Terry Castle The lesbianism of Philip Larkin “Love variously doth various minds inexpressible–so odd and incoherent I inspire,” wrote Dryden, but for many can’t begin to plumb their inner lives. of us true sexual eccentricity remains Greta Garbo, Virginia Woolf, T. E. Law- dif½cult to comprehend. We still don’t rence, the Duke of Windsor, Marlon have the words. Granted, in most mod- Brando, Simone de Beauvoir, Michael ern liberal societies, you can use the Jackson, and Andy Warhol have been on terms gay or straight and people will the list for some time; Condoleeza Rice know (or think they know) what you may join them soon. Futile my attempts mean. But anything more convoluted to pigeonhole such individuals: they than plain old homosexual or heterosexual seem to transcend–if not nullify–con- can be hard to grasp. (Bisexual doesn’t ventional taxonomies. help much: many sensible people re- Pious readers will already be splutter- main unconvinced that this elusive state ing: how presumptuous to ‘label’ someone of being even exists.) For a while I’ve else’s sexual inclinations! The truth is, how- kept a list in my head of famous people ever, Everybody Does It, and when it whose sexual proclivities I myself ½nd comes to understanding the very great- est writers and artists, some empathetic Terry Castle is Walter A. Haas Professor in the conjecture regarding the psychosexual Humanities at Stanford University. She has writ- factors involved in creativity seems to be ten seven books, including “The Apparitional necessary. Would life be better if Wilde Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern had not raised the issue of Shakespeare’s Culture” (1993), “The Female Thermometer: sexuality in “In Praise of Mr. W. H.”? If Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of Freud had not explored the homoerotic the Uncanny” (1995), a runner-up for the pen themes he found in the works of Michel- Spielvogel-Diamondstein Award for the Art of the angelo and Leonardo da Vinci? Essay, “Noel Coward and Radclyffe Hall: Kin- And it is hard to approach the work of dred Spirits” (1996), and “Courage, Mon Amie” Philip Larkin (1922–1985)–considered (2002). She also edited “The Literature of Les- by many the greatest English poet of the bianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to second half of the twentieth century– Stonewall” (2003). without acknowledging his particular brand of sexual eccentricity. The quin- © 2007 by the American Academy of Arts tessential Establishment poet–he was & Sciences offered the Poet Laureateship in 1984– 88 Dædalus Spring 2007 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2007.136.2.88 by guest on 30 September 2021 Larkin is usually thought of as a straight, But downright electrifying was the The lesbi- anism of if not blokish, man of letters. He por- news that, after ½nishing his ½nal term Philip trays himself as such in numerous po- at St. John’s College, Oxford, in 1943, the Larkin ems, though not in any vainglorious way. young poet, then twenty-one, had spent On the contrary, the rhetorical pose usu- several months writing such stories him- ally cultivated–indeed now regarded as self, under the pseudonym ‘Brunette typically Larkinesque–is that of shy (if Coleman.’ Brunette was in fact a full- sardonic) English bachelor: reclusive, blown comic persona: the imaginary sis- timid, physically unattractive to women, ter of Blanche Coleman, the platinum- envious of other men’s romantic suc- blonde leader of a 1940s ‘all-girl’ swing cesses. At its most poignant, to be Lark- band in whom the jazz-loving Larkin inesque is to feel excluded from the fam- took both a musical and prurient inter- ily life and ordinary sexual happiness est. Unlike her real-world sister, the ½c- granted to others. (“For Dockery a son, tional Brunette was supposedly tweedy, for me nothing.”) For those who love bookish, and sentimental–a proli½c Larkin, this rueful evocation of sexual author of Angela Brazil–style schoolgirl loneliness, tempered always with subtle novels and one of those mawkish mid- intransigence and a wildly uncensored dle-aged English lesbians whose imper- wit, is just what they love him for: fectly suppressed homosexuality is plain to everyone but themselves. Her works, Sexual intercourse began it seemed, were an odd mixture of the In nineteen sixty-three lecherous and the dotty. Amazingly (Which was rather late for me)– enough, the Brunette manuscripts had Between the end of the Chatterley ban survived, Motion disclosed, and were And the Beatles’ ½rst lp. to be found along with other unpub- Despite tiresome overquotation the lished works in the Larkin archive at the rhymes never go stale, nor do they lose Brynmor Jones Library, Hull University, their odd power to console. Yet, how- where Larkin had served with great dis- ever bleak the (real or imagined) erotic tinction as Head Librarian for almost life, Larkin’s ‘normality’ would seem to thirty years. be a given. As the poet has his frustrated Sensing curiosity–or at least titilla- stand-in say in “Round Another Point” tion–among Larkin readers, Faber, –an unpublished débat between two Larkin’s long-time publisher, made the young men on the subject of women, complete Brunette oeuvre available in sex, and marriage–“I want to screw de- a 2002 volume called Trouble at Willow cent girls of my own sort without being Gables and Other Fiction, edited by James made to feel a criminal about it.” Booth. ‘Brunette’s’ literary corpus con- Since the poet’s death, however, some sisted of ½ve works: Trouble at Willow unexpected kinks in the Larkin persona Gables and Michaelmas Term at St. Bride’s have come to light. Pixillating indeed (two fully elaborated parody-school was the revelation, in Andrew Motion’s stories, full of games mistresses, mash 1993 biography, that the bespectacled notes, and lubricious hijinks after lights author of The Whitsun Weddings was an out); Sugar and Spice (a set of fey sapphic avid, even compulsive, consumer of les- poems modeled–with suitable languor bian porn, especially the kind involving –on the “Femmes damnées” poems in frolicking English schoolgirls in gym Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal); Ante Meri- slips and hockey pads. dien (a fragment of autobiography in Dædalus Spring 2007 89 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2007.136.2.88 by guest on 30 September 2021 Terry which Brunette reminisces about her process by which Philip Larkin became Castle on Cornish childhood in the blowsy she- ‘Larkinesque’–modern English poetry’s sex male manner of Daphne du Maurier); reigning bard of erotic frustration and and “What Are We Writing For?” (an depressive (if verse-enabling) self-dep- artistic manifesto, supposedly composed recation. Homosexual women have long at the instigation of her live-in protégée, been associated with sexual failure and Jacinth, wherein Brunette defends the ½asco: Sappho grieves for her faithless genre of popular girls’ school ½ction girls; Olivia loses Viola; Sister George is against “penny-a-liners” who flout the cuckolded and killed off. In The Well of time-honored rules of the form). In Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall’s classic lesbi- printed form, they run to nearly three an potboiler from 1928–a book I’m con- hundred densely packed pages and, vinced Larkin knew well–the luckless along with his jazz writings, could be heroine, a supposedly famous writer, said to represent, however risibly, the ends up suicidal and alone. Brunette otherwise costive Larkin’s most fluent Coleman, spinster-sapphist-cum-panto- and sustained literary endeavor. dame, no doubt seemed a marvelous It’s hard, of course, to keep the usual comic invention in 1943. Yet by imper- scholarly po-face. Why–at the very sonating her so fully and strangely the outset of Larkin’s estimable career– young Larkin was also plumbing his own this protracted muddy detour across the well of loneliness, gaining imaginative playing ½elds of Lesbos? A postadoles- and emotional purchase on an ever- cent liking for scabrous fun is one thing, deepening sense of sexual alienation. but what inspires an ambitious young The literary results would be beautiful, poet, already sizing up his chances in the witty, and original, but it was a sad busi- great literary game, to impersonate at ness nonetheless. What begins in play such length–and with such conspicuous ends in tristesse, or so the lives of the dedication–a leering, half-mad, sapphis- poets teach us, and the ‘trouble at Wil- tically inclined author of books for girls? low Gables’ was enough to be getting on The editor of the Girls’ Own Paper, last with for a sensitive soul named Larkin. heard from in 1956, has yet to address the question. It seems important to emphasize from Conservative poetry lovers have been the start the lesbianism of the Larkin per- displeased by the whole business. In sona. Unconvincing is the attempt of “Green Self-Conscious Spurts,” a stun- Larkin scholars to explain away the Bru- ningly humorless piece about Larkin’s nette fantasy by associating it (vaguely early work recently in the tls, Adam enough) with male homoeroticism. In Kirsch dismisses the posthumous pub- his introduction to Trouble at Willow lication of Trouble at Willow Gables as Gables, James Booth suggests that when “strictly unnecessary, and potentially Larkin began composing the Brunette damaging to [Larkin’s] reputation.” As material he “was not far from his own punishment for prissiness–not to men- days as a shy ‘homosexual’ schoolboy” tion the frigid little blast of homopho- and still “undirected” in his sexuality. By bia–Kirsch should no doubt be required impersonating Brunette, he was simply to sit on it and rotate.