Early Larkin by James Underwood (review)

James Underwood’s study of Larkin’s early work challenges the idea that this writer made ‘a curiously bad false start’ (p. 1) by finding value in the letters, poetry, and fiction that he wrote during the 1940s. Reacting against the consensus (and authorized) view that Larkin discovered his true voice when he abandoned Yeats [End Page 377] for Hardy in 1946, Underwood argues that a more significant breakthrough had occurred three years earlier, one that ‘was a result of his burgeoning “interest in everything outside himself”’ (p. 2—the quotation is from Larkin’s early short story ‘The Eagles Are Gone’). This empathetic capacity, Underwood suggests, is reflected in Larkin’s invention of female heteronym Brunette Coleman, author of racy schoolgirl stories, an essay on the same topic, a fragment of autobiography, and a handful of poems entitled Sugar and Spice (all reprinted in ‘Trouble at Willow Gables’ and Other Fictions, ed. by James Booth (London: Faber and Faber, 2022)). Where Andrew Motion discerned clandestine psychosexual confession in these works (p. 56), and Jonathan Bate saw them as the author’s ‘dirty little secrets’ (p. 140), Underwood suggests that Coleman’s writing provides early evidence of ‘the multiplicity and relativity’ that would characterize Larkin’s later personae, anticipating the ‘complexity, range and the attention he pays to the inner lives of other people’ (p. 7). In its contention that ‘it was Coleman who led him away from himself’ (p. 123), Underwood’s approach to Larkin follows John Osborne’s ‘wholehearted rejection of biographicalism’ (p. 8) in Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence: A Case of Wrongful Conviction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), both books offering nuanced and sympathetic close reading as a corrective to the crude disparagement that followed Motion’s biography (Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (London: Faber and Faber, 1993)) and Anthony Thwaite’s selection of the letters (Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940–1985 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992)).

Underwood’s recognition of Larkin’s interest in otherness generates a sensitive appreciation of the negative capability that informs the novels Jill (London: Fortune Press, 1946) and A Girl in Winter (London: Faber and Faber, 1947) (‘the more Larkin engages with the difference of his characters and subjects, the more he dissolves’: p. 114). As far as the poetry is concerned, he concurs with Bruce Montgomery’s view that ‘quite the best’ of Larkin’s ‘earliest poetry is in Sugar and Spice’ (p. 131), and that the most convincing poems in The North Ship (London: Fortune Press, 1945) ‘tend to be the ones which most reveal Coleman’s influence’ (p. 134). Her beneficent presence can apparently still be discerned in The Less Deceived (Hessle: Marvell Press, 1955): not only in poems about women (‘Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album’, ‘Wedding-Wind’, ‘Maiden Name’, and ‘Born Yesterday’ ‘could easily have been written by Brunette Coleman’: p. 168), but also in ‘Toads’ (‘though it bears few overt traces of Coleman’s influence, the influence is there’: p. 175), ‘Spring’ (possibly narrated by ‘a childless and ageing woman—perhaps Brunette Coleman herself?’: p. 177), and even ‘Myxomatosis’ (‘Though this animal poem may seem far removed from the schoolgirl writings of 1943, it was Coleman’s stimulation of Larkin’s empathic and ethical interest in otherness which enabled him to write it’: p. 178). At such times the phrasing makes it easy to lose sight of the fact that Coleman was a product of Larkin’s empathetic imagination and not the other way round. Gestures to the heteronym become increasingly perfunctory in this final chapter, though, as if she still has to be involved in discussions but has in truth little further contribution to make. By the time we get to ‘Church Going’—‘the apotheosis of Larkin’s now-developed voice’ (p. 181)—Underwood is [End Page 378] reduced to noting that we also find the favoured pun ‘to lie’ in Coleman’s ‘Fourth Former Loquitur’ (p. 185).

Larkin once described ‘Church Going’ as his ‘Betjeman poem’ (Philip Larkin, 1922–1985...