable progress of time and in her

acceptance finds some kind of tranquillity which contrasts

with Robin's restlessness. Her state of mind and Larkin's

own attitude seems to be crystallized in the final image of

the novel:

There was the snow, and her watch ticking. So many snowflakes, so many seconds. As time passed they seemed to mingle in their minds, heaping up into a vast shape that might be a burial mound, or the cliff of an iceberg whose summit is out of sight: Into its shadow dreams crowded, full of conceptions and stirrings of cold, as if icefloes were moving down a lightless channel of water. They were going in orderly slow procession, moving from darkness further into darkness, allowing no suggestion that their order should be broken, or that one day, however many years distant, the darkness would begin to give place to light. Yet their passage was not saddening. Unsatisfied dreams rose and fell about them, crying out against their implacability, but in the end glad that such order, such destiny, existed. Against this knowledge, the heart, the will, and all that made for protest, could at last sleep, (p: 248)

The juxtaposing of the snow and the watch is a drawing together

of the images which operate throughout the novel. The whole

day in which the events take place is one of tension. The cold

and the frost have seemed a prelude to snow which has not come:

As the snow falls the tension is broken and the cold becomes

less intense. In the same way, Katherine has been moving

throughout the day, which is also her life in microcosm,

towards an acceptance of an order and destiny which she cannot 77 resist; an order which is represented by the signals of the passing hours from clocks, watches and timetables.

The time structure of A Girl In Winter has much in common with that of Virginia Woolf' s Mrs I Dalloway. In both there is a desire to indicate that any one moment contains and implies all other moments; that the individual can have the illusion of the speeding up and slowing of time controlled by himself, whilst constantly clocks and watches mark a steady and inexorable movement towards the end of the day and by implication the end of life. The events of A Girl in Winter are contained within one day of Katherine's life, but in that day the whole pattern of her life is explored. As In Mrs.

Dalloway, the use of flashback is always kept in control by the writer's stress on the movement of time in the present.

For example, in the' third book of the novel, whilst Katherine assesses her immediate past and the summer spent with the

Fennels, both she and the reader are very much aware of the passing of the hours from noon as she constantly refers to her watch and attempts to keep to the library timetable.

This emphasis on the physical time serves to emphasise the shifting speed of mental time. This is shown most clearly after Katherine has received news of the cancelling of Robin's visit. Time is suddenly suspended and she becomes aware of the way in which the pace of the day has echoed her own excite• ment about the visit: 78

He had been the power that had set this extraordinary day moving, that increased its speed until she and a few other chance things and people were drawn up in a kind of whirling tower of air, their faces meeting, their hands touching, seemingly the only things left in the world. And now, like the switching-off of a current, he said he was not coming, and they were all left there, spinning in the emptiness, till the impetus should be exhausted and they were tumbled back on the floor. (pp. 212-213)

With the sudden decrease in speed the sense of each moment linking with the next until only the movement is apparent

is lost, and Katherine once again finds herself aware of the slowness of time and the meaninglessness of both the moment and its relationship to the rest of her life. She begins to think of her existence in the following terms:

But did she really care what she did in England? There would be other things for her to do, and whatever it was she would do it unwillingly, obstinately, as if she were working in a field; what she did would be emptied away like a pain• fully-filled basket, and her time would be spilled away with it. There would be sleep, simply to freshen her again for work; there would be other Miss Greens, Miss Parburys, Mri Ansteys; all this was inescapable, and it did not matter if she accepted it or not: It accepted her: (p. 216)

As in Jill, the time theme is related to the use of the journey image, since movements in time and progress of emotional development are often depicted by means of a physical journey of some kind. Once again and for the same reasons the particular image of the railway journey and the travellers contained within the railway carriage is explored, but in the use of this image and of the other images there is some difference. 79

In Jill John is only half aware of the link between his journeys back and forth between Huddlesford and Oxford and his increasing awareness and maturity; for Katherine the link becomes increasingly explicit; Her two major journeys, both to England, have been related so obviously to important changes in her outlook that for her the natural expression of her sense of any emotional change taking place is in terms of a journeyi In the middle section of the book in which the summer spent with the Fennels is described, Katherine uses the travel image only rarely and perhaps in half realised response to Jane's comment on herself and Robin shortly after Katherine's arrivals "And we were tired after our lack of journeys" (pi 92).

This comment is developed in Jane's attitude towards travel generally, she has a strong desire to get outside the narrow limits of herself and, through living in a different world, contacting different people, to add something to her awareness both of herself and other people. She contrasts her attitude with Robin'ss

"I like to know about places.... All you care about is the birthrate and the standard of living. I want to know what I should feel like if I lived there." (p. 96)

Something of her desire to gain at least a part of this through contact with Katherine communicates itself to Katherine so that she thinks of the time the three of them have spent together "as if the three of them had been wandering in a 80 green maze, getting no nearer the centre" (p. 115)* Towards

the very end of the three weeks holiday Katherine's feelings about the effect of Robin and the holiday on her life crystallizes as she watches Robin manoeuvering the boat down the river:

There was something formal about him, as if her were a figure in allegory, carrying her a stage further on some undefined journey. (pi 172)

During the winter sections of the book, when the journey image recurs in Katherine's mind, it is once again in association with Robin, for it is her renewed awareness of him and his family that causes her to feel, as she accompanies Miss Green home: "Even getting on the bus gave a momentary flicker of pleasure, as if she were entering on a fresh stage of some important journey" (p. 29). The important journey proves to be her new ability to respond to someone like Miss Green and her response also takes the form of wanting to help Miss Green to get somewhere:

This was what she had not had for ages, a person dependent on her: there were streets around that she must help her to cross, buses she must help her on and afterwards buy the tickets, for the pain the girl was suffering had half-obliterated her notice of the world. In the dull suburb was her home, and she must help her to reach it safely, and hand her over to whoever would take care of her next. (p; 35)

The letter from Robin maintains and even increases what she has begun to feel, for she sees her meeting with Robin as 81 a new stage of assessment_in her life and perhaps a point from which her life will take a new direction. It is because of this that she sets off to her meeting with Miss Parbury, which will in its turn provide her with a wider recognition of the people around her, with her earlier feeling of an undefined but necessary journey:

It seemed quite natural to her to set off on this errand as she made her way towards the Bank Street bus-stop once morei This day was already so unlike other days that it was beginning to resemble an odyssey in a dream: to find herself in strange places, looking for strange people, folloxtfing out thin threads of coincidence; (pp. 179-180)

In retrospect, after the telegram cancelling Robin's visit, the whole day seems like a journey towards a discovery: she felt tired, as if that day she had made a journey.;:. She knew she had made some discovery about herself, but just at the moment she had forgotten what it was, and inclined to think she had been fancying it. (p. 225)

She has not in fact yet made the discovery about herself; she has simply prepared herself through the day's events for the recognition which follows her meeting with Robin: that the kind of contact she has been hoping for from the meeting with

Robin may not be possible, at least for her, but that in realizing this she learns something about the quality of life.

In this situation her demands and expectations from the relationship are diminished and she is left free to respond in a limited but positive way. It is at this point that the 82

image of the railway carriage occurs:

What abstract kindliness she could command was at his service, but it was no more than she might show to a fellow-traveller in a railway-carriage or on board a steamer. Indeed, that was the strongest bond she felt between them, that they were journeying together, with the snow, the discomfort, the food they shared, the beds that were not warm enough. In this situation she need know nothing more about him: there was a fire, that he paid to keep burning; she had hot coffee she could give him; there was so much laconic mutual help, while outside lay the plains, the absence of the moon, the complete enmity of darkness. (pi 237)

The journey of course has one destination, as the last two paragraphs describing the icefloes indicate.

The journey image is also worked out in terms of the action of the novel. As already mentioned the most important

journeys are Katherine's two journeys to England between which there is a. strong contrast. The first is typified by the weather in which it takes place, calm, clear and warm.

Katherine is brought to greater awareness as a result of this

journey, but the premises on which her life is based are not affected. The second time on which she journeys to England, the winter and the war reflect the upheaval, the lack of warmth and the destruction of things Katherine had thought basic to her personality:

She knew—for such a break brings knowledge, but no additional strength—that her old way of living was finished. In the past she thought she had found happiness through the interplay of herself and other people. The most important thing had been to please them, to love them, to learn them so fully that their personalities were as distinct as the taste of different fruits. Now this brought happiness no longer: she no longer felt that 83 she was exalted or made more worthy if she could spin her friendships to incredible subtlety and fineness; It was something she had tired of doing. And what had replaced it? Here she was at a loss; She was not sure if anything had replaced it. She was not sure if anything would replace it: (pp. 183-4)

Again Larkin is asserting that though development in awareness is necessary, it does not bring happiness or enable an opti• mistic view of life, since awareness can only reveal man's loneliness and ultimate helplessness.

There are many minor journeys for Katherine within the context of the major ones. Whilst she is in Oxfordshire there are the trips down the river. On one of which Katherine becomes aware of her love for Robin, on another she recognises that her awareness of Jane is far from being complete, and on a third the neat scheme of the holiday she has formed in her head is disrupted when Robin kisses her. The various walks through the village and from the gymkhana all mark some progress in development; The journey made to Oxford with Robin enables her to see clearly that the image she has built up around Robin is entirely erroneous and leads her to a greater awareness of

Jane and the reasons underlying the invitation to visit the

Fennels; In the winter sections of the book she makes three bus journeys. On the first her desire to be more outgoing and to make contact with others manifests itself. The second leads her to admit that people are not caricatures, that even someone like Mri Anstey has feelings and vulnerabilities she had chosen 84 to ignorei The third journey home from work is the one which leads to her meeting with Robin and her recognition of her limitations and those of life.

To some extent Robin undergoes the same progress towards awareness, though he is always less aware than Katherine: The journey to Oxford with Katherine seems to bring him to a very startled awareness of himself with which he cannot deal satis• factorily. Katherine has reached the same awareness earlier and understood better what was happening and how to react;

This difference is most clearly apparent in their winter meeting. Robin is about to make a journey to an unknown destination and he is involved with a similar break from every• thing which is familiar to him just as Katherine had been on coming to England in wartime: His reaction to his situation is the opposite of hers; he does not look for strength in isolation but tries desparately to establish relationships to shore up his sense of what life should be; and yet the prospects ahead of him have forced him to realize that the values iihich are normally regarded as most important lose their significance in such a situation. He lies awake trying to work out for himself what values are left to him:

"One's got to have some sort of aim in life, or you might as well be dead: Listen who's talking. My chances aren't worth much: But take these blokes who are getting married, there was one only last week; I think it's silly of them, downright silly: What's the point of it? You leave the girl, and get yourself wiped out...I don't only mean it from a practical 85 point of view—. .1. I mean who's got anything to offer anyone these days? Badly put. I say, I'm sorry to burble like thisi But it's not worth while. Obviously it's the only worth• while thing, a career and getting a family, increasing and multiplying, whatever that means. But when you don't feel it—I mean, if I asked you, for instance, to marry me, you'd refuse, wouldn't you..iwouldn't you?" "I suppose so." "Well, there you are, then." (p. 247)

Despite this realization that something has happened to all the traditional values, Robin retains a reluctance to let them go altogether and follows up these speculations with a half suppressed desire to make Katherine marry him and thus assert a value he is accustomed toi

Description of physical environment is used as a reflection of a mental condition, just as it is in Jill, but in A Girl in Winter the individual descriptions fit more closely into one overall pattern and are more tightly integrated with the central theme, which is a growing awareness of man's essential isolation. Much of the action of Jill takes place in autumn and, though the season is melancholy, it has moments of beauty which link it with earlier seasons. In

A Girl in Winter sharp contrast is made between the summer of the past and the uncompromising winter coldness of the present.

This movement from the autumn of Jill to the winter of A Girl in Winter is echoed in the themes as I shall indicate later.

The opening paragraphs of A Girl in Winter perform the same function as those of Jill in setting the tone which is to 86 dominate the novel. The first section of the book consists entirely of a generalised description of the effects of winter, with snow and frost. The emphasis lies on the paralyzing qualities of winter:

Villages were cut off until gangs of men could clear a passage on the roads; the labourers could not go out to work, and on the aerodromes near these villages all flying remained cancelled:111 People were unwilling to get up. To look at the snow too long had a hypnotic effect, drawing away all power of concentration, and the cold seemed to cramp the bones, making work harder and unpleasant. Nevertheless, the candles had to be lit, and the ice in the jugs smashed, and the milk unfrozen; the men had to be given their breakfasts and got off to work in the yards. Life had to be carried on, in no matter what circumscribed way. (p. 11)

But this is offset by two things; the first of these is the quality of the light emanating from the snow:

In contrast to the snow the sky looked brown1. Indeed, without the snow the morning would have resembled a January nightfall, for what light there was seemed to rise up from it. (pi 11)

The second thing the snow brings with it is the awareness of the railway, for this still affords a means of communication in spite of the effects of the weather:

But through the cuttings and along embankments ran the railway lines, and although they were empty they led on north• wards and southwards till they began to join, passing factories that had worked all night, and the backs of houses where light showed round the curtains, reaching the cities where the snow was disregarded, and which the frost could'only besiege for a few days, bitterly: (pp. 11-12) 87

Through this description Larkin suggests Katherine's state of mind whilst in England in wartime, where the enforced loneli• ness and isolation cause her to retreat into a state of numbness and Increase her isolation. Her gradual awareness of strength in isolation is suggested by the description of the light afforded by the snow and her final sense of what kind of contacts are possible is illustrated in the description of the railway^

A similar progression is illustrated by variations in the weather in the summer sequence. When Katherine arrives in

England the day is hot, unblemished, in a state of perfection that suggests an inevitable future deterioration:

The morning when she came to England for the first time had been still and hot; not an accidental fine day, but one of a series that had already lasted a week; Each had seemed more flawless than the one before it, as if in their slow gathering of depth and placidity they were progressing towards perfection. The sky was deep blue as if made richer by the endless recession of past summers: the sea smooth, and when a wave lifted the sun shone through it as through a transparent green window! (p: 67)

At this stage in her life Katherine has experienced no disappointment or disillusionment and she has encountered nothing to make her question herself or her way of life: She is like the day in that she has reached a point of maturity and happiness at which she must either remain or through greater awareness and maturity become saddened and less hope• ful; This point is made more explicit later in the novel 88 when Katherine thinks of girls she had known at school who do not appear to have experienced the sort of break that she has made whilst in England alone: girls she had known had slipped cosily from childhood to marriage, and their lives would be one long unintelligent summer; (pi I83)

As the visit to the Fennels draws to a close and Katherine finds herself with a more complex and perhaps less certain view of life, so too the summer begins to merge into autumn:

The weather, after the dash of rain, stabilized in pleasant warm sunshine, and in the evenings there was occasionally a chill in the blue shadows, an Infinitesimal hint of autumnal frost, saddening in any circumstances. (pi 163)

In contrast to the clarity of the colours and the sharp distinction between shadow and light which Katherine experiences on her arrival, the colours become more subtle and the easy distinctions less possible with the approach of autumn; In the same way Katherine*s easy judgements, evalu• ations, and decisive emotional responses have developed into something more complex and less definable but at that moment not unpleasant: Whilst she is out on the water with Robin she identifies her emotional state with her environment:

The water was the colour of pewter, for the afterglow had faded rapidly and left a quality of light that resembled early dawni It had drawn off the brightness from the meadows and stubblefields, that vrere now tarnished silver and pale yellow, and the shadows were slowly mixing with the mist. In this way 89 the edges of her emotions had blurred, and they now overlaid each other like twin planes of water running over wet sand, the last expenditure of succeeding waves. There was no longer any discord in them; she felt at peace. (p. 172)

Throughout the rest of the novel Katherine identifies with her environment; She sees in the bleakness of winter all round her, her own emotional coldness and isolation:

The quality of the winter scene seems to typify what life has come to appear to her:

For the world seemed to have moved off a little, and to have lost its immediacy, as a bright pattern will fade in many washings. It was like a painting of a winter landscape in neutral colours, or a nocturne in many greys of the riverside, yet not so beautiful as either: (p: 184)

She thinks of herself as the agent which has robbed life of its colour as if she were colour blind and thus responsible for the monotones through her own faulty vision; She feels that it is her own emotional coldness which has made life seem to lack warmth and variety, just as the physical environ• ment does not of itself lose colour but the snow overlays the colours and produces the monotone effects:

Elsewhere images of the cold are used to describe the state of emotional suspension she finds herself in: she describes the effect on her of her desolation when she had left London as "affecting her no more than the discomfort say, of a hard frost" (pi 182). She thinks of the meeting; with the

Fennels as having the potentiality to "warm back to life part 90 of her that had been frozen" (p. 185)* As she looks back on her attempts to help Miss Green she thinks "she had done no more than if she had handed her an elaborate basket of fruit left for weeks in a refrigerator, all frosted over and tasteless" (pi 185)» Robin, too, instinctively uses an image of cold to describe her reception of him; he tells her that she is "about as friendly as a blasted block of ice" (p. 238).

At times, however, the same winter environment takes on a different aspect. When Katherine has a sense of purpose and excitement she looks at the winter scene with pleasure: she felt that even the cold was delightful. Miss Brooks would see it in terms of the deadening snow that was littered every• where, but to Katherine the frost made everything stand alone and sparklei (pi 29)

The numbing quality of the cold is seen to be desirable when

Miss Green is in pain and gains temporary relief from the coldness of the water Katherine persuades her to drink; After the arrival of Robin, the winter and the cold and all they represent are seen as a challenge rather than as a sign of inevitable defeat, as Katherine indicates when she thinks of herself and Robin being fellow travellers providing mutual assistance against the cold; when she decides to let Robin stay the night it is because, "refusal would be dulling, an assent to all the wilderness that surrounded them" (p. 2^3):

The final image of the icefloes, though austere, has a kind 91 of beauty and the comparison of snow in the countryside and snow In the town does suggest that coldness and isolation in certain circumstances can acquire beauty:

And meanwhile, the winter remained. It was not romantic or picturesque: the snow, that was graceful in the country, was days old in the town: it had been trodden to a brown powder and shovelled into the gutters, (p. 177)

The attempt to create a balance between the beauty of the winter and its atrophying effects images the same attempt in dealing with the theme of loneliness and isolation. But the same thing happens in this novel as in Jill; despite suggestions that loneliness is seen as something to be desired and cherished, the cumulative effect of the novel implies that loneliness is an Inevitable part of man's condition, recognition of this is essential; but recognition involves an awareness of and a participation in the bleakness of life. Katherine suggests this when she realizes that acceptance of her lonely existence in England has brought knowledge "but no additional strength" (p. I83). In the concluding paragraphs acceptance of the "orderly, slow pro• cession, moving from darkness further into darkness," is gained at the cost of the deadening of the heart and will:

"Against this knowledge, the heart, the will, and all that made for protest, could at last sleep" (p. 248).

The winter image is the major means of focusing on the novel's theme but the nature of the central character is also 92 very Important. In her very physical appearance Katherine suggests her isolation. Even in the summer section of the book, when Katherine is still not totally aware of the in• evitability of isolation, she is set apart by her appearance:

In her dark brown skirt, white shirt and dark brown tie pinned with a small Olympic badge, and with her hair newly brushed and drawn back, she looked severe and foreign. (p. 82)

By the time she has come to work in the library, the emotional and mental barrier she has built around herself has found expression in her face:

There was little expression on her face as she closed the door behind her. Indeed, there rarely was: her pale, shield- shaped face, dark eyes and eyebrows, and high cheekbones, were not mobile or eloquent. Nor, more curiously, was her mouth, which was too wide and too full-lipped for beauty. Yet because it was alert and sensitive it should have been most expressive. Almost she looked as if her lips were bruised and she had to keep them unfamiliarly closed. Yet at other times a faint look of amusement stole into her face, as if with pleasure at the completeness with which she could cover her thoughts. And when she spoke it was with a foreign accent. (pp. 15-16)

Katherine's forelgnness is used in the same way as John's working-class origins; it enables the writer to examine man's isolation in a somewhat exaggerated form which in itself becomes an image for man's condition. When Katherine is in

England before the beginning of the war, the principal result of being foreign is that her communication with others and therefore her understanding of them is only partial. This is shown most clearly in the progress of her relationships with 93

Jane and Robin. From the outset she does not understand either of them, but she creates a mental image of each and bases her subsequent actions and responses on them. She fails to understand that at the outset her relationship with Robin is megative and that when he seems to be being positive towards her he is in fact working much more in terms of his relationship with Jane. When he suggests that Katherine's language should be used for at least part of the day he seems to be less concerned to establish an intimate relationship with Katherine than to exclude Jane and irritate her. The trip to Oxford is planned on a similar basis, but Katherine, not understanding this, assumes a new intimacy with Robin which does not exist, and therefore brings into the open

Robin's essential separation from her:

She leaned over and stroked a lock of his hair into place, at which his eyes, in the'shadow of her arm, opened wide. "Wake up," she said. "I wasn't asleep." He sat up quickly as if it had begun to rain. For a moment they sat side by side, then he scrambled to his feet. "If you've rested, we might perhaps be getting on." Katherine realized at once—though too late—that she had made an advance he would not receive, and she scrambled up blushing—blushing and bewildered. He had behaved almost as if she had scared him, and it had shaken the whole day off its course. (pp. 140-141)

This incident marks the beginning of Katherine's attempts to withdraw and isolate herself in situations with which she feels unable to deal. When they return to the Fennels' house,

Katherine decides to apologise to Jane, not because she wishes 94

to establish a more intimate relationship with her, but from

a desire to extricate herself from any sense of involvement:

Now she was actually here, she felt less eager to apologise; the desire had come in the first place from a longing to set everything right, so that she could extricate herself, as one might pay a bill before leaving a hotel. But it might lead to nothing of the sort.... More likely it would precipitate more entanglements, more commitments, clumsy and unsatisfying because she could not fathom what these English people meant, (p. 143)

It is at this point that she realizes that she has treated

Jane in much the same way that Robin has treated her and she

has failed to respond to the demand being made on her by Jane.

The real nature of her position in the Fennels' household then

becomes clear to her; she has been writing to Robin but

communicating with Jane; she has accepted Robin's invitation

when it was urged by Jane; and she has tried to build up a

relationship with Robin while Jane has been desperately trying

to break from her own isolation into Katherine's world. The result of this misunderstanding is Katherine's sense of failure

in achieving any kind of meaningful contact and she feels,

"she would pass through this house and leave no trace behind, as all the others who had slept in this guest room had done"

(p. 165). No real contact between Robin and Katherine is made during her stay since it is only when Katherine has succeeded

in mastering her feelings towards him that Robin breaks

through his indifference and kisses her. 95

During the war period in England, Katherine feels the

effects of being foreign much more strongly. The problem of

communication still exists and she feels that she may perhaps misjudge someone like Mr. Anstey because of her unfamiliarity with nuances of Inflection and language. More serious

difficulties arise from her awareness, and that of the other

people around her, of the fact that in wartime people of one nation tend to become closer knit and make any foreigner feel,

even more isolated and alien than normal. The response of a nation is a large scale working out of the sort of behaviour

that John experiences in relation to Christopher. The group

suppresses its own fears and gains a sense of security and

strength from the presence of one who is excluded. Mr. Anstey

is in some respects a version of Christopher; his position in the library is not particularly strong and he lacks social confidence; to compensate for this and make his position seem more secure he uses Katherine to assure himself that he belongs and she does not. His principal weapon against her is the

fact that she is a foreigner and therefore cut off from the background and instincts common to those who are English. In almost every conversation with Katherine he makes some allusion

such as the one which followss

"There are two mistakes there, Miss Lind, do you follow me?.... And neither of them, if I may say so, should have been made by anyone with an ounce of what we English call savvy or gumption or...nous." (p. 17) 96

His attitude is taken up by Miss Feather so that when Mr.

Anstey says with reference to someone to accompany Miss Green home, "'Send someone—ha, ha!—you'd be glad to get rid of

for an hour or two.'" Miss Feather responds by saying to

Katherine, "'Perhaps you wouldn't mind going, Miss Llnd'"

(p. 21). Katherine regards such incidents as simply an

extension of her total position in the library:

She had been appointed temporary assistant, which marked her off from the permanent staff: she was neither a junior a year or so out of school who was learning the profession, nor a senior preparing to take the intermediate or final examination.... Therefore any odd job that was really nobody's duty fell to her.... It annoyed her, not because she gave two pins for library practice, but because it stressed what was already sufficiently marked: that she was foreign and had no proper status there. (p. 25)

As she leaves the library and pauses to give assistance to a

small boy he "shrank from her foreign voice," and at the bus

stop "Miss Green stood a little away from her, as if dis•

claiming any relationship" (;p. 28). The dentist too, isolated

by his own deafness, takes note that Katherine is not English

and uses this to pierce her confidence and establish his own;

he refuses to give Miss Green gas without the presence of the

nurse, answering Katherine's objections with "'It's the law—

the law of this country'" (p. 46).

When Katherine arrives in England for the first time

she is very much afraid that as a foreigner she will feel

hopelessly lost, but apart from odd moments, such as finding 97 her drawers lined with "foreign newspapers", is well cushioned by the Fennels against the total loneliness and disorientation she is to meet on her second arrival. The second arrival in fact is the working out of the fears Katherine had had previously:

The first few weeks had been a nightmare.... Never in her life had she experienced such bottomless despair and loneliness: there was nothing familiar, nothing of her own choosing, nothing that she could turn to and grasp in the face of every• thing else. It was as if the world had been turned round, like innumerable bits of reversible scenery. (p. 181)

It is during this period that she comes to regard her isolation as not simply the result of being a foreigner in winter in

England, but as something basic in the personality she has become. She can no longer rely on contact with other people to provide her with happiness since she is irrevocably alone:

Henceforward, if she needed comfort, she would have to comfort herself; if she were to be happy, the happiness would have to burn from her own nature. In short, since people seemed not to affect her, they could not help her, and if she was to go on living she would have to get the strength for it solely out of herself. (p. 184)

Once she has accepted this it is inevitable that she will make her isolation even more extensive since she will make no demands on others and expect nothing to be asked of her. She is, therefore, surprised when she meets Veronica Parbury, who is in her own way isolated, despite the presence of her mother and the attachment with Mr. Anstey; but she does not regard 98 herself as entitled to refuse the demands made on her by others.

Despite Katherine's assertion that, "if someone is entirely dependent on you, there's something wrong somewhere. It shouldn't be asked or given" (p. 198), Miss Parbury's attitude makes an impression that she cannot entirely negate:

Having tried for so long to live for herself alone, having concluded that not even the maximum selfishness would secure the happiness she felt herself entitled to, it was disturbing to meet one who valued these things so lightly, (p. 205)

As a result she looks back on her conversation with Miss

Parbury realizing that all her previous attitudes have been based on the premise that "one should try to accept any mis• fortune with equanimity" (p. 205), but that Miss Parbury has a different basis for her life, one similar to that of the girl in the convent whom Katherine had known earlier. It seems to Katherine that this is a viewpoint that flung away at the start all conception of fortune and misfortune, this she found herself reluctantly respecting, and she could recognize her present respect by her knowledge that she would probably tell no-one of what she had learned that day. (p. 205)

Despite her intention of forgetting what she has learned from the incident, her newly acquired knowledge does inform her attitude towards Robin. Prom total boredom and dismay at the demands being made on her by him, she moves to a position where, without denying her isolation, she is able to accept 99 their relationship as one of "mutual help" in the face of the total chaos surrounding them. Katherine's final position is similar to that of the scholars In Jill, hut it is more positive in that she has reached the position less from fear of being vulnerable, than from a gradually increasing aware• ness through experience that only positive acceptance of loneliness and of other people's needs can provide her with a basis for her life which is at all meaningful.

The totality of Larkin's belief in man's essential loneliness is shown in the novel by the fact that he depicts no completely successful relationships. The relationship between Mr. Anstey, Miss Parbury and her mother is a less interesting and more pathetic version of the early relationshi between Katherine, Jane and Robin. Mr. Anstey, like Jane, is making demands which cannot be fulfilled because Miss Parbury and Katherine are each involved with a third person who appear insensible to the feeling directed towards him. Jane event• ually tries to achieve a meaningful relationship for herself in her marriage to Jack Stormalong, but at the conclusion of the novel we learn that the marriage does not seem entirely successful and that because of the war she and her husband are separated.

When Katherine first meets Robin she is very much aware of his isolation, but it seems to be something he has chosen.

The photo she has of him gives the impression that he has 100 avoided making himself known through his appearance: "The expression on his face was evasive in the sense of not being fully captured by the camera" (p. 72). On the journey to

London this impression is strengthened as she observes

Robin's expression:

It was impossible to imagine what he was thinking: he seemed perfectly adjusted to all his surroundings—including her— and able to withdraw his real personality elsewhere.... The expression on his face was cool, as if travelling alone, (p. 77)

This detachment, almost pleasure in being withdrawn, has disappeared entirely when Robin visits Katherine. His isolation is no longer assumed and enjoyed but very real and frightening to him. The contrast in his behaviour towards Katherine indicates this clearly, as he Immediately attempts to make her be outgoing towards him and give him the warmth and affection he craves. His demeanour convinces Katherine that this is the kind of demand he is constantly making in an attempt to render unreal the feelings of utter meaninglessness he Is experiencing.

Jane is like Robin in that she too has a barrier which sets her apart and prevents anyone from knowing her: but her reserve and isolation come from an inadequacy in communication of which she is fully aware. All her early conversations with

Katherine are a series of questions and when the questioning is turned on her she immediately withdraws. It is only when circumstances intervene that she finds herself able to make 101 any kind of contact with others. Her first real communication with Katherine only comes about when Katherine spills her cup of tea over the bed and in the resulting confusion the habit• ually assumed masks are dropped. After her exclusion from conversation by Robin and Katherine the resulting antagonism towards Katherine overcomes her natural reserve and she tells

Katherine something of what her life is. Her desire to break from her isolation is only partial. She wants the kind of contact that a letter gives, a sense of knowing someone and being known by them but with no absolute commitment on either side; she tries to express this to Katherine who does not fully understand:

"Don't you see what I mean?—how wonderful it would be to be able to tell them everything, and be certain that they'd never—I mean, that they'd be so remote and away from it all." (p. 148)

Here and elsewhere in the novel the letter seems to be

Larkin's image for the kind of limited communication which can be made between people. But the partial nature of what can be achieved is shown clearly in the results of Katherine's letters to Robin:

When she had written her letters she had barely known that Jane existed, and now she was asked to believe that the nets she had contrived so cunningly to capture Robin had succeeded down to the last syllable in snaring Jane. (p. 150) 102

Robin's plea to Katherine to write to him whilst he is in

the army is a clutching to the last possibility of feeling

close to someone. He is putting the same kind of hope in

these letters as Katherine had put into her letter to the

Fennels when she attempted to re-establish contact with them.

The winter is the most important image of isolation as

I have already indicated, but is a winter made bleaker and

darker by war. As in Jill the war is a constant background

and reminder that it is not only on the personal level that

confusion and lack of communication exists but also on an

international level. The lives of Katherine, Robin and Jane

have all been irreversibly disrupted by the war and in each

case their isolation Increased by it. The city blacked out

because of the war and gripped by cold images the action of

the novel.

There were a few people huddled in doorways, or walking from cinemas, but the wide central streets were deserted of traffic, and the buildings were great silent locked shells. Here and there soldiers were shouting. At this time all the town had drawn within itself. The doors and windows were shut and curtains had been arranged across them, to keep the light and warmth indoors. Outside there was none. There was no moon to show how the frost encrusted everything: the dark soared up like a cathedral, a blindness; it covered the town and the frozen allotments when the houses began to scatter into fields, then the brittle grass, and the woods. Convoys of lorries could get along the main roads with chains on, but there was no other traffic. She thought of the darkness covering not only these miles of streets around her, but also of the shores, the beaches, and the acres of tossing sea that she had crossed, which divided her from her proper home. At least her birth• place and the streets she walked in were sharing the same night, however many unfruitful miles were between them. And there too people would keep indoors, and not think of much beyond the fires that warmed them, for the same winter lay stiffly across the whole continent. (p. 224) CHAPTER IV

THE DEVELOPMENT OP THE TREATMENT OP THE THEME OF LOVE IN LARKIN'S POETRY

Like his novels, Philip Larkin's poetry focuses on the universal themes of love, death and its relation to life, time, and Nature as it reflects or impinges upon man and his values. These concerns are established in his first volume of poetry (his first published work), The North Ship; but as

I have already suggested in the discussion of the novels, his attitude towards these themes is one which develops and matures, so that there is a substantial difference between the attitudes informing the first volume of poetry and those of The Less

Deceived and The Whitsun Weddings, with the novels forming a bridge between the two. The gradual development finds expression not only In the poet's changing attitudes and broader vision but also in the nature of the images, situations, emphasis and verse forms he chooses.

The sense of an individual expressing himself In his own terms, which permeates The Less Deceived and The Whitsun

Weddings, is almost totally absent from The North Ship. In this volume Larkin has clearly not discovered his individuality and he relies heavily on his literary rather than his actual experience, both for his technique and Ideology. Whereas the novels obviously make use of Larkin's own experiences, they could not be described as autobiographical novels, because of 104 the degree of distancing and objectivity in them. In The North Ship he focuses closely on himself but presents him• self in terms of literary conventions rather than exploring the significance of his response to actual experiences.

The majority of the poems in The North Ship focus on the theme of love. In most cases the love poem takes the form of an expression of the poet's inability to love, or his doubts about the real value;of love. His attitude towards love is a part of his total attitude to life; he has a sense of detachment and an inability to find anything which will make life meaningful for him. He sees love as one of the means by which others seek to give life significance but finds that he is unable to do this. Lacking the enrichment he feels others may have, he identifies himself, in a series of poems dealing with his loveless state, with the cold of winter or early spring and with the cold light of early morning, all images which negate a fullness and richness in life. The poem "Dawn" is an explicit association of his emotions with images such as those mentioned above:

To wake, and hear a cock Out of the distance crying, To pull the curtains back And see the clouds flying—

How strange it is 1 For the heart to be loveless, and as cold as these.

The title of the poem is at once a statement of physical time

xThe North Ship, p. 15. (Future references to this work will be made within the text using the abbreviation NS.) 105 and also of the emotional state of the poet, he is in a process of awakening to a new awareness of his loveless condition and what it implies. The cock and the clouds reflect his mood in their restlessness and also in their detachment from the immediate situation. In poem "X" he describes his reaction to the ending of a love relationship in similar terms to those of "Dawn", but the basic image here is of night and death, since the poem describes the awareness of a loveless state which follows after an awareness of love, and presumably after a sense of life being richer:

There was no lambing-night, No gale-driven bird Nor frost-encircled root As cold as my heart. (NS. p. 22)

But in another poem closely related in theme to "X", the realization of love's fading is associated with the morning:

Morning has spread again Through every street, And we are strange again. (NS. p. 38)

The rather arbitrary use of images within this series of poems indicates the lack of assurance about the nature of the most appropriate images for particular ideas; this is related to the overall impression the volume gives of a poet who has not clearly defined the precise nature of his experiences.

In all these poems Larkin seems to be adopting a traditional romantic attitude that love is the emotion which 106 brings man alive and that to be without love is to be numb and cold. This attitude can be seen in a slightly different form in a number of poems which are close to the courtly love tradition. The object of love Is rarely described so that the focus of the poems is on the emotion for its own sake rather than on a particular love in a particular situation. The love which the poet describes becomes an Intellectual response rather than a physical or purely emotional one. The fact that two of the poems already mentioned deal with a love which has been realized imaginatively rather than through experience emphasises the intellectual quality. It is as though the poet is attempting to anticipate the Impossibility of finding a fully meaningful love through his imagination rather than committing himself to an actual relationship and facing the pain of disillusionment. In Jill he takes up this theme, but he detaches the romanticism from himself and represents it as a stage through which the Immature and innocent John must pass before reaching awareness. In this way he gives an ironic perspective to romantic love which is not present in poems within this first volume. The vision of love's inadequacies which he attributes to John is one which arises out of pain and experience rather than being an escape from the process of this experience as in the poems.

Several of the poems in this volume deal with the inadequacy of love to solve the problem of life's seeming lack 107 of meaning. By Implication in poem "XVI" love is equated with the other means to which man resorts to fill in time and avoid awareness of emptiness and loneliness:

The bottle is drunk out by one; At two.,5 the book is shut; At three the lovers lie apart, Love and its commerce done. (NS. p. 28)

But even in this poem there is a romanticism in the nature of the gesture of debasing love to the level of "commerce", without in any way justifying the statement or realizing the process of disillusionment. The statement is too general and abstract to have the Impact of a deeply-felt conviction.

The distinctly deadening qualities of love are suggested in poem "XXII" where facing up to the harshness of a solitary bleak journey "To trick this hour when lovers re-embrace" (NS. p. 35)» Is seen as preferable to the acceptance of love, security, and involvement which carry with them diminished awareness: the traveller pursues his journey, "lest/Love sink a grave round the still-sleeping head" (NS. p. 35). The last poem in the volume seems to echo this statement, for there love is seen as inimical to the creative process, which needs the awareness found in isolation and insecurity, which love attempts to disguise. The awareness experienced by one not Involved in and therefore not deceived by love is also expressed in "Ugly Sister", where love is shown as being 108 part of the world of Involvement; escape from this world makes

it possible to "attend to the trees and their gracious silence/

To winds that move" (NS. p. 31). The natural world is seen as divorced from the world of love in this poem and the con• trast between the lines quoted above and "the violin, cornet and drum" which represents Love's world in the poem, indicates a tendency on Larkin's part to present loneliness and an aware• ness of nature as more powerful and significant than love.

This is the final implication of poem "XIII", in which the repeated line, "It is not love you will find" (NS. p. 25) seems at first to be an assertion of a lack in Nature; but the last stanza reverses this Impression since love is pre• sented as offset by death:

It is not love you will find: You have no limbs Crying for stillness, you have no mind Trembling with seraphim, You have no death to come. (NS. p. 25)

The most effective treatment of love of a general nature Is in poem "XX", which is one of the few narrative poems in the volume. It indicates the direction of the later poetry both in being a dramatic narrative and in the ambivalence of Larkin's attitude towards love; he indicates his complete, awareness of his ambivalence through tone and tension rather than through direct statement. 109

The first stanza establishes the tone of the poem.

The poet's position as an observer rather than a participant

is emphasised in the first line by the positioning of the

reference to himself; "I see a girl dragged by the wrists",

which is taken up and developed In the last two lines of

the stanza:

As simple as the things I see, Being no more, no less, than two weak eyes.' (NS. p. 32)

The statement of the first stanza is the poet's awareness of his detached position as an observer and his acceptance of this:

I see a girl dragged by the wrists Across a dazzling field of snow, And there is nothing in me that resists. (NS. p. 32)

However, the sound emphasis of the stanza is carried by the next two lines, and this, coupled with the repetition of

"Once", as if to give himself reassurance of the truth of what he is saying, negates the statement of the stanza:

Once it would not be so; Once I should choke with powerless jealousies. (NS. p. 32)

The use of the word "seem" in the next line, "But now I seem devoid of subtlety1/ also undermines the statement that he is now able to assume total detachment. The snow image, which 110 is used throughout the poem, is not used as the simple external image of the poet's emotional coldness as it is in other poems in the volume: In this poem it has something of the quality of the image in A Girl In Winter, for, though it does express the poet's coldness on one level, it is also indicative of a certain kind of beauty to be found in the awareness and acceptance of isolation. The use of the words "dazzling1* and "blinding light" with reference to it also suggests that perhaps the poet is allowing the snow to operate as an image for his isolation because of the beauty involved, but that in fact a degree of self- deception is at work. This idea is supported by the fact that in the second stanza, as in the first, the decisive statement, "And still

I have no regret" is undercut by the obvious involvement expressed through sound in, "As she laughsr; and struggles, and pretends to fight," and the regret emphasised by the repeated negative which sounds in

Nothing so wild, nothing so glad as she Rears up in me, And would not, though I watched an hour yet. (NS. p. 32)

What follows Is an obvious rationalization of a situation which he is not totally able to accept; such rationalization occurs very frequently in the later poems. The slightly pompous, overstating of the case undercuts what is being said Ill so that the tensions within the poet are revealed:

So I walk on. Perhaps what I desired —That long and sickly hope, someday to be As she is—gave a' flicker and expired; For the first time I'm content to see What poor mortar and bricks I have to build with, knowing that I can Never in seventy years be more a man Than now—a sack of meal upon two sticks. (NS. p. 32)

The use of the repetition of the first line of this stanza at the beginning of the necct stanza underlines the effect of a man trying to persuade himself Intellectually of his detach• ment and willingness to accept what exists, despite his emotional resistance to it.

The "two old ragged men/Clearing the drifts with shovels and a spade" are in strong contrast to the girl.

They are old and unattractive, and, rather than playing and fighting youthfully in the snow reflecting-its beauty, they are shovelling it away in carts. The monotonous quality of their work and their apparent resignation to being "a sack of meal upon two sticks." makes them seem a suitable object for Larkin to empathize with without losing his sense of lovelessness and detachment. In them he sees a model for the way his life must be lived. But they are not the safe release for emotion he judges them to be, since the emotion once acknow• ledged quickly overtakes his rationalizing and makes him aware of his real desires: 112

Damn all explanatory rhymes! To be that girl!—but that's impossible. (NS. p. 33)

The slow monotony and difficulty of the next lines as he describes his determination to supress his desires for a life based on love and involvement Indicates the unnatural effort involved for him:

For me the task's to learn the many times When I must stoop, and throw a shovelful: I must repeat until I live the fact That everything's remade With shovel and spade. (NS. p. 33)

The last stanza weakens the poem and links it with the other poems in the volume, since, instead of resolving the conflict or acknowledging the impossibility of resolution within the terms established in the poem, that is the use of situation and response as an image, it moves into the world of fantasy and the image of the unicorn, which does not re•

late satisfactorily to the rest of the poem, is used as a

justification for the poet's choice of a way of life. Because this image is so much out of context, it seems like an evasion

of the real issues of the poem. Though Jill and A Girl In

Winter conclude similarly with an image rather than statement

or action presenting the resolution, in the novels the image arises naturally from all that has preceeded, and in both cases there is an honesty in acknowledging that whatever resolution is found is unsatisfactory and partial. 113

The love poems In The Less Deceived are less easily- grouped together than those in The North Ship; the difference between the individual poems in the volumes is reflected also in the totality of each book. The poems In The Less Deceived are dramatic in that they present the working out of attitudes rather than presenting the resolution of an idea. They share an honesty in that they usually end with a question rather than a statement. The sense of the impossibility of solving completely any of the problems life poses is carried through in the total composition of the book. The love poems for example, are so varied because the writer is attempting to view love from many angles so that, although no one angle is satisfactory, something approaching a total view of love can be gained when all the viewpoints are put together and operate simultaneously; Of necessity this difference in approach also causes a shift from the almost exclusive focus on the poet himself in The North Ship to a more wide ranging sympathy with a variety of personam in The Less Deceived. One of the many significances of the title of the volume is indicated in this shift: the increased awareness of the poet shows itself in his recognition that the problems which love poses for him are not exclusive to him but part of the unsatisfactory quality of life as a whole which faces man in general. Instead of mourning his own failures he sees that he shares certain basic in• adequacies with all men: that to view the possibility of a 114

perfect love is to be deceived. The poet recognises, however,

that he, just as other men, is only less deceived; that a

certain amount of wilful deception remains in order to make man capable of coping with what life presents. Total aware•

ness for man can only be his awareness of his attempts at

self-deception.

Perhaps the most effective way of demonstrating the

differences between the two volumes is to compare individual

poems with similar starting points. The position of observer

which Larkin assigns to himself in poem "XX" in The North

Ship is re-examined and developed in "Reasons for Attendance"

In The Less Deceived. The development and increased com•

plexity lies in the fact that, instead of simply stating his detachment and attempting to accept it, in "Reasons for

Attendance" he rationalizes and justifies his position through his allegiance to art and his desire to retain his

individuality. "The trumpet's voice, loud and authoritative"2

is the initial common focal point of the poet and the young dancers; but his total separation from them is indicated in his position as one looking in from outside through "the

lighted glass." The music appeals to his intellect whilst the dancers are responding in an emotional and physical way:

^The Less Deceived, p. 18. (Future references to this work will be made within the text using the abbreviation LD.)i 115

Shifting intently, face to flushed face, Solemnly on the peat of happiness. (LD_. p. 18)

Almost against his will the poet's imagination responds to the situation and he becomes momentarily sufficiently Involved

to question his detachments

—Or so I fancy, sensing the smoke and sweat, The wonderful feel of girls. Why be out here? (LD. p. 18)

At this point he brings his reason into play and attempts to rationalize the position he maintains. The tone of the poem changes and becomes rather glib as he overstates the value of his detachment and attempts to deny the validity of the view•

point of the dancers by reducing their response to "sex" and their dancing to "they maul to and fro." He states that in contrast to them he is drawn by something totally non-

physical:

What calls me Is that lifted, rough-tongued bell (Art, if you like) whose individual sound Insists I too am individual. (LD. p. 18)

It is more or less at this point that poem "XX" concludes, but in "Reasons for Attendance" the whole statement of the

poem is questioned by the last stanza:

Therefore I stay outside, Believing this; and they maul to and fro, Believing that; and both are satisfied, If no one has misjudged himself. Or lied. (LD. p. 18) 116

Here the poet does not simply indicate his doubts about the real motives for his position, but he questions the whole idea of choosing a stance. As the title of the poem suggests he seems to feel that man does not necessarily choose to be detached or involved but that once a certain position is realized we start to rationalize it and present it as a good choice. The whole process of the poem presents in miniature this recurring situation, since it starts with a situation; the implications of this are realized and the process of rationalization and denigration of the opposite viewpoint begins. The poem does not end with an attempt at resolution

—it simply arrives at a point of complete awareness.

In poem "XXW the focal point of the poem is the poet, and there is little to suggest universality in his position.

In "Reasons for Attendance" Larkin clearly sees himself in a different perspective as representing one aspect of a universal situation. Since he sees himself as one of many he assumes an ironic attitude towards himself which is absent from poem "XX". He does not move outside the terms of the situation he establishes as he does in poem "XX", but presents honestly the impossibility of ever feeling the security of an invulnerable viewpoint. His attitude towards love is also more honest and also ambivalent. He at once responds to the possibility of love in physical terms but because this is something he does not have he attempts to be 117 objective and ant1-romantic about it.

A poem which, like "Reasons for Attendance", works successfully and economically with a focus on one central image is "No Road". It has certain resemblances to poem

"XXIV" in The North Ship in that both deal with a definite decision to conclude a love affair. Both are based on the journey image and both imply that parting is based as much on reason as emotion. Here the similarities end, for, though the earlier poem has the journey image as a central one, there are also other Images which detract from this rather than add to it; for examples "we are husks, that see/ The grain going forward to a different use" (NS. p. 37). This lack of economy, which diminishes the effect of the focus, is reflected in the abstract language and in a rhetorical note inappropriate to the subject. The poem ends with a note of certainty and even complacency that the right decision has been made;

"No Road" describes a situation in which the decision to part has already been made and action taken; but even at this point the poet questions the decision and in particular questions what the situation reveals about himself. The use of the road as the central image creates the sense that, although communication In the form of love between two people is possible, it is a communication rather than a merging, and that within the relationship each retains-a separate identity; 118

The parting in this situation is not the dramatic one of

poem "XXIV", hut simply a letting of the road fall into disuse—more an opting out rather than a deliberate break.

But, the poet suggests, once communication between two people has been established, the grounds for the resumption of the relationship continue to exist for some time, so that the decision to part cannot be a final one but one that must be reaffirmed. The inevitability of the eventual final separation

is emphasised by the use of rhyme: "A little longer,/And time will be the stronger" (LD. p. 26). The morning image in the

last stanza establishes the poet's ambivalence: he feels the

situation to be negative and in some ways he regrets it, but he obviously feels that his awareness has been increased by his renewed isolation:. "To watch that world come up like a

cold sun,/Rewarding others, is my liberty" (LD. p. 26). At

the same time he feels that his need for such a situation of

isolation diminishes him in some way: "Not to prevent it is my will's fulfilment,/Wllling it, my ailment" (LD. p. 26).

The whole poem even through the nature of the central image, expresses a melancholy tenderness and sense of love's value, which the downward tone of the last line, quoted above,

emphasises. There is a self-awareness in the poem and a refusal on the poet's part to overdramatize himself or the

situation. In poem "XXIV" there is self-consciousness rather than self-awareness and, although the form of the poem suggests 119 an attempt at the controlled tone of "No Road", this is not always maintained, for the lines,

now at last Never has sun more boldly paced the sky, Never were hearts more eager to be free, To kick down worlds, lash forests, (NS. p. 37) attribute a largeness and vitality to the characters and situation which is not merited and which contrast with the sobriety of the final and most successful image:

But it is better that our lives unloose, As two tall ships, wind-mastered, wet with light, Break from an estuary with their courses set, And waving part, and waving drop from sight. (NS. p. 3?)

The poet of poem "XXIV" still has hope for the future; parting simply means setting out in further exploratory trips, freer alone. "No Road" expresses a sense of failure, since, though this is just one relationship which he has chosen not to maintain, it represents an overall failure to achieve satis• factory communication with anyone. It is an assertion of his isolation but an expression of this signifying a failure within man. Like "Reasons for Attendance" it makes impli• cations beyond the very specific situation described.

The counterpart of poems "IV" and "X" in The North

Ship is "Places, Loved Ones", for all deal with the feeling of isolation and of being unable to love. In the early poems 120

Larkin is concerned only with how this situation affects himself and there is an implication that his position is uniquei In "Places, Loved Ones" he puts his position into a broad perspective. He admits freely his rootlessness both in terms of places and people:

Noy. I have never found The place where I could say This is my proper ground, Here I shall stay; Nor met that special one Who has an instant claim On everything I own Down to my name. (LD> p. 16)

But any suggestion of self-pity which such an admission might imply is undercut by the slightly mocking tone he adopts towards those who have succeeded where he appears to have failed; In the claim to have found a place there is a finality and assertiveness which expresses a desire rather than a con• viction that the statement shall be true; just as "instant claim" and "everything I own/Down to my name" suggests an indecent haste and a desire for total merging lest any contrary arguments should intervene. This note of mocking criticism continues in the second stanza where the poet suggests that it is a desire to avoid responsibility for the failure of one's life that causes the haste to establish responsibility elsewhere: 121

You ask them to bear You off Irrevocably, So that it's not your fault Should the town turn dreary, The girl a dolt. (LD. p. 16)

Until this point in the poem the rootless one has, by

implication, accepted full responsibility for the way his

life evolves, but in the last stanza this illusion is destroy•

ed, since he Indicates that the very nature of this isolation

can be blamed for failure in exactly the same wayi

Yet, having missed them, you're Bound, none the less, to act As if what you settled for Mashed you, in fact. (LD. pi 16)

The possibility of the other way of life is preserved as an

illusion that perhaps things could have worked out better in different circumstances:

And wiser to keep away Prom thinking you still might trace Uncalled-for to this day Your person, your place. (LJD. p. 16)

The final statement of the poem seems to be that man is

responsible for his condition and failure in his way of life

but that the idea of the possibility of a completely successful

life is an illusion and that ultimately the man who appears to

have found love and his "proper ground" is as isolated and

rootless through the fact of being a man as he who appears to have chosen this condition. 122

The broadening awareness and area of sympathy of

"Places, Loved Ones" takes another form in "Wedding-Wind", since this is presented from a woman's point of view; The successful establishing of this viewpoint must owe something to A Girl In Winter where Larkin works entirely through

Katherine's consciousness. The problems posed by doing this in the novel are fewer since Katherine is still a girl and

Larkin seems to see the female psychology as becoming fully differentiated from the male at the point of marriage when the two are brought into conjunction. There is hint of this in poem "XXII" where the "One man restlessly waiting a train" is associated with the wind which "runs wild/Beating each shuttered house"; whereas woman and child are in "the dark silk of dreams,/A shell of sleep" (NS. p. 35). The wind image is taken up in Jill and It is at the point of reaching some kind of sexual awareness that John most completely identifies with the wind. In "Wedding-Wind" the bridegroom is assoc• iated with the wind as the ambiguity of the title suggests; the first two lines of the poem take up the implication: "The wind blew all my wedding-day,/And my wedding-night was the night of the high wind" (LD_. p. 15). The association is con• tinued in that it is the man who gets up during the night to see to the stable-doors and the horses made restless by the wind, while the woman remains and is passive in the absence of her husband: 123

And a stable door was banging, again and again, That he must go and shut it, leaving me Stupid in candlelight, hearing rain, Seeing my face in the twisted candlestick, Yet seeing nothing. (LD. p. 15)

The beginning of the second stanza, though a description of the environment, is obviously also a description of the husband's effect on the wife: "Now in the day/All's ravelled under the sun by the wind's blowing" (LD. p. 15). The image is developed as she makes an explicit comparison between the effect of the wind on the surroundings and her new emotional state s

All Is the wind Hunting through clouds and forests, thrashing My apron and the hanging cloths on the line. Can it be borne, this bodying-forth by wind Of joy my actions turn on, like a thread Carrying beads? (LD. p. 15)

She wonders whether her natural passivity and reflectiveness, even at this point she stands and stares, can be retained within the partnership, "Shall I be let to sleep/Now this perpetual morning shares my bed?" (LD. p. 15)•

The poem is Larkin's most positive statement about the power of love in this volume, but it is qualified by a certain amount of irony. Despite the woman's exhilaration and her love a separation between the man and the woman is established of which she takes no account. In both the description of the wedding-night and the following day the woman is alone; 124 the man is clearly Involved In his work and surroundings in a way which she is not. The comparison of the husband with the wind carries with it irony since the wind is shown as not simply exhilarating and forceful but also destructive— it is the cause of the floods—and the exhilaration itself is not necessarily good, since the effect of the wind on the horses is to make them restless. Her questioning of the effect on herself of the alliance with her husband suggests the possibility of her eventual destruction; and the final irony of the poem lies in her last question:

Can even death dry up These new delighted lakes, conclude Our kneeling as cattle by all-generous waters? (LD. p. 15)

Her question is intended as an assertion of the power of their love; the mention of death clearly proscribes its limits.

The sexual aspect of love is never dealt with directly in any of the poems. In "Wedding-Wind" there is an oblique reference to it through the sound quality of the line "And a stable door was banging, again and again," and even here there is sense of something destructive. The only other poem which makes reference to sexual intercourse, again deals with its violent aspect; "Deceptions" deals with a rape. This poem is only indirectly a love poem but I include it in this section for two reasons: it indicates Larkin's broadening sympathy 125

for and awareness of others and this in itself is a kind of

love; secondly because Larkin chooses to deal with physical

love in the negative aspect of rape. In none of his poems

does he suggest that a sexual relationship has any of the values normally attributed to it. Once again the female is assigned a passive role but it Is a degraded version of that

in "Wedding-Wind" since it is total lack of resistance brought about by drugs. The male is the aggressor, but it is an aggression on a petty scales he subdues resistance in advance and his desire seems based on desperation more than anything

else: His progress up the stairs is a version of the journey

theme and his ultimate awareness is a stripping away of the deception, leaving nothing. The man's attempt to gain sexual

satisfaction becomes an Image for man's hope of finding

pleasure and happiness in life; the inevitable conclusion, as suggested in "Next Please" also, is "To burst into ful•

filment's desolate attic" (LD. p. 37).

Anticipation of the failure of relationships occurs

in The North Ship, but in the poems there Larkin is dealing with specific relationships and bewailing the possibility of becoming a discarded lover. "Latest Face" is a much more aggressive and realistic version of this theme. He acknowledges

the powerful attraction of physical beauty but also suggests

that there is a potential sterility in a relationship begun on this basis: 126

Admirer and admired embrace On a useless level, where I contain your current grace, You my judgement. (LD_. p. 41)

However, development of the relationship beyond this point to discover whether anything exists behind the masks:

will The statue of your beauty walk? Must I wade behind it, till Something's found—or is not found— (LD. p. 41), creates the kind of involvement which the increased awareness may make undesirable. Denial of the basic attraction challenges beauty's power and is perhaps also destructive:

can Denial of you duck and run, Stay out of sight and double round, Leap from the sun with mask and brand And murder and not understand? (LD. pi 41)

As in "Places, Loved Ones" the situation in fact affords no real choice, since the strong possibility of destruction of some kind accompanies either choice. The energy of the last lines does suggest that the poet's impulse is to destroy before being destroyed.

The Whitsun Weddings is less markedly different from

The Less Deceived than the latter is from The North Ship.

There is an increased maturity which takes the form of an even wider range of sympathy, a greater ironic self-awareness, and an increased compassion for man in his attempts to 127 preserve an illusion of certain values in life. The poems which deal with the lack of love or with the inadequacy of love focus on the misery caused by the gap between our expectations and their fulfilment; this, significantly, is the largest group of the love poems in this volume, "Love

Songs in Age" deals with the need to maintain the illusion of love's potentialities. The songs are representative of the idea of love. They are constantly present, a household object taken for granted, but they are never examined: they represent a constant promise of what love can do if and when it is called upon:

She kept her songs, they took so little space, The covers pleased her; One bleached from lying in a sunny place, One marked In circles by a vase of water, One mended, when a tidy fit had siezed her, And coloured, by her daughter—3

When the moment of widowhood, and by implication loneliness arrives, then the songs are opened that their potentiality may be exploited. They bring back the memory of youth and the sense then of life's rich potential:

And the unfailing sense of being young Spread out like a spring-woiken tree, wherein That hidden freshness sung, That certainty of time laid up in store As when she played them first. (WW. p. 12)

3The Whitsun Weddings, p; 12. All future references to this volume will be included in the text with the abbreviation, WWi 128

The potential included the idea of loves

Its bright incipience sailing above, Still promising to solve, and satisfy, And set unchangeably in order. (WW. p. 12)

But, with the examination of the memory in the light of subsequent experience, love's power is seen for the illusion it is, and the admission of this means the denial of all future hope of love as a remedy for the chaos and inadequacies of lifes

So To pile them back, to cry, Was hard, without lamely admitting how It had not done so then, and could not now. (WW. p. 12)

In this poem and in "Faith Healing" Larkin is suggesting that the traditional values placed on love are destructive, since the illusion cannot always be maintained and the accept• ance of life without the illusion then becomes much harder.

The focus of "Faith Healing", too, is older women who are lonely, but the irony is directed less against them than against those whose profession is the creating and maintaining of illusions, using the fact of loneliness to assist them. The discrepancy between the illusion these people attempt to create and the reality of their motives and attitudes is brought out in the first stanza, particularly in the contrast between "warm spring rain of loving care" and "Each dwells 129 some twenty seconds":

Stewards tirelessly Persuade them onwards to his voice and hands, Within whose warm spring rain of loving care Each dwells some twenty seconds. Now, dear child, What's wrong, the deep American voice demands, And, scarcely pausing, goes into a prayer Directing God about this eye, that knee. (WW. p. 15)

The excessive responsibility that the healers take upon them• selves in what they promise is shown in their "Directing God".

The promised love and understanding looses a pent-up flood of emotion, ugly In its excess and the depth of loneliness it betrays:

and such joy arrives Their thick tongues blort, their eyes squeeze grief, a crowd Of huge unheard answers jam and rejoice—. (WW. p. 15)

Like the widow of "Love Songs in Age" they have maintained an illusion that had they been loved their lives would have been different. The illusion is shattered when they are given all that the faith healer has to offer and they find that they have nothing but "An immense slackening ache". The illusion is destroyed and the strength of the acceptance of loneliness and isolation has gone leaving only a total vulnerability.

The imagery of the poem suggests that Larkin is not simply applying his ideas about love to this specific occasion of the confrontation of the faith healer and the women, but 130 suggesting that life as a whole operates on this basis. The faith healer is Larkin's version of our vision of God, and the women's belief In him and their expectation of receiving love at his hands is man's belief in a Christian God and the

Idea of an all embracing heavenly love. Such a belief,

Larkin seems to suggest, is destructive since it turns our eyes away from the present and the limited possibilities which are open to us. He suggests as he does in A Girl In

Winter that, though we cannot expect to receive undivided love, we are capable of offering to others a limited form of lovei

In everyone there sleeps A sense of life lived according to love. To some it means the difference they could make By loving others, but across most it sweeps As all they might have done had they been loved. That nothing cures. (WW. p. 15)

Even the capacity to give love has inherent dangers. "Home is so Sad" illustrates the pathos of a life dedicated to others, since the giving becomes in such a case a kind of dependence and stifles the receiver; the object of love becomes too much the reason for existence, so that with its removal there is no purpose left, no strength, only an un• wanted and burdensome love. In a relationship which seems to afford the fewest barriers and the greatest opportunity for communication, "Talking in bed ought to be easiest,/Lying together there goes back so far", an awareness and honesty 131 are created which themselves prevent a sense of total identification. Two people who are honest and aware cannot focus totally on themselves: their awareness will extend to their environment and their position within it:

Outside, the wind's Incomplete unrest Builds and disperses clouds about the sky,

And dark towns heap up on the horizon. None of this cares for us. (WW. p. 29)

So that their honesty takes them to the position of silence, since within the situation

It becomes still more difficult to find Words at once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind. (WW. p. 29)

Brought to a similar kind of awareness through impending death, again love seems to solve nothing, for at such a moment the individual finds himself totally alone:

Far From the exchange of love to lie Unreachable within a room The traffic parts to let go by Brings closer what is left to come, And dulls to distance all we are. (WW. p. 33)

Larkin seems to feel that what most people define as love is basically selfishness and an almost instinctive desire to escape from the inevitable isolation. He suggests this briefly in "Faith Healing" and deals with the point at some length in "Self's the Man" and "Dockery and Son". The former 132 poem is very similar to "Places, Loved Ones", for it contrasts the state of the married settled man and that of the isolated man, eventually showing that the contrast Is false, since the basic motivation for choice of state is selfishness. The man without ties, whom Larkin feels he represents, is without them because he does not wish to meet the demands that marriage or any close relationship will make on him. Though the married man or woman seems at first sight to be prepared to meet these demands, what each in fact requires is that someone else shall fulfil the demands, so that each partner becomes engaged in taking rather than giving:

He married a woman to stop her getting away Now she's there all day,

And the money he gets for wasting his life on work She takes as her perk To pay for the kiddles' clobber and the drier And the electric fire. (WW. p. 24)

The two states appear within himself in "Wild Oats", since the relationship described there seems to be a consolation for loneliness rather than anything.else. The point is emphasised since the progress of the relationship is described in material terms rather than emotional ones:

And in seven years after that Wrote over four hundred letters, Gave a ten-guinea ring I got back in the end. (WW. p. 41) 133

The extravagance of the four hundred letters suggests an almost frenzied attempt to communicate. The relationship ends because of illusion on both parts. The girl obviously feels that a particular kind of all-involving love is possible, though not with him:

Parting, after about five Rehearsals, was an agreement That I was too selfish, withdrawn, And easily bored to love. (WW. p. 41)

His dissatisfaction with the relationship is obviously related to his awareness of "bosomy English rose" who represents some• one beyond his reach, an unreal standard against which his relationship has been measured:

In my wallet are still two snaps Of bosomy rose with fur gloves on. Unlucky charms, perhaps. (WW. p. 41)

The essentially destructive quality of his vision of her is perhaps suggested in the predatory image in the fur gloves.

The final poem in the volume is "An Arundel Tomb" and this presents Larkin*s most complete comment on love and its place in life. He maintains his ironical attitude towards both love and the values others attribute to it by choosing to make his concluding remarks about a love depicted in stone above the tomb of a dead couple. Immediately love is put into the context of death and its limitations in the face of this 134 clearly defined. It is almost despite himself that he responds to the fact that the knight and his lady are holding hands, "One sees, with a sharp tender shock,/His hand with• drawn, holding her hand" (WW. p. 45). He negates this

•vulnerability in himself immediately with the ambiguity of

"lie" in the next line: "They would not think to lie so long"

(WW. p. 45)• He suggests that what began as a whimsical idea has been translated by time into a statement which was not intended:

Such faithfulness in effigy Was just a detail friends would see: A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace Thrown off in helping to prolong The Latin names around the base. (WW. p. 45)

The essentially unrealistic nature of the statement they appear to make is suggested in, "Rigidly they/Persisted, linked through lengths and breadths/Of time" (WW. p. 45).

Later generations, lacking the sense of order established in the Knight's way of life, seek another kind of order in love and take them as a symbol of its possibilities. They visit the tomb, "to prove/Our almost-instinct almost true:/

What will survive of us is love" (WW. p. 46).

It is, however, "Our almost-instinct"; the very fact that proof has to be sought and is found only at the tomb of dead lovers whose relationship is totally static, questions the instinct and turns it into need. The proof, such as it is, is "amost true" rather than true, because it is not the actual love or its effects which have survived, but

"faithfulness in effigy" and "stone fidelity". What does in fact survive is man's Instinctive need to prove the

Importance of love, since this is what links the knight and lady with the "endlessly altered people" passing by the tomb.. CHAPTER V

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE TREATMENT OF ALL OTHER MAJOR THEMES IN LARKIN»S POETRY

The central issue in all Larkin's poems is an examination of the realities of man's condition. He is concerned with the limitations which exist in life; the major limitation being the inevitability of death; He sees man as a creature who constantly avoids facing up to his state through having a number of easily recognisable modes of escape. The problem which emerges gradually as the poetry matures is not that of stating what he believes but that of finding and depicting any kind of meaningful existence once the meaningless quality of life has been accepted. The love poems fit into this pattern, but, since

Larkin sees love as the major illusory escape, the group Is large enough to be considered separately. All other themes can be considered within the context of the overall theme.

The North Ship poems which question life are like the love poems in the volume In their quality of abstraction;

They rely very heavily on certain images working with a cumulative effect and do not have the economy of the later poems in which the situation is itself an image. In these early poems the idea expressed is the most important aspect of the poem, not the resolving of or presenting of a conflict or viewpoint. The writer is stating his questions about life 137 rather than actively formulating them through the process of the poem.

In Jill and A Girl in Winter an idea which emerges clearly through the use of the season Imagery is that of the cyclic quality of nature in which man participates and yet is separate from. The progress of the year from spring to winter is mirrored in man's progress from birth to death; but, whilst the winter of the year suggests the oncoming spring and so always contains an element of hope, Larkin sees man's winter as his final season. He is focused so closely on the individual and on life itself that he does not ever present the tragedy or pathos of the individual man as redeemed by the continued existence of man in future generations or by the possibility of some kind of life after death. The idea first takes shape :in the first poem in The

North Ship, though it is not as clearly and finally expressed as in the novels. The poem deals with the onset of spring, describing the awakening of new life in nature and in man as almost frenzied in activity. The first stanza in particular has a succession of forceful verbs culminating in the

Imperative "Rejolcel" Each stanza is, however, undercut by the repeated line, "A drum taps: a wintry drum." This emphasises the fact that spring will be followed by winter and, since the word "drum" with its funereal connotations is repeated, there is further emphasis on man's approaching 138 death. In subsequent stanzas the Idea of death Is kept to

the fore; in stanza two the words "resurrected" and "dead"

carry sufficient emphasis to negate the positive qualities

the stanza seems to assert. Similarly the quality of life

in the ploughman and the lovers is undercut by the perspective

in which they are puts

What ploughman halts his pair To kick a broken plate Or coin turned up by the share? What lovers worry much That a ghost bids them touch? (NS. p. 11)

Even in the last and most assertive stanza, the positive

effort required to "Cast off rememberings" suggests the force

of death, as does the irony in the second half of the stanza

in which spring is seen in juxtaposition to death and the

concluding note of the frenzy is the repeated reminder of

deaths

Let it all come about Till centuries of springs And all.their buried men Stand on earth again. A drum tapss a wintry drum. (NS. p. 12)

Poem "XVII" develops the idea of the above poem of the

separation between man and nature for which man's mortality

is largely responsible. The poet begins by associating man and nature for he feels that to capture the melancholy of the 139

"sad wind" he must come into contact with that part of the human condition which is its counterpart, "For this I must visit the dead" (NS. p. 29). He imagines what he will find in such a visit and reveals an expectation of finding nature in harmony with the tragedy of man:

Headstone and wet cross, Paths where the mourners tread, A solitary bird, These call up the shade of loss. (NS. p. 29)

His vision is destroyed by the reality he finds that man's death does not inspire melancholy in nature; in fact nature in contrast asserts her lack of mortality: in the face of

"each sodden grave", the stones "shine like gold" and the morning as a whole creates the image

Of more and ever more, As some vast seven-piled wave, Mane-flinging, manifold, Streams at an endless shore. (NS. p. 29)

It is through the discrepancy between man and nature that Larkin on occasions chooses to express what he considers the disappointing limitations of life. The image of the moon, used in a manner which is reminiscent of Yeats, is seen in contrast to the earth. Through the contrast of the "definite and bright" moon which is so perfect as to hurt the eyes, and the earth from which "All quietness and certitude of worth are gone" (NS. p. 14), he indicates his dissatisfaction with 140 the flawed quality of life. The statement is made obliquely through an intellectual rather than physical situation in a way which is not found at all In the later poems. Similarly

in the poem "Winter" it is through his imaginative response

to the scene before him that his ideas are indicated rather

than through his sudden awareness of some significance in a normal everyday situation. It is the swan which calls up the

image of winter:

For the line of a swan Diagonal on water Is the cold of winter (NS. p. 19), and the horse which suggests the human winter:

And each horse like a passion Long since defeated Lowers its head. (NS. p. 19)

Neither of the images is in Itself particularly evocative.

His awareness of winter becomes an awareness of death and the

earlier image of the "waste of thistles" is translated into human terms:

And shrivelled men stand Crowding like thistles To one fruitless place. (NS. p. 19)

In this way the desolation of winter becomes an image for man's

condition. However, unlike any of the later poems, or Indeed

the novels, the poem ends on an upward note with the suggestion 141 of glory In man's Indomitable spirit and in his ability to be extended through the generations to follow:

Yet still the miracles Exhume in each face Strong silken seed, That to the static Gold winter sun throws back Endless and cloudless pride. (NS. pp. 19-20)

Among the other poems based on this theme two are worth considering in some detail, since they are better poems than most in the volume and the qualities which distinguish them from the rest are those which are to recur in the later poetry. Poem "XII" has a clearness of focus and an economy and consistency of Imagery springing from this which the poems mentioned so far lack. The central image of this poem is one which dominates the later work: the railway carriage conveying a group of isolated people to one destination. The poet focuses on a Polish alrglrl within this context in much the same way as he focuses on Katherine in A Girl In Winter. The observer's sense of the girl is based entirely on his visual awareness of her, since she speaks a language which he does not understand. The poem indicates his viewpoint In the pro• fusion of physical details:

The swinging and narrowing sun Lights her eyelashes, shapes Her sharp vivacity of bone. Hair, wild and controlled, runs back: And gestures like these English oaks Flash past the windows of her foreign talk. (NS. p. 24) 142

The closeness of his observation Indicates his interest in her; but It is a strange and partial interest; "all humanity of interest/Before her angled beauty falls" (NS. p. 24).

There is a complete lack of real communication between them because of the incomprehensibility of what she is saying.

What she says becomes simply "a voice/watering a stony place"

(NS. p. 24). The use of the railway image suggests that the situation has wider implications. The incomprehensible sounds which the girl makes are compared to the train beat, so that the idea of significance not understood attaches itself to the journey and so to life. Similarly the girl's failure to communicate on this occasion becomes an Image for any person's Isolation. The use of the words "swinging and narrowing sun" suggest a wider time context which is supported by the implications of ageing carried in "shapes/Her sharp vivacity of bone." The image is further extended with the suggestions of accruing experience in

The train runs on through wilderness Of cities. Still the hammered miles Diversify behind her face. (NS. p. 24)

The journey as an Image for life is central to poem

"XIV", "Nursery Tale", in which disillusionment about one aspect of life in poem "XII" is extended to include the whole of life. The poem suggests not only that life is a dis• appointment but that this is constantly being realized afresh, 143

each disillusionment carrying the poet one step nearer to the final disillusionment of death:

So every journey that I make Leads me, as in the story he was led, To some new ambush, to some fresh mistake: So every journey I begin foretells A weariness of daybreak, spread With carrion kisses, carrion farewells. (NS. p. 26)

The awareness of this aspect of life is brought about by his

imaginative sympathy with the nursery tale which gives the poem its title. Indirectly the poem begins to build up the

idea that is developed in Jill, that awareness of reality may come through imaginative experience as much as through concrete experience. In his recreating of the tale of the horseman, he perceives a pattern on which most lives are based: the approach towards each new experience with some hopeful illusion which is destroyed by the reality which presents itself in the place of the expectations, until we realize that everything is leading to one inevitable conclusion:

for though His place was set, there was no more Than one unpolished pewter dish, that bore The battered carcase of a carrion crow. (NS. p. 26)

The title of the poem suggests a further link with the novels, since it suggests that the process of disillusionment is one which begins very early and is common to all men's experience. 144

Poem MXXI", which also explores the idea of imaginative perception is in some ways even closer to Jill; in this poem the dream or vision is a direct product of the poet's own mind. Like John he lives through an experience in his imagination before he does so in reality, so that his aware• ness of all experiences developing towards the dream situation will be enhanced by his knowledge of the possible conclusion.

Within the dream the poet sees life as a precarious opposition to death. It is a blind ignoring of the forces of destruction surrounding it:

And the wind climbed up the caves To tear at a dark-faced garden Whose black flowers were dead, And broke round a house we slept in, A drawn blind and a bed. (NS. p. 34)

When the ignorance is broken, the reality of existence must be faced:

I was sleeping, and you woke me To walk on the chilled shore Of a night with no memory. (NS, p. 34) and total isolation and emptiness become apparent:

Till your voice forsook my ear Till your two hands withdrew And I was empty of tears, On the edge of a bricked and streeted sea And a cold hill of stars. (NS. p. 34)

It is to escape this kind of awareness that man has devised for himself various means of disguising his loneliness 145 and his knowledge of death's approach. Two of the poems in

The North Ship which deal with self-deception focus on the night as the time when it becomes most difficult to maintain the deception, since it is then that we find ourselves alone; and in our isolation at this time perceive our basic loneliness.

Night, too, is associated with death, so that the frenzied attempts during the day to avoid facing night become images

of the way in which life is lived. In poem "VI" and "XVI" there is an awareness of time which emphasises the approach of the inevitable hours of Isolation. Poem "VI" expresses a much greater degree of urgency in the attempt to prolong the daytime activities and to avoid being alone. The verbs carry

this sense of urgency In the energy they express, and this is picked up In the Images of light and dark, "Kick up the fire, and let the flames break loose/To drive the shadows back"

(NS. p. 17). In poem "XVI" there Is a greater sense of an

established, almost monotonous, routine to which the poet is resigned:

The bottle is drunk out by one; At two, the book is shut; At three, the lovers lie apart, Love and its commerce done. (NS. p. 28)

Yet in both poems the moment of being alone is made more difficult because of the attempts to delay it. In poem "VI" much of the meaning is carried by the change in pace and sound;

in contrast to the energy of the earlier lines we have: 146

Who can confront The instantaneous grief of being alone? Or watch the sad increase Across the mind of this prolific plant, Dumb idleness? (NS. p. 17)

Poem "XVI" develops rather differently, since the poet regrets his inability to enjoy the final escape of the day, sleep and

forgetfulness:

And I am sick for want of sleep; So sick, that I can half-believe The soundless river pouring from the cave Is neither strong nor deep; Only an image fancied In conceit. (NS. p. 28)

The series of poems which give the volume its title con•

tain all the themes and most of the images which occur elsewhere

in the volume. Although this series is different in kind from anything else that Larkin has written, it is not a particularly

original poem and like the others in The North Ship It lacks

the immediacy of the later poems. In style it has much in

common with Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner", but is unlike it

in that it does not work with Images of such archetypal

significance and association, and it does not have the same

sense of Inevitability.

The journey image is the basis of the poem in conjunction with the idea of the north, coldness and Isolation, all assist•

ing towards a more complete awareness. The "Legend" establishes the greater significance of the journey north in comparison with the journeys made east and west: 147

But the third went wide and far Into an unforgiving sea Under a fire-spilling star, And it was rigged for a long journey. (NS. p. 44)

The remaining poems in the sequence each mark a stage in

the journey northwards. "65° North" is a poem which traces

the gradual merging of vision and reality. In the dream the world of emptiness is perceived:

My sleep is made cold By a recurrent dream Where all things seem Sickeningly to poise On emptiness, on stars Drifting under the world. (NS. p. 45)

As the ship goes northward, the dream is partly realized and

so indicates its ultimate,complete realization:

Light strikes from the ice: Like one near death Savours the serene breath, I grow afraid, Now the bargain is made, That dream draws close. (NS. p. 45)

"70° North" and '^^North" work together to make the same balance between vision and reality as is contained in the

previous poem. "Fortune Telling" indicates a long journey and the meeting with a dark girl who seems to be associated

with death. In "75°North", within the blizzard, each person

on board ship sees different images; the poet recognises his approaching fate in the form of the girl: 148

And beyond all doubt I know A girl Is standing there Who will take no lovers Till she winds me in her hair. (NS. p. 46)

The word "wind" picks up "winding-sheet" in the previous stanza and makes the association with death more explicit.

The last poem in the sequence, "Above 80 North", is disappointing in the way that the conclusion of poem "XX" is. The vision becomes the total experience and the idea of death as a woman is again suggested. But the significance of the vision is not clear and the expected resolution of the experience of the earlier poems in the sequence does not occur.

The clear impression given by The Less Deceived that the poet has learnt to express himself in his own terms is reflected in a series of poems which are self-exploratory. Although the volume has a much broader range of sympathy and a wider perspective on universal problems, as the number of poems making some kind of social comment indicates, in a sense this is only possible once Larkin has established his own identity and is aware of how his vision of life is affected by it. The self that Larkin presents in The Less Deceived is almost identical with Katherine at the conclusion of A Girl in Winter. The last paragraph of the novel summarises the statements made in Larkin's poems of self-examination: 149

Yet their passage was not saddening. Unsatisfied dreams rose and fell about them, crying out against their implacability, but in the end glad that such order, such destiny, existed. Against this knowledge, the heart, the will, and all that made for protest, could at last sleep. (AGW. p. 248)

Larkin feels that he has reached a point of awareness when

his illusions are apparent as such to him. In "Toads" and

"Poetry of Departure" he indicates ways of life which appeal

to him as being more satisfying than his own. His desire to

escape work is the starting point of "Toads" and he thinks

longingly of those who do so:

Lots of folk live on their wits: Lecturers, lispers, Losels, loblolly-men, louts— They don't end as paupers; Lots of folk live up lanes With fires in a bucket, Eat windfalls and tinned sardines— They seem to like it. Their nippers have got bare feet, Their unspeakable wives Are skinny as whippets—and yet No one actually starves. (LD. p. 32)

And yet even while he expresses his envy, there is a reluctant

awareness in him of the unromantic and unappealing aspects of

such situations indicated in the slightly qualifying, slightly

undercutting quality of the last lines of each stanza. In

"Poetry of Departures" he shows himself to be excited by

hear lng, "He chucked up everything/And .just cleared off"

(LP. p. 34); But again in the implied comparison between the 150 effect this has on him and a certain type of Imaginative literature, he suggests his awareness of the lack of reality such situations hold for him:

So to hear it said

He walked out on the whole crowd Leaves me flushed and stirred, Like Then she undid her dress Or Take that you has tard. fDD. p. 3*0

In both poems he concludes by demonstrating his awareness that such escapes are not for him because he is too aware of them as escapes rather than solutions. "Toads" uses the same image for this awareness as does A Girl in Winter:

For something sufficiently toad-like Squats in me, too; Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck, And cold as snow. (ID. p. J2)

The final stanza also expresses a similar acceptance of what this awareness involves in the way of diminished expectations:

I don't say, one bodies the other One's spiritual truth; But I do say it's hard to lose either, When you have both. (LD. p. 33)

"Poetry of Departures" concludes with an idea similar to one expressed at the end of Jill and in "Places, Loved Ones" and

"Reasons for Attendance". Larkin tends to accept the situation in which he finds himself, to some extent because he believes 151 his nature has created the situation, so that a definite pattern determines his life to which he will eventually return despite any attempt to "break from it:

But I'd go today

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads, Crouch in the fo'c'sle Stubbly with goodness, if It weren't so artificial, Such a deliberate step backwards To create an object: Books; china; a life Reprehensibly perfect. (LD. p. Jk)

The image of cold for awareness occurs in "I Remember,

1 Remember": "Coming up England by a different line/For once, early in the cold new year" (LD. p. 38). In this poem, as the title suggests, Larkin balances the kind of romanticised view back on his life which It would be tempting to fabricate, with the actualities of what he remembers. His childhood and adolescence is described entirely in negative terms:

By now I've got the whole place clearly charted. Our garden, first: where I did not invent Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits, And wasn't spoken to by an old hat. And here we have that splendid family

I never ran to when I got depressed, The boys all biceps and the girls all chest, Their comic Ford, their farm where I could be "Really myself". I'll show you, come to that, The bracken where I never trembling sat, 152

Determined to go through with it; where she Lay back, and "all became a burning mist". And in those offices, my doggerel Was not set up in blunt ten-point, nor read By a distinguished cousin of the mayor,

Who didn't call and tell my father There Before us, had we the gift to see ahead—• (LD. pp. 3«-9)

The temptation would be to do as the friend suggests he seems to wish, "You look as if you wished the place in Hell,"

(LD. p. 39). But once again comes the assertion that the limitation he rediscovers are those of his own personality and that whenever or wherever he had been born a similar pattern would have emerged:

"Oh well, I suppose it's not the place's fault," I said. "Nothing, like something, happens anywhere." (LD. p. 39)

The disappointment he experiences temporarily is caused by the illusion fostered by general opinion that childhood is necessarily exciting and memorable. The tone of complete resignation at the recognition of what life really has to offer echoes the conclusions of "Toads" and "Poetry of

Departures" and "Skin". In the last mentioned poem there is, too, the sense of a life which as a result of Larkin's own personality has been more empty than most:

And pardon me, that I Could find, when you were new, No brash festivity To wear you at, such as Clothes are entitled to Till the fashion changes. (LD. p. kj) 153

"If My Darling" is an investigation of Larkin*s personality different from that in the other poems. Instead of using his response to a particular situation as an indication of his total personality, he tries to show what goes on in his head. He makes use of the Alice Through the Looking Glass situation, at the same time using the idea of the eyes being the windows of the soul. If his darling were to go beyond the image of herself reflected in his eyes then she would discover what he really is. Typically he begins the descrip• tion negatively, indicating that she would not find in him a secure normality with evidence of order and a routine capable of continuation:

She would find no tables and chairs, No mahogany claw-footed sideboards, No undisturbed embers;

The tantalus would not be filled, nor the fender-seat cosy, Nor the shelves stuffed with small-printed books for the Sabbath, Nor the butler bibulous, the housemaids lazy. (LD. p. 42)

She would find, instead of an environment familiar and easy to accept a landscape changeable and slightly disgusting:

She would find herself looped with the creep of varying light, Monkey-brown, fish-grey, a string of infected circles Loitering like bullies, about to coagulate. (LD. p. 42)

Instead of the suggestion of an order possible to be continued indefinitely she would "remark/The unwholesome floor, as it 154 might be the skin of a grave" (LD. p. 42). His sense of the

way in which death robs life of its beauty and meaning finds

expression in the "adhesive sense of betrayal,/A Grecian

statue kicked in the privates,.money,/A swill-tub of finer

feelings" (LJD. p. 42). She would be made fully aware of the

effects of his attempts to be free of illusion, balanced by

constant rationalizing leading to continual equivocation:

She'd be stopping her ears against the constant recital Intoned by reality, larded with technical terms, Each one double-yoked with meaning and meaning's rebuttal. (LD. p. 42)

To be such a person means accepting the meaninglessness of

life, and to fully understand this position would Involve

giving up all the illusions that make life seem worth while:

For the skirl of that bulletin unpicks the world like a knot, And to hear how the past is past and the future neuter Might knock my darling off her unprlceable pivot. (LD. p. 42)

This group of poems represents Larkin's attempt to view himself

in action responding to situations and other people's view of

life; and also investigates his mental-psychological make-up and his physical appearance, all without illusion or self-

deception;

When Katherine in A Girl In Winter reaches a state of awareness, she begins to see more clearly the motivations of 155 the lives of others and she begins to view with compassion what she would have once despised. In particular she becomes aware of Robin's frantic attempts to find meaning in life, his need to establish some order within the chaos and his reluctance to accept the movement of time towards impending death; Similarly Larkin in The Less Deceived is less self- absorbed and more aware of man within the context of his everyday life searching for values. There are poems in this volume of a kind which are not present in The North Shlpi

These are poems which try to view life objectively—rfiot simply pointing out its inadequacies as in The North Ship—but attempting to be positive about what life has to offer once its limitations are accepted. "Born Yesterday" is represent• ative of this' group; It indicates what is normally seen as necessary for a happy life through the expectations and hopes centred on a new-born girl:

the usual stuff About being beautiful, Of running off a spring Of innocence and love— They will all wish you that. (LD.. p. 24)

Larkin expresses his scepticism about such hopes, "And should it prove possible,/Well you're a lucky girl" (ID. p. 24);

What he feels is that the basis for any kind of happiness is the lack of expectations which arise from any unusual talent or extreme beauty. If she can regard herself as ordinary, then she will not be distracted by hopes for the future from 156 extracting the maximum from what actually exists. The paradox which his wish contains is the rarety of "the ordinary person" with the potential for happiness:

May you be ordinary; Have, like other women, An average of talents: Not ugly, not good-looking, Nothing uncustomary To pull you off your balance, That, unworkable Itself, Stops all the rest from working. In fact, may you be dull— If that is what a skilled, Vigilant, flexible, Unemphasised, enthralled Catching of happiness is called. (LD. p. 24)

"At Grass" expresses a similar viewpoint, for it is the horses in their anonymity, with all their fame and excitement behind them who find some peace in life. They too have reached the point of ordinariness in which happiness of a sort can be found despite the approach of death:

Do memories plague their ears like flies? They shake their heads. Dusk brims the shadows. Summer by summer all stole away, The starting-gates, the crowds and cries— All but the unmolesting meadows. Almanacked, their names live; they

Have slipped their names, and stand at ease, Or gallop for what must he joy, And not a fleldglass sees them home, Or curious stop-watch prophesies: Only the groom, and the groom's boy, With bridle; in the evening come. (Ljp.. p. 45)

"Wires" approaches the same problem through the image of the young and old cattle. Larkin represents youth as a state of 157 expectancy which can only lead to painful disillusionment:

Young steers are always scenting purer water Not here but anywhere. Beyond the wires

Leads them to blunder up against the wires Whose muscle-shredding violence gives no quarter. (LD. p. 27)

It is through the pain of realization that maturity comes.

But maturity represents a limitation since it means the recognising of limits, an avoidance of pain through deliberate narrowing of expectation: "Young steers become old cattle from that day,/Electric limits to their widest senses"

(LD. p. 27). The first line of the poem indicates how in• evitable Larkin feels this sense of limitation is: "The widest prairies have electric fences" (LD. p. 27).

"Wires" obviously represents a more violent statement of that in the last paragraph of A Girl in Winter. It seems that Larkin is suggesting that reaching a state of awareness can be more positively destructive and painful than he had previously indicated, since he is more aware himself of other people less able to accept what he sees as inevitable.

Violence of the same kind occurs in "Myxomatosis". There is no violence at all in The North Ship and the reason for its appearance in this volume is perhaps explained within the poem itself. The slowly dying rabbit, "Caught in the centre of a soundless field/While hot inexplicable hours go by"

(LP. p. 31)» seems, like Katherine, to hope that a state of 158 stillness and waiting will be rewarded by a return to the past before the painful experiences: "You may have thought things would come right again/If you could only keep quite still and wait" (LD. p. 31). Larkin's sharp reply to the rabbit is an assertion of death. He kills the rabbit but at the same time destroys the illusory hope of a return to normality which would have ultimately caused more pain and suffering: "I'm glad I can't explain/Just in what jaws you were to suppurate" (LD. p. 31)•

The clear assertion of the inevitability of death and what this means is a characteristic of The Less Deceived. In

The North Ship Larkin reveals that deceptions and illusions exist but he does not himself take any action to destroy them, as he does very positively in this volume. He does so in several ways: he makes clear that man finds it difficult to face up to the fact of death but he asserts that refusing to do so is destructive; he comments on the nature of death as he sees it and the influence he feels it has on life.

"Dry-PoInt" is an indication of man's inability to accept death as It is. In some ways this is one of the most abstract poems in the volume but this in Itself gives it a concreteness, since it represents through the quality of its abstractions man's thought processes concerning death. Because there is in us an inability to see death in real, physical terms, we tend to intellectualize in the manner of the poem. 159

The poem is also concrete in its reflection, in its movement, of the process of illusion, disillusionment, recreation of a new kind of illusion, a process in which most of us participate.

The first stanza asserts our basic awareness of death which we attempt to suppress through illusion. Life is then a constant struggle for supremacy between the awareness and the illusion until death is too close to be longer avoided}

Endlessly, time-honoured irritant, A bubble is restively forming at your tip. Burst it as fast as we can— It will grow again, until we begin dying.

Silently it inflates, till we're enclosed And forced to start the struggle to get outs Bestial, Intent, real. The wet spark comes, the bright blown walls collapse: (LD. p. 19)1

The sterility which then faces us in our new awareness, Larkin depicts in terms of landscapes

But what sad scapes we cannot turn from then: What ashen hills! what salted, shrunken lakes! How leaden the ring looks, Birmingham magic all discredited. (LD. p. 19)

But because we are reluctant to accept such an utter negation of life, there is a temptation to create a different kind of

cafv. Shopenhauer's comment when discussing the fact that, although death must conquer, we pursue Our futile purposes, "as we blow out a soap-bubble as long and as large as possible, although we know perfectly well that, it will burst." Quoted by Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1946), p. 784. i6o illusion—that of some life to be experienced after death, which being experienced after death is beyond its powers of destruction and negation. That this is an illusion Larkin indicates by the use of "dream" in the last line:

And how remote that bare and sunscrubbed room, Intensely far, that padlocked cube of light We neither define nor prove, Where you, we dream, obtain no right of entry. (LD. p. 19)

Larkin seems to feel that there are special difficulties facing his contemporaries and future generations because the society in which we live offers less and less in terms of a structured order and a sense of traditional values. In "An

Arundel Tomb" this is presented as one reason for the desire to see a permanence in love; in another poem located in a church, "Church Going", the wider implications are explored!

The ambiguity of the title suggests the two themes which dominate the poem: the disappearance of the church and all that it represents, and man's tendency to continue to seek out such places in search of something which seems to be missing from lifei One part of Larkin can afford to mock the church building:

Another church: matting, seats, and stone, And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff Up at the holy end; the small neat organi (LD. p. 28) 161

But there is something which cannot be destroyed by his mockery and which forces him to acknowledge its powers

And a tense, musty, unignorable silence, Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off My cycle-clips in awkward reverence. (LD. p. 28)

His desire for amused detachment and a reluctant awareness of an inexplicable involvement create in him and the poem a tension which reflects the larger problem. For, although he wishes to deny that the church is anything more than a building, it asserts, its presence as representative of something more.

Despite his assertions

But superstition, like belief, must die, And what remains when disbelief has gone? Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognisable each week, A purpose more obscure, (LD. pp. 28-29) he feels that as long as there is nothing to take the place of the church it will remain an Irresistable attraction to some s

because it held unsplit So long and equably what since is found Only in separation—marriage, and birth, And death, and thoughts of these—for which was built This special shell. (LD. p. 29)

Again the last two paragraphs of A Girl In Winter seem to provide the basic pattern of Larkin's conclusion, for what 162 he is saying is that man must find some kind of order in life. When all else falls there is a comfort to be gained from the awareness of one perceptible order: the inevitable progression of life towards death. Within the old system, the church created an awareness that all tends towards death and, if only for the reason that the church ground still has visible reminders of mortality, it will assist in creating a perception of the only remaining indestructible order in life:

A serious house on serious earth it is, In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, Are recognised and robed as destinies. And that much never can be obsolete, Since someone will forever be surprising A hunger in himself to be more serious, And gravltating^with it to this ground, Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in, If only that so many dead lie round. (LD. p. 29)

Although Larkin insists so firmly that constant aware• ness of death and life's limitations is necessary—and even in a poem such as "Wants" expresses a desire to be free of the artificial ways of making life significant to the extent of suggesting a positive death wish in himself, "Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs" (LD_. p. 22)—he has no illusions about what death involves. He does not welcome death un• reservedly but expresses some fear and revulsion for what it means to him. "Arrivals, Departures", as the title suggests, is concerned with the journey theme and once again the journey is an image of life. On the narrative level the poem describes 163 the constant comings and goings of which people living a port cannot fall to be aware. This awareness creates a sense of the fluctuating, arbitrary quality of life. Each new arrival suggests the possibility of a new beginning, though this is illusory since we always make the same choices:

And we, barely recalled from sleep there, sense Arrivals lowing in the doleful distance— Horny dilemmas at. the gate once more. Come and choose wrong, they cry, come and choose wrong; And so we rise. (LP. p. 44)

With each departure we are reminded of the inevitable but undetermined time of our own departure and what it involves:

At night again they sound,

Calling the traveller now, the outward bound: 0 not for long, they cry, 0 not for long— And we are nudged from comfort, never knowing How safely we may disregard their blowing, Or if, this night, happiness too is going. (LD. p. 44)

The poem has a sad and uneasy tone; it suggests the perpetual disease brought about by the constant awareness of death and the limitations of life but suggests that we are never totally prepared for the end. The discomfort and restlessness in the poem springs from the quality that death imposes on life. In

"Going" the focus is on death Itself. Whilst Larkin asserts constantly that we must be aware of death, in this poem he suggests that death itself is still an unresolved problem. 164

We can only conceive of it in terms of what we know and so death seems the reverse of life and what we are familiar with. The coming of death is like the onset of evening, but it is "one never seen before/That lights no lamps" (LD. p. 21).

The resolution of chaos it seems to offer when distant,

"Silken it seems at a distance" (LD. p. 21), is illusory;

"When it is drawn up over knees and breast/It brings no com• fort" (LD. p. 21). In ending the chaos of life it brings with it a new chaos through its unfamiliarity:

Where has the tree gone, that locked Earth to the sky? What is under my hands, That I cannot feel?

What loads my hands down? (LD. p. 21)

The description here of the senses finding themselves without any point of reference is very reminiscent of the chorus * speeches towards the end of Murder in the Cathedral. The similarity lies in the writers' sense that the perception of something unknown and horrifying can only be reached through the normal sensory organs. This creates a physical horror because of the inability of the brain to translate the sense impression to the normal responses. The negative and sterile qualities attributed to death here are stated explicitly in

"Triple Time" and "Next Please". In "Triple Time" the present is described in negative terms and in our rejection of this. we imply that the future too is not to be looked to with great 165 expectancy since the present is "the future furthest childhood saw" (LD. p. 35)- For the same reason our view of the past should be modified, for what we disregard as unimportant in the present will become "A valley cropped by fat neglected chances/That we insensately forbore to fleece" (LD. p. 35).

Because of our Inability to see the present clearsightedly, we shall always make the wrong choices as is shown in "Arrivals,

Departures". It is the wrong choices we shall blame when we reach the sterility of our winter: "On this we blame our last/

Threadbare perspectives, seasonal decrease" (LD. p. 35). In

"Next Please" Larkin uses the image of the person on land looking out to sea at what approaches, paying no attention to what goes on where he is or in the present time but focusing all attention on the "tiny, clear,/Sparkling armada of promises" (LD. p. 20). Distance lends glamour as does time, for, when what we have hoped for arrives, we find that we have been deceived. The "tiny, clear,/Sparkling armada of promises" turns out to be crude, vulgar, unenticing and totally unlike its promise; it is

Leaning with brasswork prinked, Each rope distinct,

Flagged, and the figurehead with golden tits Arching our way. (LD. p. 20)

Even this parody of our expectations "never anchors" for "it's/

No sooner present than it turns to past" (LD. p. 20). Hope for 166 anything from life is mistaken for what will eventually anchor for each one is "a black-/Sailed unfamiliar" (LD. pi 20), for which we have not been lookingi Instead of unloading "all good Into our lives", this ship is "Towing at her back/A huge and birdless silence. In her wake/No waters breed or break" (LD. p. 20). The poem concludes with an image of total sterility; it is one of the few direct statements that Larkin makes. He is certain of only two things: that for each of us the end is death and that death Is total annihilation.

John Holloway's review of The whitsun Weddings in the

Spectator2 captures the difference between The Less Deceived and The whitsun Weddings through its title, "Still Less

Deceived", since the ideas which are established in the earlier volume of poetry are developed still further in the last volumei Within the review the critic says, "There is no new theory, only new poems," whereas it seems to me that the process of maturing which Larkin undergoes in the time between the publication of the two volumes does result in some modifications and a new emphasis in his theory. The poems group themselves in a similar manner to those in The Less

Deceived except that there are many more poems in this volume which could be described as social poems. I suggested earlier that the social poems In The Less Deceived were possible because of Larkin*s increased self-awareness: the increased

i. 2 John Holloway, "Still Less Deceived," The Spectator, February 28, 1964, 288. 167

number of social poems in The Whitsun Weddings is accompanied

by poems of self-examination which are much more positive

than their counterparts in the earlier volume. Larkin points

to his own development by producing a sequel to "Toads"

entitled "Toads Revisited". In this poem he examines prag•

matically what it is like to be without the "toad work" and

finds that those who are enjoying such leisure are not those

he had imagined in the earlier poem but instead

Palsied old step-takers, Hare-eyes clerks with the jitters,

Waxed-fleshed outpatients Still vague from accidents, And characters in long coats Deep in the litter-baskets—. (WW. p. 18)

His own value judgement of such people has changed too, for

now he thinks of them as "dodging the toad work/By being

stupid or weak" (WW. p. 18). He no longer envies them but

thinks what emptiness such enforced leisure exposes, "Nowhere

to go but indoors,/No friends but empty chairs—" (WW. p. 18).

For this reason he values his own work-ordered life. His

ironic tone, as he describes the Importance to him of work,

shows his awareness that although the work itself is no more meaningful than the activities of the idlers he has described,

he, like most men, needs a sense of order and a sense of ful•

filling some function, both of which work gives. The final

lines of the poem, "Give me your arm, old toad;/Help me down 168

Cemetry Road" (WW. p. 19), Indicate that he has not lost sight of the only possible end of life, but that he has chosen a way of making progress towards that end seem less terrible and meaningless. The changed attitude which dominates the poem is primarily towards himself. He is no longer making such stringent demands upon himself, condemning himself for failure or feeling the need to rationalize his position. He

is acknowledging a need in himself and meeting that need without self-recrimination, whilst losing none of the clarity of his awareness of things external to man. His feeling that he is less isolated in his failures than he has previously suggested is shown in two poems in which he examines himself in relation to others. In each poem another man is the starting point of his exploration. In "Mr. Bleaney" we learn all the external circumstances of-Mr. Bleaney*s life, forming a clear picture of an existence narrow and deprived. His room without any comforts suggests someone who Is essentially homeless and images his life:

Flowered curtains, thin and frayed, Fall to within five inches of the sill,

Whose window shows a strip of building land, Tussocky, littered. "Mr. Bleaney took My bit of garden properly in hand." Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook

Behind the door, no room for books or bags—. (WW. p. 10) 169

The Image is developed further by the elaborately ordered routine designed to shut out awareness of essential isolation and alienation. The poet takes his room and becomes familiar with the external details of Mr. Bleaney*s life. Taking the room seems to him like an indentification between his own way of life and that of Mr. Bleaney. He examines himself respond• ing to the situation:

But if he stood and watched the frigid wind Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed Telling himself that this was home, and grinned, And shivered. (WW. p. 10)

He realizes that his fear is that the comfortless room in totally unbeautiful surroundings Images his way of life just as much as he feels it must reflect Mr. Bleaney's; he has a

"dread/That how we live measures our own nature" (WW. p. 10).

He does not know whether Mr. Bleaney shared this fear and he does not know himself how valid a fear it is. In "Dockery and Son" the same problems and questions about what a way of life indicates are raised, this time from a sense of contrast between himself and his contemporary. Revisiting his old college he finds himself totally divorced from his youth,

"I try the door of where I used to live:/Locked" (WW. p. 37)•

Dockery, on the other hand, maintains a link between past and present through his son's presence in the college. The un• expected difference leads to an awareness on Larkin's part that what we know of anyone outside ourselves is very little 170 and that even our self-awareness is limited. The image of the railway lines crystalizes the experience: "the ranged/

Joining and parting lines reflect a strong/Unhindered moon"

(WW. p. 37)» Lives which seem to run parallel at the outset gradually diverge and proceed to different destinations.

Each destination is, however, ultimately the same and the conditions governing the journey are also common:

Life Is first boredom, then fear. Whether or not we use it, it goes, And leaves what something hidden from us chose, And age, and then the only end of age. (WW. p. 38)

It is the "something hidden from us" which causes the seeming differences in ways of life, "innate assumptions" which have little relation to "what/We think truest, or most want to do"

(WW. p. 38). It is not until a way of life has established itself and hardened "into all we've got", that we are fully aware that a choice has been made. The point that Larkin is making is very similar to the one made in "Places, Loved Ones", but his attitude towards what he is saying is different. He is no longer mocking man's rationalization of his life's failures, but he is expressing compassion for the fact that man is without any clear choices and that a way of life sub• merges desires and beliefs and hurries us towards death. He is less concerned to justify his own isolation than to see how it fits into an overall pattern and links him with others.

The poem could be seen as a working out of the realization of 171

Katherine in A Girl in Winter when she describes her relation• ship with Robin as based on being his fellow traveller able to give and receive limited assistance. In the poem Larkin is clearly recognising his Isolation but also that of others, and he is very much aware of their mutual journey. His attempt to understand Dockery and see what he has in common with him is the counterpart to Katherine's desire to give some assist• ance to Robin. The willingness to accept life's limitations and to try to make something within them rather than to simply protest against them is expressed in all the poems of self- examination and in ?The Importance of Elsewhere". The two positions described within the poem are to some extent parallel to the relative positions held by Larkin in the last two volumes of poetry. In The Less Deceived he is concerned to point to his differences, to his sense of being an out• sider, as, for example, in "Reasons for Attendance", and to rationalize his position by pointing to his greater awareness of the ultimate meaninglessness of life. His position in Ireland is that of someone who is an outsider, but whose values cannot be too closely challenged because of his forelgnness. He appears to be different from accident of circumstances rather than perverse choice:

Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home, Strangeness made sense. The salt rebuff of speech, Insisting so on difference, made me welcome: Once that was recognised, we were in touch. 172

Their draughty streets, end-on to hills, the faint Archaic smell of dockland, like a stable, The herring-hawker's cry, dwindling, went To prove me separate, not unworkable. (WW. p. Jh)

His position in England is much more difficult since he is not foreign and has no acceptable reason for seeming alien:

Living in England has no such excuse: These are my customs and establishments It would be much more serious to refuse. Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence. (WW. p. 3^)

Similarly having asserted that life is all we have and that death is annihilation, he has no justification for not trying to make something positive of life. In this volume of poetry

Larkin is being positive: he is asserting his similarities to others rather than his differences from them and the increased number of social poems suggests a concern with life strong enough to believe in the possibility of improve• ment .

In both "Church Going" and "An Arundel Tomb" Larkin expresses a belief in the value of tradition and stability given to the individual and to the society as a whole by a clearly defined social structure. In these two poems he indicates that he thinks the forces for order are being or have been destroyed. "MCMXIV" marks the moment of the change from the old life to the new, showing that what is most to be regretted is the loss of Innocence. He describes the men 173

queuing up to volunteer to fight, and reveals those qualities in them which he no longer sees around him. They seem to belong to their environment; their activities are established within a clear routine; they stand waiting for enlistment

As if they were stretched outside The Oval or Villa Park,

Grinning as if it were all An August Bank Holiday lark. (WW. p. 28)

They have a dignity which he suggests by the use of "crowns" and "archaic", "The crowns of hats, the sun/On moustached archaic faces" (WW. p. 28). The regal imagery is picked up

later in the poem when he speaks of the coinage and of the

children:

The farthings and sovereigns, And dark-clothed children at play Called after kings and queens. (WW. p. 28)

He suggests through this the structured quality of society when the fact of a monarch was meaningful and gave to every•

one else a sense of their own position. The mention of the

servants emphasises this point: "The differently-dressed

servants/With tiny rooms in huge houses" (WW. p. 28). The

sense of an unbroken tradition is suggested by "the bleached/

Established names on the sunbllnds", and

The place-names all hazed over With flowering grasses, and fields Shadowing Domesday lines Under wheat's restless silence. (WW. p. 28) 174

The idea of Innocence is suggested.in the simplicity of their behaviour and In the sense of sunshine, leisure and warmth. The last stanza indicates the suddenness and the completeness of the break from this innocence:

Never such innocence, Never before or since, As changed Itself to past Without a word—. (WW. p. 28)

He suggests that the loss of innocence is comparable with the expulsion from Eden: "the men/Leaving their gardens tidy", but that it is a fall in some respects more terrible because it was unnecessary on this occasion: there was no edict of

God since it took place "Without a word".

"Essential Beauty" describes the world after the loss of innocence. What marks this world most clearly is its lack of simplicity and the bewilderment about identity and about what life really is. Materialism is the dominating value as the advertisements dominating life indicate:

In frames as large 'as rooms that face all ways And block the end of streets with giant loaves, Screen graves with custard, cover slums with praise Of motor-oil and cuts of salmon, shine Perpetually these sharply-pictured groves Of how life should be. (WW. p. 42)

They suggest what seems to be the ideal way of life but in fact they represent something utterly false; they are not ideal beauty in the Platonic sense, that is the potential 175 perfection of what we observe, since they have no relation• ship with reality: they "reflect none of the rained-on streets and squares" (WW. p. 42), and consequently can teach us nothing about the world we live in. They ape platonic beauty in some respects:

they rise Serenely to proclaim pure crust, pure foam, Pure coldness to our live Imperfect eyes That stare beyond this world, where nothing's made As new or washed quite clean, seeking the home All such inhabit. (WW. p. 42)

Perception of them does not lead to wisdom but rather to bewilderment, illusion and aspiration towards something lacking real value:

There, dark raftered pubs Are filled with white-clothed ones from tennis clubs, And the boy puking his heart out in the Gents Just missed them, as the pensioner paid A halfpenny more for Granny Graveclothes' Tea To taste old age. (WW. p. 42)

There is an anger in this poem which the irony at once restrains and reveals. Lines such as "Screen graves with custard, cover slums with praise/Of motor oil and cuts of salmon", indicate the horror to which the situation gives rise. We are living a world which is not simply lacking in traditional values but which deceives Itself about the lack by substituting for them the values of the advertisement world. There is a strong contrast between the world depicted 176

In this poem and that In "MCMXIV". Description of the natural world is entirely missing in "Essential Beauty", since the advertisements "Dominate outdoors". The "rained-on streets and squares" contrast with the suggestion of summer in "MCMXIV" and instead of men and children there are "pensioners",

"dying smokers", and "the boy puking his heart out in the

Gents". "Sunny Prestatyn" is a less angry poem but it echoes the ideas of "Essential Beauty". Again an advertisement is used as a standard for our ideas of beauty. The girl who is supposed to represent every man's ideal is

Kneeling up on the sand In tautened white satin. Behind her, a hunk of coast, a Hotel with palms Seemed to expand from her thighs and Spread breast-lifting arms. (WW. p. 35)

Her obvious sexual charms invite the response they get:

A couple of weeks, and her face Was snaggle-toothed and boss-eyed; Huge tits and a fissured crotch Were scored well in, and the space Between her legs held scrawls That set her fairly astride A tuberous cock and balls

Autographed Titch Thomas, while Someone had used a khife Or something to stab right through The moustached lips of her smile. (WW. p. 35) 177

The irony of the next line, "She was too good for this life", seems to suggest that in part Larkin approves of the destruct• ive response to the poster. The destruction is more of a recognition of the Irrelevance of such an advertisement; it is an attempt to make the poster fit life rather than an attempt to make life fit the poster as in "Essential Beauty".

The poem concludes with a further irony; the poster which does seem acceptable, since it is not mutilated, is one which says, "Fight Cancer".

Associated with these poems, because of a concern with illusion, are "Naturally the Foundation will Bear your Expenses" and "A Study,of Reading Habits". The former again indicates a way of life which deliberately obscures its real issues.

The speaker of the poem is not only

Hurrying to catch my Comet One dark November day, Which soon would snatch me from it To the sunshine of Bombay, (WW. p. 13) he is also seeking to escape what the "dark November day" represents in a world of illusion and superficial values. He scorns the ritual of Remembrance Day as childish:

Yet not till I was airborne Did I recall the date— That day when Queen and Minister And Band of Guards and all Still act their solemn-sinister Wreath-rubbish in Whitehall.

It used to make me throw up, These mawkish nursery games: 0 when will England grow up? (WW. p. 13) 178

He shows no recognition of the immaturity of his own position, focused as he is entirely on himself and Imagining that the rest of the world has the same focus, and attempting to escape the facts of time and death. In contrast to the state of deception which the persona of this poem displays, the speaker in "A Study of Reading Habits" indicates his sense of total disillusionment. After a life spent vicariously participating in the activities of the fictional, victorious heroes, he recognises his identity with the opposite number:

the dude Who lets the girl down before The hero arrives, the chap Who's yellow and keeps the store, Seem far too familiar. (WW. p. 31)

He condemns the illusion because of its failure, unaware that in doing so he is also condemning life. His comment "Get stewed:/Books are a load of crap", Is a comment on the quality of his own life.

"Here", "The Whitsun Weddings", and "Faith Healing" form a group within the social poems: they represent Larkin's attempt to observe without the total detachment of some of his earlier poems. "Faith Healing" as I have already indi• cated, expresses an understanding of those who feel loveless and respond extravagantly and without discrimination to a warmth which proves to be false. Larkin's own position is very different from the one he describes, but his criticism 179 is directed against a way of life which makes such misery possible rather than against the individual woman, towards whom he feels compassion. "Here" and "The Whitsun Weddings" are rather different because they are an attempt not to criticize or change others, but to see them as they are and yet accept them. The description of the residents of Hull is not flattering,

residents from raw estates, brought down The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys, Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires— Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies, Electric mixtures, toasters, washers, driers—. (WW. p. 9)

Yet, despite his distaste for their desires, he does depict them as having a strength and consistency which rises partly from the isolated context in which they live:

A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling Where only salesmen and relations come Within a terminate and fishy-smelling Pastoral of ships up streets. (WW. p. 9)

Since the poem as a whole seems to be an image for life—it is the journey theme ending at the sea, "Here is unfenced existence:/Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach (WW. p. 9)

—and the tone of the poem is one of acceptance of what exists, the acceptance embraces also the existence of people with whom

Larkin feels little in common beyond mortality. "The Whitsun

Weddings" is the title poem of the volume and crystallizes 180 most of Its aspects. The setting, Whitsuntide, suggests the feeling of an almost visionary perception sending life off in another direction, which is the experience Larkin expresses through the poem. The co-ordinating image is the same as that of "Here", the railway journey, though on this occasion, perhaps significantly, it is a journey away from the isolation of Hull to London. A contrast is made throughout between the city and the country, with glimpses of life in each environ• ment: the "wide farms" and "shortshadowed cattle" contrast with the "town, new and nondescript", with its "acres of dismantled cars". The "tall heat" of the journey contrasts with the shade of the stations, and at first Larkln's perception of people is dimished in proportion as "the sun destroys/The interest of what's happening in the shade" (WW. p. 21). There is a strong contrast between the father's view of the weddings,

"fathers had never known/Success so huge and wholly farcical"

(WW. p. 22), and those of the women, "The women shared/The secret like a happy funeral" (WW. p. 22). The discrepancy here is echoed in the juxtaposition of the religious imagery established by the whitsun setting and by the weddings which the girls regard as "a religious wounding", with the popular concept of Whitsuntide as an occasion for the display of new clothes rather than perceptions and the uncles' concept of the wedding as a time to shout "smut". The train is the link 181 between all these discordant elements:

Free at last, And loaded with the sum of all they saw, We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam. (WW. p. 22)

Despite the ignorance of those who participate in what for Larkin becomes a significant journey—"and none/Thought of the others they would never meet/Or how their lives would all contain this hour" (WW. p. 23)—it aquires a potency for him because it combines so many disparate elements. The con• clusion of the penultimate stanza indicates the change in vision which this effects, for the contrasts are now less important than the common elements; he describes London in terms of the country: "I thought of London spread out in the sun,/Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat"

(WW. p. 23). The image of-the last stanza reveals his sense of a new vision and through it a potentiality newly created for seeing and accepting a sense of order in what had always seemed meaningless chaos:

and it was nearly done, this frail Travelling coincidence; and what it held Stood ready to be loosed with all the power That being changed can give. We slowed again, And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled A sense of falling, like an arrow shower Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain. (WW. p. 23) 182

Like "Here", the total impression the poem creates is an awareness of discordant elements in life and of aspects and people which are ugly and displeasing; but stronger than the revulsion and bitterness created by these is a desire to accept what exists, and to find meaning, not in an illusion of a life better than what exists, but in the fact that everyone is in the same position; and, since life is all we have, it is better to try to create from this common basis than to refuse any commitment.

Both "Here" and "The Whitsun Weddings" make an oblique comment on death: both make use of images which Larkin has led us to expect to be associated with death. The journey image is always used as a metaphor for life and increasing maturity; the destination is always a stage nearer to death.

In "Here" the sea image reinforces the sense of the con• clusion of the journey being death, since once again it is an image with accumulated associations. Yet neither of the poems focuses on death, but rather on life and what can be made of it. In "Here" the positive emphasis on life is to some extent created through the descriptions of the environ• ment in which the journey takes place. Larkin rarely focuses on physical surroundings in his poetry as objects of beauty, but in "Here" there are lines which recreate an impression of Immediately perceived beauty: "And the widening river's 183 slow presence,/The piled gold clouds, the shining gull- marked mud" (WW. p. 9). It is a beauty in a setting not particularly noted for beauty. Similarly in the last stanza he conveys his impression that silence and isolation can be creative and fruitful through his description of the country• side just before the end of land:

"Here silence stands

Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken, Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken, Luminously-peopled air ascends; And past the poppies bluish neutral distance Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach Of shapes and shingle. (WW. p. 9)

In "The Whitsun Weddings" the emphasis on life comes from the detailed descriptions of what Larkin sees. What he describes is open to the kind of Ironic treatment he uses elsewhere, but on this occasion he is motivated by a desire to under• stand rather than to destroy. The assertion of life comes also from the journey's end not being simply a conclusion but also a beginning. The "fresh couples" are ready to embark on a new life in changed circumstances and the poet himself has a sense of some new direction.

However, traces of the violence of a poem like

"Myxomatosis" remain in "Take One Home For the Kiddies". The anger here is directed against the arbitrary cruelty of life.

The animals in the pet shop crystallize this view since, 184

On shallow straw, in shadeless glass, Huddled by empty howls, they sleep: No dark, no dam, no earth, no grass—. (WW. p. 26)

But though they have no control over their existence and seem like "flies to wanton boys" in their passive suffering,

Larkin does not seem to think that their position need necessarily mirror our own. He suggests that perhaps It is our own lack of respect for life that bears some of the responsibility for our condition:

Living toys are something novel, But it soon wears off somehow. Fetch the shoebox, fetch the shovel— Mam, we're playing funerals now. (WW. p. 26)

A similar point is made, though much less angrily, in "Days", where Larkin suggests that all that we have is life and any shift in concentration from it is simply a move towards death.

"Ignorance" expresses the basic ambiguity of our lives. We know only one certain thing and that is that we shall die; but of everything else, Including why we must die, we are

ignorant. We are provided with certain instincts and abilities, "our flesh/Surrounds us with its own decisions"

(WW. p. 39), and yet we have no intellectual apprehension of what we are or what we shall become:

Yes, it is strange,

Even to wear such knowledge—for our flesh Surrounds us with its own decisions— 185

And yet spend all our life on imprecisions, That when we start to die Have no idea why. (WW. p. 39)

The poem is not angry but questioning, and compassionate for man's limitations.

"Ambulances" is a confrontation with the nearest thing we know to death. Sudden serious illness puts man into the position of having to accept the nearness of his death and all those who become aware of him are also faced with the fact of sometime facing a similar situation.

There is an air of mystery which surrounds one about to die.

The ambulances are "Closed like confessionals" (WW. p. 33): our curiosity to know what the confrontation means is not satisfied, since "they thread/Loud noons of cities, giving back/None of the glances they absorb" (WW. p. 33). Our normal everyday lives are suddenly given a new perspective as we "see/A wild white face that overtops/Red stretcher blankets momently/As it is carried in and stowed" (WW. p. 33).

We are made to realize the universality of what is Implied:

And sense the solving emptiness That lies just under all we do, And for a second get it whole, So permanent and blank and true. (WW. p. 33)

Larkin does not mock at the triviality of our lives in contrast with death but instead seems to have a sense of the 186 uniqueness of the individual life:

For borne away in deadened air May go the sudden shut of loss Bound something nearly at an end, And what cohered in it across The years, the unique random blend Of families and fashion, there

At last begin to loosen. (WW. p. 33)

New to this volume, too, is the expression of his sense that

in each person there is an awareness of death which in such

situations comes to the surface and "Brings closer what is

left to come,/And dulls to distance all we are" (WW. p. 33).

The poem is like death poems in The Less Deceived in that

it attempts to create awareness, but Larkin's view of people

seems different and has affected his method. He does not

feel the need to use violence or irony but recognises that thereis a capacity for response and awareness in man which certain situations make apparent. It is by recreating such a situation that he recreates the awareness and makes articulate emotions not normally expressed. He does not

present himself as any more of an outsider or any more

isolated than everyone else. The poem is typical of the volume in its sense of the poet facing man's common lot and gaining something from the ability to share with others and

see himself in context. CHAPTER VI

CONCLUSION: LARKIN'S DEVELOPMENT OF TECHNIQUE FROM THE NORTH SHIP THROUGH THE NOVELS TO THE LESS DECEIVED AND THE WHITSUN WEDDINGS

In his introduction to the second edition of The North

Ship, Larkin comments on the lack of coherence in the volume as a whole:

Looking back, I find in the poems not one abandoned self but several—the ex-schoolboy, for whom Auden was the only alternative to "old-fashioned" poetry; the undergraduate, whose work a friend affably characterised as "Dylan Thomas, but you've got a sentimentality that's all your own"; and the immediate post-Oxford self, isolated in Shropshire with a complete Yeats stolen from the local girls' school. This search for a style was merely one aspect of a general immaturity. (NS. p. 8)

It is the immaturity and the unsuccessful search for a style which marks this volume off so decisively from the rest of

Larkin's work. There is no consistency in mood or point of view, no one poem providing a focus for the central Issues of the volume as there is in The Less Deceived and The Whitsun

Weddings. The fact that most of the poems are untitled indicates a lack of assurance about the central concern of

individual poems, and is also indicative of the lack of economy in the volume: in the late volumes the titles of indi• vidual poems not only crystallize the concerns of the poem but often provide an added ironic comment. For example the titles

"Church Going" and "Wedding-Wind" are deliberately ambiguous 188 and reflect the duality and ambivalence on which the poems are built. "Reasons for Attendance" is at once completely descriptive of the poem it heads and also provides an ironic comment on the rationalizing element within the poem.

In The Less Deceived and The whitsun Weddings every element of a poem is controlled towards a significant end, whereas in The North Ship there is not same close relation• ship between meaning and form, so that often an obvious poetic device is used but operates towards dispersing the meaning of the poem rather than contributing to it. In poem "VII" the poet uses sound very self-consciously!

The horns of the morning Are blowing, are shining, The meadows are bright With the coldest dew; The dawn reassembles. Like the clash of gold cymbals The sky spreads its vans out The sun hangs in view. (NS. p. 18)

The onomatopaeic quality of words such as "shining", "blowing",

"clash", and "cymbals" is delighted in for its own sake and for the contribution made towards the generally rousing quality of the stanza which is created by the war imagery and by the rhythm. But the whole concept of morning which the stanza creates seems rather an interesting conceit than a powerful recreation of what the dawn actually is and how it affects the observer. The image is there for its own sake 189 rather than because It carries the meaning, and the sounds are simply an extension of the image. The second stanza further undercuts the sincerity of the image of the first stanza, for it concludes,

For never so brilliant, Neither so silent Nor so unearthly, has Earth grown before. (NS. p. 18)

We have to take this evaluation of the morning on trust, since this is not at all the sense of the morning which the first stanza creates. The qualities of brilliance are there but nothing to suggest the accompanying silence; and far from suggesting the unearthly qualities of the earth, the first stanza works in the opposite direction through its use of familiar battle imagery.

In the poem "Winter" the swans and the horses are used as quite arbitrary symbols, since nothing in the rest of the poem supports the function they are given in the lines,

For the line of a swan Diagonal on water Is the cold of winter, And each horse like a passion Long since defeated Lowers its head. (NS. p. 19)

Similarly in the poem "Dawn" the cock and the clouds are used as Images of lovelessness and cold, but their significance as such exists only in the poem. They do not have connotations 190 which bring further meaning into the poem.

Jill was published in 1946, just a year after The

North Ship, but many of the faults of the poetry are less obvious in the novel. There Is of course less temptation in a novel to focus closely on the sound patterns, so that this problem does not arise; but the problem of significant images is relevant. The central images of the novel,.the autumn, the wind, the journey theme, operate consistently. They form a natural part of the narrative structure, part of the novels as "a piece of virtual history"!, and yet they have a cumulative effect which illuminates the central issues of the novel. There are, however, other images less important to the central issues raised by the novel which are less skilfully handled. The symbolism of the dog barking at

Elizabeth in the last chapter has already been mentioned but its obviousness as a symbol causes its failure in much the same way; as delight in sound for its own sake destroys the tone of poem "VII". The descriptions of the swan which John sees on the canal seems to have some symbolic function, since references to it occur twice in relationship to John's emotions about Jill. It seems to be symbolic of something beautiful in essentially drab surroundings, but it is rather vaguely directed. If the description occured only once it would be

^-Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York* Scrlbner, 1953), P. 252. 191 accepted simply on the narrative level but its repetition gives it an emphasis, the significance of which is not fully apparent.

A Girl in Winter, published in 19^7, is even more tightly controlled than Jill in terms of significant images completely absorbed into the level of the narrative. Even the names of some of the characters are symbolic, though never obtrusively so. Katherine is surnamed "Lind", and the shield image is picked up in the description of her face and in her general withdrawn behaviour. Mr. Anstey's name suggests the nastiness which Katherine finds in him; Jane appears on the surface to be the plain and simple girl her name suggests; Robin has the cheerful, unabashed qualities associated with the bird; Miss Green is immature, inex• perienced, jealous of Katherine and sick; Miss Feather is superficial, her opinions and actions being directed by those of her superiors.

The images which do not work are not essential to the theme or plot of the novel. The tennis game, for example, fits into the narrative but the way it is used to reveal aspects of the personalities of Jane, Katherine and Robin is rather too neat and consequently not very convincing. The description of the record which Jane plays and the associations it has is developed too far. The development gives it an importance it does not have on the narrative level so that it 192

becomes an interesting image the writer is exploring rather

than an integral part of the action:

The record was old-fashioned, and it had a tinny quality only partly due to the needle. The tune it played had been popular for perhaps a week or two, or perhaps for even as long as a musical comedy had run in London, but was now quite forgotten. The orchestra that played it did so in what had been the fashion of the moment, with little empty tricks of syncopation that recalled the outmoded dresses of the girls that had danced to it. It was strange to think it had once sounded modern. Now it was like an awning propped in the sun, nearly white, that years ago had been striped bright red and yellow. (AGW. pp. 118-9)

Similarly Larkin occasionally describes an action or thought

in metaphorical terms which do not blend well with the general

narrative; they are too obviously poetic. An example is his

description of Katherine*s thoughts prior to sleeping on her

first night at the Fennels':

Finally, her mind gave one last flicker of surprise, as a sail gleams for a moment before going over the horizon. (AGW. p. 91)

The Less Deceived was not published until 1955 and

The Whitsun Weddings in 1964. The poems in these volumes are much more closely wrought; the obvious faults in economy and relevance which can be shown in the early works are

entirely absent from them. They can be examined in terms of

the positive advances in technique that they show. None of

these poems has the delight in sound regardless of structure: whenever sounds are emphasised it is because they contribute 193 significantly to the total experience of the poem. The poem

"Wires" is a very clear example of this, as a detailed analysis will indicate. In the first line the vowels in the words "widest" and "prairies" in conjunction create a sense of unlimited space hut the words which conclude the line,

"electric fences", negate that sense in the short sharpness of their vowel sounds. In the second line no word Invites being dwelt upon so that the sense is of a consistent and balanced progression of sounds, which echoes the commonsense attributed to the old cattle. In contrast the conclusion of the third line with Its insistence on long vowels being pulled back by consonant sounds suggests the longings of the "young steers". The change in the poem's direction is emphasised by the punctuation of the fourth line. The end'.of this line continues syntactically until the end of the second line of the second stanza. The effect of the sound in these lines is at once of extended movement—the steers moving out beyond where they normally are—and yet the repetition of the word

"wires" indicates the inevitable terminal quality they have.

"Muscle-shredding violence", through the harshness and dis• cordant quality of the sounds, Indicates the intensity and the surprise of pain. The third line of this stanza contrasts in sound with the second line, being smooth and balanced, in the same way that the second and third lines of the first stanza contrast. The final line gives emphasis to the word "electric" 194 which occurs also in the first line. The sharp abruptness of the vowel sounds is increased since the word following is not "fences" but "limits". "Widest" occurs again with its echoing of the first line and the sense of space expressed there, but its effect in this context is changed since it is followed by the short vowel sounds of "senses". As a result the meaning of the poem cannot be located simply in the idea or even the images but in the total effect of both of these, combined with the working out of the sound patterns.

Poem "XX" in The North Ship is the only poem in that volume to make use of sound in a way which is very common to the later poems. The sound is used in this poem to deliberate• ly undercut the statement the words make. In poems such as

"Reasons for Attendance" and "Naturally the Foundation will

Bear Your Expenses" this device is used for ironic purposes.

In these poems the total meaning of the poem cannot be found in the succession of statements or images but can only be reached through an awareness of the way in which the rhythm creates a tension because of the way in which it contrasts with what is being said; the meaning of these poems lies as much in that tension as anywhere.

The images which Larkin uses in his later poems are never as contrived and limited as the ones mentioned earlier.

They are usually drawn directly from the situation itself and because of this they are not at all startling. This was regarded 195

by some of the Movement critics as being a fault common to the

Movement poets. In fact It is consistent with the view of

life and poetry held by these poets. Larkin, like the others,

uses traditional forms, commonplace situations and images which

are not exciting in themselves because he is concerned to

produce poetry which is carefully and tightly made, so that

any surprise or shock comes, not from how the poem is made,

but from the combination of what the poem is saying in contrast

with its form. On occasion the images go beyond this function

and draw together ideas or images which have occured earlier

in a poem. For example, in "The whitsun Weddings" in the

description of London, "spread out in the sun,/Its postal

districts packed like squares of wheat" (WW. p. 23), the

simile does more than create a visual aerial picture of London,

it also refers back to the town and country images and draws

together the total meaning of the poem in its creation of

harmony between apparent incompatlbles.

A distinctive feature of the last two volumes, which is

rarely found in The North Ship is the use of situation Itself as an Image. "At Grass" is a good example since in this poem, as in "Winter", horses are the means by which Larkin explores an idea. In the poem "Winter" he makes explicit his view of

the horses as symbols:

And each horse like a passion Long since defeated Lowers its head. (NS. p. 19) 196

In "At Grass" the horses are not symbols of any particular concept; It is the totality of their lives observed at a point when a pattern is perceptible that forms an image for Larkin's vision of life. He does not need to go beyond the situation he describes with precision, since it is through the process

of observation in which the reader is made to participate,

that implications of the situation become apparent. This is

true too of "The Whitsun Weddings"; it is not necessary to make

the train journey into a symbol of a process of discovery since

it is exactly that.

The language of The North Ship is distinctly poetical and it is matched by an artificial and sometimes strained

syntax and a rhetorical tone. Through these devices the poet

seems to be making poetry into something esoteric and border•

ing on the mysterious and vague. Larkin mentions in that

section of the Introduction to the volume which I have quoted

earlier that he was influenced by one aspect of Yeats' work

and that of Dylan Thomas whilst he was writing The North Ship.

In the volume there is no use of dialogue and no colloqialism.

In Jill and A Girl In Winter the very form demands a greater

use of normal vocabulary and speech patterns. For the most

part the dialogue Is very well handled and convincing. Despite

the temptations inherent in the situation in Jill to lapse

into vocabulary common only to the undergraduate during the

war period, there is no sense now that the language is dated. 197

Larkin has overcome the dangers of writing what might ultimately become a piece of social documentation in a way that Amis and Wain have not. For though the dialogue is natural and appropriate it is not aggressively of its time in the way that the language of the dialogue is in the work of the other two writers. In A Girl In Winter there is less dialogue and it is sometimes less well handled. The writer makes little attempt to create a sense of Katherine's foreign- ness through her speech, for the formality which informs her speech Is common to the other characters also. There is perhaps some justification for this, since we view the action of the novel from Katherine's point of view and her foreign- ness of speech is something which others would be aware of more than she is. The diction of the last two books is not poetic and on occasions it is deliberately colloquial. The syntax too is natural despite the tightness of the verse structure. In his introduction to New Lines II, Conquest quotes Wordsworth as characterizing the kind of poetic theory the Movement poets adhered to. The quotation is a very apt description of the nature of Lafkin's language in his last two volumes of poetry:

Not only the language of a large portion of every good poem, even of the most elevated character, must necessarily, except with reference to the metre, in no respect differ from that of good prose, but likewise that some of the most interesting parts of the best poems will be found to be strictly the language of prose when prose is well written.2

2New Llnes-II. p. xxii. 198

Where obvious colloqulalismsare used, they have a definite purpose beyond the simple desire to appeal to a

popular audience. In "Next Please" the word "tits" is used to indicate the poverty of our expectations and their fulfil• ment. Instead of an idealised symbol of love and fertility the "figurehead with golden tits" adorns the ship which represents our desires. The rest of the poem has a very neutral diction so that the word gains an emphasis which forces our awareness of the cheapness of what we look to.

In "Sunny Prestatyn" the deliberately vulgar language recrea- ates the discrepancy between the poster and the lives of those who observe it and also points to the essential poverty of imagination which prompts such posters. In "Lines on a Young

Lady's Photograph Album" the mention of the "disquieting chaps" serves to place the writer in slightly Ironic context since his use of slang is designed to put himself on the girl's level; instead it increases the distance by dating him. There is ironic intention also in "I remember, I remember" where, through the colloquialism, the poet recreates the hearty quality of the youth he did not experience, and also, through the language, indicates the ephemeral quality of such experiences; In "Poetry of Departures", the colloquial ex• pressions convey the simplicity, even naivety, of response in those who admire the one who "chucked up everything/And just cleared off (LD. p. 34). In The Whitsun Weddings the 199

colloquialisms are fewer "but they fulfil much the same

functions. The conclusion of "A Study of Reading Habits",

"Get stewed. Books are a load of crap" (WW. p. 31), conveys

in his own terms the utter frustration of the persona of the

poem who has found that illusion has failed him, and identifies

him closely with the kind of literature he is rejecting. The

contrast between these lines and the title reveals the dis•

crepancy between the way in which we would like to regard

reading and literature as primarily an Intellectual activity,

whilst, in fact, it is equally an emotional and even escapist

one.

For the most part the poems in The North Ship are short

and epigrammatic; only three poems are longer and narrative in

form. What is being said in most of the other poems is too

slight to warrant expansion. The novels obviously provided

Larkin with the experience of the longer narrative form and most of the poems in the last two volumes are narrative and

descriptive rather than epigrammatic. Two poems dealing with

similar themes illustrate this, poem "XXVI", which is short

enough to quote in full, and "Triple Time" in The Less

Deceived.

This is the first thing I have understood: Time is the echo of an axe Within a wood. (NS. p. 39) 200

In contrast to the epigrammatical statement of this poem,

"Triple Time" recreates Larkin's theory of time through a concrete image which allows the reader to participate in the poet's moment of awareness. The first stanza describes the present in terms of a particular time and places

This empty street, this sky to blandness scoured, This air, a little indistinct with autumn Like a reflection, constitute the present— A time traditionally soured, A time unrecommended by event. (LD. p. 35)

The words "empty", "blandness", "indistinct", create the sense of a yagueness which springs from our desire not to focus too closely on the present because of our lack of ex• pectations from it. The word "scoured" indicates the almost wilful nature of our refusal to see clearly. In the next stanza the poet shows that what we view as the present is not simply the present but also the future and the past.

It is the future because the present occasion Is

the future furthest childhood saw Between long houses, under travelling skies, Heard in contending bells— An air lambent with adult enterprises. (LJD. p. 35)

The Images of the landscape of the first stanza are picked up here and given a new perspective. The empty street becomes

"long houses" so that the feeling of looking down a long per• spective, so long that details are enticingly vague, is created. 201

This is the child's sense of a future stretching ahead full of as yet indefinite possibilities. The bland sky from a different perspective is "travelling skies", the child's own excitement finds a reflection in his view of the restless moving quality of his environment. Instead of being "un- recommended by event" the future seems full of the potential of

"adult enterprises". Everything in the picture Ls the same, the only difference being the perspective of the viewer. The last stanza indicates what the occasion will seem like when it has inevitably become the past:

A valley cropped by fat neglected chances That we insensately forbore to fleece. On this we blame our last Threadbare perspectives, seasonal decrease. (LD. p. 35)

Our view of the past has a distorting quality more extreme than our view of the present or the future. The change from the "empty street" to the valley suggests a kind of romanticism in our view of the past, perhaps because of a sense that, when we have ceased to look to the future and can only look back to the past, if we are to attribute any meaning at all to life then we must see the unfulfilled potential as being our responsibility rather than the result of there being no potential. The idea of perspective is Introduced into this stanza thus emphasising the point that our sense of potential is relative, not only in terms of whether we are looking at 202 the present, the past or the future, but also in terms of what portion of life we can reasonably assume is left to us.

Through the shifting perspective the poem recreates the feeling that it is almost impossible to understand the significance of any particular time since it changes in time.

This is at once an abstraction of what is worked out through the action of A Girl In Winter and yet it works through images which give it an immediacy and concreteness and recreate the process of understanding and realization; the poem from The

North Ship simply presents the poet's conclusions using the image as a clarification of the conclusion rather than a recreation of the process by which the conclusion was reached.

In both poems Larkin Is dealing with a difficult concept. In the earlier poem he is content to suggest this by using a metaphor which leaves the reader to resolve the total concept.

The poem from the The Less Deceived has the quality attributed to Larkin in an article entitled "Obscurity in Poetry"^ of attempting to say difficult things in a deceptively simple way.

Since most of the poems in The North Ship present a conclusion rather than the experience itself they do not have a stylistic device common to the novels and the other volumes of poetry: Larkin's tendency to use the conclusion of a poem or a novel in a peculiarly significant manner. The novels are

^"Obscurity in Poetry", The Times Literary Supplement, January 16, 1959, 33. 203 resolved through images which throw the reader hack into the novel, since the final Images put the action into a new perspective, one which undercuts the firmness of any con• clusions reached earlier. In the same way many of the poems conclude with a questioning tone which involves a complete reassessment of what has gone before. The conclusions of

"Reasons for Attendance" and "Next Please" have already been mentioned in this context. In other poems the conclusion draws together all the implications of the poem to make a final assertion, what Betjeman describes "the final stroke"24"j* the conclusion of "An Arundel Tomb" and that of "Church Going" are examples of this.

Larkin's method of either drawing together a process of reasoning or challenging it creates a situation in which the reader is made to participate in the debate. The convers• ational tone similarly draws the reader in as does the choice of commonplace situations and experiences through which Larkin explores and reveals his ideas.

Yet, despite the illusion which Larkin successfully and deliberately creates of poetry based primarily on the principle of giving pleasure, it has a tension which becomes part of its emotional experience. The cumulative impression given by the volume The Whitsun Weddings is the same as the total experience

^John Betjeman, "The Whitsun Weddings". The Listener. 19 March, 1964, 483. 204 of each poem. The ambivalence in Larkin is his perception of random disorder and meaninglessness in life and a strong desire to find a meaning without losing any of his awareness.

One order he finds is in the large pattern into which all lives fit, but even this pattern has its own quality of meaninglessness. The second order is one which he makes for himself, since he creates poetry out of the very disorder which troubles him. F. W. Bateson In his review of The Less

Deceived summarises this aspect of Larkin's work:

The emotional crises, the sentimental outpours, and the aesthetic titillatlons are all, one feels, under control. They have not been denied or repressed, they are still there— but included and co-ordinated in a rational system of human values and obligations.5

The order is extended into each poem for he makes the commonplace experience significant by its implications about life, through this he suggests that a pattern of life must exist, if any trivial incident can be related to a whole. He uses apparently normal speech patterns and vocabulary and yet, by careful ordering, he creates from them a significance which out of context they would not have so that positioning gives emphasis to a particular word and so particular meaning to an apparently flat statement:

^F. W. Bateson, "The Less Deceived". Essays in Criticism. January, 1957, pp. 74-70. 205

Typically the line from which these poets start (developed from Mr. Empson), is apparently transparent but conceals other meanings beneath its colloquial flatness."

Larkin does the same thing with individual words often by the device of repetition with cumulative meaning. For example in "Wants" (LJD. p. 22), the word "however" occurs three times in three lines:

Beyond all this the wish to be alone• However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards However we follow the printed directions of sex However the family is photographed under the flagstaff— Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.

Here the word "however" relating to the first line means, despite the fact of our wish to be alone we do various things which hide this fact from us. Put into the context of the last line it has the additional meaning that despite all we do the fact remains that the basic desire is to be alone.

The alternating emphasis reflects the constantly shifting emphasis on our lives and indicates the ambivalence of the poet in his attitude towards life and death. Paraphrased, the clarity of what the poet is saying is lost, though., the lines in which he expresses this complex idea appear to be very simple. It is, to a large extent, positioning which gives the meaning beyond the words themselves.

^Anthony Hartley, "Poets of the Fifties," The Spectator. 2? August, 195^. 261. 206

In the poem "Toads" the repetition of the word "stuff" similarly affects the meaning of earlier parts of the poem.

When the poet expresses his desire to shout "Stuff your pension" the word has connotations of the speech which would be associated with "folks" who "live up lanes". In making

such an assertion he would be relating himself to them. When he says "that's the stuff/That dreams are made on" he there• fore comments not only on the unreality of his desire to shout "Stuff your pension" but also on the lives he has been

envying.

After The North Ship Larkin's attitude towards the

function of art appears to have undergone a change. He no

longer seems to feel that art and life are so unrelated that art has a quality of abstraction and is sufficiently distant to be regarded without real emotion or involvement. Instead he employs techniques designed to relate poetry as closely as possible to life. His comments prefacing his poems in

Enright's anthology show his changed attitude:

I write poems to preserve things I have seen/thought/felt—my prime responsibility is to the experience itself, which I am trying to preserve from oblivion for its own sake.7

He is in a sense combating mortality and meaninglessness by a

process of creation and conservation in his art. Like Yeats'

7Poets of the 19q0's. p. 77. 207

"gay" poet In "Lapis Lazuli" he is able to view the tragedy of life and yet get beyond the despair arising from this and create even on the basis of the most trivial incident. A reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement expresses this seeming paradox in Larkin*s approach to his art:

These poems are concerned with the impermanence of life, the loneliness of man, the sadness of age, the indulgence of memory, the sense...that life's meaninglessness and man's ignorance are in some obscurely moving way celebrated by being recorded.8

Larkin himself supports this point when he says that "the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art".9

In the use of the word "celebrate", the reviewer in

The Times Literary Supplement raises another problem about the nature of Larkin's poetry and that is the difficulty of defining his forms. Richard Kell says that Larkln's "mode is lyrical"^0 and this viewpoint would seem to support the use of the word "celebrate" in the review quoted above.

Susanne Langer in Feeling and Form defines the lyric at length. In broad terms

The virtual history that a lyric poem creates is the occur• rence of a living thought, the sweep of an emotion, the intense experience of a mood. This is a genuine piece of subjective history, though usually it is a single episode.

8"Undeceived Poet," The Times Literary Supplement, March 12, 1964, 216.

9Poets of the 1950*3, p. 77.

10Richard Kell, "Poetry Selection 1964," The Critical Survey, II, 2, 1965, 110. 208

Its differences from other literary products are not radical, and there is no device characteristic of lyric composition that may not also be met in other forms. It is the frequency and importance of certain practices, rather than their exclusive use, that make lyric poetry a special type.**

The practices she refers to are the use of speech in the first person, direct address and the use of the present tense. These are all aspects which are basic to Larkin's poetry. Of the emotional element he says himself in "The Pleasure Principle" that the first stage in writing a poem is, "When a man becomes obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that he is compelled to do something about it;" The second stage is to

"construct a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, any time."1

He thus acknowledges in his own writing elements basic to the lyric: the desire to recreate an emotional experience and to achieve a universality in tone.

However, there are also aspects of his poetry which

Langer sees as having little or no place in the lyric poem: the lyric poet uses every quality of language because he has neither plot nor fictitious characters nor, usually, any intellectual argument to give his poem continuity.I3

The intellectual argument is as basic to the structure of

Larkin's poetry as the emotional content! In defining the

^Feeling and Form, pi 259.

12Philip Larkin, "The Pleasure Principle," Listen. II, 3, 1957, 28i

^Feeling and Form, p: 259. 209 dramatic Langer suggests: we do not usually have any idea of the future as a total experience which is coming because of our past and present acts; such a sense of destiny arises only in unusual moments under peculiar emotional stress.1^

The sense of the future fulfilling a pattern established by

present and past is one of the distinctive features of Larkin's 1

poetry as is the "tension between past and future". J Larkin himself suggests that the problem of reconciling the two

elements of the dramatic and the lyric arises from his basic theory of poetry which he describes as "emotional in nature and theatrical In operation."l^

Much of Browning's poetry presents similar problems of definition. In his doctoral thesis on Browning J. P. Hulcoop defines both the lyric and the dramatic forms in order to reach a definition of the hybrid mode in which Browning writes. He distinguishes the lyric from the dramatic as follows: Lyric and dramatic can be defined as genres and dis• tinguished from one another on the basis of the attitudes which each adopts towards the presentation of character. It is not usually the intention of the author of the genuine lyric to reveal either himself or the speaker as ^„ a character; the lyric poem reveals a mood or state of mind.

•^Feeling and Form, p. 308.

15ibid., p. 308.

16"The Pleasure Principle," p. 28.

17J. F. Hulcoop, "Robert Browning, 'Maker of Plays' and Poet" (Ph.D., London, I960), p. 508. 210

However, In Browning's poetry, as in Larkin's, there are elements which take the poem beyond the definition of lyric, which have associations with the dramatic whilst not being capable of being defined totally in terms of the dramatic.

To describe this hybrid form Dr. Hulcoop uses the term "stream- of-consciousness lyric", in which the mood or state of mind becomes characteristic of an individual speaker; there is a real attempt to suggest a consistently operating viewpoint which would, if related to a dramatic situation, determine characteristic actions or reactions. In fact, no such situation occurs; the poem remains the cry of an occasion.;. In this form we encounter a character, still lyrically revealed through moods and states of mind, who is involved In a dramatic situation or story.1°

The above description is more applicable to Larkin's work in The Less Deceived and The Whitsun Weddings than any more limited definition. To take just one example, "Reasons for Attendance" gives the reader a clear picture of the kind of reaction Larkin makes when presented with a particular situation; he suggests that his reaction to the dancers is representative of a whole area of his responses so that the reader has a clear sense of an individual. The situation in which he finds himself is potentially dramatic. He could be put into the position where he has to make a clear choice between remaining outside and participating. The process of argument In the poem is an inner confrontation with this

18J. P. Hulcoop, p. 649. 211 situation, though he is not called upon to act on the basis of his choice. The poem is In the present tense throughout but it carries implications of both past and future, since the nature of the reaction Larkin defines is one in a recurrent pattern.

The line of development I have traced from the novels to the later poems also has its place in the writer's movement towards new forms: In many respects Larkin's work appears to be very conventional and unexperimental: he uses traditional stanzaic forms, rhyme schemes and discreet imagery in his poetry just as in the novels he seems at first reading to be making simple and straightforward use of the narrative form.

In both media, however, he works within the closely defined conventional form to achieve something which transcends it.

Just as his poetry cannot be satisfactorily defined in terms of established genre so his novels go beyond the simple novel form to become novel-poems. The element which they have in common is the lyrical: I have already shown those aspects of the poetry which can be defined in no other way. The novels are lyrical in the sense that Freedman defines in The Lyrical

Novel: I have demonstrated in the chapters on Jill and A

Girl In Winter that the actual action of the novels is slight; what is more important is the process of experience and perception which each of the central characters undergoes.

The external world in which each lives is described less to 212

create for the reader a sense of the "reality" of the lives

of the characters than to create an external reflection of

the consciousness of each. The working towards a resolution

in each novel is done through Images, since even the action

becomes part of the pattern of the imagery. All these aspects

of the novels put them in a special category which Freedman

labels the lyrical novel:

Novels are usually associated with storytelling: the reader looks for the characters with whom he can identify, for action in which he may become engaged, or for ideas and moral choices he may see dramatized. Lyrical poetry on the other hand, suggests the expression of feelings of themes in musical or pictorial patterns. Combining features of both, the lyrical novel shifts the reader's attention from men and events to a formal design: The usual scenery of fiction becomes a texture of imagery, and characters appear as personae for the self. Lyrical fiction, then, is not defined essentially by a poetic style of purple prose..; Rather, a lyrical novel assumes a unique form which transcends the causal and temporal movement of the narrative within the framework of fiction. It is a hybrid genre that uses the novel to approach the function of a poem:18

The relationship between the central characters of the novels and their environment is also typical of the lyrical novel:

The hero as an aesthetic image of nature leads to the technique of mirroring... The "world" is part of the hero's inner world; the hero, in turn, mirrors the external world and all its multitudinous manifestations.19

1 fl Ralph Freedman, The Lyrical Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 1.

19ibid., p. 21. 213

I have already mentioned the way in which Larkin concludes both the novels and Individual poems within the last two volumes with images or statements which turn the reader back into the novel or poem. In this respect he is very much a lyric writer by Freedman's definition, since, through his conclusions, he is forcing the reader to see the novel or poem as a whole:

Conventionally the lyric, as distinct from the epic and drama, is seen either as an instantaneous expression of a feeling or as a spatial form. The reader approaches a lyric in the way an onlooker regards a picture: he sees complex details in juxtaposition and experiences them as a whole.20

There is a very clear line of development in the technique in Larkin's work which is expressive of the develop• ment In his ideology. The North Ship is in many respects very different from the later work, but It does contain in embryo most of what was to follow! Most of the poems in the volume could be described as conventional lyrics, though not very good ones. The ideas they express are conventional poetic ones, so that there is not a discrepancy between form and content; both are conventional and stereotyped.

The novels represent a greater skill in expression and a maturing of a personal ideology; in them a less conventional form is used to express what is new and individual, though

20The Lyrical Novel, pi 6i 214 the lyric element of the first book is retained. The Less

Deceived and The Whitsun Weddings again contain the lyric element, but fused with it are the narrative and dramatic elements learnt In the novels. The unconventional welding of the two forms is expressive of Larkin's view of the world at the timei The rational structure which is responsible for the dramatic and narrative elements of his poems, is reminiscent of the work of a poet such as Pope; Larkin, who is aware of the faults in his society but who has no hope of reforming them, is as close to being a poet of social satire as the age can produce. He cannot be a truly satiric poet in the manner of Pope, because of his lack of confidence in the coherence of his society, of his own place in it, and of the relevance of both in universal terms. The lyric element thus provides a balance, and an expression of his sense of being an Individual responding emotionally to particular situations: The development from The North Ship to The whitsun Weddings is based, therefore, on a growing awareness within the poet of both himself and his environment, and his increasing desire and ability to express himself in forms which reflect his sense of an age without traditions in which new values must be established in both life and art: BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY MATERIAL

a) Novels

Larkin, Philip. Jill. London: Faber and Faber, 1964, 1st ed., 1946^

. A Girl in Winter. London: Faber and Faber, 1964, 1st edi, 1947.

b) Poetry

i The North Ship. London: Faber and Faber, 1966, "1st ed., 1945.

Fantasy: 21 (Fantasy Poets Series). London: Oxford University Press for the Fantasy Press, 195^•

. The Less Deceived. Hessle, England: Marvell Press, "1962, 1st ed., 1955.

The Whitsun Weddings. London: Faber and Faber, 1964.

. "Love," The Critical Quarterly. VIII, 2 (Summer 1966), "173.

c) Selected Critical Articles

. "The Pleasure Principle," Listen. II, 3 (Summer/ Autumn, 1957), 28-32.

.. "Betjeman en Bloc." Listen, V, 2 (Spring, 1959). 14-22.

. "What's Become of Wystan?" The Spectator. July 15, i960, '104-5. 216

d) Movement Anthologies

Conquest, Robert, ed. New Lines. London: Macmillan, 195&.

. New Lines II. London: Macmillan, 1963.

Enright, D. J., ed. Poets of the 1950*5: An Anthology of New English Verse. Tokyo: Kenkyusha Ltd., 1958.

SECONDARY MATERIAL

a) Books

Bodkin, Maudi Archetypal Patterns In Poetry. London: Oxford University Press, 1934.

Cox, C. B. and Dyson, A. E. Modern Poetry: Studies in Practical Criticism: London: Arnold, 1963:

Fraser, Gi S. The Modern Writer and His World. London: Deutsch, 1964.

. Vision and Rhetoric: Studies in Modern Poetry. London: Deutsch, 1962.

Freedman, Ralph. The Lyrical Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963.

Frye, Northrop. Fables of Identity, Studies In Poetic Mythology: New York: Harvest Brace and World, I963;

Glndin, James. Postwar British Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962.

Grubb, Frederick. A Vision of Reality: A Study of Liberalism In Twentieth Century Verse. London: Chatto and Windus,

Langer, Susanne K. Feeling and Form.. New York: Scribner, 1953*

Lodge, David. Language of Fiction. Essays In Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966.

Moore, Geoffrey. Poetry Today. London: The British Council, 1958: 217

Press, John.... Rule-and-Energy: Trends In British Poetry Since the Second World War. London: Oxford University Press, 1963.

Rosenthal, M• L. The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Stevens Wallace. Opus Posthumous. London: Faber and Faber, 1957.

Thwaite, Anthony. Contemporary English Poetry: An Introduction. London: Heinemann Ltd., 1959*

Van 0*Connor, William. The New University Wits and the End of Modernlsmi Carbondale: Illinois University Press, 1963; Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1925:

. Granite and Rainbow. London: The Hogarth Press, i960:

b) Articles and Reviews

Anon. "Poetic Moods;" The Times Literary Supplement. 16 December, 1955, 762:

. "Undeceived Poet." The Times Literary Supplement. 12 March, 1964, 216. • "Obscurity in Poetry." The Times Literary Supplement. 16 January, 1959, 33. . "A Girl In Winter." The Times Literary Supplement. 22 March, 1947, 125, . "The Less Deceived." The List finer, 15 November, 1956, 809:

. "Solitary Sensibility." Time. 19 February, 1965, 81 (Canadian ed.): Ball, Patricia: "The Photographic Art:" Review of English Literature. Ill, 2, 50-58.

Bateson, F: W. "The Less Deceived." Essays in Criticism vii, 1, 76-80; Bergonzl, Bernard. "After the Movement." The Listener, 24 August, 1961, 284-285. 218

Betjeman, John. "The Whitsun Weddings." The Listener. 19 March, 1964, 483.

Bogan, L. "Verse." The New Yorker. 10 April, 1965, 193-194.

Cox, C; B. "Philip Larkin." The Critical Quarterly. I, 1 (Spring 1959), 14-1?.

Crispin, Edmund. "An Oxford Group." The Spectator. 17 April, 1964, 525.

Davie, Donald. "Remembering the Movement." Prospect, Summer, 1959, 13-16.

Deen, R. F. "Larkin's Poetry." a-ommonwegl f 25 December, 1964, 459.

Drake, L. B. "The New Poetry." Atlantic Monthly. July 1958, 77-88.

Enright, D. J. "Down Cemetry Road." The New Statesman. 28 February, 1964, 331-332.

Featherstone, J. L. "Poetry of Commonplaces." New Republic, 6 March, I965, 27-29.

Fraser, G. S; "English Poetry In the 1950's." Audience. 1961.

i "The New Tone." The New Statesman. 21 January, 1956, 79:

. et ali "Symposium on Poetry since 1945:" The London Magazine. VI, 11 (November, 1959), H-36. Hainsworth, J. D. "A Poet of our Time." Hlbbert Journal. LXIV, I53-I55.

Hartley, Anthony. "Natural Piety." The Spectator, 8 June, 1956, 801-802.

: "Poets of the Fifties." The Spectator. 27 August, 1954, 260-261.

Holloway, John: "Still Less Deceived." The Spectator, 28 February, 1964, 288.

Hugh-Jones, Stephen, "Jill." The New Statesman, 3 April, 1964, 533. 219

Jones, A; R. "The Poetry of Philip. Larkin:. A Note on Transatlantic Culture." Western Humanities Review, Spring, 1962, 143-152.

Kell, Richard. "Poetry Selection 1964." The Critical Survey. II, 2 (Summer, 1965), 109-112.

Klingopulis, G; D. and Leavis, P. R. "The Novel as Dramatic Poem." Scrutiny. XIV, 3 and 4, 1947; XV, 3, 1948; XVII, l and 3, 1950; XVII, 4, 1951; XVIII, 1, 1951.

Lehmann, J;., "The Wain-Larkin Myth: A Reply to John Wain:" Sewanee Review. Autumn 1958, 579-587:

Mitchell, Julian. "Out of Touch With the Times." The London Magazine. VI, 1, 45-50.

Morse, S. P: "Five Young English Poets." Poetry. December, 1956, 193-200.

Page, Norman: "Philip Larkin's "Myxomatosis"; A Critical Appreciation." The Critical Survey. II, 3 (Winter I965), 169-170:

Rodway, Allan. "A Note on Contemporary English Poetry." Texas Quarterly. IV, 3 (Autumn 1958), 66-72.

Rosenthal, M. L. "Tuning in on Albion." Nation. 16 May, 1959, 458:

Spender, Stephen; "On Literary Movements." Encounter. November, 1953, 666-68.

. "Are Poets Out of Touch with the Times." The Listener. 20 September, 1962, 439. Stafford, William. "Losses, Engagements, Privacies." Poetry. July, 1965, 294.

Swinden, Patrick: "The. Movement Ten Years After:" The Critical Quarterly. IX, 4 (Winter 1967), 347-359. Tomlinson, Charles. "The Middlebrow Muse." Essays In Criticism. VII, 2 (April, 1957), 208-217:

Wain, John: "Engagement or Withdrawal? Some Notes on the work of Philip Larkin." The Critical Quarterly. VI, 2 (Summer, 1964), 167-179. 220

Wain, John. "English Poetry: The Immediate Situation." Sewanee Review. LXV, 3 (July/September, 1957), 353-374: Williams, Christopher: "The State of English Poetry:" Twentieth Century. November i960, 433-442.

Williams, Raymond: "Poetry Today:" The New Statesman. 6 December, 1958, 811-812;

c) Unpublished Material

Hulcoop, J. P. "Robert Browning, 'Maker of Plays* and Poet: A study of his concepts and Practice of Drama and of their relationship to his concepts and practice of poetry. With a chronology of his early literary career, 1832-1846." Doctoral thesis at The University of London, i960.