A Girl in Winter

During the last years of his lifetime, the consensus of the British literary establishment was that Philip Larkin was the greatest English poet of the postwar era. He had been offered the title of Poet Laureate upon the death of John Betjeman in 1984, but declined the honor, explaining that he hadn't any more poetry in him. (Ted Hughes took it instead.) Larkin died the following year. 

His political leanings emerged cryptically in some of his poems. In "Homage to a Government," dated 1969, he wrote about bringing the soldiers home, "which is alright," but that 

Next year we shall be easier in our minds. 

Next year we shall be living in a country 

That brought its soldiers home for lack of money. 

The statues will be standing in the same 

Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same. 

Our children will not know it’s a different country. 

All we can hope to leave them now is money. 

After his death, when his letters were published, and everyone got a much clearer idea of his Tory sympathies, as well as his taste for smutty bondage magazines, there was an attempted backlash. It was ineffective simply because enough people reminded us that a person's private idiosyncrasies were quite separate from his or her work. Since 1992, however, it was discovered that during his last years at Oxford, Larkin had written works of "lesbian" fiction under the pseudonym "Brunette Coleman". It's believed that it had helped him cure his writer's block, because the following three years, 1945-47, saw the publication - in his own name - of his first volume of poems and two novels. 

Having just finished reading Philip Larkin's second novel A Girl in Winter, after having read and admired his poems ever since I first encountered them when I was about the same age Larkin was when he wrote the novel (22), my immediate reaction was he is already all there. 

But there are other things in the novel as well, unfamiliar things to an avid reader of his poetry. First, as he was quick to accede, there are other people. There are other people in his poems, too, but they are there incidentally and not for long. Larkin's first published book was The North Ship, which was his undisguised bow to Yeats. Not a bad model for a young poet. A year later his first novel, Jill, and a year after that, A Girl in Winter. Both of the novels are small - in length (about 250 pages each) and scope. 

A Girl in Winter begins and ends in a provincial English town during the war that is entombed in snow and mist where Katherine Lind, in her mid-20s, works as a librarian. In the middle there is a lengthy flashback set before the war at a sizeable house in Oxford to which Katherine, then a 16-year-old girl from a European country Larkin doesn't identify, has come on a three-week visit at the height of an English summer. She and other classmates had become pen pals with boys in England and she had corresponded with Robin Fennel. Their correspondence dwindles until, out of nowhere, Robin invites Katherine to come to visit him in England. The visit had been amusing except that Robin turns out to be a disappointing bore. It is his older sister, Jane, who proves to be the more interesting of the Fennels. 

Larkin doesn't explain how, some years later, Katherine comes to be in England during the war, but it appears to have been her decision. She was in London, but took an offer of a job in a village some distance away. She writes to Jane to let her know she is in England, 

So where did the Fennels come in all this? Simply, that she was lonely; more complexly, that they supported her failing hope that she was wrong to think 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. 

Robin, in the Army and stationed close by the town, learns that Katherine is there and sends her a letter alerting her to a possible visit from him. On examing her expectations of seeing Robin again, 

there had been other, unexpressed fancies: the way she would be swept off to their home, like a long-lost cousin, dropping an airy resignation to the City Librarian, to make herself useful about that fascinating house until Mr. Fennel could find her a remunerative job which she could do while still continuing to live with them; and then of course the slow ripening of her friendship with Robin into love, a love firmer and reciprocal, yet still bearing the fervour of their first acquaintance—or, if this last was too much to swallow, then at least some male friend of the family who would eventually hold out to her love, security, happiness, and a British passport.

The ending is less than she - or we - expected. Robin just wants to sleep with her before he's deployed to the continent (a deployment that is supposed to be secret). Their pillow talk dwindles as they both drift off to sleep. I won't go as far as Clive James, who wrote that "the last paragraphs of A Girl in Winter have something of the cadenced elegance you find at the close of The Great Gatsby." It is a beguilingly written, modest success. You feel a sense of loss, really, for all of the following novels Larkin never wrote. 

As one might expect, Larkin is fond of using metaphors.

Miss Green looked apprehensively up the dark steps, like a dog knowing it has been brought to be destroyed. 

As time drew on, the quality of the early morning, like paper-thin glass, grew deeper and more clear; 

Her mind was like a puzzle in which many silver balls have to be shaken into their sockets; it was her thoughts that were rolling free, and she moved her head from side to side as if to settle them. 

It was all a little insincere, like a school prizegiving. 

Behind them the barn was like a whispering hollow shell as rain beat on the roof. 

It was strange to think it [an old record] 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. 

The evening whispered outside, the quiet evening that had suddenly risen up against her in one great stamping chord, like the beginning of music she would never hear. 

It was easy, too, to join in the pallid duties as usual, it composed her trembling hands, and it prevented her thoughts from settling into colourless stillness, like stirring a teaspoon in a glass of cold water. 

In 1976, Larkin was a guest on the radio program Desert Island Discs and at the very end of the broadcast there was this exchange: 

And one luxury to take with you to the island? 

Well, something to write on, something to write with. Could I have a typewriter and an unlimited supply of paper? 

Yes indeed, what are you going to write? 

Well, I might try to write another novel…